We Need Chrome No More
redalemeden.comI enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today.
Luckily, Firefox, arguably among the most "free from corporate greed" of the browsers, has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed (in my experience), and is rapidly adding privacy and content blocking features and defaults that Chrome lacks. If it were still behind Chrome technically, as it was in 2008, it probably wouldn't matter that Mozilla is more trustworthy than Google.
> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser.
Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled with.
There seems to be a bloat cycle with many products, browsers being one of them. They start off lean, gain features over time, and then they are or feel so heavy that a lean new competitor can feel like a fresh breeze.
Remember when Firefox was the fresh breeze, compared to the Netscape suite? I remember Chrome being perceived the same way when it came out.
I'm surprised there aren't more people on here who moved to chome for the dev tools. That is what moved me over there. Firebug was great in it's day but at some point Chrome's dev tools just became too much better to make staying on Firefox possible.
Firebug was awesome, then 2011 happened and Firebug’s lead dev joined the Google Chrome team to work on their dev tools [1].
[1] https://news.softpedia.com/news/Lead-Firebug-Developer-Joins...
Even to this day Firefox doesn't have websocket frame inspection. Its very frustrating to me that dev tools aren't a higher priority for Firefox. As they are now, they are only slightly worse than Chromes which is unacceptable considering more and more websites are being developed with only Chrome in mind.
That is frustrating, but the good news is that this is being picked up as part of (somewhat ironically) Google Summer of Code: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508#c49
I find it ironic that they kept lowering the priority since an extension already added the ability, yet that very same extension no longer works thanks to their recent API changes. Perhaps lowering the priority several times wasn't that best idea after all?
The decision to revamp their extensions API also cost a lot of goodwill from the community. FF today may be faster and more secure than two years ago, but from my perspective it has permanently lost some of its utility and appeal.
As a long time Firefox user I think the change in its extensions APIs is one of the greatest moves they did and I’m glad they did it.
Chrome’s extensions were isolated, easy to develop and had a permissions system in place.
To this day Firefox is still lagging behind in its isolation. For example Chrome can disable extensions in Incognito, but Firefox does not.
Also if you’re not paying attention, Chrome won and it’s nearly a monopoly. This means browser extensions get developed for Chrome first. Having similar APIs helps with migration.
I view the change as a good thing because I can finally develop my own extensions without headaches.
> To this day Firefox is still lagging behind in its isolation.
That is being worked on though:
> The first batch of changes to not run extensions in private browsing mode by default landed, this is still behind a preference.
https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2019/01/31/these-weeks-in-f...
That's very good news.
Extensions are profile-specific.
Solution: change profile to launch another browser instance without extensions.
Go to "about:profiles" in the address bar, or configure shortcuts in your OS to launch browser with different profiles: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Mul...
Isolation isn’t a benefit for extensions: the whole point of extensions, bookmarklets, etc. is to be able to modify arbitrary aspects of the browsing experience in arbitrary ways.
It's a balance, right? If browser extensions had kernel access, I think we'd all agree that's bad. Now, that's obviously an extreme, but where is the line?
Up until recently†, I'm not aware of a situation where a popular Firefox extension was unable to work in Chrome due to Google restrictions.
†I'm purposefully excluding the whole adblock thing, as that's super recent and thus not relevant here.
Playing devil's advocate, many firefox extensions don't work as well or at all as they used to. tree style tabs can't integrate in the same way without extra modification, all of the FF extensions that allowed you to control your browser with vim bindings no longer work.
I actually still think the API design was a good idea and am glad for the added security. Still, the API change took down some popular extensions for sure.
But it's not about the popular extensions.
Now there is no more middle click to submit on forms and I used that at my old job to speed up a bunch of tedious tasks.
That sounds trivial to implement in an extension at least. If there isn't one already I could probably take a crack at it.
> It's a balance, right? If browser extensions had kernel access, I think we'd all agree that's bad. Now, that's obviously an extreme, but where is the line?
It is, and it boils down to the usual security vs. utility tradeoff - beyond some point, more secure means less useful. Kernel access is a stretch, but then again, I could make my computing experience much more pleasant if I had a deeper ability to control and inspect the browser from external software running on my computer.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust all the extensions that I want to use.
Especially in Private/Incognito Mode I only want extensions for blocking ads/trackers + 1Password and that’s it.
Also being able to see what the extension does is really valuable to me, because allowing an extension to read the data on all websites you visit is really suspicious for a majority of extensions.
Mozilla has had a good review process in place and truth be told Chrome's Web Store has suffered from spyware and malicious extensions more than Firefox. But that's only because it is more popular and Google is known for really screwed / non-existent human support (e.g. extensions being reported as being malware with no immediate action).
> I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust all the extensions that I want to use.
That's fair, but this dynamic drags down usefulness of the whole platform. Browsers could offer extended permissions allowing extensions arbitrary control over the browsing experience, but they can't trust extension authors not to get greedy about privileges, and can't trust regular users to be smart about it. It's what happened with Android: applications requested every possible permission, users learned to just accept it.
> Also being able to see what the extension does is really valuable to me, because allowing an extension to read the data on all websites you visit is really suspicious for a majority of extensions.
That's true, and I wish there was an easy way to transparently run a I/O trace on an extension, and to have super-fine-grained user-level control over its permissions. I use a bunch of extensions that modify the contents of sites; I wish I could manually restrict them to a whitelist - and sometimes blacklist. Like, e.g. I don't need Cloud2Butt to work on my banking site.
> As a long time Firefox user I think the change in its extensions APIs is one of the greatest moves they did and I’m glad they did it.
Not me. If the new extension system didn't present a loss of important (to me) functionality, then I'd think it was a good thing.
But the loss of functionality happened, and that change is what makes the new Firefox unsuitable for me, so I stopped using it (and I never used Chrome).
It could never deploy multi-process with XUL cruft. Then the argument would be that Firefox is too far behind. You can never win everybody.
"e10s compatible" add-ons were as fully-featured as the "original" XUL add-ons and did not interfere with multi-process at all. For instance, VimFx was e10s compatible and could even run with Firefox Nightly (which allowed "legacy" add-ons), without disabling multi-process, until about Firefox 65(!), without major changes.
Taking away XUL is not the problem. Leaving users with a crippled replacement is.
Yes. DevTools's superiority was the catalyst for me (and many other devs I worked with at the time).
Same here. Firebug started to feel "limited" to what I could do in DevTools and they finally got me to switch. I honestly feel like I need to get Firefox another shot since Chrome's perf tools are heavily focused around the V8 engine. (Even though there is a lot of cross over with general JS perf)
Back when Chrome was new, I'd occasionally open Firefox for the debugging tools.
When I was a QA I’d use Firefox’s network inspector to edit and replay network requests easily, changing different parameters while being in an environment that stores all the necessary auth and cookies to use the APIs. I’ve had a lot of fun with that trying to reverse engineer websites without too much effort. Chrome still doesn’t do that.
I'm not a professional web developer, but in the experience I've had building a couple of JS heavy sites, I've actually found the Edge developer tools to be the best. If there's one thing microsoft knows how to do well, it's build developer tools.
> If there's one thing microsoft knows how to do well, it's build developer tools.
This is probably very subjective, but I can absolutely not relate to that.
Me neither. It may or may not be true in Edge, I've never tried, but it absolutely wasn't true in any IE so I wouldn't naturally expect it to be true in Edge.
I certainly see where GP is coming from, Microsoft do have an awesome legacy in dev tooling that lives on to this day with products like VSCode, but browser tooling might be the glaring exception to this - perhaps since Microsoft never really was or became an 'internet' company.
It seems like people consistently love or hate Visual Studio , and a lot of people seem to like VSCode.
> If there's one thing microsoft knows how to do well, it's build developer tools.
I think that's a debatable assertion.
I've been in frontend for a long time, since 1999. The dev console is my workplace. I have to use and be familiar with all popular browsers. Chrome's dev tools are far better in my opinion.
I vaguely remember all of those things as separate phases. - Moving away from IE, I fell in love with Opera (lots of built-in features), most others with Firefox - Chrome comes in, it's Google, it's lightweight, people try it and like it - Chrome gets really fast, it appeals to even more people - Meanwhile, Firefox has enough extension power to replace Opera for me (who can live with the tabs BELOW address bar or without mouse gestures?) - Chrome implements the aforementioned technical stuff (separate processes, etc.), appealing to power users (this may have happened before speed improvements or at the same time) - Chrome finally gets extensions and I start using it personally, but it's impossible to be a web dev without Firefox+Firebug. (IE6 still sucks, but combined with Visual Studio, feels superb for JS debugging) - Chrome's dev tools gradually get better at everything. I start living in Chrome.
... years later ...
- A year ago I often used Firefox for its great Canvas debugger. They broke it. I've since forgotten about Firefox.
... 2019 ...
- Microsoft is trying to drive people away from IE, hoping for Edge adoption. I don't care for Firefox. Opera is almost Chrome with extensions. Edge sounds like it wants to be Chrome. Chrome won on most battlefronts. I don't like that fact, because of the "free from corporate greed" reasons mentioned, but it's going to be hard to change the status quo.
> Microsoft is trying to drive people away from IE, hoping for Edge adoption.
Lolno, they gave up and are ditching Edge to use Chrome because Electron. https://9to5google.com/2018/12/03/microsoft-chrome-based-bro...
That is not correct. MS is ditching Trident for Blink but Edge and Chakra are still remaining technologies. This is unfortunate because Chrome is super slow on large CSS animations
> It's going to be hard to change the status quo.
There's plenty of room to improve on privacy. Non technical people don't care too much about privacy issues yet, but they will.
That was true back then, but the FF dev tools are much superior now. Chrome lags behind severely. Last I checked, clicking an XHR link in the console just took me to the network tab instead of actually showing that request. FF shows it inline in the console. Not to mention code caching bugs in Chrome even with the cache turned off. This is the primary reason I switched back to FF.
Sadly I find that the Firefox debugger is more likely to stall and flail about.
I keep trying to change to Firefox, but bring dragged back to Chrome.
I mostly work on stupidly big Single Page Apps, which may be part of the issue.
The problem was I was so used to Firebug after using it for so many years that I just kept using it out of inertia up until the day Mozilla dropped it from Firefox entirely. Then I just moved over to Firefox's developer tools (still out of inertia).
I thought Firefox’s Developer Edition had decent dev tools.
As you alluded to at the start of your post, Chromes speed improvements were more technical than it was due to a lack of bloat. In fact Chrome consumed more memory than FF did at that time and that was down to it being multi-processed (ie one heavy page wouldn’t slow down the rest of the application in other tabs) but that came at a cost in terms of RAM used.
Obviously the v8 stuff also made a massive difference too.
Honestly, I hate the term "bloat". Most of the times when I've seen bloat blamed, the real cause has been a bad algorithm somewhere. Just as was the case with Chrome, its often the case that using more RAM (and maybe more "bloat") can make things faster.
After fixing bad algorithms, dealing with performance and resource utilization basically comes down to a series of trade-offs. In most cases:
Less RAM = More CPU or more disk space (and much slower)
Less CPU = more disk or RAM
Less disk = more network, RAM and/or CPU
> a bad algorithm somewhere
Along the lines of a custom memory manager, that never releases memory back to the OS. If you open tons of tabs, closing them wouldn't release the memory back. Which is a decent guess - it used the memory once, it will probably need it again.
Yeah, i agree. And very succinctly put too.
I think another factor is just that Chrome's speed changed the landscape of web design itself, which fed back into Chrome's popularity.
By making javascript so much faster, it allowed web designers to do things that only Chrome could do.
> Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason.
This was how I remember it as well. Not only that but the timing was very fortunate for Chrome because at the time Firefox had some very bad memory leaks which in my opinion really helped with Chrome adoption since people who use Firefox were more likely to be willing to switch browsers having already switched from another browser.
Chrome won people away from Firefox because it was fast enough, and it worked correctly. The "working correctly" part was what pulled me away from Firefox.
Breaking ad-blocking is sending me back to Firefox.
>Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason.
Chromes super fast start up speed and clean UI is what caused me to switch when it first came out.
I never switched because once upon a time I switched from Opera to Firefox because it was the most free (as in libre) browser and I haven't found a more free browser yet.
I try to live after the maxim: freedom before convenience (at least in parts of my life).
If there's one thing that Google does well, it's convince the relevant people that their software is open source.
See: Chrome and Android
They are though. There are no Edge forks or free iOS distributions.
No, they’re not. They’re based on open source software.
But by that measure safari is open source because WebKit is open source.
> But by that measure safari is open source because WebKit is open source.
There's a lot more closed source code in Safari than there's in Chrome. But sure: Why not give them credit for open-sourcing WebKit? Safari is closer to open-source than IE.
And yet I trust Safari a fucking lot more than I trust Chrome. Something about not being a business reliant on harvesting every bit of personal information possible.
And you're probably right. "Open-source-ness" shouldn't be the only measure when valuing software.
Have you considered switching to lynx?
I used it for a month or something back when I couldn't get the graphics card working, but it was not fun.
Perhaps it is the so-called "corporate greed" that creates the bloat.
The added funtionality that the browser "needs", once added, is in practice overwhelmingly directed at commercial purposes, primarily advertising-supported businesses.
In theory it could be used for anything.
Correct me if wrong, but Netscape was originally intended to be a browser for commercial enterprise where companies would pay licensing fees.
And Firefox, whatever its purpose was (perhaps an alternative to another corporate browser from Microsoft), ended up being the precursor to Chrome, a browser written by an ad sales company, as the original Chrome developers were originally Firefox developers.
Following the ideal that the web is this wonderful open platform accessible to anyone, I would like to see more browsers, with reduced functionalty (and perhaps increased safety/privacy and freedom from ads), written not by companies nor organizations that try to compete feature-for-feature with those corporations. These simpler browsers could target the non-commercial web, e.g. the web as a free information source. A web where an individual page need not be a conglomeration of random third parties vying for user attention.
Methinks it should be more troubling to the HN crowd that "browsers" are not amongst the class of programs that can be easily written, edited and compiled by anyone. They could be, but the popular definition of "browser" needs to change, moving away from "all the features of Company's browser" or "all the features Working Group is discussing with input from Companies" and more toward what a given user (cf. company, advertiser), including non-commercial users, actually needs for a given task.
There will always be corporate-sponsored web browsers with corporate-friendly, advertising-friendly features. But we need non-corporate browsers too. They may be enough to accomplish the user's non-commercial tasks but not well-suited for web advertising, e.g. optional auto-loading third party resources.
I remember using Firefox in the pre 1.0 days.
It took slightly longer to launch than IE, but since it had tabs, I didn't care, because I wasn't opening a new instances constantly.
Fwiw, IE was pre-launched with Windows. That was the secret behind its (often) fast startup.
Not doing the same in Firefox was a conscious design decision by the Firefox team, which didn't want to hoard the memory when Firefox wasn't in use.
Yeah, seamonkey (and maybe opera) also had ways to start the browser with the os.
v8 was initially 32-bit x86 only. And it wasn’t coded in a CPU independent way or word size independent way at all. Adding a new CPU amounted to basically rewriting the whole JIT. Chrome took a long time to go 64-bit for this reason.
You would need to break web standards compatibility to fight the current bloat cycle on the web. But it might happen, a simpler, faster web.
Or you could block the trackers, which are most of the bloat.
On some sites, on others it's the 2.5-5mb PWA-that-gracefully-falls-back-to-SPA-that-gracefully-falls-back-to-SSR-with-bundled-inline-styles-and-images JS app that has horrid caching that is causing most of the bloat.
That’s what AMP is..,
Good point, V8 (that is, fast Javascript) was key as well.
(I suppose it makes sense I'd agree with someone else with a Perl-inspired handle :-)
>> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser.
>Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason
It was probably both. I know I was definitely sick of sites (mostly Flash) crashing the browser and throwing my entire session in the bin. I was probably already using some Gecko-based "light" browser instead of Firefox, but V8 did make a difference when using the emerging web app style sites like Gmail.
If it was either, why wasn't it a patch set against firefox, rather than IP owned by google?
Probably because WebKit was easier to patch.
I always thought it was the cool name and logo. Chrome sounds way more slick then internet explorer or firefox. Plus the logo for chrome was shiny.
Yeah speed is the reason I used (and sometimes still) use it. Also the dev tools are better than Firefox's.
I assumed it was in clear relationship to the gmail era of web applications trying to be a full desktop equivalent.
> They start off lean, gain features over time
I'm pretty sure there's a copy of MooTools in the Chromium repository.
> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical
Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from the pervasive advertisement campaigns, from the bundling strategy with other pieces of software, for the pre-installation on new computers or from the ads on Google SEarch homepage.
Chrome's main appeal was that it was much faster than firefox and IE. At everything. I had no technical knowledge when chrome came out, was using firefox, tried chrome, never looked back.
It's not really possible to separate out the effects of advertising from the effects of the product actually being better. Maybe I installed chrome because I saw an ad, but I stopped using firefox because it was clear that chrome was better. The fact that you're emphasizing ads over the very real performance advantages just means you've got an axe to grind.
I've had to use both on and off for years.
My patience with software is small but I had few issues with Firefox except on Google properties.
Not saying your experience didn't happen but it doesn't match mine.
I even used to be a Google fan and without being able to pinpoint a date I have memories of trying (and failing to) start using Chrome as my default browser at least once.
So I agree with GP and personally think the real story is more that Chrome:
- had massive marketing budgets and misleading campaigns
- won a number of benchmarks (but nothing to write home about on my Linux or Windows boxes)
- sometime between 2009 and now web developers forgot what we fought for when we fought against IE until 2009: that sites should work in all mainstream browsers. We didn't fight so much to kill IE as to let everybody else live.
- Suddenly sites started showing up that only worked in Chrome. Every new browser including modern versions of IE is more capable than anything we had back then and we also have polyfills and whatnot and so if someone cannot be bothered to do basic testing in more than one browser then I don't know what.
- I cannot say that Google was the worst but they certainly have had their "weird issues that doesn't affect Chrome". And I cannot say they did it on purpose and everyone is innocent until proven guilty but let me say that for a company that almost prints their own money their QA departement might have been slightly understaffed :-P
Until the Firefox quantum update, the reason a lot of sites only worked in Chrome, was that it was the only browser with kind of decentish performance.
This is plain wrong.
1. Firefox worked very well, thank you and I'm no natural saint when it comes to patience with software.
2. I am frontend (and backend) developer so I should know the difference between using bleeding edge features that doesn't exist in all browsers yet, non standard quirks that developers abuse, and performance problems.
Very well is relative. Chrome is better, even now, from a feature and performance perspective, but the tradeoff has become acceptable for a sense of privacy.
That’s my opinion anyway.
Won't argue about the performance, you might very well be right and I cannot prove anything.
Feel free to expand on what features you still miss in Firefox that exists in Chrome though.
Looking from the other side Chromes extension API looks like a toy compared to Firefox, even after Mozilla "nerfed" it. (And ours is improving while Chrome is actively trying to remove even some of the most used features from theirs.)
My issue with Firefox is that it's just slower. I've read the articles showing that the rendering engine is just as fast or faster, and I don't doubt it, but it definitely feels a lot slower in real-life tasks with dozens of tabs and windows, constantly switching, opening, closing. I know Chrome "fakes" it's speediness using tricks, but I wish Firefox did the same.
I don't know who downvoted you but here's my upvote. Your experience is as valid as mine.
I wish we could be honest about things like you && at the same time behave like grown ups.
Yes: I've been arguing against a couple of Chrome fans here but hopefully only when they're plain wrong or are presenting their personal ideas as truisms without any evidence :-)
Rather Electrolysis. Switched it on when it was not default yet, and happy with it. That killed the performance plus for Chrome (Chromium at least), but either way I was never satisfied enough with Chromium.
While Chrome was definitely very good, it did benefit from a huge worldwide marketing campaign, even without counting omnipresent ads on Google properties, or tech evangelism.
All this at a time when Mozilla was spending lots of time trying to come up with a good Firefox 4.0, and was about to bet the farm on Firefox OS (and lose).
I've used firefox and never bothered with chrome as a daily driver. The speed issue is entirely marketing driven. Nobody cares about a few tenths of a second of load times until the ads were shoving stats down our throats that chrome was so much faster
Firefox is and has always been perfectly adequate, except maybe for a few html5 canvas type apps.
No one is quite the overstatement, and I suspect it is completely wrong. Anecdotally, I and several people I know switched to Chrome when it came out due to it's blazing speed.
It would seem that was the case for many more people, see for example for a fairly old article: https://www.cnet.com/news/why-i-switched-from-firefox-to-chr...
Of course, many were using plugins with Firefox which contributed to the speed advantage of Chrome. But milliseconds matter, even program startup time.
It wasn’t entirely market driven. Chrome was collectively faster, smoother and tab crashes were isolated which was critical back then. My dad was firmly middle aged when it came out and was very attached to Firefox. After a few debates we did some very unscientific desktop-to-page render comparisons as well as loading some pretty js heavy sites and chrome beat Firefox handily.
He still took a while to come around and ultimately it was the tab isolation that convinced him. Tabs were a critical component to how he did research and a few crashes were all it took.
Sounds like your Dad would not have switched without your advocacy.
It was less about advocacy and more about arguing with him. I was a teenager at the time eager to best him in any argument I could.
True as that may be, we're arguing that you would not have argued it had Chrome not been advertised the way it was.
Firefox was incredibly slow by that time. It was having maintainability problems for a few years, with unfixed memory leaks, deadlocks and core instabilities. Mozilla had a large ongoing effort for fixing those things, but it took some time until they got results.
Javascript heavy sites were also very slow on every browser, except for Chrome that invested in a good JS interpreter.
back then, for me, there was a massive qualitative difference between chrome and the rest. i didn't have any particular preference, but chrome just was a far superior user experience.
> The fact that you're emphasizing ads over the very real performance advantages just means you've got an axe to grind.
Alternatively, it could mean that, like me, they had NoScript installed when Chrome came out[0], making Firefox genuinely faster by dint of brute do-less-stuff-ism.
0: or when we heard about it anyway.
I'm not sure why so many HN posters feel the need to boast about not executing JavaScript.
All that means is that you've opted out of the web that the rest of the world is using. Good for you. But people who have disabled JS make up such a small porportion of web users (~.2% of pageviews) that your experience is pretty much irrelevant to the question of general browser trends.
I'd also bet that Chrome was faster at painting pages than Firefox, so it wasn't just a JS engine advantge.
> I'd also bet that Chrome was faster at painting pages than Firefox, so it wasn't just a JS engine advantge.
That may very well have been true, but if Chrome spends 10 cycles rendering the page and 100 cycles executing malware, and Firefox spends 20 cycles rendering the page and zero cycles executing malware, Chrome still loses despite being being twice as fast at the only thing that matters.
I surmise it is because HN attracts a higher percentage of critical thinkers than many other boards. A startling amount of JS on the web falls into the following categories: 1) Advertisement 2) Tracking 3) Useless animation I don't care for any of those things. I generally prefer simple html pages that load <1 second, take very few resources, do not track any information about me, and don't use any mouse-reactive animations while I'm trying to get work done.
It's more likely that most of the "critical thinkers" you speak of write JavaScript for money everyday. Even on HN the amount of JS blockers is tiny but it seems higher because they always have to mention they block JS.
So is "I block JS" the new "I don't own a TV"?
FWIW, I also don't use a TV[0]; I just don't bring it up often because it's rarely relevant. I brought up javascript because javascript is usualy the reason why <any webbrowser that executes javascript> is slower than <any webbrowser that doesn't executes javascript>. See "do less stuff".
0: unless you count monitors as TVs, or disassembly-for-parts as use.
I also don't own a TV. And as soon as I go vegan, I'll gain superpowers and ascend into the Mothership, where I can hang out with Tom Cruise and Ronny Hubbard!
Compare firefox or Opera market progression back in IE heydays to chrome progression when it came out.
Marketing and the antitrust against MS are the difference.
> The fact that you're emphasizing ads over the very real performance advantages just means you've got an axe to grind.
No, it means I have a mother, siblings, friends, colleagues, ... that understand next to nothing to computers and would probably not even notice if I switched them from Chrome to Edge. And if any of them use Chrome, it is definitely not out of a conscious choice.
With all due respect, the single fact that you are commenting here on HN makes you more tech-literate than an overwhelming majority of the Web users. For a simple experiment, got to see your mom/dad, and just ask them what browser they are using, and why. IME, in every case, they will tell you they use ‶Google″, because they are not even necessarily aware of the whole browser concept, just accessing ‶The Internet″ – and I say it without any contempt; I'd be unable to do the tenth of what they are able to do in other fields.
Once again, I'm not saying that Chrome had/has not technical advantages; I'm saying that they were not decisive in making people switch.
IIRC, it was faster than Firefox 3 specifically, which caused many FF users to migrate. Something happened between FF2 and FF3, since the latter appeared noticeably slower.
YES! I remember Firefox 2 being so much faster than 3 that I kept using it until most websites started to break. Then I switched to Chrome.
> Maybe I installed chrome because I saw an ad
Or maybe you did because it was drive-by installed with other software, like common malware, something Google paid millions for.
Imagine if MS did anything similar with any of their products. There would be no end to the outrage.
For me it was a nice UX that kept me on chrome... the performance was really nice too. There was some chrome in IE extension iirc that I pushed for around 2010, as one of our SPA applications tended to really bloat in IE7-8, and worked fine in chrome and ff. (Note this was an actual application, not a website)
Heh, that just shows how wide chasms can be. I find Chrome's UX to be horrible (and unfixable), and it's why I never adopted it.
Firefox's has been horrible for a long time, but at least (until they dropped the old extension system) it was possible to fix it.
I spent years stridently recommending Chrome to non-technical users, because it was by far the fastest and most secure browser available.
Google's primary objective for Chrome and Android was simply to get people to use the internet more, on the (entirely reasonable) assumption that they'd probably use Google and they would see a lot of AdSense units. They invested heavily in getting better software into the hands of as many users as possible. Of course they harvest a whole bunch of user data, but dragging up the quality of the browsing experience was a far bigger factor IMO.
Would Edge exist if Chrome had never happened? Would Firefox have a fast JS engine and proper sandboxing? What would the non-Apple smartphone market look like without Android? Whether you like Google's business practices or not, they've massively increased our expectations of browser software, in the same way that Starbucks created a world where you can buy a half-decent cappuccino in McDonalds.
>Google's primary objective for Chrome and Android was simply to get people to use the internet more, on the (entirely reasonable) assumption that they'd probably use Google and they would see a lot of AdSense units.
Google paid Apple 12 billion dollars last year to be the default search engine in Safari and another half billion to Firefox for the same. Google's primary objectives with Chrome was to lower that amount and to guard their monopoly on search.
It's very hard for me to consider Chrome as a "most secure" browser. But I suppose it depends on what you do and don't consider security threats.
Or the fact that in the beginning it was just blazing fast and very hassle-free (single click installer, automatic updates, no "IE toolbar hell").
Good point. Auto-updates were a groundbreaking feature (at least in browsers) that most people have largely forgotten about.
I'd also add that 2008 Google was trusted by the public a lot more than 2019 Google.
> by the public
by technical users
I imagine the general public still trusts them all the same or maybe even more.
I think with the recent focus of privacy by the media, users are beginning to trust Google less. Maybe not enough to stop using their services, but enough to at least question what Google might be doing with their data.
This stuff has been on the front pages of mainstream media for long enough. Ask your non-tech acquaintances what they think about Google, Facebook etc - you might be surprised.
In general, they don't care. They care about the conveniences forsaking privacy brings. Haven't talked to everyone on this topic, though. So who knows, there might be some.
Technical users are multiplicators though.
multiplicators? You mean because we advocate with those near us? Normal users also advocate in favor of products based on features which are sometimes based on forsaking privacy.
Reads to me a descending attitude towards normal users.
I was a non technical users when chrome come out. I was studying civil engineering then in college. I certainly like Google as a symbol of freedom and technology superiority in the more pure sense than msft.
Not condescending (if that's what you mean), it's more of an attitude of hopelessness. After all, it will be "normal" users that control where the market goes.
>For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from...
Bingo! Thank you for pointing this out. For those younger readers, Chrome's penetration was forceful and uninvited. A browser add-on/search hijacker/ persistant spyware known as Google Toolbar was it's predecessor project from Google. It was an epidemic across the PC landscape for half a decade and all those infected machines became Chromes initial foothold. There's plenty of positives from the project, but for Chrome to achieve browser monopoly status, user consent sure did seem to get sacrificed.
I beg to disagree. Chrome was also extremely lean, but very well thought out.
- a bit unrelated but installer was a shim, ~downloading it took 3 seconds and 500kB
- Few buttons
- Transient status bar
- Transient download widget
- Good ergonomics (easy to close tabs in rapid successions without moving your mouse, the next one would fall in place)
- Clear preference panel
- Maybe later: pdf support and print dialog
I'm not pretending it was not well thought; I'm merely saying its technical advantages were not the main drive behind its huge adoption rate.
With all due respect, none of the pluses you mentioned would be a reason for a random, tech-illiterate, using-a-computer-for-FB person to install Chrome.
You're right, there's also a bootstrap thing, they couldn't know before installing. The only thing they'd know would be "it's by Google". But all the point listed above were strong factors for newbs too. They could easily discard it if it was an annoyance I believe.
For the remaining users I reckon tech-literate family members set it as their search engine for them. I certainly switched over A LOT of people this way.
I switched to chrome before I became technically literate, because it seemed a lot faster and less prone to breaking. I couldn't describe why, but the effect was felt.
Now, I still struggle to move to firefox as I'm on a retina MBP, where firefox riles up my cpu and drains my battery.
Yup. I'm using Firefox on macOS as well and suffering from the same bug. If you use your Macbook with the resolution set to 'scaled' Firefox absolutely murders your battery. On top of that there's a bug where H264 video doesn't get properly accelerated. Both these bugs have been in Firefox at least since FF62. Both have alternatingly been marked 'priority 2' or 'fix-optional' which is absolutely baffling to me considering how crucial battery life is in today's portable world. I've even gone into the Firefox IRC multiple times where the fix has been promised to be in a 'point release' since FF63..
I get that they have limited resources but it makes getting people to switch (and stay) on Firefox increasingly hard if it cuts battery life of their laptop nearly in half.
It isn't a bug; it's the fact that Firefox uses a transparent window and doesn't yet use Core Animation, which offloads scrolling to the window server. Switching to CA involves heavy lifting inside the compositor and is not an easy task. My planeshift crate does some of the work needed to make the WebRender path use Core Animation.
In the meantime, setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config helps battery life significantly, at the cost of rounded corners and vibrancy.
I'm curious (genuine curiosity, not meant sarcastic), why is Firefox only now switching to CoreAnimation? AFAIK CoreAnimation has been around since Leopard which makes it nearly 12 year old, which is positively ancient in the tech world.
Also, coincidentally, do you know what exactly causes the H264 problem on macOS? I've tried to track it down in bugzilla to no success, but I am 100% sure it is a bug. The energy impact for playing a H264 YouTube video in Safari has an energy impact of ~25. Firefox used to be ~60, but these days its ~180 (!)
> In the meantime, setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config helps battery life significantly, at the cost of rounded corners and vibrancy.
Thanks for this! :)
> I'm curious (genuine curiosity, not meant sarcastic), why is Firefox only now switching to CoreAnimation? AFAIK CoreAnimation has been around since Leopard which makes it nearly 12 year old, which is positively ancient in the tech world.
I think CA was only moved to the window server relatively recently. Before then, my understanding is that it simply used OpenGL in-process, so it had no energy advantages over Firefox's built-in compositor. There was also a long time when the APIs to host CA content in the window server were private APIs and only Safari could use them.
> Also, coincidentally, do you know what exactly causes the H264 problem on macOS?
I believe, but am not sure, that H.264 is decoded in software in Firefox but is decoded in hardware in Safari.
Thanks for clearing up the CA stuff
> I believe, but am not sure, that H.264 is decoded in software in Firefox but is decoded in hardware in Safari.
I am 100% certain it is (was?) on Firefox as well, because it would have been impossible to hit the aforementioned 60 energy impact without hardware acceleration. This is done through VideoToolBox, but that might have changed.
Unless the intended behaviour is to cut battery life in half then yes it's a bug. Just because it's hard to fix doesn't mean it's not a bug.
I think Chrome's design appeal is obvious just from looking at a screenshot of Chrome and Firefox in 2008: https://imgur.com/a/uyBcxI0.
Firefox and Edge eventually adopted Chrome's design choices to have more content area, no "File, Edit, View" menu bar and an integrated search and address bar. But for years Chrome was ahead.
This. The most refreshing thing I felt when Chrome came out in 2008 was that it let me treat a webpage as an application _per se_, instead of a document being opened by an application (i.e. the browser).
Agreed, the google homepage wouldn't shut up about it.
> Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not.
Guess who sets up the computers for the remaining 99.99%? If you seduce the tech crowd, you also get the other users.
Chrome's growth was due to speed initially, but at least a decent chunk of it later was due to trickery. I've had to uninstall Chrome from my Mom's computer multiple times. It's one of the most popular bundleware apps out there. Free antivirus, games, system 'utilities', Adobe Flash updates, etc all got paid to employ dark patterns to sneak Chrome onto PCs and have it automatically set as the default and pinned to your task bar.
Examples: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
This reason alone is tragic enough to NEVER use Chrome.
And of course it has a complete garbage resources management which can be easly tested by opening few hundred empty tabs.. (mostly freezes whole OS around 180-270 tabs on modern desktops)
which browser right now can handle 180-270 tabs lol?
289 tabs open right now in Firefox (I have a little addon installed that counts them for you).
Firefox does so easily, although Chrome did too last I used it.
It's probably worth referring back to the comic that Google produced as an introduction to Chrome: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
I think the focus was technical-- stability, speed, security being the main focuses. There is an element of breaking away from proprietary software in the comic too. (Rather ironic, to my mind, considering that it's Google's Internet now... >sigh<)
Beyond even that, Firefox was already stripping market share away from IE at the time. Around 2010 or so it was really a 3-way split, which was really nice in terms of getting a lot of things worked out between the three (relatively speaking). A lot of people would have migrated away from IE, it just would have been more Firefox, less Chrome.
Id argue it was a 4 way split honestly. Mobile Safari absolutely dominated the mobile browsing space which was growing by leaps and bounds at that time.
At one point Firefox's growth stopped or slowed considerably. Without Chrome I doubt many would've migrated away from Internet Explorer.
firefox had been taking market share from IE slowly, then when it started to make some real gains, chrome came around and swiped it all out from under firefox.
i've mainly used the mozilla lineage of browsers (all the way through netscape and back to mosaic) and was really dismayed when this happened because even by then it was pretty obvious that chrome was part of google's wild west landgrab before regulations and law had a chance to catch up to online surveillance.
> online surveillance
I think the drive behind Chrome was to compete with Microsoft, by making a browser that was good enough to deliver your applications, and so make your OS irrelevant.
They have succeeded to the point where the only thing I would use Windows for now is Excel (and sometimes some obsolete development tools).
Chrome (when not on Android) seems far more benign than most applications as far as "surveillance" goes.
yes, chrome was part of google's hedge against microsoft, but microsoft poorly understand the web and badly bungled their internet strategy, to the point that it seemed that they were desperately trying to cede the leadership position to anyone but themselves. google really hadn't needed to worry about microsoft there.
make no mistake, chrome's primary strategic purpose was to control the web in ways that extended and solidified google's reach in search, ad views, and personal data. they flanked it with a suite of tools (e.g., gmail, maps), content (e.g, youtube), and platforms (e.g., android) and made them work best on chrome (à la microsoft with IE).
chrome phones home constantly and uses increasingly intrusive techniques to identity us (like requiring a google account). whether you believe it's benign or not, that's surveillance. they're slowly boiling the pot and we're the frogs.
Microsoft has always been a non-innovator. Their whole MO has been to wait to see what innovations catch on, and then dominate that space. The software/products they create in these spaces tend to be competent but not brilliant. They are almost a market-follower which happens to gain significant market share due to shrewd business tactics and, eventually, their sheer size. They have always mostly taken a 'wait and see' approach -- just look at the way Azure has come around as a response to AWS.
I agree with your views on privacy and Chrome. I've stopped using Chrome except at work, where (sadly) the Chrome dev tools are too valuable to ignore.
I don't entirely agree with that. Up until IE6, MS made a LOT of efforts towards making web apps work relatively well compared to alternatives. DHTML worked a lot better in IE5-6 than in the Mozilla counterpart at the time imho. It wasn't until around when Firefox (then firebird) came out that it started to really shift. IE was stagnant for what seemed like forever. IE7-8 were relatively insignificant shifts supporting some newer features, but still didn't resolve some of the huge memory holes with the JS engine and rendering engine separated by discrete COM layers. (separate issue)
I can agree with that in some regards, but I do think that MS has done a lot of things better. I think classic ASP was much better than PHP, though most of the unique functionality you might need was captured behind third party COM components. I think C# was/is a significant improvement over Java, and prefer .Net in general. .Net Core has been a very good shift, though some things seem more convoluted than they probably need to be.
As someone who tends to reach for Node first, I really do appreciate MS's efforts in that space to get things running as smoothly in windows as in Linux and Mac. As an early adopter (0.6/0.8 era) windows use was pretty painful. VS Code is imho was leaps and bounds ahead of brackets and atom at release. I also really do like MS Teams, though lack of a Linux build of the client is just stupid and short sighted.
I still use chrome first, but have ublock origin enabled, and tend to be picky about my exclusions, pisses me off to no end when sites just don't work with it enabled.
i’m not sure i’d go as far as to say they were non-innovators. microsoft famously employed “embrace, extend, extinguish” but it required quite a bit of “extend” to be successful. ms-dos, windows, office, exchange, sql server, etc. were all solid advancements in their time.
but they’ve certainly stagnated in my mind. i still use outlook/exchange and excel, but generally migrated away from microsoft many years ago now.
I do think their Office 365 and Azure strategies will keep them around for a long while. It's significantly better than the alternatives. All the same, most of my efforts have been towards not deploying to windows centered infrastructure, though Azure itself is decent enough.
> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time
IE8 Beta 1 shipped March 5, 2008; Chrome's beta release wasn't till September. OK, admittedly, Chrome's stable release happened before IE8's, but MS was working on much the same thing.
I'm pretty sure that a very old version of IE (maybe IE4?) was released with multiprocess before Microsoft killed that project.
I switched back to Firefox before it was cool to switch back :-)
And no, for me if Chrome is superior, it’s absolutely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that I cannot trust Chrome and that Firefox has been good enough for quite some time.
Yes I know the general population doesn’t think like me. I also think that ignorance in tech is dangerous.
I like the car analogy for browsers back then:
Back when I first started using Chrome (I think in 2008), I used to describe it as a weekend race car with all the seats, upholstery, and HVAC stripped out. Fast, no frills.
Firefox, on the other hand, was your 1970s custom van with a cool wizard painted on the side, really comfortable seats, and lots of room for further customization. Not fast, but certainly versatile and designed to your liking.
IE7, naturally, was a Yugo.
In my experience I can't stream video on firefox without the video freezing within the first 5 minutes, and it feels clunky even with non video webpages. I really hate google the company, and I'd love to stop using their software, but so far I have yet to see a browser that even comes close to chrome.
What OS, hardware and video platform(s)? I haven't had any issues with Desktop Firefox on Windows 10 on any of my Core i7 machines, when watching YouTube/Vimeo. Even my old dual-core budget Inspiron 3137 laptop works for YouTube and Firefox as well as Pandora/Firefox/bluetooth audio blasting.
(It does like to consume RAM as if it was running SQL Server though.)
It happens both on my Mac Book Pro and my Windows 10 desktop. I don't have the problem as much with pre uploaded videos but with live streaming sites like twitch.
Also having a good time with Firefox on macOS running on an early 2018 MacBook Pro. It has fully replaced my Chrome use at work.
Same here on Arch Linux for me.
I am able to stream video on Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Mac, including on a computer with a 2nd-gen i3 with 4GB RAM. I suspect there may be something besides Firefox at fault for your issue.
I've been using Brave, which is basically Chrome but even faster, and with more privacy features. All Chrome extensions work.
The only problems I have with video in Firefox on Mac are with Hangouts / Meet sometimes not working correctly. This is likely due to Google not cross browser testing.
This, very noticeable with something like shadertoy.
I certainly feel the gap between chrome and firefox has narrowed. I struggle to think of a reason NOT to use firefox anymore. I do find myself clicking on that red fox more and more. I've sort of made firefox my incognito "browser".
If the firefox vs IE wars taught me anything its that tech savvy users have a huge impact on adoption. If you win over the nerds they will install firefox absolutely everywhere. They will develop their stuff to work well with firefox.
Chrome hasn't quite become ie6 yet but I feel like if trends continue Firefox will become power users favored browser. Firefox even today is still more extensible and customizable. It also has a more credible reputation for privacy. I believe even now the threat of Firefox is what makes Google hesitate to do things like kill ad blocking.
That's living in a bizarro fantasy world where any meaningful number of people evaluate anything on technical merits. Even the speed argument below is suspect. People can't tell the difference between their browser and their internet connection.
Chrome was widely adopted because it didn't suck and because google--a brand they already learned to trust for search--was constantly beating them over the head to upgrade.
IE wasn't just bad on technical grounds. It genuinely sucked for everyone. It was constantly getting infected with toolbars, popups, and generally crashing all to hell. It was confusing for people to use even when it wasn't any of those things.
Chrome was adopted by the majority of users because it worked at all. IE just didn't.
> I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed."
Indeed. When Chrome was first released Firefox had already broken the IE monopoly having reached around 33% of the browser "market share", and was still growing. Speed was the issue I seem to remember most people switching to Chrome for at the time.
Firefox started with a terrible backdrop (Netscape 4), but after it's mozilla and phoenix days it was fairly fast fairly quickly.
It then started adding bloat and terribleness, which Chrome didn't have.
It's recovered now though, and is far better than chrome. It saddens me that so many on HN champion google and actively push for competitors to fail.
I remember it grew to about 26% and then sort of stalled.
I don't remember where IE was at the time but I remember some websites were still only supporting it.
It still is behind technically isn't it? Does Firefox support Site Isolation yet?
There are features Chrome has that Firefox doesn't. There are also features that Firefox has that Chrome doesn't, such as Stylo and WebRender.
You can argue that Site Isolation is more important than large performance improvements (I think that's a losing argument, given that Site Isolation as presently deployed in Chrome doesn't even defend against compromised renderers and as such is restricted to being another Spectre mitigation), but you're being way too glib here.
I'm not being glib, my current work involves security and privacy, and so I'm more sensitive / concerned about those issues than rendering performance. Current JITs like V8 even give me the willies in terms of attack surface area, such that I'm willing to stomach something like a WASM interpreter for my use cases.
I recognize that WebRender is a huge technique achievement and I absolutely love it when people achieve silky smooth 60fps renders, and if I was working on games or graphics or UX, I'd probably rank that over top of Site Isolation.
The original post mentioned process isolation and flash, so my comment was more a long the lines of 'it's still behind chrome (in isolation)'
Even if all you care about is security, I don't think Site Isolation makes a real-world difference right now, as it's simply a defense-in-depth Spectre mitigation in case the first-line Spectre mitigations, which are deployed in both Chrome and Firefox, fail. At present, using Site Isolation to protect against compromised renderers is a TODO for both Chrome and Firefox. It's true that Chrome is closer to getting there, though.
Please correct me if am wrong: But I think both Chrome and Safari have disabled/removed their Spectre-mitigations in the JS engine.
For Chrome the TurboFan (jit optimizing compiler) Spectre mitigations are turned off when site isolation is on.
No, Firefox doesn't have Site Isolation. It's a planned feature addition.
It doesn't matter if Firefox has caught up if their usage share is still dropping. With Microsoft moving to a Chromium based browser as well, Firefox is very close to being irrelevant. More than 90% of the market will be Webkit or Blink.
In my opinion, despite their technical achievements, Firefox is currently headed down the same path Opera went down before they became essentially a Chromium reskin. Their dropping usage share is negatively affecting sites compatibility with Firefox, which is the only reason I went back to Chrome after giving Quantum a try.
Hey hey. My name is Michael. So, just did a quick cut&paste of part of your comment that I wish to comment on: "Luckily, Firefox, arguably among the most 'free from corporate greed' of the browsers, has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed (in my experience)," No, you're not alone. I will absolutely agree with you about Firefox quickly catching up to Chrome and at an alarming (but satisfying) rate. By that, I only mean that Google is no longer a sort of "underdog" like it was-at least when standing next to Microsoft-(and hasn't been for some time).And I have to agree with Reda's comment that Google has become the very thing that it was trying to stomp out in Microsoft: a sort of monopoly-just-short-enough-of-being-a-monopoly to escape the law's notice. What I fear is that Google will get so big and powerful that if they did get close enough to technically qualifying as being a monopoly that they could and quite possibly would be like, "SO?! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?" And being able to because at that point, who COULD do anything? I never thought it possible for any one company until recently. It is too close for comfort. Thanks, Michael
ps- sorry it was so long. I actually am working on that.
Not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but...
> No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today.
I never saw a site crash my browser/tab until I used chrome.
To me it seemed like a workaround to a immature code-vase, because Firefox never had issues like this.
Either way: not really a selling point to me, at least.
WRT crashing stuff: I’ve used mostly Windows and Linux. Is unstable web browsers just a Mac thing?
>Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today.
Actually IE8 had the same thing (and it was in development by 2007, so the few-months-later release date vs Chrome doesn't matter in terms of architecture).
Here's the original announcement from Sundar Pichai - who was then the VP of Product Management, now CEO: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browse...
Chrome was the first browser to give each tab a unique subprocess but it did not start out with this. I think this may have been 2010.
Also when Flash crashed it would crash its container opposed to the outer page. Flash was also a separate process from the containing page.
> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser
This was my main initial reason for switching - sick of constantly having one tab lock up the entire browser. It was also prettier, and I liked the combined search and URL bar.
Now, I have no reason to change. Plus, Firefox is on all the machines at work, and really badly handles multi-system user accounts - if logged in on one computer then you cannot use on any others without launching with a special command line flag and switching to an entirely new profile (where none of the settings/logins are kept). Last I checked they had no interest in fixing this.
> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser
Chrome has never been process-per-tab - this is a common misconception. It's process per domain, except there are certain circumstances in which two tabs on different domains will still share the same process (such as opening a tab through a middle click).
For non-technical users: faster pages, account syncing, google name recognition and default searching. For technical users: V8, dev tools, better privacy, evergreen, frequent updates, tabs as processes, fast implementations of new specifications. There were many reasons that Chrome rapidly gained market share.
> better privacy
Pardon ? Its completely opposite, same with performance, try to open more than 100 tabs on firefox and chrome..
They're commenting on why "Chrome rapidly gained market share.", not commenting on the current situation.
How did Chrome have better privacy than Firefox at any point in the past?
Chrome's primary competition wasn't FireFox as they've never been anything close to a market leader. My post was about what features led to Chrome gaining such high market share, and their default privacy settings were superior to some other browsers.
This is what I remember about Chrome's release: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
The first change it referenced was a process per tab, and then on page 13 it referenced V8.
I'm making an effort to stay on Firefo, but frankly the experience on mobile is IMO not as good as Chrome in term of navigation. I miss the pull to refresh, the inability to hide the URL bar when using a PWA (could be some websites that aren't fully compliant though..)
I mostly use FF, but often Chrome. On my Dell laptop, I frequently get notified that "Firefox has been blocked from accessing the graphics hardware" or something to that effect. It's never happened once in Chrome.
For me, it was the unified bookmarks across all ones machines with Chrome. No more fiddling with copying bookmarks or syncing - it was done automatically and it worked.
No other browser had it built in at the time.
Speed was nice, but this really hooked me. What really blew me away not long after was synced tabs between my computer and phone.
> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time
IE8 had a public release with process-per-tab before Chrome debuted.
Yeah, before Chrome became popular, Firefox had close to 50% marketshare, and Firefox is a lot farther away from your typical corp than Chrome.
Did folks really switch because of the tab /per process? I honestly didn't know until I saw memory hogging + folks posting about it.
> Firefox, arguably among the most "free from corporate greed" of the browsers, has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed (in my experience)
I’m sad to say that I hope that was my experience, but I’ve being trying Firefox (again) for the last 6 months and I still manage to make it irresponsive while developing, and very slow when using plugins like dark reader. So I had to revert to Chrome but I’ll try again in a few months.
The dark theme in Firefox isn't great, it's why I can't get people to switch, I've tried a half dozen add-ons, and while some of them are acceptable, FF flashes white between every page load, producing a blinding beam that immediately sends people back to Chrome.
I know enough to try to change it in the config files, but I couldn't figure it out in the time I spent attepting = /
and firefox had deep memory issue, while v8 transformed the webapp experience.
the main selling point to me was closing it and opening it back with all the tabs was not a dramatic event but part of a clutter-free workflow
> has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed
Arguably, with its market share dwindling fast, it's not enough to just be technically on par.
Further, it is absolutely not up to par on Linux and from what I know, MacOS as well.
As someone who recently switched to Firefox on Linux partially due to performance.. it is really a toss up. Some sites FF renders faster, others Chrome. Chrome does tend to do a bit better on large javascript heavy 'single-page-app' type sites while Firefox crushes Chrome when displaying large (as in lots of text) pages. The latter made reading documentation impossible, such that I always had to use FF for it.
Plus you get the benefit of Firefox not corrupting its session weekly. Losing all your cookies, tabs and history frequently got super annoying.
Both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show the opposite [0] [1]. My own experience and unresolved performance bugs that I've filed show the same [2].
I want Firefox to be faster and superior to chrome in every way. Ignoring it's problems won't make them go away and definitely won't make them a priority for the devs.
[0] https://blog.macsales.com/46993-rocket-yard-testing-lab-whic...
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=firefox-...
> Further, it is absolutely not up to par on Linux
I am sitting on Arch here, Firefox Wayland and it's absolutely up to par, in fact Chromium seems less responsive these days. Granted, I have a very tuned, minimalist install, maybe on the likes of Ubuntu it's a different story.
I switched to Firefox about a year ago on Mac, and coming from Chrome I've been totally satisfied. Not that I've run any comparison benchmarks or anything, but it'll load basically anything I want to throw at it, has the right set of extensions to keep me rolling, and the only real performance issue I've noticed with sites is the occasional rendering block waiting on content I have blocked with uMatrix. But that last one's my fault, not Firefox's.
I use a 2017 Macbook Pro in work, on which I use Firefox as my main browser.
I also have Firefox on my Windows 10 gaming machine at home and while I haven't run any performance anaylsis, I can;t tell the difference between the two in terms of speed and responsiveness.
The Mac version has crashed on me a few times though whereas my Windows 10 version hasn't.
Other than the OS they are on the two browser instances are set up exactly the same way.
It’s got great performance on macOS, and I suggest that people try it again.
Firefox still feels non-native on OS X as a result of its reliance on XUL. My main issues are around UI. The menu bar only fully populates once the browser is almost loaded, not when the browser is first opened. The other thing is that UI elements exist in an uncanny valley, where they are not quite native, but not quite foreign.
Camino meant to fix that, but it has moved onto greener pastures.
> "Firefox still feels non-native on OS X..."
As opposed to Chrome? Or Opera, Vivaldi, etc?
Browsers are a class of application whose UI's have been "native" only to themselves for years now.
Didn't they get rid of XUL entirely several releases ago?
See jorvi's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19264960 there are some bugs that drive me back to chrome when I try it
I've been heads down building an app which relies on Google Chrome and I go back and forth on this.
Polar is an app for managing your reading. It also supports advanced features like caching web pages locally, annotating PDFs, tagging the documents you're reading, etc.
It's based on Electron and I've been going deep into Chrome internals as well as experimenting with Chrome extensions.
It's definitely a double edges sword here but I think there's an overly negative view of Chrome and/or having one platform.
Chrome is owned by Google. However, Chromium is Open Source.
Electron wouldn't exist without Chromium and there are other browsers based on Chromium.
I don't really see the benefit of duplicating things for the sake of duplicating them.
A lot of Firefox fans here argue that Firefox provides an alternative to keep us safe.
Safe from what? Chromium? It's Open Source?
Do we really need a duplicated HTML renderer? It's not like Chromium is going to vanish.
There's the argument that most Chromium developers are employed by Google - but not if Mozilla employs them.
It's always possible for fork these things.
> Safe from what? Chromium? It's Open Source?
Safe from monopoly control over Web standards.
The Web has been a consensus ecosystem, and Google does not have a track record of proposing reasonable standards. In my mind this is most grossly evident in the case of PNaCl, which was tied to their Pepper API and effectively impossible for non-Blink browsers to implement.
Google pushed for PNaCl to become a Web standard, and it was only through years of difficult effort that Mozilla was able to show AsmJS as a better solution, which eventually gave rise to the reasonable standard of WebAssembly.
Were Google in a monopoly market position back then, they would have pushed PNaCl, and non-Blink browsers would be unable to render the modern Web.
That might sound fine if you believe that Blink is the be-all-and-end-all of Web technology. But we have Servo now, and we already know better.
Right but Mozilla could still do this within the context of Chromium.
They could fork it if necessary.
And I definitely agree that Google is faltering on a lot of their execution lately.
Most of the things they ship are like a 6/10 in terms of usability.
There would be a ton of pressure to adopt NaCl in a world in which it's just a configuration flag away. Absent other browser engines, we would be using NaCl and Dart everywhere.
I've never understood the "just fork Blink" argument in favor of a single renderer. Forking Blink results in multiple renderers that diverge over time: just look at what happened to WebKit and Blink. You can't have it both ways: either the entire Web is under control of Google management, or you have multiple competing renderers.
Chromium certainly shouldn’t die. However…
> Do we really need a duplicated HTML renderer?
Hah. Yes, and if there’s a point when we don’t, I vote we keep Servo instead of Blink. (There won’t be.)
Although it’s possible I’m replying to some filler in a comment that starts with a link to a product only related in the sense of “apps that use Electron exist”…
> I've been heads down building an app which relies on Google Chrome
IE6 called
Other browsers need to catch up to Chrome with their development tools. I'd be happy to use Safari or Firefox for development, but...
- I can't disable CORS in Firefox (yes, sometimes you have to disable CORS rather than modify the Allow-Origin header response, for example if you need to test against a production backend) (and, no, CORS Everywhere is not a sufficient solution).
- I can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome.
- Safari does not allow self-signed certs over WSS (and there's no way to override it).
- Safari does not respect System-wide APC Config for Proxies.
There's a handful of other issues. Both Safari and Firefox do do things well, and often better than Chrome. For example, Firefox tends to actually handle standards correctly, whereas Chrome tries to be overly forgiving. And Safari's Develop and Debug menus are easily the best and quickest way to disable CORS or JavaScript, and examine service workers.
Unfortunately, some of the above issues are blockers.
I can test with Firefox on staging or in production, but not being able to test up front during development really impacts compatibility testing.
If another browser was as good or better for development, I'd be happy to use it.
I agree. While the Firefox dev-tools improved a lot over in recent years, they are still not up to where the chrome dev-tools are. Currently, I try to use the Firefox dev-tools as much as possible but keep chrome prepared for some special cases.
From a consumer perspective, the story is very different: Any browser will probably do, but choosing Firefox has the best long term effect on the development of the internet.
You just said Chrome was the superior browser for developers.
> the best long term effect
What do you mean by this?
> What do you mean by this?
Supporting Google/Chrome is supporting corporate interest over user interest. We've seen them already taking steps to remove support for 3rd Party Ad Blocking and to ignore privacy related features.
For the 99.9% non-technical people out there, we're gonna need an easy to install and manage Pi-hole like program that can be deployed on Windows and automatically set Chrome's proxy to 127.0.0.1.
Google already ignores DNS in favor of hardcoded IPs or it's own DNS for certain things.
> remove support for 3rd Party Ad Blocking
that's a bit misleading, no?
Google maintains plausible deniability but it's an odd coincidence that they first introduce their own Ad Blocker, and then soon after propose to remove an API that's necessary for 3rd Party Ad Blockers.
If you keep in mind that Google is an Ad company then adding an Ad Blocker to their product doesn't make sense until you consider that by doing so they diminish the need for 3rd party Ad Blockers. Once you can successfully argue 3rd Party Ad Blockers are unnecessary then the argument for removing an API they depend on to function is easier.
Embrace, extend, exterminate
Well, for example, there is no major OS that brings Firefox bundled with it. So they have to keep creating something good or people will stop using it. Therefore, getting into a monopoly position is kinda hard for the Mozilla guys. Browser monopolies are bad because the ruling browser's implementation will always compete with the web standards.
Yup, Chrome has the best devtools for what I need and I'll continue to use it until there's a better alternative.
What is the difference between the two?
I am primarily a back-end/services/middleware dev and don't do much front-end stuff these days.
When I do though, I use Firefox's dev tools and I don't know...I'm not sure what I'm missing?
I have Chrome on this machine too and have tried the dev tools there but I beyond layout I don't know what the differences are or what Firefox's dev tools are lacking.
Chrome DevTools is far more feature-complete than any of the alternatives. I consider it the gold standard for developer tools.
Every release they publish a blog post with new DevTools features, here's the latest one from January 2018 [0]. If you scroll to the bottom it has a section titled "Discover other DevTools features", which provides a long list of features they've been adding over time.
Their console autocomplete is just amazing. If you type `document.querySelectorAll('body')`, it shows you a preview of the result without even having to hit enter. Then if you type a period it shows you that the constructor is a NodeList, as well as its methods. They go over many of these features in their May 2018 [1] blog post. Keyboard navigation has continually been improving as well.
There's no huge killer feature, it's just very solid all-around. Over the years it has remained miles ahead of the competition. With that being said, I still use Firefox as my daily-driver, and I'm perfectly happy with their DevTools for many tasks. And they're actually superior for certain tasks, for example, when working with `display: grid` and `display: flex` [2]. I usually switch over to Chromium while I'm actively developing or debugging something, but I don't think there's any need to limit yourself to just one tool.
[0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/01/devtools
[1] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/05/devtools
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto...
This is a worthwhile point. I still consider Chrome handy and occasionally essential for development.
But it's no longer my day-to-day browser. Firefox became more than adequate for that with quantum, and I see no reason to enable a Google that has made absolutely sure to shape itself into a machine that will always have powerful incentives to do the wrong thing.
>- I can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome.
For what it's worth, WebSockets show up as type 'Other' in the inspector, and the frames are listed under 'Preview'.
Edit: Safari.
It just says "WebSocket Connection Established", and then a list of "Binary Frame". Is there a way to inspect their contents? Just seeing that frames are being sent doesn't seem very useful for debugging.
I just tested Safari 12.0.3 on macOS 10.14.3 with https://websocket.org/echo.html and it works for me. In the inspector it has a Sockets folder with the socket, and when I select it, it shows the textual content of each frame.
Edit: This is of course textual frames. I don't know where to find a site that demonstrates binary frames. I do notice that if I right-click the textual frame it has "Log Frame Text" as an option; maybe with a binary frame you can ask it to log the binary frame contents?
Edit 2: Ok I found a binary websocket test and unfortunately there is no option to log the binary info. That sucks. I recommend filing a bug report at bugreport.apple.com requesting better tooling around this. It's also worth checking the Safari Technical Preview to see if they've already added any better tooling.
In which browser?
I switched recently to using Safari for all my browsing except when I need DevTools, then I just fire up a Chrome window. Only having one Chrome tab open instead of dozens seems to help performance and battery life on my MacBook as well.
I cannot use the Firefox dev tools because they completely choke on the Angular app I'm working on, while Chrome chugs along like nobodies business.
I am using Firefox as my daily driver, because the browser itself is fast. But the dev tools just don't deliver. Waiting for a breakpoint to hit and open takes forever.
Yep. Chrome chugs on super long minified JS lines, but is fine after pretty printing. Meanwhile Firefox will crash on those minified lines, and even when they are non-minified, the size of the files causes FF devtools to run so slowly they are unusable.
Yes, totally agreed. I have given Firefox a try several times over the past year, but always came back to Chrome because of Dev Tools.
totally agree. There's one thing that safari has and (afaik) noone else: you can visually inspect all canvas elements on the site even if they are offscreen
The problem with these articles is that the recommendation always ends up just preaching to the choir: people who already switched away from Chrome nod in appreciation, but people who haven't switched literally get nothing out of these posts to convince them to switch to what is basically the same application made by a different company, with completely different conventions on where everything is, without any concrete perceived benefits (security and tracking are invisible problems, you don't sell someone on switching by saying they won't have them anymore, no matter how important you think that is). And to boot, the switch would almost certainly make things worse because add-ons people relied on won't work and now you've burdened them with having to find new and unfamiliar alternatives to what they were comfortable with.
Chrome's main problem isn't that it's overstayed its welcome and is strangling the web (whatever you want that to mean), it's that it's so pervasive that people have become accustomed to it to such a degree that you're now faced with needing to convince people to give up what they're accustomed to. And that's a _much_ harder sell. Using chrome needs to literally be a grating or even damaging experience before someone will voluntarily switch to a different browser.
I gave Firefox a solid test last year (about 3 months of dedicated use at work + home) and I ended up coming back to Chrome. There are some really great things about Firefox. It has gotten so much better and faster than it was, but Chrome still struggles less with troublesome websites, and seems to load all pages faster overall.
I'm keeping my eye on Firefox, but Chrome still gets my business for now.
I use both on a daily basis, and even I have no idea why I'd pick one over the other, except for power-user functions that 96% of the world couldn't care less about. In normal use, even standard dev work, they both do what I need them to do, and I (infrequently) run into bugs for both of them.
And honestly, at this point I don't even bother opening sites that struggle in one with the other: I just go "you clearly just didn't care to develop your website to work cross browser, good job, goodbye forever" and close the tab.
For almost everything, both browsers are identical except for the veneer their UIs present. They have different quirks, but a reasonably generated website or React app will work just fine in both. So while, if someone asked me to recommend one, I would absolutely tell them to get Firefox: not one asks for recommendations... everyone's already using either Chrome, or "the ios browser".
(and safari on iOS really _is_ the new IE6. I 100% disagree with the article's claim that Apple is making good strides, there. It needs to get out the shotgun and take Safari out to the back of the barn)
I dev with Chrome for the dev tools and use firefox for literally everything else, the Tab containers thing was the latest in a long sequence of "man they make that so much easier than Chrome" features.
Used both for a long time.
I'm okay with the dev tools in either. Install the React dev tools addons in both browsers and you're basically 99% of the way there =P
(I like chrome's mobile 'simulation' better, but both still lack lots of things I wish I could do, like simulating tiny CPUs or limited RAM, actually tracing through setTimeout, etc)
I use both regularly, and the only differences that I've noticed are related to Google web properties (particularly gmail and youtube), where Firefox has to rely on inefficient polyfills for chrome-specific features (I think, based on some googling one time, take this with a grain of salt.) What troublesome websites does Chrome work better on in your experience?
Same here - made a switch and switched back quickly after.
1. Compatibility - random sites would just break...I reckon 15% of the time
2. Battery life - FF destroyed my battery life. To the tune of 8 hours on Chrome vs like 2 on FF.
Did you have add-ons in Firefox? I almost never have sites break—certainly not anywhere near 15% of the time. And at least 95% of the time I've had issues in the past, it has turned out to be an add-on causing problems, rather than the browser itself. (Ad blockers would be the first thing to check in the case of random breakages.)
I don't think 15% is accurate, I only know of 1 site that breaks under Firefox and that is operated at minimum budget by a chinese electronics shop. I've literally never found any other site that broke on Firefox.
I suspect more detail regarding your setup would prove to be useful for context as neither one of your bullets point towards an issue with Firefox directly.
> and I ended up coming back to Chrome
same, except i use Brave (Chromium minus the Google crap/tracking.)
I try Firefox after every major update, but for me "pinch to zoom" not working for the trackpad is the biggest flaw. It's so frustrating/such a basic feature.
Safari and Chrome have had this feature for at least 6 years.
>the switch would almost certainly make things worse because add-ons people relied on won't work and now you've burdened them with having to find new and unfamiliar alternatives to what they were comfortable with.
I have no data to back this up so you could say I'm just talking out of my ass, but I would guess that the non-technical users who makes up most of Chrome's userbase either don't use any add-ons at all or mainly use extremely popular ones that have equivalents in other web browsers like adblock.
I 100% agree with everything else though, the average user who uses a web browser exclusively for instagram and gmail does not see things like small performance increases or privacy as being worth changing habits for. Hell, some of the technical people I work with have no problem with companies/the NSA spying on them because they have "nothing to hide". I really think the only reason Chrome got so popular was because the meme that Internet Explorer sucks premeated our culture so strongly that basically everyone started to know that the first thing you do with a new computer is use IE to download a different browser, and what better to use than the one made by the search engine you use every day?
I think you'll find that a billion dollar company throwing literally hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to get people to use their product, all at the same time across multiple continents, has far more of an effect than you are giving it credit for. If you're using IE, but your _train station_ has a wall-sized poster going "pst, give Chrome a try", and every other train station does too, then your average person will absolutely give in to that poster's suggestion after being exposed to it for 14 days straight. Even if it's only so that they can tell their friends they tried it.
Chrome's campaign was a phenomenal example of a successful international product launch. Made even more impressive because it was for software, something most people /really/ don't care about.
You hit the nail on the head: the problem with overturning the status quo is that you can't offer an alternative that is just as good -- it needs to be better.
We don't know that this kind of article doesn't have effects.
If there's always some subpopulation who's never heard of diet coke & mentos (https://www.xkcd.com/1053/ ), it's pretty likely that there's some subpopulation that is unaware of the implications of Chrome's dominance combined with Google's business model and amenable to arguments that something like Firefox or even Safari might be a better choice.
And I think it's also worth considering that Firefox made significant strides into IE's marketshare back in the early/mid 2000s when users ostensibly had no reason to care by the standard of "no concrete/perceived benefits", since everyone had to code to accomodate IE. There's no other reasonable model I can think of other than IT professionals frequently recommending FF, and many non-pros finding that recommendation compelling enough to switch.
I only recommend Brave nowadays and tbh it's an easy sell because it's: familiar as it uses Chromium and so compatible with Chrome plugins, much faster than Chrome, and uses a lot less battery compared to other browsers (particularly on mobile).
The speed and energy usage points instantly resonate with less technical folk who aren't so invested in browser wars.
For those who care a little more the increased security, ad / tracking blocking, tor integration etc are just the icing on the cake.
>"with completely different conventions on where everything is"
...what?
GP is talking about how other web browsers have different conventions for where different web browsers place standard UI elements. Tabs on top, tabs beneath the addresss bar, separated search bars, different icons and terminology for the same concept, different items in the "share" pop ups, different placement of global menus, different customisability of the basic user interface layout, etc.
These are things to which we technically minded can easily adapt, but for the less technically literate it's bewildering, confusing, and possibly enough to make them angry.
Agreed. Aside from some vague intimations that Google is using Chrome as a business tool, it really didn't present much of an argument to switch to something else.
Furthermore I'd argue that if the author hasn't used Chrome since 2014, he's not well positioned to comment on its usability today.
> Agreed. Aside from some vague intimations that Google is using Chrome as a business tool
Not sure about 'vague', they're using non-standard APIs to advantage their browser accross Google products, implemented a forced Chrome login and are planning to remove ad blocking APIs, the last one being the most clear case of Chrome being used to support their primary source of revenue.
I find posts like this kind of interesting. Chrome gained prominence because it had great performance improvements over the competition -- IE and Firefox. IE in particular was dog slow at all times, and Chrome ran everything at least as well and almost always better. Firefox didn't have process isolation when Chrome came onto the scene, and that kind of knocked it for security and stability.
It's not as if people switched just because it had Google branding. Everyone switched because it was quantifiably better. From benchmarks to design, Chrome was a winner, and has enjoyed its success.
Now, Chrome is doing things that could be seen as "IE-like." Manifest v3 -- even with relaxed changes towards ad blocking -- will not necessarily enable uBlock Origin to continue exactly as it does today. The forced user system is another move in the direction of anti-consumer behavior.
I've tried to switch back to the competition. I'm using Firefox right now. Pages render faster and compact mode is great. But Handoff myseteriously doesn't work on my Mac when it does with Chrome (added in Firefox 65). I had to enable U2F support with an about:config flag. I had to turn off the spell checker to fight mysterious input latency in average textboxes.
I'm reluctantly staying because I ultimately like what I see, but there's an undeniable truth somewhere in here. It's really hard for Firefox to match Chrome simply based on resources. Google can drop millions of dollars on a browser -- and few other companies can afford to do that. Certainly not Mozilla.
>It's not as if people switched just because it had Google branding. Everyone switched because it was quantifiably better.
The knowledgeable minority, maybe. _Most_ people switched because Google pushed it like a piece of adware. Bundling it with other software installers, prompting you to use it whenever you use Google search or other products, and bundling it with an OS.
If that was the deciding factor we'd still be using IE.
No we wouldn't.
Microsoft was legally prevented from doing that, remember?
Why Google has been allowed to get away with it I have no idea.
> Microsoft was legally prevented from doing that, remember?
> Why Google has been allowed to get away with it I have no idea.
Wasn't Microsoft only legally prevented from doing that due agreements made when they settled their antitrust case?
There needs to be another anti-trust case against Google, especially for the cases where it's used its monopoly in search to push its other products like Chrome, since that shouldn't even be controversial under current antitrust interpretations.
This probably does explain why a lot of people tried it, but it doesn't explain why they kept on using it. Often, ad campaigns cause churn as people try a product but bounce off of it.
I don't think most average web users do a comparison of browsers. They pick one (or get told to use one) and stick with it because for their use cases, there isn't much differences between the browser anyway.
They probably aren't keen observers, but if the browser is slow or confusing and they get annoyed, maybe they wouldn't install it next time? It's not like people are completely oblivious to quality.
But we're just comparing impressions and I'd bet there is better data out there.
Most people I've ever met, have found it to be faster and easier to use. But yes, a lot of older people still use IE because that's the default
> Google can drop millions of dollars on a browser -- and few other companies can afford to do that. Certainly not Mozilla.
Mozilla Revenue: US$562.3 million (2017)
And personally I don't think it is just money. As a developer, I feel that the whole Chrome dev team are astoundingly competent developers. Mozilla has their bright spots, but overall I feel they struggle to compete technically in some areas.
I don't doubt the technical competence at all, I doubt the management.
for example, we now have https://screenshots.firefox.com/ so that I can store my browser screenshots In The Cloud. The developer hours are going somewhere, to Screenshots, or Pocket integration, or taking away unsigned extensions, or whatever. It's not that the devs can't make something better, it's that management doesn't think that's the best investment of time?
They're sunsetting the cloud storage for screenshots, so I would suggest a better description would be that Mozilla management likes to spend time digging holes and refilling them.
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/01/24/clarifyin...
In retrospect the practical shifting of web-standards-setting from an at least possibly neutral standards body representing multiple interests (W3C) to a a body wholly controlled by browser-vendors (WHATWG)... may have been good for speed of "innovation" for a time, but was in the long-term not good for the "Web as an open platform."
> Making matters worse, the blame often lands on other vendors for “holding back the Web”. The Web is Google’s turf as it stands now; you either do as they do, or you are called out for being a laggard.
Indeed, I think it's the structural politics of WHATWG that make that hard to counter. WHATWG was almost founded on the principles of "not being a laggard" and "doing what we [browser vendors] do". When there were several browser-vendors with roughly equal market power they could counter-balance each other, and had an interest in compatibility with each other, but when there's an elephant in the room...
That is, the W3C folks that were accused of "holding back the web" while trying to keep standards-setting from going to WHATWG... were probably right.
You can disagree, but 10-15 years on, I think we're overdue a larger discussion and retrospective evaluation of the consequences of the WHATWG "coup". I haven't seen much discussion of this, many developers today may not even be aware of the history.
Other than AMP, I can't really think of a case that I would characterize as "Google abusing its position" w.r.t. Open Web. It was Chrome that led the push for PWAs, which I think is both great for the Open Web and consumers... The author complains about other vendors being "called laggards", which - let's be honest - we're really talking about how long Apple/Safari dragged their feet on Service Workers... and they _should_ be called out for that because it was an incredibly cynical thing to do to protect their walled App garden from the Open Web.
I'm pretty cynical about the "Chrome Experiments" project. Google never explicitly claimed that only Chrome can run those Experiments properly, but that was the clear implication.
It's laughable that the author suggests Apple as a viable alternative. Apple, the last company pushing license encumbered formats into web standards. Apple, the perennial laggard on standards support in general.
Probably because Apple take privacy seriously, which is a direct threat to Google's bottom line.
That's their PR position, but I don't see them taking privacy particularly seriously in reality. They tolerated predatory behavior from darling apps like Facebook for ages.
Apple sure hopes so, but do we know this from data? It seems like there are privacy scandals every week and yet Google seems to be swimming along fine.
And Apple takes the web platform not seriously at all, which is why the author's suggestion is ludicrous.
>Probably because Apple take privacy seriously,
by making google the default search engine on iOS?
I agreed to your comment before you edited it, simply because on a price point, Apple stuff isn't viable for laptops and desktops for many people.
I don't agree with your weird rant, without any sources. Apple has shown with Safari that some people do like privacy features baked in, and while I can't say for sure, I hope it played a part in emboldening Firefox/Mozilla to focus a bit more on privacy.
> I don't agree with your weird rant, without any sources.
We are in a thread about browsers and web standards. Do I really need to explain that Apple pushed h.264 on the web, ultimately forcing a binary blob on Firefox? The lagging on web standards is a common complaint among web developers.
Apple's Intelligent Tracking Protection is another common complaint among web developers.
Most don't care. The people who want that just get the same thing in better browsers.
The post is missing one simple point: the complexity of browser's engine.
The complexity of current web client stack is comparable with the average OS. Any modern browser has all components of Android OS for example - internal file systems, threads, VM, virtual native code execution, independent windowing and graphics stack, message routing, etc.
That's like situation with Windows and WINE. Yes, you may run some win progs on Wine but original Windows will always be better for them.
So we will have just one browser. That's the reality, want we that or not.
Until either one of these:
1. The spec of Web Client will be reduced to bare minimum. With unified extensions mechanism, think about <applet> but more flexible - based on universal bytecode VM free from licensing issues.
2. Or users will pay for the browser application, instead of having it for free - giving up their private data instead of money. So browser vendors will be able and motivated to provide better, privacy first browsers.
IMHO we got here because we chose the design-by-committee philosophy of organizations like the W3C over more of a waterfall approach built from first principles.
I would like to see a core HTML/CSS/Javascript spec that is a union of features proven to be available and work consistently across all browsers. The spec should incorporate ideas that are obvious in hindsight, such as the DOM diffing optimizations in frameworks like React, or running each tab in its own process.
I think that it should also take a broad perspective approach on things like padding and margin. For example, use simpler abstractions from layout engines like Qt or the layout-as-a-matrix-solver math behind iOS's Auto Layout constraints.
Find the commonalities to give us a high-level abstraction over all the div/span/table concepts of the web, then show a mapping from the abstraction to the quirks of how a div flows, for example. Maybe we could allow one transpiler to go from the solvable/predictable rules to the quirks of say HTML5.
The steps in this process could be relatively tiny and easy to test. It should render the DOM at > 60 fps on a Pentium 100 or equivalent, since games used to do that before they even had OpenGL.
I don't see any step of this process that is intractable. Once we had that, it should be relatively straightforward to build an open source browser as a base spec implementation. This is the sort of thing I fantasized about working on before I got so burned out.
I think we got here because of Martian Headsets:
>The complexity of current web client stack is comparable with the average OS.
I'm with you here, go on
>That's like situation with Windows and WINE.
Um, no. The situation is not, and has not ever been like that.
(If you think the analogy holds water, the burden is on you to argue that. I am not going to write an essay on how an airplane is unlike a cow; it simply is not.)
Here's hoping. The proliferation of browser standards has made this appear a more daunting task as time has gone by. There was a point where if you built a good DOM, javascript engine, and a layout engine and had a reasonable ability to fetch resources, you could bootstrap a browser. That's how Konquerer got there.
But now, I think we're past that point -- if your browser can't do native video conferencing and opengl and music apis and SVG animations and canvas support it might as well be a steaming turd.
I'd love to see someone try; to build a browser with third-party cookies excluded by design rather than policy (so that all off-domain fetches come from a blank "incognito" context), to build a React-style shadow DOM as the primary DOM and have the W3C DOM implemented as a polyfill, with client certificates integrated more naturally, completely killing the notion of allowing windows to open programmatically (I mean, how can pop-ups still be a problem? Any sane site is now using on-page popups if they need the UX), and some sort of model for integrating new web APIs and content handlers.
But combining all of that with a smooth and well-polished UI that works on multiple platforms is rapidly becoming something that only a large software corporation can pull off, and even there, mostly pull off badly. For now, I think Chrome is here to stay.
I have a better idea: build a new browser for a new web that is designed with decades of hindsight and isn't as bogged down in all the stupid legacy crap that the current web is.
Then port Chromium to it as a portal to the legacy web.
The most popular browsers in China take a similar approach: they're hybrids of Chromium and Microsoft's Trident engine for legacy pages that require NPAPI plugins. Many ecommerce and banking websites in China require proprietary NPAPI plugins so these hybrid browsers seamlessly switch to Trident for those websites.
That's cute and wishful but the world is built on legacy crap. And it'll remain that way until economic forces dictate otherwise.
Better idea:
To move Chrome development to some non-commercial "free world" institution. Like UN for example.
That's the only option to have a) security first and b) free browser.
No other options for free browser. Web client stack is so complex that to finance its development it should be a company that gets income from each browser instance installed. How they do that is a rhetoric question I think.
yeah and then the UN would bloat up the browser with non browser concerns like blocking loli cartoons or whatever their current excuse is to waste time
> Within two years, Chrome accounted for 15% of all Web traffic on desktop—for comparison, it took Firefox 6 years to get there. Google managed to deliver a fast, thoughtfully designed browser that was an instant hit among users and Web developers alike.
It took 2 years for IE to get 20% [1], and I wouldn't describe IE 1-3 as "fast and thoughtfully designed". I think the lesson here is simply that big tech companies with an established channel for reaching users can boost market share faster than open-source non-profit projects.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#/media/File:...
Immediately after Chrome released Google was having it bundled with every freeware program under the sun and bribed every major PC vendor to start including it as the default browser in new consumer Windows PCs being sold.
Mozilla never had the raw revenue to just dump millions into forcing Chrome onto everyones desktop like that.
It left a sour taste in my mouth that Microsoft joined Chrome instead of investing in FireFox and helping them advance their multi-process architecture quicker.
Is having a Chromium "kernel" such a bad thing? We don't complain there isn't sufficient competition for the Linux "kernel"
More eyes and hands on a single open source code base is better use of resources and leads to a better output.
I think the issue is that Google still has full control over the source. Maybe we just need to pull an io.js on chromium, though Microsoft would need to be on board.
I wish someone from Mozilla or MS would comment on this, to be honest. Were they even considered?
Historically, I've heard from various sources that Mozilla may not work at the same pace as some of the large corporations do in upstreaming patches and releases to the code base. This has (according to what I have heard, which may simply rest on rumor/speculation/heresey, mind you) kept a lot of large entities from getting on board.
I've also heard that in building Quantum this is less of an issue, but their code base is a mess, and chromium's is incredibly well documented and clean by comparison.
Anecdotally, I would be inclined to agree with my second statement up front, after just browsing the two, but please compare for yourself
microsoft switched to chromium because they want better control/integration with electron apps and the windows store. firefox wasn't on the table for them.
I really don't think this is it, if I'm being completely frank, because they already have an enormous amount of up front work done with making Windows PWA friend:
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/pwa
I also am willing to surmise that they are going to put in alot of work re-working all their APIs that are exposed as Edge based interfaces into whatever engine they and up with here (namely chromium), so I don't think it would have been beyond them to put in the work to do something like they did with node and chakra core:
https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore
(which, btw, for now isn't dead: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/issues/5865 likely for the reasoning I mentioned above)
I just don't buy it. I don't think easy electron compatibility is the main drive here.
This was the reason I was given from a dev on the edge team. Do with that what you will.
This is kind of weird, because if there is anything Microsoft doesn't like, they can patch it and make it work differently. Just like Apple did with KHTML and Google did with Webkit.
I don't really get why people judge source code by politics rather than "stealing" (forking) from the best.
Writing and maintaining a modern webbrowser isn't cheap or easy; exactly why MS switched to Chromium as an engine.
Google is the main power behind all Chromium development and there have already been plenty of examples of the devs going "our way or the highway" with noone forking the browser engine. Upcoming is the new change to block adblockers from working properly in chrome. I see nobody willing to fork chromium over that.
Is there any bad blood left over from the days that Mozilla supported the antitrust suit against MS?
You'd think a business would do whatever maximized value and ignore past negative interactions, but businesses are made of people.
Microsoft is in the ad business now.
Microsoft is largely in the PaaS business. Amazon is, too. It helps these companies to grow usage of outsourced hosting for third-party applications, much of which are web-based applications. They're often web-based not just at the user interface level but at the API and data handling levels. Web standards are actually good for business when you're charging all comers for processor hours at your data center.
> An ecosystem that doesn’t seem concerned with performance, user experience, privacy, or pushing computing forward.
What? Chrome was more performant that any browser at the time it was released and it's still pretty good. It also became the gold standard for browser UX so much so that all other browsers copied a lot of it. Chrome also brought with it multi-process tabs and the V8 Javascript engine, how is that not "pushing computing forward"?
This is such a fairytale retelling of history. Firefox was well on the way to crushing IE. It was the whole reason Microsoft re-kick started IE development again. Firefox was the dominant browser in 2008.
Safari was the browser pushing ahead on performance and being lightweight except in JavaScript. So Google took WebKit and added their own JS engine to it so that Gmail and their office suite could compete with Microsoft's offerings.
It worked and all browsers started an arms race for JS performance.
Firefox was never the dominant browser. Neither was it on its way to crushing IE. You my friend are recalling a fairytale.
From that source, it looks like the story depends on the region though (for desktop). In order of decreasing use of firefox:
* Europe: Firefox overtook IE in 2011 with ~40%
* Africa: Firefox overtook IE in 2012 with ~40%. It looks like Firefox had the best chance of "crushing it" here.
* South America: Firefox overtook IE in 2015 with 12%. Peak was 32% in 2010
* Asia: Firefox overtook IE in 2016 with ~12%. Peak was 28% in 2011
* Oceana: Firefox overtook IE in 2017 with 12%. Peak was 32% in 2010
* North America: Firefox peaked at 30% in 2009 and was half as common as IE until 2015-2016. It still hasn't overtaken IE
Yeah but in most cases that happened during the rise of Chrome which could suggest that Firefox didn't really overtake IE, but IE lost users to Chrome and Firefox happened to lose less users.
Another point to reinforce this argument is that in many of those regions Firefox peaked around 2010 and started losing users too.
In 2004 95% of browsers were IE, firefox was on 2.7% (TheCounter.com)
By 2009 this had dropped to 70%, with Firefox and Safari on 20% and 6%. Chrome hadn't even launched.
The hard work had been done -- people were using things other than IE, and it was growing.
Firefox then plateaued and Chrome built on this, in 2012 not a single browser had more share than 33% share.
After that things started going pear-shaped, and chrome started snowballing into monopoly
I'd be thrilled to use another browser if they worked.
In my case, the feature that is missing from every other browser is MIDI access. I can plug a digital piano into my computer, and Chrome can talk to it. This is a standard, but the other browsers talk about it but never do anything, it's been "coming any day now" in Firefox since 2015, when I first conceived of the project ( https://pianop.ly/, a web app for playing piano along with original music videos from YouTube, karaoke style). It sucks that I have to tell people to use Chrome or it won't work. (although technically they can use Brave, Opera or other Blink based browsers)
Regardless of that one feature, I'm curious why there aren't better alternatives based on Blink that allow you to get the Blink engine without all these things we hate about Google's decisions (related to the being an ad company, for one thing). I understand that we'd still have a monoculture, but I don't see that as nearly the problem it was when browsers worked so differently, for basic layout and such.
> Ten years ago, we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free from corporate greed
How? It never stops puzzling me why anyone thoght Chrome would be any different. Somehow less corporate.
> How? It never stops puzzling me why anyone thoght Chrome would be any different.
It is different! Microsoft never released even a single line of IE. Chromium on the other hand is completely open source, and we have that to thank for all the fun things that came of it from VSCode, to Brave browser, to Puppeteer. Things are WAY better now than in the dark IE days.
How?
It was open source from start. Yes, Firefox as well, but it had Google as a brand behind it which put lots of trust in it because of the engineering talent they have.
Google's motto used to be "don't be evil," and there was a time when people honestly believed they meant it. Hell, I think there was a time when Google did honestly mean it.
> The company’s focus gradually shifted towards transforming their browser dominance into business growth
It hasn’t shifted. It’s always been there.
It puzzles me how anyone can believe Firefox will be different, especially with examples to the contrary already existing.
If anyone's to blame it's mozilla's criminal laziness. There I said it. We were stuck with firefox 3 for 3 years (early 2008-2011), on a time where chrome was getting a +1 version every month or 2 months.
I remember Mozilla "evangelist" employees hard at work, tweeting "version doesn't matter, it's the changelog that matters, chrome team could have changed two background colors and did +1 to the version counter".
Great battle move. Then, Firefox 4 got released and everyone hated the new interface. Even ex-mozilla cofounder JWZ complained that it feels beta even though it's a fully mature product out for a decade now and that's unacceptable. Also, No mp4 support. Oh yeah. They added it in Firefox 20 finally (then no webm support. They finally added it in January 2019. Good job)
In the meantime, Mozilla engineering kept fooling around with projects that went nowhere. Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that? THE JAVASCRIPT PHONE! FLASH TO JS CONVERTER, where is that now? That JS only Video Codec ORBX.js? that Eich said "I saw the future today" 10 years ago, and it's still not out yet. PDF JS (in it's first release made opening large PDF files on Firefox impossible) etc etc. Many good things came of from it too, like asmjs (ancestor of wasm), but in general there seemed a direction of everywhere, neither arriving here nor there.
Mozilla then switched the default search engine of Firefox to Yahoo! At a time when Yahoo was in the spotlight for rapidly dying and looking for a pity-acquisition!! It also came bundled with great bugs that kept resetting the default search engine back to yahoo - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1206101
To give praise where praise is worth, Mozilla did realize their mistakes got back from their 9 year vacation (2009-2018) and Firefox today is finally very stable and relatively fast compared to Edge and Safari.
I know I am sounding trollish and bitter, but the truth is that I am just sad at how Firefox fell. What happened? Did people get lazy as their savings grew? Where key individuals poached away by Google and Apple? Did they burn out? Something surely must have happened...
Addressing your entire post would require further research on my part so I hope you'll excuse that I only address what I can recall off the top of my head.
> Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that?
That's just the code name for Firefox for Android. Ime it's fairly pleasant to use since flick scrolling was improved, and browser plugins on mobile are the selling feature.
> FLASH TO JS CONVERTER
Definitely sad to see Shumway die, but I think in retrospect it will be clear it was a forward thinking decision. WASM will obviate a lot of the effort for what has clearly become a historical feature.
> Mozilla did realize their mistakes got back from their 9 year vacation (2009-2018)
The origin of modern Firefox could be dated back to the origin of Servo in 2012 since it layed all the groundwork. I think this is the clear turning point in Mozilla's refocus, maybe push it back to 2015 when Firefox OS was dropped.
Thanks for commenting. My comment was meant to to be slightly exagerated but since your response is grounded, I 'll rephrase mine too :)
The evangelist tweets (I won't dig them because it's not cool) are 100% real, but keep in mind they were meant to be humorous and not official stance.
Firefox 3 got released in 2008, but firefox 3.5 (arguably the best browser at the time) was released a year later. Mozilla released many firefox updates in the meantime I believe they did so even after firefox 4 was released (no forced update from 3.5 to 4).
Firefox 4 was delayed to my understanding due to the whole html5 hype and trying to support as many of the new standards as possible (this info is from twitter so it might be wrong).
Lots of projects in limbo, not much different than google pushing NaCl, Dart, webkit prefixes. It looks bad only when paired with the general low activity. There were some chat logs leaked of mozilla people talking about adding webkit prefix support to firefox. Some where getting very angry over this. Today firefox supports the webkit prefixes :p must have been a multi-year argument.
Lack of mp4 support was due to MPEG LA owning the rights to h264. Mozilla didn't wanna pay the patent owners, in the end cisco created openh264 and mozilla used that, in 2014 nonetheless. Webm was not added because it wasn't a web standard. In my opinion both h264 and webm events got dealt in poor judgement but whatever.
The Yahoo change was due to an expensive multi-year contract between Mozilla and Yahoo. Money before users. I remember people defending it by saying that yahoo search is powered by Bing, not by yahoo themselves.
In general mozilla used to be this awesomely perceived company... no not company, foundation! They organized things like place giant firefox stickers in your city and gain online fame, and sending a cake to the IE team with every major release they did. Spearheaded the whole open web movement. It was Richard Stallman with Charisma 10! And then.. kinda suddenly stopped and became more like the Apache Foundation. Cool and all but slow and old.
> developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship.
That's me. Sorry, but I just can't be bothered to support every browser's quirks. I check Firefox every once in a while, but really, I don't mind losing a few users if it means significantly less maintenance and testing for me.
It's like complaining that developers are increasingly shunning other OSes - if it works on Windows, it's ready to ship. Yet people do this all the time for video games and most Linux users understand that making a game that runs equally well on Windows and Linux and Mac is no simple task.
Developing against Chrome is exactly "support every browser's quirks" instead of developing against the actual standards (usually Firefox has the truest implementation of which).
Developers have never, in the history of the world, cared about standards. Nothing can be more blindingly obvious when strolling through history. You don't even have to look at the web. Look at SMTP, IMAP, you name it.
People don't write C++ and think about the standard, they write C++ and see if it compiles.
Should they operate this way? Of course not.
Are you going to change human psychology and cause this to happen anytime soon?
Nope.
If you want them to change, you'd have to provide a reason it matters, and very abstract long term notions of "goodness" are not gonna cut it for most developers, for better or worse.
Well, they care about standards when the consequences of _not_ caring about standards become painful in the ecosystem as a whole.
But if that gets fixed, they go back to not caring... until/unless the pain rises.
But in general I agree with you.
> People don't write C++ and think about the standard, they write C++ and see if it compiles.
Yep, you not just have to provide a _reason_, you have to provide tools that fit into workflow as efficiently as conveniently as that. (Ideally, that's a (in this case) compiler that's standard compliant!)
But as a web developer I don't necessarily care about standards. I want the page to work for as many users as possible. For the longest time this meant to support IE's way of doing things, now it means to support Chrome (unless you target Enterprise users).
Even if you develop for Chrome, Firefox and Edge you'll just end up building workarounds for all 3, not adhering strictly to the standard.
Sorry to break this to you, but as a web developer you should only care about standards, otherwise you have no standards.
The standards are a single source of truth for your production, if you build solely to a single browsers quirks (in this case Chrome) then those quirks can change at any time.
My standard is the browser ~95% of my users use. It's the only meaningful one.
I still fix FF bugs when they come in (it seems to be a bigger offender than IE recently) but developing for Chrome first is the only approach which makes business sense.
95%? I haven’t seen less than 20% mobile Safari on any site I’ve worked on in the last few years, and that’s not even including Edge / IE / Firefox and desktop Safari.
Our users are almost exclusively professionals working on Windows desktops. Probably a fairly unique situation but the point is standards are relative.
only true in american markets
I was actually talking about UK and Sweden (haven’t been to the US in 15 years).
what's the difference? these countries are basically american markets, everything west of belarus is kinda a software monoculture
I get to mandate the browser the work system supports (which is Chrome because that was what the majority of users used when I started so I went with what would cause the least amount of pain) but every feature I rollout works with Chrome, Firefox and mobile Safari (I test all three).
It adds very little extra work with the advantage of surfacing edge cases/issues that might have bitten me even if it was just Chrome in the mix.
Also from a business risk point of view tying the entire platform to a capricious vendor is dangerous and I've been around long enough to remember the days of IE5 then 6.
Once bitten, twice shy.
You would have loved IE6 back in the day.
This point of view is as ignorant of reality as the grammarians that say Webster's English is the only true English. Every standard is a three-edged sword: the spec, the intent behind the spec, and the practical application of the spec in the real world (which all-too-often, unfortunately, includes things like "Yeah, that's what the spec says, but then scammers realized you could exploit that to use people's browsers to mine Bitcoin or something, so no browser actually does that").
A web developer codes against real machines, not the imagined, idealized, and non-existent machines the specs describe.
By your argument we should only need a single dictionary, Websters, because your language is real and not the imagined one people in other english places speak, Webster just happens to be the one that aligns closest to your usage of english.
If that were true then web developers would have never bothered supporting alternative browsers.
Regardless of browser matrices, it is the will of the developer to support the open web platform that made sure that Internet Explorer and thus Microsoft didn't own the web (browser) in the 2000s.
Anecdotally this point of view has done no harm to me and I'm not the only that shares it.
Web devs support multiple browsers for the same reason desktop and mobile software developers code against multiple operating systems: some of their customers prefer those systems, and when you ask a customer to switch their framework to support your product you risk they'll say "no."
The reason web developers care about those customers varies from dev to dev. Some believe there is value in a heterogeneous ecosystem of browser implementations. Some have a few high-value customers who refuse to switch (or, in the case of e.g. Microsoft, cannot switch because enterprise constraints are restricting what browser stack they're allowed to run).
But the point stands that when you support multiple browsers, you don't approach ideal user experience (in terms of performance and reliability) for all your customers by throwing your fingers in your ears and proclaiming "That browser is out of spec!" when you find a quirk---you do what you have to do to make your code run on, around, or in spite of the quirk.
The standards are the starting point for the code, that dosen't mean that a dev shouldn't then write code to support the quirks of the browsers.
Writing to support one browser first was exactly what got everyone down in the deep hole writing code for IE only to find that it didn't work the same in Firefox and Chrome early on.
Also the Dev should be well aware that anything they write to support quirks could well be invalid code such as IE conditional comments.
And if you build to the standards, it's possible that no actual browser implements them correctly.
And then what?
> And if you build to the standards, it's possible that no actual browser implements them correctly.
> And then what?
Build to standards first, then accommodate quirks last.
Building to Chrome first is just building to its quirks, and totally forgetting about standards.
I'm not sure what the difference is. It's not like people learn HTML from Chrome's source code. They learn HTML from places like MDN, which document web standards.
"Write HTML, test on Chrome" - what people do in practice - seems to fit "build to standards first, accommodate quirks last" just as well as "build to Chrome first".
You wait for them to do so, and are vocal whenever this happens.
"Wait for them to do so" is an answer that guarantees your team will get passed over in favor of a team that brought a working product to market today, to solve real problems real users have.
This is like an unpleasant blast from the past. It was wrong when web developers did this for IE, it's wrong now.
I read comments like this all the time and I feel like I'm in a different world.
I just write standards compliant ES6 code, put it through a transpiler and some polyfills, and my code runs on every browser. I haven't had to think about which browser I'm targeting for years.
It's often the case that this works fine. When you get into corner cases (i.e. if you try to stretch what animation APIs can do or you start to need to care deeply about the performance constraints of flex layout), you start to need to care about how the browsers actually work.
... but you can (and I'd argue in a lot of cases, looking around at the overly-complicated sites on the web, should) write a lot of fully functional web pages by keeping to the standard and trusting it's good enough. We are no longer in the bad old days where IE and other browsers deviated significantly---most of the browsers today adhere closely to the spec, and in the places they don't, it's often more like one browser handles a nasty corner case better than another because the browser built an optimization in for a critical path your page layout cares about.
I'm tempted to say JS is not the biggest problem between browsers, but CSS... the fact that valid CSS code behaves differently and that it cannot be fixed without changing most of it. Not even mentioning if you actually need to change your DOM structure to make a layout work.
> (usually Firefox has the truest implementation of which).
Is there an "objective" test for standards compliance these days, like the good ol' acid test was for the box model? I agree with this sentiment, but only anecdotally - I'd like to see something concrete to back it up.
Chrome is the new IE?
safari is the new IE.
Edge is the new IE
So, Chrome is the new IE?
The new IE is the new IE.
ie. Chrome
was a joke..
> It's like complaining that developers are increasingly shunning other OSes
Except that web apps are easy to make OS-agnostic and always have been[1]. If your webapp isn't, that is because you chose to make it that way, not for a technical reason.
Pretending that's OK because these other things have to be that way isn't going to convince anyone, but you can get away with that for enterprise-development or captive audiences. Just don't try to gaslight people. For me, I'm just going to close your site when it breaks and not come back. Seems that tradeoff works for you too, so that's good, at least.
[1] Sure, that thing that never caught on, and IE6. Thanks.
And this is why Chrome will win, become complacent, and a new browser will dethrone it like it did IE. Meanwhile, Firefox will continue to hover around the 10% mark or so.
Don't see Google pausing Chrome's development for 4 years like Internet Explorer.
I honestly don't remember what the last time was Chrome introduced some cool new feature in Chrome. Maybe the PDF reader?
PWA, WebComponents, File Access, Worklets and Houdini and everything else in HTML5/CSS3 still missing from ChromeOS are all being pushed by Chrome.
I don't see how those really benefit the end user.
Firefox has developed Container Tabs, First Party Isolation, integrated Tracking Blocker, an early alpha for a password manager, Screenshots, Firefox Sync, DNS over HTTP and eSNI, not to mention that Mozilla lets addons do much more with the browser so an addon can really change how your browser works instead of being severely limited in what it can do.
Firebug was probably the only add-on I ever cared.
For everything else there are network protocols, native apps and scripting.
Blocking ads, should be done at the network layer.
Blocking ads can be done both on app and net layers. I use both piHole and uMatrix (and uBlock Origin on the phone), piHole eliminates the worst offenders already and the addons can make more direct modifications to traffic.
i'm a developer and i find it hard to give a shit about any of that, container tabs are cute but they end up breaking a lot of websites, the rest is not even a blip on my radar
as for addons changing how my browser works - no thanks, i'd rather have a consistently nice browser experience than have to re-install addons everywhere
If container tabs break your website, I suspect you're doing something shady with tracking. It does literally nothing but isolate cookies/storage/scripts.
Aside from File Access, I haven't seen any of these. PWA is sometimes mentioned on HN but I've never seen one in the wild (I had to look up the term a few weeks ago). Worklets, WebComponents, and Houdini, I never heard of. I'm not the most in the loop person since I'm not a web developer, but you'd think the cool stuff gets at least mentioned, so going with that, the most recent progressive feature that comes to mind is still the PDF reader (other than general maintenance work to keep up with HTML5, which all browsers do, and which I assume MSIE was also doing in the 4 year period mentioned -- or CSS3 or whatever was hot back then).
Twitter and Starbucks mobile apps are PWAs.
Houdini allows for low level control of CSS rendering, basically it allows for creating CSS classes with our own paint methods, and in the process having lower level JavaScript concurrency using less resources than workers.
I've been doing web development for almost 20 years now and I've used Firefox as my primary browser since it was Phoenix and before that I used the Mozilla Communicator Suite and Navigator.
I may not be rolling the latest features like WebSockets but I very rarely come across incompatibilities anymore. IE remains the biggest issue and honestly a lot of those are removing hacks and workarounds on older sites as after about IE9 they started to catch up with support.
Most of the "incompatibilites" that I fix are actually when our Junior Devs are using CSS attributes incorrectly and they've hacked their code until Chrome mostly works. In this era of Bootstrap it's not uncommon for developers to just throw CSS at the problem and 99% of the time that's what's caused the issue in the first place.
The web is a global open standard platform for the free exchange of information. I would call it one of the great achievements of computing and mankind. To hear someone say "Meh I'd trade that to save myself a bit of effort" is deeply, deeply disappointing.
I encountered so many people like you in the early to mid 2000s, IE6 or bust.
15 years later and we're stuck with old corporate sites that require IE6 and activex.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Linux, macOS and Windows aren't variations of the same OS APIs.
You make it seem like the differences between firefox and chrome are HUGE. What quirks are these you've encountered that can be compared to the hardships of shipping a game that runs equally well in windows and linux?
You would have loved working in the industry 10 years ago.
There is an important difference between Google and Microsoft. Google is using their market dominance to push their opinions on the open standards bodies; Microsoft used their market dominance to ignore standards bodies completely.
Googles browser offers functionality to Googles websites that it does not offer to any other website.
When you log into an Google owned site, it interacts with the browser so that you are 'logged into your browser' with that Google account.
That is not pushing standards into a direction. That is blatant exploitation of ther market position.
You're already logged into sites you're already logged into.
I'm not exactly sure how advantageous you think this is.
Yeah, all that really happens is that it shows your profile picture, and autofills passwords, when it detects the google login cookie. Nothing that other browsers couldn't implement themselves.
For what sites would other browsers do this? Would those browsers be paid by those sites?
The standards are unimplementably complex. Open but inaccessible is not useful for fostering competitors.
I don't particularly like the manifesto style of this post. The author attempts a hard sell by first admitting that the world needed Chrome and then after it succeeded he suggests throwing it to the depths after the wish came true.
> Chrome is effectively everywhere you look. And that’s bad news.
Why? It's the dream you wanted 10 years ago, but it comes with Google now. Ooops for you if you dislike Google, but the vast majority of people doesn't care. Use Safari, Firefox or anything, but calling out ditching Chrome is for the greater good is ridiculous.
H mentions 60% as a dominant position which is not how I would describe it in my dictionary.
> It's the dream you wanted 10 years ago
10 years ago we didn't want a browser monopoly
We're worryingly close to having that now.
Realistically, would we have cared if IE was everywhere if it wasn't garbage in supporting web standards?
I'm not arguing for a lack of competition. It's just that someone needs to be on top of the heap. Might as well be a company that's invested in having their pages load fast rather than an OS maker with no incentive to improve their browser.
I wish Google would go back to funding Mozilla like they used to. At one point they were 90% of Mozilla's revenue.
> Realistically, would we have cared if IE was everywhere if it wasn't garbage in supporting web standards?
No, I would have been perfectly happy if IE was a developer friendly, standards compliant browser, but they created a huge opportunity by ignoring this. I remember when I was super excited for a little floating JavaScript debug tool that you had to include in HTML and you could inspect variables without alerting them. I was amazed by it :)
> I wish Google would go back to funding Mozilla like they used to.
I think that's still the case:
https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-m...
As others have said here, I think the article mischaracterizes why stakeholders were enthusiastic about Chrome back in the day. It was a technically compelling browser which joined Firefox in pushing web standards in a way that Microsoft (and Apple) wouldn't.
I think the dominance of Webkit is concerning, but I don't think we can reuse the justifications of ten years ago to say why. Chrome continues to be technically strong (though perhaps not as much) and continues to push web standards (though perhaps too many supporting Google). The situation just isn't as bad today as it was. There is a lot less friction in the everyday experience of developers and users who want to use cutting-edge web standards.
Monoculture is bad, but it's hard to get people excited about challenging it when the monocultural product isn't awful.
Chrome (from the consumer POV) wasn't about freeing us from "corporate greed". It was about:
- Isolating tabs
- Seamless upgrades (seriously, why does Firefox STILL ask on startup if I'd like to wait and install an update?)
- Syncing between devices
- Performance (which at the time was largely terrible)
Most of this still holds true, at least for me, so I see myself using Chrome for years to come.
> If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship
A great step Firefox could take in this space is improving the transparency and performance auditing of its own engine. Debugging rendering performance issues between browsers is still an absolute nightmare. If Firefox can provide a better developer experience than Chrome, it might increase the likelihood that web developers would use FF as their first-choice development platform for simplicity and utility of tools. If it doesn't, it may still decrease the odds that when faced with a nasty performance bug, developers will throw up their hands and say "Chrome does it right; I guess FF still just sucks for performance in this corner case."
FF has been making impressive strides in this space, but their toolchain still feels clunky and slow relative to Chrome Developer Tools.
I'm pretty sure this is a commentary on the laziness of devs/why browser dominance is bad for standards, when taken in context:
> The dominance of Chrome has a major detrimental effect on the Web as an open platform: developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship.
When you're following decently established standards (not bleeding edge), it's usually Chrome that breaks now, not Firefox or Safari. Chrome truly is the new IE.
I haven't personally encountered this phenomenon. Can you give an example of an established standard that breaks on Chrome but FF / Safari handle?
Indeed I can, although one anecdote does not data make. The latest was using SVG sprites as background in CSS I think. Maybe I can throw up a demo during my lunch break, but honestly it isn't that exciting. It just doesn't work correctly in Chrome, the sprite is cropped/has a weird rendering artifact.
Weird flex suggesting Vivaldi, given that it's proprietary and there are other open source Chromium forks.
He specifically states it's not ideal. And the question of other Chromium forks to me, is how well are they maintained and are they actively investigated for security vulnerabilities?
Ideally, of course, you should not use Chromium-based browsers at all. Unfortunately this also now rules out Edge, but thankfully, Firefox is now a great browser again.
It's most likely because the people behind Vivaldi are the same people who created Opera.
Could you recommend some? From a quick search all I could find were things like Opera, Torch, Epic etc, which do not seem to be open source.
I must I am quite happy with Vivaldi at the moment, but a true open source browser would make me even happier.
I did try to use Firefox Developer Edition for a while, but despite being a step in the right direction, I must say I prefer the chromium developer tools.
I'm using the Brave developer channel on one of my machines. It's working well. Like Chromium, but without the creepier Google parts that had still managed to get their way in. I also like their theme a little better. Dark, and a little more compact.
I’ve been doing the same. I noticed that their public release is now also chromium based, so I was going to switch over to that. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to port browsing history, etc from Brave dev, only from prior versions of Brave, or other browsers.
They do mention Opera and Brave in a footnote.
Man, I can remember when Google was still an up-and-coming, underdog-ish and exciting tech company, where working was cool and people and "do not evil" was enshrined.
I was really happy and excited whenever Google announced something new, because it was always so diverse, new, clever and somehow helped the world.
Now things have taken a complete 180 degree turn. Google has become an ad company, and any innovation serves only to squeeze a little bit more data out of users. "Don't be evil" got deleted, and Google indeed seems to actively embrace "be evil". They are not even arguing with it anymore - anything that serves to close down the web, force tracking, breaches of privacy and so on...
What changed in google? Any insiders? Just greed? Did important people leave?
I try to switch to Firefox (or even Safari) every few months or so.
Firefox was close this time, but there were still a few things that forced me to switch back:
- On Chrome I can type 'thisisunsafe' (previously 'danger' and 'badidea') to skip security warnings, sometimes I have to do this at work when testing things with invalid certs. On FF there's a class of these issues (HSTS I think?) that doesn't let you bypass the warning so it's unusable.
- FF still crashes more regularly (like when plugging or unplugging an external monitor.
Thankfully the other two main issues are no longer a problem:
- FF is now fast enough to be comparable
- The third party extensions I required (switchy omega) now exist for FF.
Yeah that HSTS issue is ridiculous, although to be fair the spec requires browsers to give users "no recourse" to bypass the error. I'm also still annoyed by https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85601
My experience is that on Chromium you can bypass HSTS-related errors by typing something, but expired certificate gives you patronizing "you have clock set wrong, go fix it" message and no way to bypass it. (But maybe I'm just doing something wrong)
Another issue is that Chrome uses trust store from underlying OS which means that it does not support ECC certificates (ie. Cloudflare) on Windows XP. (Lets just say that there are valid reasons why one would want to use XP today and download something from web...)
> Ten years ago, we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free from corporate greed
Firefox already did this. We needed Chrome because Firefox lagged behind in performance and was a memory hog.
Oh right, that's why I switched to Chrome. At the time Firefox had that horrid memory leak that would consume gigs of RAM if you left a tab open long enough.
So we all switched to Chrome, which makes the memory hog blush.
Where we are now, it's not hard to look at Chrome in a negative light, for all the reasons the article states. However, I still remember where I was when I first saw the Chrome "speed test" ad, and thought "wow, this is what a browser should be! https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/film/google_chrome_speed...
Hypothetically speaking, suppose we didn't care about privacy at all. In that case, what are the disadvantages of a single browser engine taking over the market?
I suspect one disadvantage is that it's harder to innovate. Specifically, your new browser engine has no hope of sticking if all websites are heavily customized to Blink, rather than to open standards. It may seem that it's not a problem if Blink is open sourced. However, writing a new engine that works exactly like some legacy engine is nearly impossible, even if that legacy engine is open sourced. OTOH, writing a new engine to the specifications of well-designed standards is much more realistic, since presumably those standards are (a) clearly spelled out, (b) written with the idea that they can be implemented without a million lines of legacy code.
Of course, this assumes that the community can create high quality and efficient standards. It's not obvious, given how difficult it's been to achieve in the past, when there was more competition between browsers.
Does it sound about right? Any other disadvantages I haven't thought of?
The vendor will make decisions that are not in your interest, but in theirs. have you have tried to install an ad-blocker in chrome mobile? they just work in firefox mobile, and in both desktop browsers, but not in chrome mobile. (unless you do some very weird things with rooting your phone, using VPN providers, etc)
Without using an ad-blocker, if I use chrome mobile on my older phone (original Pixel), any time I browse a web site, the whole phone appears to lock up for a few seconds, it starts getting warm, and then a whole page ad appears over the web-site, and half the time clicking the X in the corner loads up the ad in a new tab...
Ah yeah good point, ads isn't only a concern for privacy reasons but also for performance/annoyance reasons.
I personally expect that, for purely selfish business reasons, Chrome will eventually kill all ads that are especially annoying or cause performance issues. But you're right, situations where vendor and user interests are at odds may always come up.
> I personally expect that, for purely selfish business reasons, Chrome will eventually kill all ads that are especially annoying or cause performance issues.
What I expect is that Chrome will be designed to block all non-Google ads alone, so that Google doesn’t get affected. Google/Chrome then becomes the gatekeeper for what constitutes a decent ad for users. That would then arm twist publishers to switch to Google AdSense because that would be the only one providing revenues (or more revenues). Advertisers would then see their CPM/CPC costs increase, and they wouldn’t have many other choices. That would increase prices for consumers. I recall seeing stats recently that Google (still) is the largest in online advertising, with Facebook being second.
We’ve seen this kind of behavior before with Adblock Plus and the “acceptable ads” scheme.
There’s almost nothing to gain for the users. It will always drift (and only faster, with a monopoly) to satisfy the interests of the company.
> What I expect is that Chrome will be designed to block all non-Google ads alone, so that Google doesn’t get affected.
I assume you meant:
> What I expect is that Chrome will be designed to leave Google ads alone, so that Google doesn’t get affected.
I agree with your analysis, but I'm surprised with your conclusion. I think if there's a monopoly that decides which ads are decent, it will cause the overall level of the ads to be higher, which is better for users - at no extra cost to them.
My rationale (and I'm very interested in the opposite opinion, if you're willing to explain it) is this. A monopoly has too much to lose from frustrated or unhappy users. If too many people become too angry, they'll eventually cause a major damage to the ad industry through political action, greater popularity of ad blockers, people avoiding websites with too many ads, or people becoming desensitized to ads (leading to a dramatic reduction in ad value). A small company won't really care if its ads damage the industry -- it's not there for a long run, it just needs to push its products and long-term effects are something it worries about. A (near-)monopoly that controls 20-30% or more of the market worth $100B's a year is going to be really, really careful about even the slightest damage to the industry.
As to your other point, CPM/CPC costs are not dictated by Google. It's a marketplace with supply provided by publishers, and demand created by advertisers. Google influences the prices by choosing the auction rules and by saying which ads are acceptable, but any large shift in prices can only happen from a change in supply/demand. So I'm not sure why you think a monopoly would cause a rise in CPC. If anything, a monopoly would make the marketplace more efficient, taking out intermediaries who take a big cut, and lead to lower prices (as for example happened with Amazon in online retail).
It's bizarre to see the number of comments on this thread adamantly insisting that Chrome became and stayed popular because of an ad campaign. I was a high school student when Chrome was released. I saw an ad for it, downloaded it, and found that it was much faster and much cleaner-looking that Firefox, so I stayed with it.
Whenever Firefox comes out with a new version I try to use it for a week and realize it just doesn't perform as well as Chrome. Theres always one or two sites like twitch where it just LAGS to death whereas in Chrome its smooth as butter. At this point I just go back to it. Sigh...
Are you using mostly Google pages or services? That might explain why Firefox runs worse.
Anecdotally, of the three browsers I have on my dev machine Chrome is the biggest resource hog.
Resource hog != lag.
The reason Chrome doesn't lag is probably due to the fact that it uses so much RAM. I personally use Safari because of the OS integration but for some sites I do have to fire up Chrome just for performance.
Google still pushes Chrome very aggressively. Gmail shows a popover advertising Chrome when I log in. It also puts Chrome ads in security alerts about new logins (!!).
Chrome is just a better browser. Also, Google already has all my information, so who better to trust with my browsing history?
Firefox has >10% market share, it's not like anybody can ignore 10% of users. So this article to me sounds like pure content marketing for Firefox.
Article recommends Vivaldi and Safari too.
Let me know when Firefox stops being an insane resource hog and I will switch.
Now you’ll receive dozens of responses of people saying that Firefox is much faster and leaner than Chrome for them. But that’s not the case for me or anybody I know. Chrome continues being faster for me.
It performs okay (except for a few versions a while back when the helper processes would periodically lock up in kernel mode and it would take a reboot to fix), but 980MB of memory to have one tab open to Hacker News is definitely not lean.
One thing I found is that Firefox doesn't do gc/cc that often on it's own. I keep a tab open to "about:memory" and click on "gc / cc / reduce mem" ever so often and it keep the memory usage between 800MB and 1.2 GB with several tabs open (jira, slack, HN, misc other sites)
Firefox and Safari broke IE's dominance of the web. Chrome came along much later.
Safari killed flash in favor of HTML 5.
How quickly everyone likes to forget.
Do we know why Google grew dissatisfied with Apple and forked Webkit?
From what I understand, it had to do with how fast Apple was upstreaming their changes/patches, a big part of which would require Apple to accept the modifications to Webkit core.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/googl...
Do we know why Google grew dissatisfied with sites serving their own content and developed AMP?
Because sites serving their own content were generally slower, and slower load times means fewer ad clicks.
Google making the web faster is a mutually beneficial arrangement.
I believe Google felt that WebKit was too bloated for their taste. When they forked they ripped out quite a bit of code they did not need.
Yes - it project complexity was becoming unmanageable due to difference in multiprocessing architectures[1] of WebKit and Chromium.
1. https://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for...
Do we know why apple didn't just push patches to khtml?
Companies will just want control over their development pipeline
Generally, it was slowing each team down to implement new features.
Look, some misguided individuals seem to hate Chromium because they think it doesn't respect their privacy or out of abject hatred for Google. But a lot are not actually looking from an engineering point of view. Browser's are the 1# security risk on any computer system due their complexity and access to the outside world. Chromium was the first (and mabye only) web browser that was designed from the ground up with privsep in mind. Firefox on the other hand did not have privsep for a long time, it was only implemented later after the fact. Not only that, Chromium now supports unveil, and new security innovation that blocks the browser's access to all files folders on the system except for what specified in settings.
As a user (non-developer), I never trusted Chrome and never installed it onto my computer. Half of that was laziness, but the other half was understanding that Chrome is driven by ad-revenue and so privacy options would be severely sub-optimal, at least compared to Firefox.
yeah....Apple, thats the solution to ending corporate ownership of the web. :smacks head:
I almost regret invariably suggesting chrome in every conversation back when IE was leading, such is hindsight.
Perhaps instead of telling people what to use we should be telling them how to use, or more accurately how to change. Once people are invested in a platform or service it's hard to get them to change their mindset, especially over issues taken for granted like privacy.
There's a lot more attention to social media on the same issue of privacy, this would be the ideal time to bring chrome into this discussion to work on the 'detachment', self-imposed roadblocks, logging out, deleting apps, disabling notifications.
I'm afraid we are all way too far down the slippery slope here, you've piled so much garbage into web standards its no longer possible for any new players to enter the game without an unreal amount of financial backing.
Should someone dare the major task of writing a new web browser, please, make it fully XML aware, so, as to be able to use it as just another component in an XML pipeline, for rendering.
A setting to convert all HTML to XHTML. This would allow easy XPath queries while browsing, then XPath 3.1 support, XSLT 3.0 support, XML Catalogs and XQuery in the browser would be cool as well. I am aware, that this is lots of work, but it would be nice to have something, that keeps the document centric web alive, and does not play to the rumor web, that we have become.
> "developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines..."
Not me. I use Chrome to briefly test my builds, then close it and get the hell out of there.
I don't know why developers didn't or don't see the conflict of interest with a Google branded browser. I was unsettled by this from the moment they released the browser. Google uses manipulative design patterns as much as any of the big guns. Chrome is not immune to those efforts to manipulate user behavior for business agenda reasons at every tick.
If the desired effect is to make people consider not using Chrome, painting Chrome's origins in such rose-tinted light is unlikely to achieve that.
Google engaged in exclusionary "embrace-extend-extinguish"-esque tactics from a very early stage in Chrome's life, and on web properties that predated Chrome's public launch in their development. Painting Chrome as "break[ing] the Web free from corporate greed" is a pretty disparaging insult to those who genuinely have worked for years to try and do that.
FWIW, something like 80% to 90% of Mozilla's income comes from Google. The non-naive interpretation is that Mozilla/Firefox is a figleaf over Google's hegemony.
I did not find the author's points very compelling wrt the "we need chrome no more" link-baity title. Clearly, many users -- mostly devs -- do need Chrome.
But more importantly I think that articles such as this deflect from the real abuse-of-power that Google wields and that's in advertising. Google can and has shut down whole businesses by withholding access to its ad platforms. I'm not sure that Google has ever hurt anybody by denying access to Chrome.
"We Need Chrome No more" appeared on HN five months ago, and there was a comment that confirmed there is interest in an alternative search engine written by djb.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053163
It was obviously a joke as no one serious about text-only browsing would suggest lynx over the alternatives (w3m, links, links2, etc.)
Am I the only one on the planet that never had stability nor speed problems with Firefox?
(e.g. on Linux when I start Firefox it displays all tabs, but it refreshes/loads only the "last"/current tab - other tabs are refreshed/loaded only if I switch to them. On the other hand when I start Chrome, all tabs are refreshed/downloaded immediately, and all of them start running their code whatever it is)
Edge: Hi I'm Edge, I'm better than IE. User: I dismiss you on the fact that your icons look identical. Edge: But wait Im diff.......
> They are even noticeably ahead in areas such as performance, battery usage, privacy, and security.
Privacy - maybe.
Security? I doubt it. Google does a lot for Chrome to stay safe.
Performance adn battery usage? Safari works only on once OS it is build for, so there is really no contest, Firefox on the other hand is still a great way to stresstest your CPU. At least on macOS.
Firefox user for many years.
I would love to switch from Chrome to FF on my daily driver but I rely on the multi-profile thing that has no analog in FF. My work windows are separate from my personal ones, and I have different work windows for each company. Of course each is themed differently too, so I know at a glance which I’m in.
Firefox multi account containers.
I did investigate that, but it does not really work for my workflow. I literally want a window locked to a container, and all tabs in that window in exactly one, that container, and with each one with a different set of plugins, etc.
The plugin thing is really important so I can have some windows testing sites with different ad blockers and such.
The only reason I use Chrome is because I have a chromecast and they only allow Chrome to native cast
It isn't about developer tools anymore than it is about privacy or the open-web. Sadly, just like with IE6, Chrome is the default pre-installed browser in most used handheld OS. Plus, it is in-your-face-advertised on the front page of world's most popular website, in case you don't happen to have it installed on a Mac or a PC.
There's very little individuals can do to reverse the trend, short of websites and OEMs coming together to start reversing Chrome's stranglehold in an unified campaign (which doesn't seem likely).
The fall of IE6 was due to innovation from Mozilla and Google putting it's weight behind Firefox... What could Safari/Firefox do now? Get all or several of Microsoft/Facebook/Amazon/Apple on-board? Investment from these companies is the only way I see out, frankly, if history is any indicator (OpenStreetMap vs GMaps).
That said, tech needs to keep improving and so Firefox Quantum was a great first step in the right direction, imo.
As someone that loves clean UI and blink's speed, is Chromium a trustworthy alternative ?
I'll write an unpopular opinion:
1. Developer's time is not a commodity. The time you spend testing in alternative browsers is time you can spend in tasks that will make life less painful to the people who work with you such as writing tests, documentation, or new code.
2. A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not exist. The business should be the one who dictates which browsers should be supported, and it should be a rational decision based on data such as reviewing your own analytics. Nobody has infinite resources.
3. Using a website is a privilege, not a right. The same way you are free to choose your favorite browser, a website owner is free to choose which users to serve, the same way we can say "Are you still using IE8 in 2019? tough luck buddy, the site is broken", we can also say "Sorry dude, I didn't care enough to support Firefox because X feature was broken".
4. When you as a user decide to choose Firefox because "my ideological reasons", you are also choosing to deal with the negative aspects such as broken websites, broken extensions, lack of features, loss of mindshare, etc., etc., if you don't like dealing with them the alternative is pretty simple: Use Chrome, that's what the end users do anyway.
The reason Chrome has gained lots of mindshare is because we all love convenience, and there are less-painful alternatives to push the "we don't like Google" agenda such as forking Chromium. The "we don't track you" is a huge competitive advantage against Google, why should you give up everything that Chromium does right? The resources that Mozilla spends maintaining Gecko could be used more intelligently to build for example a security team to alleviate the concern of having a huge common attack area.
Wasn't "test once, run everywhere" the holy grail? Or now we like O(N) instead of O(1)?
> A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not exist
I think the only scenario where that's acceptable is experimental/nightly features that haven't yet made their way to the majority of browsers.
> Using a website is a privilege
Some would dispute that. My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical branches. Is it considered a privilege to access my funds via website?
> My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical branches. Is it considered a privilege to access my funds via website?
Glad you made this question. I'm a customer from BBVA and years ago, when Opera recently launched its Chromium-based fork I got a nag: You're using an unsupported browser
I was infuriated: "How the f*ck are you targeting the new Opera?!?!?!?! I mean, even the user agent looks like Chrome, to display this nag you had to explicitly target the new Opera WTF?!?!?!"
Now I ask you the following question: Can you access your bank account with Lynx? Curl? Where do you draw the line between which browsers to support?
Where do you draw the line between telling a user "Use Chrome" or having the user to complain at your call center because the website broke specifically in Brave browser? (pretty unlikely but not unrealistic scenario)
Years ago many banks and government agencies even required you to install Java to access their service. So yeah, it is a privilege to access your funds in a non-supported mean, if you complain at their call center they'll probably tell you "just use Chrome", or "install the Android app", or a similar alternative. If a bank thinks it is a competitive advantage to let you access in Mosaic, then it will push their development team to support even Mosaic.
I agree but have a different perspective. The web is overrun with ads and user-hostile behaviors. Other browsers combat this in various ways (Reader View, Firefox's Tracking Protection, Safari's ITP) but Chrome basically does nothing.
Websites work better with these features, not worse. And so long as Chrome is dominant, these protection features will continue to be effective, because there's not much incentive to defeat them.
It's a bit like the blissful period when IE was dominant and still allowed popup windows. The div-style popups didn't take over until IE's popup blocker.
No mention in this thread so I'm just going to throw this out there, qutebrowser is an excellent choice in 2019: https://www.qutebrowser.org
There certainly is a danger of monopolization with chrome garnering an overwhelming majority of user share. However, I'm yet to see the negative in testing with chrome and shipping (assuming you're only using W3C APIs), as most of the time, chrome is fully compliant with W3C, and other browsers simply aren't. Apple is the worst, most guilty of the others, that purposefully cripples iOS Safari to goad users and developers towards the app store. Microsoft probably intended to be fully W3C compliant with Edge, but for whatever reason, they always lagged. And with Mozilla/Firefox, it's always an obtuse, unreasonable argument when they don't comply, they claim it to be in the best interest of the open web, but it is usually a philosophical, more than technical opposition.
I agree with the author's sentiment but Chrome/chromium is just so much better than the alternatives. I've tried to switch to Firefox many times and always came back.
They seem to be doing something right.
Chrome is the new IE all over again. Remember that it was IE that saved us from Netscape's slow performance and advancements of new web technologies.
Jump ahead 20 years, low an behold Google Earth - Chrome only!
Chrome has some great extensions now: Great Suspender is one of the best. Before Chrome killed my computer with too many tabs, now it's fine! Chrome is the best product of Google to me.
Out of curiosity, what Google Apps work better in Chrome? I use plenty of Google services entirely in Firefox and have never had problems. I only fire up chrome when using Chromecast.
Never liked Chrome, but I liked Google as an idea once upon a time.
Yet Another Post Against Chrome. Yes it's bad and it spies on us but it's also damn good for web development and so far I've found no decent replacement :)
> we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free Maybe true for the author. But most people use Chrome to browse the web.
When I upgraded to FF 60.0.2 the energy use on my Mac went off a cliff. Maybe you should try re-creating your FF profile?
Harvey Dent put it best- "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain"
Profiles are the only thing stopping me moving to Firefox right now. They're so easy to use on Chrome.
Container tabs don't require new windows for that cookie/account separation.
Firefox Dev tools Network tab still does not allow to resize columns. It's why I hate to use them...
OP - the footnotes seem to be reversed.
I'm an avid Firefox user, but I just can't ignore the fact that it's way less performant. Consequently, I use it for my personal life, but when it comes to all the web apps I need for work, I have to go with Chrome, or my computer slows to a crawl. I keep fairly extreme numbers of tabs open, but Chrome is significantly better at coping.
In what way is it less performant? The start up is faster on Firefox on both PCs that I use. When there are a ton of tabs, both browsers eat on all RAM, but I wouldn't say that Firefox drags the system down anymore than Chrome.
I am on Windows 10.
I'm on Mac OS. It bogs down all the time. I have very little in the way of add-ons. Don't know why I've been downvoted, because this is just my experience. I've been and remain a user since Firefox 2.
Chrome is nothing more to me than a launchpad for (google) ads and a vehicle for surveillance.
I find the opposite - many websites still don't seem to test properly on chrome.
Firefox Devtools Network tab still does not allow to resize columns in 2019...
Just use Opera or Brave right?
Aren't those browsers just chromium reskinned and customized
Clicking the RSS or JSON link goes no where and then breaks the back button.
One thing that people seem to forget is the extreme amount of marketing and push that happened. If you used any Google product (even today) it's basically annoyance not to use Chrome, because of all the "popups" and messages you see on screen to switch to Chrome.
I have one bigger complaint: It blows my mind that web browsers take GBs of ram to run. I mean, c'mon, it's 2019 how can we not address that? It's probably the biggest concern I hear from everyone that uses Chrome and knows how to read their task/app manager
It's probably the web page causing that. I am sure a single chrome window with https://news.ycombinator.com inside it won't use GBs.
Leaving aside everything else, how is that even relevant? Even cheap laptops have 8gigs of ram these days, most have 16. Considering the browser is becoming the de-facto single application used at all for most people, what else would they need their ram for?
If you use machines in schools usually you end up having older laptops or netbooks. That's why matters IMHO. Definitely not for the person who is a dev and has fully decked out macbooks or thinkpads...
Firefox mobile on android is shit
Cant even render wikipedia properly
I hope mozilla staff reading this
Really? No one going to mention brave.com. It’s chromium based.
We never needed Chrome. Firefox has been around since 2002.
Back to firefox, few years later, back to chrome.
One of the reasons I stay with Chrome is because of the superb dev tools, which are even better than in the Firefox Developer Edition
Chrome is poised to comletely monopolize the browser share market.
You can't fault them either for doing this, this is just what pubic companies do, maximize returns for shareholders and monopolies are the hen that lays golden eggs.
This article will not be seen beyond HN. The fact is the vast majority of Chrome users don't care that other browser exists, and don't want it as long as it is convenient for them (to keep using a familiar platform thats worked well).
Anyways, this is just my two cents. I just don't see myself using Firefox anymore, it's no longer deserving of my attention because I am not concerned about Google's goals, we get a lot of shit for free from Google, and we gave up our privacy. Whether this is beneficial or not is up for debate.
Vivaldi and Firefox user, here. Nothing more to say, just wanted to lend my support.
What do you all use?
No one is in this stinking bordel questions the underlying assumption that the web is an 'open standard' or that 'competition is good' or that somehow the democratization of browser implementations and 'standards-making' is a net win for humanity?
The web is an edifice of pressed shit-board that hasn't been designed so much as piled up. It isn't an open forum of freely-exchanged ideas and social goods so much as a tool in the arsenal of liberal capitalism to more completely atomize and subjugate the individual by forming his proper sense of obligation to have himself devoured by the fetischism of merchandise.
Pluck out thy phone and cast it from thee.
Harvey Dent said it best "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain"
Extensions. I am now locked into Chrome because several services I use require Chrome extensions that aren't available elsewhere. The idea that Chrome can be unseated, or isn't needed, is unrealistic for the many users who rely on Chrome-exclusive extensions.
Not to mention users who enjoy using ChromeOS and do not share the privacy alarmist feeings of HN. Go ahead and downvote this.
Firefox implements chrome's webextensions api, so it should be possible to run those extensions. Try chrome store foxified https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...
Firefox's webextensions api is a totally different thing from chrome's ones. Some of its api are either missing or work differently.
I would be curious how many of those extensions aren't an extreme compromise of your security. (Most extensions are.)
You should be using as few extensions as humanly possible, and looking to remove extensions whenever you can.
(I currently use one, the EFF's Privacy Badger, though Firefox's new Tracking Protection makes it somewhat redundant, and I may not keep it forever.)
This is so sad really. I have to keep Chrome around to run one extension, but Chrome's WebExtensions are now the 'standard' in the main browsers and many companies have been shunning support to the other browsers by not bothering to package outside the Chrome Store.
Brave, as but one example, natively supports Chrome extensions. [1] It also has a slew of really awesome features now including single click TOR windows, native anti-fingerprinting / anti-tracking, native ad-blocking, native anti-script support, etc.
[1] - https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017909112-How...
> Both Chrome and Chromium run Blink under the hood, the rendering engine that started as a WebKit fork in 2013 when Google grew dissatisfied with the Apple-led project
Wait, is this accurate? I remember back when Chrome was released, people were talking about how it used parts of both WebKit and Gecko, and the exact specs of which rendering was used changed based on the website.
I remember not liking Chrome the moment it came out. Google had poured money into Firefox for years and then suddenly came out with (an initially) closed source competitor. Sure it's open source now, but it didn't start that way, and was a slap in the face to the Mozilla project.
> Wait, is this accurate? I remember back when Chrome was released, people were talking about how it used parts of both WebKit and Gecko, and the exact specs of which rendering was used changed based on the website.
You are misremembering. Chrome never used Gecko.
> I remember not liking Chrome the moment it came out. Google had poured money into Firefox for years and then suddenly came out with (an initially) closed source competitor. Sure it's open source now, but it didn't start that way
This is completely false. Chromium and its associated source code were released to the public at the same time as Chrome. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#2008
More like we need Google no more.
You always find the smartest bunch in these threads. Proof: not a single downvoted comment so far.
But with all your smarts why aren't you building search engines? Is it because you think that with superior tech we can't beat Google? I think it will come down to precisely that. Don't you see how easy it would be for someone who specializes in search to beat an opponent who specializes in ads?
Edit: I should clarify. What I meant was, start specializing in search, or we're all dead. Dead meat. By the hands of the Android.
I'm using DuckDuckGo and don't miss Google for search. It's mostly a solved problem for me at this point. Google Maps is harder to replace but there are workable though generally not as good alternatives. YouTube is the hardest Google property to escape for me.
I found that DuckDuckGo is still not competent enough for non-English users. The quality of its result in non-English language still worse than Google's ones.
I can believe that. English is my first language though and I find it works well for me with English searches.
> with all your smarts why aren't you building search engines
It's a hard problem, especially if you factor in keeping your servers running.
But there are people though who love when you give them that problem. There are businesses out there that specialize in keeping those servers running. Do you all of a sudden have loads of traffic? Wow, you must really be popular.
If you are not popular, some will host your servers for free until you are.
You know. Because there is money in traffic. So if you generate it, they'll sell it. On the market.