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.
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.
Obviously the v8 stuff also made a massive difference too.
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.
Chromes super fast start up speed and clean UI is what caused me to switch when it first came out.
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.
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.
(I suppose it makes sense I'd agree with someone else with a Perl-inspired handle :-)
>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.
I'm pretty sure there's a copy of MooTools in the Chromium repository.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
Guess who sets up the computers for the remaining 99.99%? If you seduce the tech crowd, you also get the other users.
Examples: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
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)
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<)
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.
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.
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.
(It does like to consume RAM as if it was running SQL Server though.)
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.
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.
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.
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 don't remember where IE was at the time but I remember some websites were still only supporting it.
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.
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.
ps- sorry it was so long. I actually am working on that.
> 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?
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).
Also when Flash crashed it would crash its container opposed to the outer page. Flash was also a separate process from the containing page.
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.
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).
Pardon ? Its completely opposite, same with performance, try to open more than 100 tabs on firefox and chrome..
The first change it referenced was a process per tab, and then on page 13 it referenced V8.
No other browser had it built in at the time.
IE8 had a public release with process-per-tab before Chrome debuted.
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.
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 = /
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
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.
Plus you get the benefit of Firefox not corrupting its session weekly. Losing all your cookies, tabs and history frequently got super annoying.
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 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.
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 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.
> 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”…
IE6 called
- 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.
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.
> the best long term effect
What do you mean by this?
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.
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.
For what it's worth, WebSockets show up as type 'Other' in the inspector, and the frames are listed under 'Preview'.
Edit: Safari.
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.
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'm keeping my eye on Firefox, but Chrome still gets my business for now.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
...what?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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'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.)
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.
Then port Chromium to it as a portal to the legacy web.
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.
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:...
Mozilla never had the raw revenue to just dump millions into forcing Chrome onto everyones desktop like that.
More eyes and hands on a single open source code base is better use of resources and leads to a better output.
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
I don't really get why people judge source code by politics rather than "stealing" (forking) from the best.
You'd think a business would do whatever maximized value and ignore past negative interactions, but businesses are made of people.
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"?
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.
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.
How? It never stops puzzling me why anyone thoght Chrome would be any different. Somehow less corporate.
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.
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.
It hasn’t shifted. It’s always been there.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
15 years later and we're stuck with old corporate sites that require IE6 and activex.
Linux, macOS and Windows aren't variations of the same OS APIs.
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.
> 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.
10 years ago we didn't want a browser monopoly
We're worryingly close to having that now.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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...)
Firefox already did this. We needed Chrome because Firefox lagged behind in performance and was a memory hog.
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?
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...
Anecdotally, of the three browsers I have on my dev machine Chrome is the biggest resource hog.
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.
Safari killed flash in favor of HTML 5.
How quickly everyone likes to forget.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/googl...
1. https://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for...
Companies will just want control over their development pipeline
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
(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)
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.
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.
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)?
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?
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.
They seem to be doing something right.
Jump ahead 20 years, low an behold Google Earth - Chrome only!
I am on Windows 10.
Aren't those browsers just chromium reskinned and customized
Cant even render wikipedia properly
I hope mozilla staff reading this
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.
What do you all use?
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.
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.
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.
