>Chrome introduced a lot of neat new features (Porn “Incognito Mode,” multithreaded memory changes, tabs and more).
Now chrome is getting credit for in private browsing and tabs? (Safari and Opera respectively. Phoenix/Firefox popularized them long before Chrome was a twinkle.)
>It is mind-boggling that basic tools like these are not yet standard features in browsers.
How long have browsers offered to save passwords? Seems like a lot of bad history in this article.
>The way existing password managers work, the vendor’s liability even if they are hacked is minimal. They don’t hold any passwords!
HUH? Yes they do.. They absolutely hold a copy of your password ... in the cloud.
>Sure, Chromium and the V8 engine are open-source, but they still belong to Google in a way that, say, TCP/IP or IMAP does not.
Im gonna feel really bad breaking the QUIC / HTTP/3 news. Cuz google totally wrote the new transport layer. They wrote the last one too (SPDY HTTP/2.) With this much market share, what google implements and forces the hands of the standards organizations.
>This is why Microsoft’s decision to kill Internet Explorer, once the leading portal to the web, and replace it with a Chromium-based successor says so much about its new direction as a company. I suspect that decision had more to do with clearly understanding Microsoft’s strengths and weaknesses than anything else.
Its primarily for two reasons. 1 is battery life, they want to embed blink into the os so programs dont need to bundle it (electron included.) 2 is because 99% of the web just targets blink now. I dont think you can credit "the move to ssas" alone with Microsoft finally abandoning IE derivatives.
I agree with your points over all, but I'm still bitter and will take the time every time to sound my bitterness about the fact that Microsoft didn't back Firefox/servo (the rust implementation of their rendering engine)
Why am I bitter?
1. It hands a lot of power over to chromium, regardless of how much it gets forked by Microsoft.
2. It would have put some very talented engineers onto a Chrome competitor, which I always like to see
3. It would have been a huge boost to Rust, which if it ever will unseat c++/c as a systems language target, will need all the help it can get as a de facto standard (you can argue if this is worthwhile or just pie in the sky dreaming, I'll concede on that)
4. I just plain think we need a V8 alternative for a nodejs/electron like ecosystem, in my opinion servo could be that. I know they are doing node-chakra-core, but this could have taken it to a whole new level.
Competition is good, in another words. Even if all my assumptions are wrong, I'd love to see an alternative history where they were laid to bare.
Now, I will admit, I am actually happy to see that they are on Chromimum instead of yet another engine, and I see all the upsides of this move too, and will definitely take advantage of them (with Microsoft Edge being my favorite version of Chrome right now)
I too believe this was a very short-sighted move on Microsoft's part. There might have been some very good short-term reasons for building off of Chromium rather than Firefox or servo, but long-term entrenching the Google monopoly is going to cost them big time.
It's almost gotta be a new guard of developers that though it was easier to force blink on the windows team, than abandon what they they grew up using.
Microsoft could have written any browser engine it wanted and then placed iOS/Safari like rules on other browsers, such as... "if you want us to allow your app to run in Battery Friendly mode, you must ONLY use our OS provided web engine."
I guess Microsoft was tired of losing the browser game, so it decided to back the winning worse this time. But I still believe it will be a mistake long-term, as Google will start controlling Chromium's direction with more of an iron fist.
I believe someone else mentioned in a previous HN comment about the ad-blocking API that it doesn't matter if Edge, Brave, or other Chromium-based browsers can "continue to support a Chromium API if Google wants to kill it", because in the end if their combined market share is tiny, most developers will stop supporting that API anyways.
I imagine the Chromium browsers will be going in the direction of Android, where "anyone can fork Android" but in practice you're dead in the market if you don't back Google's Android.
I vouched for this one, which was [dead], but most of their comments made in the last 20 days are [dead], and so are all of their submissions since July.
Chrome had the nifty break away title bar tabs before anyone else.
But the major improvement that made everyone switch was process separation for each tab. One tab could crash while the others stayed functional and a security vulnerability in one tab would have a more difficult time compromising the others.
It's also one of the reasons Chome uses so much memory, they failed to keep optimizing their copy-on-write paging behaviour so that tabs would share more memory among themselves.
Nowadays Firefox has process separation for tabs AND it's not written by an advertising company, so I like it better.
But the major improvement that made everyone switch was process separation for each tab
Which IE8 had around the same time (It may have launched after Chrome, but in the contemporaneous betas, they both had the feature)
What made people switch was a combination of everything google did having the sheen of "cool" around it, and the fact that I.E development was slow and shoddy.
My perspective on browser history is a little different. I've been following and using Firefox since before it was Firefox. At one point in time, I was working in a computer store. IE6 - 8 was letting ActiveX controls and other scripts run rampant, infecting people like crazy. 99% of our business was malware cleanup and removal due to IE. Once you explained to people what happened, they were appaled and were happy to switch to Firefox, despite many sites only working on IE at the time. THIS is what really triggered the migration away from IE. Firefox was taking off (look at the chart in the linked article), and was starting to dominate, well before Chrome ever became a thing. Those of us on Linux also had Konqueror, and it had a decent userbase as well.
I think that's when Google noticed that the IE monopoly was breaking, and they jumped onboard and took Konqueror's code and then launched their own browser. The same code that Apple used for Safari. So they basically came in on the hard work of Firefox and the KHTML team and took over the market by putting Chrome right on Google's homepage.
It's my opinion that Chrome didn't become popular because it was better, or because it was cool (no average user cares about that). It became popular by being right there on everybody's home page, right at the perfect time that people were catching on to the fact that IE had zero security.
Firefox broke the monopoly and freed us, and then Google and Apple came in and shat all over them.
Blink forked off from WebKit long after WebKit forked off from KHTML. Maybe you wanted to say that, but it reads more like Blink (Chrome engine) forked directly from KHTML.
Werent safari 3 tabs below the bookmark bar? Safari tabs on top werent until 2009 I wanna say. I thought they quickly reverted it as well. Like Maybe it was just the safari 4 beta?
> the major improvement that made everyone switch was process separation for each tab
In addition I also consider the marketing reach and the success of Android as important. Fwiw I never switched completely to chrome and quite regularly got a hint to try out a better/optimised browser.
> Im gonna feel really bad breaking the QUIC / HTTP/3 news. Cuz google totally wrote the new transport layer. They wrote the last one too (SPDY HTTP/2.)
This would presumably be news to everybody involved.
Google's QUIC ("GQUIC") isn't very close to the IETF QUIC standard under development. The IETF went with TLS 1.3 as the cryptographic foundation (which didn't exist when Google built GQUIC) and most the details have changed considerably. You can definitely see a family resemblance, but for Google this was a proof of concept hack and for the QUIC WG they're building what is probably a successor to TCP. It's the difference between a five year old's doodle of a house and the plans you need to submit to get someone to approve it and then build the house.
The chairs are currently not Google employees (they work at Fastly and NetApp) and the editors on the main transport draft aren't Google either (Mozilla and Fastly). There are Google people in the room (such as Adam Langley of course) but there are people from the other browsers too.
The Firefox 3-4 era is the era of the interminably long betas for Firefox. The private browsing feature was committed to Firefox trunk on 2008-11-04, long before the 2009-06-30 release date given on that Wikipedia page. The bug for Firefox was filed 2004-06-28, long before Chrome was a thing.
Regarding tabbed browers: they are ancient. I remember the first time I used tabs with a wrapper for IE 4 or 5 back in the mid-90s. I think it was called NetCaptor or NetRaptor or something. It was magical. Of course, back then, no one knew anything about the privacy implications of something like that.
Off-topic, but I don't think its about being cocky. For me, the most difficult thing to keep in mind about information technology is that it is entirely a construct of the human mind and we haven't yet devised methods to validate it against reality.
We see things as they are now and think "well, of course it has to be that way." That kind of view is true in a lot of fields--a rocket ship has a certain design because it must have a certain design. You can't put the engines on perpendicular to the ship or the fuel storage under the rocket exhaust.
But you can do that kind of thing with computers and might not even know it. I started to get a sense of this a couple years ago, when I first learned about the works of Ted Nelson and his contemporaries. Ted is critical of things like the modern hyperlink which, at first, seemed to me like criticizing the ocean. He even disapproves of the word "computer".
The idea that computing can and should be fundamentally reinvented has been the most exciting discovery of my life.
> The idea that computing can and should be fundamentally reinvented has been the most exciting discovery of my life.
This was one of the more depressing discoveries of mine.
"Reinvention" works by the main stream of this industry having knowledge half-life on the order of decade or less. Instead of building on top of prior work, we keep reinventing the old stuff; sometimes better, but usually very poorly - I attribute this to bad incentives. In the 70s they had time to think about what they're actually doing. In 2010s we have constant race to the market, and "move fast and break things" culture, which leads to layers of crappy abstractions that keeps relative performance of our software on the level of 1980s while delivering little usability on top.
The idea that computing can and should be fundamentally reinvented has been the most exciting discovery of my life.
Sorry but you hype me but don't deliver.
This seems fascinating but is far too vague to be actionable, could you exemplify what are computing reinvention?
That's the whole point, isn't it? Google wants web sites to load more quickly without needing to reduce the size or number of resources they send. Consuming more bandwidth seems like the only way to square that circle.
Now chrome is getting credit for in private browsing and tabs? (Safari and Opera respectively. Phoenix/Firefox popularized them long before Chrome was a twinkle.)
Password managers don't hold your password in plaintext, so the liability there only exists if you don't think the latest encryption methods are enough.
Thats not true. Theres other ways into your account besides breaking encryption. Off the top of my head, a brick to my head and the use of my thumbprint would do it.
Unlike how a normal service is normally supposed to store my password (hashed, but with no copy of the original password anywhere, EVENT THE LOGS) the password manager DOES retain a plain text copy of a password, not JUST a hashed derivative.
It's possible that the author meant 'multi-threaded memory changes, and multi-threaded tabs' rather than 'tabs' alone. And it's true that chrome DID introduce threaded tabs afaik.
Regarding saving password in browser, the author probably means an encrypted password manager such as KeePass or 1Password, and not the current implementation which does not have a master password
Firefox has a master password that encrypts the data. I dont use it, but doesnt a Sync account also sync the passwords between instances of your browser?
That said, can you still copy the profile to a new computer and have it autofill? Physical access to data on a hard drive is often end of game, unlike cloud only hosted stuff that streams. Im guessing you cant copy a firefox profile with lastpass or 1pass or dashlane and have the new computer start autofilling without reentering the master password?
Firefox also has Firefox Lockbox now for storing passwords in the cloud.
I've noticed Safari on iOS offering to generate a password and store it when I register for new sites recently. It works pretty well (until I'm on Windows and need the password).
I don't get why people (I mean technically minded people who are aware of privacy issues and so on) don't just use firefox. They are pretty much at feature parity (Firefox may even get the edge due to the fantastic extensions ecosystem), except one spies on you and the other doesn't. Why do people find the switch so hard?
In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to block ads, unless you want to fiddle with hosts files or pi-holes or something.
I'm a technically minded person. I've been using web browsers since NCSA Mosaic. I switch browsers probably once per decade (mosaic -> netscape navigator -> firefox -> chrome).
At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war because content creators were continually accidentally making things work in IE only. (By "accidentally" I mean that the standards were very confusing, and understanding what would work with which browser was a continual battle, and Microsoft had a good 15 years under its belt of attempting to make the web a windows only affair).
So then Chrome comes along, backed my Google, and people started treating it as a first class citizen. Sites were belt to run with, and tested on Chrome.
Fast forward to now. I actually do want to have a wide array of ad sponsored content on the internet because I appreciate the free content and I'm not going to pay 30 different 5$ per month subscriptions for stuff I might read. Are they tracking me? Yes. When I search for lawn mowers online I get spams (which gmail seems to filter just fine) and my rarely logged into facebook feed is full of lawn mower ads. I use in-cognito when I want to see what a google or linked in search looks like without my user context. I use ABP when sites are too aggressive with their ads.
And it's all fine. I suspect my current experience is common, to answer your question.
> At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war [...]
This is false. Firefox's market share was continuously rising until Chrome came along (and Google marketed it aggressively). IE was still strong but already losing.
You are correct. For some reason, I keep seeing this history repeated over and over, but even the chart in the article confirms you're correct. Firefox was taking over like crazy before Chrome came along...
... I'm talking about before that. Netscape went from 90% to 6% once IE started bundling on Windows. Firefox "taking over like crazy" is a later comeback.
Netscape Navigator was something like 90% at one point. Netscape fell down to single digits against IE and then started climbing back up. That's the point at which the chart in the article begins. That's what I'm referring to when I say "losing the war". 90% -> 6% is losing.
I'm not like an IE fan - I don't user Windows for anything other than gaming, I just remember what the browser wars were like in the early 2000s.
It's share was definitely stagnating around the time Chrome came out. I advocated heavily for Firefox at the time, but it was not enough. Not a surprise that many Firefox engineers went on to create Chrome at Google, Firefox codebase was still carrying the burden of old Netscape and it took them 10 years to modernize it.
IE wasn't winning any war against Firefox, it was Firefox which was gaining marketshare from IE, which had a crap reputation at that point.
For this reason and the fact that you think lawnmower ads are the worst that surveillance capitalism can do, I'm skeptical that you are technically minded at all. This is 100% how the average Joe thinks.
I remember when I made the change, must've been 2004 or 2005, I was reluctant at first to change from IE to Firefox, but the killer feature FF had at that time was tabbed browsing.
Kids these days will never know the struggle of having 10 browser windows clogging up the task bar...
While I agree with your point on not willing to pay “30 different $5 per month subscriptions for stuff I might read”, I do not agree that technically aware people who know about privacy ought to have a lackadaisical attitude to tracking and surveillance. At an individual level you could argue that it doesn’t harm you (or better, hasn’t harmed you so far), but at the level of society and the world, we’d be worse off if everybody thought this wasn’t important and hence did nothing about it.
If only user tracking was limited to product ads. Behaviour control and propaganda are a thing, as evidenced many times over with Rohingya genocide, US elections, Brexit, and the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests to name but a few.
The biggest problem is the subtle frustrations if you use Google websites or services at all, since Google builds the Internet explicitly for Chrome, and sometimes works on other browsers okay-ish. reCAPTCHA harassment is particularly egregious too.
I'm a Firefox user, but I've also already excised most of the rest of Google from my life. If you're still using Gmail, you're likely to stick with Chrome.
I'm also a full time Firefox/uBO user, but I've never noticed isues with reCAPTCHA or gmail. The only time I can think of hitting reCAPTCHA is when creating a new account somewhere and gmail seems to work as expected. Photos, maps, Keep, and YouTube all seem to work fine too.
It's possible of course that I just don't know any better since I haven't actually used Chrome with any regularity in the last 5 years or so.
My experience (on macOS, windows 10, and Ubuntu Desktop) is that captchas on Chrome pass seamlessly (frequently without a prompt), and firefox on all three platforms require 3-10 screenfuls of "where's the signal light?" where's-waldo fun and games.
I use Gmail, but through Thunderbird and occasionally Firefox. Works pretty well for me. I keep Chrome around mainly for occasional compatibility testing.
It's not just Google. I've had helpdesk tickets with multiple services automatically assume I'm on mobile if I mention something doesn't work in Safari. I will even say "Safari on Mac OS 10.xx" and they will still assume mobile. The idea of desktop browsers that aren't Chrome seems to be fading away among even the marginally technically aware people.
I mostly use Firefox, except I use Chrome for certain tasks at work [1]. There is one thing about Firefox that occasionally has me on the verge of ditching it for Chrome.
It has a terrible spell checker. I find about as many errors in its spelling as it finds in mine.
There used to be one other thing that really irked me, but it looks like they recently fixed that (I'm on the beta channel, so not sure if everyone has this yet). That was handling of keyboard shortcuts. Shortcuts, such as OPTION-HOME to go to the home page, did not work if the focus was in the address bar, the "search in page" field, or a text entry field on the page.
[1] Chrome's dev tools seem more responsive and better organized, and it handles multiple profiles better.
Profiles provide separate bookmarks and add-ons per profile. I don't think containers do. Containers seem to be more about making it so you can appear as different people to different sites. Profiles are more about letting you separate roles.
For different things I do during development, I want different sets of cookies, bookmarks, history, and add-ons. With profiles, I get that, effectively getting a separate browser that I can extensively customize to its particular task.
Those were actually what I was thinking of when I said Chrome handles profiles better. Firefox has the functionality, but it doesn't have as nice an interface to it. Chrome, for example, on MacOS puts the available profiles on the right-click menu on its dock icon.
Do Containers support segregated browsing history yet? That's what I've liked most about Chrome profiles. I can have a "personal" profile and then a "work" profile that doesn't comingle the browsing history. It's convenient when on a screenshare--the URL bar's type-ahead won't reveal your personal browsing history.
You can have multiple profiles in Firefox too. If you start Firefox with the "-P" flag, it brings up the profile manager, which allows you create/delete profiles or start Firefox with a selected profile.
You can also start/manage profiles from inside Firefox by navigating to about:profiles.
I am on a MacbookPro and would love to use Firefox, however because of this never-solved bug [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042], I have to stick to Opera or Safari or.. Chrome (and probably I am not the only one).
Firefox is losing a lot share just because it gets our fan/cpu crazy on macbooks.
I use both. The firefox interface still freezes when the page freezes. Hung anything should never stop me from closing tabs. Quantum/Electrolysis was supposed to be a savior, but the problem remains for now.
I want to like Firefox, and I use it regularly, but I just veer back to Chrome. I still prefer the UI and extensions (which Chrome still has the 'edge' in).
Out of curiosity, what extensions do you miss?
I've never really used anything beyond the usual privacy extensions (uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and HTTPS everywhere). All of which seem to be as well or better supported in FireFox.
Same here. I use Firefox+adblocker on mobile for some sites. I don't know why it is, but i just dislike the UI of Firefox. I want to like it more, but it just doesn't work out...
Ublock origin can be added to Palemoon and it makes a great browser. If a website doesn't work in Palemoon then too bad for them. I've had a great break from twitter since their new UI doesn't work. And recaptchas can go captcha themselves.
I run NoScript + UBO in Pale Moon(1) on the desktop. UBO Legacy does not block Javascript. On mobile, PM is dead and Waterfox w/ newer JS blocking UBO works great.
(1) it's a PIA to manage both extensions, I'm using WF more & more on Desktop these days. I hope Pale Moon can survive, evolve or one-up their lack of Web Extension APIs.
I stopped using it (after many, many years) because it has bugs where the hamburger menu (and, often, tabs) stop working, and it was frustrating to deal with.
It also had some weird issues with remote desktop, and I remote to my desktop from meetings fairly often.
It runs fine on my Mac, the only time it seems to spin up the fans is for Youtube videos. It wouldn't suprise me if Google has done something to make Firefox not work as well on Youtube as they have done before.
First, a lot of technically minded people run Linux and want to have hardware-accelerated video decoding for performance and Firefox isn't focused on supporting this for Linux, but it does work on multiple distros for Chromium.
In terms of mobile, me guesses you haven't got the news about Mozilla doing away with extensions for newer versions. Plus there are other open source browsers with extension support, even based on Chromium.
It's slower, which is practically all I care about now that all browsers have the same extension API.
>In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to block ads, unless you want to fiddle with hosts files or pi-holes or something.
On Android, Blokada, or any browser like Brave. On iOS, Safari has a builtin content filter.
> Firefox is a fine browser by itself [...] I have the comfort of knowing that my personal information is protected (to the extent possible) – and also that my portal to the web is not custom-built to track me and serve me ads
FF is fantastic, but the uncomfortable question is, will it always be, given Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as well? Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of user and developer incentives.
For a sustainable web (what's left of it anyway), it would be more helpful to radically simplify the web such that developers have reasonable and feasible specs to work against, and have diversity in browsers once again. Meanwhile, Google is working hard to lead audiences elsewhere via AMP, a Trojan made possible by JavaScript in the first place.
> FF is fantastic, but the uncomfortable question is, will it always be, given Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as well? Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of user and developer incentives.
Looks like they've got a plan in place to handle this. I also secretly wish Mozilla would offer up a paid email service that only scans emails to filter our spam. Maybe some incredible Rust based email server.
Spam filtering is a horrendous problem which can never be "solved" because people continue to innovate around the filters. It only looks "solved" because gmail have enough data to do an amazing job of it.
I have a gmail account and a non-gmail account, and the non-gmail privately hosted one gets considerable spam, some of which even makes it through my manually curated filters.
I used to self-host email but the minimum time and expertise investment is now too high for me - I got fed up of having to fix breakages or losing email from random other sources.
Its a perpetual arms race, if the spammers have access to the blocking software they can work around it. Anti-evil works best when the evil cant see the inner workings.
As somebody who runs their own mail server, I think it's also just a problem of time and relative importance. The full-time job of a spammer is to spam, while I adjust my anti-spam solution only when the spam gets bad enough to prompt action in my spare time.
At this point I'd love to turn running my mail server over to a paid service that I trusted, because they could have full-time people dealing with spam proactively. But Google's free service means a lot of people no longer pay, so the market seems to be very limited.
> Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as well?
This was also mentioned at the bottom of the article:
> If I were a Product executive at Mozilla, I would be banging the table to introduce useful, paid products that could enrich and support the Firefox ecosystem. Chief among these would be a low-cost, independent email service focused on privacy and spam protection that would allow people to migrate off of Gmail; a VPN service; a media/content whitelisting service combined with an ad-blocker that allowed people to easily pay for content; and maybe even its own password manager.
> introduce useful, paid products that could enrich and support the Firefox ecosystem
This is where I'm wary, that it could become just a better walled garden. I trust Mozilla more than Google, but they've had hiccups in the past that tarnished that trust.
> allow people to migrate off of Gmail
My utopian dream is Mozilla spearheading open alternatives to all Google services: email, Open Street Maps, search, password manager, P2P file transfer, ad blockers, maybe even ethical ads. It gives me hope to see them already embracing some of this general direction.
The billions Google pays Apple is purely a tax that they extract from them. If it's meant to buy Apple off then it doesn't appear to be working given the privacy features that Apple continues to roll out.
I assume they meant aligned _with respect to users and developers_. Google is primarily an advertising company, and Firefox's revenue comes mostly from Google. Apple has no interests in ads these days (and their old ad platform never did browser ads anyway), so you don't have the same sort of competing incentives.
> Apple gets credit for being aligned with users and developers?
Yeah I can see where this wasn't very well put into words. I meant Safari core browser development is financed via Apple sales, as opposed to FF being in the position where Mozilla wouldn't want to bite the hands that feed them. Though Apple is also taking Google money for listing them as default search provider on Safari and has ambitions to push their service business.
I made Firefox as the primary browser even though battery usage during conference call and some webapps is much higher than chrome on a Mac.
I do it on principle and make sure my apps work on Firefox besides chrome. Although many friends and fellow developers tell me why I spend extra efforts.
Web components created a lot of issue when trying to make them run on both Firefox and chrome. But I went ahead with it and my front end team need to put a lot of additional efforts. I don't know why it's so hard to stick to standards. Both chrome and Firefox will behave bit differently for CSS and JavaScript.
Developing a PWA which works good on both browser feels like developing native apps for Android and iOS using cross platform toolkits, which at times require a lot of additional code and testing just so that they work predictable. Still results in not so good experience.
What I've heard is that Chrome shipped an unfinished early version of the web components spec, and now there are sites relying on it because it works in Chrome and that's good enough. I think the spec has been more or less finalized now? I'm not sure whether it's shipping in both browsers, though. Something is (eg for firefox it's since 63), but I don't know exactly what.
I believe YouTube uses a whole framework based on the preratified spec?
Even though the spec is finalized there are enough variation on support on different browsers leading to substantial efforts to make a web components based pwa work on multu-browser.
If it had been worked out properly there's isn't any need of react or angular except for a state management library, since the views and components is taken care of by the browser directly.
Monopolies like these are partially built by the demand side flowing towards the option of least resistance. In such case, the average person will float towards browser X when Y seems to, for example, become slower, take more processing power or pure peer pressure "I can't believe you are still using browser P, it is so slow!".
As demand floats towards few suppliers, organizations with the most value to gain from it will either look to purchase one of the current suppliers or increase investment to outpace its competitors. In time, the market becomes a monopoly/oligopoly due to both demand (customer) and supply (org/biz interests). At this point, the mono/oli has the means to change things, either slowly or drastically, to maximize their gains.
Unless a good portion of society takes further interest in keeping what they believe to be right (e.g. privacy) and put their money and time where their belief is, non-profit orgs or less agressive ones are most likely to lose 99 out of 100 times in the long run. This is a human nature challenge, not necessarily an entity problem.
Am I the only one that doesn't like chrome? There has always been a "weird feel" to it that I don't like. I used to really like Konqueror, so I guess its mostly the interface that gets to me.
...As I type this I look the sandwich menu, and lack of search bar in firefox and I die a little inside.
I never did either even when most of my savvier co-workers switched. The passive-aggressive nudges such as hiding cookie deletion and other privacy friendly functionality in 'Advanced Settings', not supporting extensions in Android (while Firefox did) really rubbed me the wrong way. I use Chrome when I have to (such as for some unavoidable things on my chromebook) but for everything else, it is Firefox as much as possible
Pale Moon is my go-to browser because it keeps the old Firefox interface. It has problems with some websites, but I dislike the chromification of the web interface more than I care about having to run another browser for certain things.
I recently ditched Chrome and switched back to Firefox, at home and on my mobile, only to discover that a surprising number of sites don't work in Firefox. In particular: Twitter doesn't work on Firefox Mobile.
Most work fine, but still, I ended up switching to Safari, to discover that it's just not quite as good an experience as Firefox or Chrome.
That's a bit presumptuous. My issue with Safari isn't that sites don't work; its seems comparable to Chrome in that regard. But using it doesn't feel as nice as Firefox or Chrome. It's harder to find features I need. Though to be honest, I find all browsers a bit lacking. I want more granular control over which cookies to accept and for how long, and how exactly to treat various sites.
And I certainly don't blame browsers for badly written sites, but blaming the site doesn't magically make it work either. Having less sites work for me is still a worse experience, no matter whose fault it is.
I just tried Twitter on iOS in Firefox where I have the strict privacy settings enabled including with Safari Firefox Focus content blocking turned on, and Twitter worked fine. In what way does it not work for you?
Why Chrome exists is missing a key driver - A significant portion of Google's search traffic came from business deals where they paid browser vendors (or others) to be the default search option. As they cannibalized the browser market they eliminated this cost or gained significant negotiating power.
"Driving innovation on the web" is the don't be evil slogan that motivates us all to allow them to "vertically integrate advertising and cut costs".
A seemingly minor issue got me really worried about the future of the Chrome monopoly.
For some reason, some developer/product manager at Chrome decided to ignore `"autocomplete"="off". This reeks havoc with the 100s of JS autocomplete addons out there when chrome autocomplete pops up over the custom built on.
Seems like there's no resolution yet, aside from a stream of ridiculous hacks that all tend to break at one point or another.
If Google wants to own the browser, they are going to need a more transparent process on these things. It affects everyone now and they have to start governing their changes more appropriately.
I was shocked to see the browser market share graph. Chrome appears to be collapsing on itself, dropping from from an all-time high of 65.4% to 55.4% in just 16 months, effectively losing all share gains since 2016.
But then I looked closer at the data, noticing that only net 120 basis points of the change can be explained by share changes in the other browsers. The rest of the data seems to be missing, as the numbers add up to less than 100%.
What the heck is going on?
Edit: It goes without saying that the article's failure to address this point fundamentally discredits the author. It should be obvious that the first thing an article claiming monopoly would need to do is explain the plummeting market share of the thing that is allegedly a monopoly..
Even looking at just the original one graph, the only thing showing a big rise is IE, with a 39% jump in usage. The author makes clear how that fits his thesis, in that Edge is now built on Chrome.
Maybe fewer people using web browsers to access Internet content? That could be explained by social networks like Reddit pushing users toward single-purpose apps.
I think w3counter's graph only shows the major browsers, and doesn't include data from the rest. Wikipedia has a breakdown of browser usage with more browsers (and an "other" section)
This article has a lot of wrong or otherwise misleading information. One I haven't noticed in the comments so far is that the author refers to Chromium as being free and open-source. It isn't [0]. It downloads more Google account and activity tracking related blobs than ever when building the code as well.
While I agree with the gist of the article, this is worth pointing out since a lot of people do use Chromium because it is advertised this way, thinking that somehow they are not playing into the Chrome/Google monopoly. For those interested, there is an alternative build without all the google stuff baked in: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
>but what Google was really doing was laying the groundwork for the ability to deliver all sorts of new online ad formats (like video) and complicated Javascript behind them that would help track and target users more effectively.
this is just plain dumb. There are plenty of other uses for javascript and powerful programming features beyond ads, and even google's most complicated ad products barely scratch the surface of what's possible with the new js features that have been introduced since the beginning of the chrome project.
Just because google is an ad company, doesn't mean everything they do is purely and simply about serving ads. And if you're going to try and make the argument that it is, you had better have something to back it up - you can't just make the claim and then skip on to the next bit of your rant.
Just a quick rant about Firefox -- an INSANELY annoying bug that they've yet to fix is when trying to copy the URL on Mobile Firefox, 99% of the time I get the wrong address (the previous page I was on), because it seemingly doesn't populate the address as the page you're currently looking at if the page hasn't fully loaded yet. It's so odd.
Other than that, Firefox > Chrome. Privacy situation is vastly superior and web standards support is comparable. I also just feel that Mozilla is a way better company ethics wise, and for the software community at large, than Google.
So I have a Gmail (G Suite Free) account, and I use Thunderbird on any computer I use regularly. Gmail is painfully slow to being almost unusable on Firefox. Sometimes I cannot get emails to send. So if I'm logging in temporarily, I'm usually forced to use Chrome.
I think is just one example of Chromium being a bit too ubiquitous, and forcing users into the Google black hole.
Is there an affordable paid custom domain email option with good spam filtering?
The only way you are going to get a competitive landscape for browsers is to get away from the paradigm of the browser containing the entire kitchen sink, i.e. its own OS.
Maybe there could be an alternative that only supports markdown. Or maybe markdown/rst and web assembly.
I have recently returned to Firefox for my personal browsing after using Chrome since about 2014 and it works great. However...
In work I'm stuck using Chrome due to the amount of time I spend in Google Apps (Docs, Sheets, Google Analytics, Search Console & Data Studio) as they break certain functionality on Firefox, which makes me less productive.
Google has too much power. I work in Search Engine Marketing and it wasn't so long ago that we optimised sites for different search engines, now no-one cares about any search engine other than Google.
Can we talk about Brave? Its impressed me immensely, and BAT is a profound new approach to monetization on the web. in the context of this article its the only salvation i see; much like telegram for messaging, it provides a privacy and performance focus that makes it infinitely better than the bloat of chrome at getting you around the web; And without the ads and tracking. Awesome.
Interesting i was just thinking about this yesterday. I should ditch chrome. yet here i am typing more shit for google to harvest from me and sell to the highest bidder.
Too much bloat? It's lean and getting leaner, and has a dashboard on your homepage showing just how much bloat it has saved! It's the natural successor to Firefox from Firefox's founder. I don't think it can be dismissed that easily.
The number of features that gecko (Firefox) lack vs blink (chromiums) is growing everyday...
In a factual sense, mozilla slow down the evolution of the web and what it allow web masters to create.
But it is nothing in comparison of safari which is pathetically behind blink and gecko feature wise.
It's a shame that the most popular websites don't team up to block safari and ask to install a browser that supports web standards.
YouTube did this with a version of IE and weeks after they were followed by thousands of websites not supporting this antic version.
I never understood this trope. I have not found this to be the case.
I think people who weren't around developing for the majority IE days are the ones saying this. It was just so much worse
For instance, before Edge adopted Chromium, it didn't have support for the web components/custom elements specification. Safari was one of the first browsers to have it properly (I think even before FireFox) beside Chrome (which had a reasonable interest in having it)
Also Safari mostly supports newer CSS standards, and they even propose some very good ideas to the W3C/WHATWG groups (like their Template Instantiation proposal [0])
I check caniuse often, and I find that most of the mainstream APIs I want to use Safari supports.
Is there some specific glaring hold back that I'm missing?
Most of the new daily use APIs seem to be well supported, not to mention iOS Users tend to be extremely well update to date (at least in my experience, and it seems to be the case as they report often in their developer conferences). I tend to note that Mac users aren't usually 1 or 2 releases behind, either (and they have been getting better at back porting Safari versions)
and I don't see any glaring omissions of day to day APIs that I think most developers use most often, since not everyone is even on the latest versions of Chrome, per se, or the need for enterprises to mandate support for IE11.
I can see:
Lazy Loading of images and iframes via an attribute
requestIdleCallback API
The `:has` and `:focus-visible` pseudo selectors
`text-justify` is a weird omission, I will say that
(though its roadmapped to arrive)
They have ResizeObserver in 13 and the Tech preview, and
likely this will land with iOS 13 at some point. Desktop
Safari and iOS Safari don't tend to be too far behind
each other.
CSS Paint API (Then again, only Chromium based browsers
have this right now anyway, this is essentially houdini.
Also worth noting it can be enabled behind a flag in
developer versions of Safari right now, so I wholly
expect this to be implemented in the future. FireFox
isn't even that far along yet)
I'm sure I could find others, but how many day to day APIs are actually missing? All the big ones (CSS-Grid, Web components, CSS and SVG Animations etc) are alive and well, and the Safari team has most of the missing ones in their pipeline.
I am open to discussing this further, of course! I want to know if I'm missing something or unique, and I realize not every case is the same.
I also acknowledge that No, its not as good as Chrome, and some of these features have to be polyfilled (which is nice that it can be, but not ideal), and yes, I wish they were faster (much faster) at updating webkit and safari across the board. I'm not here to sing the praises of their release schedule and feature updates by any means.
However IE never had a real history of implementing things that most developers even wanted to use most of the time. It was truly that bad. With the exception of Flex Box and Ajax, I can't think of anything that came out of Internet Explorer that became a standard or inspired a standard. Microsoft at many points was actively hostile in participating with much of the WHATWG/W3C process. IE11 even didn't support the ES6 standards nearly at all (They got Map, but not all of Map, but didn't implement Promises etc). That was just plain horrible in my opinion.
I think Safari is falling behind in some aspects, but in terms of covering most of the popular, meaningful APIs? they seem to keep up OK, much better than IE or even Edge ever did.
Its also important to acknowledge that Apple is a devices and software integration company, not a Web Application Company, so Safari follows a product schedule, not a rolling release one, though they have made a lot of motions to decouple the Safari update and release process from this product cycle its been on (slow, for sure)
I think they don't deserve this moniker, because its completely distracting from real criticisms that can be leveraged into action. By declaring it the new IE you're taking power away from better, more substantial, valid criticisms and concerns that I think the webkit/safari team would be more willing to engage, honestly.
Truth, mobile Safari is far and away the worst of the "modern" browsers, and it's basically impossible to test unless you have a spare Apple device or you pay for BrowserStack :/
You also need a Mac to (a) remote debug Mobile Safari, and (b) Test Safari on desktop.
You probably need both an iPad and an iPhone because (1) iPadOS 13 now acts like desktop by default, (2) If you do anything with inputmode= or number fields the virtual keyboards are different, (3) screen size
In theory you can test iOS/iPadOS devices in xcode, but I have found real devices far easier and more reliable.
> But it is nothing in comparison of safari which is pathetically behind blink and gecko feature wise. It's a shame that the most popular websites don't team up to block safari and ask to install a browser that supports web standards. YouTube did this with a version of IE and weeks after they were followed by thousands of websites not supporting this antic version.
There's no alternative until there's one.
If the web stopped working on Apple devices do you imagine the public reaction? Apple would be humiliated and would instantly indeed allow to install other browsers.
But we don't need to go so fast.
Firstly the web should block desktop safari, then laptop safaris. We wait that Apple fixe it's OS.
Then we do the same on IOS waiting for the same "fixe"
Instead of making apple bend the knee, the web got broken for GPUs with the shitshow that is webgpu (which is the intersection of features from metal, Vulkan and dx12) instead of doing a webVulkan which is well supported on all OSes except Apple because they choose to make the world a worse place.
Google lack balls. Mozilla too.
More likely: News publishers would see their ad revenue tank as iOS users tend to have more money/more valuable audience, consumers would get extremely annoyed at having their device gimped for no reason ('it worked yesterday') and are further driven into the app ecosystem, which helps Apple and harms the open web.
Now chrome is getting credit for in private browsing and tabs? (Safari and Opera respectively. Phoenix/Firefox popularized them long before Chrome was a twinkle.)
>It is mind-boggling that basic tools like these are not yet standard features in browsers.
How long have browsers offered to save passwords? Seems like a lot of bad history in this article.
>The way existing password managers work, the vendor’s liability even if they are hacked is minimal. They don’t hold any passwords!
HUH? Yes they do.. They absolutely hold a copy of your password ... in the cloud.
>Sure, Chromium and the V8 engine are open-source, but they still belong to Google in a way that, say, TCP/IP or IMAP does not.
Im gonna feel really bad breaking the QUIC / HTTP/3 news. Cuz google totally wrote the new transport layer. They wrote the last one too (SPDY HTTP/2.) With this much market share, what google implements and forces the hands of the standards organizations.
>This is why Microsoft’s decision to kill Internet Explorer, once the leading portal to the web, and replace it with a Chromium-based successor says so much about its new direction as a company. I suspect that decision had more to do with clearly understanding Microsoft’s strengths and weaknesses than anything else.
Its primarily for two reasons. 1 is battery life, they want to embed blink into the os so programs dont need to bundle it (electron included.) 2 is because 99% of the web just targets blink now. I dont think you can credit "the move to ssas" alone with Microsoft finally abandoning IE derivatives.