8 ms·

Is this about replacing one monopoly with another? It is slowly starting too look like in the early 00's, most developers are starting to support only chrome,

by krzyk 10y ago

Is this about replacing one monopoly with another? It is slowly starting too look like in the early 00's, most developers are starting to support only chrome, with no testing in Firefox or latest IE. On Android it is even worse, no one is testing with Firefox Mobile (Fennec) - this is WinXP-IE6 all over again.

Quenz 10y ago
One day every webpage will render the same in every browser. One day...
- swiley 10y ago
  Stick to <h> <a> <img> and <hr> and you can probably have that now.
- Endy 10y ago
  Doubtful, because someone will come up with their own proprietary rendering engine in a free browser, with some minor built-in feature people want; and then we're back where we started. PS - I miss Presto-based Opera.
ianai 10y ago
Bingo. One might say the economic system in whole really pushes monopolies or oligopolies.
- abtinf 10y ago
  One might say that if one were completely ignorant of economics and economic history. There are no examples of long running monopolies unsupported by state power.
  - barney54 10y ago
    It would be nice for the people who are down voting you to provide a counter example.
    - ianai 10y ago
      The banking sector, Alcoa, big pharma, automotive, oil/gas energy, telecom, and even groceries. Anywhere you have rents being sought and reaped you have monopolistic power. Im excluding the remark about government supported because that's more of a corporation forcing the governments hand through threats. When someone calls me ignorant I don't necessarily feel like replying.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    Define "supported" and "long"...
notgood 10y ago
Yeah, no; most times when you test in Firefox it works just fine with no changes; specially when you already tried on mobile, because if it works in mobile it works on desktop Firefox. The other thing is that major libraries (CSS, JS: jQuery, bootstrap, React) make sure they work on all browsers so you don't have to worry about that part. The winXP-IE6 was hell because that never happened, you always had to changes to make it work on IE6 and some other changes to support IE7 and so on.
- Insanity 10y ago
  Most times but not always unfortunately. Had a couple of times that I did not check a small frontend change on firefox because I assumed a small change would be fine, yet had different results in chrome as on firefox. I did not check on mobile though.
- TwoBit 10y ago
  I use Firefox on Android and often run into web sites that don't work right because they are dependent on some Chrome or Webkit behaviour, and I need to switch the browser to desktop mode to resolve the problem.
  - Nexxxeh 10y ago
    It's rare for me to find one, although the highest profile annoyance for me is textboxes break on m.facebook.com. The caret refuses to move from the current line without deleting or adding a character. Known issue and I'm yet to see a fix (other than "mbasic" which you have to use for messenger anyway). Almost everything else seems to be fixed with uBlock Origin and/or Reading Mode.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      I experianced this myself and was pretty sure this is on purpose. If you request desktop on Chrome for Android you get a stretched out version of the mobile site and the auto complete of your keyboard makes the textbox on messages impossible to use. I think they want to funnel people to the app I just don't go on the site anymore.
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
I completely agree. It's re-enforced with Chrome's supplied dev tools which are really, really nice (I always found them far better than Firefox's built-in or Firebug). It's going to be harder to unseat Chrome. IE 6 wasn't so difficult due to an increase in competition who offered features that IE wasn't even working on (standards, tabs, etc). How would you even unseat Chrome?
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Don't use 8GB of memory? Nah, people have lots of memory. I honestly don't know (but...then that's not such a bad thing, right?).
- frik 10y ago
  Safari and nowadays Chrome DevTools are great. I miss the "DOM" tab, that Firebug for Firefox had features had, and I haven't found anywhere else. You can browse the DOM tree state and edit - similar to Smalltalk and Windows Registry - very useful & powerful. Sadly, they just killed Firebug, broke the addon, deactivated it with an update and replaced it with a still not feature-complete (at the moment sub-par) solution.
  - fbender 10y ago
    > I miss the "DOM" tab, that Firebug for Firefox had features had, and I haven't found anywhere else. It's in the Fx DevTools sinve v48 [1]. You may need to enable it though in the DevTools settings. > Sadly, they just killed Firebug, broke the addon, deactivated it with an update and replaced it with a still not feature-complete (at the moment sub-par) solution. Who's they? The Firebug Team works with the DevTools team since forever to port all functionality to the internal tools. The Firebug Team decided it was not worth to maintain the standalone version beyond v2 (also related to architectural changes to Fx, see project e10s) since they almost achieved feature parity by now and are working on the last remaining pieces [3]. Firebug v3 is Fx DevTools + a lot of extra features that Firebug never had. If you miss a feature in the DevTools, try Fx DevEdition [3]. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/DOM_Property_Viewer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/DOM_Property_... [2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-lives-on-in-firefox-devtools/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-lives-on-in-firefo... [3] https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/developer/
disiplus 10y ago
while i agree with you ( i use firefox on my macbook and on my nexus 6 ) the situation is not even close to the one with ie6, everybody that has be doing web development in those days knows what im talking about, now days its usually some little quirk, those days you had to rewrite parts of your code or have big if(IE6) do something completely different. while i also hate that chrome has such a big influence, if all of them implement the common specs, i would be ok with that.
ENGNR 10y ago
They seem pretty good about using the open specification. Also they're starting to phase out -webkit tags for experimental chrome only features. They're hidden behind flags so you basically can't use them in production unless it's endorsed as part of the spec. Not to derail but safari mobile is the real IE6, plus lock in so users can't even get away from it.
- PakG1 10y ago
  From a vendor strategy perspective, that's true. From a web browser market share perspective, that's not true at all.
simfoo 10y ago
>On Android it is even worse, no one is testing with Firefox Mobile (Fennec) - this is WinXP-IE6 all over again. I'm always surprised why this is the case. Firefox Mobile + UBlock Origin works really well and is only very slightly slower than Chrome, while also blocking ads
- vorticalbox 10y ago
  Chrome is more convenient in that it syncs everything once you sign in and Firefox sync system just doesn't feel as refined. Probably doesn't help that google plaster "get google chrome" over all of their services.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - TwoBit 10y ago
    What is Firefox's sync lacking?
    - sametmax 10y ago
      For me it just never works. It never did during the last 3 years I tried it. The tab just don't sync, and I don't have the time or will to play the debug game.
  - gcp 10y ago
    The latest ads are interesting in their "Official browser from Google" angle. Read: Google is the internet. Google is whom you should trust.
- kuschku 10y ago
  Firefox Mobile works because it has a huge set of fixes they use for exactly that – changing UA on some sites, patching the code of other sites, implementing all the -webkit-* things, etc. It’s not that sites support Firefox, it’s that Firefox tries to implement 1:1 what Chrome does. At far less than a tenth of the budget.
DannyBee 10y ago
"It is slowly starting too look like in the early 00's, most developers are starting to support only chrome, with no testing in Firefox or latest IE. " Certainly you realize this kind of cycle has been going on for longer than that. In browsers, yeah, but that's only because browsers have only existed that long. This is pretty much the way of all software cycles since the dawn of computers. No area of software that i'm aware of has really broken out of this kind of cyclic behavior. Sorry :(
abrbhat 10y ago
Even though it is mostly under the radar, UC Browser is an extremely popular browser for Android in India
- babayega2 10y ago
  Indeed. It's highly customizable.
- gcp 10y ago
  It's WebKit based so it doesn't actually change anything.
throwawasiudy 10y ago
I, For One, Welcome Our New Google Overlords
satysin 10y ago
I was a long time Firefox user until the start of this year. I think I started using Pheonix as my main browser around 0.5 or 0.6. However over the years Firefox has got heavier and slower and taken way too long to evolve. It sucked when I realised I hadn't opened Firefox for a whole month. Now I just stay in Chrome as it is, for me, the best browsing experience. It is fast and looks good. It might be a large program in terms of install size but it doesn't feel bloated. The UI is snappy, scrolling is instant, etc. I do miss a few things about Firefox but not enough to slow down my whole browsing experience. I have moved on from the huge UI changing extensions. Now I just keep things minimal with just a content blocker and one or two other things for convenience. What I don't understand about Firefox is that Mozilla have a lot of money but progress seems very slow. Sure they get there in the end (or most of the way) but it just seems to take forever. Why?
- sametmax 10y ago
  You are not answering his concern at all, just talking about your preferences.
- Nexxxeh 10y ago
  Assuming we're talking on the desktop, have you tried Firefox multithreaded? It's a relatively new change.
- gcp 10y ago
  Mozilla have a lot of money but progress seems very slow As opposed to Google, Apple and Microsoft? Consider what happened to Opera. I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of modern browsers. By orders of magnitude.
- fbender 10y ago
  Firefox slowness is often related to some bad-behaving extension (though that improved over time), some AV software hijacking the process (happens far too often and way harder to detect than it should), or some busted profiles with a lot of cruft that failed to be cleaned up automatically (re: bad behaving extensions). I advise you to try the Firefox DevEdition (which uses a separate profile by default) and check if it works for you. You can also get rid of your old profile or try to reset it (preserving some data). Money isn't necessarily the issue for Mozilla, they managed to create a decent browser with a fraction of the big player's budget. As always, it's the triangle of complexity and time and manpower, they just can't fight on all fronts at once. At the moment, they are trying to get rid of a lot of legacy that prevented them from improving some aspects of the system (see project e10s, WebExtensions, etc.) all while preserving as much of the ecosystem as possible – which is very hard due to the current extension system that was created more than 10 years ago and just doesn't fit the bill anymore. E.g. e10s is already going on for 5 years or so and it just started rolling out a few months ago. Good news is that with these projects completing (improving overall responsiveness), there's a huge new project starting (Project Quantum) that aims to overhaul major parts of the rendering engine. This will integrate a lot of the research and investment poured into Rust and Servo, which will probably outrun current browsers by an order of magnitude (at least in some aspects that has already been shown, see WebRender).
pjmlp 10y ago
Yet somehow many thought that the cynic ones of us where wrong and Google would be different. Our opinions are based on life experience, watching the same cycles unfold time and time again. The next one will be the demise of open source ideals after everyone has migrated away from GPL for everything but the Linux kernel. I will give it around 10 years for it to happen.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  Open source ideals defined by who? Richard Stallman? True open source is code that you can do whatever you want with it. When Google releases their code it's under what I consider the true ideals for open source software and not some license that threatens legal action if you don't release your modifications.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    How does it feel following your true ideals of open source software, installing AOSP on your mobile device, with the ability to use apps from the Play Store? What about updating the BSD distribution on the PS4?
donatj 10y ago
We test on browsers we see more than 1% usage on by rule. This includes a swath of versions and platforms of IE, Chrome, Firefox, Edge as well as some foreign ones I know little about like UCBrowser. Firefox Mobile does not meet that rule for us. I know personally a single person who uses it, and that's only because he's fiercely anti-Google. There's just little sense testing against something no one is using, lest we want to test NetPositive [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetPositive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetPositive
- fbender 10y ago
  Well, if nobody tests it, the browser doesn't stand a chance because it does not work on many sites. It's a vicious circle …
kevindong 10y ago
> On Android it is even worse, no one is testing with Firefox Mobile (Fennec) Maybe because (almost) no one uses it? It's definitely a vicious cycle (If there are no users, there won't be any testing on that platform. If there is no testing on that platform, there are no users.). Developer time/resources are not unlimited. It's not worth their while to target an obscure platform.
devopsproject 10y ago
> this is WinXP-IE6 all over again. This is logical. If you have limited developer resources, it makes sense to target the most popular combos first. Until we have true "write once run anywhere" it will always be this way.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
The difference is that Chrome is probably the most standard compliant browser around. IE was just a clusterfuck from a monopolistic company whose intent was to lock you into their self appointed standards.

by krzyk 10y ago

Quenz 10y ago

One day every webpage will render the same in every browser. One day...

swiley 10y ago
Stick to <h> <a> <img> and <hr> and you can probably have that now.
Endy 10y ago
Doubtful, because someone will come up with their own proprietary rendering engine in a free browser, with some minor built-in feature people want; and then we're back where we started. PS - I miss Presto-based Opera.

ianai 10y ago

Bingo. One might say the economic system in whole really pushes monopolies or oligopolies.

abtinf 10y ago
One might say that if one were completely ignorant of economics and economic history. There are no examples of long running monopolies unsupported by state power.
- barney54 10y ago
  It would be nice for the people who are down voting you to provide a counter example.
  - ianai 10y ago
    The banking sector, Alcoa, big pharma, automotive, oil/gas energy, telecom, and even groceries. Anywhere you have rents being sought and reaped you have monopolistic power. Im excluding the remark about government supported because that's more of a corporation forcing the governments hand through threats. When someone calls me ignorant I don't necessarily feel like replying.
- sametmax 10y ago
  Define "supported" and "long"...

notgood 10y ago

Yeah, no; most times when you test in Firefox it works just fine with no changes; specially when you already tried on mobile, because if it works in mobile it works on desktop Firefox. The other thing is that major libraries (CSS, JS: jQuery, bootstrap, React) make sure they work on all browsers so you don't have to worry about that part. The winXP-IE6 was hell because that never happened, you always had to changes to make it work on IE6 and some other changes to support IE7 and so on.

Insanity 10y ago
Most times but not always unfortunately. Had a couple of times that I did not check a small frontend change on firefox because I assumed a small change would be fine, yet had different results in chrome as on firefox. I did not check on mobile though.
TwoBit 10y ago
I use Firefox on Android and often run into web sites that don't work right because they are dependent on some Chrome or Webkit behaviour, and I need to switch the browser to desktop mode to resolve the problem.
- Nexxxeh 10y ago
  It's rare for me to find one, although the highest profile annoyance for me is textboxes break on m.facebook.com. The caret refuses to move from the current line without deleting or adding a character. Known issue and I'm yet to see a fix (other than "mbasic" which you have to use for messenger anyway). Almost everything else seems to be fixed with uBlock Origin and/or Reading Mode.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    I experianced this myself and was pretty sure this is on purpose. If you request desktop on Chrome for Android you get a stretched out version of the mobile site and the auto complete of your keyboard makes the textbox on messages impossible to use. I think they want to funnel people to the app I just don't go on the site anymore.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

I completely agree. It's re-enforced with Chrome's supplied dev tools which are really, really nice (I always found them far better than Firefox's built-in or Firebug). It's going to be harder to unseat Chrome. IE 6 wasn't so difficult due to an increase in competition who offered features that IE wasn't even working on (standards, tabs, etc). How would you even unseat Chrome?

paulddraper 10y ago
Don't use 8GB of memory? Nah, people have lots of memory. I honestly don't know (but...then that's not such a bad thing, right?).
frik 10y ago
Safari and nowadays Chrome DevTools are great. I miss the "DOM" tab, that Firebug for Firefox had features had, and I haven't found anywhere else. You can browse the DOM tree state and edit - similar to Smalltalk and Windows Registry - very useful & powerful. Sadly, they just killed Firebug, broke the addon, deactivated it with an update and replaced it with a still not feature-complete (at the moment sub-par) solution.
- fbender 10y ago
  > I miss the "DOM" tab, that Firebug for Firefox had features had, and I haven't found anywhere else. It's in the Fx DevTools sinve v48 [1]. You may need to enable it though in the DevTools settings. > Sadly, they just killed Firebug, broke the addon, deactivated it with an update and replaced it with a still not feature-complete (at the moment sub-par) solution. Who's they? The Firebug Team works with the DevTools team since forever to port all functionality to the internal tools. The Firebug Team decided it was not worth to maintain the standalone version beyond v2 (also related to architectural changes to Fx, see project e10s) since they almost achieved feature parity by now and are working on the last remaining pieces [3]. Firebug v3 is Fx DevTools + a lot of extra features that Firebug never had. If you miss a feature in the DevTools, try Fx DevEdition [3]. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/DOM_Property_Viewer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/DOM_Property_... [2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-lives-on-in-firefox-devtools/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-lives-on-in-firefo... [3] https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/developer/

disiplus 10y ago

while i agree with you ( i use firefox on my macbook and on my nexus 6 ) the situation is not even close to the one with ie6, everybody that has be doing web development in those days knows what im talking about, now days its usually some little quirk, those days you had to rewrite parts of your code or have big if(IE6) do something completely different. while i also hate that chrome has such a big influence, if all of them implement the common specs, i would be ok with that.

ENGNR 10y ago

They seem pretty good about using the open specification. Also they're starting to phase out -webkit tags for experimental chrome only features. They're hidden behind flags so you basically can't use them in production unless it's endorsed as part of the spec. Not to derail but safari mobile is the real IE6, plus lock in so users can't even get away from it.

PakG1 10y ago
From a vendor strategy perspective, that's true. From a web browser market share perspective, that's not true at all.

simfoo 10y ago

>On Android it is even worse, no one is testing with Firefox Mobile (Fennec) - this is WinXP-IE6 all over again. I'm always surprised why this is the case. Firefox Mobile + UBlock Origin works really well and is only very slightly slower than Chrome, while also blocking ads

vorticalbox 10y ago
Chrome is more convenient in that it syncs everything once you sign in and Firefox sync system just doesn't feel as refined. Probably doesn't help that google plaster "get google chrome" over all of their services.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- TwoBit 10y ago
  What is Firefox's sync lacking?
  - sametmax 10y ago
    For me it just never works. It never did during the last 3 years I tried it. The tab just don't sync, and I don't have the time or will to play the debug game.
- gcp 10y ago
  The latest ads are interesting in their "Official browser from Google" angle. Read: Google is the internet. Google is whom you should trust.
kuschku 10y ago
Firefox Mobile works because it has a huge set of fixes they use for exactly that – changing UA on some sites, patching the code of other sites, implementing all the -webkit-* things, etc. It’s not that sites support Firefox, it’s that Firefox tries to implement 1:1 what Chrome does. At far less than a tenth of the budget.

DannyBee 10y ago

"It is slowly starting too look like in the early 00's, most developers are starting to support only chrome, with no testing in Firefox or latest IE. " Certainly you realize this kind of cycle has been going on for longer than that. In browsers, yeah, but that's only because browsers have only existed that long. This is pretty much the way of all software cycles since the dawn of computers. No area of software that i'm aware of has really broken out of this kind of cyclic behavior. Sorry :(

abrbhat 10y ago

Even though it is mostly under the radar, UC Browser is an extremely popular browser for Android in India

babayega2 10y ago
Indeed. It's highly customizable.
gcp 10y ago
It's WebKit based so it doesn't actually change anything.

throwawasiudy 10y ago

I, For One, Welcome Our New Google Overlords

satysin 10y ago

I was a long time Firefox user until the start of this year. I think I started using Pheonix as my main browser around 0.5 or 0.6. However over the years Firefox has got heavier and slower and taken way too long to evolve. It sucked when I realised I hadn't opened Firefox for a whole month. Now I just stay in Chrome as it is, for me, the best browsing experience. It is fast and looks good. It might be a large program in terms of install size but it doesn't feel bloated. The UI is snappy, scrolling is instant, etc. I do miss a few things about Firefox but not enough to slow down my whole browsing experience. I have moved on from the huge UI changing extensions. Now I just keep things minimal with just a content blocker and one or two other things for convenience. What I don't understand about Firefox is that Mozilla have a lot of money but progress seems very slow. Sure they get there in the end (or most of the way) but it just seems to take forever. Why?

sametmax 10y ago
You are not answering his concern at all, just talking about your preferences.
Nexxxeh 10y ago
Assuming we're talking on the desktop, have you tried Firefox multithreaded? It's a relatively new change.
gcp 10y ago
Mozilla have a lot of money but progress seems very slow As opposed to Google, Apple and Microsoft? Consider what happened to Opera. I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of modern browsers. By orders of magnitude.
fbender 10y ago
Firefox slowness is often related to some bad-behaving extension (though that improved over time), some AV software hijacking the process (happens far too often and way harder to detect than it should), or some busted profiles with a lot of cruft that failed to be cleaned up automatically (re: bad behaving extensions). I advise you to try the Firefox DevEdition (which uses a separate profile by default) and check if it works for you. You can also get rid of your old profile or try to reset it (preserving some data). Money isn't necessarily the issue for Mozilla, they managed to create a decent browser with a fraction of the big player's budget. As always, it's the triangle of complexity and time and manpower, they just can't fight on all fronts at once. At the moment, they are trying to get rid of a lot of legacy that prevented them from improving some aspects of the system (see project e10s, WebExtensions, etc.) all while preserving as much of the ecosystem as possible – which is very hard due to the current extension system that was created more than 10 years ago and just doesn't fit the bill anymore. E.g. e10s is already going on for 5 years or so and it just started rolling out a few months ago. Good news is that with these projects completing (improving overall responsiveness), there's a huge new project starting (Project Quantum) that aims to overhaul major parts of the rendering engine. This will integrate a lot of the research and investment poured into Rust and Servo, which will probably outrun current browsers by an order of magnitude (at least in some aspects that has already been shown, see WebRender).

pjmlp 10y ago

Yet somehow many thought that the cynic ones of us where wrong and Google would be different. Our opinions are based on life experience, watching the same cycles unfold time and time again. The next one will be the demise of open source ideals after everyone has migrated away from GPL for everything but the Linux kernel. I will give it around 10 years for it to happen.

bitmapbrother 10y ago
Open source ideals defined by who? Richard Stallman? True open source is code that you can do whatever you want with it. When Google releases their code it's under what I consider the true ideals for open source software and not some license that threatens legal action if you don't release your modifications.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  How does it feel following your true ideals of open source software, installing AOSP on your mobile device, with the ability to use apps from the Play Store? What about updating the BSD distribution on the PS4?

donatj 10y ago

We test on browsers we see more than 1% usage on by rule. This includes a swath of versions and platforms of IE, Chrome, Firefox, Edge as well as some foreign ones I know little about like UCBrowser. Firefox Mobile does not meet that rule for us. I know personally a single person who uses it, and that's only because he's fiercely anti-Google. There's just little sense testing against something no one is using, lest we want to test NetPositive [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetPositive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetPositive

fbender 10y ago
Well, if nobody tests it, the browser doesn't stand a chance because it does not work on many sites. It's a vicious circle …

kevindong 10y ago

> On Android it is even worse, no one is testing with Firefox Mobile (Fennec) Maybe because (almost) no one uses it? It's definitely a vicious cycle (If there are no users, there won't be any testing on that platform. If there is no testing on that platform, there are no users.). Developer time/resources are not unlimited. It's not worth their while to target an obscure platform.

devopsproject 10y ago

> this is WinXP-IE6 all over again. This is logical. If you have limited developer resources, it makes sense to target the most popular combos first. Until we have true "write once run anywhere" it will always be this way.

bitmapbrother 10y ago

The difference is that Chrome is probably the most standard compliant browser around. IE was just a clusterfuck from a monopolistic company whose intent was to lock you into their self appointed standards.