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A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations and we're already down to less than a handful major ones

A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations and we're already down to less than a handful major ones. Ideally they should hold equivalent usage share which implies that as currently usage is heavily tilted towards Google Chrome, the best way in which you can help Mozilla is to use their browser and get your friends and family to use it too, unless there's a deal-breaker reason they can't. Your vote (usage) counts, so use it!

cknight 9y ago
I switched back to Firefox 57 about a decade after abandoning it for Opera. I remember the advocacy movement around Firefox 1.0 which I was quite involved in. I thought (and still think) it was great. I don't plan to go quite as far this time, but do plan to try and convince all my friends and family to get on board. It'll be a harder task for sure since Chrome is not IE6, but as the resident IT guy that everyone asks for help, I know I have some sway. I'm just waiting for Quantum to land on Android, because I know enough of them will have issues with the current version and I want to skip over those problems to leave a good first impression.
- steve19 9y ago
  Firefox on Android is so frustrating. Things like no swipe down to refresh, despite all other apps implementating that pattern. On my phone, scrolling by swiping is slow, it scrolls such a short distance. Meaning going down a long NH page takes many swipes. All other Android browsers seem to get it right. Fonts also seem "off". It's these small things that make the experience frustrating. I truly want to use it, but it seems the designers of the app don't use other browsers, or have no interest in making the switch and Android FF easier.
  - LocutusOfBorges 9y ago
    Things like no swipe down to refresh This is the thing that made me switch to it from Chrome. Something as experience-breaking as refreshing the page isn't something that the user should encounter just through energetic scrolling.
    - csydas 9y ago
      I can see the flip side on this too though - the user action is pretty universal in apps, and it's disruptive when 9 out of 10 apps use this and you're trying to get fresh data out of app #10. There should be some consistency in user expectations across apps, or a clear way of performing the same action. That being said, I agree with you and really like that FF doesn't have a motion for refresh. It's mildly annoying sometimes, but usually it's only on sites very clearly constructed around the mechanism which have no other way of refreshing the page without going somewhere else first. HN is convenient enough on mobile with FF because you can just tap on the HN Title to refresh the page. Other pages are not as kind.
      - khedoros1 9y ago
        I expect swiping down to take me to the top of the page. It's frustrating when it does more (like reloading the page). I guess I'm the wrong person to ask whether 9/10 apps do it; I usually find a replacement when they do. Firefox, Pale Moon, and Chrome all have a refresh command in the "3 dots" menu. I usually use that.
        Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
        Swiping down only refreshes when you are already at the top of the page, and it even gives some visual feedback to see that you have indeed reached the top and you are now initiating a refresh gesture. I'm a quite energetic swiper and, to be honest, I have never found a situation where I wanted to return to the top and ended up refreshing due to too much swiping. But YMMV, I guess.
      - birksherty 9y ago
        Personally I want to disable "swipe down to refresh" system wide and instead have a button at the top of those apps. "on sites very clearly constructed around the mechanism" Browsers have refresh buttons for that.
    - languageiunvs 9y ago
      How did this even become a thing???? I absolutely hate it
  - rtpg 9y ago
    Yeah, I'm a heavy Firefox for Android user and I _really_ want to use it but the performance is really rough. I wish I had the sort of skills to help contribute to performance, but the whole thing is so huge I wouldn't even know where to begin. At this point if Chrome implemented the "open tab in background" feature (when I click on a link in an e-mail I don't want to switch directly to the browser) I would probably switch back.
    - moz23 9y ago
      Mozilla don't really care about mobile. The (too) small mobile teams do care, but the company as a whole doesn't - which mostly explains why it's so rough.
      - Sylos 9y ago
        And you take this wisdom from where? They tried to build an entire mobile operating system before. Clearly they do care.
      - jimnotgym 9y ago
        Firefox Focus is my go to browser on Android for 'just looking things up'. It's perfect for Wikipedia and IMDB (when someone points at the film you are watching and asks who the actor is). I only use another browser if I want up keep the page. No cookies, no bookmarks, no trackers
        JeremyNT 9y ago
        Sadly, Focus appears to just be another Chrome skin with some ui and privacy tweaks, and I think it's pretty telling that Mozilla did this rather than actually use FF mobile as the basis for this product. If you want to encourage browser diversity it doesn't really help. I use FF Mobile because I want competition and I do like the features Firefox offers, but the performance and UX on Android are definitely lacking relative to Chrome.
        Sylos 9y ago
  - diminish 9y ago
    ..Swipe down to refresh intervenes with google maps or canvas bad interactive content on firefox focus. I just opened a ticket.
  - cdancette 9y ago
    The thing that annoys me the most is to change tab: on chrome / brave we can just swipe the top bar and change tab. On firefox, we need to first click on the tab button, and then find the right tab by looking at a huge list of tabs. I find it much less practical and that's what got me back to chrome.
    - ant6n 9y ago
      Ha yeah. Firefox seems to want to encourage people to use fewer tabs, by having the tab-bar on top be a scroll-bar, so it's super annoying to have many tabs open.
    - dblohm7 9y ago
      All you need to do is go to your awesome bar and type "%" as the first character, then space, then start typing the string you're looking for.
      - cdancette 9y ago
        Yeah but on mobile it's annoying to type % .. it's so much faster to just swipe the address bar
- mwilliaams 9y ago
  Check out FF nightly on Android. It has the new features. I use it and it's great
  - tempestn 9y ago
    You're not going to install a nightly build on your friend's or mom's phone though. Your parent is already sold on FF; just waiting for Quantum to be released on Android before pushing it.
    - chrismorgan 9y ago
      I can think of only one crash in the best part of a year of using Firefox Nightly exclusively on my phone. (Firefox Nightly on my laptop has been far more heavily used for a number of years and has had a handful of crashes and a few other issues, but still fewer crashes at least than I get the impression production Chrome has.)
      - mwilliaams 9y ago
        I've had a few crashes with it. But nothing serious or really different from Chrome. There's also FF developer edition, which is more stable.
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    Firefox on android kills my phone, gobbles tons of memory. Nexus 5x, no plugins. I've given up on it now.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      Have you tried Firefox Focus?
      - moz23 9y ago
        Focus is chrome with a different skin and ads blocked. Literally, it's WebView which is Chrome.
- ksec 9y ago
  I started before it was called Firefox, and it was similar story. I abandoned Firefox last year to the Chrome Opera, So i have been bitting my fingers for years, Firefox was slow, and I knew Chrome was better, and I had waited. I used to force the usage of Firefox as the resident IT, with over 150 computer's default browser and later grew to 250. But every year since the introduction of Chrome, I have had more resistant, Chrome was faster, and better from those employees who knew IT, and may be 4 years ago, someone who is absolutely computer Illiterate came and asked if she could use this Google thing (Chrome). I asked for a reason, because I was curious how she knew, it turns out someone helped her using Chrome, and the speed was much better. She since then loved using it. And that wasn't only case, there were many other similar examples. And others from friends and family as well. It was at that time I gave up. Before then many within the Mozilla communities were begging for a better, more performant browser. That was right after Firefox 3, the goal of Firefox 4, the project of e10s. We thought JS was the problem, we advocated Spidermonkey being faster in benchmarks, but not much in UI or general feel of the Browser. Mozilla then literally gave up making a better browser and its users, and went on to built Firefox OS. Their ideology of Javascript is the best, build an OS with JS. It was pure luck they had a small group of people crazy enough to work on Rust, and Servo as an experiment which later turned into what we had today, Quantum. From the outside it was what i call a management and vision issue. And Mozilla left a very bad taste in my month. There used to be Article from Ars every month showing the decline of Firefox usage. I kept wondering at some point they should become worry as with less market share means less money from Search Engine, I dont think they see that as a problem until fairly recently. It wasn't until a month ago, someone on HN posted an comment on Mozilla that helped me Grief. It was never their intention to have the best browsers, or to care for user experience, that wasn't their main Goal. Their goal, as it always has been, is an Open Web; all others are secondary and merely the results for their first goal. They weren't here to compete, they were merely here to make sure the Web is open. It is good they are now back to Focus on Firefox. With WebRender, more Quantum parts, Firefox's future is bright. I am using Firefox now, but I wont be advocating for it any more, I guess everyone just choose what they want. Sorry for a long rant, but that is the results of someone who has been following them since Netscape era.
  - dangoor 9y ago
userbinator 9y ago
...and ideally, we should also encourage the use of the "lesser" browsers like Dillo, NetSurf, and all the text-based ones. They can't really run "web apps" and the like, but will be fine for viewing the "long tail" of content-focused sites out there (including this one.) What has become quite obvious to me within the past few years is that the whole "move the Web forward" thing seems to be really about coming up with and implementing as many complex features as possible (and advocating for their use in new sites), making it harder over time for smaller efforts at creating independent browsers to produce anything useful.
- baddox 9y ago
  I wonder: who could even feasibly introduce another browser today? The task seems almost impossible.
  - nrhk 9y ago
    Well you could also fork Chromium I guess.
    - colehasson 9y ago
      And with Puppeteer/Devtools programmers can stay in text editors.
    - Vinnl 9y ago
      Except that that doesn't really broaden the ecosystem, unfortunately.
      - rlanday 9y ago
        Given enough time, it does. People used to talk about a “WebKit monoculture” on mobile back when both Safari and Chrome were built on WebKit (although, they enabled different features and used different JavaScript engines). After Google forked WebKit to create Blink, WebKit and Blink started to diverge with different development priorities resulting in different improvements being made and different features being implemented. So as time goes on, and code gets added, removed, and rewritten, much of the commonality eventually disappears over time.
lucaspiller 9y ago
There is a third major independent option: Microsoft Edge. I assume (like me) a lot web of developers aren’t using Windows, but we can at least help people out by making sure our applications work fine on those browsers. Since IE 9, with a polyfill, most things just work unless you need some very recent HTML5 APIs. Microsoft provides free VMs for testing different browsers here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago
  If only ms would just make their software available cross platform.
  - sverhagen 9y ago
    Wasn't it just released for Android and iOS? (I get that that might not be what you meant...)
    - kitsunesoba 9y ago
      The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons), and while it’s possible they’ve ported Edge’s engine to Android I’d bet that Edge for Android either wraps WebKit or Blink/Chromium. The primary value proposition for Edge on mobile is syncing of tabs/bookmarks/history/etc, not its engine.
      - erikbye 9y ago
        > The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons) Which is why viewport values like maximum-scale, minimum-scale, and user-scalable do not work on iOS10+, no matter the browser.
      - Sylos 9y ago
        Yes, the Android-version is also just a Blink wrapper. It's almost impossible for Microsoft to port Trident/EdgeHTML to other operating systems, because it's so deeply integrated into Windows.
nasso 9y ago
I tried to switch over. Switched from chrome to firefox completely for about two weeks after quantum. I got random high cpu usage from firefox. Some random pages just spiked the cpu and everything slowed down. Same thing on both my workstation and laptop. I also didnt find a way to make opensearch working. In chrome i can just type part of the url of a website, press tab and write a search query and get a search on the website. That is so worked into my daily routine. It just became an annoyance and a dealbreaker. :( I really really want to switch. But chrome works really well and my browser is such an important tool for me so i really want to use the absolute best.
- bojan 9y ago
  Google Maps crash Quantum for me on a regular basis. I am trying not to become a conspiracy theorist, but this is making it difficult.
- fastball 9y ago
  As far as I can tell, anything Javascript heavy performs significantly worse on Quantum than on Chrome. The benchmarks I've looked at seem to indicate that this shouldn't be the case, but I'm thinking maybe Google has put in some "real life application" optimizations for certain configurations that can't be measured easily with benchmarks? Maybe they've learned some lessons from Angular? Just spitballin' here. Kinda like how Apple managed for a long time to make everything a lot more "buttery" than the competition, even though they usually pushed hardware with specs that aren't at the tippy top. Additionally, I think whatever version of flash is bundled with Chrome is less CPU-inflaming than the actual current version of flash, as flash sites seem to perform worse on Quantum as well, and Quantum relies are your system-installed flash.
  - lossolo 9y ago
    There was an article some time ago by someone from Chrome/google in which you could read that they optimized for benchmarks before but benchmarks are not real world usage so they stopped and started to optimize for real world usage. They did it because they optimized for some benchmarks while making real world average usage less efficient. Benchmarks do not show real browser performance.
greggman 9y ago
I'm curious, why does the web need multiple independent client implementations? Note I'm not trolling, I'm seriously asking the question. I think it's assumed to be true but not necessarily true. I'm probably wrong. As a counter example AFAIK there is no python standard that lots of teams make competing implementations. There is basically one python and a few incomplete copies but those copies have little to no say in the spec. Then we have C++ where there are independent implementations but every implementation embraces and extends with optional non-standard features you can enable. Linux doesn't seem to have much of a standard. Is there a spec? Are there multiple implementations or are there just multiple distributions of the same implementation. There's effectively no spec or standard for phones. There's 2 proprietary OSes, Android and iOS. Android happens to be open source but there's no spec that multiple teams can implement AFAIK. There's just an API that Google decides on it's own what to add/change. I guess you're free to make another implementation by copying the API but there's no spec to follow you'd just have to try to keep up. Would Android and/or Linux be better if there was a standard, committees deciding what gets in it and multiple implementations?
- strawcomb 9y ago
  Do you want one already very large company to be the only browser provider? That company could start to make its implementation less user friendly/less friendly to competition; but users would have no alternative but to use it. e.g. "Let's track everyone's usage, and prevent adblockers". Not sure that applies to language implementations. Imagine if C++ started trying to send user data to some organisation.
- Macha 9y ago
  The last time we had a web monoculture (IE6), it was not a pleasant experience. MS had decided it was over, they won, no more need to invest resources in that (and really, they would have preferred you write native Windows apps, but IE-only web pages which still only ran on Windows was a good second choice to them). It's also easy for a single dominant vendor implementation to impose terms on required periphery tech even if the primary standard is open (see the fate of Apache Harmony) You could argue the Python/Linux case are safer because: * They are themselves independent open source projects. While Chromium is open source, if Google pulled out, I'd expect the remaining development effort to be on par with e.g. Pale Moon * You could argue there _are_ multiple implementations of Linux-as-OS, if you're not just looking at the kernel. See Ubuntu, Red Hat, Arch, Alpine, etc. There's no standards body (unless you count stuff like POSIX or LSB, but then they are only subsets of functionality compared to what users expect of a full OS) but still things become standard by community consensus (e.g. systemd)
jrs95 9y ago
Well we have 4. That's more competition than we have in a lot of other software platforms.
hungerstrike 9y ago
Chrome does exactly what I want, the way I want it. Mozilla/Firefox OTOH has failed to respect me and my OS time and time again. Honestly, I'd rather see Mozilla go away and stop making software completely because I don't like them, their politics, the way they turn people into ideologues who beg you to use their inferior product or the way they do just about anything. If the pain of everybody using the same browser is real, people will get around to building a worthy competitor to Chrome. I suspect that the issue is a bit overblown though.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  You're saying Mozilla is turning people into idealogues without joking? Besides the fact that people independently choose to be active, half the Mozilla fans in this thread aren't shoving Firefox down anyone's threat. Firefox Quantum is a worthy competitor to Chrome. So is Safari on Mac. Not sure about Edge as I haven't used it.
  - hungerstrike 9y ago
    Mozilla obviously doesn't turn people into what they are already. It just attracts that certain type of person. My poor choice of words doesn't change the fact that Mozilla annoys me, but thanks for the correction... > half the Mozilla fans in this thread aren't shoving Firefox down anyone's threat. They don't have to when the top comment patronizes everybody by telling them what's "ideal". Gimme a break! > Firefox Quantum is a worthy competitor to Chrome. No it's not.
    - skinnymuch 9y ago
      Why did you use ...? You admit you had poor choice of words. I can't mind read so I didn't know your intended meaning. > No it's not. How does saying that help or inform in any way? I didn't elaborate on Firefox 57 because but others had in the thread and the post itself is about the browser.
coldtea 9y ago
>A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations I don't think it does. It could just do (and do better) with a single client implementation, as long as it wasn't controlled by a single company.

cknight 9y ago

I switched back to Firefox 57 about a decade after abandoning it for Opera. I remember the advocacy movement around Firefox 1.0 which I was quite involved in. I thought (and still think) it was great. I don't plan to go quite as far this time, but do plan to try and convince all my friends and family to get on board. It'll be a harder task for sure since Chrome is not IE6, but as the resident IT guy that everyone asks for help, I know I have some sway. I'm just waiting for Quantum to land on Android, because I know enough of them will have issues with the current version and I want to skip over those problems to leave a good first impression.

steve19 9y ago
Firefox on Android is so frustrating. Things like no swipe down to refresh, despite all other apps implementating that pattern. On my phone, scrolling by swiping is slow, it scrolls such a short distance. Meaning going down a long NH page takes many swipes. All other Android browsers seem to get it right. Fonts also seem "off". It's these small things that make the experience frustrating. I truly want to use it, but it seems the designers of the app don't use other browsers, or have no interest in making the switch and Android FF easier.
- LocutusOfBorges 9y ago
  Things like no swipe down to refresh This is the thing that made me switch to it from Chrome. Something as experience-breaking as refreshing the page isn't something that the user should encounter just through energetic scrolling.
  - csydas 9y ago
    I can see the flip side on this too though - the user action is pretty universal in apps, and it's disruptive when 9 out of 10 apps use this and you're trying to get fresh data out of app #10. There should be some consistency in user expectations across apps, or a clear way of performing the same action. That being said, I agree with you and really like that FF doesn't have a motion for refresh. It's mildly annoying sometimes, but usually it's only on sites very clearly constructed around the mechanism which have no other way of refreshing the page without going somewhere else first. HN is convenient enough on mobile with FF because you can just tap on the HN Title to refresh the page. Other pages are not as kind.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      I expect swiping down to take me to the top of the page. It's frustrating when it does more (like reloading the page). I guess I'm the wrong person to ask whether 9/10 apps do it; I usually find a replacement when they do. Firefox, Pale Moon, and Chrome all have a refresh command in the "3 dots" menu. I usually use that.
      - Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
        Swiping down only refreshes when you are already at the top of the page, and it even gives some visual feedback to see that you have indeed reached the top and you are now initiating a refresh gesture. I'm a quite energetic swiper and, to be honest, I have never found a situation where I wanted to return to the top and ended up refreshing due to too much swiping. But YMMV, I guess.
    - birksherty 9y ago
      Personally I want to disable "swipe down to refresh" system wide and instead have a button at the top of those apps. "on sites very clearly constructed around the mechanism" Browsers have refresh buttons for that.
  - languageiunvs 9y ago
    How did this even become a thing???? I absolutely hate it
- rtpg 9y ago
  Yeah, I'm a heavy Firefox for Android user and I _really_ want to use it but the performance is really rough. I wish I had the sort of skills to help contribute to performance, but the whole thing is so huge I wouldn't even know where to begin. At this point if Chrome implemented the "open tab in background" feature (when I click on a link in an e-mail I don't want to switch directly to the browser) I would probably switch back.
  - moz23 9y ago
    Mozilla don't really care about mobile. The (too) small mobile teams do care, but the company as a whole doesn't - which mostly explains why it's so rough.
    - Sylos 9y ago
      And you take this wisdom from where? They tried to build an entire mobile operating system before. Clearly they do care.
    - jimnotgym 9y ago
      Firefox Focus is my go to browser on Android for 'just looking things up'. It's perfect for Wikipedia and IMDB (when someone points at the film you are watching and asks who the actor is). I only use another browser if I want up keep the page. No cookies, no bookmarks, no trackers
      - JeremyNT 9y ago
        Sadly, Focus appears to just be another Chrome skin with some ui and privacy tweaks, and I think it's pretty telling that Mozilla did this rather than actually use FF mobile as the basis for this product. If you want to encourage browser diversity it doesn't really help. I use FF Mobile because I want competition and I do like the features Firefox offers, but the performance and UX on Android are definitely lacking relative to Chrome.
        Sylos 9y ago
- diminish 9y ago
  ..Swipe down to refresh intervenes with google maps or canvas bad interactive content on firefox focus. I just opened a ticket.
- cdancette 9y ago
  The thing that annoys me the most is to change tab: on chrome / brave we can just swipe the top bar and change tab. On firefox, we need to first click on the tab button, and then find the right tab by looking at a huge list of tabs. I find it much less practical and that's what got me back to chrome.
  - ant6n 9y ago
    Ha yeah. Firefox seems to want to encourage people to use fewer tabs, by having the tab-bar on top be a scroll-bar, so it's super annoying to have many tabs open.
  - dblohm7 9y ago
    All you need to do is go to your awesome bar and type "%" as the first character, then space, then start typing the string you're looking for.
    - cdancette 9y ago
      Yeah but on mobile it's annoying to type % .. it's so much faster to just swipe the address bar
mwilliaams 9y ago
Check out FF nightly on Android. It has the new features. I use it and it's great
- tempestn 9y ago
  You're not going to install a nightly build on your friend's or mom's phone though. Your parent is already sold on FF; just waiting for Quantum to be released on Android before pushing it.
  - chrismorgan 9y ago
    I can think of only one crash in the best part of a year of using Firefox Nightly exclusively on my phone. (Firefox Nightly on my laptop has been far more heavily used for a number of years and has had a handful of crashes and a few other issues, but still fewer crashes at least than I get the impression production Chrome has.)
    - mwilliaams 9y ago
      I've had a few crashes with it. But nothing serious or really different from Chrome. There's also FF developer edition, which is more stable.
- mattmanser 9y ago
  Firefox on android kills my phone, gobbles tons of memory. Nexus 5x, no plugins. I've given up on it now.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Have you tried Firefox Focus?
    - moz23 9y ago
      Focus is chrome with a different skin and ads blocked. Literally, it's WebView which is Chrome.
ksec 9y ago
I started before it was called Firefox, and it was similar story. I abandoned Firefox last year to the Chrome Opera, So i have been bitting my fingers for years, Firefox was slow, and I knew Chrome was better, and I had waited. I used to force the usage of Firefox as the resident IT, with over 150 computer's default browser and later grew to 250. But every year since the introduction of Chrome, I have had more resistant, Chrome was faster, and better from those employees who knew IT, and may be 4 years ago, someone who is absolutely computer Illiterate came and asked if she could use this Google thing (Chrome). I asked for a reason, because I was curious how she knew, it turns out someone helped her using Chrome, and the speed was much better. She since then loved using it. And that wasn't only case, there were many other similar examples. And others from friends and family as well. It was at that time I gave up. Before then many within the Mozilla communities were begging for a better, more performant browser. That was right after Firefox 3, the goal of Firefox 4, the project of e10s. We thought JS was the problem, we advocated Spidermonkey being faster in benchmarks, but not much in UI or general feel of the Browser. Mozilla then literally gave up making a better browser and its users, and went on to built Firefox OS. Their ideology of Javascript is the best, build an OS with JS. It was pure luck they had a small group of people crazy enough to work on Rust, and Servo as an experiment which later turned into what we had today, Quantum. From the outside it was what i call a management and vision issue. And Mozilla left a very bad taste in my month. There used to be Article from Ars every month showing the decline of Firefox usage. I kept wondering at some point they should become worry as with less market share means less money from Search Engine, I dont think they see that as a problem until fairly recently. It wasn't until a month ago, someone on HN posted an comment on Mozilla that helped me Grief. It was never their intention to have the best browsers, or to care for user experience, that wasn't their main Goal. Their goal, as it always has been, is an Open Web; all others are secondary and merely the results for their first goal. They weren't here to compete, they were merely here to make sure the Web is open. It is good they are now back to Focus on Firefox. With WebRender, more Quantum parts, Firefox's future is bright. I am using Firefox now, but I wont be advocating for it any more, I guess everyone just choose what they want. Sorry for a long rant, but that is the results of someone who has been following them since Netscape era.
- dangoor 9y ago

userbinator 9y ago

...and ideally, we should also encourage the use of the "lesser" browsers like Dillo, NetSurf, and all the text-based ones. They can't really run "web apps" and the like, but will be fine for viewing the "long tail" of content-focused sites out there (including this one.) What has become quite obvious to me within the past few years is that the whole "move the Web forward" thing seems to be really about coming up with and implementing as many complex features as possible (and advocating for their use in new sites), making it harder over time for smaller efforts at creating independent browsers to produce anything useful.

baddox 9y ago
I wonder: who could even feasibly introduce another browser today? The task seems almost impossible.
- nrhk 9y ago
  Well you could also fork Chromium I guess.
  - colehasson 9y ago
    And with Puppeteer/Devtools programmers can stay in text editors.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    Except that that doesn't really broaden the ecosystem, unfortunately.
    - rlanday 9y ago
      Given enough time, it does. People used to talk about a “WebKit monoculture” on mobile back when both Safari and Chrome were built on WebKit (although, they enabled different features and used different JavaScript engines). After Google forked WebKit to create Blink, WebKit and Blink started to diverge with different development priorities resulting in different improvements being made and different features being implemented. So as time goes on, and code gets added, removed, and rewritten, much of the commonality eventually disappears over time.

lucaspiller 9y ago

There is a third major independent option: Microsoft Edge. I assume (like me) a lot web of developers aren’t using Windows, but we can at least help people out by making sure our applications work fine on those browsers. Since IE 9, with a polyfill, most things just work unless you need some very recent HTML5 APIs. Microsoft provides free VMs for testing different browsers here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...

gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago
If only ms would just make their software available cross platform.
- sverhagen 9y ago
  Wasn't it just released for Android and iOS? (I get that that might not be what you meant...)
  - kitsunesoba 9y ago
    The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons), and while it’s possible they’ve ported Edge’s engine to Android I’d bet that Edge for Android either wraps WebKit or Blink/Chromium. The primary value proposition for Edge on mobile is syncing of tabs/bookmarks/history/etc, not its engine.
    - erikbye 9y ago
      > The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons) Which is why viewport values like maximum-scale, minimum-scale, and user-scalable do not work on iOS10+, no matter the browser.
    - Sylos 9y ago
      Yes, the Android-version is also just a Blink wrapper. It's almost impossible for Microsoft to port Trident/EdgeHTML to other operating systems, because it's so deeply integrated into Windows.

nasso 9y ago

I tried to switch over. Switched from chrome to firefox completely for about two weeks after quantum. I got random high cpu usage from firefox. Some random pages just spiked the cpu and everything slowed down. Same thing on both my workstation and laptop. I also didnt find a way to make opensearch working. In chrome i can just type part of the url of a website, press tab and write a search query and get a search on the website. That is so worked into my daily routine. It just became an annoyance and a dealbreaker. :( I really really want to switch. But chrome works really well and my browser is such an important tool for me so i really want to use the absolute best.

bojan 9y ago
Google Maps crash Quantum for me on a regular basis. I am trying not to become a conspiracy theorist, but this is making it difficult.
fastball 9y ago
As far as I can tell, anything Javascript heavy performs significantly worse on Quantum than on Chrome. The benchmarks I've looked at seem to indicate that this shouldn't be the case, but I'm thinking maybe Google has put in some "real life application" optimizations for certain configurations that can't be measured easily with benchmarks? Maybe they've learned some lessons from Angular? Just spitballin' here. Kinda like how Apple managed for a long time to make everything a lot more "buttery" than the competition, even though they usually pushed hardware with specs that aren't at the tippy top. Additionally, I think whatever version of flash is bundled with Chrome is less CPU-inflaming than the actual current version of flash, as flash sites seem to perform worse on Quantum as well, and Quantum relies are your system-installed flash.
- lossolo 9y ago
  There was an article some time ago by someone from Chrome/google in which you could read that they optimized for benchmarks before but benchmarks are not real world usage so they stopped and started to optimize for real world usage. They did it because they optimized for some benchmarks while making real world average usage less efficient. Benchmarks do not show real browser performance.

greggman 9y ago

I'm curious, why does the web need multiple independent client implementations? Note I'm not trolling, I'm seriously asking the question. I think it's assumed to be true but not necessarily true. I'm probably wrong. As a counter example AFAIK there is no python standard that lots of teams make competing implementations. There is basically one python and a few incomplete copies but those copies have little to no say in the spec. Then we have C++ where there are independent implementations but every implementation embraces and extends with optional non-standard features you can enable. Linux doesn't seem to have much of a standard. Is there a spec? Are there multiple implementations or are there just multiple distributions of the same implementation. There's effectively no spec or standard for phones. There's 2 proprietary OSes, Android and iOS. Android happens to be open source but there's no spec that multiple teams can implement AFAIK. There's just an API that Google decides on it's own what to add/change. I guess you're free to make another implementation by copying the API but there's no spec to follow you'd just have to try to keep up. Would Android and/or Linux be better if there was a standard, committees deciding what gets in it and multiple implementations?

strawcomb 9y ago
Do you want one already very large company to be the only browser provider? That company could start to make its implementation less user friendly/less friendly to competition; but users would have no alternative but to use it. e.g. "Let's track everyone's usage, and prevent adblockers". Not sure that applies to language implementations. Imagine if C++ started trying to send user data to some organisation.
Macha 9y ago
The last time we had a web monoculture (IE6), it was not a pleasant experience. MS had decided it was over, they won, no more need to invest resources in that (and really, they would have preferred you write native Windows apps, but IE-only web pages which still only ran on Windows was a good second choice to them). It's also easy for a single dominant vendor implementation to impose terms on required periphery tech even if the primary standard is open (see the fate of Apache Harmony) You could argue the Python/Linux case are safer because: * They are themselves independent open source projects. While Chromium is open source, if Google pulled out, I'd expect the remaining development effort to be on par with e.g. Pale Moon * You could argue there _are_ multiple implementations of Linux-as-OS, if you're not just looking at the kernel. See Ubuntu, Red Hat, Arch, Alpine, etc. There's no standards body (unless you count stuff like POSIX or LSB, but then they are only subsets of functionality compared to what users expect of a full OS) but still things become standard by community consensus (e.g. systemd)

jrs95 9y ago

Well we have 4. That's more competition than we have in a lot of other software platforms.

hungerstrike 9y ago

Chrome does exactly what I want, the way I want it. Mozilla/Firefox OTOH has failed to respect me and my OS time and time again. Honestly, I'd rather see Mozilla go away and stop making software completely because I don't like them, their politics, the way they turn people into ideologues who beg you to use their inferior product or the way they do just about anything. If the pain of everybody using the same browser is real, people will get around to building a worthy competitor to Chrome. I suspect that the issue is a bit overblown though.

skinnymuch 9y ago
You're saying Mozilla is turning people into idealogues without joking? Besides the fact that people independently choose to be active, half the Mozilla fans in this thread aren't shoving Firefox down anyone's threat. Firefox Quantum is a worthy competitor to Chrome. So is Safari on Mac. Not sure about Edge as I haven't used it.
- hungerstrike 9y ago
  Mozilla obviously doesn't turn people into what they are already. It just attracts that certain type of person. My poor choice of words doesn't change the fact that Mozilla annoys me, but thanks for the correction... > half the Mozilla fans in this thread aren't shoving Firefox down anyone's threat. They don't have to when the top comment patronizes everybody by telling them what's "ideal". Gimme a break! > Firefox Quantum is a worthy competitor to Chrome. No it's not.
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Why did you use ...? You admit you had poor choice of words. I can't mind read so I didn't know your intended meaning. > No it's not. How does saying that help or inform in any way? I didn't elaborate on Firefox 57 because but others had in the thread and the post itself is about the browser.

coldtea 9y ago

>A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations I don't think it does. It could just do (and do better) with a single client implementation, as long as it wasn't controlled by a single company.