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I have been using Firefox since version 1.0. I don't understand the desire to use google's browser. However, why would even trying view secure data in your web-
by anfilt 8y ago
I have been using Firefox since version 1.0. I don't understand the desire to use google's browser. However, why would even trying view secure data in your web-browser... Not even just Chrome. Things may get cached ect... Although, Mozilla has been doing things that I find annoying at times. Like adding pocket ect...
Little Rant
Although, I have looked at some of the other forks. What I find more depressing is how few up to date browser engines exist. It's a sign that web standards are getting too complicated. We already going to have a 3rd version HTTP as well... Both HTTP/2 and potential HTTP/3 are based off of work from google. Those protocols are a lot more complicated than HTTP. So it's much harder for a small group to implement them. That's just the protocol layer. Let alone JS, HTML, CSS, and all the other little things. It's like big companies keep bloating the standards. The result is the browser is probably one more complicated pieces of software regularly use.
What ever happened to "KISS".
- woolvalley 8y agoFirefox performs badly, especially on my 2-core macbook. Quantum is still not fast enough with many pages I use, I bet most devs do not test on firefox anymore and I've found FF unusable unless you use a 4 core machine, otherwise you get many random pauses here and there. So my choice is chrome or safari. Safari is not customizable enough for me so chrome it is.
- cptskippy 8y agoI use Firefox as my daily driver and I am consistently amazed by how slow Chrome is whenever I load it up for a debug session or to access a work related site (it's the new IE, sites only support it). Most Google sites are faster than Firefox (big surprise /s) but most everything else is the same or slower. I thought Chrome was supposed to be fast, it feels like a turd. I have a Yoga 2 (4 years old) and my laptop fan revs up like a harrier jump jet whenever I load Chrome. Firefox only manages to make it purr loudly.
- pmoriarty 8y ago"It's a sign that web standards are getting too complicated." Is there precedent for standards significantly simplifying over time, or do they always tend to get more and more complex?
- dredmorbius 8y agoWhat frequently happens is that a simplified alternative appears. HTML5 rather than XHTML, Markdown vs. HTML or LaTeX, HTML, originally, vs. SGML or Sun's ... proprietary hypertext system (Vue?). Arguably, replacement of much office suite software with Web technologies. Multics -> Unix.
- anfilt 8y agoThis is true, but a web browser can't really make those choices without a breaking a lot existing stuff. The big problem is that we keep piling onto HTML, CSS, and JS. For instance if we wanted web apps it would have been better to make something separate. Instead we have taken HTML which was originally just a way of rich text formatting and have made into the beast that it is today.
- robocat 8y agoI wish Google Search would create an HTML5 subset for documents that would boost rankings if used. A good majority of search results I am looking for should be simple single page HTML documents that don't use complex HTML5 features that are needed for web apps. Change ranking, and you give websites the incentive to avoid JavaScript or CSS features that are against the reader's interests.
- brobdingnagians 8y agoMaybe over-complicating things is a way of eliminating competition from Google. If it wasn't so complicated, someone could easily offer a competing, privacy-oriented browser; which Google would not like-- so make it so hideously complex no one can do it without $50 mil? There would be more innovation if things were simple, because anyone with a good idea could contribute.
- ianai 8y agoPrecisely that has been observed across many markets. Teachers unions being an example where adding on requirements to entry enshrine current members.
- apatters 8y agoThis sort of happened when the WHATWG effectively wrested control of HTML away from the W3C (although Google was not a founding member, they are one of the Steering Members now). https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/when-standards-divide/ https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/when-standards-divide/ The membership of the W3C supported XHTML, to improve interoperability among other reasons. Apple, Mozilla and Opera had a different vision and broke away and formed the WHATWG which Google and Microsoft later joined. Those companies (minus Opera) now have near total control over HTML and the W3C just rubber stamps whatever they decide. (Note: I don't believe the participants in WHATWG were doing what they did for anti-competitive purposes, but in hindsight it had that effect.)
- brohee 8y agoXHTML actually decreased interoperability with seldom anyone able to produce conformant strict XHTML. XHTML was a huge mistake, the W3C obsoleted itself with this one.
- moderation 8y agoI've seen a number of comments about http/2 and http/3 being driven by Google. The ideas originated there (SPDY and QUIC respectively) but in both cases many different entities backed the ideas and formulated specifications in IETF settings. I'm not sure I buy that somehow Google managed to hoodwink the people that toiled on these specifications in a non-Google environment and managed to influence them in such a way that the output was beneficial to their nefarious goals. There are already quite a number of http/3 implementations from non-Google companies and projects [0]. Cloudflare seem to be big backers of http/3 [1]. There were some other articles today that are generally positive on the http/3 approach. One was from Tim Bray at AWS [2] and the other from @ErrataRob [3]. 0. https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/wiki/Implementations https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/wiki/Implementations 1. https://cloudflare-quic.com/ https://cloudflare-quic.com/ 2. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/11/18/Post-REST#p-11 https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/11/18/Post-REST... 3. https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/11/some-notes-about-http3.html https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/11/some-notes-about-http3.ht...
- dogecoinbase 8y agoCloudflare seem to be big backers of http/3 [1]. Having the second-largest traffic analyzer on board would seem like more of a cautionary negative than a positive to me.
- nijave 8y agoTinfoil hat off for a second it makes more sense Cloudflare and Google are backing these protocols because they're more efficient which means lower infrastructure costs. They both terminate traffic already so can already see everything regardless of the protocol used.
- anfilt 8y agoI am not the person you responded to. However, I would only be considering things that people in general are eager to use not just a few big companies. Most users of HTTP have never been too concerned with it's overhead. Except maybe the way cookies have been design. It definitely has problems, but most peoples problems are not googles or cloud flares.
- AlexCoventry 8y ago> I don't understand the desire to use google's browser. It was the only browser with a decent Javascript sandbox, at least until recently. Wikipedia claims Firefox got a sandbox this month, but I think I've seen earlier claims: > Until November 2018, Firefox was the last widely used browser not to use a browser sandbox to isolate Web content in each tab from each other and from the rest of the system.[120][121]
- raarts 8y agoAlso it was the only browser where every tab ran in its own process so a crash would only take down that tab.
- ntauthority 8y agoMicrosoft's browsers got this functionality pretty early as well (I believe around the IE9/10 timeframe), though they of course had and still have numerous other issues that would make them undesirable for regular usage.
- youwishboye 8y agoin practice, the lack javascript sandbox and tab process isolation didn't affect 99% of internet users
- auslander 8y ago> It was the only browser with a decent Javascript sandbox What about Safari? IMHO it has strong sandboxing. Another interesting thing I found, is sharing cookie access between private tabs, Safari does not, Chrome does.
- AlexCoventry 8y agoCould be. I don't know much about the Apple ecosystem.
- eridius 8y ago> Those protocols are a lot more complicated than HTTP. So it's much harder for a small group to implement them. Why does a small group need to reimplement HTTP/2 and HTTP/3? It's important that we have more than 1 or 2 implementations, but we don't need more than a small handful, and we definitely don't need every independent group reimplementing them. We just need enough that anyone who needs it has access to an implementation that's usable for them, whether it's bundled with the OS (such as Apple's Foundation framework including a network stack that supports HTTP/2), or available as a library (such as Hyper for Rust, or I assume libcurl has HTTP/2 support).
- xg15 8y agoBecause then you get more parts of your stack that you don't really understand how they work and are unable to audit. We are basically doing with TLS. Which went fine - until people realized that one of the major go-to implementations of TLS contained years old unfixed bugs that could be remotely exploited.
- rocqua 8y agoI am not sure TLS would have been better if instead everyone rolled their own TLS implementation. Nor do I think that a more diverse world of TLS implementations would've led to better auditing of openSSL. We had barely enough eyeballs to audit openSSL, let alone to audit more stuff. The issue with openSSL was that the protocol was sufficiently complicated and sufficiently critical that people just picked the available option. Perhaps those who did look into the code they were running concluded it was bad, but weren't willing to create a new library. Besides, any new library would have the stigma of 'they are using a non-standard and new crypto library'. In that case, the solution would've been louder complains about the code quality of openSSL.
- eridius 8y agoBetter for everyone to be using a small handful of battle-tested implementations written by experts than for everyone to roll their own implementation. The latter may mean that people have a better understanding of the component, but it's also pretty much guaranteed to mean the various implementations are buggy. Even very simple protocols are easy to introduce bugs into. For example, it's pretty easy to write an HTTP/1.0 implementation, but it's also easy to open yourself up to DoS attacks if you do so. If you're writing a server, did you remember to put a limit on how large a request body can be before you shut down the request? Great! Did you remember to do that for the headers too? Limiting request bodies is an obvious thing to do. Limiting the size of headers, not so much. But maybe you thought of that anyway. What about dealing with clients that open lots of connections and veeery sloowly feed chunks of a request? The sockets are still active, but the connections are so slow you can easily exhaust all your resources just tracking sockets (or even run out of file descriptors). And this is just plain HTTP, without even considering interacting with TLS.
- tannhaeuser 8y agoGoogle also has additional power by simply not implementing things introduced by WHATWG participants. Case in point: the menu/menuitem elements which would have provided scriptless interaction in a limited way (removed from W3C HTML 5.2). Any small attempt to make the web more declarative by extending HTML is doomed since not essential because it can be implemented using JS. WHATWG's specification process, putting the world's main communication medium into the hands of browser vendors with an interest to eliminate competition and define entirely new Turing runtimes (WASM), and advertisers who turn around and create competing mechanisms (AMP), then not actually ever delivering a standard (the "living standard" nonsense) is broken, and has been for a long time.