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No, I tell my friends and family to use Firefox. There is more than one decent browser out there. I don't like the idea of everything using the Chromium engine;

No, I tell my friends and family to use Firefox. There is more than one decent browser out there. I don't like the idea of everything using the Chromium engine; monoculture _is_ bad and we shouldn't put our eggs in the one basket. That said, IE and Edge have historically been terrible both compatibility and performance-wise. It's not just websites that aren't tested in Edge - my experience with Edge is that all aspects of performance (initial load time, ui responsiveness, web site responsiveness) are terribly slow. I applaud the death of IE and Edge. One thing I'm worried about though is that Chromium may take over the market and we end up with websites working only in Chromium based browsers and other important browsers like Firefox and Safari get left in the dirt.

headmelted 8y ago
It's not really better though - having only two real browsers is not good for open standards or the open web. This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it, and starts using Chromium too. Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME).
- vijaybritto 8y ago
  The main reason developers prefer chrome over firefox is the devtools hands down. When firebug was amazing in the jquery era, we used firefox but now chrome's devtools is simple, fast and full featured to use. If firefox's devtools is as good as or better than chrome's maybe things can change!
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Agreed, the Chrome Devtools are amazing for development and the pace of new features helps in testing new standards.
  - sunaurus 8y ago
    What specifically do you find better in the Chrome devtools? I find Firefox devtools to be slightly nicer (but I don't really think either one has a massive edge over the other).
    - vijaybritto 8y ago
      1.speed - FF tools always take time to open a script file. Chrome hickups only for huge files which is understandable. 2. Sourcemaps doesnt work most of the times in webpack bundles. Dont know why. (Maybe they tested only for chrome or something.) 3. This new FF devtools was developed after chrome took the dev mindshare and familiarity. I don't see FF devtools very compelling to be used all the time. No disrespect, but there is no incentive or visible improvement in productivity. 4. I'm a react dev now, the react dev tools plugin in FF is laggy. Not pleasant to use. I can go on like this. But maybe for your use case, FF devtools is better.
      - vorticalbox 8y ago
        one plus to FF is that when you hit an end point that is JSON it actually formats it as JSON rather then just printing to the screen like chrome
    - fragkakis 8y ago
      For me the FF dev tools are not as good as Chrome's. For the basics I need both browsers offer the same functionality. However, on my machine, FF has performance problems with the dev tools open. Also, when I rearrange the width of the columns in the network tab, after some seconds and without knowing why, the columns return to their original width.
    - xfitm3 8y ago
      Websocket frame inspection in Firefox is not possible.
    - 13years 8y ago
      1. speed. On a million+ line code base chrome starts the app in about 5 secs. Firefox over a minute. 2. Blackboxing. Easy to setup and configure in chrome and you can preserve you settings. 3. Blackboxing combined with event breakpoints. Chrome lets you set event break points and combined with black boxing will drop you right into your code on an event. This is awesome.
  - laumars 8y ago
    I used to think this too, but After seeing some colleagues using FireFox dev tools and making the switch (back) to Firefox myself, I realised that there really isn’t that much between the two and in fact it’s mire a matter of what you’re used to. Much like the debates about other developer tools in fact (text editors et al).
    - lucianoci 8y ago
      It's all the small things. Till recently there weren't even react devtools for Firefox. Almost any dev-oriented extension targets chrome first. Chrome has a great devtools protocol, and node conveniently happens to support it too, which is also why many node debugging tools will use chrome. I use Firefox for casual browsing, but all work-y stuff I do in chrome. Sometimes I'll start debugging a site in Firefox and then some behavior is a bit "off" or missing and I just go back to Chrome. And the only reason I'm using Firefox is because it's not Chrome. I wanted a different browser that looks a bit different to always be aware of the difference between work and personal.
      - PJDK 8y ago
        It really is the small things. The one that gets me constantly is that you can't resize the columns in the Network tab. I appreciate a lot of the stuff Firefox has been doing, but Google was very wise to realise that first class developer support was the winning move.
- endymi0n 8y ago
  While I'm with you on the variety side, lest not forget that Chromium is at least open source, permitting other vendors to do a move like this instead of being left in the cold (and in this way probably committing back to the project). The flip side here is that building a fully featured browser engine from scratch that is "just" good enough to render 80% of pages correctly is a herculean, almost impossible task in 2018. Browsers went from graphic tools to browse the Internet to a full blown Operating System with sandboxed arbitrary code execution, intricate cross-origin rules, staged caching, full vector graphics animation systems and whatnot. Although I would have loved even more choice (or MS championing the superb Firefox rendering engine instead), I think we're already well off with two fully featured and completely open source browser engines.
  - JohnBooty 8y ago
    > building a fully featured browser engine from > scratch that is "just" good enough to render 80% > of pages correctly is a herculean, almost impossible > task in 2018. Absolutely! > I think we're already well off with two fully > featured and completely open source browser engines. Well, that's the problem. The death of Edge brings us one step closer to a browser monoculture. Which is apparently something developers want, since apparently none of them were working in the industry the last time we had a monoculture.
    - headmelted 8y ago
      This is my point distilled exactly. It doesn't matter if HN uses Firefox. It doesn't matter if web developers like us the world over use Firefox. Ezra and Taylor just want to manage their personal brands and don't care about all that nerd stuff. We'll build for where the audience is, and they're not going to switch for any of the reasons in this thread. It works good enough as it is. Yes, Chrome is open source, but in marketing/critical mass terms this is no different than last time.
- koonsolo 8y ago
  The "open standards" is actually the reason why there can only be a limited amount of web browsers. Let me explain: there is no true open standard (as explained at https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/). You don't realize this until you make HTML5 games or apps, like when Google decided to break tons of HTML5 games with https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p... So basically it is already really hard to support all web browsers out there, since there is no "standard". So what you do is you limit yourself to a few, and display "Best played in browser X", because browser Y has these strange issues, and might introduce others with a new update, and the same for browser Z and F. So if you make rich web content such as games, the ecosystem will automatically push itself to a limited amount of web browsers.
  - JoelTheSuperior 8y ago
    Not to mention that fixing it for one browser may well break it for another. Usually it leads to compromising but even then still favouring one browser (usually Chrome) over another.
    - zolthrowaway 8y ago
      This is my biggest gripe with Edge/IE. - Build some webapp and get it working correctly in Chrome - Test on Firefox. It works 90% of the time. 9% of the time it's relatively easy to support. 1% of the time it isn't worth the hassle. - Test on Edge. It works 80% of the time. 10% it's an easy enough fix. 10% you have to move heaven and Earth to fix and when you contact Microsoft, they know about the issue but won't do anything to help. - Test on IE. It works 60% of the time. The other 40% of the time you start looking for a new job so you don't have to write the same code a second time for IE.
      - setquk 8y ago
        This. I raised an issue where Microsoft fucked up download prompting in IE9 (identified in beta released 2010) and broke ClickOnce launched via Javascript redirection. They haven't fixed it yet as of today (including in Edge!) and rep contacted me and said they deleted the case we had open. We rewrote the app so it didn't use ClickOnce in the end.
- vic20forever 8y ago
  > This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it, and starts using Chromium too. Watching Mozilla align Firefox's extension API with Chromium's, I'm a little surprised that they haven't already made the move. If browser evolution continues along the current path, I predict Firefox will switch to Chromium within 3 years. > Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME). It's already happening. Until a year or two ago, the only time I ever opened Chrome was when a page using some sort of experimental API ran slowly or not at all on Firefox. Now, the number of mainstream websites I see with serious glitches in Firefox is increasing by the month.
  - kakarot 8y ago
    9/10 times when I encounter a bug either when doing web dev or just browsing the web, it's because of Chrome/WebKit improperly implementing standards. It's not Firefox's fault if people aren't testing their websites on both browsers, just like it wasn't Firefox or Chrome's fault whenever people only tested their webpages with Internet Explorer and its mess of exclusive APIs and deviations from standards.
  - canacrypto 8y ago
    I use Firefox as my primary browser and I don't find mainstream websites glitchy at all.
    - nwah1 8y ago
      Same. I have found one boutique e-commerce site that wouldn't let me complete a purchase on Firefox, but mainstream sites all work fine.
    - joosteto 8y ago
      When I find a glitchy site in Firefox, I try chromium. Usually turns out it's glitchy there as well.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts That is Firefox. Shuttering that kills the project. It's like, I don't know, Tumblr deciding to ban porn or something.
  - keypusher 8y ago
    I've got some bad news.
    - superflyguy 8y ago
      There's always one.
    - Gruselbauer 8y ago
      I just heard about that and I'm still kind of puzzled. App Store money, yeah, but isn't Tumblr like 10% SJW kids / fandoms and 90% porn? Seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot.
  - deleted 8y ago
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- asituop 8y ago
  You seems very certain that Firefox will switch to Chromium but the recent trend is going in the exact opposite direction : - Firefox Focus is switching from Chromium Engine to Gecko Engine. - Huge amount of work in WebRender, they're starting to test it. If it lives up its promise Chromium Engine might fall far behind in terms of performance. So maybe you're right but from what we can tell right now, the current trend for Mozilla is to remove the last pieces of Chromium and bet everything on a new generation engine which is not Chromium.
  - headmelted 8y ago
    Cool. I'd love to be dead wrong about this, it's just that history is tempering my optimism. I feel like Debbie Downer from SNL back in the day, so let's hope you're right.
- WA 8y ago
  Not sure about that, because after all, most users use their smartphones and iOS has quite a big market share. So there's at least Chromium and Webkit. Web devs simply won't get away with testing only in Chrome that easily.
  - ThaJay 8y ago
    12% is not a very big market share compared to Android https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-share-held-by-smartphone-operating-systems/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-sha...
- sametmax 8y ago
  > This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it, and starts using Chromium too. It seems very unlikely: - Mozilla has been in a far worse uderdog position before during the IE6 era, with way more incompatible sites and less funding. - Mozilla is not for profit. Fighting for the open Web is one of their goal. It always has been. They are not perfect, but their track record is damn good compared to almost any player of their size and impact in the tech world. - Mozilla strongly invested in their own tech, including rewritting the browser rendering engine and taking huge risks such as create a bloody hole new language, rust, in the process. To my knowledge, the "oxydation" project has been a success so far, and rust is proving everyday that it's a positive force in the world as well. - Firefox is the only decent mobile browser. I can't navigate the web without the ublock extension. I just can't. - Mozilla keeps innovating. Their last brillant idea, the tab container, is worth switching on it's own. - Mozilla has the hardcore geeks on their side. Even during the V30 to v50 transition period where Firefox was, at the time, clearly an inferior product, we kept using it to support it for the sheer ideal of it. We hoped it would come back from it, and it happened: Firefox is now a fast, lean and fantastic browser again. - Privacy concerns are (FINALLY !) being taken in consideration from the crowd. And Chrome is terrible at this, so moving to a chromium core, while technically not related at all because you can set it up the way you like, would carry the stigma. All in all, I'm incredibly optimistic about Mozilla et Firefox's future despite the market share taking a serious hit.
  - gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
    > Mozilla has the hardcore geeks on their side. Even during the V30 to v50 transition period where Firefox was, at the time, clearly an inferior product, we kept using it to support it for the sheer ideal of it. We hoped it would come back from it, and it happened: Firefox is now a fast, lean and fantastic browser again. I use Firefox. I always have. My experience is totally different to yours. Before FF57 it was a single process and it ran nicely on a 4GB machine with a 2009 Intel Atom processor. Afterwards it became much hungrier for memory and processor. I had to buy a new computer. (I tried Chrome of course but it is hungrier.)
    - 8y ago
- teddyuk 8y ago
  I'd like to see microsoft/mozilla/google collaborate on "THE" browser engine then all this compatibility bs goes away - they can all ship their own cruft and advertising but with a single rendering engine we can forget about multiple browsers forever
  - TheForumTroll 8y ago
    So IE 6.2
  - Angostura 8y ago
    Apple and Google did that for a while with Webkit powering both Chrome and Safari. A shame they fell out.
btschaegg 8y ago
> It's not just websites that aren't tested in Edge - my experience with Edge is that all aspects of performance (initial load time, ui responsiveness, web site responsiveness) are terribly slow. 100% agree here. I'd be way more worried about monoculture if any other browser would be discontinued, but the MS browser history was and is just a shitshow. <rant> I can't even remember how many years MS and even some people in my vincinity were going on about how amazing the new IE (or later Edge) were and that MS would totally be changing their ways now. Usually, if you used their browser for more than five minutes, that sounded more like a bad joke. To this day, the (properly updated) Edge on my dev machine does user interaction orders of magnitude worse than FF/Chrome. Tabs frequently stop functioning properly and even won't reload anymore, until you find out that some subprocess crashed and you'll have to close and re-open the site to try again. The adoption of new web standards happens at a crawl. Yet, at the same time, their "Edge is totally a next-gen browser! Promise!" rhetoric leads to actual companies prohibiting users from getting and using an actually useful browser like FF. Their dev story sucks, too. The best of their jokes was when someone wanted to convince me on how cool VS2015 was for HTML/Javascript development. Yes, I totally want a 16GB+ IDE that literally can take minutes to load from an SSD and frequently freezes to do nimble HTML editing m( The funny thing is: They actually arguably fixed that one in the mean time (VS Code), but their browser politics remained. Perhaps this signifies the same shift there? </rant> TL;DR: I actually wouldn't mind that much, but MS has been repeatedly overselling and underdelivering for years and just slows down everyone else doing it.
- deleted 8y ago
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- jodrellblank 8y ago
  TL;DR: I actually wouldn't mind that much, but MS has been repeatedly overselling and underdelivering for years and just slows down everyone else doing it. I know what you mean, but that is mildly amusing and not entirely false.
  - MeriMark 8y ago
    Yeah, even I have no worries with that. Because Microsoft is selling all their products and losing faith in the market. So no to work that much. Regards, https://run3online.co https://run3online.co
manigandham 8y ago
Safari is leaving itself in the dirt. It's the new IE with slow, quirky, and unreliable features. They made some advancements in privacy, but so did Firefox without giving up on actual rendering and standards.
- alliecat 8y ago
  I hear this a lot, but I find Safari to be an entirely usable browser day-to-day - the reduction in power usage is very noticeable vs Firefox or Chrome.
  - wklauss 8y ago
    More than usable. For the majority of users I'd say it is a better option, not as resource-hungry as Chrome or chromium based browsers.
    - TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
      And, while I'm not a hard-core JS programmer, I've found Safari's dev tools to be just as good as Firefox's or Chrome's.
      - andrethegiant 8y ago
        Same! I prefer Safari dev tools for inspecting the DOM, CSS prototyping, debugging, seeing request/response headers, local storage info. I use it every day, and find its interface much more intuitive and way less bloated. However Chrome devtools are better when it comes to performance profiling, and having extensions like React devtools make me wish that was a capability of Safari.
- mr_toad 8y ago
  > unreliable standards I presume you mean that Safari doesn’t support experimental standards that Chrome is pushing because they align with Google’s businesses strategy. This is exactly the problem with a browser monoculture. If we’re not lucky Google will be the new Microsoft.
barking 8y ago
Well I'm hoping internet explorer doesn't die, unless the webbrowser control moves on to supporting whatever replaces it.
- khacking 8y ago
  Why do you hope it doesn't die? The replacement of it with Edge as the default Windows browser sealed its fate anyway, so it could be argued it already has?
prince005 8y ago
I won't really complain if there are just 2 render engines out there in the market, given that both are open source. It will make work hell lot easier for so many developers and the competition and development will stay healthy.
- emn13 8y ago
  Open source doesn't reduce the issues with people writing to the implementation, not the spec - leading to unintentional interactions and trivia suddenly becoming impossible to change. If edge dies, and FF shrinks further (both of which seem likely), FF will in effect be reduced to an alternative implementation of chrome; not a implementation of a web browser. Both Edge and FF already include chrome-quirk emulating features; you can expect those exceptions to become the norm. Apple - for all it's wealth - isn't likely to bother bucking the trend here. The same forces pushing MS affect Apple too; and given their high-end only marketing and various political factors, they will be completely ignored in much of asia - and that's a lot of devs creating a lot of stuff that is likely to depend on chrome-only features eventually.
pietrovismara 8y ago
It's easy not to be left in the dirt, just keep the same pace of the other vendors in implementing support for new JS features.
- simias 8y ago
  A modern browser is effectively on par with an Operating System complexity-wise. You need to implement a huge number of APIs (many of which are security-sensitive), you need to have a good UI, you need to be super fast while making all that play together nicely etc... If you don't have a large team of developers and a few millions in the bank you basically don't have a chance. As Google keeps pushing more and more features in the browser the bar keeps getting higher and higher. I'm actually surprised that Mozilla still manages to mostly keep up, but since it's mostly running on Google's money it's still not quite a relief.
  - lgl 8y ago
    > A modern browser is effectively on par with an Operating System complexity-wise. I don't think this is even remotely true. Those same arguments (using apis, good security, good ui, speed, etc) could be made for any piece of non-trivial software. But there's no way a browser is "on par" in complexity with an operating system.
    - simias 8y ago
      I maintain that. Actually I think a modern browser is probably more complex than many small kernels. It's probably not the best metric but my checkout of the Linux kernel (a very advanced OS with support for many architectures and devices) is at about 14 million lines of C code (per sloccount), although if you remove device drivers and only count the "core" of the kernel you end up with about 3M lines. I don't have any browser source code available on my computer but a website[1] says that Firefox 20 (released in 2013) was around 4M lines of code and was rising quite fast. Again, this is comparing apples to kernels but it shows that it's still within the same order of magnitude as far as code size is concerned. The maintenance burden alone on these large codebases is huge, you need teams of engineers just dealing with things like testing and regressions. The bar is extremely high for competition, you won't have two clever engineers write the next killer browser in their basement. [1] https://almossawi.com/firefox/ https://almossawi.com/firefox/
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criddell 8y ago
> monoculture _is_ bad From a security point of view, I think that's true. What are other problems? I think everybody using the same rendering engine would be a net positive.
- proaralyst 8y ago
  It gives the Chromium project massive power over web standards. This happened with IE6 and was a bad time for the web.
  - tbranyen 8y ago
    It was a complete and totally different time for the web. I was waiting for folks to claim an open source project with outside contributors is the same as a proprietary company moving fast internally and shipping anything and evetything without following a standards process.
    - JohnBooty 8y ago
      > proprietary company moving fast internally and shipping anything and evetything without following a standards process. Well, that's the thing. What's to stop Google from doing that? It won't be as overt as Microsoft ramming shitty versions of IE down people's throats for a decade, but please rest assured that Google's goal is profit and domination. I'm not saying they are worse than any other for-profit corporation, but they are a for-profit corporation. > It was a complete and totally different time for the web You lack a very basic sense of vision. You understand that the past is different from today, but seem unable to comprehend that the future might be different from today. 20 years ago: Microsoft was doing a pretty good job with the web! IE3/4/5 were consistently better than Netscape. Developers generally welcomed the IE monoculture because developing for both Netscape and IE was a real pain in the ass. 10 years ago: Microsoft had a stranglehold on the web and it suffered greatly, to the point where governments had to intervene (the EU mandating browser choice, etc) Today: Google is doing a pretty good job with the web! 10 years from now: ????????????
me551ah 8y ago
I recently made the switch to Firefox from chrome. Webrender is a revolution in web technology since it primarily uses the GPU for rendering resulting in much faster and smoother websites. I'd urge everyone to give webrender a shot, it feels noticeably smoother than chrome.
- sciurus 8y ago
  Yes, webrender is fast, but keep in mind that if you're using webrender you will see bugs, even crashes, that you wouldn't otherwise. Use it only if you're willing to accept that in order to help Mozilla test and improve it. Disclosure: I work for Mozilla but not on webrender.
_jp__ 8y ago
Define Monoculture. For me, both Firefox and Chrome are developed under the US law, and in this sense, they are both the same.

headmelted 8y ago

It's not really better though - having only two real browsers is not good for open standards or the open web. This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it, and starts using Chromium too. Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME).

vijaybritto 8y ago
The main reason developers prefer chrome over firefox is the devtools hands down. When firebug was amazing in the jquery era, we used firefox but now chrome's devtools is simple, fast and full featured to use. If firefox's devtools is as good as or better than chrome's maybe things can change!
- manigandham 8y ago
  Agreed, the Chrome Devtools are amazing for development and the pace of new features helps in testing new standards.
- sunaurus 8y ago
  What specifically do you find better in the Chrome devtools? I find Firefox devtools to be slightly nicer (but I don't really think either one has a massive edge over the other).
  - vijaybritto 8y ago
    1.speed - FF tools always take time to open a script file. Chrome hickups only for huge files which is understandable. 2. Sourcemaps doesnt work most of the times in webpack bundles. Dont know why. (Maybe they tested only for chrome or something.) 3. This new FF devtools was developed after chrome took the dev mindshare and familiarity. I don't see FF devtools very compelling to be used all the time. No disrespect, but there is no incentive or visible improvement in productivity. 4. I'm a react dev now, the react dev tools plugin in FF is laggy. Not pleasant to use. I can go on like this. But maybe for your use case, FF devtools is better.
    - vorticalbox 8y ago
      one plus to FF is that when you hit an end point that is JSON it actually formats it as JSON rather then just printing to the screen like chrome
  - fragkakis 8y ago
    For me the FF dev tools are not as good as Chrome's. For the basics I need both browsers offer the same functionality. However, on my machine, FF has performance problems with the dev tools open. Also, when I rearrange the width of the columns in the network tab, after some seconds and without knowing why, the columns return to their original width.
  - xfitm3 8y ago
    Websocket frame inspection in Firefox is not possible.
  - 13years 8y ago
    1. speed. On a million+ line code base chrome starts the app in about 5 secs. Firefox over a minute. 2. Blackboxing. Easy to setup and configure in chrome and you can preserve you settings. 3. Blackboxing combined with event breakpoints. Chrome lets you set event break points and combined with black boxing will drop you right into your code on an event. This is awesome.
- laumars 8y ago
  I used to think this too, but After seeing some colleagues using FireFox dev tools and making the switch (back) to Firefox myself, I realised that there really isn’t that much between the two and in fact it’s mire a matter of what you’re used to. Much like the debates about other developer tools in fact (text editors et al).
  - lucianoci 8y ago
    It's all the small things. Till recently there weren't even react devtools for Firefox. Almost any dev-oriented extension targets chrome first. Chrome has a great devtools protocol, and node conveniently happens to support it too, which is also why many node debugging tools will use chrome. I use Firefox for casual browsing, but all work-y stuff I do in chrome. Sometimes I'll start debugging a site in Firefox and then some behavior is a bit "off" or missing and I just go back to Chrome. And the only reason I'm using Firefox is because it's not Chrome. I wanted a different browser that looks a bit different to always be aware of the difference between work and personal.
    - PJDK 8y ago
      It really is the small things. The one that gets me constantly is that you can't resize the columns in the Network tab. I appreciate a lot of the stuff Firefox has been doing, but Google was very wise to realise that first class developer support was the winning move.
endymi0n 8y ago
While I'm with you on the variety side, lest not forget that Chromium is at least open source, permitting other vendors to do a move like this instead of being left in the cold (and in this way probably committing back to the project). The flip side here is that building a fully featured browser engine from scratch that is "just" good enough to render 80% of pages correctly is a herculean, almost impossible task in 2018. Browsers went from graphic tools to browse the Internet to a full blown Operating System with sandboxed arbitrary code execution, intricate cross-origin rules, staged caching, full vector graphics animation systems and whatnot. Although I would have loved even more choice (or MS championing the superb Firefox rendering engine instead), I think we're already well off with two fully featured and completely open source browser engines.
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  > building a fully featured browser engine from > scratch that is "just" good enough to render 80% > of pages correctly is a herculean, almost impossible > task in 2018. Absolutely! > I think we're already well off with two fully > featured and completely open source browser engines. Well, that's the problem. The death of Edge brings us one step closer to a browser monoculture. Which is apparently something developers want, since apparently none of them were working in the industry the last time we had a monoculture.
  - headmelted 8y ago
    This is my point distilled exactly. It doesn't matter if HN uses Firefox. It doesn't matter if web developers like us the world over use Firefox. Ezra and Taylor just want to manage their personal brands and don't care about all that nerd stuff. We'll build for where the audience is, and they're not going to switch for any of the reasons in this thread. It works good enough as it is. Yes, Chrome is open source, but in marketing/critical mass terms this is no different than last time.
koonsolo 8y ago
The "open standards" is actually the reason why there can only be a limited amount of web browsers. Let me explain: there is no true open standard (as explained at https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/). You don't realize this until you make HTML5 games or apps, like when Google decided to break tons of HTML5 games with https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p... So basically it is already really hard to support all web browsers out there, since there is no "standard". So what you do is you limit yourself to a few, and display "Best played in browser X", because browser Y has these strange issues, and might introduce others with a new update, and the same for browser Z and F. So if you make rich web content such as games, the ecosystem will automatically push itself to a limited amount of web browsers.
- JoelTheSuperior 8y ago
  Not to mention that fixing it for one browser may well break it for another. Usually it leads to compromising but even then still favouring one browser (usually Chrome) over another.
  - zolthrowaway 8y ago
    This is my biggest gripe with Edge/IE. - Build some webapp and get it working correctly in Chrome - Test on Firefox. It works 90% of the time. 9% of the time it's relatively easy to support. 1% of the time it isn't worth the hassle. - Test on Edge. It works 80% of the time. 10% it's an easy enough fix. 10% you have to move heaven and Earth to fix and when you contact Microsoft, they know about the issue but won't do anything to help. - Test on IE. It works 60% of the time. The other 40% of the time you start looking for a new job so you don't have to write the same code a second time for IE.
    - setquk 8y ago
      This. I raised an issue where Microsoft fucked up download prompting in IE9 (identified in beta released 2010) and broke ClickOnce launched via Javascript redirection. They haven't fixed it yet as of today (including in Edge!) and rep contacted me and said they deleted the case we had open. We rewrote the app so it didn't use ClickOnce in the end.
vic20forever 8y ago
> This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it, and starts using Chromium too. Watching Mozilla align Firefox's extension API with Chromium's, I'm a little surprised that they haven't already made the move. If browser evolution continues along the current path, I predict Firefox will switch to Chromium within 3 years. > Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME). It's already happening. Until a year or two ago, the only time I ever opened Chrome was when a page using some sort of experimental API ran slowly or not at all on Firefox. Now, the number of mainstream websites I see with serious glitches in Firefox is increasing by the month.
- kakarot 8y ago
  9/10 times when I encounter a bug either when doing web dev or just browsing the web, it's because of Chrome/WebKit improperly implementing standards. It's not Firefox's fault if people aren't testing their websites on both browsers, just like it wasn't Firefox or Chrome's fault whenever people only tested their webpages with Internet Explorer and its mess of exclusive APIs and deviations from standards.
- canacrypto 8y ago
  I use Firefox as my primary browser and I don't find mainstream websites glitchy at all.
  - nwah1 8y ago
    Same. I have found one boutique e-commerce site that wouldn't let me complete a purchase on Firefox, but mainstream sites all work fine.
  - joosteto 8y ago
    When I find a glitchy site in Firefox, I try chromium. Usually turns out it's glitchy there as well.
pjc50 8y ago
> Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts That is Firefox. Shuttering that kills the project. It's like, I don't know, Tumblr deciding to ban porn or something.
- keypusher 8y ago
  I've got some bad news.
  - superflyguy 8y ago
    There's always one.
  - Gruselbauer 8y ago
    I just heard about that and I'm still kind of puzzled. App Store money, yeah, but isn't Tumblr like 10% SJW kids / fandoms and 90% porn? Seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
asituop 8y ago
You seems very certain that Firefox will switch to Chromium but the recent trend is going in the exact opposite direction : - Firefox Focus is switching from Chromium Engine to Gecko Engine. - Huge amount of work in WebRender, they're starting to test it. If it lives up its promise Chromium Engine might fall far behind in terms of performance. So maybe you're right but from what we can tell right now, the current trend for Mozilla is to remove the last pieces of Chromium and bet everything on a new generation engine which is not Chromium.
- headmelted 8y ago
  Cool. I'd love to be dead wrong about this, it's just that history is tempering my optimism. I feel like Debbie Downer from SNL back in the day, so let's hope you're right.
WA 8y ago
Not sure about that, because after all, most users use their smartphones and iOS has quite a big market share. So there's at least Chromium and Webkit. Web devs simply won't get away with testing only in Chrome that easily.
- ThaJay 8y ago
  12% is not a very big market share compared to Android https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-share-held-by-smartphone-operating-systems/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-sha...
sametmax 8y ago
> This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it, and starts using Chromium too. It seems very unlikely: - Mozilla has been in a far worse uderdog position before during the IE6 era, with way more incompatible sites and less funding. - Mozilla is not for profit. Fighting for the open Web is one of their goal. It always has been. They are not perfect, but their track record is damn good compared to almost any player of their size and impact in the tech world. - Mozilla strongly invested in their own tech, including rewritting the browser rendering engine and taking huge risks such as create a bloody hole new language, rust, in the process. To my knowledge, the "oxydation" project has been a success so far, and rust is proving everyday that it's a positive force in the world as well. - Firefox is the only decent mobile browser. I can't navigate the web without the ublock extension. I just can't. - Mozilla keeps innovating. Their last brillant idea, the tab container, is worth switching on it's own. - Mozilla has the hardcore geeks on their side. Even during the V30 to v50 transition period where Firefox was, at the time, clearly an inferior product, we kept using it to support it for the sheer ideal of it. We hoped it would come back from it, and it happened: Firefox is now a fast, lean and fantastic browser again. - Privacy concerns are (FINALLY !) being taken in consideration from the crowd. And Chrome is terrible at this, so moving to a chromium core, while technically not related at all because you can set it up the way you like, would carry the stigma. All in all, I'm incredibly optimistic about Mozilla et Firefox's future despite the market share taking a serious hit.
- gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
  > Mozilla has the hardcore geeks on their side. Even during the V30 to v50 transition period where Firefox was, at the time, clearly an inferior product, we kept using it to support it for the sheer ideal of it. We hoped it would come back from it, and it happened: Firefox is now a fast, lean and fantastic browser again. I use Firefox. I always have. My experience is totally different to yours. Before FF57 it was a single process and it ran nicely on a 4GB machine with a 2009 Intel Atom processor. Afterwards it became much hungrier for memory and processor. I had to buy a new computer. (I tried Chrome of course but it is hungrier.)
  - 8y ago
teddyuk 8y ago
I'd like to see microsoft/mozilla/google collaborate on "THE" browser engine then all this compatibility bs goes away - they can all ship their own cruft and advertising but with a single rendering engine we can forget about multiple browsers forever
- TheForumTroll 8y ago
  So IE 6.2
- Angostura 8y ago
  Apple and Google did that for a while with Webkit powering both Chrome and Safari. A shame they fell out.

btschaegg 8y ago

> It's not just websites that aren't tested in Edge - my experience with Edge is that all aspects of performance (initial load time, ui responsiveness, web site responsiveness) are terribly slow. 100% agree here. I'd be way more worried about monoculture if any other browser would be discontinued, but the MS browser history was and is just a shitshow. <rant> I can't even remember how many years MS and even some people in my vincinity were going on about how amazing the new IE (or later Edge) were and that MS would totally be changing their ways now. Usually, if you used their browser for more than five minutes, that sounded more like a bad joke. To this day, the (properly updated) Edge on my dev machine does user interaction orders of magnitude worse than FF/Chrome. Tabs frequently stop functioning properly and even won't reload anymore, until you find out that some subprocess crashed and you'll have to close and re-open the site to try again. The adoption of new web standards happens at a crawl. Yet, at the same time, their "Edge is totally a next-gen browser! Promise!" rhetoric leads to actual companies prohibiting users from getting and using an actually useful browser like FF. Their dev story sucks, too. The best of their jokes was when someone wanted to convince me on how cool VS2015 was for HTML/Javascript development. Yes, I totally want a 16GB+ IDE that literally can take minutes to load from an SSD and frequently freezes to do nimble HTML editing m( The funny thing is: They actually arguably fixed that one in the mean time (VS Code), but their browser politics remained. Perhaps this signifies the same shift there? </rant> TL;DR: I actually wouldn't mind that much, but MS has been repeatedly overselling and underdelivering for years and just slows down everyone else doing it.

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jodrellblank 8y ago
TL;DR: I actually wouldn't mind that much, but MS has been repeatedly overselling and underdelivering for years and just slows down everyone else doing it. I know what you mean, but that is mildly amusing and not entirely false.
- MeriMark 8y ago
  Yeah, even I have no worries with that. Because Microsoft is selling all their products and losing faith in the market. So no to work that much. Regards, https://run3online.co https://run3online.co

manigandham 8y ago

Safari is leaving itself in the dirt. It's the new IE with slow, quirky, and unreliable features. They made some advancements in privacy, but so did Firefox without giving up on actual rendering and standards.

alliecat 8y ago
I hear this a lot, but I find Safari to be an entirely usable browser day-to-day - the reduction in power usage is very noticeable vs Firefox or Chrome.
- wklauss 8y ago
  More than usable. For the majority of users I'd say it is a better option, not as resource-hungry as Chrome or chromium based browsers.
  - TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
    And, while I'm not a hard-core JS programmer, I've found Safari's dev tools to be just as good as Firefox's or Chrome's.
    - andrethegiant 8y ago
      Same! I prefer Safari dev tools for inspecting the DOM, CSS prototyping, debugging, seeing request/response headers, local storage info. I use it every day, and find its interface much more intuitive and way less bloated. However Chrome devtools are better when it comes to performance profiling, and having extensions like React devtools make me wish that was a capability of Safari.
mr_toad 8y ago
> unreliable standards I presume you mean that Safari doesn’t support experimental standards that Chrome is pushing because they align with Google’s businesses strategy. This is exactly the problem with a browser monoculture. If we’re not lucky Google will be the new Microsoft.

barking 8y ago

Well I'm hoping internet explorer doesn't die, unless the webbrowser control moves on to supporting whatever replaces it.

khacking 8y ago
Why do you hope it doesn't die? The replacement of it with Edge as the default Windows browser sealed its fate anyway, so it could be argued it already has?

prince005 8y ago

I won't really complain if there are just 2 render engines out there in the market, given that both are open source. It will make work hell lot easier for so many developers and the competition and development will stay healthy.

emn13 8y ago
Open source doesn't reduce the issues with people writing to the implementation, not the spec - leading to unintentional interactions and trivia suddenly becoming impossible to change. If edge dies, and FF shrinks further (both of which seem likely), FF will in effect be reduced to an alternative implementation of chrome; not a implementation of a web browser. Both Edge and FF already include chrome-quirk emulating features; you can expect those exceptions to become the norm. Apple - for all it's wealth - isn't likely to bother bucking the trend here. The same forces pushing MS affect Apple too; and given their high-end only marketing and various political factors, they will be completely ignored in much of asia - and that's a lot of devs creating a lot of stuff that is likely to depend on chrome-only features eventually.

pietrovismara 8y ago

It's easy not to be left in the dirt, just keep the same pace of the other vendors in implementing support for new JS features.

simias 8y ago
A modern browser is effectively on par with an Operating System complexity-wise. You need to implement a huge number of APIs (many of which are security-sensitive), you need to have a good UI, you need to be super fast while making all that play together nicely etc... If you don't have a large team of developers and a few millions in the bank you basically don't have a chance. As Google keeps pushing more and more features in the browser the bar keeps getting higher and higher. I'm actually surprised that Mozilla still manages to mostly keep up, but since it's mostly running on Google's money it's still not quite a relief.
- lgl 8y ago
  > A modern browser is effectively on par with an Operating System complexity-wise. I don't think this is even remotely true. Those same arguments (using apis, good security, good ui, speed, etc) could be made for any piece of non-trivial software. But there's no way a browser is "on par" in complexity with an operating system.
  - simias 8y ago
    I maintain that. Actually I think a modern browser is probably more complex than many small kernels. It's probably not the best metric but my checkout of the Linux kernel (a very advanced OS with support for many architectures and devices) is at about 14 million lines of C code (per sloccount), although if you remove device drivers and only count the "core" of the kernel you end up with about 3M lines. I don't have any browser source code available on my computer but a website[1] says that Firefox 20 (released in 2013) was around 4M lines of code and was rising quite fast. Again, this is comparing apples to kernels but it shows that it's still within the same order of magnitude as far as code size is concerned. The maintenance burden alone on these large codebases is huge, you need teams of engineers just dealing with things like testing and regressions. The bar is extremely high for competition, you won't have two clever engineers write the next killer browser in their basement. [1] https://almossawi.com/firefox/ https://almossawi.com/firefox/

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criddell 8y ago

> monoculture _is_ bad From a security point of view, I think that's true. What are other problems? I think everybody using the same rendering engine would be a net positive.

proaralyst 8y ago
It gives the Chromium project massive power over web standards. This happened with IE6 and was a bad time for the web.
- tbranyen 8y ago
  It was a complete and totally different time for the web. I was waiting for folks to claim an open source project with outside contributors is the same as a proprietary company moving fast internally and shipping anything and evetything without following a standards process.
  - JohnBooty 8y ago
    > proprietary company moving fast internally and shipping anything and evetything without following a standards process. Well, that's the thing. What's to stop Google from doing that? It won't be as overt as Microsoft ramming shitty versions of IE down people's throats for a decade, but please rest assured that Google's goal is profit and domination. I'm not saying they are worse than any other for-profit corporation, but they are a for-profit corporation. > It was a complete and totally different time for the web You lack a very basic sense of vision. You understand that the past is different from today, but seem unable to comprehend that the future might be different from today. 20 years ago: Microsoft was doing a pretty good job with the web! IE3/4/5 were consistently better than Netscape. Developers generally welcomed the IE monoculture because developing for both Netscape and IE was a real pain in the ass. 10 years ago: Microsoft had a stranglehold on the web and it suffered greatly, to the point where governments had to intervene (the EU mandating browser choice, etc) Today: Google is doing a pretty good job with the web! 10 years from now: ????????????

me551ah 8y ago

I recently made the switch to Firefox from chrome. Webrender is a revolution in web technology since it primarily uses the GPU for rendering resulting in much faster and smoother websites. I'd urge everyone to give webrender a shot, it feels noticeably smoother than chrome.

sciurus 8y ago
Yes, webrender is fast, but keep in mind that if you're using webrender you will see bugs, even crashes, that you wouldn't otherwise. Use it only if you're willing to accept that in order to help Mozilla test and improve it. Disclosure: I work for Mozilla but not on webrender.

_jp__ 8y ago

Define Monoculture. For me, both Firefox and Chrome are developed under the US law, and in this sense, they are both the same.