17 ms·

State of web browsers in 2018

218 points by petethomas 8y ago

Reinmar 8y ago
Amazing read! Very insightful and open at the same time. I've literally highlighted every other sentence in it. Thank you, Ferdy! I basically went through the same thinking process myself. I'm a moderate idealist and would like Firefox to succeed because it's important for the web that there's no monopoly. However, my realist soul tells me that Firefox is losing badly and it's hard to tell where it's going to end. It's a pity that Microsoft didn't choose Gecko – I wonder if they even seriously considered it. With Microsoft joining Chromium, we're slowly entering a duopoly of WebKit and Chromium. It's still a much better situation than the dark IE6 times. However, it's hard to tell whether WebKit (AFAIU, supported mainly by Apple and Samsung) will keep up with Chromium (Google and Microsoft) in a long term. I'm afraid that it will look like a Cold War's arms race – one of the parties will invest so much that the other will just lose economically (not being able to afford that many developers). Such economical wars make developers happy, because the web progresses very fast, but I think it actually leads to a monopoly. Anyway, I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for Gecko. They do a great job there and perhaps will be able to partner with a big enough company to keep its pace and market share.
- bergie 8y ago
  > I'm afraid that it will look like a Cold War's arms race – one of the parties will invest so much that the other will just lose economically (not being able to afford that many developers). Given all the "Safari is the new IE6" posts that have been here over the past few years, that seems to be already happening. Apple is lagging behind quite a bit with implementing newer web standards, especially in areas where they have anticompetitive interest in doing so (PWAs cannibalising native apps). Of course, they're the only game in town on iOS, so that ensures them some captive market.
  - Reinmar 8y ago
    I'm not sure how long they can keep doing so. At what point it may affect iOS's reception in general? From my own experience, making the app I'm working on (CKEditor 5 - a web based rich-text editor) compatible with mobile Safari is right now impossible. None of the RTEs work well in mobile Safari because of its quirks and bugs. If Apple will overdo this (just like Microsoft did with IE6), that may affect iOS's usefulness. Sure, right now you can't build a business without your presence there, but there may be a breaking point. It's hard to imagine and I kinda doubt it will happen (I rather agree with the author of this article that Apple will invest enough to keep Safari alive), but it's a possibility. Microsoft screwed it up once, so can Apple.
    - wvenable 8y ago
      If you care about iOS, you don't build a web application you build a native one (perhaps using web technologies). This ultimately benefits users and Apple so there is no incentive to improve this.
    - pxtail 8y ago
      Probably they are doing it on purpose, cripling web-based apps/PWA experience forces user to install app from AppStore.
singularity2001 8y ago
There is a different way to interpret this: Firefox is irrelevant on mobile, but not on Desktop. Will mobile kill desktop? No, these are two different markets/use-cases/applications. Just like video didn't kill the radio*. Firefox will stay relevant on desktop a.k.a. in work environments.
- snaky 8y ago
  > Firefox is irrelevant on mobile That's pretty sad, considering the fact it's the only mobile browser not only with the support of extensions, but the same extensions as the desktop version. Future might not be that grim for mobile Firefox actually, with more and more modern Android smartphones and tablets support more and more RAM, and 4GB is pretty much standard.
  - Kye 8y ago
    Mobile Firefox didn't support all extensions last I checked. It at least has uBlock Origin on Android, but almost everything else I looked for wasn't available. Firefox on iOS doesn't support them at all.
    - snaky 8y ago
      I think most of extensions that are not listed as compatible with Android version of Firefox is due the developer's lazyness to test it on Android and check the additional checkbox submitting it to the store. There are some differences in API, but they are minor https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Differences_between_desktop_and_Android https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
  - wvenable 8y ago
    What's cool is if you have Firefox sync, your extensions come over automatically. I use Firefox on my tablet because it has all the extensions I use on my desktop.
- SandwichTeeth 8y ago
  Firefox has some catches that make it not as easy to use in a work environment though and I honestly think will hurt their market share over time, mainly the fact that it doesn't use the OS cert store. This causes issues with most corporate web proxies that do SSL inspection since IT departments will push the proxy CA cert into OS cert stores through whatever endpoint management solution they have. People can disagree all they want about SSL interception in a corporate environment (for good reason), but it's here to stay. When a corporate user downloads Firefox, tries to simply go to Google and gets a cert error page, they're just going to go back to Chrome because the process of exporting your company's CA cert and then importing it into Firefox so you can use the browser is just simply not feasible for most users.
superkuh 8y ago
We're getting to the point where browsers are worthy of the decades old criticism Emacs has received. They have eventually become an OS with many fine features - simply lacking a good web browser. It's a large, sprawling project to make a good OS. Especially when the language of choice to run on it changes with such haste. Hopefully this nth re-imagining of dumb terminals dies off over the next few years and applications go back to the OS where they belong. Otherwise thing are going to get rough.
- LarryDarrell 8y ago
  I feel sad that through so many years of progress we ended up with multicore CPUs, obscene amounts of RAM, graphics cards that can heat a house... all to power one or more web browser engines.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    While running our software in someone's else computer.
  - t0mislav 8y ago
    I bet someone will say now RAM is cheap. :D I agree with you.
- always_good 8y ago
  What about the good qualities that websites have, like the ability to link (and deep link) people to specific parts of it? The re-trending of the local application is a step back in this regard. And "when will this internet fad die off so we can return to native applications" throws a lot of baby out.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  Browsers to me are amazing. I can run untrusted code in my computer from all over the world and at least with Chrome the odds of my machine getting pwned are pretty low. The Chromium team fixes security issues quickly. For that I get this amazing environment where I can see things as incredible as Google Maps 3D, games, music apps, etc all sandboxed incredibly well. The whole thing is far far more secure than running native apps on Windows, MacOS, or Linux, they're arguably far more secure than Android and maybe more secure than iOS. In other words, they aren't just an OS, they're a secure OS. Something most OSes don't give me.
Cynox 8y ago
If it had been introduced today, would PNaCl have been rejected which ultimately lead to a better solution (WASM), or would it have been broadly accepted since it had sufficient market reach though Chrome?
- Vinnl 8y ago
  Ouch, that's an excellent question, and a perfect example of why the state of web browsers is pretty bleak. Likewise, we could wonder what we will see when it comes to AMP.
- jhpriestley 8y ago
  Five years on, asm.js/wasm has been completely rewritten, has almost no adoption from developers, and lacks many of the features from PNaCl ... it may turn out well eventually but I don't think it's a great success story for web standards.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    PNaCl didn't have adoption either, and the entire foundation was flawed. Starting with LLVM may have made it easy to add features quickly, but the only reason to do that would have been to get early adoption at the expense of long-term engineering benefits. That bet failed.
austincheney 8y ago
> At least those browsers are compatible with the web. Websites will work in them because websites are built to work in Chromium. That is a poorly drawn conclusion. Edge is compatible with the web. Developers are solely developing for Chrome and not caring for cross browser testing. As a Firefox user I sometimes encounter this myself.
- acheron 8y ago
  Developers are solely developing for Chrome and not caring for cross browser testing. The true spirit of Internet Explorer lives on!
- fchristant 8y ago
  hi, I'm the author. Agree with your point when you read it like that, so I'll clarify what I meant. "Compatible with the web" in the context of this article means compatible with the web that is primarily built to work on Chromium/Webkit. Because at this point of time, the web is Chromium. You're right that Edge is compatible with web standards, albeit that they are lagging a bit behind in implementing newer standards. By that logic, IE11 is also compatible with web standards.
sstangl 8y ago
As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in the future will increasingly be people who do so consciously, presumably because they view Mozilla as helping them protect their privacy. Chrome is and will continue to be the default. Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power. Either there will eventually be a privacy/creepiness fiasco, or Google will attempt to use Chrome as leverage to squeeze a competitor out of a market. When that happens, Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative. The path forward in this view would look more like Mozilla as a constellation of disaffected companies and users attempting to free themselves from Google. It won't look like Mozilla on the side doing something by itself. We will largely be defined in opposition to Google. The article correctly points out that a wiser Microsoft could have gotten a head-start on this inevitability by partnering with us early.
- zamadatix 8y ago
  I really don't think the general population cares about any of that enough to incite the change you are referring to. People stopped using IE because it was hilariously bad to use compared to Firefox and then Chrome. Until Chrome becomes hilariously worse for an average user to use it'll remain a near monopoly.
- Reinmar 8y ago
  You say that Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative to Google. That sounds realistic and I hope it will be able to team up with bigger companies which would like to compete with Google (instead of helping it). However, that made me think about Brave (https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/). What are your thoughts about it? It's also privacy oriented, but it's actually built on top of Chromium. What is even more interesting, Brave was founded by Brendan Eich (the co-founder of Mozilla).
  - gilrain 8y ago
Domark 8y ago
This blog post was tough to read! Seems to have capped out at a 6th grade level. Re: the topic, the author shows clear bias toward Firefox. It might be better to just acknowledge this: the best browser wins on each platform. Period. Safari is up there because it runs the best/fastest/with least trouble on iPhones and iPads. 20/20 means PERFECT vision. Above that is ‘abnormally good’. In other words, the author has a clearly biased view, tries to figure out the obvious, and doesn’t ‘agree’ with definitions for words. Right!
- fchristant 8y ago
  hi, author here. "This blog post was tough to read! Seems to have capped out at a 6th grade level." I'm not a native speaker, and this is the best I can do. I was expecting less than 6th grade, so thanks! "Re: the topic, the author shows clear bias toward Firefox" Yes, the article literally says I am biased towards Firefox success. You didn't discover a secret plot or anything. "It might be better to just acknowledge this: the best browser wins on each platform." No, the one shipped to user's home screens wins. Even crappy ones. "20/20 means PERFECT vision. Above that is ‘abnormally good’." If it would mean perfect, there would not be a level above it. I do agree the statement isn't as clever as I planned it to be.
aklemm 8y ago
As good a place as any to ask something I've been wondering about: Is a Chromebook a complete computing environment now that WebAssembly is getting adoption?
- sehugg 8y ago
  Depends on your definition of "complete" -- ChromeOS now has Android and Linux container support, so you've got options for command-line apps. Ironically, you have to run Electron apps (based on Chromium) in a Linux VM.
  - aklemm 8y ago
    Interesting, thank you. I could see Electron apps replaced with WebAssembly apps eventually.
lettergram 8y ago
Reading this on FireFox mobile, I think it's the best mobile browser out there (I've tried a lot of different browsers). Sad to see it not gaining market share. That being said, there is a way for it to pick up steam. It would just require a new platform to come a long (probably competing with Google) to use FireFox
- SamWhited 8y ago
  That's been tried so many times I've lost count; none of them ever gain any traction. I'm not really sure why, but at a guess I suspect it comes down to Google being able to outspend and already having deals with every major phone manufacturer and mobile provider.
- kibwen 8y ago
  That was precisely the point of FirefoxOS. Mozilla knew years ago that the browser wars would come to hinge upon platform defaults. If you want to have a dominant browser these days, you also need to ship hardware yourself, and you then need to convince people to use it.
- curlypaul924 8y ago
  I keep trying firefox mobile every few months, and it feels really sluggish on my phone compared to chrome. I really want to like it; firefox has for a decade been my browser of choice on the desktop because of add-on support (which unfortunately got much worse with WebExtensions).
adimitrov 8y ago
Firefox for mobile is an excellent browser, and the only one I use. It supports extensions, such as uBlock without rooting the phone. The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Honestly, I don't know why people aren't using it. I think most people just don't care, and just use what the system provides. As Google gets more invasive and evil, I hope that people will start to care, and Firefox and other browsers start to flourish again.
- PurpleRamen 8y ago
  > The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Ever used chrome or some other browser on android? The droidfox is quite infamous for it's slowness and backward interface.
  - Yizahi 8y ago
    I used Chrome and Samsung one and Firefox. There is no perceptible difference in speed of the browser, only in speed of mobile internet. I switched to FF a year ago as a main mobile browser and it works just fine.
    - StyloBill 8y ago
      > There is no perceptible difference in speed of the browser No difference that maybe you can perceive, but I for one find the scrolling a lot more sluggish on FF than on Chrome, and that's on a SD 845 device, which is the latest and supposedly greatest Qualcomm chip. I just can't use FF on Android, and that's a shame because the desktop version is very good.
      - Spivak 8y ago
        Tumblr was the site that got me to switch away from Firefox on Android to Brave. Firefox scrolling was like watching a slideshow, the animations would happen 5 or so seconds after you tap but Chrome/Brave was as smooth as the native app.
  - 8y ago
MarkOSullivan 8y ago
I'm sad that there's nothing about Brave browser in this
SamWhited 8y ago
Great read, although I thought it wasn't quite cynical enough about the bad things Chrome can do with Blink (is that their rendering engine? Whatever it's called, I forget, but it doesn't really matter) dominance: the article suggested that the way forward is to ensure that the standards process has equal representation, and I agree with that, but once all the other browsers are using your rendering engine you don't have to care about the standards process. Just like IE back in the day, or Netscape before that, you can introduce a blink tag and everyone else has to do it or it gets to be standardized later to be compatible with what you've done. The standards process becomes more or less useless every single time we get into this situation. Google's already doing this to a certain degree, see also SPDY and QUIC, or any of the various Chrome-only CSS things that everyone else adopts. For SPDY/QUIC they're still working within the process, but they basically get to force their baseline without any competition even so. Later they won't even have to pretend to work within the process.
jacobherrington 8y ago
I'm a developer and a Firefox user. I'm always a little sad when I pair with another developer, and they ask why I'm not using Chrome. Mozilla is one of the few tech companies that care about the well-being of its users. In my opinion that is very special.
- azangru 8y ago
  > I'm a developer and a Firefox user. By developer, do you mean web developer? I tried to use Chrome dev tools, and they were incredibly easy to pick up; however whenever I try to use Firefox dev tools, they feel embarrassingly awkward. Perhaps it's just the familiarity with the tools (and if so, I am very curious to hear whether you prefer Firefox dev tools over Chrome's), but have a nagging feeling that it's just an inferior developer tool.
  - vanadium 8y ago
    Both have their pluses and minuses. It was delightful when auditing the experiences from a potential new client in Firefox Dev Tools the other day, and realizing that I could see, inline to the target DOM element, JS events tied to them while looking through the source. Saved me a good amount of time. When I'm looking for pure-play performance auditing, Lighthouse integrated into Chrome's Dev Tools are an obvious win. So yeah, each have their strengths and weaknesses.
    - azangru 8y ago
      > It was delightful when auditing the experiences from a potential new client in Firefox Dev Tools the other day, and realizing that I could see, inline to the target DOM element, JS events tied to them while looking through the source. Saved me a good amount of time. Just tried that, and wow, that's really cool!
    - azangru 8y ago
      Also, finally they made the whole web console into an editable area, like in Chrome dev tools. I used to be so frustrated that you had only one line where to write code.
skybrian 8y ago
Even if some web sites don't care about cross-browser adoption, it seems like the browser vendors do, including people at Chrome who propose new standards? As long as this is the case, the web standards process is still working much as it always has. Apple and Firefox still have a veto.
- zbraniecki 8y ago
  Our power to influence standards is linked to our marketshare. At Mozilla we say that we have a different reason to strive for marketshare than most companies in the world. We need it to have a seat at the table.
- bzbarsky 8y ago
  As far as I can tell, people at Chrome have _very_ strong incentives to propose new standards and ship implementations of them in the browser. Incentives around then responding to feedback on those standards and getting them into a state where anyone else would implement them are much weaker. Incentives to not ship until this process has happened are nonexistent; in fact lack of interest from anyone else is very explicitly never a reason to not ship something for Chrome, as far as I can tell. Disclaimer: I work on Firefox, but read the blink-dev list fairly regularly; the last sentence above is repeated pretty often on that list.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    Hmm, what do you think of Blink's feature launch process? [1] (I'm no expert, but to me it seems impressively bureaucratic.) [1] https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features
    - bzbarsky 8y ago
      I think it's a lot better than not having a process, for sure! The hearts of most of the people involved are in the right place, as far as I can tell, and they do listen to feedback some of the time. That said, they feel that if they think something is a good idea then that means they should do it even if others disagree. Which is understandable, of course.
bad_user 8y ago
From TFA: >> "For developers, it’s one less browser engine to worry about" >> "For the open web: it’s complicated. If I were to put on the hat of a pragmatic developer, I fail to see the big gain in having competing browser engines." The author does not understand web standards and probably doesn't remember IExplorer's monopoly and the era of "works best in IExplorer" websites. And what fewer and fewer people remember is that IExplorer 5 was the best browser of its generation, the Chrome of its days. And actually I fail to see what this article is doing on HN. Surely there must be better rants around.
- majewsky 8y ago
  Downvoted because this is quoted entirely out of context. The author makes it abundantly clear that he is not actually holding this position.
- wvenable 8y ago
  The author says "Microsoft had a browser that sucked (IE6)." This is not true. Microsoft had the best browser -- fastest, most stable, and friendliest for development. They created many of the standards we now take for granted. IE was literally the Chrome of the day -- the best browser installed by default on the biggest operating system.
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    You're both right. At the beginning of it's reign in 2001 IE6 was way better than alternatives. In 2011 IE6 still had a 5% market share and was the bane of every developer's existence.
  - joel_ms 8y ago
    Then they decided to stop improving IE6 (outside security updates) because they (correctly) realized that the web was a threat to the company. IE7 was released 5 years later, literally due to the pressure of other browsers on web standards support. That's when IE 6 sucked, and we all had to live with that suckiness for years on end because of microsofts insane backwards compatibility policies keeping deprecated software alive on life support. Even Microsoft has a IE6 countdown timer now https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/ie6countdown/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/ie6coun... IE6 was an unfathomably damaging disaster for the web.
nix0n 8y ago
Comparing default Chrome vs default FireFox it's easy to think they're similar, and say "Chrome is ok." But FireFox-with-blockers is in a class by itself in terms of speed and usability on both desktop and mobile. Most of the things that work on Chrome but not Firefox end up being blocked and I don't even notice they're gone. The recent change to make tracker blocking default in FireFox gives me hope.
xte 8y ago
IMO the actual state of web browsers is: "there is NO browsers.", we have labeled as browsers awful monsters that are a sort of OS-cancer that try to reduce OS itself as a mere kernel and basic userland needed to run that monster. Actual size of those project is so big that practically no one, their devs included, can know the entire big picture, there are so any day new critical security vulnerabilities and a constant refrain, repeated following the nazi Goebbels principles of "repeat a lie enough and it became reality", that desktop is dead and the sole possible evolution are those monsters and, of course, "the cloud", because "we need integration and the sole really integrated platforms are cloud and mobile" and other classic marketing phrases. Unfortunately, as with physical cancers, he are in the process of succumb. And even worse there are many people happy with that, like few crazy individual happy to have AIDS "so they know that they can get nothing worse STM and they feel free"... Or like south Koreans that pay a "prison hotel" to "free them for daily life"... I think a ~60g rifle cartridge charged with salt and a small forest can be a good playground, only I fear we may run out of salt...
- kiriakasis 8y ago
  Which is part of the reason for Microsoft switch. To bring new life to the desktop via vastly better electron performance. Which can be seen as the best and worst of both world at the same time. For sure we live in interesting times.
mike22223333 8y ago
As a publisher, most of us do not care about Firefox either. They have done us no good. So we don't even bother to test on it. Their so called "Tracking Protection" is nothing more then a gimmick. It can be bypassed easily using methods other then cookies. All it did was reduce the revenue from ads because of no cookies (the legitimate way to track id's). It did an insignificant harm to Google. But it reduced the revenue from Firefox users by a huge percentage for publishers. Firefox is losing because it favors the wrong demographics. Firefox offers nothing much exclusive to users and neither to developers. Most people using ad blockers, use Firefox on mobile. Sad to see it the way it is. Safari did the same. But the market share is still relevant, but it is declining as well. Once it reaches a certain point, no one will bother to test for it either. DNT was a shit show. DNT should have always required manual user intervention to be respected. Google's interests apart from their AMP project aligns with the publishers. If we win, they win.
- GonzaloQuero 8y ago
  So Firefox's Do Not Track is harming the way you track people through advertising? I'd say it's working perfectly, then. Maybe it is your business that is broken.
  - Spivak 8y ago
    Businesses that make their money on ads have no reason to ensure their product works on a segment of the browser market that almost entirely blocks ads.
- acheron 8y ago
  Thanks for the excellent reminder of reasons to not use Google products.
- jnurmine 8y ago
  The tracking protection using DNT and the like is indeed a gimmick. It is an ineffectual and passive way to hinder tracking. Better ways are to be more active: to reject third-party cookies, disallow sites from storing anything, uninstall Flash and such, run AdBlock Plus, run uBlock Origin and so on. I mean, if I visit a random site which is full of non-original content and/or simple regurgitation of press releases, why should I care about its business model and ability to monetize through tracking me? Sorry, show me value from the get-go and I might come back and let you "monetize" through whitelisting or something.
asituop 8y ago
I really don't find this insightful, just repeating what everyone thinks : "people don't care about privacy", "Chrome is successful because it is installed by default", etc. thx captain obvious
tokyodude 8y ago
Personally I see the bigger issue right now as Apple. Apple basically has all their iOS users hostage to WebKit. Maybe we'll get lucky and Apple will lose the current app store case and another store will be able to allow other browser engines on iOS and hopefully that will light a fire under their butts so they start implementing all the missing APIs. As a dev there are so many features missing from iOS WebKit and because iOS has such a huge market share I'm basically forced to design without those features. I don't personally see the issue with one browser engine. It can be skinned differently and different features can be enabled or disabled. More people from more companies can contribute to the same basic engine. Kind of like so many Linux distros contribute to the same basic kernel.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  Again: How do I get Chromium to accept our Rust code, in the world where it's the only browser engine?
miles_matthias 8y ago
Great article. Discussion question - what incentives need to change to make Apple invest more in Safari? They've always been invested in native apps first and foremost, because that's where they make their money - the app stores. The other place they make their money is hardware. And it's hard to say you buy a MacBook or iPhone because of safari. You don't. So I just don't know what it will take for Apple to make significant investments in the web. Whereas Google makes all their money on the web.
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
  I’m not sure that Apple specifically avoids investing in Safari… I think it’s more that their vision of the web differs significantly from Google’s. They still see Safari as a web browser while Google sees Chrome as a platform akin to an operating system. Apple also just prioritizes different things in WebKit than Google does with Blink. Where Apple implements energy saver and privacy protection features, Google implements whizz-bang bells and whistles to keep the attention of front end web developers.
- whizzkid 8y ago
  Priorities change unfortunately. Read this article if you have time. It highlights the importance and passion that was given to safari at a time. I am sure most engineers working on safari are still having great ideas for the product but management will not be on the same page as them. https://donmelton.com/2014/04/10/memories-of-steve/ https://donmelton.com/2014/04/10/memories-of-steve/
- fchristant 8y ago
  hi, author here, and thanks. I have a straightforward answer. Build incredible PWAs that users will miss out on on iOS, because it has partial support at best. You'd still serve 80% of the market. I'll admit its a theoretical answer, as most commercial organization would not risk losing out on iOS users. They're not the biggest group of users, yet some of the most valuable groups of users, commercially speaking.
lostmsu 8y ago
I stopped reading the article after the statement about Edge and FF, that a lot of sites do not work in them. I am yet to see any of those websites outside of google.com. And the author did not name any examples. That made me think the author does not know what he is talking about.
scblock 8y ago
Web developers "building for Chromium" is a travesty. It's every mistake made when IE was dominant, repeated. Just do a find and replace from Microsoft to Google. If you are a web developer, please don't do it, and don't try to convince yourselves that it's OK. It's not OK. It wasn't OK before, it's not OK now, and it won't be OK down the road. I don't care that it's expedient; like your reliance on third party tracking scripts it shows you don't respect me. Microsoft has done us no favors today.
djhworld 8y ago
An on point article and excellent read, but I felt deflated by the end. This is the end of days for the open web I'm afraid, and this article lays out the path travelled and road ahead.
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
The author of this article hand-waves away the speed advantages of one browser engine over another. I'd be inclined to agree, except, am I the only one who has seen a marked speed advantage in Firefox Quantum over other browsers? I'm reminded of how I felt about Chrome in the early days. Everything just seems to load in ever-so-slightly more quickly. I still use Safari on macOS due to Apple's nice touchpad gestures, but on Windows I'm now Firefox all the way. Not just because I like what Firefox represents, but because I find the experience markedly superior.
- fchristant 8y ago
  hi, author checking in. Just doubling down on my statement. I've seen hundreds of discussions and flame wars on browser performance, RAM usage, the ability to keep open 200 tabs. I mean it when I say that I cannot reproduce any of these differences. Perhaps I could if I would actively measure things, but in terms of just experiencing the speed of all major browsers, I really do not see a meaningful difference. It could be device related, but I'm on a 6 year old PC (a pretty sizable one though), not having any issues on my mediocre work laptop either. Doesn't mean it doesn't matter in absolute terms, I'm just saying I don't see it. The more important point though is non-technologist do not tend to pick browsers in such rational ways.
ksec 8y ago
May be I am in the extreme minority. I don't have problems with Safari. ( Judging from the 170 Comments so far and not a single supporter of Safari, I really think I am ) Instead of implementing every single iteration of Web Standard that Google dished out, kill it and rework much like all of their products, Safari decide to pick it up once everything has been stabilise. Instead of trying to turn everything on the Web as Web App and give everything on the computer a Web API, they have been perfecting the Web Pages. ( Which in terms of publishing standard is still far from perfect )
jchook 8y ago
I want to switch to Firefox. The few things preventing me seems small, but have made the transition unfriendly and/or tedious. 1. Chromium "Multiple Users" feature allows me to separate business and personal life very conveniently. Now that I have this feature, I cannot give it up. It seems Firefox has this functionality, but it's difficult to use without additional extensions and "Import from Chrome" doesn't support it. 2. 1Password and other extensions I use on a daily basis have inconvenient drawbacks on Firefox. For example, 1Password dropdown does not show in form fields like it does in Chromium. 3. Firefox UX still feels... meh. The ugly dotted focus ring around any link I click stands as a good example. I don't see any preference to turn it off. Menu navigation... there's no submenu peeking-- you have to click in then click back. The whole browser feels jerky compared to Chrome. It's easier and more pleasant for me to ignore Chrome's lack of privacy and forget about Firefox. I think Mozilla should give some serious thought and focus on making it incredibly easy and smooth to switch to Firefox.
jaredcwhite 8y ago
This article's assessment of Safari is way off. It's an excellent browser, and my default browser as a web designer and application developer. The interface is night and day superior to Chrome, it's very very fast on macOS and iOS, and it's often been at the forefront of design-related improvements to the web. The one area it's historically been behind on (progressive web apps) is the reason it gets knocked by people who care primarily about progressive web apps. Personally I'm more interested in the web primarily as a visual interface communications medium, and so in that sense, I'm actually against a number of decisions Google has made in its development of Chromium over the past few years (because Google has also prioritized PWA over other use cases for the web). Anyway, if you don't care for Safari, that's your jam, but to state objectively that Safari is mediocre and Chrome is much better is simply unjustifiable and reveals the bias of the author.
- lazzlazzlazz 8y ago
  I haven't seen a single sober argument in favor of Safari. Even now, before writing this comment, I did a small side-by-side comparison and I can't find a single place Safari really stands out as better. I'm not saying you're wrong - opinions about usability have some subjectivity - but the opinion that Safari is an `excellent` browser are a small minority.
  - thirdsun 8y ago
    > I haven't seen a single sober argument in favor of Safari. Even now, before writing this comment, I did a small side-by-side comparison and I can't find a single place Safari really stands out as better. I'm not a Safari user, but for owners of Apple laptops battery life should be a big one. It's my impression that Safari is significantly more efficient when it comes to energy consumption.
fiatjaf 8y ago
I don't understand why people don't use Firefox for Android. It's easily the best mobile browser: allows addons (like uBlock Origin) and connects with the desktop browser (share tabs etc).

218 points by petethomas 8y ago

Amazing read! Very insightful and open at the same time. I've literally highlighted every other sentence in it. Thank you, Ferdy! I basically went through the same thinking process myself. I'm a moderate idealist and would like Firefox to succeed because it's important for the web that there's no monopoly. However, my realist soul tells me that Firefox is losing badly and it's hard to tell where it's going to end. It's a pity that Microsoft didn't choose Gecko – I wonder if they even seriously considered it. With Microsoft joining Chromium, we're slowly entering a duopoly of WebKit and Chromium. It's still a much better situation than the dark IE6 times. However, it's hard to tell whether WebKit (AFAIU, supported mainly by Apple and Samsung) will keep up with Chromium (Google and Microsoft) in a long term. I'm afraid that it will look like a Cold War's arms race – one of the parties will invest so much that the other will just lose economically (not being able to afford that many developers). Such economical wars make developers happy, because the web progresses very fast, but I think it actually leads to a monopoly. Anyway, I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for Gecko. They do a great job there and perhaps will be able to partner with a big enough company to keep its pace and market share.

bergie 8y ago
> I'm afraid that it will look like a Cold War's arms race – one of the parties will invest so much that the other will just lose economically (not being able to afford that many developers). Given all the "Safari is the new IE6" posts that have been here over the past few years, that seems to be already happening. Apple is lagging behind quite a bit with implementing newer web standards, especially in areas where they have anticompetitive interest in doing so (PWAs cannibalising native apps). Of course, they're the only game in town on iOS, so that ensures them some captive market.
- Reinmar 8y ago
  I'm not sure how long they can keep doing so. At what point it may affect iOS's reception in general? From my own experience, making the app I'm working on (CKEditor 5 - a web based rich-text editor) compatible with mobile Safari is right now impossible. None of the RTEs work well in mobile Safari because of its quirks and bugs. If Apple will overdo this (just like Microsoft did with IE6), that may affect iOS's usefulness. Sure, right now you can't build a business without your presence there, but there may be a breaking point. It's hard to imagine and I kinda doubt it will happen (I rather agree with the author of this article that Apple will invest enough to keep Safari alive), but it's a possibility. Microsoft screwed it up once, so can Apple.
  - wvenable 8y ago
    If you care about iOS, you don't build a web application you build a native one (perhaps using web technologies). This ultimately benefits users and Apple so there is no incentive to improve this.
  - pxtail 8y ago
    Probably they are doing it on purpose, cripling web-based apps/PWA experience forces user to install app from AppStore.

singularity2001 8y ago

There is a different way to interpret this: Firefox is irrelevant on mobile, but not on Desktop. Will mobile kill desktop? No, these are two different markets/use-cases/applications. Just like video didn't kill the radio*. Firefox will stay relevant on desktop a.k.a. in work environments.

snaky 8y ago
> Firefox is irrelevant on mobile That's pretty sad, considering the fact it's the only mobile browser not only with the support of extensions, but the same extensions as the desktop version. Future might not be that grim for mobile Firefox actually, with more and more modern Android smartphones and tablets support more and more RAM, and 4GB is pretty much standard.
- Kye 8y ago
  Mobile Firefox didn't support all extensions last I checked. It at least has uBlock Origin on Android, but almost everything else I looked for wasn't available. Firefox on iOS doesn't support them at all.
  - snaky 8y ago
    I think most of extensions that are not listed as compatible with Android version of Firefox is due the developer's lazyness to test it on Android and check the additional checkbox submitting it to the store. There are some differences in API, but they are minor https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Differences_between_desktop_and_Android https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
- wvenable 8y ago
  What's cool is if you have Firefox sync, your extensions come over automatically. I use Firefox on my tablet because it has all the extensions I use on my desktop.
SandwichTeeth 8y ago
Firefox has some catches that make it not as easy to use in a work environment though and I honestly think will hurt their market share over time, mainly the fact that it doesn't use the OS cert store. This causes issues with most corporate web proxies that do SSL inspection since IT departments will push the proxy CA cert into OS cert stores through whatever endpoint management solution they have. People can disagree all they want about SSL interception in a corporate environment (for good reason), but it's here to stay. When a corporate user downloads Firefox, tries to simply go to Google and gets a cert error page, they're just going to go back to Chrome because the process of exporting your company's CA cert and then importing it into Firefox so you can use the browser is just simply not feasible for most users.

superkuh 8y ago

We're getting to the point where browsers are worthy of the decades old criticism Emacs has received. They have eventually become an OS with many fine features - simply lacking a good web browser. It's a large, sprawling project to make a good OS. Especially when the language of choice to run on it changes with such haste. Hopefully this nth re-imagining of dumb terminals dies off over the next few years and applications go back to the OS where they belong. Otherwise thing are going to get rough.

LarryDarrell 8y ago
I feel sad that through so many years of progress we ended up with multicore CPUs, obscene amounts of RAM, graphics cards that can heat a house... all to power one or more web browser engines.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  While running our software in someone's else computer.
- t0mislav 8y ago
  I bet someone will say now RAM is cheap. :D I agree with you.
always_good 8y ago
What about the good qualities that websites have, like the ability to link (and deep link) people to specific parts of it? The re-trending of the local application is a step back in this regard. And "when will this internet fad die off so we can return to native applications" throws a lot of baby out.
tokyodude 8y ago
Browsers to me are amazing. I can run untrusted code in my computer from all over the world and at least with Chrome the odds of my machine getting pwned are pretty low. The Chromium team fixes security issues quickly. For that I get this amazing environment where I can see things as incredible as Google Maps 3D, games, music apps, etc all sandboxed incredibly well. The whole thing is far far more secure than running native apps on Windows, MacOS, or Linux, they're arguably far more secure than Android and maybe more secure than iOS. In other words, they aren't just an OS, they're a secure OS. Something most OSes don't give me.

Cynox 8y ago

If it had been introduced today, would PNaCl have been rejected which ultimately lead to a better solution (WASM), or would it have been broadly accepted since it had sufficient market reach though Chrome?

Vinnl 8y ago
Ouch, that's an excellent question, and a perfect example of why the state of web browsers is pretty bleak. Likewise, we could wonder what we will see when it comes to AMP.
jhpriestley 8y ago
Five years on, asm.js/wasm has been completely rewritten, has almost no adoption from developers, and lacks many of the features from PNaCl ... it may turn out well eventually but I don't think it's a great success story for web standards.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  PNaCl didn't have adoption either, and the entire foundation was flawed. Starting with LLVM may have made it easy to add features quickly, but the only reason to do that would have been to get early adoption at the expense of long-term engineering benefits. That bet failed.

austincheney 8y ago

> At least those browsers are compatible with the web. Websites will work in them because websites are built to work in Chromium. That is a poorly drawn conclusion. Edge is compatible with the web. Developers are solely developing for Chrome and not caring for cross browser testing. As a Firefox user I sometimes encounter this myself.

acheron 8y ago
Developers are solely developing for Chrome and not caring for cross browser testing. The true spirit of Internet Explorer lives on!
fchristant 8y ago
hi, I'm the author. Agree with your point when you read it like that, so I'll clarify what I meant. "Compatible with the web" in the context of this article means compatible with the web that is primarily built to work on Chromium/Webkit. Because at this point of time, the web is Chromium. You're right that Edge is compatible with web standards, albeit that they are lagging a bit behind in implementing newer standards. By that logic, IE11 is also compatible with web standards.

sstangl 8y ago

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in the future will increasingly be people who do so consciously, presumably because they view Mozilla as helping them protect their privacy. Chrome is and will continue to be the default. Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power. Either there will eventually be a privacy/creepiness fiasco, or Google will attempt to use Chrome as leverage to squeeze a competitor out of a market. When that happens, Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative. The path forward in this view would look more like Mozilla as a constellation of disaffected companies and users attempting to free themselves from Google. It won't look like Mozilla on the side doing something by itself. We will largely be defined in opposition to Google. The article correctly points out that a wiser Microsoft could have gotten a head-start on this inevitability by partnering with us early.

zamadatix 8y ago
I really don't think the general population cares about any of that enough to incite the change you are referring to. People stopped using IE because it was hilariously bad to use compared to Firefox and then Chrome. Until Chrome becomes hilariously worse for an average user to use it'll remain a near monopoly.
Reinmar 8y ago
You say that Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative to Google. That sounds realistic and I hope it will be able to team up with bigger companies which would like to compete with Google (instead of helping it). However, that made me think about Brave (https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/). What are your thoughts about it? It's also privacy oriented, but it's actually built on top of Chromium. What is even more interesting, Brave was founded by Brendan Eich (the co-founder of Mozilla).
- gilrain 8y ago

Domark 8y ago

This blog post was tough to read! Seems to have capped out at a 6th grade level. Re: the topic, the author shows clear bias toward Firefox. It might be better to just acknowledge this: the best browser wins on each platform. Period. Safari is up there because it runs the best/fastest/with least trouble on iPhones and iPads. 20/20 means PERFECT vision. Above that is ‘abnormally good’. In other words, the author has a clearly biased view, tries to figure out the obvious, and doesn’t ‘agree’ with definitions for words. Right!

fchristant 8y ago
hi, author here. "This blog post was tough to read! Seems to have capped out at a 6th grade level." I'm not a native speaker, and this is the best I can do. I was expecting less than 6th grade, so thanks! "Re: the topic, the author shows clear bias toward Firefox" Yes, the article literally says I am biased towards Firefox success. You didn't discover a secret plot or anything. "It might be better to just acknowledge this: the best browser wins on each platform." No, the one shipped to user's home screens wins. Even crappy ones. "20/20 means PERFECT vision. Above that is ‘abnormally good’." If it would mean perfect, there would not be a level above it. I do agree the statement isn't as clever as I planned it to be.

aklemm 8y ago

As good a place as any to ask something I've been wondering about: Is a Chromebook a complete computing environment now that WebAssembly is getting adoption?

sehugg 8y ago
Depends on your definition of "complete" -- ChromeOS now has Android and Linux container support, so you've got options for command-line apps. Ironically, you have to run Electron apps (based on Chromium) in a Linux VM.
- aklemm 8y ago
  Interesting, thank you. I could see Electron apps replaced with WebAssembly apps eventually.

lettergram 8y ago

Reading this on FireFox mobile, I think it's the best mobile browser out there (I've tried a lot of different browsers). Sad to see it not gaining market share. That being said, there is a way for it to pick up steam. It would just require a new platform to come a long (probably competing with Google) to use FireFox

SamWhited 8y ago
That's been tried so many times I've lost count; none of them ever gain any traction. I'm not really sure why, but at a guess I suspect it comes down to Google being able to outspend and already having deals with every major phone manufacturer and mobile provider.
kibwen 8y ago
That was precisely the point of FirefoxOS. Mozilla knew years ago that the browser wars would come to hinge upon platform defaults. If you want to have a dominant browser these days, you also need to ship hardware yourself, and you then need to convince people to use it.
curlypaul924 8y ago
I keep trying firefox mobile every few months, and it feels really sluggish on my phone compared to chrome. I really want to like it; firefox has for a decade been my browser of choice on the desktop because of add-on support (which unfortunately got much worse with WebExtensions).

adimitrov 8y ago

Firefox for mobile is an excellent browser, and the only one I use. It supports extensions, such as uBlock without rooting the phone. The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Honestly, I don't know why people aren't using it. I think most people just don't care, and just use what the system provides. As Google gets more invasive and evil, I hope that people will start to care, and Firefox and other browsers start to flourish again.

PurpleRamen 8y ago
> The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Ever used chrome or some other browser on android? The droidfox is quite infamous for it's slowness and backward interface.
- Yizahi 8y ago
  I used Chrome and Samsung one and Firefox. There is no perceptible difference in speed of the browser, only in speed of mobile internet. I switched to FF a year ago as a main mobile browser and it works just fine.
  - StyloBill 8y ago
    > There is no perceptible difference in speed of the browser No difference that maybe you can perceive, but I for one find the scrolling a lot more sluggish on FF than on Chrome, and that's on a SD 845 device, which is the latest and supposedly greatest Qualcomm chip. I just can't use FF on Android, and that's a shame because the desktop version is very good.
    - Spivak 8y ago
      Tumblr was the site that got me to switch away from Firefox on Android to Brave. Firefox scrolling was like watching a slideshow, the animations would happen 5 or so seconds after you tap but Chrome/Brave was as smooth as the native app.
- 8y ago

MarkOSullivan 8y ago

I'm sad that there's nothing about Brave browser in this

SamWhited 8y ago

Great read, although I thought it wasn't quite cynical enough about the bad things Chrome can do with Blink (is that their rendering engine? Whatever it's called, I forget, but it doesn't really matter) dominance: the article suggested that the way forward is to ensure that the standards process has equal representation, and I agree with that, but once all the other browsers are using your rendering engine you don't have to care about the standards process. Just like IE back in the day, or Netscape before that, you can introduce a blink tag and everyone else has to do it or it gets to be standardized later to be compatible with what you've done. The standards process becomes more or less useless every single time we get into this situation. Google's already doing this to a certain degree, see also SPDY and QUIC, or any of the various Chrome-only CSS things that everyone else adopts. For SPDY/QUIC they're still working within the process, but they basically get to force their baseline without any competition even so. Later they won't even have to pretend to work within the process.

jacobherrington 8y ago

I'm a developer and a Firefox user. I'm always a little sad when I pair with another developer, and they ask why I'm not using Chrome. Mozilla is one of the few tech companies that care about the well-being of its users. In my opinion that is very special.

azangru 8y ago
> I'm a developer and a Firefox user. By developer, do you mean web developer? I tried to use Chrome dev tools, and they were incredibly easy to pick up; however whenever I try to use Firefox dev tools, they feel embarrassingly awkward. Perhaps it's just the familiarity with the tools (and if so, I am very curious to hear whether you prefer Firefox dev tools over Chrome's), but have a nagging feeling that it's just an inferior developer tool.
- vanadium 8y ago
  Both have their pluses and minuses. It was delightful when auditing the experiences from a potential new client in Firefox Dev Tools the other day, and realizing that I could see, inline to the target DOM element, JS events tied to them while looking through the source. Saved me a good amount of time. When I'm looking for pure-play performance auditing, Lighthouse integrated into Chrome's Dev Tools are an obvious win. So yeah, each have their strengths and weaknesses.
  - azangru 8y ago
    > It was delightful when auditing the experiences from a potential new client in Firefox Dev Tools the other day, and realizing that I could see, inline to the target DOM element, JS events tied to them while looking through the source. Saved me a good amount of time. Just tried that, and wow, that's really cool!
  - azangru 8y ago
    Also, finally they made the whole web console into an editable area, like in Chrome dev tools. I used to be so frustrated that you had only one line where to write code.

skybrian 8y ago

Even if some web sites don't care about cross-browser adoption, it seems like the browser vendors do, including people at Chrome who propose new standards? As long as this is the case, the web standards process is still working much as it always has. Apple and Firefox still have a veto.

zbraniecki 8y ago
Our power to influence standards is linked to our marketshare. At Mozilla we say that we have a different reason to strive for marketshare than most companies in the world. We need it to have a seat at the table.
bzbarsky 8y ago
As far as I can tell, people at Chrome have _very_ strong incentives to propose new standards and ship implementations of them in the browser. Incentives around then responding to feedback on those standards and getting them into a state where anyone else would implement them are much weaker. Incentives to not ship until this process has happened are nonexistent; in fact lack of interest from anyone else is very explicitly never a reason to not ship something for Chrome, as far as I can tell. Disclaimer: I work on Firefox, but read the blink-dev list fairly regularly; the last sentence above is repeated pretty often on that list.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Hmm, what do you think of Blink's feature launch process? [1] (I'm no expert, but to me it seems impressively bureaucratic.) [1] https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features
  - bzbarsky 8y ago
    I think it's a lot better than not having a process, for sure! The hearts of most of the people involved are in the right place, as far as I can tell, and they do listen to feedback some of the time. That said, they feel that if they think something is a good idea then that means they should do it even if others disagree. Which is understandable, of course.

bad_user 8y ago

From TFA: >> "For developers, it’s one less browser engine to worry about" >> "For the open web: it’s complicated. If I were to put on the hat of a pragmatic developer, I fail to see the big gain in having competing browser engines." The author does not understand web standards and probably doesn't remember IExplorer's monopoly and the era of "works best in IExplorer" websites. And what fewer and fewer people remember is that IExplorer 5 was the best browser of its generation, the Chrome of its days. And actually I fail to see what this article is doing on HN. Surely there must be better rants around.

majewsky 8y ago
Downvoted because this is quoted entirely out of context. The author makes it abundantly clear that he is not actually holding this position.
wvenable 8y ago
The author says "Microsoft had a browser that sucked (IE6)." This is not true. Microsoft had the best browser -- fastest, most stable, and friendliest for development. They created many of the standards we now take for granted. IE was literally the Chrome of the day -- the best browser installed by default on the biggest operating system.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  You're both right. At the beginning of it's reign in 2001 IE6 was way better than alternatives. In 2011 IE6 still had a 5% market share and was the bane of every developer's existence.
- joel_ms 8y ago
  Then they decided to stop improving IE6 (outside security updates) because they (correctly) realized that the web was a threat to the company. IE7 was released 5 years later, literally due to the pressure of other browsers on web standards support. That's when IE 6 sucked, and we all had to live with that suckiness for years on end because of microsofts insane backwards compatibility policies keeping deprecated software alive on life support. Even Microsoft has a IE6 countdown timer now https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/ie6countdown/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/ie6coun... IE6 was an unfathomably damaging disaster for the web.

nix0n 8y ago

Comparing default Chrome vs default FireFox it's easy to think they're similar, and say "Chrome is ok." But FireFox-with-blockers is in a class by itself in terms of speed and usability on both desktop and mobile. Most of the things that work on Chrome but not Firefox end up being blocked and I don't even notice they're gone. The recent change to make tracker blocking default in FireFox gives me hope.

xte 8y ago

IMO the actual state of web browsers is: "there is NO browsers.", we have labeled as browsers awful monsters that are a sort of OS-cancer that try to reduce OS itself as a mere kernel and basic userland needed to run that monster. Actual size of those project is so big that practically no one, their devs included, can know the entire big picture, there are so any day new critical security vulnerabilities and a constant refrain, repeated following the nazi Goebbels principles of "repeat a lie enough and it became reality", that desktop is dead and the sole possible evolution are those monsters and, of course, "the cloud", because "we need integration and the sole really integrated platforms are cloud and mobile" and other classic marketing phrases. Unfortunately, as with physical cancers, he are in the process of succumb. And even worse there are many people happy with that, like few crazy individual happy to have AIDS "so they know that they can get nothing worse STM and they feel free"... Or like south Koreans that pay a "prison hotel" to "free them for daily life"... I think a ~60g rifle cartridge charged with salt and a small forest can be a good playground, only I fear we may run out of salt...

kiriakasis 8y ago
Which is part of the reason for Microsoft switch. To bring new life to the desktop via vastly better electron performance. Which can be seen as the best and worst of both world at the same time. For sure we live in interesting times.

mike22223333 8y ago

As a publisher, most of us do not care about Firefox either. They have done us no good. So we don't even bother to test on it. Their so called "Tracking Protection" is nothing more then a gimmick. It can be bypassed easily using methods other then cookies. All it did was reduce the revenue from ads because of no cookies (the legitimate way to track id's). It did an insignificant harm to Google. But it reduced the revenue from Firefox users by a huge percentage for publishers. Firefox is losing because it favors the wrong demographics. Firefox offers nothing much exclusive to users and neither to developers. Most people using ad blockers, use Firefox on mobile. Sad to see it the way it is. Safari did the same. But the market share is still relevant, but it is declining as well. Once it reaches a certain point, no one will bother to test for it either. DNT was a shit show. DNT should have always required manual user intervention to be respected. Google's interests apart from their AMP project aligns with the publishers. If we win, they win.

GonzaloQuero 8y ago
So Firefox's Do Not Track is harming the way you track people through advertising? I'd say it's working perfectly, then. Maybe it is your business that is broken.
- Spivak 8y ago
  Businesses that make their money on ads have no reason to ensure their product works on a segment of the browser market that almost entirely blocks ads.
acheron 8y ago
Thanks for the excellent reminder of reasons to not use Google products.
jnurmine 8y ago
The tracking protection using DNT and the like is indeed a gimmick. It is an ineffectual and passive way to hinder tracking. Better ways are to be more active: to reject third-party cookies, disallow sites from storing anything, uninstall Flash and such, run AdBlock Plus, run uBlock Origin and so on. I mean, if I visit a random site which is full of non-original content and/or simple regurgitation of press releases, why should I care about its business model and ability to monetize through tracking me? Sorry, show me value from the get-go and I might come back and let you "monetize" through whitelisting or something.

asituop 8y ago

I really don't find this insightful, just repeating what everyone thinks : "people don't care about privacy", "Chrome is successful because it is installed by default", etc. thx captain obvious

tokyodude 8y ago

Personally I see the bigger issue right now as Apple. Apple basically has all their iOS users hostage to WebKit. Maybe we'll get lucky and Apple will lose the current app store case and another store will be able to allow other browser engines on iOS and hopefully that will light a fire under their butts so they start implementing all the missing APIs. As a dev there are so many features missing from iOS WebKit and because iOS has such a huge market share I'm basically forced to design without those features. I don't personally see the issue with one browser engine. It can be skinned differently and different features can be enabled or disabled. More people from more companies can contribute to the same basic engine. Kind of like so many Linux distros contribute to the same basic kernel.

pcwalton 8y ago
Again: How do I get Chromium to accept our Rust code, in the world where it's the only browser engine?

miles_matthias 8y ago

Great article. Discussion question - what incentives need to change to make Apple invest more in Safari? They've always been invested in native apps first and foremost, because that's where they make their money - the app stores. The other place they make their money is hardware. And it's hard to say you buy a MacBook or iPhone because of safari. You don't. So I just don't know what it will take for Apple to make significant investments in the web. Whereas Google makes all their money on the web.

kitsunesoba 8y ago
I’m not sure that Apple specifically avoids investing in Safari… I think it’s more that their vision of the web differs significantly from Google’s. They still see Safari as a web browser while Google sees Chrome as a platform akin to an operating system. Apple also just prioritizes different things in WebKit than Google does with Blink. Where Apple implements energy saver and privacy protection features, Google implements whizz-bang bells and whistles to keep the attention of front end web developers.
whizzkid 8y ago
Priorities change unfortunately. Read this article if you have time. It highlights the importance and passion that was given to safari at a time. I am sure most engineers working on safari are still having great ideas for the product but management will not be on the same page as them. https://donmelton.com/2014/04/10/memories-of-steve/ https://donmelton.com/2014/04/10/memories-of-steve/
fchristant 8y ago
hi, author here, and thanks. I have a straightforward answer. Build incredible PWAs that users will miss out on on iOS, because it has partial support at best. You'd still serve 80% of the market. I'll admit its a theoretical answer, as most commercial organization would not risk losing out on iOS users. They're not the biggest group of users, yet some of the most valuable groups of users, commercially speaking.

lostmsu 8y ago

I stopped reading the article after the statement about Edge and FF, that a lot of sites do not work in them. I am yet to see any of those websites outside of google.com. And the author did not name any examples. That made me think the author does not know what he is talking about.

scblock 8y ago

Web developers "building for Chromium" is a travesty. It's every mistake made when IE was dominant, repeated. Just do a find and replace from Microsoft to Google. If you are a web developer, please don't do it, and don't try to convince yourselves that it's OK. It's not OK. It wasn't OK before, it's not OK now, and it won't be OK down the road. I don't care that it's expedient; like your reliance on third party tracking scripts it shows you don't respect me. Microsoft has done us no favors today.

djhworld 8y ago

An on point article and excellent read, but I felt deflated by the end. This is the end of days for the open web I'm afraid, and this article lays out the path travelled and road ahead.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago

The author of this article hand-waves away the speed advantages of one browser engine over another. I'd be inclined to agree, except, am I the only one who has seen a marked speed advantage in Firefox Quantum over other browsers? I'm reminded of how I felt about Chrome in the early days. Everything just seems to load in ever-so-slightly more quickly. I still use Safari on macOS due to Apple's nice touchpad gestures, but on Windows I'm now Firefox all the way. Not just because I like what Firefox represents, but because I find the experience markedly superior.

fchristant 8y ago
hi, author checking in. Just doubling down on my statement. I've seen hundreds of discussions and flame wars on browser performance, RAM usage, the ability to keep open 200 tabs. I mean it when I say that I cannot reproduce any of these differences. Perhaps I could if I would actively measure things, but in terms of just experiencing the speed of all major browsers, I really do not see a meaningful difference. It could be device related, but I'm on a 6 year old PC (a pretty sizable one though), not having any issues on my mediocre work laptop either. Doesn't mean it doesn't matter in absolute terms, I'm just saying I don't see it. The more important point though is non-technologist do not tend to pick browsers in such rational ways.

ksec 8y ago

May be I am in the extreme minority. I don't have problems with Safari. ( Judging from the 170 Comments so far and not a single supporter of Safari, I really think I am ) Instead of implementing every single iteration of Web Standard that Google dished out, kill it and rework much like all of their products, Safari decide to pick it up once everything has been stabilise. Instead of trying to turn everything on the Web as Web App and give everything on the computer a Web API, they have been perfecting the Web Pages. ( Which in terms of publishing standard is still far from perfect )

jchook 8y ago

I want to switch to Firefox. The few things preventing me seems small, but have made the transition unfriendly and/or tedious. 1. Chromium "Multiple Users" feature allows me to separate business and personal life very conveniently. Now that I have this feature, I cannot give it up. It seems Firefox has this functionality, but it's difficult to use without additional extensions and "Import from Chrome" doesn't support it. 2. 1Password and other extensions I use on a daily basis have inconvenient drawbacks on Firefox. For example, 1Password dropdown does not show in form fields like it does in Chromium. 3. Firefox UX still feels... meh. The ugly dotted focus ring around any link I click stands as a good example. I don't see any preference to turn it off. Menu navigation... there's no submenu peeking-- you have to click in then click back. The whole browser feels jerky compared to Chrome. It's easier and more pleasant for me to ignore Chrome's lack of privacy and forget about Firefox. I think Mozilla should give some serious thought and focus on making it incredibly easy and smooth to switch to Firefox.

jaredcwhite 8y ago

This article's assessment of Safari is way off. It's an excellent browser, and my default browser as a web designer and application developer. The interface is night and day superior to Chrome, it's very very fast on macOS and iOS, and it's often been at the forefront of design-related improvements to the web. The one area it's historically been behind on (progressive web apps) is the reason it gets knocked by people who care primarily about progressive web apps. Personally I'm more interested in the web primarily as a visual interface communications medium, and so in that sense, I'm actually against a number of decisions Google has made in its development of Chromium over the past few years (because Google has also prioritized PWA over other use cases for the web). Anyway, if you don't care for Safari, that's your jam, but to state objectively that Safari is mediocre and Chrome is much better is simply unjustifiable and reveals the bias of the author.

lazzlazzlazz 8y ago
I haven't seen a single sober argument in favor of Safari. Even now, before writing this comment, I did a small side-by-side comparison and I can't find a single place Safari really stands out as better. I'm not saying you're wrong - opinions about usability have some subjectivity - but the opinion that Safari is an `excellent` browser are a small minority.
- thirdsun 8y ago
  > I haven't seen a single sober argument in favor of Safari. Even now, before writing this comment, I did a small side-by-side comparison and I can't find a single place Safari really stands out as better. I'm not a Safari user, but for owners of Apple laptops battery life should be a big one. It's my impression that Safari is significantly more efficient when it comes to energy consumption.

fiatjaf 8y ago

I don't understand why people don't use Firefox for Android. It's easily the best mobile browser: allows addons (like uBlock Origin) and connects with the desktop browser (share tabs etc).