4 ms·

This isn't newsworthy at all; it's just a guy expressing his personal opinion and he happens to be employed at Microsoft. My opinion: No, of course we shouldn'

This isn't newsworthy at all; it's just a guy expressing his personal opinion and he happens to be employed at Microsoft. My opinion: No, of course we shouldn't have only one browser base to work with. Even more opinion: Chrome's extensions are consistently worse than FF's (can you even get a decent vim extension like we had with vimperator and does it even have tab groups + tab containers?) and FF quantum seems faster to me than any Chrome I've run.

wayneftw 8y ago
It's certainly discussion worthy though and I think discussion is more often the point here on HN than the actual "news" articles. In my opinion, the web standards have moved way too slowly and that is directly the fault of Mozilla, who won't let us have things like WebSQL due to their ridiculous insistence on having 2 independent implementations (as if we don't already have that for SQL and, as if there has to be 2 implementations of oxygen for air to be breathable...) I don't trust Mozilla to do the right thing here or ever anyway. They're allegedly a group that fights for merit, freedom and openness but they consistently work against those things by rejecting the best ideas and by selling their users out to marketers. Honestly, I trust them less than Google or Microsoft and since I don't like anything about Firefox anyway, I simply ignore it and build all my apps to target Chrome. And that's the same thing that a lot of people are doing, which is why web devs keep using things like WebSQL in their projects.
- Yoric 8y ago
  > In my opinion, the web standards have moved way too slowly and that is directly the fault of Mozilla, who won't let us have things like WebSQL due to their ridiculous insistence on having 2 independent implementations (as if we don't already have that for SQL and, as if there has to be 2 implementations of oxygen for air to be breathable...) That's an interesting view on the problem. If you recall, WebSQL not only didn't have two independent implementations, but it also didn't have specs (if you want to check, you can read the proposal here https://dev.w3.org/html5/webdatabase/ https://dev.w3.org/html5/webdatabase/ and realize that it's missing all the important stuff such as what queries do). WebSQL was a nice hack/proof of concept by the Google team, but it was formulated in such a way that pretty much guaranteed that you would eventually lose data and/or that your programs would break. That's the reason for which specs are needed, rather than just an implementation. Having two independent implementations is the only way known to humanity to ensure that the specs are useful. > I don't trust Mozilla to do the right thing here or ever anyway. They're allegedly a group that fights for merit, freedom and openness but they consistently work against those things by rejecting the best ideas and by selling their users out to marketers. Honestly, I trust them less than Google or Microsoft That's a shame. I don't think that anybody claims that Mozilla has always made the right choices – starting with Mozilla itself. However, Mozilla has consistently attempted to fight for the users of the internet. I don't remember the word "merit" ever being mentioned, though. While Google (and recently Microsoft) have better PR teams (and lots of money to pay for them), their track record is not even close to being as good as Mozilla's. > and since I don't like anything about Firefox anyway, I simply ignore it and build all my apps to target Chrome. This is certainly your right. But this is also a way to ensure that Google can make all decisions for the web, without having to go through standards. You may have already witnessed APIs that work only for Google properties. I may be wrong, but I suspect that it's only going to get worse.
gralx 8y ago
> can you even get a decent vim extension like we had with vimperator Just FYI, Qutebrowser[1] is a wonderful Vim-like chromium browser inspired by vimperator, VimFX, and the like. It is not extensible, unfortunately, and the web's worst websites will break its functionality. But it has Adblock built-in, and running in Firejail[2] it's about as secure as a browser can be. [1] https://qutebrowser.org https://qutebrowser.org [2] https://firejail.wordpress.com/ https://firejail.wordpress.com/
- 59nadir 8y ago
  I used to use qutebrowser, actually, because I (obviously) found the vim integration to be best in breed. I still had to use both Chrome and Firefox to fill the gaps, though, and for working on our own pages. Currently I use Tridactyl for FF, which is decent. There are some annoyances and it seems to me to have some performance issues (using it on BitBucket's pages seems to be particularly bad sometimes...?) but it's good enough and certainly better than I've had in Chrome. On top of that, my qutebrowser usage had to be complemented because of the other extensions like tab containers and tab groups. I use tab containers for when I want to sandbox certain tabs into their own little bubbles which is particularly useful for work (logging in on two completely separate sessions alongside eachother, for example).

wayneftw 8y ago

It's certainly discussion worthy though and I think discussion is more often the point here on HN than the actual "news" articles. In my opinion, the web standards have moved way too slowly and that is directly the fault of Mozilla, who won't let us have things like WebSQL due to their ridiculous insistence on having 2 independent implementations (as if we don't already have that for SQL and, as if there has to be 2 implementations of oxygen for air to be breathable...) I don't trust Mozilla to do the right thing here or ever anyway. They're allegedly a group that fights for merit, freedom and openness but they consistently work against those things by rejecting the best ideas and by selling their users out to marketers. Honestly, I trust them less than Google or Microsoft and since I don't like anything about Firefox anyway, I simply ignore it and build all my apps to target Chrome. And that's the same thing that a lot of people are doing, which is why web devs keep using things like WebSQL in their projects.

Yoric 8y ago
> In my opinion, the web standards have moved way too slowly and that is directly the fault of Mozilla, who won't let us have things like WebSQL due to their ridiculous insistence on having 2 independent implementations (as if we don't already have that for SQL and, as if there has to be 2 implementations of oxygen for air to be breathable...) That's an interesting view on the problem. If you recall, WebSQL not only didn't have two independent implementations, but it also didn't have specs (if you want to check, you can read the proposal here https://dev.w3.org/html5/webdatabase/ https://dev.w3.org/html5/webdatabase/ and realize that it's missing all the important stuff such as what queries do). WebSQL was a nice hack/proof of concept by the Google team, but it was formulated in such a way that pretty much guaranteed that you would eventually lose data and/or that your programs would break. That's the reason for which specs are needed, rather than just an implementation. Having two independent implementations is the only way known to humanity to ensure that the specs are useful. > I don't trust Mozilla to do the right thing here or ever anyway. They're allegedly a group that fights for merit, freedom and openness but they consistently work against those things by rejecting the best ideas and by selling their users out to marketers. Honestly, I trust them less than Google or Microsoft That's a shame. I don't think that anybody claims that Mozilla has always made the right choices – starting with Mozilla itself. However, Mozilla has consistently attempted to fight for the users of the internet. I don't remember the word "merit" ever being mentioned, though. While Google (and recently Microsoft) have better PR teams (and lots of money to pay for them), their track record is not even close to being as good as Mozilla's. > and since I don't like anything about Firefox anyway, I simply ignore it and build all my apps to target Chrome. This is certainly your right. But this is also a way to ensure that Google can make all decisions for the web, without having to go through standards. You may have already witnessed APIs that work only for Google properties. I may be wrong, but I suspect that it's only going to get worse.

gralx 8y ago

> can you even get a decent vim extension like we had with vimperator Just FYI, Qutebrowser[1] is a wonderful Vim-like chromium browser inspired by vimperator, VimFX, and the like. It is not extensible, unfortunately, and the web's worst websites will break its functionality. But it has Adblock built-in, and running in Firejail[2] it's about as secure as a browser can be. [1] https://qutebrowser.org https://qutebrowser.org [2] https://firejail.wordpress.com/ https://firejail.wordpress.com/

59nadir 8y ago
I used to use qutebrowser, actually, because I (obviously) found the vim integration to be best in breed. I still had to use both Chrome and Firefox to fill the gaps, though, and for working on our own pages. Currently I use Tridactyl for FF, which is decent. There are some annoyances and it seems to me to have some performance issues (using it on BitBucket's pages seems to be particularly bad sometimes...?) but it's good enough and certainly better than I've had in Chrome. On top of that, my qutebrowser usage had to be complemented because of the other extensions like tab containers and tab groups. I use tab containers for when I want to sandbox certain tabs into their own little bubbles which is particularly useful for work (logging in on two completely separate sessions alongside eachother, for example).