28 ms·

We Need Chrome No More

• mixedCase 8y ago
  Weird flex suggesting Vivaldi, given that it's proprietary and there are other open source Chromium forks.
  • jccalhoun 8y ago
    They do mention Opera and Brave in a footnote.
  • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    He specifically states it's not ideal. And the question of other Chromium forks to me, is how well are they maintained and are they actively investigated for security vulnerabilities? Ideally, of course, you should not use Chromium-based browsers at all. Unfortunately this also now rules out Edge, but thankfully, Firefox is now a great browser again.
  • iosonofuturista 8y ago
    Could you recommend some? From a quick search all I could find were things like Opera, Torch, Epic etc, which do not seem to be open source. I must I am quite happy with Vivaldi at the moment, but a true open source browser would make me even happier. I did try to use Firefox Developer Edition for a while, but despite being a step in the right direction, I must say I prefer the chromium developer tools.
    • mixedCase 8y ago
      I'm using the Brave developer channel on one of my machines. It's working well. Like Chromium, but without the creepier Google parts that had still managed to get their way in. I also like their theme a little better. Dark, and a little more compact.
      • gnicholas 8y ago
        I’ve been doing the same. I noticed that their public release is now also chromium based, so I was going to switch over to that. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to port browsing history, etc from Brave dev, only from prior versions of Brave, or other browsers.
  • josefresco 8y ago
    It's most likely because the people behind Vivaldi are the same people who created Opera.
• MentallyRetired 8y ago
  Vivaldi and Firefox user, here. Nothing more to say, just wanted to lend my support. What do you all use?
• umvi 8y ago
  > developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. That's me. Sorry, but I just can't be bothered to support every browser's quirks. I check Firefox every once in a while, but really, I don't mind losing a few users if it means significantly less maintenance and testing for me. It's like complaining that developers are increasingly shunning other OSes - if it works on Windows, it's ready to ship. Yet people do this all the time for video games and most Linux users understand that making a game that runs equally well on Windows and Linux and Mac is no simple task.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • bantunes 8y ago
    And this is why Chrome will win, become complacent, and a new browser will dethrone it like it did IE. Meanwhile, Firefox will continue to hover around the 10% mark or so.
    • bobajeff 8y ago
      Don't see Google pausing Chrome's development for 4 years like Internet Explorer.
      • lucb1e 8y ago
        I honestly don't remember what the last time was Chrome introduced some cool new feature in Chrome. Maybe the PDF reader?
        • pjmlp 8y ago
          PWA, WebComponents, File Access, Worklets and Houdini and everything else in HTML5/CSS3 still missing from ChromeOS are all being pushed by Chrome.
          • 8y ago
• mapgrep 8y ago
  I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Luckily, Firefox, arguably among the most "free from corporate greed" of the browsers, has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed (in my experience), and is rapidly adding privacy and content blocking features and defaults that Chrome lacks. If it were still behind Chrome technically, as it was in 2008, it probably wouldn't matter that Mozilla is more trustworthy than Google.
  • Passthepeas 8y ago
    In my experience I can't stream video on firefox without the video freezing within the first 5 minutes, and it feels clunky even with non video webpages. I really hate google the company, and I'd love to stop using their software, but so far I have yet to see a browser that even comes close to chrome.
    • neogodless 8y ago
      What OS, hardware and video platform(s)? I haven't had any issues with Desktop Firefox on Windows 10 on any of my Core i7 machines, when watching YouTube/Vimeo. Even my old dual-core budget Inspiron 3137 laptop works for YouTube and Firefox as well as Pandora/Firefox/bluetooth audio blasting. (It does like to consume RAM as if it was running SQL Server though.)
      • tzakrajs 8y ago
        Also having a good time with Firefox on macOS running on an early 2018 MacBook Pro. It has fully replaced my Chrome use at work.
        • AsyncAwait 8y ago
          Same here on Arch Linux for me.
• ressetera 8y ago
  It left a sour taste in my mouth that Microsoft joined Chrome instead of investing in FireFox and helping them advance their multi-process architecture quicker.
  • ams6110 8y ago
    Microsoft is in the ad business now.
    • cestith 8y ago
      Microsoft is largely in the PaaS business. Amazon is, too. It helps these companies to grow usage of outsourced hosting for third-party applications, much of which are web-based applications. They're often web-based not just at the user interface level but at the API and data handling levels. Web standards are actually good for business when you're charging all comers for processor hours at your data center.
  • no_wizard 8y ago
    I wish someone from Mozilla or MS would comment on this, to be honest. Were they even considered? Historically, I've heard from various sources that Mozilla may not work at the same pace as some of the large corporations do in upstreaming patches and releases to the code base. This has (according to what I have heard, which may simply rest on rumor/speculation/heresey, mind you) kept a lot of large entities from getting on board. I've also heard that in building Quantum this is less of an issue, but their code base is a mess, and chromium's is incredibly well documented and clean by comparison. Anecdotally, I would be inclined to agree with my second statement up front, after just browsing the two, but please compare for yourself https://github.com/chromium/chromium https://github.com/chromium/chromium https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev
    • snek 8y ago
      microsoft switched to chromium because they want better control/integration with electron apps and the windows store. firefox wasn't on the table for them.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• turdnagel 8y ago
  OP - the footnotes seem to be reversed.
• perfunctory 8y ago
  > Ten years ago, we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free from corporate greed How? It never stops puzzling me why anyone thoght Chrome would be any different. Somehow less corporate.
  • perfunctory 8y ago
    > The company’s focus gradually shifted towards transforming their browser dominance into business growth It hasn’t shifted. It’s always been there.
  • umvi 8y ago
    > How? It never stops puzzling me why anyone thoght Chrome would be any different. It is different! Microsoft never released even a single line of IE. Chromium on the other hand is completely open source, and we have that to thank for all the fun things that came of it from VSCode, to Brave browser, to Puppeteer. Things are WAY better now than in the dark IE days.
  • kowdermeister 8y ago
    How? It was open source from start. Yes, Firefox as well, but it had Google as a brand behind it which put lots of trust in it because of the engineering talent they have.
  • Merad 8y ago
    Google's motto used to be "don't be evil," and there was a time when people honestly believed they meant it. Hell, I think there was a time when Google did honestly mean it.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    It puzzles me how anyone can believe Firefox will be different, especially with examples to the contrary already existing.
• rrggrr 8y ago
  Extensions. I am now locked into Chrome because several services I use require Chrome extensions that aren't available elsewhere. The idea that Chrome can be unseated, or isn't needed, is unrealistic for the many users who rely on Chrome-exclusive extensions.
  • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I would be curious how many of those extensions aren't an extreme compromise of your security. (Most extensions are.) You should be using as few extensions as humanly possible, and looking to remove extensions whenever you can. (I currently use one, the EFF's Privacy Badger, though Firefox's new Tracking Protection makes it somewhat redundant, and I may not keep it forever.)
  • sridca 8y ago
    Not to mention users who enjoy using ChromeOS and do not share the privacy alarmist feeings of HN. Go ahead and downvote this.
  • rjf72 8y ago
    Brave, as but one example, natively supports Chrome extensions. [1] It also has a slew of really awesome features now including single click TOR windows, native anti-fingerprinting / anti-tracking, native ad-blocking, native anti-script support, etc. [1] - https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017909112-How-can-I-add-extensions-to-Brave- https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017909112-How...
  • earenndil 8y ago
    Firefox implements chrome's webextensions api, so it should be possible to run those extensions. Try chrome store foxified https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...
    • maple3142 8y ago
      Firefox's webextensions api is a totally different thing from chrome's ones. Some of its api are either missing or work differently.
• NotANaN 8y ago
  There is an important difference between Google and Microsoft. Google is using their market dominance to push their opinions on the open standards bodies; Microsoft used their market dominance to ignore standards bodies completely.
  • TicklishTiger 8y ago
    Googles browser offers functionality to Googles websites that it does not offer to any other website. When you log into an Google owned site, it interacts with the browser so that you are 'logged into your browser' with that Google account. That is not pushing standards into a direction. That is blatant exploitation of ther market position.
    • fastball 8y ago
      You're already logged into sites you're already logged into. I'm not exactly sure how advantageous you think this is.
      • Technetium_Hat 8y ago
        Yeah, all that really happens is that it shows your profile picture, and autofills passwords, when it detects the google login cookie. Nothing that other browsers couldn't implement themselves.
        • jessaustin 8y ago
          For what sites would other browsers do this? Would those browsers be paid by those sites?
  • ori_b 8y ago
    The standards are unimplementably complex. Open but inaccessible is not useful for fostering competitors.
• wespiser_2018 8y ago
  Where we are now, it's not hard to look at Chrome in a negative light, for all the reasons the article states. However, I still remember where I was when I first saw the Chrome "speed test" ad, and thought "wow, this is what a browser should be! https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/film/google_chrome_speed_tests https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/film/google_chrome_speed...
• dak1 8y ago
  Other browsers need to catch up to Chrome with their development tools. I'd be happy to use Safari or Firefox for development, but... - I can't disable CORS in Firefox (yes, sometimes you have to disable CORS rather than modify the Allow-Origin header response, for example if you need to test against a production backend) (and, no, CORS Everywhere is not a sufficient solution). - I can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome. - Safari does not allow self-signed certs over WSS (and there's no way to override it). - Safari does not respect System-wide APC Config for Proxies. There's a handful of other issues. Both Safari and Firefox do do things well, and often better than Chrome. For example, Firefox tends to actually handle standards correctly, whereas Chrome tries to be overly forgiving. And Safari's Develop and Debug menus are easily the best and quickest way to disable CORS or JavaScript, and examine service workers. Unfortunately, some of the above issues are blockers. I can test with Firefox on staging or in production, but not being able to test up front during development really impacts compatibility testing. If another browser was as good or better for development, I'd be happy to use it.
  • fredsted 8y ago
    >- I can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome. For what it's worth, WebSockets show up as type 'Other' in the inspector, and the frames are listed under 'Preview'. Edit: Safari.
    • echeese 8y ago
      In which browser?
    • ken 8y ago
      It just says "WebSocket Connection Established", and then a list of "Binary Frame". Is there a way to inspect their contents? Just seeing that frames are being sent doesn't seem very useful for debugging.
      • eridius 8y ago
        I just tested Safari 12.0.3 on macOS 10.14.3 with https://websocket.org/echo.html https://websocket.org/echo.html and it works for me. In the inspector it has a Sockets folder with the socket, and when I select it, it shows the textual content of each frame. Edit: This is of course textual frames. I don't know where to find a site that demonstrates binary frames. I do notice that if I right-click the textual frame it has "Log Frame Text" as an option; maybe with a binary frame you can ask it to log the binary frame contents? Edit 2: Ok I found a binary websocket test and unfortunately there is no option to log the binary info. That sucks. I recommend filing a bug report at bugreport.apple.com requesting better tooling around this. It's also worth checking the Safari Technical Preview to see if they've already added any better tooling.
• remir 8y ago
  Do we know why Google grew dissatisfied with Apple and forked Webkit?
  • mda 8y ago
    Generally, it was slowing each team down to implement new features.
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    I believe Google felt that WebKit was too bloated for their taste. When they forked they ripped out quite a bit of code they did not need.
  • ams6110 8y ago
    Do we know why Google grew dissatisfied with sites serving their own content and developed AMP?
    • fastball 8y ago
      Because sites serving their own content were generally slower, and slower load times means fewer ad clicks. Google making the web faster is a mutually beneficial arrangement.
  • no_wizard 8y ago
    From what I understand, it had to do with how fast Apple was upstreaming their changes/patches, a big part of which would require Apple to accept the modifications to Webkit core. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/google-going-its-own-way-forking-webkit-rendering-engine/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/googl...
  • sangnoir 8y ago
    Yes - it project complexity was becoming unmanageable due to difference in multiprocessing architectures[1] of WebKit and Chromium. 1. https://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for-chromium.html https://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for...
  • 8y ago
• Shank 8y ago
  I find posts like this kind of interesting. Chrome gained prominence because it had great performance improvements over the competition -- IE and Firefox. IE in particular was dog slow at all times, and Chrome ran everything at least as well and almost always better. Firefox didn't have process isolation when Chrome came onto the scene, and that kind of knocked it for security and stability. It's not as if people switched just because it had Google branding. Everyone switched because it was quantifiably better. From benchmarks to design, Chrome was a winner, and has enjoyed its success. Now, Chrome is doing things that could be seen as "IE-like." Manifest v3 -- even with relaxed changes towards ad blocking -- will not necessarily enable uBlock Origin to continue exactly as it does today. The forced user system is another move in the direction of anti-consumer behavior. I've tried to switch back to the competition. I'm using Firefox right now. Pages render faster and compact mode is great. But Handoff myseteriously doesn't work on my Mac when it does with Chrome (added in Firefox 65). I had to enable U2F support with an about:config flag. I had to turn off the spell checker to fight mysterious input latency in average textboxes. I'm reluctantly staying because I ultimately like what I see, but there's an undeniable truth somewhere in here. It's really hard for Firefox to match Chrome simply based on resources. Google can drop millions of dollars on a browser -- and few other companies can afford to do that. Certainly not Mozilla.
  • TremendousJudge 8y ago
    >It's not as if people switched just because it had Google branding. Everyone switched because it was quantifiably better. The knowledgeable minority, maybe. _Most_ people switched because Google pushed it like a piece of adware. Bundling it with other software installers, prompting you to use it whenever you use Google search or other products, and bundling it with an OS.
    • ng12 8y ago
      If that was the deciding factor we'd still be using IE.
      • ionised 8y ago
• andrewla 8y ago
  Here's hoping. The proliferation of browser standards has made this appear a more daunting task as time has gone by. There was a point where if you built a good DOM, javascript engine, and a layout engine and had a reasonable ability to fetch resources, you could bootstrap a browser. That's how Konquerer got there. But now, I think we're past that point -- if your browser can't do native video conferencing and opengl and music apis and SVG animations and canvas support it might as well be a steaming turd. I'd love to see someone try; to build a browser with third-party cookies excluded by design rather than policy (so that all off-domain fetches come from a blank "incognito" context), to build a React-style shadow DOM as the primary DOM and have the W3C DOM implemented as a polyfill, with client certificates integrated more naturally, completely killing the notion of allowing windows to open programmatically (I mean, how can pop-ups still be a problem? Any sane site is now using on-page popups if they need the UX), and some sort of model for integrating new web APIs and content handlers. But combining all of that with a smooth and well-polished UI that works on multiple platforms is rapidly becoming something that only a large software corporation can pull off, and even there, mostly pull off badly. For now, I think Chrome is here to stay.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    I have a better idea: build a new browser for a new web that is designed with decades of hindsight and isn't as bogged down in all the stupid legacy crap that the current web is. Then port Chromium to it as a portal to the legacy web.
    • cpeterso 8y ago
      The most popular browsers in China take a similar approach: they're hybrids of Chromium and Microsoft's Trident engine for legacy pages that require NPAPI plugins. Many ecommerce and banking websites in China require proprietary NPAPI plugins so these hybrid browsers seamlessly switch to Trident for those websites.
    • scrollaway 8y ago
      That's cute and wishful but the world is built on legacy crap. And it'll remain that way until economic forces dictate otherwise.
• redsavagefiero 8y ago
  Never liked Chrome, but I liked Google as an idea once upon a time.
• jklinger410 8y ago
  Let me know when Firefox stops being an insane resource hog and I will switch.
  • kabwj 8y ago
    Now you’ll receive dozens of responses of people saying that Firefox is much faster and leaner than Chrome for them. But that’s not the case for me or anybody I know. Chrome continues being faster for me.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • rootusrootus 8y ago
      It performs okay (except for a few versions a while back when the helper processes would periodically lock up in kernel mode and it would take a reboot to fix), but 980MB of memory to have one tab open to Hacker News is definitely not lean.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • LinuxBender 8y ago
    One thing I found is that Firefox doesn't do gc/cc that often on it's own. I keep a tab open to "about:memory" and click on "gc / cc / reduce mem" ever so often and it keep the memory usage between 800MB and 1.2 GB with several tabs open (jira, slack, HN, misc other sites)
• misterman0 8y ago
  More like we need Google no more. You always find the smartest bunch in these threads. Proof: not a single downvoted comment so far. But with all your smarts why aren't you building search engines? Is it because you think that with superior tech we can't beat Google? I think it will come down to precisely that. Don't you see how easy it would be for someone who specializes in search to beat an opponent who specializes in ads? Edit: I should clarify. What I meant was, start specializing in search, or we're all dead. Dead meat. By the hands of the Android.
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    > with all your smarts why aren't you building search engines It's a hard problem, especially if you factor in keeping your servers running.
    • misterman0 8y ago
      But there are people though who love when you give them that problem. There are businesses out there that specialize in keeping those servers running. Do you all of a sudden have loads of traffic? Wow, you must really be popular. If you are not popular, some will host your servers for free until you are. You know. Because there is money in traffic. So if you generate it, they'll sell it. On the market.
  • mattnewport 8y ago
    I'm using DuckDuckGo and don't miss Google for search. It's mostly a solved problem for me at this point. Google Maps is harder to replace but there are workable though generally not as good alternatives. YouTube is the hardest Google property to escape for me.
    • maple3142 8y ago
      I found that DuckDuckGo is still not competent enough for non-English users. The quality of its result in non-English language still worse than Google's ones.
• lxe 8y ago
  > Ten years ago, we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free from corporate greed Firefox already did this. We needed Chrome because Firefox lagged behind in performance and was a memory hog.
  • rootusrootus 8y ago
    So we all switched to Chrome, which makes the memory hog blush.
  • closetohome 8y ago
    Oh right, that's why I switched to Chrome. At the time Firefox had that horrid memory leak that would consume gigs of RAM if you left a tab open long enough.
• dccoolgai 8y ago
  Other than AMP, I can't really think of a case that I would characterize as "Google abusing its position" w.r.t. Open Web. It was Chrome that led the push for PWAs, which I think is both great for the Open Web and consumers... The author complains about other vendors being "called laggards", which - let's be honest - we're really talking about how long Apple/Safari dragged their feet on Service Workers... and they _should_ be called out for that because it was an incredibly cynical thing to do to protect their walled App garden from the Open Web.
  • lern_too_spel 8y ago
    It's laughable that the author suggests Apple as a viable alternative. Apple, the last company pushing license encumbered formats into web standards. Apple, the perennial laggard on standards support in general.
    • guitarbill 8y ago
      I agreed to your comment before you edited it, simply because on a price point, Apple stuff isn't viable for laptops and desktops for many people. I don't agree with your weird rant, without any sources. Apple has shown with Safari that some people do like privacy features baked in, and while I can't say for sure, I hope it played a part in emboldening Firefox/Mozilla to focus a bit more on privacy.
      • lern_too_spel 8y ago
        > I don't agree with your weird rant, without any sources. We are in a thread about browsers and web standards. Do I really need to explain that Apple pushed h.264 on the web, ultimately forcing a binary blob on Firefox? The lagging on web standards is a common complaint among web developers.
        • millstone 8y ago
          Apple's Intelligent Tracking Protection is another common complaint among web developers.
• aeturnum 8y ago
  As others have said here, I think the article mischaracterizes why stakeholders were enthusiastic about Chrome back in the day. It was a technically compelling browser which joined Firefox in pushing web standards in a way that Microsoft (and Apple) wouldn't. I think the dominance of Webkit is concerning, but I don't think we can reuse the justifications of ten years ago to say why. Chrome continues to be technically strong (though perhaps not as much) and continues to push web standards (though perhaps too many supporting Google). The situation just isn't as bad today as it was. There is a lot less friction in the everyday experience of developers and users who want to use cutting-edge web standards. Monoculture is bad, but it's hard to get people excited about challenging it when the monocultural product isn't awful.
• fixermark 8y ago
  > If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship A great step Firefox could take in this space is improving the transparency and performance auditing of its own engine. Debugging rendering performance issues between browsers is still an absolute nightmare. If Firefox can provide a better developer experience than Chrome, it might increase the likelihood that web developers would use FF as their first-choice development platform for simplicity and utility of tools. If it doesn't, it may still decrease the odds that when faced with a nasty performance bug, developers will throw up their hands and say "Chrome does it right; I guess FF still just sucks for performance in this corner case." FF has been making impressive strides in this space, but their toolchain still feels clunky and slow relative to Chrome Developer Tools.
  • guitarbill 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure this is a commentary on the laziness of devs/why browser dominance is bad for standards, when taken in context: > The dominance of Chrome has a major detrimental effect on the Web as an open platform: developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. When you're following decently established standards (not bleeding edge), it's usually Chrome that breaks now, not Firefox or Safari. Chrome truly is the new IE.
    • fixermark 8y ago
      I haven't personally encountered this phenomenon. Can you give an example of an established standard that breaks on Chrome but FF / Safari handle?
      • guitarbill 8y ago
        Indeed I can, although one anecdote does not data make. The latest was using SVG sprites as background in CSS I think. Maybe I can throw up a demo during my lunch break, but honestly it isn't that exciting. It just doesn't work correctly in Chrome, the sprite is cropped/has a weird rendering artifact.
• kowdermeister 8y ago
  I don't particularly like the manifesto style of this post. The author attempts a hard sell by first admitting that the world needed Chrome and then after it succeeded he suggests throwing it to the depths after the wish came true. > Chrome is effectively everywhere you look. And that’s bad news. Why? It's the dream you wanted 10 years ago, but it comes with Google now. Ooops for you if you dislike Google, but the vast majority of people doesn't care. Use Safari, Firefox or anything, but calling out ditching Chrome is for the greater good is ridiculous. H mentions 60% as a dominant position which is not how I would describe it in my dictionary.
  • MivLives 8y ago
    Realistically, would we have cared if IE was everywhere if it wasn't garbage in supporting web standards? I'm not arguing for a lack of competition. It's just that someone needs to be on top of the heap. Might as well be a company that's invested in having their pages load fast rather than an OS maker with no incentive to improve their browser. I wish Google would go back to funding Mozilla like they used to. At one point they were 90% of Mozilla's revenue.
    • kowdermeister 8y ago
      > Realistically, would we have cared if IE was everywhere if it wasn't garbage in supporting web standards? No, I would have been perfectly happy if IE was a developer friendly, standards compliant browser, but they created a huge opportunity by ignoring this. I remember when I was super excited for a little floating JavaScript debug tool that you had to include in HTML and you could inspect variables without alerting them. I was amazed by it :) > I wish Google would go back to funding Mozilla like they used to. I think that's still the case: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-mozilla-more-money-to-push-privacy/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-m...
  • isostatic 8y ago
    > It's the dream you wanted 10 years ago 10 years ago we didn't want a browser monopoly We're worryingly close to having that now.
• carlosdp 8y ago
  > An ecosystem that doesn’t seem concerned with performance, user experience, privacy, or pushing computing forward. What? Chrome was more performant that any browser at the time it was released and it's still pretty good. It also became the gold standard for browser UX so much so that all other browsers copied a lot of it. Chrome also brought with it multi-process tabs and the V8 Javascript engine, how is that not "pushing computing forward"?
• marcrosoft 8y ago
  I agree with the author's sentiment but Chrome/chromium is just so much better than the alternatives. I've tried to switch to Firefox many times and always came back. They seem to be doing something right.
• johnmarcus 8y ago
  yeah....Apple, thats the solution to ending corporate ownership of the web. :smacks head:
• shoulderfake 8y ago
  Whenever Firefox comes out with a new version I try to use it for a week and realize it just doesn't perform as well as Chrome. Theres always one or two sites like twitch where it just LAGS to death whereas in Chrome its smooth as butter. At this point I just go back to it. Sigh...
  • ionised 8y ago
    Are you using mostly Google pages or services? That might explain why Firefox runs worse. Anecdotally, of the three browsers I have on my dev machine Chrome is the biggest resource hog.
    • rhlsthrm 8y ago
      Resource hog != lag. The reason Chrome doesn't lag is probably due to the fact that it uses so much RAM. I personally use Safari because of the OS integration but for some sites I do have to fire up Chrome just for performance.
• TheRealPomax 8y ago
  The problem with these articles is that the recommendation always ends up just preaching to the choir: people who already switched away from Chrome nod in appreciation, but people who haven't switched literally get nothing out of these posts to convince them to switch to what is basically the same application made by a different company, with completely different conventions on where everything is, without any concrete perceived benefits (security and tracking are invisible problems, you don't sell someone on switching by saying they won't have them anymore, no matter how important you think that is). And to boot, the switch would almost certainly make things worse because add-ons people relied on won't work and now you've burdened them with having to find new and unfamiliar alternatives to what they were comfortable with. Chrome's main problem isn't that it's overstayed its welcome and is strangling the web (whatever you want that to mean), it's that it's so pervasive that people have become accustomed to it to such a degree that you're now faced with needing to convince people to give up what they're accustomed to. And that's a _much_ harder sell. Using chrome needs to literally be a grating or even damaging experience before someone will voluntarily switch to a different browser.
  • obtaniumstool 8y ago
    Agreed. Aside from some vague intimations that Google is using Chrome as a business tool, it really didn't present much of an argument to switch to something else. Furthermore I'd argue that if the author hasn't used Chrome since 2014, he's not well positioned to comment on its usability today.
    • AsyncAwait 8y ago
      > Agreed. Aside from some vague intimations that Google is using Chrome as a business tool Not sure about 'vague', they're using non-standard APIs to advantage their browser accross Google products, implemented a forced Chrome login and are planning to remove ad blocking APIs, the last one being the most clear case of Chrome being used to support their primary source of revenue.
  • samirm 8y ago
    >"with completely different conventions on where everything is" ...what?
• orliesaurus 8y ago
  I have one bigger complaint: It blows my mind that web browsers take GBs of ram to run. I mean, c'mon, it's 2019 how can we not address that? It's probably the biggest concern I hear from everyone that uses Chrome and knows how to read their task/app manager
  • 9dev 8y ago
    Leaving aside everything else, how is that even relevant? Even cheap laptops have 8gigs of ram these days, most have 16. Considering the browser is becoming the de-facto single application used at all for most people, what else would they need their ram for?
    • orliesaurus 8y ago
      If you use machines in schools usually you end up having older laptops or netbooks. That's why matters IMHO. Definitely not for the person who is a dev and has fully decked out macbooks or thinkpads...
  • quickthrower2 8y ago
    It's probably the web page causing that. I am sure a single chrome window with https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com inside it won't use GBs.
• ignoramous 8y ago
  It isn't about developer tools anymore than it is about privacy or the open-web. Sadly, just like with IE6, Chrome is the default pre-installed browser in most used handheld OS. Plus, it is in-your-face-advertised on the front page of world's most popular website, in case you don't happen to have it installed on a Mac or a PC. There's very little individuals can do to reverse the trend, short of websites and OEMs coming together to start reversing Chrome's stranglehold in an unified campaign (which doesn't seem likely). The fall of IE6 was due to innovation from Mozilla and Google putting it's weight behind Firefox... What could Safari/Firefox do now? Get all or several of Microsoft/Facebook/Amazon/Apple on-board? Investment from these companies is the only way I see out, frankly, if history is any indicator (OpenStreetMap vs GMaps). That said, tech needs to keep improving and so Firefox Quantum was a great first step in the right direction, imo.
• jonotime 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, what Google Apps work better in Chrome? I use plenty of Google services entirely in Firefox and have never had problems. I only fire up chrome when using Chromecast.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• meh206 8y ago
  Chrome is nothing more to me than a launchpad for (google) ads and a vehicle for surveillance.
• jarjoura 8y ago
  This is such a fairytale retelling of history. Firefox was well on the way to crushing IE. It was the whole reason Microsoft re-kick started IE development again. Firefox was the dominant browser in 2008. Safari was the browser pushing ahead on performance and being lightweight except in JavaScript. So Google took WebKit and added their own JS engine to it so that Gmail and their office suite could compete with Microsoft's offerings. It worked and all browsers started an arms race for JS performance.
  • bobajeff 8y ago
    Firefox was never the dominant browser. Neither was it on its way to crushing IE. You my friend are recalling a fairytale.
    • pier25 8y ago
      Indeed: http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-200901-201902 http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-20090...
      • rovolo 8y ago
        From that source, it looks like the story depends on the region though (for desktop). In order of decreasing use of firefox: * Europe: Firefox overtook IE in 2011 with ~40% * Africa: Firefox overtook IE in 2012 with ~40%. It looks like Firefox had the best chance of "crushing it" here. * South America: Firefox overtook IE in 2015 with 12%. Peak was 32% in 2010 * Asia: Firefox overtook IE in 2016 with ~12%. Peak was 28% in 2011 * Oceana: Firefox overtook IE in 2017 with 12%. Peak was 32% in 2010 * North America: Firefox peaked at 30% in 2009 and was half as common as IE until 2015-2016. It still hasn't overtaken IE
        • pier25 8y ago
          Yeah but in most cases that happened during the rise of Chrome which could suggest that Firefox didn't really overtake IE, but IE lost users to Chrome and Firefox happened to lose less users. Another point to reinforce this argument is that in many of those regions Firefox peaked around 2010 and started losing users too.
• dade_ 8y ago
  Chrome is the new IE all over again. Remember that it was IE that saved us from Netscape's slow performance and advancements of new web technologies. Jump ahead 20 years, low an behold Google Earth - Chrome only!
• robbrown451 8y ago
  I'd be thrilled to use another browser if they worked. In my case, the feature that is missing from every other browser is MIDI access. I can plug a digital piano into my computer, and Chrome can talk to it. This is a standard, but the other browsers talk about it but never do anything, it's been "coming any day now" in Firefox since 2015, when I first conceived of the project ( https://pianop.ly/ https://pianop.ly/, a web app for playing piano along with original music videos from YouTube, karaoke style). It sucks that I have to tell people to use Chrome or it won't work. (although technically they can use Brave, Opera or other Blink based browsers) Regardless of that one feature, I'm curious why there aren't better alternatives based on Blink that allow you to get the Blink engine without all these things we hate about Google's decisions (related to the being an ad company, for one thing). I understand that we'd still have a monoculture, but I don't see that as nearly the problem it was when browsers worked so differently, for basic layout and such.
• quacked 8y ago
  It's bizarre to see the number of comments on this thread adamantly insisting that Chrome became and stayed popular because of an ad campaign. I was a high school student when Chrome was released. I saw an ad for it, downloaded it, and found that it was much faster and much cleaner-looking that Firefox, so I stayed with it.
• bbb91 8y ago
  Profiles are the only thing stopping me moving to Firefox right now. They're so easy to use on Chrome.
  • timw4mail 8y ago
    Container tabs don't require new windows for that cookie/account separation. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
• graphememes 8y ago
  Back to firefox, few years later, back to chrome.
• nadim 8y ago
  No mention in this thread so I'm just going to throw this out there, qutebrowser is an excellent choice in 2019: https://www.qutebrowser.org https://www.qutebrowser.org
• jrochkind1 8y ago
  In retrospect the practical shifting of web-standards-setting from an at least possibly neutral standards body representing multiple interests (W3C) to a a body wholly controlled by browser-vendors (WHATWG)... may have been good for speed of "innovation" for a time, but was in the long-term not good for the "Web as an open platform." > Making matters worse, the blame often lands on other vendors for “holding back the Web”. The Web is Google’s turf as it stands now; you either do as they do, or you are called out for being a laggard. Indeed, I think it's the structural politics of WHATWG that make that hard to counter. WHATWG was almost founded on the principles of "not being a laggard" and "doing what we [browser vendors] do". When there were several browser-vendors with roughly equal market power they could counter-balance each other, and had an interest in compatibility with each other, but when there's an elephant in the room... That is, the W3C folks that were accused of "holding back the web" while trying to keep standards-setting from going to WHATWG... were probably right. You can disagree, but 10-15 years on, I think we're overdue a larger discussion and retrospective evaluation of the consequences of the WHATWG "coup". I haven't seen much discussion of this, many developers today may not even be aware of the history.
• xenadu02 8y ago
  Firefox and Safari broke IE's dominance of the web. Chrome came along much later. Safari killed flash in favor of HTML 5. How quickly everyone likes to forget.
• djsumdog 8y ago
  > Both Chrome and Chromium run Blink under the hood, the rendering engine that started as a WebKit fork in 2013 when Google grew dissatisfied with the Apple-led project Wait, is this accurate? I remember back when Chrome was released, people were talking about how it used parts of both WebKit and Gecko, and the exact specs of which rendering was used changed based on the website. I remember not liking Chrome the moment it came out. Google had poured money into Firefox for years and then suddenly came out with (an initially) closed source competitor. Sure it's open source now, but it didn't start that way, and was a slap in the face to the Mozilla project.
  • delroth 8y ago
    > Wait, is this accurate? I remember back when Chrome was released, people were talking about how it used parts of both WebKit and Gecko, and the exact specs of which rendering was used changed based on the website. You are misremembering. Chrome never used Gecko. > I remember not liking Chrome the moment it came out. Google had poured money into Firefox for years and then suddenly came out with (an initially) closed source competitor. Sure it's open source now, but it didn't start that way This is completely false. Chromium and its associated source code were released to the public at the same time as Chrome. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#2008
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• charliedevolve 8y ago
  When I upgraded to FF 60.0.2 the energy use on my Mac went off a cliff. Maybe you should try re-creating your FF profile?
• cletus 8y ago
  Chrome (from the consumer POV) wasn't about freeing us from "corporate greed". It was about: - Isolating tabs - Seamless upgrades (seriously, why does Firefox STILL ask on startup if I'd like to wait and install an update?) - Syncing between devices - Performance (which at the time was largely terrible) Most of this still holds true, at least for me, so I see myself using Chrome for years to come.
• ken 8y ago
  > Within two years, Chrome accounted for 15% of all Web traffic on desktop—for comparison, it took Firefox 6 years to get there. Google managed to deliver a fast, thoughtfully designed browser that was an instant hit among users and Web developers alike. It took 2 years for IE to get 20% [1], and I wouldn't describe IE 1-3 as "fast and thoughtfully designed". I think the lesson here is simply that big tech companies with an established channel for reaching users can boost market share faster than open-source non-profit projects. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#/media/File:Internet-explorer-usage-data.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#/media/File:...
  • zanny 8y ago
    Immediately after Chrome released Google was having it bundled with every freeware program under the sun and bribed every major PC vendor to start including it as the default browser in new consumer Windows PCs being sold. Mozilla never had the raw revenue to just dump millions into forcing Chrome onto everyones desktop like that.
• roystonvassey 8y ago
  The only reason I use Chrome is because I have a chromecast and they only allow Chrome to native cast
• arnaudsm 8y ago
  As someone that loves clean UI and blink's speed, is Chromium a trustworthy alternative ?
• lucideer 8y ago
  If the desired effect is to make people consider not using Chrome, painting Chrome's origins in such rose-tinted light is unlikely to achieve that. Google engaged in exclusionary "embrace-extend-extinguish"-esque tactics from a very early stage in Chrome's life, and on web properties that predated Chrome's public launch in their development. Painting Chrome as "break[ing] the Web free from corporate greed" is a pretty disparaging insult to those who genuinely have worked for years to try and do that.
• appsonify 8y ago
  Chrome is poised to comletely monopolize the browser share market. You can't fault them either for doing this, this is just what pubic companies do, maximize returns for shareholders and monopolies are the hen that lays golden eggs. This article will not be seen beyond HN. The fact is the vast majority of Chrome users don't care that other browser exists, and don't want it as long as it is convenient for them (to keep using a familiar platform thats worked well). Anyways, this is just my two cents. I just don't see myself using Firefox anymore, it's no longer deserving of my attention because I am not concerned about Google's goals, we get a lot of shit for free from Google, and we gave up our privacy. Whether this is beneficial or not is up for debate.
• carapace 8y ago
  FWIW, something like 80% to 90% of Mozilla's income comes from Google. The non-naive interpretation is that Mozilla/Firefox is a figleaf over Google's hegemony.
• stackzero 8y ago
  Harvey Dent said it best "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain"
• stackzero 8y ago
  Harvey Dent put it best- "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain"
• tschellenbach 8y ago
  Chrome is just a better browser. Also, Google already has all my information, so who better to trust with my browsing history? Firefox has >10% market share, it's not like anybody can ignore 10% of users. So this article to me sounds like pure content marketing for Firefox.
  • paulryanrogers 8y ago
    Article recommends Vivaldi and Safari too.
• wmnwmn 8y ago
  I find the opposite - many websites still don't seem to test properly on chrome.
• c-smile 8y ago
  The post is missing one simple point: the complexity of browser's engine. The complexity of current web client stack is comparable with the average OS. Any modern browser has all components of Android OS for example - internal file systems, threads, VM, virtual native code execution, independent windowing and graphics stack, message routing, etc. That's like situation with Windows and WINE. Yes, you may run some win progs on Wine but original Windows will always be better for them. So we will have just one browser. That's the reality, want we that or not. Until either one of these: 1. The spec of Web Client will be reduced to bare minimum. With unified extensions mechanism, think about <applet> but more flexible - based on universal bytecode VM free from licensing issues. 2. Or users will pay for the browser application, instead of having it for free - giving up their private data instead of money. So browser vendors will be able and motivated to provide better, privacy first browsers.
  • zackmorris 8y ago
    IMHO we got here because we chose the design-by-committee philosophy of organizations like the W3C over more of a waterfall approach built from first principles. I would like to see a core HTML/CSS/Javascript spec that is a union of features proven to be available and work consistently across all browsers. The spec should incorporate ideas that are obvious in hindsight, such as the DOM diffing optimizations in frameworks like React, or running each tab in its own process. I think that it should also take a broad perspective approach on things like padding and margin. For example, use simpler abstractions from layout engines like Qt or the layout-as-a-matrix-solver math behind iOS's Auto Layout constraints. Find the commonalities to give us a high-level abstraction over all the div/span/table concepts of the web, then show a mapping from the abstraction to the quirks of how a div flows, for example. Maybe we could allow one transpiler to go from the solvable/predictable rules to the quirks of say HTML5. The steps in this process could be relatively tiny and easy to test. It should render the DOM at > 60 fps on a Pentium 100 or equivalent, since games used to do that before they even had OpenGL. I don't see any step of this process that is intractable. Once we had that, it should be relatively straightforward to build an open source browser as a base spec implementation. This is the sort of thing I fantasized about working on before I got so burned out.
• drilldrive 8y ago
  As a user (non-developer), I never trusted Chrome and never installed it onto my computer. Half of that was laziness, but the other half was understanding that Chrome is driven by ad-revenue and so privacy options would be severely sub-optimal, at least compared to Firefox.
• zwaps 8y ago
  Man, I can remember when Google was still an up-and-coming, underdog-ish and exciting tech company, where working was cool and people and "do not evil" was enshrined. I was really happy and excited whenever Google announced something new, because it was always so diverse, new, clever and somehow helped the world. Now things have taken a complete 180 degree turn. Google has become an ad company, and any innovation serves only to squeeze a little bit more data out of users. "Don't be evil" got deleted, and Google indeed seems to actively embrace "be evil". They are not even arguing with it anymore - anything that serves to close down the web, force tracking, breaches of privacy and so on... What changed in google? Any insiders? Just greed? Did important people leave?
• writepub 8y ago
  There certainly is a danger of monopolization with chrome garnering an overwhelming majority of user share. However, I'm yet to see the negative in testing with chrome and shipping (assuming you're only using W3C APIs), as most of the time, chrome is fully compliant with W3C, and other browsers simply aren't. Apple is the worst, most guilty of the others, that purposefully cripples iOS Safari to goad users and developers towards the app store. Microsoft probably intended to be fully W3C compliant with Edge, but for whatever reason, they always lagged. And with Mozilla/Firefox, it's always an obtuse, unreasonable argument when they don't comply, they claim it to be in the best interest of the open web, but it is usually a philosophical, more than technical opposition.
• bvanderveen 8y ago
  No one is in this stinking bordel questions the underlying assumption that the web is an 'open standard' or that 'competition is good' or that somehow the democratization of browser implementations and 'standards-making' is a net win for humanity? The web is an edifice of pressed shit-board that hasn't been designed so much as piled up. It isn't an open forum of freely-exchanged ideas and social goods so much as a tool in the arsenal of liberal capitalism to more completely atomize and subjugate the individual by forming his proper sense of obligation to have himself devoured by the fetischism of merchandise. Pluck out thy phone and cast it from thee.
• _cs2017_ 8y ago
  Hypothetically speaking, suppose we didn't care about privacy at all. In that case, what are the disadvantages of a single browser engine taking over the market? I suspect one disadvantage is that it's harder to innovate. Specifically, your new browser engine has no hope of sticking if all websites are heavily customized to Blink, rather than to open standards. It may seem that it's not a problem if Blink is open sourced. However, writing a new engine that works exactly like some legacy engine is nearly impossible, even if that legacy engine is open sourced. OTOH, writing a new engine to the specifications of well-designed standards is much more realistic, since presumably those standards are (a) clearly spelled out, (b) written with the idea that they can be implemented without a million lines of legacy code. Of course, this assumes that the community can create high quality and efficient standards. It's not obvious, given how difficult it's been to achieve in the past, when there was more competition between browsers. Does it sound about right? Any other disadvantages I haven't thought of?
  • briffle 8y ago
    The vendor will make decisions that are not in your interest, but in theirs. have you have tried to install an ad-blocker in chrome mobile? they just work in firefox mobile, and in both desktop browsers, but not in chrome mobile. (unless you do some very weird things with rooting your phone, using VPN providers, etc) Without using an ad-blocker, if I use chrome mobile on my older phone (original Pixel), any time I browse a web site, the whole phone appears to lock up for a few seconds, it starts getting warm, and then a whole page ad appears over the web-site, and half the time clicking the X in the corner loads up the ad in a new tab...
    • _cs2017_ 8y ago
      Ah yeah good point, ads isn't only a concern for privacy reasons but also for performance/annoyance reasons. I personally expect that, for purely selfish business reasons, Chrome will eventually kill all ads that are especially annoying or cause performance issues. But you're right, situations where vendor and user interests are at odds may always come up.
      • 8y ago
• throwaway66666 8y ago
  If anyone's to blame it's mozilla's criminal laziness. There I said it. We were stuck with firefox 3 for 3 years (early 2008-2011), on a time where chrome was getting a +1 version every month or 2 months. I remember Mozilla "evangelist" employees hard at work, tweeting "version doesn't matter, it's the changelog that matters, chrome team could have changed two background colors and did +1 to the version counter". Great battle move. Then, Firefox 4 got released and everyone hated the new interface. Even ex-mozilla cofounder JWZ complained that it feels beta even though it's a fully mature product out for a decade now and that's unacceptable. Also, No mp4 support. Oh yeah. They added it in Firefox 20 finally (then no webm support. They finally added it in January 2019. Good job) In the meantime, Mozilla engineering kept fooling around with projects that went nowhere. Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that? THE JAVASCRIPT PHONE! FLASH TO JS CONVERTER, where is that now? That JS only Video Codec ORBX.js? that Eich said "I saw the future today" 10 years ago, and it's still not out yet. PDF JS (in it's first release made opening large PDF files on Firefox impossible) etc etc. Many good things came of from it too, like asmjs (ancestor of wasm), but in general there seemed a direction of everywhere, neither arriving here nor there. Mozilla then switched the default search engine of Firefox to Yahoo! At a time when Yahoo was in the spotlight for rapidly dying and looking for a pity-acquisition!! It also came bundled with great bugs that kept resetting the default search engine back to yahoo - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1206101 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1206101 To give praise where praise is worth, Mozilla did realize their mistakes got back from their 9 year vacation (2009-2018) and Firefox today is finally very stable and relatively fast compared to Edge and Safari. I know I am sounding trollish and bitter, but the truth is that I am just sad at how Firefox fell. What happened? Did people get lazy as their savings grew? Where key individuals poached away by Google and Apple? Did they burn out? Something surely must have happened...
  • PrototypeNM1 8y ago
    Addressing your entire post would require further research on my part so I hope you'll excuse that I only address what I can recall off the top of my head. > Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that? That's just the code name for Firefox for Android. Ime it's fairly pleasant to use since flick scrolling was improved, and browser plugins on mobile are the selling feature. > FLASH TO JS CONVERTER Definitely sad to see Shumway die, but I think in retrospect it will be clear it was a forward thinking decision. WASM will obviate a lot of the effort for what has clearly become a historical feature. > Mozilla did realize their mistakes got back from their 9 year vacation (2009-2018) The origin of modern Firefox could be dated back to the origin of Servo in 2012 since it layed all the groundwork. I think this is the clear turning point in Mozilla's refocus, maybe push it back to 2015 when Firefox OS was dropped.
• fossuser 8y ago
  I try to switch to Firefox (or even Safari) every few months or so. Firefox was close this time, but there were still a few things that forced me to switch back: - On Chrome I can type 'thisisunsafe' (previously 'danger' and 'badidea') to skip security warnings, sometimes I have to do this at work when testing things with invalid certs. On FF there's a class of these issues (HSTS I think?) that doesn't let you bypass the warning so it's unusable. - FF still crashes more regularly (like when plugging or unplugging an external monitor. Thankfully the other two main issues are no longer a problem: - FF is now fast enough to be comparable - The third party extensions I required (switchy omega) now exist for FF.
  • brianpgordon 8y ago
    Yeah that HSTS issue is ridiculous, although to be fair the spec requires browsers to give users "no recourse" to bypass the error. I'm also still annoyed by https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85601 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85601
  • dfox 8y ago
    My experience is that on Chromium you can bypass HSTS-related errors by typing something, but expired certificate gives you patronizing "you have clock set wrong, go fix it" message and no way to bypass it. (But maybe I'm just doing something wrong) Another issue is that Chrome uses trust store from underlying OS which means that it does not support ECC certificates (ie. Cloudflare) on Windows XP. (Lets just say that there are valid reasons why one would want to use XP today and download something from web...)
• ravieira 8y ago
  Yet Another Post Against Chrome. Yes it's bad and it spies on us but it's also damn good for web development and so far I've found no decent replacement :)
• SomeHacker44 8y ago
  I would love to switch from Chrome to FF on my daily driver but I rely on the multi-profile thing that has no analog in FF. My work windows are separate from my personal ones, and I have different work windows for each company. Of course each is themed differently too, so I know at a glance which I’m in.
  • kevyin 8y ago
    Firefox multi account containers. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
    • SomeHacker44 8y ago
      I did investigate that, but it does not really work for my workflow. I literally want a window locked to a container, and all tabs in that window in exactly one, that container, and with each one with a different set of plugins, etc. The plugin thing is really important so I can have some windows testing sites with different ad blockers and such.
• KangLi 8y ago
  Edge: Hi I'm Edge, I'm better than IE. User: I dismiss you on the fact that your icons look identical. Edge: But wait Im diff.......
• NeoBasilisk 8y ago
  We never needed Chrome. Firefox has been around since 2002.
• amiga-workbench 8y ago
  I'm afraid we are all way too far down the slippery slope here, you've piled so much garbage into web standards its no longer possible for any new players to enter the game without an unreal amount of financial backing.
• acjohnson55 8y ago
  I'm an avid Firefox user, but I just can't ignore the fact that it's way less performant. Consequently, I use it for my personal life, but when it comes to all the web apps I need for work, I have to go with Chrome, or my computer slows to a crawl. I keep fairly extreme numbers of tabs open, but Chrome is significantly better at coping.
  • starik36 8y ago
    In what way is it less performant? The start up is faster on Firefox on both PCs that I use. When there are a ton of tabs, both browsers eat on all RAM, but I wouldn't say that Firefox drags the system down anymore than Chrome. I am on Windows 10.
    • acjohnson55 8y ago
      I'm on Mac OS. It bogs down all the time. I have very little in the way of add-ons. Don't know why I've been downvoted, because this is just my experience. I've been and remain a user since Firefox 2.
• keithtom 8y ago
  Really? No one going to mention brave.com. It’s chromium based.
• zmix 8y ago
  Should someone dare the major task of writing a new web browser, please, make it fully XML aware, so, as to be able to use it as just another component in an XML pipeline, for rendering. A setting to convert all HTML to XHTML. This would allow easy XPath queries while browsing, then XPath 3.1 support, XSLT 3.0 support, XML Catalogs and XQuery in the browser would be cool as well. I am aware, that this is lots of work, but it would be nice to have something, that keeps the document centric web alive, and does not play to the rumor web, that we have become.
• ridiculous_fish 8y ago
  Google still pushes Chrome very aggressively. Gmail shows a popover advertising Chrome when I log in. It also puts Chrome ads in security alerts about new logins (!!). https://imgur.com/a/eAOCL3J https://imgur.com/a/eAOCL3J
• kdmedev 8y ago
  Just use Opera or Brave right? Aren't those browsers just chromium reskinned and customized
• babkayaga 8y ago
  > we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free Maybe true for the author. But most people use Chrome to browse the web.
• Aldo_MX 8y ago
  I'll write an unpopular opinion: 1. Developer's time is not a commodity. The time you spend testing in alternative browsers is time you can spend in tasks that will make life less painful to the people who work with you such as writing tests, documentation, or new code. 2. A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not exist. The business should be the one who dictates which browsers should be supported, and it should be a rational decision based on data such as reviewing your own analytics. Nobody has infinite resources. 3. Using a website is a privilege, not a right. The same way you are free to choose your favorite browser, a website owner is free to choose which users to serve, the same way we can say "Are you still using IE8 in 2019? tough luck buddy, the site is broken", we can also say "Sorry dude, I didn't care enough to support Firefox because X feature was broken". 4. When you as a user decide to choose Firefox because "my ideological reasons", you are also choosing to deal with the negative aspects such as broken websites, broken extensions, lack of features, loss of mindshare, etc., etc., if you don't like dealing with them the alternative is pretty simple: Use Chrome, that's what the end users do anyway. The reason Chrome has gained lots of mindshare is because we all love convenience, and there are less-painful alternatives to push the "we don't like Google" agenda such as forking Chromium. The "we don't track you" is a huge competitive advantage against Google, why should you give up everything that Chromium does right? The resources that Mozilla spends maintaining Gecko could be used more intelligently to build for example a security team to alleviate the concern of having a huge common attack area. Wasn't "test once, run everywhere" the holy grail? Or now we like O(N) instead of O(1)?
  • btmiller 8y ago
    > A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not exist I think the only scenario where that's acceptable is experimental/nightly features that haven't yet made their way to the majority of browsers. > Using a website is a privilege Some would dispute that. My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical branches. Is it considered a privilege to access my funds via website?
    • Aldo_MX 8y ago
      > My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical branches. Is it considered a privilege to access my funds via website? Glad you made this question. I'm a customer from BBVA and years ago, when Opera recently launched its Chromium-based fork I got a nag: You're using an unsupported browser I was infuriated: "How the f*ck are you targeting the new Opera?!?!?!?! I mean, even the user agent looks like Chrome, to display this nag you had to explicitly target the new Opera WTF?!?!?!" Now I ask you the following question: Can you access your bank account with Lynx? Curl? Where do you draw the line between which browsers to support? Where do you draw the line between telling a user "Use Chrome" or having the user to complain at your call center because the website broke specifically in Brave browser? (pretty unlikely but not unrealistic scenario) Years ago many banks and government agencies even required you to install Java to access their service. So yeah, it is a privilege to access your funds in a non-supported mean, if you complain at their call center they'll probably tell you "just use Chrome", or "install the Android app", or a similar alternative. If a bank thinks it is a competitive advantage to let you access in Mosaic, then it will push their development team to support even Mosaic.
• 3xblah 8y ago
  "We Need Chrome No more" appeared on HN five months ago, and there was a comment that confirmed there is interest in an alternative search engine written by djb. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053163 It was obviously a joke as no one serious about text-only browsing would suggest lynx over the alternatives (w3m, links, links2, etc.)
• revskill 8y ago
  Chrome has some great extensions now: Great Suspender is one of the best. Before Chrome killed my computer with too many tabs, now it's fine! Chrome is the best product of Google to me.
• kerng 8y ago
  One thing that people seem to forget is the extreme amount of marketing and push that happened. If you used any Google product (even today) it's basically annoyance not to use Chrome, because of all the "popups" and messages you see on screen to switch to Chrome.
• zepearl 8y ago
  Am I the only one on the planet that never had stability nor speed problems with Firefox? (e.g. on Linux when I start Firefox it displays all tabs, but it refreshes/loads only the "last"/current tab - other tabs are refreshed/loaded only if I switch to them. On the other hand when I start Chrome, all tabs are refreshed/downloaded immediately, and all of them start running their code whatever it is)
• satoshisvision 8y ago
  Firefox mobile on android is shit Cant even render wikipedia properly I hope mozilla staff reading this
• exodust 8y ago
  > "developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines..." Not me. I use Chrome to briefly test my builds, then close it and get the hell out of there. I don't know why developers didn't or don't see the conflict of interest with a Google branded browser. I was unsettled by this from the moment they released the browser. Google uses manipulative design patterns as much as any of the big guns. Chrome is not immune to those efforts to manipulate user behavior for business agenda reasons at every tick.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• temporallobe 8y ago
  One of the reasons I stay with Chrome is because of the superb dev tools, which are even better than in the Firefox Developer Edition
• mrtweetyhack 8y ago
  The same could have been said about Microsoft when Internet Explorer had a large portion of the market and Firefox came along and showed everybody what a real browser was. The fact is, there are a myriad of web browsers and chrome happens to be the best and that is reflected in their marketshare. Mozilla needs to figure out how and why they have fallen below 10% marketshare. Mozilla dropped the ball just like Microsoft. They focused on features users don't care about. Chrome's developer tools are a pleasure to work with. Even with Chrome having a bad reputation with privacy Google is still winning the battle. Now that Chrome is entrenched, it would need some large missteps(ie breaking adblockers) for users to dump it. I still have Firefox installed and periodically open it; it's still really bad, fails to open file, source code does not show in developer. But I'm sure Mozilla is already working on some other usless feature.
• gedassan 8y ago
  Firefox Dev tools Network tab still does not allow to resize columns. It's why I hate to use them...
• gedassan 8y ago
  Firefox Devtools Network tab still does not allow to resize columns in 2019...
• untangle 8y ago
  I did not find the author's points very compelling wrt the "we need chrome no more" link-baity title. Clearly, many users -- mostly devs -- do need Chrome. But more importantly I think that articles such as this deflect from the real abuse-of-power that Google wields and that's in advertising. Google can and has shut down whole businesses by withholding access to its ad platforms. I'm not sure that Google has ever hurt anybody by denying access to Chrome.
• newsgremlin 8y ago
  I almost regret invariably suggesting chrome in every conversation back when IE was leading, such is hindsight. Perhaps instead of telling people what to use we should be telling them how to use, or more accurately how to change. Once people are invested in a platform or service it's hard to get them to change their mindset, especially over issues taken for granted like privacy. There's a lot more attention to social media on the same issue of privacy, this would be the ideal time to bring chrome into this discussion to work on the 'detachment', self-imposed roadblocks, logging out, deleting apps, disabling notifications.
• konart 8y ago
  > They are even noticeably ahead in areas such as performance, battery usage, privacy, and security. Privacy - maybe. Security? I doubt it. Google does a lot for Chrome to stay safe. Performance adn battery usage? Safari works only on once OS it is build for, so there is really no contest, Firefox on the other hand is still a great way to stresstest your CPU. At least on macOS. Firefox user for many years.
• chacha2 8y ago
  Clicking the RSS or JSON link goes no where and then breaks the back button.
• freedman1611 8y ago
  Look, some misguided individuals seem to hate Chromium because they think it doesn't respect their privacy or out of abject hatred for Google. But a lot are not actually looking from an engineering point of view. Browser's are the 1# security risk on any computer system due their complexity and access to the outside world. Chromium was the first (and mabye only) web browser that was designed from the ground up with privsep in mind. Firefox on the other hand did not have privsep for a long time, it was only implemented later after the fact. Not only that, Chromium now supports unveil, and new security innovation that blocks the browser's access to all files folders on the system except for what specified in settings.