7 ms·

Great article - poor execution. Users win when the browser market is competitive. The article heavily promotes Brave. Others to move to are Firefox, Opera and

Great article - poor execution. Users win when the browser market is competitive. The article heavily promotes Brave. Others to move to are Firefox, Opera and Min.

gnud 7y ago
I'd stay away from Opera. If you don't like Firefox, try Vivaldi instead - feels like "old" Opera, made by the same people, mostly.
kmlx 7y ago
“Users win when the browser market is competitive.” i’ll get downvoted for this, but i simply don’t agree. i think users lose when there are multiple browsers. my argument relies on a basic fact: one cannot guarantee that a new website will work on all browsers without heavy amounts of testing. as such, the battle of the browsers shouldn’t be around engines, which simply duplicates code into different paradigms, instead it should be around ideas. imagine a world with a single browser: all websites work perfectly, while implementing new tech would be a fierce competitive battle of ideas. want newTechX implemented? then you’ll have to convince ms, goog and the rest of the community in order to implement it. users would get both the competitive advantage and a stable “runs anything environment”, instead of the chaos of yesterday.
- kzzzznot 7y ago
  Sure, while that one browser is functioning perfectly and the company developing it is playing nice/functioning perfectly. Wouldn’t it be great if everywhere we never had to make any choices between products, there was just one clear perfect choice offered by one perfect company? Yes, but that’s a utopian fantasy.
- Firadeoclus 7y ago
  Sometimes it's very much in the users' interest for websites not to "work perfectly", i.e. do what the designer intended.
- Terretta 7y ago
  I guess I’m a contrarian, I think “all websites work perfectly” when they are allowed to be web sites instead of “apps”. “Heavy amounts of testing” comes from trying to use the web as a combination of magazine publishing design style and Flash animation interactivity. If you used hypertext with semantic markup, you’d work in anything including Lynx in a terminal and text readers for the blind. Add a minimalist CSS such as https://milligram.io/ https://milligram.io/, change font, spacing, colors of elements, and be done with it. If you use the web just a piece of paper to convey information, think Economist or The Atlantic instead of Cosmo or Us magazine, it all pretty much “just works”. By contrast, if you use the web as a SPA (single page app) engine, you’re gonna have a bad time. For that, test in Safari for iOS, Chrome on Android, so you work in their native embedded engine. Given they’re both originally WebKit / KHTML, you’re not too far apart. This approach downscopes your test footprint dramatically. You’re still worried about “duplicates code into different paradigms” but (a) you should have different paradigms for Android and iOS, they have a very different user expected feel, and (b) its really only the 2 paradigms with 2 modalities each: iOS/Android, phone/tablet. Recognize this is a contrarian view when these days it’s popular to try to shoot for a single experience on every form factor, and easy to forget most content on the web is still not in app form, it’s just stuff to read. HTML 3.2 / 4 with CSS wasn’t a terrible place to live. Fun fact: “Internet Explorer 5.0 for the Macintosh (really!), shipped in March 2000, was the first browser to have full (better than 99 percent) CSS 1 support, surpassing Opera, which had been the leader since its introduction of CSS support fifteen months earlier.”
- psychoslave 7y ago
  That's right, comrade, that's also why we need a single party, a deeply centralized world government and a great Führer^W Leader to guide us all under its wonderful unifying vision of the brave upcoming world. Let's all remember that harmony is not unison: our single goal must be to reduce everything until no difference remains and the universe is at last reconciled into the great singularity.
- orpheline 7y ago
  > "[O]ne cannot guarantee that a new website will work on all browsers without heavy amounts of testing." Then maybe all browsers should implement standards consistently. That's why we have standards.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    Even if everyone implemented the same set of standards, there would still be bugs. Considering the code size of browsers, I expect on the order of 10,000s of bugs in each browser. Now that's not going to be a problem for a static blog, but any sufficiently complex web application is bound to hit some of those bugs.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > imagine a world with a single browser I have a better idea: imagine a world where the specification for how to render websites is simple, clear, unambiguous, and infrequently changed. Do you hear people saying the world would be better off if there were only one PNG viewer?
- zrobotics 7y ago
  When there was a single dominant browser, it didn't reduce the chaos all that much. Are you pining for the days of "This site best viewed in Internet Explorer 5.0"? Considering that currently in the front page there is an article bashing Google for single-handedly introducing <toast> with no outside consultation,at this point if you want new tech introduced Google are the only people you need to convince.
Slashbot 7y ago
I moved away from Firefox, Vivaldi is just far better...Mozilla screwed up, you can get better built in features in Vivaldi, than Firefox even has addons for.. because those retards at Mozilla.. they might aswel work for Google.

Great article - poor execution. Users win when the browser market is competitive. The article heavily promotes Brave. Others to move to are Firefox, Opera and Min.

gnud 7y ago

I'd stay away from Opera. If you don't like Firefox, try Vivaldi instead - feels like "old" Opera, made by the same people, mostly.

kmlx 7y ago

“Users win when the browser market is competitive.” i’ll get downvoted for this, but i simply don’t agree. i think users lose when there are multiple browsers. my argument relies on a basic fact: one cannot guarantee that a new website will work on all browsers without heavy amounts of testing. as such, the battle of the browsers shouldn’t be around engines, which simply duplicates code into different paradigms, instead it should be around ideas. imagine a world with a single browser: all websites work perfectly, while implementing new tech would be a fierce competitive battle of ideas. want newTechX implemented? then you’ll have to convince ms, goog and the rest of the community in order to implement it. users would get both the competitive advantage and a stable “runs anything environment”, instead of the chaos of yesterday.

kzzzznot 7y ago
Sure, while that one browser is functioning perfectly and the company developing it is playing nice/functioning perfectly. Wouldn’t it be great if everywhere we never had to make any choices between products, there was just one clear perfect choice offered by one perfect company? Yes, but that’s a utopian fantasy.
Firadeoclus 7y ago
Sometimes it's very much in the users' interest for websites not to "work perfectly", i.e. do what the designer intended.
Terretta 7y ago
I guess I’m a contrarian, I think “all websites work perfectly” when they are allowed to be web sites instead of “apps”. “Heavy amounts of testing” comes from trying to use the web as a combination of magazine publishing design style and Flash animation interactivity. If you used hypertext with semantic markup, you’d work in anything including Lynx in a terminal and text readers for the blind. Add a minimalist CSS such as https://milligram.io/ https://milligram.io/, change font, spacing, colors of elements, and be done with it. If you use the web just a piece of paper to convey information, think Economist or The Atlantic instead of Cosmo or Us magazine, it all pretty much “just works”. By contrast, if you use the web as a SPA (single page app) engine, you’re gonna have a bad time. For that, test in Safari for iOS, Chrome on Android, so you work in their native embedded engine. Given they’re both originally WebKit / KHTML, you’re not too far apart. This approach downscopes your test footprint dramatically. You’re still worried about “duplicates code into different paradigms” but (a) you should have different paradigms for Android and iOS, they have a very different user expected feel, and (b) its really only the 2 paradigms with 2 modalities each: iOS/Android, phone/tablet. Recognize this is a contrarian view when these days it’s popular to try to shoot for a single experience on every form factor, and easy to forget most content on the web is still not in app form, it’s just stuff to read. HTML 3.2 / 4 with CSS wasn’t a terrible place to live. Fun fact: “Internet Explorer 5.0 for the Macintosh (really!), shipped in March 2000, was the first browser to have full (better than 99 percent) CSS 1 support, surpassing Opera, which had been the leader since its introduction of CSS support fifteen months earlier.”
psychoslave 7y ago
That's right, comrade, that's also why we need a single party, a deeply centralized world government and a great Führer^W Leader to guide us all under its wonderful unifying vision of the brave upcoming world. Let's all remember that harmony is not unison: our single goal must be to reduce everything until no difference remains and the universe is at last reconciled into the great singularity.
orpheline 7y ago
> "[O]ne cannot guarantee that a new website will work on all browsers without heavy amounts of testing." Then maybe all browsers should implement standards consistently. That's why we have standards.
- majewsky 7y ago
  Even if everyone implemented the same set of standards, there would still be bugs. Considering the code size of browsers, I expect on the order of 10,000s of bugs in each browser. Now that's not going to be a problem for a static blog, but any sufficiently complex web application is bound to hit some of those bugs.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> imagine a world with a single browser I have a better idea: imagine a world where the specification for how to render websites is simple, clear, unambiguous, and infrequently changed. Do you hear people saying the world would be better off if there were only one PNG viewer?
zrobotics 7y ago
When there was a single dominant browser, it didn't reduce the chaos all that much. Are you pining for the days of "This site best viewed in Internet Explorer 5.0"? Considering that currently in the front page there is an article bashing Google for single-handedly introducing <toast> with no outside consultation,at this point if you want new tech introduced Google are the only people you need to convince.

Slashbot 7y ago

I moved away from Firefox, Vivaldi is just far better...Mozilla screwed up, you can get better built in features in Vivaldi, than Firefox even has addons for.. because those retards at Mozilla.. they might aswel work for Google.