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It's honestly a pity. Firefox is it perfect but the Internet is becoming worse because of chrome. Google is able to fast track any non standard Web tech and the

It's honestly a pity. Firefox is it perfect but the Internet is becoming worse because of chrome. Google is able to fast track any non standard Web tech and the hordes follow. Soon after, that become the standard. I don't want to cheer for a broken browser, but only Safari is able to stop this madness now. Also, Firefox on the Desktop is really good and still let's you do so much more than chrome clones. But it suffers specially when using Google websites.

nsilvestri 5y ago
Chrome is already the standard. Firefox usually works, but more and more often nowadays I encounter a glitchy or poorly performing page, which I switch to Chrome to use properly. I use Firefox to not be part of the Chrome monopoly, not because it's actually a fundamentally better browser.
- yaomtc 5y ago
  > I encounter a glitchy or poorly performing page When you have the time, you should note it here: https://webcompat.com/ https://webcompat.com/
- xcambar 5y ago
  Chrome is not better because you witness some pages to render better in Chrome. It is actually the opposite: pages are more and more built for and with Chrome in mind. And that omnipresence of Chrome allows Google to force their own moves as de facto standards, which is dangerous overall. Firefox is better because it follows standards and it is open-source and it is not tied to a behemoth like Google. The authors of pages you see perform better in Chrome are indeed not building for the web but rather building for Chrome.
  - TranquilMarmot 5y ago
    Especially with the prevalence of sites that "work" in browser but really expect you to download yet-another-Electron-app (i.e. Slack) Develop for Chrome first, all other browsers second. Why worry if other browsers don't work when the solution is "download our desktop Electron application :)"
- nightski 5y ago
  I have used Firefox for about a decade now and I can't think of a single page that did not work. I'm not saying it's impossible, but incredibly rare. I'd be more inclined to just give up on the site than install Chrome.
  - eightails 5y ago
    Stuff doesn't always completely break -- e.g. Google forcing new Chrome-only web standards on certain sites and making other browsers like Firefox resort to alternatives which can end up being 5x slower [0], or serving a more dated design of google search on FF mobile vs Chrome. I suspect this sort of thing might be enough to make some people switch. And I have had a few experiences with sites not loading properly in the last few months. Try windy.com for example: on FF 90 with no extensions enabled and tracking protection on 'balanced' I get blue and yellow banding on the map, and the wind gusts graphics fail to load properly. I have reported a few of these instances in the past, but a lot of the time I'd rather just switch to chromium temporarily and continue with what I'm doing. [0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-exec-says-google-slowed-youtube-down-on-non-chrome-browsers/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-exec...
    - kiwijamo 5y ago
      Just out of interest I looked at Windy.com on Firefox/Linux and it looks fine? No blue/yellow banding. Wind gusts seem to show up fine. I've also had a look at the other stuff (e.g. waves, clouds, etc) which all seem to work as expected. This is with Firefox 78 LTS. Unless things have regressed in between version 78 to 90, I wonder if there is something else causing your issues?
      - eightails 5y ago
        So it seems like it was caused by FF blocking HTML5 canvas fingerprinting. Enabling that allowed it all to load correctly. I guess I must've hit disallow without thinking when I first visited, and that response was saved even after clearing cache, so that example at least is probably my fault. I do wonder if every user would be aware that the 'Allow site to extract canvas data?' popup can break site functionality though -- its not as though there's a warning to that effect in browser.
- BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
  That's my experience too. Unfortunately I don't think it's possible for complex standards to be well specified in human language instead of in code so a reference implementation is what will always win in the end. At least chromium is open source. The best we can hope is maybe that organizations adopting chromium other than Google can wield more influence over it. As I point out here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222818 human language is not precise enough to write good specifications. Natural language words are polysemic and contextual. See the meaning of "break" for example: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break Kolmogrov showed that fully specified information distills down to computer programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length The ideal language for a specification might be a mix of natural language and code with a test suit, something like Literate Programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) or its descendants along with modern pull request based discussions that are tied to version controlled code. I wish Mozilla or a similar organization adopted the chromium core. We really need a well funded non-profit managed release of the reference browser.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > complex standards to be well specified in human language instead of in code so a reference implementation is what will always win in the end. > At least chromium is open source. That source code is 12-15 million lines of code. They implement literally thousands of specs. Chrome adds 40-70 new web APIs [1] with each release which happen roughly once every 40 days and contain god knows how many code changes. Good luck deducing "precise specs" from that. > I wish Mozilla or a similar organization adopted the chromium core That would mean cementing Google's monopoly of the web. [1] https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
    - BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
      >That source code is 12-15 million lines of code. Exactly, it's impossible to describe that in human language which doesn't have precise enough semantics. That's why the spec has to be in code, in the form of a reference implementation and/or test suit. The goal should be to move chromium away from being controlled too much by Google.
- eitland 5y ago
  > I use Firefox to not be part of the Chrome monopoly, not because it's actually a fundamentally better browser. For me there is - in addition to not wanting to support Chrome - still a few things that Firefox does better. As for websites that only support Chrome I consider them broken which means I don't use them or if I have to I try to notify the operator.
soperj 5y ago
>only Safari is able to stop this madness now Safari is usable on less than 20% of machines, it absolutely will not be stopping anything. It's also the bane of my existence as a web developer.
- camjohnson26 5y ago
  I’m guessing a huge percentage of the lost users switched to Brave since it had 25 million as of February and is affiliated with Brendan Eich. https://brave.com/25m-mau/ https://brave.com/25m-mau/
  - DavideNL 5y ago
    I’m guessing a huge percentage now spends more time browsing on their iPads instead of Desktop/Laptop…
    - christophilus 5y ago
      Can confirm. Writing this from Brave on my iPhone.
      - TranquilMarmot 5y ago
        Does Apple still require using Safari as the engine for all browsers on iPhone or has that changed?
        freediver 5y ago
        Apple requires WebKit to be web rendering engine for all browsers. Safari is one of 100+ browsers on iPhone.
        TranquilMarmot 5y ago
        Tomato, tomato
emrah 5y ago
> only Safari is able to stop this madness now Safari is a hard sell when one can't install an ad-blocker on it (work on the street is you can but not easily)
- marcellus23 5y ago
  You’ve been able to use ad blockers in Safari for years.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    The ad-blocking API Safari offers isn’t as powerful as Firefox’s.
    - marcellus23 5y ago
      Okay… in practice they work fine though. Saying you can’t use ad blockers in safari is straight up wrong.
      - emrah 5y ago
        I never said "you can't". Please read carefully before replying
        scrollaway 5y ago
        I don't think you've read your own comment...
  - emrah 5y ago
    Ya I know I "can". Via app store, I know. Hence my comment: "hard" to install ad-blockers
    - marcellus23 5y ago
      maybe you should go back and read your own comment. Also, it's not terribly hard to install extensions through the App Store — what makes it more difficult than going through the Firefox/Chrome extension store?
pjmlp 5y ago
I keep using Firefox on the desktop as a kind of resistance factor,. however the truth is that the war is lost, the Web has turned into ChromeOS for all practical purposes. Specially since Microsoft has always been on the same boat as Google, remember that such kind of features go back to Active Desktop. Additionally, everyone pushing Electron apps is basically contributing to Chrome market share.
yann2 5y ago
I dont worry. I have seen these cycles with IBM and Microsoft. And they all blow up eventually because the unintended consequences keep increasing. So Google has got itself locked into that same trajectory for a long time now. "Features" are total bullshit. Its all about making sure every small thing is in the cloud or eventually gets pushed into it. That vision is as dumb as moving the DNA in every cell in your body into a nearby lake and visiting the lake everytime you want to read 1 bit. With a Google toll booth at the lake entrance. Its doomed to fail. Just look at the consequences. If you have a webpage on your local hard drive and want to use the browsers javascript to access it to make it look better, the Google Chrome team will come running like well programmed alert robots to call it a security violation and disable api access to your own disk. This is how empires fall.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  IE was essentially a one-trick pony (the browser) Chrome is being used on the browser (with a mobile footprint Microsoft never had), the desktop (VS Code, Slack, etc), and v8 is driving a substantial part of the web's backend (Node). Even the smaller use case of web scraping is moving towards Puppeteer.
- beerandt 5y ago
  Yeah chrome features stopped being features a long time ago. Why else would they force upgrades to be so persistent yet secretive? Because that's what you have to do when people value the existing feature set over security updates, if they're attached to new features like cookieless tracking.
rudian 5y ago
Exactly. They just shipped a UUID implementation to stable chrome before it was even finalized. They barely discussed and now it’s live. But hey they wrote a proposal so it’s all good.
bdcravens 5y ago
> Safari is able to stop this madness now Apple stopped developing Safari for Windows nine years ago.
TranquilMarmot 5y ago
> it suffers specially when using Google websites I keep seeing this rhetoric, but I've never experienced this myself. I use Firefox as my main driver and use Google Search, Docs, Mail, Sheets, Slides, YouTube, and whatever other Google products literally every day and everything works just fine. I've tried them out in Chrome/Edge/whatever and they all work exactly the same. The only thing that doesn't work 100% is search on Firefox on Android, but there's no reason for it and changing the user agent fixes all the problems (Google intentionally makes it bad to try and drive you to Chrome).
JohnFen 5y ago
> Firefox on the Desktop is really good I strongly disagree with this statement. My opinion is that it's the opposite. I always get sad when I think about modern Firefox. I loved Firefox dearly before the transition, and I tried really hard to love it after the transition, too. But it failed me and lost much of what I loved about it. Then every subsequent release was just a little worse, excising more of what made Firefox great. Eventually, I just had to give up on it.

nsilvestri 5y ago

Chrome is already the standard. Firefox usually works, but more and more often nowadays I encounter a glitchy or poorly performing page, which I switch to Chrome to use properly. I use Firefox to not be part of the Chrome monopoly, not because it's actually a fundamentally better browser.

yaomtc 5y ago
> I encounter a glitchy or poorly performing page When you have the time, you should note it here: https://webcompat.com/ https://webcompat.com/
xcambar 5y ago
Chrome is not better because you witness some pages to render better in Chrome. It is actually the opposite: pages are more and more built for and with Chrome in mind. And that omnipresence of Chrome allows Google to force their own moves as de facto standards, which is dangerous overall. Firefox is better because it follows standards and it is open-source and it is not tied to a behemoth like Google. The authors of pages you see perform better in Chrome are indeed not building for the web but rather building for Chrome.
- TranquilMarmot 5y ago
  Especially with the prevalence of sites that "work" in browser but really expect you to download yet-another-Electron-app (i.e. Slack) Develop for Chrome first, all other browsers second. Why worry if other browsers don't work when the solution is "download our desktop Electron application :)"
nightski 5y ago
I have used Firefox for about a decade now and I can't think of a single page that did not work. I'm not saying it's impossible, but incredibly rare. I'd be more inclined to just give up on the site than install Chrome.
- eightails 5y ago
  Stuff doesn't always completely break -- e.g. Google forcing new Chrome-only web standards on certain sites and making other browsers like Firefox resort to alternatives which can end up being 5x slower [0], or serving a more dated design of google search on FF mobile vs Chrome. I suspect this sort of thing might be enough to make some people switch. And I have had a few experiences with sites not loading properly in the last few months. Try windy.com for example: on FF 90 with no extensions enabled and tracking protection on 'balanced' I get blue and yellow banding on the map, and the wind gusts graphics fail to load properly. I have reported a few of these instances in the past, but a lot of the time I'd rather just switch to chromium temporarily and continue with what I'm doing. [0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-exec-says-google-slowed-youtube-down-on-non-chrome-browsers/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-exec...
  - kiwijamo 5y ago
    Just out of interest I looked at Windy.com on Firefox/Linux and it looks fine? No blue/yellow banding. Wind gusts seem to show up fine. I've also had a look at the other stuff (e.g. waves, clouds, etc) which all seem to work as expected. This is with Firefox 78 LTS. Unless things have regressed in between version 78 to 90, I wonder if there is something else causing your issues?
    - eightails 5y ago
      So it seems like it was caused by FF blocking HTML5 canvas fingerprinting. Enabling that allowed it all to load correctly. I guess I must've hit disallow without thinking when I first visited, and that response was saved even after clearing cache, so that example at least is probably my fault. I do wonder if every user would be aware that the 'Allow site to extract canvas data?' popup can break site functionality though -- its not as though there's a warning to that effect in browser.
BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
That's my experience too. Unfortunately I don't think it's possible for complex standards to be well specified in human language instead of in code so a reference implementation is what will always win in the end. At least chromium is open source. The best we can hope is maybe that organizations adopting chromium other than Google can wield more influence over it. As I point out here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222818 human language is not precise enough to write good specifications. Natural language words are polysemic and contextual. See the meaning of "break" for example: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break Kolmogrov showed that fully specified information distills down to computer programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length The ideal language for a specification might be a mix of natural language and code with a test suit, something like Literate Programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) or its descendants along with modern pull request based discussions that are tied to version controlled code. I wish Mozilla or a similar organization adopted the chromium core. We really need a well funded non-profit managed release of the reference browser.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > complex standards to be well specified in human language instead of in code so a reference implementation is what will always win in the end. > At least chromium is open source. That source code is 12-15 million lines of code. They implement literally thousands of specs. Chrome adds 40-70 new web APIs [1] with each release which happen roughly once every 40 days and contain god knows how many code changes. Good luck deducing "precise specs" from that. > I wish Mozilla or a similar organization adopted the chromium core That would mean cementing Google's monopoly of the web. [1] https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
  - BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
    >That source code is 12-15 million lines of code. Exactly, it's impossible to describe that in human language which doesn't have precise enough semantics. That's why the spec has to be in code, in the form of a reference implementation and/or test suit. The goal should be to move chromium away from being controlled too much by Google.
eitland 5y ago
> I use Firefox to not be part of the Chrome monopoly, not because it's actually a fundamentally better browser. For me there is - in addition to not wanting to support Chrome - still a few things that Firefox does better. As for websites that only support Chrome I consider them broken which means I don't use them or if I have to I try to notify the operator.

soperj 5y ago

>only Safari is able to stop this madness now Safari is usable on less than 20% of machines, it absolutely will not be stopping anything. It's also the bane of my existence as a web developer.

camjohnson26 5y ago
I’m guessing a huge percentage of the lost users switched to Brave since it had 25 million as of February and is affiliated with Brendan Eich. https://brave.com/25m-mau/ https://brave.com/25m-mau/
- DavideNL 5y ago
  I’m guessing a huge percentage now spends more time browsing on their iPads instead of Desktop/Laptop…
  - christophilus 5y ago
    Can confirm. Writing this from Brave on my iPhone.
    - TranquilMarmot 5y ago
      Does Apple still require using Safari as the engine for all browsers on iPhone or has that changed?
      - freediver 5y ago
        Apple requires WebKit to be web rendering engine for all browsers. Safari is one of 100+ browsers on iPhone.
        TranquilMarmot 5y ago
        Tomato, tomato

emrah 5y ago

> only Safari is able to stop this madness now Safari is a hard sell when one can't install an ad-blocker on it (work on the street is you can but not easily)

marcellus23 5y ago
You’ve been able to use ad blockers in Safari for years.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The ad-blocking API Safari offers isn’t as powerful as Firefox’s.
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    Okay… in practice they work fine though. Saying you can’t use ad blockers in safari is straight up wrong.
    - emrah 5y ago
      I never said "you can't". Please read carefully before replying
      - scrollaway 5y ago
        I don't think you've read your own comment...
- emrah 5y ago
  Ya I know I "can". Via app store, I know. Hence my comment: "hard" to install ad-blockers
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    maybe you should go back and read your own comment. Also, it's not terribly hard to install extensions through the App Store — what makes it more difficult than going through the Firefox/Chrome extension store?

pjmlp 5y ago

I keep using Firefox on the desktop as a kind of resistance factor,. however the truth is that the war is lost, the Web has turned into ChromeOS for all practical purposes. Specially since Microsoft has always been on the same boat as Google, remember that such kind of features go back to Active Desktop. Additionally, everyone pushing Electron apps is basically contributing to Chrome market share.

yann2 5y ago

I dont worry. I have seen these cycles with IBM and Microsoft. And they all blow up eventually because the unintended consequences keep increasing. So Google has got itself locked into that same trajectory for a long time now. "Features" are total bullshit. Its all about making sure every small thing is in the cloud or eventually gets pushed into it. That vision is as dumb as moving the DNA in every cell in your body into a nearby lake and visiting the lake everytime you want to read 1 bit. With a Google toll booth at the lake entrance. Its doomed to fail. Just look at the consequences. If you have a webpage on your local hard drive and want to use the browsers javascript to access it to make it look better, the Google Chrome team will come running like well programmed alert robots to call it a security violation and disable api access to your own disk. This is how empires fall.

bdcravens 5y ago
IE was essentially a one-trick pony (the browser) Chrome is being used on the browser (with a mobile footprint Microsoft never had), the desktop (VS Code, Slack, etc), and v8 is driving a substantial part of the web's backend (Node). Even the smaller use case of web scraping is moving towards Puppeteer.
beerandt 5y ago
Yeah chrome features stopped being features a long time ago. Why else would they force upgrades to be so persistent yet secretive? Because that's what you have to do when people value the existing feature set over security updates, if they're attached to new features like cookieless tracking.

rudian 5y ago

Exactly. They just shipped a UUID implementation to stable chrome before it was even finalized. They barely discussed and now it’s live. But hey they wrote a proposal so it’s all good.

bdcravens 5y ago

> Safari is able to stop this madness now Apple stopped developing Safari for Windows nine years ago.

TranquilMarmot 5y ago

> it suffers specially when using Google websites I keep seeing this rhetoric, but I've never experienced this myself. I use Firefox as my main driver and use Google Search, Docs, Mail, Sheets, Slides, YouTube, and whatever other Google products literally every day and everything works just fine. I've tried them out in Chrome/Edge/whatever and they all work exactly the same. The only thing that doesn't work 100% is search on Firefox on Android, but there's no reason for it and changing the user agent fixes all the problems (Google intentionally makes it bad to try and drive you to Chrome).

JohnFen 5y ago

> Firefox on the Desktop is really good I strongly disagree with this statement. My opinion is that it's the opposite. I always get sad when I think about modern Firefox. I loved Firefox dearly before the transition, and I tried really hard to love it after the transition, too. But it failed me and lost much of what I loved about it. Then every subsequent release was just a little worse, excising more of what made Firefox great. Eventually, I just had to give up on it.