5 ms·

Early chrome was a breath of fresh air. Design was light, it was fast, and it felt like the promise of the web will soon pay off. Unfortunately, it helped kill

Early chrome was a breath of fresh air. Design was light, it was fast, and it felt like the promise of the web will soon pay off. Unfortunately, it helped kill the hated IE6/7 dragon only to take it's place. If you value the free internet and open standards, use Firefox. It is not important how's good chrome is or how beautiful it is (it actually isn't, early design was way better), because, after the demise of Opera, Firefox is the last alternative browser engine we have. We don't want one company decide the standards, it'll end badly.

slowwriter 5y ago
I think the larger tech community should be made more aware of this. Maybe if the likes of LTT or MKBHD (popular YouTube tech channels) could be convinced to do a video on it, it could help get more people into the Firefox camp
staticassertion 5y ago
Doesn't Chrome already effectively decide standards? What do they do that isn't standards compliant anyway? AFAIK they push new web standards all the time, and even if they didn't, they have the vast majority of the market share so the boat's sailed on Firefox imo.
- RubyRidgeRandy 5y ago
  Agreed. I also always feel like linux communities or hackernews is gaslighting me into thinking that firefox is just as fast as chrome. It's not. There is a tangible speed difference when using it.
  - cyberpunk 5y ago
    I use it on a M1 and in my (totally subjective) experience it goes in order of fastest to slowest: safari, firefox, then chrome for speed on heavy websites...
  - spartanatreyu 5y ago
    I just ran a little test to see what the difference was on my end. I opened a private tab in Firefox and Microsoft Edge (which is for all intents and purposes the same as chrome) on a 2020 iMac. (I uninstalled Chrome and installed Microsoft Edge when I found that their css styling of the chromium dev tools was easier to read) I wanted to test a commonly visited heavy website. I settled on reddit.com due to it's famous weight. Before loading the website, I opened both browser's dev-tools, switched to their network tabs and disabled both of their caches. These were my results: ----------------------------- Firefox (with uBlock Origin): - DOMContentLoaded: 2.84s - load: 4.19s - Network requests: 291 ----------------------------- Microsoft Edge: - DomContentLoaded: 3.99s - Load: 5.79s - Network requests: 318 ----------------------------- I double checked the network tabs and noticed that Firefox received 291 network requests while Microsoft Edge received 318 requests. Thinking that uBlock Origin may have blocked some ads and trackers making the site load faster, I disabled uBlock Origin on firefox and reran the test (again with the caches disabled). ----------------------------- Firefox (without uBlock Origin): - DomContentLoaded: 3.02s - load: 5.14s - Network requests: 305 ----------------------------- By my (admittedly small) testing, it appears that Firefox is faster than Microsoft Edge (which is just a restyled chrome). Also, this really highlights just how great uBlock Origin is on Firefox and how painful it is for Google to push Manifestv3 on their browser (and by extension, other browsers) since it neuters uBlock Origin.
least 5y ago
There's also webkit, though there is no webkit browser on Windows, as far as I know. I do use Firefox, but Mozilla really goes out of their way to betray their core audience more and more with addons like Pocket being integrated into the browser along with advertisements in the new tab window. In either case it always feels like no matter what browser I'm using there are huge tradeoffs in one sense or another, which I never felt when I originally started using Firefox early on or early Chrome.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  > there is no webkit browser on Windows But there is for every other OS. Macs can use Safari, obviously. On Linux, KDE users (or other Qt based desktops) can use Falkon, and GNOME users (or other GTK based desktops) can use GNOME Web.
  - least 5y ago
    Yeah, I didn't mention Linux because there are actual builds that are baked into many systems or easily installed. On Windows there seems to be a way to run webkit, but not viably as a daily driver web browser. Webkit browsers in linux feel a bit half baked as well, though, when you compare it against Firefox and Chromium.
    - LeoPanthera 5y ago
      > Webkit browsers in linux feel a bit half baked as well, though, when you compare it against Firefox and Chromium. They're just browsers. They don't have built-in web services, they don't dial home, they don't sync your history and bookmarks with some unknown service. Frankly, this is a positive.
      - least 5y ago
        Yes, but they’re also not extensible as far as I know, which is the much bigger issue with them. If you don’t find yourself needing extensions that’s just fine but I rely on several to make my web browsing experience better or more useful.
Rodeoclash 5y ago
Just as IE6 took the place of the hated Netscape Navigator 4.7! Die a hero, live long enough, yadda yadda
vdfs 5y ago
> We don't want one company decide the standards It's already the case, Firefox lost a long time ago
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Then do your part regardless. Use Firefox everywhere, and eventually, it'll have enough users to prevent that one company from fully owning the web and the standards.
  - HKH2 5y ago
    I was a Firefox user, but Firefox these days pushes all sorts of Firefox advertising. I want a blank page when I load my browser; don't do the Microsoft thing and change it to your ads. I don't care about your color schemes. I don't want your proprietary extensions added after I remove them.
    - coldpie 5y ago
      > I want a blank page when I load my browser Settings->Home->"Homepage and new windows"->Blank Page
      - HKH2 5y ago
        I know. I don't want to keep doing that. I don't care how good your new features are.
        coldpie 5y ago
        I set it once per installation, then it's blank forever. If it's getting reset for you, maybe it's a Windows-vs-Linux thing or something?
birken 5y ago
Part of the reason that IE6/7 was so annoying is that those browsers had a large market share but also lacked the features of the other leading browsers so you always had to bend over backwards to make your code support both. Chrome does not have that problem. I fully appreciate the monopoly/privacy concerns, but Chrome being the market leading browser is 100x better from a development perspective then when you had to worry about IE6.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cyberpunk 5y ago
Well, I recon safari counts for something? I guess they forked a while back from whatever chrome is using. But yes, support Firefox. I've been using it for a decade, there have been ups and downs, but at the moment there's nothing I would change with it. I have to have chrome installed, like everyone else, for that one form that only works in chrome (or, I use it as the browser without any ad-blocking for when I need that..), but besides that I use it for everything work wise. The argument about the devtools isn't true anymore.
- jefftk 5y ago
  > I recon safari counts for something? I guess they forked a while back from whatever chrome is using. Safari used WebKit, and Chrome initially did as well. In 2013 Chrome forked WebKit to make Blink: https://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for-chromium.html https://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for...
freedomben 5y ago
I use and love Firefox, but I don't think it's really fair to say Chrome is the new IE. The biggest reason why IE was a nightmare was because they were slow to implement new things, and had weird unpredictable behavior and bugs that only showed up in IE. You also had to have Windows in order to test with it. On top of that, crappy or nonexistent dev tools. Also (not their fault, but) many company IT policies required use of IE. Installing Firefox or Chrome made you a rebel ;-) Chrome is far from perfect but they implement things fast and have great dev tools. If anything, I feel like Safari is the new IE. You have to have a Mac to test it, it's slow to adopt new features (sometimes aggravatingly slow), and it breaks in weird ways that Chrome and Firefox don't. I can't speak to the dev tools in Safari but I'd love to hear from someone how those compare to Chrome.
- ajdude 5y ago
  The issue in this case, I believe, is that Google is using its dominance as the primary rendering engine to strongarm its own standards. If they want something, they just implement it in chrome and everyone must follow, least the smaller browsers fails to load more and more websites.
- ______-_-______ 5y ago
  I would say the opposite. IE was popular long ago because they were fastest to implement new features. IE is the reason XMLHttpRequest has such a silly name. IE supported CSS grid 5 years before anyone else[1]. The problem is they tried to force features on everyone instead of collaborating. That started decades ago with the <marquee> tag trying to stand out against netscape, and never really stopped until IE11 got feature frozen. Now IE is left with a "grid" that's different from everyone else's "grid", because everyone else waited for consensus. Google is playing the exact same game now with things like manifest v3 and federated cohorts, etc. They're winning the game so far. They may keep winning forever, or they may not. We can only wait and see. [1] https://caniuse.com/css-grid https://caniuse.com/css-grid
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  > I use and love Firefox, but I don't think it's really fair to say Chrome is the new IE. Nobody wanted ActiveX on the web except Microsoft. Nobody wants Manifest v3 except Google.
Apofis 5y ago
Apple is working with Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and others to make web standards work more consistently across different browsers. https://web.dev/interop-2022/ https://web.dev/interop-2022/

slowwriter 5y ago

I think the larger tech community should be made more aware of this. Maybe if the likes of LTT or MKBHD (popular YouTube tech channels) could be convinced to do a video on it, it could help get more people into the Firefox camp

staticassertion 5y ago

Doesn't Chrome already effectively decide standards? What do they do that isn't standards compliant anyway? AFAIK they push new web standards all the time, and even if they didn't, they have the vast majority of the market share so the boat's sailed on Firefox imo.

RubyRidgeRandy 5y ago
Agreed. I also always feel like linux communities or hackernews is gaslighting me into thinking that firefox is just as fast as chrome. It's not. There is a tangible speed difference when using it.
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  I use it on a M1 and in my (totally subjective) experience it goes in order of fastest to slowest: safari, firefox, then chrome for speed on heavy websites...
- spartanatreyu 5y ago
  I just ran a little test to see what the difference was on my end. I opened a private tab in Firefox and Microsoft Edge (which is for all intents and purposes the same as chrome) on a 2020 iMac. (I uninstalled Chrome and installed Microsoft Edge when I found that their css styling of the chromium dev tools was easier to read) I wanted to test a commonly visited heavy website. I settled on reddit.com due to it's famous weight. Before loading the website, I opened both browser's dev-tools, switched to their network tabs and disabled both of their caches. These were my results: ----------------------------- Firefox (with uBlock Origin): - DOMContentLoaded: 2.84s - load: 4.19s - Network requests: 291 ----------------------------- Microsoft Edge: - DomContentLoaded: 3.99s - Load: 5.79s - Network requests: 318 ----------------------------- I double checked the network tabs and noticed that Firefox received 291 network requests while Microsoft Edge received 318 requests. Thinking that uBlock Origin may have blocked some ads and trackers making the site load faster, I disabled uBlock Origin on firefox and reran the test (again with the caches disabled). ----------------------------- Firefox (without uBlock Origin): - DomContentLoaded: 3.02s - load: 5.14s - Network requests: 305 ----------------------------- By my (admittedly small) testing, it appears that Firefox is faster than Microsoft Edge (which is just a restyled chrome). Also, this really highlights just how great uBlock Origin is on Firefox and how painful it is for Google to push Manifestv3 on their browser (and by extension, other browsers) since it neuters uBlock Origin.

least 5y ago

There's also webkit, though there is no webkit browser on Windows, as far as I know. I do use Firefox, but Mozilla really goes out of their way to betray their core audience more and more with addons like Pocket being integrated into the browser along with advertisements in the new tab window. In either case it always feels like no matter what browser I'm using there are huge tradeoffs in one sense or another, which I never felt when I originally started using Firefox early on or early Chrome.

LeoPanthera 5y ago
> there is no webkit browser on Windows But there is for every other OS. Macs can use Safari, obviously. On Linux, KDE users (or other Qt based desktops) can use Falkon, and GNOME users (or other GTK based desktops) can use GNOME Web.
- least 5y ago
  Yeah, I didn't mention Linux because there are actual builds that are baked into many systems or easily installed. On Windows there seems to be a way to run webkit, but not viably as a daily driver web browser. Webkit browsers in linux feel a bit half baked as well, though, when you compare it against Firefox and Chromium.
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    > Webkit browsers in linux feel a bit half baked as well, though, when you compare it against Firefox and Chromium. They're just browsers. They don't have built-in web services, they don't dial home, they don't sync your history and bookmarks with some unknown service. Frankly, this is a positive.
    - least 5y ago
      Yes, but they’re also not extensible as far as I know, which is the much bigger issue with them. If you don’t find yourself needing extensions that’s just fine but I rely on several to make my web browsing experience better or more useful.

Rodeoclash 5y ago

Just as IE6 took the place of the hated Netscape Navigator 4.7! Die a hero, live long enough, yadda yadda

vdfs 5y ago

> We don't want one company decide the standards It's already the case, Firefox lost a long time ago

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Then do your part regardless. Use Firefox everywhere, and eventually, it'll have enough users to prevent that one company from fully owning the web and the standards.
- HKH2 5y ago
  I was a Firefox user, but Firefox these days pushes all sorts of Firefox advertising. I want a blank page when I load my browser; don't do the Microsoft thing and change it to your ads. I don't care about your color schemes. I don't want your proprietary extensions added after I remove them.
  - coldpie 5y ago
    > I want a blank page when I load my browser Settings->Home->"Homepage and new windows"->Blank Page
    - HKH2 5y ago
      I know. I don't want to keep doing that. I don't care how good your new features are.
      - coldpie 5y ago
        I set it once per installation, then it's blank forever. If it's getting reset for you, maybe it's a Windows-vs-Linux thing or something?

birken 5y ago

Part of the reason that IE6/7 was so annoying is that those browsers had a large market share but also lacked the features of the other leading browsers so you always had to bend over backwards to make your code support both. Chrome does not have that problem. I fully appreciate the monopoly/privacy concerns, but Chrome being the market leading browser is 100x better from a development perspective then when you had to worry about IE6.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

cyberpunk 5y ago

Well, I recon safari counts for something? I guess they forked a while back from whatever chrome is using. But yes, support Firefox. I've been using it for a decade, there have been ups and downs, but at the moment there's nothing I would change with it. I have to have chrome installed, like everyone else, for that one form that only works in chrome (or, I use it as the browser without any ad-blocking for when I need that..), but besides that I use it for everything work wise. The argument about the devtools isn't true anymore.

jefftk 5y ago
> I recon safari counts for something? I guess they forked a while back from whatever chrome is using. Safari used WebKit, and Chrome initially did as well. In 2013 Chrome forked WebKit to make Blink: https://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for-chromium.html https://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for...

freedomben 5y ago

I use and love Firefox, but I don't think it's really fair to say Chrome is the new IE. The biggest reason why IE was a nightmare was because they were slow to implement new things, and had weird unpredictable behavior and bugs that only showed up in IE. You also had to have Windows in order to test with it. On top of that, crappy or nonexistent dev tools. Also (not their fault, but) many company IT policies required use of IE. Installing Firefox or Chrome made you a rebel ;-) Chrome is far from perfect but they implement things fast and have great dev tools. If anything, I feel like Safari is the new IE. You have to have a Mac to test it, it's slow to adopt new features (sometimes aggravatingly slow), and it breaks in weird ways that Chrome and Firefox don't. I can't speak to the dev tools in Safari but I'd love to hear from someone how those compare to Chrome.

ajdude 5y ago
The issue in this case, I believe, is that Google is using its dominance as the primary rendering engine to strongarm its own standards. If they want something, they just implement it in chrome and everyone must follow, least the smaller browsers fails to load more and more websites.
______-_-______ 5y ago
I would say the opposite. IE was popular long ago because they were fastest to implement new features. IE is the reason XMLHttpRequest has such a silly name. IE supported CSS grid 5 years before anyone else[1]. The problem is they tried to force features on everyone instead of collaborating. That started decades ago with the <marquee> tag trying to stand out against netscape, and never really stopped until IE11 got feature frozen. Now IE is left with a "grid" that's different from everyone else's "grid", because everyone else waited for consensus. Google is playing the exact same game now with things like manifest v3 and federated cohorts, etc. They're winning the game so far. They may keep winning forever, or they may not. We can only wait and see. [1] https://caniuse.com/css-grid https://caniuse.com/css-grid
GeekyBear 5y ago
> I use and love Firefox, but I don't think it's really fair to say Chrome is the new IE. Nobody wanted ActiveX on the web except Microsoft. Nobody wants Manifest v3 except Google.

Apofis 5y ago

Apple is working with Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and others to make web standards work more consistently across different browsers. https://web.dev/interop-2022/ https://web.dev/interop-2022/