18 ms·

I’m truly scared of Chrome. It pushes proprietary features, from what I know it starts enforcing some analytics/ads without possibility to block it out and the

• simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  > once it gets enough ground. I think that Chrome is way past that, being at ~70% browser market share.
• onli 4y ago
  Fighting Apple's monopoly behaviour around Safari is not fighting for chrome. Since you asked, Firefox is the browser to use if you do not want chrome.
  • boxed 4y ago
    I mean.. not intentionally maybe.
  • kristiandupont 4y ago
    As a Firefox user who is very upset with Apple for (clearly intentionally) lacking support for PWA features, I am still happy that Safari exists as a counter-weight to Chrome. Any contribution counts.
    • ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
      As a Firefox user on Linux I'm about to switch honestly. The browser is in a terrible state on Linux in terms of performance. There is video playback on without fan noise (Chromium) or a very audible fan noise on Firefox (Notebook & Steam Deck + Fedora/Pop/Arch/Ubuntu) => More use of power resulting in less time for me. Switching to Linux resulting in me ditching my forever browser Firefox is something I would not have guessed.
      • capableweb 4y ago
        You might want to check out that it's using hardware acceleration properly, and that's it's configured correctly to use wayland if you're on wayland. Personally, I bounce between macOS, Windows and Linux (mostly Linux, with Wayland), between Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari (mostly Firefox), and also between laptops/desktops and Firefox on Linux is consistently the fastest one with the least amount of crashes for me. Also the combination that lets me get the most battery life out of my laptop.
        • FpUser 4y ago
          >"You might want to check out that it's using hardware acceleration properly, and that's it's configured correctly to use wayland if you're on wayland." Maybe it should be browser's task to do it. As a user I just do not want to waste my time on things like that unless they're vital. In this case I'll just use different browser.
          • nicoburns 4y ago
            > Maybe it should be browser's task to do it. Unfortunately you don't really get that luxury if you use Linux.
          • TillE 4y ago
            Running Linux on a desktop pretty much guarantees that you have an endless parade of small problems to fix. I really wish this weren't true, but the user experience has barely improved in the past 15-20 years. The specific problems may be different, but it's still the same struggle.
  • lelandfe 4y ago
    https://gs.statcounter.com/ https://gs.statcounter.com/ Firefox is not a serious competitor at this point and its tiny 4% of the market has already slipped to 3% in the last year. That’s inching close to the “can we please drop IE11” sort of numbers from some years ago.
    • MerelyMortal 4y ago
      Are you suggesting that people shouldn't use it since it has a small market share, and thus should allow it to get smaller until it dies out?
      • lelandfe 4y ago
        Moreso that Safari truly is the only bastion against Chrome’s hegemony.
        • mtomweb 4y ago
          Safari is not competing. It only runs on MacOS and iOS. It doesn't compete on Linux, Windows or Android. - It comes last out of the three major browser engines in feature support. - It has the most number of bugs out of the three engines. - It has the worst support for Web Apps. Apple has deprived the Safari/Webkit team of funding for the past decade. Safari places no competitive pressure on chrome, and has deprived Mozilla and thus Firefox of 100's of millions of dollars in search engine revenue. Apple has done untold damage to the web and this needs to be fixed.
          • rvz 4y ago
            Firefox is almost no where to be found and hardly has anything to bring to fight against Chrome [0]. In fact, Mozilla is on life support with Google's money with the Mozilla CEO being the one laughing all the way to the bank as Firefox continues to be irrelevant. Safari (WebKit) is the only one competing against the Chrome ecosystem, especially on mobile devices market. The EU Digital Markets Act will just declare Chrome the winner and will increase Chrome's dominance and will make Mozilla even more irrelevant. [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/ https://gs.statcounter.com/
  • kivle 4y ago
    I tried to switch to Firefox as my main browser, but sadly the blocker for me was the absolutely horrible battery life on my Macbook Pro M1. It's like it's continuously running a spinning loop or something. It reduced my battery life to somewhere between 4 to 6 hours. I have since switched to Vivaldi (which is based on Chromium unfortunately), but I will probably switch back to Firefox if those battery issues are ever resolved.
    • gls2ro 4y ago
      If Firefox will focus _everything_ on making FF on MacOS reduce their batter consumption to the minimum possible (less than Safari should be the goal) then I think this is the only _winning strategy_ for FF not going into irrelevance. not sure it is also possible to compete on battery performance with Safari but that is the only one I see. Drop any other project, any initiative and just focus on this. Why: 1. Because there is a big chunk of developers who code web on MacOS thus winning them means what they build will run on MacOS 2. Becoming default for this group of technical people means they will recommend it for their families and more important install it for their young kids laptops 3. Can do it with Google money :)
      • kibwen 4y ago
        There are approximately as many Firefox users are there are MacOS users, on the order of 200 million users. In fact, there are probably more Firefox users than MacOS users. Concrete numbers are hard to come by, but you have to take optimistic estimates of MacOS's userbase to match moderate estimates of Firefox's userbase. If Firefox is a global also-ran, then so is MacOS.
        • gls2ro 4y ago
          You might be right - I did not check the numbers. My idea was primarily based on my experience is something like this: I know (meaning I know what they use) around 15-20 devs on MacOS. Almost all of them have FF installed. Some may open it occasionally but just as an alternative to open in private mode or check some weird behavior to see if it is cross-browser or cache related. - personal usage: except maybe 2, all the others are using Safari (most of them) and Chrome few - professional usage: except for the same 2, here I think Chrome is more used and Safari less Thus in these developers' case, I don't think they will recommend FF to their friends or relatives even if FF is installed on their machine as it is not their daily driver. I am in the same category regarding usage: I forced myself multiple times to use FF. Still try to do that couple of times per year. But fallback to Safari because the battery lasts so much longer and because it is integrated with the MacOS keychain. One might think that with M1, people might afford to lose a bit of battery but it is the reverse. Seeing how long it lasts one barely thinks of cutting those hours short :) Could mean starting to carry again the power adapter or always looking for a table near a power socket. Here is a browser that I installed not long ago and start to like it more and more: https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com
  • Gorbzel 4y ago
    It functionally is. Many of those who have not learned from history are so anti-Apple (or possibly subpar webdevs) that they completely ignore the lessons we've previously learned about why browser monoculture is dangerous. Even more worrisome, these people often ignorantly call Safari "the new IE", meaning they're aware of the history and problems and choose to pursue their own broken interpretation. If these people will ignore a browser with 50% market share on mobile and 20% overall due to their own shortsightedness, clearly they're going to ignore Firefox or others hanging out in the single digits.
    • error503 4y ago
      > Many of those who have not learned from history are so anti-Apple (or possibly subpar webdevs) that they completely ignore the lessons we've previously learned about why browser monoculture is dangerous. I'm confused, because to me it seems that the pro-Apple folks are the ones ignoring the lessons from large corporations using their weight to force monocultures. Firefox is the only meaningful browser that is open and won't be leveraged by its steward to promote their business interests.
      • dmitriid 4y ago
        Please read "Breaking the Web Forward" https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_the_we.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th... --- sart quote --- Back fifteen years ago IE held back the web because web developers had to cater to its outdated technology stack. “Best viewed with IE” and all that. But do you ever see a “Best viewed with Safari” notice? No, you don’t. Another browser takes that special place in web developers’ hearts and minds. --- end quote ---
        • error503 4y ago
          Oh you're absolutely right about Chrome, I'm just not sure why you mention 'anti-Apple', because Apple's leverage is being used in many of the same ways, just much more aggressively than 'best viewed in IE', instead it's 'App Store/WebKit/<choose your monoculture> or pound sand'.
  • vehemenz 4y ago
    If you are in favor of Chrome on iOS, then you are in favor of a Chrome monopoly, or you don't understand how browser monopolies work. Or maybe you weren't around during the browser wars (a lot of < 30s on HN).
    • tristan957 4y ago
      This is a false dichotomy. Open competition is not an endorsement for monopolies.
      • vehemenz 4y ago
        First, can you explain how you came to interpret my particular statement as a universal one? It doesn't seem like a good faith reading. If you doubt that a Chrome monopoly results from Chrome on iOS, that's an argument you can make, but it doesn't look terribly plausible. Second, your use of "open competition" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, suggesting that browser market share is determined by ordinary market forces (it's not) or that Apple isn't competing openly with Google already. Why would allowing the competitor's browser on your hardware be considered "open competition?" Again, it's not clear.
• amelius 4y ago
  Perhaps we should prepare for this by building nice, user-friendly sandboxes that run Chrome inside it.
  • mistrial9 4y ago
    no, Canonical is doing this with Ubuntu desktop and a default Firefox in a snapd container. Tragedy and comedy ensue .. not fun, don't like it
    • amelius 4y ago
      That's why I said nice and user-friendly :)
• samwillis 4y ago
  If Apple was forced to compete on iOS for the dominant position that Safari holds, it would receive greater investment, add support for vital missing PWA features and potentially as a result grow its desktop market. I believe competition in the long run would break Blinks dominant position, and be better for both consumers and developers.
  • microtonal 4y ago
    If Apple was forced to compete It is not a fair market since the maker of one of the browsers also owns a significant portion of the websites that people use daily. Now Google has to play nice with Safari to some extend, since the don't want to miss out on the lucrative iPhone market. Once Google can offer Chrome on iOS, they will destroy Safari with the same underhanded practices as they did to Firefox (a pattern of subtly breaking Firefox with Google products).
    • samwillis 4y ago
      > Once Google can offer Chrome on iOS, they will destroy Safari with the same underhanded practices I don't believe that would happen, firstly Apple would fight back, and secondly the competition authorities would take action against Google. Google is under scrutiny for its behaviour too. You can't fight or justify anti competitive behaviour with anti competitive behaviour back.
      • nlitened 4y ago
        > firstly Apple would fight back With what?
      • girvo 4y ago
        You have more faith in our competition authorities fairness and approaches to these mega corps than I do, but I hope you’re right and I am wrong.
      • philliphaydon 4y ago
        The moment iOS is forced to give browser freedom, chrome has won. It will be a sad day for sure.
• amq 4y ago
  I'm using Firefox on my Windows, Mac and Android, and I don't remember when was the last time that I had to open Chrome.
  • Larrikin 4y ago
    I've used Firefox for twenty years. It's not everyday but I have to open Chrome, or recently Brave, atleast once a month to deal with shitty frontend developers that only test their latest code in chrome, awful security captchas that only work in Chrome, and just total shit show foreign/non American sites that went from worst practices in IE to worst practices in Chrome because some old man/men in their government/company decided it needs to be done in a certain way because it works best on their ten year old laptop. I just open tickets, complain, limit interaction with offending sites, because as someone who lived through AOL and internet explorer I know how awful it will be if a mega tech company is allowed to dictate web standards because they don't have to interoperate. Most sites can just be cordoned off until they fix the issue or be forgotten about but banking sites often intersect total shit programmers and by the book regulations that are poorly written sadly. Also Firefox is the only cross platform browser that lets me control what I see and doesn't force me to waste time in my life by seeing ads without jumping through hoops.
    • acomjean 4y ago
      I had a similar experience. Though for me it turns out the reason Firefox wasn’t working for me for some sites was that some sites didn’t work with ublock origin which wasn’t installed on my chromium. Turning it off for non working sites in Firefox fixed the issues for me.
    • FpUser 4y ago
      >"Also Firefox is the only cross platform browser that lets me control what I see and doesn't force me to waste time in my life by seeing ads without jumping through hoops." Brave blocks ads by default
      • Larrikin 4y ago
• kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
  Thankfully I've noticed an uptick in younger Firefox users due to memes on Reddit about how using Firefox is cool.
  • nobleach 4y ago
    My son uses Opera! He keeps telling me (an engineer) I should use it. I'm like, "do not cite the deep magic to me kid, I was there when it was written. It does give me hope that not all folks are lemmings. Just like during the IE6 days, there was a nice ground-swell of Firefox (or "Fox-fire" as some of the older folks called it) users.
    • jabroni_salad 4y ago
      Opera GX has been sponsoring youtubers, might have seen it from there. It does actually have some interesting features nowadays. The background resource limiter would have been nice when back when I played WoW, since the usual database site had some serious memory leaks.
      • nobleach 4y ago
        I'm certain that's it.
    • jefftk 4y ago
      Since 2013 Opera has been a Chromium wrapper, like Edge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)
      • nobleach 4y ago
        Oh yeah, that one's a bit trickier to explain. It's a bit like telling people, "no, You CAN NOT currently run real Chrome on your iPhone... yes I know you see an icon that says 'Chrome' on it..." I'm not sure he gets the concept of "browser engines".
• summerlight 4y ago
  You don't need to worry about Apple. You don't need to underestimate Apple's engineering team. It has the most well-funded and competitive engineering team on the planet and they can afford fighting for browser market share against Chrome. Safari was falling behind the competition for a while not because Chrome is a unbeatable monstrosity but Apple doesn't have to compete against it.
  • pmontra 4y ago
    Whatever they'll do, company policies will only let Safari run on Apple hardware where they want developers create apps to make Apple profit from. Any improvement to Safari is less profit for the Store. However maybe the EU will really force Apple to let other browser engines run on their devices and they'll have to let go a part of the Store. We will see. On the other side, Chrome runs on any hardware and people using Safari on their iPhone are likely to use Chrome at work or on their PCs. The competition is almost one sided and can't be won by staying inside the closed world of Macs and ìPhones, especially ìPhones because of the internal competition from native apps.
• emsy 4y ago
  > Hey, sorry but we can’t sell you toothbrush because you’re using Safari/Firefox/Vivaldi/whatever. Don’t buy there. This has nothing to do with chrome.
  • asddubs 4y ago
    individual solutions will never fix systemic issues like that.
• reitanqild 4y ago
  How Google hasn't even got a slap on its wrist yet for how they have massively abused their market position to push Chrome is beyond me. Which reminds me it is about time to send one of my approximately twice-a-year reminders to competition authorities around here and remind them about it. If anyone else feels the same, please do, maybe if letters start arriving from other persons than old grumpy reitan they will actually care?
  • sprkwd 4y ago
    That would be something I would do. Do you have a template you send?
    • reitanqild 4y ago
      Sadly no. But something along the lines of: -------- header, greetings etc I'm writing you in the hope that you would have time to look into the abuse of market power by Google that has destroyed a well functioning market for web browsers. Background: Back before 2008 IE was both stale and very dominant and [...] The reason for this was both that Internet Explorer (IE from now) started out as a very good browser for it time, but more importantly that Microsoft (MS) abused its market position to push it everywhere and to intentionally degrade experiences for other browsers as proven by Opera Software when they showed that MS technical support web pages magically started working if one let their browser identify itself as IW. Microsoft was fined severly for this and was also forced to create a browser ballot on machines sold in the EU at least where they had to present IE togheter with competing browsers. Around this time MS also to some degree started changing their ways This was followed by the rise of OS independent browsers, especially Firefox in the beginning but also Chrome later. Since around 2010 the growth of Chrome has been happening by eating every other browsers share and there is a lot to indicate that technical superiority is far from the only reason why this has happened: - remeber to mention bundling (w/Adobe and probably others) - ads on the front page of Google, something that no others have been allowed to - misleading ads (showing download a better browser also to firefox users and opera users) - and last but not least: Google has also been caught red handed in degrading experiences for other browsers, not based on technical capabilities but how they identify themselves -------- This should serve as a starting point. I need to get back to work and English is not my first language so make your own : )
• rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
  >Is there any other anti-Chrome bastion than iOS’ Safari? What an insane take, I don't believe you are serious, there's no way you're not a troll. Safari is not an anti-Chrome bastion, Apple does not care and does not want Safari to be a better browser than Chrome. They just care about controling from where you install the apps on your phone.
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    Insane? Regardless of Apple's intentions, Safari's iOS monopoly is the only reason web devs test on two browser engines rather than one.
  • Klonoar 4y ago
    They’re not a troll and this is an increasingly commonly held take. Chill.
• grishka 4y ago
  The first thing we need to do is to limit the scope of the web. Make the web tech finite. Stop evolving it. Throw away all the wannabe-app-platform crap and anti-user features like service workers, PWAs, DRM, WebUSB, WebBluetooth, WebSerial, WebMIDI, then declare HTML, CSS, and JS immutable. Third party cookies also need to be abolished, yesterday, with no replacement. Then we could possibly have new, from-scratch, independent browser engines that could compete with the status quo.
  • kbrosnan 4y ago
    That would mean the web is dead. The things you mention would result in more app only experiences.
    • grishka 4y ago
      Yes. That's the point. The web is for documents. Please stop trying to build actual apps with hypertext macros. We did have a technology for adding interactive app-like content to hypertext documents, it was called Flash. I do hope that it gets eventually resurrected but as an open standard. There is an open-source Flash player being actively developed right now, Ruffle. There isn't an open-source authoring program yet, but this feels like a much lesser issue. IMO it's important for there to be that boundary between the "document" and the "app". The only real shortcoming of the original Flash was that it relied on a proprietary plugin. Of course, Apple also needs to be forced to allow app sideloading, that's regardless of what they do or do not implement in Safari.
  • Sargos 4y ago
    The web is the only credibly neutral platform humanity has. If you get rid of the web then all software that humans interact with will be controlled by one of a small handful of giant corporations which I think I can speak for nearly everyone here would be a Very Bad Thing. No more porn. No more innovative experiments. No more kids making dumb little things to learn programming. No more freedom to set your own app policies. The web is the only platform keeping user and dev freedom alive and it's imperative that hackers like us fight for it.
• Gordonjcp 4y ago
  You should probably just not use the Internet any more.
• tdy_err 4y ago
  Well it is still open source and in that case you would be able to access the site with the same browser features just using Chromium instead