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Everytime we discuss this here, there are still a ton of ways people defend using Chrome. It’s like being sucked into the network effect and they feel powerless

by prox 3y ago

Everytime we discuss this here, there are still a ton of ways people defend using Chrome. It’s like being sucked into the network effect and they feel powerless without using Chrome. I would like to counter that and say that diversity is better for the ecosystem than any gain you might find in using Chrome. Use Brave, Firefox… any other of the new browsers… anything really that brings more choice and less power to Google. It’s about balance. Nobody wants to go back to IE6 - part 2.

Eisenstein 3y ago
> Nobody wants to go back to IE6 - part 2. Indeed. The IE dominance and then stagnation set back web development for half a decade at least.
- userbinator 3y ago
  and then stagnation That's a good thing. People figured out how to do more with less, and make it compatible cross-browser too.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    The IE6 era had lots of websites "designed for IE". Once IE became dominant enough, most people stopped caring about cross-browser compatibility. Which made it even harder to get out of the browser monopoly
  - beej71 3y ago
    This was a coding nightmare that I don't wish to re-live. IE6 was a tremendous resource sink.
veave 3y ago
Way to dismiss everybody else's opinions. You won't win the "war" by doing that. I use Chrome because it's fast and it gets out of my way. Firefox on the other hand is slower (not slow, but slower than Chrome) and shows ads every now and then. Other browsers are Blink-based so they are as fast as Chrome but there are concerns about ads too (think Brave, Opera, etc). So maybe Firefox should get their act together? Why are you blaming users? Is it our fault that things are this way? We do what we can with the tools we have.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  You could at least use a "degoogled" chrome variant like Thorium, Bromite, Ungoogled Chromium and such. And some "farther from the tree" variants like Vivaldi are not as shady as, say, Opera.
  - nomilk 3y ago
    I should also 'know better', yet I still use chrome despite a growing distrust of google. I agree with the parent comment's observation that it's no good blaming users; other browsers need to make a compelling case. There's a saying in YC lore that a new app has to be an order of magnitude better for people to switch, but I think other browsers are approximately as good as chrome (but not 10x better). The greatest concern for me is privacy; I presume the org who makes the browser sees a list of every action I do on the internet, so I have to be able to 1. know who they are and 2. trust them (or, distrust them less than I do Google). There's probably also some 'safety in numbers' heuristic to browser choice too.
  - veave 3y ago
    The browser is a very sensitive piece of software (most of the data I receive and send goes through it every day) and I can't trust the creators of small forks. I also can't trust they are updated fast enough. Vivaldi is awful. They rewrote the UI in javascript and it's slow and buggy.
- piva00 3y ago
  I've been back to using Firefox for about 3 years now, never seen an ad from it. What do you mean by "show ads every now and then"? I really don't remember one single instance of being shown an ad in the browser since I got fed up with Chrome's bullshit. At least on my computers I don't see any performance difference between Firefox and Chrome, at work I have to use both, and right now I have 3 Chrome windows and 2 Firefox ones open, all of them with multiple (like dozens) of tabs, no noticeable difference.
  - luuurker 3y ago
    > What do you mean by "show ads every now and then"? Last month, for example: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-stops-firefox-fullscreen-vpn-ads-after-user-outrage/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-stops... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360
nerdjon 3y ago
This is not defending it, but the annoying situation is that I am finding myself sometimes forced to use Chrome. I don't use it as my primary browser and it I use it at an absolute minimum, but more and more I see popups of being unsupported in Firefox or needing a critical plugin for a workflow at work. I do worry that we are seeing a repeat of that situation, a bit different but the same idea. A browser having too much control and shaping things their way.
- starttoaster 3y ago
  > This is not defending it, but the annoying situation is that I am finding myself sometimes forced to use Chrome. ... but more and more I see popups of being unsupported in Firefox The obvious suggestion here is to use a Chromium-based browser that is not Google Chrome. Like Brave.
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    Is there a reason to use brave besides being a contrarian? Why do you trust brave? They've had their own share of controversies. And it's still a chromium browser. Sure they could disable evil feature X, if you trust them to decide which features are evil and Chrome doesn't have a setting to disable that feature, but if Google decided to remove a feature that you liked, Brave would have no way* of adding it back. * Afaik they aren't really staffed up to maintain a fork so much as tweak settings and repackage
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - starttoaster 3y ago
      > Why do you trust brave? They've had their own share of controversies. Not incredibly relevant, I suggested to use a different browser. If you don't like my suggestion, input your own valid replacement to Google's Chrome. Talk about being a contrarian. You also seem to mistakenly believe that Brave is a child of Google Chrome. Brave is a child to Chromium, and Google Chrome is a child to Chromium. This article states that the Topics API is being added to Google Chrome. I made my suggestion on the assumption that they would have said that Google added the Topics API to Chromium if they added it to Chromium. If the article worded this poorly and they actually meant to say that Google has sunk this in to upstream Chromium, then I cheekily alter my suggestion to W3m or Lynx.
vbezhenar 3y ago
It is not obvious to me that diversity is better. I, for one, like Google moves and like Chrome. I think that web will be better with a single engine. Safari is alternative and I hate it because it always breaks complex layouts and requires additional work. Linux is a single server OS and it's good. IE was bad because Microsoft is bad.
- prox 3y ago
  Ok, so one day you have a single engine and everything works through that one engine. Google gets say a new CEO who does things that are contrary to what you want (say they become like Microsoft) What you gonna do? Nowhere, because you don’t have choice left. All important things work ONLY through that engine. For me making sites that work on other engines is the job!
  - paintman252 3y ago
    >What you gonna do? I'm gonna use Chrome fork or previous version. Chromium is open source

by prox 3y ago

Eisenstein 3y ago

> Nobody wants to go back to IE6 - part 2. Indeed. The IE dominance and then stagnation set back web development for half a decade at least.

userbinator 3y ago
and then stagnation That's a good thing. People figured out how to do more with less, and make it compatible cross-browser too.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  The IE6 era had lots of websites "designed for IE". Once IE became dominant enough, most people stopped caring about cross-browser compatibility. Which made it even harder to get out of the browser monopoly
- beej71 3y ago
  This was a coding nightmare that I don't wish to re-live. IE6 was a tremendous resource sink.

veave 3y ago

Way to dismiss everybody else's opinions. You won't win the "war" by doing that. I use Chrome because it's fast and it gets out of my way. Firefox on the other hand is slower (not slow, but slower than Chrome) and shows ads every now and then. Other browsers are Blink-based so they are as fast as Chrome but there are concerns about ads too (think Brave, Opera, etc). So maybe Firefox should get their act together? Why are you blaming users? Is it our fault that things are this way? We do what we can with the tools we have.

brucethemoose2 3y ago
You could at least use a "degoogled" chrome variant like Thorium, Bromite, Ungoogled Chromium and such. And some "farther from the tree" variants like Vivaldi are not as shady as, say, Opera.
- nomilk 3y ago
  I should also 'know better', yet I still use chrome despite a growing distrust of google. I agree with the parent comment's observation that it's no good blaming users; other browsers need to make a compelling case. There's a saying in YC lore that a new app has to be an order of magnitude better for people to switch, but I think other browsers are approximately as good as chrome (but not 10x better). The greatest concern for me is privacy; I presume the org who makes the browser sees a list of every action I do on the internet, so I have to be able to 1. know who they are and 2. trust them (or, distrust them less than I do Google). There's probably also some 'safety in numbers' heuristic to browser choice too.
- veave 3y ago
  The browser is a very sensitive piece of software (most of the data I receive and send goes through it every day) and I can't trust the creators of small forks. I also can't trust they are updated fast enough. Vivaldi is awful. They rewrote the UI in javascript and it's slow and buggy.
piva00 3y ago
I've been back to using Firefox for about 3 years now, never seen an ad from it. What do you mean by "show ads every now and then"? I really don't remember one single instance of being shown an ad in the browser since I got fed up with Chrome's bullshit. At least on my computers I don't see any performance difference between Firefox and Chrome, at work I have to use both, and right now I have 3 Chrome windows and 2 Firefox ones open, all of them with multiple (like dozens) of tabs, no noticeable difference.
- luuurker 3y ago
  > What do you mean by "show ads every now and then"? Last month, for example: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-stops-firefox-fullscreen-vpn-ads-after-user-outrage/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-stops... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360

nerdjon 3y ago

This is not defending it, but the annoying situation is that I am finding myself sometimes forced to use Chrome. I don't use it as my primary browser and it I use it at an absolute minimum, but more and more I see popups of being unsupported in Firefox or needing a critical plugin for a workflow at work. I do worry that we are seeing a repeat of that situation, a bit different but the same idea. A browser having too much control and shaping things their way.

starttoaster 3y ago
> This is not defending it, but the annoying situation is that I am finding myself sometimes forced to use Chrome. ... but more and more I see popups of being unsupported in Firefox The obvious suggestion here is to use a Chromium-based browser that is not Google Chrome. Like Brave.
- bagacrap 3y ago
  Is there a reason to use brave besides being a contrarian? Why do you trust brave? They've had their own share of controversies. And it's still a chromium browser. Sure they could disable evil feature X, if you trust them to decide which features are evil and Chrome doesn't have a setting to disable that feature, but if Google decided to remove a feature that you liked, Brave would have no way* of adding it back. * Afaik they aren't really staffed up to maintain a fork so much as tweak settings and repackage
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - starttoaster 3y ago
    > Why do you trust brave? They've had their own share of controversies. Not incredibly relevant, I suggested to use a different browser. If you don't like my suggestion, input your own valid replacement to Google's Chrome. Talk about being a contrarian. You also seem to mistakenly believe that Brave is a child of Google Chrome. Brave is a child to Chromium, and Google Chrome is a child to Chromium. This article states that the Topics API is being added to Google Chrome. I made my suggestion on the assumption that they would have said that Google added the Topics API to Chromium if they added it to Chromium. If the article worded this poorly and they actually meant to say that Google has sunk this in to upstream Chromium, then I cheekily alter my suggestion to W3m or Lynx.

vbezhenar 3y ago

It is not obvious to me that diversity is better. I, for one, like Google moves and like Chrome. I think that web will be better with a single engine. Safari is alternative and I hate it because it always breaks complex layouts and requires additional work. Linux is a single server OS and it's good. IE was bad because Microsoft is bad.

prox 3y ago
Ok, so one day you have a single engine and everything works through that one engine. Google gets say a new CEO who does things that are contrary to what you want (say they become like Microsoft) What you gonna do? Nowhere, because you don’t have choice left. All important things work ONLY through that engine. For me making sites that work on other engines is the job!
- paintman252 3y ago
  >What you gonna do? I'm gonna use Chrome fork or previous version. Chromium is open source