Live data from Hacker News

Chrome Won

andreasgal.com

71–80 of 583 posts

Re: Chrome Won

#71

I don't understand the graphs. Chrome's growth seems to be slowing according to the raw data part of the graph, yet the trend line suggests Chrome's growth to be speeding up. The trend line basically doesn't seem to fit the data at all in the case of Chrome, aside from the fact that both point more-or-less upward.

It's a classic example of someone who hasn't had to deal with "hard" statistics thinking that just drawing a trendline (and dismissing biases out-of-hand) is all that statistics is.

The author is right that Chrome has a massive share, but everyone knows that. Any analysis more specific than that requires more than just overplotting exponentials on a graph.

Re: Chrome Won

#72

Mozilla the foundation did deserve this. This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.

You're letting your personal politics cloud the facts. Firefox was struggling well before that point, not because it was bad but because Google was pouring enormous amounts of money into Chrome and the only way you don't lose in that situation is if the competition screws up.

Firefox had a big decade because Microsoft put IE on a starvation diet after Netscape folded but Google shows no sign of making a similar level of error. Firefox has never been better technically but at the end of the day they're fighting on the wrong side of a war which will be decided by budgets.

Re: Chrome Won

#73
post #17

In fairness to Firefox, at this point I'm just waiting for their dev tools to get as good as Chrome's before I seriously consider switching, and other efforts like Quantum certainly make the prospect even more attractive. Once they have me on desktop, I'll want to switch on mobile as well for the state syncing benefits. I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable portion of Chrome users were in a similar boat, quietly wait…

2 things keep me on Chrome. First, the overly large titlebar on Linux. I've tried some addons to make it more like Chrome but they all look like shit. And second, the dev tools. I find dev tools in Firefox clumsy to use. I believe I originally switched to Chrome for the dev tools when I ventured into frontend development.

Re: Chrome Won

#74

I agree with this blog post. But I don't think Mozilla lost. I worked for Mozilla for a few years, after seeing John Lily (CEO at the time) speak. It was right after Chrome started getting popular, and a smug person in the crowd asked him about how he felt about Chrome. John's response was awesome. "This is the web that we wanted. We exist not because we want everyone to use Firefox, but because we wanted people to h…

Agreed that Mozilla's original mission has been accomplished in spades, but I wouldn't count Mozilla out of the browser race just yet. Servo and Webrender[0] will completely shake up the browser landscape, and will allow web apps to match (maybe even surpass?) native mobile apps in terms of rendering performance. Unless Chrome, IE, and Safari can develop an answer to Servo and Webrender by the time those technologies…

Servo won't be ready for quite some time. (I'm thinking maybe 5 years) Project Quantum might be out sooner but it won't be that big of a leap ahead of other browsers.

Re: Chrome Won

#75
post #26
post #17

In fairness to Firefox, at this point I'm just waiting for their dev tools to get as good as Chrome's before I seriously consider switching, and other efforts like Quantum certainly make the prospect even more attractive. Once they have me on desktop, I'll want to switch on mobile as well for the state syncing benefits. I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable portion of Chrome users were in a similar boat, quietly wait…

Yeah the war is certainly not over. Chrome is vulnerable in a lot of ways. Heck at this point I can imagine IE making a huge comeback even. We'll see.

IE has been abandoned by Microsoft. No comebacks. Edge is pretty good though.

Re: Chrome Won

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does someone see a replacement on the horizon for the supposedly "legacy" laptop/desktop power combo? Even on a phone/tablet, communication often includes web hyperlinks. The obsession with mobile is a reflection of business model. If you are in the advertising / surveillance capitalism business, mobile ("sensor phone") devices provide non-desktop signals that can be monetized. Unfortunately, desktop software was h…

> Today, Apple makes money on desktop hardware rather than desktop software. Uh, App Store? http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/01/13/revenue-from-apple...

Yes, Apple make money by taxing software, not selling software directly. There is a long list of complaints by Apple software developers about the lack of marketing support that they receive from Apple, in return for the 30% tax that is yielding the app store revenue cited above. Apple can enforce iOS ISV tax because of hardware control.

From that article, the top 10 mobile "apps" by revenue can be mapped to the modern equivalent of TV, radio and telecom services. None of these are creative software apps like those from large ISVs on desktops/laptops. Instead we have many mobile ISVs who are not very profitable.

Re: Chrome Won

#77
post #53

"All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users." Faster browsing and less memory use is the only reason I've ever heard anyone switch browsers outside of privacy issues. If Servo is significantly faster and uses less memory, and if it can keep that up for years like Chrome did, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this flipping in a few years. Thankf…

The key word is “slightly”. Beating IE6 after years of neglect was possible; going against a very good team which isn't slowing down is much harder.

Re: Chrome Won

#78
I only jumped ship to Chrome when FireFox was having performance issues way back in the day. Since then FireFox improved its performance to be on par with Chrome, but Chrome isn't broke so I'm not switching back.

FireFox probably had the greatest contribution ever to modern browsing though giving us developer tools, plugins, and tabbed browsing.

Re: Chrome Won

#79
post #53

"All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users." Faster browsing and less memory use is the only reason I've ever heard anyone switch browsers outside of privacy issues. If Servo is significantly faster and uses less memory, and if it can keep that up for years like Chrome did, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this flipping in a few years. Thankf…

> Faster browsing and less memory use is the only reason I've ever heard anyone switch browsers outside of privacy issues.

Stability.

License, at least for me. I would only use a free as in speech browser.

Add-ons and success blocking ads.

Post reply on HN