Live data from Hacker News

Chrome Won

andreasgal.com

171–180 of 583 posts

Re: Chrome Won

#171

I disagree with the horse / car metaphor. Each platform is different, radio or TV is a better metaphor for still being popular but different. I highly doubt PCs will be relegated to a novelty few dozen in a cities.

Roc has a similar comment in the comment section. I agree and disagree. Desktop PCs will be around, but the vast majority of interaction minutes will be on mobile (and maybe in the future elsewhere). Most of the 6bn people or so who arrived online once the Web took off don't have PCs, and don't need it. Its a geographic/infrastructure issue (lots of LTE in Africa and Asia but no landlines etc), and also a generational one. Kids grow up with smartphones. Why use a PC if the phone works? PC won't go away, but if 90% or 95% or online minutes are mobile, do PCs still matter?

Re: Chrome Won

#172
The discussion here got me thinking about my own sluggish Firefox vs. Chrome experiences. I took a look at my extensions config panel in Firefox 53.0.3, and wondered if there was a way to tell which of my myriad of addons (most of which I don't use regularly) might be blocking electrolysis from turning on.

Well, there's an addon for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

If you install it, it will mark on the panel which of your extensions are not using the new plugin API, and it will tell you at the top of the panel if Multiprocess Firefox is enabled. I got mine enabled by cleaning house. I'm curious to see how well it behaves under load now!

Re: Chrome Won

#173
post #157
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good, a website doesn't need access to my file system. Stuff like that is why we need firefox and why SaaS companies shouldn't be making browsers.

It's sandboxed. I would love to see Firefox to succeed. That would be good for the web. But Firefox cannot succeed if Mozilla is unwilling to innovate. Stuff like this is why Firefox is falling behind. Stuff like this is what differentiated Chrome. Without Chrome and Google's push on the technical boundaries of the browser, many HTML5 features wouldn't exist. I, like many, don't want to stay in the web Stone Age.

Look, at some point we either need to decide that the 'web' is just a VM bolted to a downloader or there need to be some limits on how it can interact with the host system.

Re: Chrome Won

#174
post #54

I finally switched to Chrome from Firefox just last week. I just couldn't take the hang ups anymore. Here I am with an absurdly beefy game development workstation and it's hitching switching tabs and scrolling pages. Absolutely unacceptable. Moving everything over to Chrome took about 2 minutes since the importer pretty much grabbed everything and it wasn't hard to get the extensions I needed. The only thing that ann…

I had the opposite experience. I used Firefox the last 48 hours on Mac and it works really well. I can't find a reason to not use it, but also no reason to use it. Commodity products. I think this is the choice most users face. Add a lot of marketing dollars and defaults on Android and you can explain Chrome's growth curve.

Re: Chrome Won

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I installed Chrome on my kid's laptop the other day because the web app they were using in class didn't work in Edge or Firefox. Another time she had tried to open a link to a Word Doc and didn't realize it downloaded it. I showed her where it was in the downloads folder and she proceeded to upload it to Google Drive to open it instead of using Word. Very few functions kids do these days require a specialist app, jus…

>"I don't like Apps, I prefer websites." for netflix, the website has more features, so yeah.

Apps have some features not available on the web. E.g. You can fast forward in Netflix's apps on certain platforms. Not on the web.

Re: Chrome Won

#176
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We cannot possibly be talking about the same Google. This is the Google of AMP et al. You think they won't do the exact same thing Microsoft did with IE when they find themselves in a similar dominant/monopolistic position in the market? You're sorely mistaken. We already find many examples of websites and Web apps that work only on chrome or the chrome "web store". This not to mention the surveillance and privacy nu…

The only sites I've seen that only work on Chrome are generally due to the developers being lazy and only targeting the top platform. It's similar to many games only being available on iOS a few years ago, or many programs only being available on Windows. Now with the web, it's much easier to make something work across all platforms, except at the bleeding edge, which is generally where you'll find those sites. Almos…

WhatsApp Web was Chrome-only for a while. That was quite a big one for many people I know.

Re: Chrome Won

#178
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We cannot possibly be talking about the same Google. This is the Google of AMP et al. You think they won't do the exact same thing Microsoft did with IE when they find themselves in a similar dominant/monopolistic position in the market? You're sorely mistaken. We already find many examples of websites and Web apps that work only on chrome or the chrome "web store". This not to mention the surveillance and privacy nu…

But there is more than just web browsing. Microsoft owned the entire platform at one point.

Why do you think google is pushing web-everything and chromebooks? They want to own the entire platform just as Microsoft did.

Re: Chrome Won

#179
post #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.

Google definitely not standing still. I hope that doesn't change despite the near-monopoly status.

Re: Chrome Won

#180

> exponential trend They're market shares & hence bounded by 0 and 1, so exponential seems pretty unrealistic. The logistic curve is a better starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_economics...

This is what I came here to post, and you can see that, in the mobile chart, Chrome and Safari already seem to be levelling off. Maybe a better model would be like an ADSR (attack decay sustain release) envelope in sound synthesis where the logistic curve represents the attack / initial adoption phase, possibly followed by a mirror logistic curve representing mature saturation then eventual replacement by competitors…

2004 was a dark time...
Post reply on HN