Live data from Hacker News

Chrome Won

andreasgal.com

181–190 of 583 posts

Re: Chrome Won

#181

Firefox took marketshare from IE when that was impossible. It could do it again with Chrome, if things change a bit. Some problems with Mozilla are that they don't do community management well any more. In the old days, there were amazing grassroots-driven projects like spreadfirefox.com. It is not like that any more. Grassroots supporters have trouble participating, even if they try. For example, I tried to create a…

Tech-savvy users don't drive adoption. They provide insight on product direction to help a nascent company with an immature tech product cross the chasm to mainstream usage, saving it from the usual fate of foundering aimlessly until it runs out of funds.

These two suggestions -- Mozilla getting involved in meetups and not deprecating an API allowing vim navigation in the browser -- would take Mozilla even farther from relevance, assuming any nonzero opportunity cost to those actions.

Re: Chrome Won

#182

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…

> (maybe even surpass?)

As Servo would be a mobile app itself, I think no ;)

Re: Chrome Won

#183

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…

Firefox is the only android browser with ad-blocking plugins enabled. That makes it the only usable browser on mobile. Sucks that they don't have an IOS version, but Apple is the problem there, not Mozilla.

Try Brave. It has built-in ad-blocking and tracking protection on iOS and Android. I use the iOS version.

Re: Chrome Won

#184
I don't have the perspective of a Mozilla CTO, but I feel like it's just history repeating itself. 15ish years ago, IE had "won", but eventually Firefox had pushed for better web standards with extensions, and then Chrome doing the same thing, but at the time, significantly faster and more secure than other browsers. But trends always change, and I'm sure in a few years (maybe a short few, maybe a long few) we will have a browser that will "win" over Chrome. The major advantage that Chrome has currently is that it's pushed heavily by Google, but that is also fickle, as evident by older search engines that went away like Yahoo, Ask Jeeves. I know a lot of people that won't use Chrome because it sucks on a laptop. The major benefit now is that we have all major browsers targeting standards compliance, unlike when IE was biggest.

Besides, why is it a competition? It's not a zero sum game to see who is the biggest, best browser.

Re: Chrome Won

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox and haven't run into this problem. I guess I've been lucky. Why Firefox rather than Chrome? On my Google Chromebook (original Pixel), Chrome (the last versions I tried) are almost completely unusable - it hogs all the CPU until it crawls to a stop and needs to be killed. Even if they fix that, I'm not going back, however, because Firefox's handling of text is so immensely superior. It was bad years ago¹…

Google products, which I can't get away from, are starting to fail completely on Firefox. I've run into several other complex sites that fail on Firefox. It's sad, because I've used it for years. I'm using it right now. But my default just switched to Chrome because I started having too many Firefox issues.

The real problem is not that Firefox has issues, but that it's a small enough market share now that more and more web services can get away with not bothering to test on it.

Re: Chrome Won

#186

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…

>> We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. Well said. I certainly hope it is not a PR stunt, but WordPress is probably the other big player in the fight for the open web. It might actually benefit all of us if Automattic starts making a lot of noise about privacy. And ultimately, its not as if anyone wants any of these tech giants to completely fail (well, maybe Facebook). What we want is to n…

And the EFF (and potentially the ACLU)

Re: Chrome Won

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google products, which I can't get away from, are starting to fail completely on Firefox. I've run into several other complex sites that fail on Firefox. It's sad, because I've used it for years. I'm using it right now. But my default just switched to Chrome because I started having too many Firefox issues.

Hmm. I use Pale Moon and rarely have problems. Maybe I'm just not creative enough about the websites I visit.

And meanwhile I've been having no trouble with Firefox, but had to stop using Palemoon because too many websites were breaking consistently.

Re: Chrome Won

#188
post #87
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is we're moving extremely fast to a chrome only world. If it wasn't for corporate sites and the success of the iPhone chrome would probably be dominating the way IE used to. I definitely run into sites that only work on chrome and not in any other browser. In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to. Unlike IE and FireFox and Safari it…

Chrome is improving on the resource usage front. It's far from perfect but it's getting better. As for privacy you could use the open source chromium, there's a fork somewhere which has all the Google removed.

One of the privacy enhanced Cromium clones is called Iridium Browser.

https://iridiumbrowser.de/

Re: Chrome Won

#189
post #115

I started Firefox OS in 2011 because already back then I was convinced that desktops and browsers were dead. Not immediately–here we are 6 years later and both are still around–but both are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential going forward. ...snip... To stick with the transportation metaphor: Google makes the best horses in the world and they clearly won the horse race. I just don’t think that…

The desktop couldn't save them either. Remember their biggest source of funding and promotions came from Google. With Chrome out Google had no reason to promote Firefox anymore.

So now Firefox has to look for more partners but there is little sense in partnering with a browser vendor for anything outside of websites. Among those nothing is as lucrative as and ubiquitous as a search engine.

Now a OS vendor could maybe get funded and promoted by a manufacturer or a phone service company.

Re: Chrome Won

#190
post #87
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is we're moving extremely fast to a chrome only world. If it wasn't for corporate sites and the success of the iPhone chrome would probably be dominating the way IE used to. I definitely run into sites that only work on chrome and not in any other browser. In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to. Unlike IE and FireFox and Safari it…

Chrome is improving on the resource usage front. It's far from perfect but it's getting better. As for privacy you could use the open source chromium, there's a fork somewhere which has all the Google removed.

I find it shameful they ever let it become such an incredible energy hog in the first place. It's been well known for years among mini Mac people that you can get drastically better battery life by using Safari. I mean it wasn't like it was a 10 or 15% problem, it's orders of magnitude.

It's nice there working on it, but why didn't they ever care before?

Post reply on HN