Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

ha.x0r.be

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 180 posts

Re: Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

#81

Post by tialaramex »

k__ wrote: post #42
jdeibele wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Mozilla has a special container just for Facebook and I use that. Other people have made similar special containers for Google, etc. but I don't trust them as much as Mozilla. So I use one container for Google properties (gmail, YouTube, etc.), a different one for social networks other than Facebook (Twitter, Reddit, etc.), and a third for shopping (eBay, Amazon, etc.) You can teach Firefox to always open cer…

Multi-Account Containers is from Mozilla too. As far as I know, Facebook Container is just more comfortable to use. https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/multi-account-co...

For MAC you are responsible for curating the decisions about what's inside each container.

That's a bunch of work. The more complicated or fast changing the sites in a container, the more work.

Facebook Container comes with the curation done by its maintainers. This is probably less trouble than it might be because it's not as though developers who use Facebook are unheard of.

Re: Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

#82

Post by pcwalton »

kevingadd wrote: post #76
eightysixfour wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except battery, it is a battery destroyer unfortunately.

There's some potential for the new WebRender stack to improve battery life a lot - part of the reason why Edge is so good at saving battery is that it makes good use of modern GPUs to save power, and Firefox's new graphics stack is another modern one that attempts to avoid wasting CPU/GPU to do old-style rendering of web pages

It's really that we should be using the OS compositor more than we are, particularly on macOS. I think I'm probably going to be working on this, or at least finding someone to work on it, soon. WebRender should make this easier, because we should be able to get away with using a smaller subset of the OS composition functionality than other browsers do.

Anyway, for now, if you're on macOS, set gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config for a large increase in energy efficiency at the cost of some visual effects.

Re: Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

#83

Post by snaky »

user812 wrote: post #39

The new Google Chrome design with version 69 marked the beginning of a new era – Google wants to portray Chrome as something that is way more than a browser. They want you to see it as the primary interface of the web. This is what the average user wants. All complex functionality has been put in the background. Cross-platform integration has been perfected. Give it a year and users around the world will no longer th…

> users around the world will no longer think of Chrome as a browser, but simply as the interface to the (Google-)Web

The funny thing is the only country free from that (Google-)Web is China.

Re: Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

#84

Post by lern_too_spel »

mthoms wrote: post #60
user812 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I think about it, no. People make the decision between different ecosystems, and Apple and Google are the biggest. Apple has a tight control over Safari on iOS. Safari has been defeated on Desktop though.

I disagree. Safari way outperforms Chrome on MacOS while using considerably less battery. I know, it's behind on some features/standards though.

Not only is it missing a lot of features, many of the features it has implemented are buggy to the point of being unusable. Try speeding up an HTML5 video for a quick example of something people often do that is not implemented correctly in Safari.

Re: Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

#85

Post by checkyoursudo »

mehrdadn wrote: post #52
Teknoman117 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any sites specifically that were causing you problems? I've not run into any issues myself with flash sites, netflix, amazon, hulu, etc. That being said, I use the gentoo chromium package that builds chromium from source and rips the codecs out of the binary chrome release.

No, I was asking to figure out if I should switch! When I look up their differences this is what I see, which makes me hesitant, so I'm wondering if it's an actual problem or not.

I also use Gentoo and the packaged Chromium and have zero issues with YouTube and Amazon videos.

Re: Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

#86

Post by mehrdadn »

checkyoursudo wrote: post #85
mehrdadn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I was asking to figure out if I should switch! When I look up their differences this is what I see, which makes me hesitant, so I'm wondering if it's an actual problem or not.

I also use Gentoo and the packaged Chromium and have zero issues with YouTube and Amazon videos.

Thanks! But have you had issues with any other videos (or anything else besides lack of Google integration/auto-updates for that matter)?

Re: Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

#87

Post by vxNsr »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #27
pishpash wrote: post #17

Syncing Chrome across devices has long rendered the point moot. If you wanted syncing you were already logged in to the browser. If you didn't want syncing, there was no reason to use Chrome.

And yet Firefox has sync too.

I'm actually kinda upset at firefox, because I wanted to switch, but when I tried the syncing (from one firefox instance to another) it didn't seem to work for like 90% of my bookmarks, history, passwords so I kinda gave up.

Re: Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

#88

Post by kentonv »

pcwalton wrote: post #71
kentonv wrote: post #64

I feel like there's some implied assumption here that this change lets Google do something evil that they couldn't do before, but I don't really see what. If you're logged into Google properties (independent of browser), Google can already track you across most of the internet, via their Ads and Analytics embedded in a rather large percentage of web sites. If you don't want Google to track you on non-Google web sites…

Firefox has containers that allow you to effectively run multiple profiles at once.

Oh, nice! I failed to discover "containers" when I searched for "firefox profiles"; maybe someone should add a link from https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-... and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Mul... ...

Re: Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

#89

Post by Retr0spectrum »

kiaulen wrote: post #35
jen729w wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would think that would be as a direct result of consuming more resources, not less. What is it doing to drain your power, do you know? I really want to switch from Chrome -> Firefox for dev work but my MBP’s battery already lasts nowhere near “10 hours”...

Well, if you're looking for battery life, both safari and edge have excellent battery life by virtue of not doing anything useful. And if you're looking to do dev work, that usually means at minimum an editor, a server, and a browser, which seems like too much to run unplugged.

Unless your editor is actually a webapp itself, I don't see how that's going to tip anything over the edge in terms of practicality...

The resources consumed by any web server I can think of are entirely inconsequential.

Re: Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

#90

Post by amluto »

dredmorbius wrote: post #2

The obvious problems and conflicts here are multiple. 1. People may wish to not have activity on multiple services connected or associated. This was certainly true for me when I found that G+ and YouTube accounts, independently created, though sharing a common email address, were conjoined. 2. Google is put in a position of advantage as regards online identity. This persists across several dimensions: a). Google apps…

> What were they thinking?

That all these things are good or neutral for Google.

Post reply on HN