State of web browsers in 2018 • Hacker News Board

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#41

Post by SamWhited » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

sstangl wrote: post #11

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in…

> Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power.

This is one of Mozilla's problems: they constantly advertise privacy, etc. and while I agree their views in general, most users don't care. If you position yourself as the privacy respecting web browser, you will only ever get the tiny niche of people who care and everyone else who sees your marketing will just roll their eyes and makes jokes about tinfoil hats. That's not to say that Mozilla should do all the anti-competitive things Google does, just that they need to stop advertising themselves this way if they ever want to get any reasonable market share back (unless they want to be a niche browser for people who don't like Google, which is fine if that's all they want to do).

That being said, I don't see how any amount of marketing can fix Mozilla's problem for the same reasons the article pointed out.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#42

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:17 PM UTC

SamWhited wrote: post #32

adimitrov wrote: post #20

Firefox for mobile is an excellent browser, and the only one I use. It supports extensions, such as uBlock without rooting the phone. The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Honestly, I don't know why people aren't using it. I think most people just don't care, and just use what the system provides. As Google gets more invasive and evil, I hope that people will start to care, and Fi…

> I don't know why people aren't using it. Like the article said: no one cares (more or less) about how good the browser is. If you have to go install a new browser, that's more work than just using the builtin one, and Google can force every Android phone to install Chrome out of the box. Also, though I use Firefox mobile out of a desire to not be a part of the Chrome problem (even though I know it's useless and I'm…

[deleted]

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#43

Post by SamWhited » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:17 PM UTC

tapoxi wrote: post #37

sstangl wrote: post #11

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in…

What would be the downside of "pulling an Edge" and just making Firefox a Chrome fork with some Mozilla specific features? There's an alternative to Google, Mozilla saves a ton of money/time on duplicated effort, and developers only have to worry about testing against Blink/Webkit. Servo/Quantum is cool, but it seems to be too late for that. I'm worried that Mozilla is simply in denial about this and when reality set…

But there's now no alternative to Blink, and Google can do the IE/Netscape thing of just ignoring the standards process and making up new web technologies that benefit them (and everyone else has to adopt them). The browser UI is the least important thing to compete on.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#44

Post by SamWhited » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

akavel wrote: post #38

SamWhited wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why people aren't using it. Like the article said: no one cares (more or less) about how good the browser is. If you have to go install a new browser, that's more work than just using the builtin one, and Google can force every Android phone to install Chrome out of the box. Also, though I use Firefox mobile out of a desire to not be a part of the Chrome problem (even though I know it's useless and I'm…

Uh, crashing??? I, like, never actually switched to Chrome in the first place (only using it sometimes for sites that "only work in IE^H^HChrome"), am using Firefox on multiple computers on Linux and Windows, and absolutely don't remember it crashing, for years at least! (edit: tweaked to clarify) edit 2: using Firefox on mobile (Android) too, for ~2 years now (i.e., since I have a smartphone), cannot recall a single…

Chrome or Firefox? I meant that Firefox mobile crashes more frequently than the others (in fact, specific sites make it crash consistently and have done for years; I could probably dig some up, but I gave up reporting them since none of the bugs have been fixed for years to my knowledge). For the most part it's still not a frequent occurrence I suppose, but it only has to happen once or twice on a popular website to make someone switch away.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#45

Post by danShumway » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

tapoxi wrote: post #37

sstangl wrote: post #11

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in…

What would be the downside of "pulling an Edge" and just making Firefox a Chrome fork with some Mozilla specific features? There's an alternative to Google, Mozilla saves a ton of money/time on duplicated effort, and developers only have to worry about testing against Blink/Webkit. Servo/Quantum is cool, but it seems to be too late for that. I'm worried that Mozilla is simply in denial about this and when reality set…

It would give the Chromium dev team a massive amount of leverage in directing web standards.

This matters because, on-the-whole, Mozilla's dev teams tend to be much better at writing standards than Google's are; partially because many of the standards Chromium focuses on are prioritized and developed with the intention of being helpful to Google's long-term strategies. There have been multiple instances (html imports spring to mind) where bad decisions were averted purely because Mozilla had the guts to say, "we're not putting that in Firefox, come back when you have a better proposal."

Yes, Chromium is Open Source, but Open Source isn't magic. It's still very much a Google product, designed to increase Google's overall influence over the direction of the web. Unless Mozilla's plan is to literally fork Blink, then having a primarily for-profit mono-culture in charge of what features get fast-tracked and prioritized for browsers is still incredibly harmful.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#46

Post by Yizahi » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:22 PM UTC

sstangl wrote: post #11

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in…

Arguably Google is already abusing their monopoly power but in the way that people like. I'm talking about AMP. In the future AMP/regular page boundary will blur and Chrome/GSearch/AMPpages will merge in the ubiquitous googlenet hosted on google servers (because it will work better than regular internet pages). Almost everybody will be happy after this and Mozilla will fall into obscurity.

Basically you can't create a revolution in tech by failing once and then trying harder the second time and it looks like Mozilla failed even while being better. The only way for Mozilla to win is (like linked article suggests) is to dominate somewhere else and then leverage that to push web browser. They won't do this and don't want to really.

PS: maybe they could buy/merge with other privacy oriented players in tech and create end-to-end privacy services that are usable, seemingly secure and integrated and then push this offering. But I can't see a big market today for this offer if it would exist.

PPS: also to add to less known evil moves by Google - their U2F websites refuse to work in Firefox, despite it supporting U2F for a long time.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#47

Post by CWuestefeld » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

SamWhited wrote: post #32

adimitrov wrote: post #20

Firefox for mobile is an excellent browser, and the only one I use. It supports extensions, such as uBlock without rooting the phone. The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Honestly, I don't know why people aren't using it. I think most people just don't care, and just use what the system provides. As Google gets more invasive and evil, I hope that people will start to care, and Fi…

> I don't know why people aren't using it. Like the article said: no one cares (more or less) about how good the browser is. If you have to go install a new browser, that's more work than just using the builtin one, and Google can force every Android phone to install Chrome out of the box. Also, though I use Firefox mobile out of a desire to not be a part of the Chrome problem (even though I know it's useless and I'm…

Until Mozilla gets the performance problems under control

Performance is 1/2 of the reason that I prefer Mozilla. As one of those people that typically has 50-100 tabs open, the Firefox model for memory management is vastly superior.

The other half of the reason is TreeStyleTab, again because I'm one of those zillion-tab users. Vertically-stacked tabs in a sidebar is the only way to manage that mountain of tabs - horizontal at the top just doesn't work. And Chrome doesn't have any extensions that support this.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#48

Post by organsnyder » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

SamWhited wrote: post #41

sstangl wrote: post #11

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in…

> Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power. This is one of Mozilla's problems: they constantly advertise privacy, etc. and while I agree their views in general, most users don't care. If you position yourself as the privacy respecting web browser, you will only ever get the tiny niche of people who care and everyone else who sees your marketing will just roll their eyes and makes…

During the IE-6 dark ages of the early 2000s, Mozilla's browser (the Mozilla suite, then standalone Firebird, finally renamed to Firefox) was positioned in a similar way: it was the niche browser for people who cared about an open web. It stayed that way for quite a few years, slowly gaining traction by implementing features—tabbed browsing, popup blocking—not found in the dominant IE browser.

I could see a similar approach working again. Mozilla could focus on user-centric features, while Chrome has to also serve the needs of Google's business interests.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#49

Post by jolmg » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

gilrain wrote: post #36

Reinmar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative to Google. That sounds realistic and I hope it will be able to team up with bigger companies which would like to compete with Google (instead of helping it). However, that made me think about Brave ( https://brave.com/ ). What are your thoughts about it? It's also privacy oriented, but it's actually built on top of Chromium. What is even more interesting,…

Brave is rent-seeking the entire Internet and doesn’t deserve serious mention.

I haven't looked into Brave in years, but the original idea I remember was that the trend of having the web be free for the public and funded by advertising (mostly the single entity, Google) was bad for the general public in terms of privacy. Therefore, it would be better if people financially supported the sites they visited and benefit from, so as to extinguish the need to give so much power to the advertising industry. In order to do that, they were modifying an existing browser with a system that would make a payment to the sites you visited that supported accepting such a payment.

Is this what you're against, or has Brave done something else that deserves being dismissive of them?

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#50

Post by Yizahi » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 4:29 PM UTC

PurpleRamen wrote: post #28

adimitrov wrote: post #20

Firefox for mobile is an excellent browser, and the only one I use. It supports extensions, such as uBlock without rooting the phone. The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Honestly, I don't know why people aren't using it. I think most people just don't care, and just use what the system provides. As Google gets more invasive and evil, I hope that people will start to care, and Fi…

> The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Ever used chrome or some other browser on android? The droidfox is quite infamous for it's slowness and backward interface.

I used Chrome and Samsung one and Firefox. There is no perceptible difference in speed of the browser, only in speed of mobile internet. I switched to FF a year ago as a main mobile browser and it works just fine.