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State of web browsers in 2018

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Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#71

Post by jcranmer »

sebazzz wrote: post #24
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…

How well is Gecko/Servo suitable for embedding in another application as a web browser? Apparently it is very easy with Chrome, why we have 25+ Chrome derivatives.

I can't speak for Servo, but Mozilla pretty firmly gave up on trying to have a good embedding story for Gecko and SpiderMonkey (in the name of being able to rapidly iterate on APIs, which never ended up settling down) somewhere around 2009. I contend that one of Mozilla's big mistakes was to give up on embedding.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#72

Post by majewsky »

bad_user wrote: post #54

From TFA: >> " For developers, it’s one less browser engine to worry about " >> " For the open web: it’s complicated. If I were to put on the hat of a pragmatic developer, I fail to see the big gain in having competing browser engines. " The author does not understand web standards and probably doesn't remember IExplorer's monopoly and the era of " works best in IExplorer " websites. And what fewer and fewer people r…

Downvoted because this is quoted entirely out of context. The author makes it abundantly clear that he is not actually holding this position.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#73

Post by jcranmer »

Yizahi wrote: post #46
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…

> 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.

The one that still sticks in my craw is that they never bothered to add support for Hangouts in Firefox. Hangouts was modified to use WebRTC in Chrome, but relied on a plugin in Firefox--despite Firefox actually implementing the relevant WebRTC features first.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#74

Post by danShumway »

tapoxi wrote: post #64
danShumway wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are enough large, interested parties (Samsung, Microsoft, Mozilla) out there that they could literally fork Blink if organizational issues arise and gain a sizable install base.

Sure, but how big would those issues need to be?

Would it be worthwhile to make a fork over HTML imports? Suppose that in a mono-engine world Google decides to build AMP directly into the browser rather than on top of Javascript -- would that be a big enough issue to make a fork? I was (like many people) fairly disappointed about Web DRM, but I was happy that Firefox was at least planning to put some additional sandboxing above what Chromium was doing. Would they have forked a codebase just to introduce that extra sandboxing?

You're right that Open Source does allow us to reverse course and fork Blink later if something terrible happens. Remember though, the moment that someone like Mozilla or Microsoft makes a fork, at that point they're back to the same situation that they're in right now -- even worse, because they're stuck using a codebase that wasn't architectured specifically to meet their goals. That provides a big incentive to wait as long as possible before deciding, "heck it, we'll build our own engine."

What I would suggest is that there are at this moment already at least minor organizational issues within Chromium, and there are currently benefits to having multiple browser engines. We could give up those benefits and get them back later if stuff got really bad. But it would mean waiting until things got really bad; and ignoring all of the tiny, daily decisions before that point that go in to setting the direction of the web.

Remember that the web isn't supposed to break backwards compatibility. If you don't get things right the first time, there isn't a second chance to change them.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#75

Post by jolmg »

BostonEnginerd wrote: post #40
gilrain wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I disagree. They have presented an alternative to the current system of surveillance capitalism without forcing anyone into their platform. I don’t really love the browser and wish the Brave protocol was available for Firefox, but hopefully we can get there sometime in the future.

I really don't know what's better. While it's bad that having a free web has lead to multiple entities doing everything they can to track as much as they can, it's also a great benefit to society to have free access to so much knowledge.

In the end though, I don't think we'll see a shift to people paying for their content. Societal problems arising from lack of privacy is one of those high-impact-low-probability-or-slow-to-come risks that the public is so bad at handling for their greater aggregate benefit.

To really see a change, if Brave has done their part, what'd be missing would be a general public education program that would better inform the public of what the risks are and what can be done about it. Something like Smokey Bear.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#76

Post by CWuestefeld »

SamWhited wrote: post #55
CWuestefeld wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - hor…

That's actually really interesting; I don't tend to have a ton of tabs, but coworkers always told me Firefox did a terrible job with 100+ tabs and that Chrome worked better. This always made sense to me because of the multi-process architecture of Chrome, but I've never seen it myself. So you're suggesting that Firefox actually performs better now? Maybe all my coworkers complaining about it are just repeating lore t…

Chrome has separate processes for each tab, as well as for each extension. In my Windows install I right now have only 3 tabs open, but it's using 24 processes. And in my experience, those processes all carry a goodly amount of overhead: even a simple page seems to consume 10s of MB, as does even a simple extension with no UI. I just created a HelloWorld page with nothing but that text, and it alone is consuming one process with 22.9MB.

In contrast, Firefox pools those processes. I currently have 56 tabs open, but only 6 Firefox processes running, consuming a total of 1.7GB. So for example, there is (AIUI) just one single process that's responsible for all rendering behavior. I don't have the same detailed information about how much resources that HelloWorld page is taking, but it feels more efficient to me.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#77

Post by dtech »

xte wrote: post #63
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,…

Only a sidenote: did you think any human being can have properly reviewed webkit source code before using it? If not, how can be anything based on webkit considered to be safe, privacy oriented etc?

This is a pretty bad argument, as exactly the same can be said for the Servo/Firefox codebase

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#78

Post by acheron »

mike22223333 wrote: post #65

As a publisher, most of us do not care about Firefox either. They have done us no good. So we don't even bother to test on it. Their so called "Tracking Protection" is nothing more then a gimmick. It can be bypassed easily using methods other then cookies. All it did was reduce the revenue from ads because of no cookies (the legitimate way to track id's). It did an insignificant harm to Google. But it reduced the rev…

Thanks for the excellent reminder of reasons to not use Google products.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#79

Post by vanadium »

azangru wrote: post #70
jacobherrington wrote: post #27

I'm a developer and a Firefox user. I'm always a little sad when I pair with another developer, and they ask why I'm not using Chrome. Mozilla is one of the few tech companies that care about the well-being of its users. In my opinion that is very special.

> I'm a developer and a Firefox user. By developer, do you mean web developer? I tried to use Chrome dev tools, and they were incredibly easy to pick up; however whenever I try to use Firefox dev tools, they feel embarrassingly awkward. Perhaps it's just the familiarity with the tools (and if so, I am very curious to hear whether you prefer Firefox dev tools over Chrome's), but have a nagging feeling that it's just a…

Both have their pluses and minuses.

It was delightful when auditing the experiences from a potential new client in Firefox Dev Tools the other day, and realizing that I could see, inline to the target DOM element, JS events tied to them while looking through the source. Saved me a good amount of time.

When I'm looking for pure-play performance auditing, Lighthouse integrated into Chrome's Dev Tools are an obvious win.

So yeah, each have their strengths and weaknesses.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#80

Post by acheron »

austincheney wrote: post #7

> At least those browsers are compatible with the web. Websites will work in them because websites are built to work in Chromium. That is a poorly drawn conclusion. Edge is compatible with the web. Developers are solely developing for Chrome and not caring for cross browser testing. As a Firefox user I sometimes encounter this myself.

Developers are solely developing for Chrome and not caring for cross browser testing.

The true spirit of Internet Explorer lives on!

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