Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brave is rent-seeking the entire Internet and doesn’t deserve serious mention.
So is cURL for that matter.
What do you mean?
State of web browsers in 2018
81–90 of 217 posts
Re: State of web browsers in 2018
#82Earlier 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?
Not just webkit's source code. What human being can have properly reviewed the source code of Chrome or Firefox or anything else both open and closed source before using it? How can any program any one of us is using right now be considered safe if we haven't properly reviewed it?
Re: State of web browsers in 2018
#83Earlier 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…
> This always made sense to me because of the multi-process architecture of Chrome, but I've never seen it myself.
If you have hundreds of tabs in Chrome, you'd have hundreds of processes. In this case, Firefox used to perform much better with lots of tabs because it didn't spin up a process for each one. The downside of this model is that a crash would take down all your tabs in Firefox rather than a single tab in Chrome. Of course, now Firefox is also multi-process.
I can never have hundreds of tabs open in Chrome because the UI just doesn't handle that nicely. In Firefox I use multi-row tabs and can comfortably have 40 tabs open without issue.
Re: State of web browsers in 2018
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also syncs nicely with the desktop version sharing tabs and passwords and whatnot. Even if Chrom* was as good as firefox there, the mobile aspect would make the difference
Sadly, the sync functionality is gated behind an insecure authentication system, so one really shouldn't use it. This is a pity, because Chrome's sync is even less secure. Compounding the pity, Firefox used to have a more secure auth system, which they threw away. I'm still appalled by that.
While I really liked the old sync system, it was never going to be user-friendly because it entrusted key management/safety to users. People just aren't ready for that and Mozilla maintaining two systems would compound the user issues.
I would accept running my own server for Sync as a solution and I believe this was even possible with the old system? Then power users could have that extra layer of security if they desired but regular users don't have to worry so much.
Re: State of web browsers in 2018
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Not just webkit's source code. What human being can have properly reviewed the source code of Chrome or Firefox or anything else both open and closed source before using it? How can any program any one of us is using right now be considered safe if we haven't properly reviewed it?
That's true, but at least Firefox born as FOSS so there is a community that potentially see the code growing by the time so while they may have lost something as individuals as a community there is a certain knowledge of the code. Webkit born open (KHtml, Kde's Konqueror html engine) but subsequent evolution happen inside few big companies and sources are release "en mass" so there is essentially "no community" that having at least seen the code grow a commit at a time so to have a sort of "big picture" knowledge...
Re: State of web browsers in 2018
#86Earlier 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…
Quantum did a bunch to speed up rendering, and Electrolysis added a multi-process architecture that makes more sense than Chrome, IMO. You essentially have a main process and multiple content processes. The number of content processes is limited to some sane amount, instead of 1/tab.
Re: State of web browsers in 2018
#87Personally I see the bigger issue right now as Apple. Apple basically has all their iOS users hostage to WebKit. Maybe we'll get lucky and Apple will lose the current app store case and another store will be able to allow other browser engines on iOS and hopefully that will light a fire under their butts so they start implementing all the missing APIs.
As a dev there are so many features missing from iOS WebKit and because iOS has such a huge market share I'm basically forced to design without those features.
I don't personally see the issue with one browser engine. It can be skinned differently and different features can be enabled or disabled. More people from more companies can contribute to the same basic engine. Kind of like so many Linux distros contribute to the same basic kernel.
Re: State of web browsers in 2018
#88Great article.
Discussion question - what incentives need to change to make Apple invest more in Safari? They've always been invested in native apps first and foremost, because that's where they make their money - the app stores.
The other place they make their money is hardware. And it's hard to say you buy a MacBook or iPhone because of safari. You don't.
So I just don't know what it will take for Apple to make significant investments in the web. Whereas Google makes all their money on the web.
Re: State of web browsers in 2018
#89From 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…
The author says "Microsoft had a browser that sucked (IE6)." This is not true. Microsoft had the best browser -- fastest, most stable, and friendliest for development. They created many of the standards we now take for granted. IE was literally the Chrome of the day -- the best browser installed by default on the biggest operating system.
Re: State of web browsers in 2018
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> There is no perceptible difference in speed of the browser No difference that maybe you can perceive, but I for one find the scrolling a lot more sluggish on FF than on Chrome, and that's on a SD 845 device, which is the latest and supposedly greatest Qualcomm chip. I just can't use FF on Android, and that's a shame because the desktop version is very good.
Tumblr was the site that got me to switch away from Firefox on Android to Brave. Firefox scrolling was like watching a slideshow, the animations would happen 5 or so seconds after you tap but Chrome/Brave was as smooth as the native app.