State of web browsers in 2018 • Hacker News Board

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#121

Post by joel_ms » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #89

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…

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.

Then they decided to stop improving IE6 (outside security updates) because they (correctly) realized that the web was a threat to the company. IE7 was released 5 years later, literally due to the pressure of other browsers on web standards support.

That's when IE 6 sucked, and we all had to live with that suckiness for years on end because of microsofts insane backwards compatibility policies keeping deprecated software alive on life support.

Even Microsoft has a IE6 countdown timer now https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/ie6coun...

IE6 was an unfathomably damaging disaster for the web.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#122

Post by thaumaturgy » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:08 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…

Firefox's current problems go back to around 2011, and you can see this in the trend graphs.

At that time, there was still a hot three-way race between Chrome, Firefox, and IE. But Mozilla made a misstep: they decided that, to compete with Chrome, they would adopt a new "Rapid Release" model. This resulted in a massively pissed-off base of former supporters and articles like "Rapid-release Firefox meets corporate backlash" [1] and "Understanding the Corporate Impact" [2]. There were multiple discussions with titles like, "Mozilla Executive: We're Not Interested In Enterprise Level Users", and it was still going on a year later with, "Everybody Hates Firefox Updates" [3].

People have been conditioned now to accept frequent updates, and -- years later -- the browser vendors have mostly stopped reskinning their interface every other release. But that wasn't the situation at the time, and so Firefox gave up their one competitive advantage over Chrome, and leveled the playing field in Chrome's favor.

Mozilla could have instead embraced that big, loyal enterprise base, and found a sane middle road for updates that allowed them to keep a healthy release schedule for DOM, JS, and CSS support. But, they didn't.

So all of that good will that Mozilla had fostered over the years just evaporated, and Mozilla never looked back.

(It didn't help that, just after alienating their enterprise user base, Mozilla also kicked off some drama with a developer [5].)

This falls into that category of mistakes-that-kill-your-business-years-later, alongside other case studies like Sears and RadioShack.

[1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/rapid-release-firefox-meets-corpor...

[2]: https://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/understanding-the-corporat...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692205

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209384

[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741660

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#123

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:13 PM UTC

jhpriestley wrote: post #120

Cynox wrote: post #5

If it had been introduced today, would PNaCl have been rejected which ultimately lead to a better solution (WASM), or would it have been broadly accepted since it had sufficient market reach though Chrome?

Five years on, asm.js/wasm has been completely rewritten, has almost no adoption from developers, and lacks many of the features from PNaCl ... it may turn out well eventually but I don't think it's a great success story for web standards.

PNaCl didn't have adoption either, and the entire foundation was flawed. Starting with LLVM may have made it easy to add features quickly, but the only reason to do that would have been to get early adoption at the expense of long-term engineering benefits. That bet failed.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#124

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:14 PM UTC

tokyodude wrote: post #87

Personally 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 b…

Again: How do I get Chromium to accept our Rust code, in the world where it's the only browser engine?

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#125

Post by CalRobert » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

joombaga wrote: post #81

CalRobert wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is cURL for that matter.

What do you mean?

My understanding was that op felt by blocking trackers, ads, etc. Brave was effectively a free rider on the internet. This has always seemed weird to me since I shouldn't be obliged to run code that gets downloaded. When I use cURL (or block js, etc.) I can download just the content (usually) without all the dependencies. But I don't think this makes me a free rider.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#126

Post by tapoxi » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

asituop wrote: post #69

tapoxi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If Mozilla can't reach enough user now, why would they do with a fork of Blink ? It's not a web engine problem, it's just that Google is too powerful and Chrome is everywhere, so they decide. And actually it is better for innovation not to use to Blink. WebRender is potentially much more performant than any other engine and it would never had existed if Mozilla were just aligning with Blink

They won't, but it'll save money and engineering effort spent on Quantum/Servo.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#127

Post by curlypaul924 » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

jolmg wrote: post #49

gilrain wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ind…

Advertising isn't fundamentally bad for privacy, otherwise newspapers and movies would be bad for privacy; it's targeted advertising (which requires keeping a profile for each user) that is fundamentally at odds with privacy.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#128

Post by curlypaul924 » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #18

Reading this on FireFox mobile, I think it's the best mobile browser out there (I've tried a lot of different browsers). Sad to see it not gaining market share. That being said, there is a way for it to pick up steam. It would just require a new platform to come a long (probably competing with Google) to use FireFox

I keep trying firefox mobile every few months, and it feels really sluggish on my phone compared to chrome.

I really want to like it; firefox has for a decade been my browser of choice on the desktop because of add-on support (which unfortunately got much worse with WebExtensions).

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#129

Post by aklemm » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

sehugg wrote: post #22

aklemm wrote: post #15

As good a place as any to ask something I've been wondering about: Is a Chromebook a complete computing environment now that WebAssembly is getting adoption?

Depends on your definition of "complete" -- ChromeOS now has Android and Linux container support, so you've got options for command-line apps. Ironically, you have to run Electron apps (based on Chromium) in a Linux VM.

Interesting, thank you. I could see Electron apps replaced with WebAssembly apps eventually.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#130

Post by Semaphor » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

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…

I don't understand how anyone can claim FF is faster. I love FF and I switched completely from chrome. But Chrome is far faster. I don't know maybe it is because I have an abundance of RAM (32 GB) and others don't and that's why they think FF is faster.

But for me, it's easy to test. Go to http://addic7ed.com/ and open the (very long, nearly 5k entries) [Select a TV Show] drop-down. On FF (and IE/Edge FWIW) there is a noticeable delay in opening. I'd say 200-400ms. On Chrome it opens instantly.

Next, have something playing that consumes decent amounts of CPU in a tab. I used twitch. Then go somewhere and rapidly open new links (I middle-clicked around on Wikipedia). After about 10 tabs, FF starts slowing down (opening tabs that look like blank tabs and only starting to load after a delay) and possibly interrupts playback in the background tab. IE/Edge are even worse and will start opening tabs slower than you click and keep opening for a while after you are done. In Chrome on the other hand, everything is instant.

I'm on Windows 10 and everything is up to date. I'd love for someone to tell me that it's different for them.