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State of web browsers in 2018

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Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#151

Post by Wowfunhappy »

mrweasel wrote: post #97
asituop wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Exactly, people seems to only remember that Mozilla was a little behind Chrome some years back. That by no means the case anymore. Unless you're somehow embedded in the Google ecosystem, there's no reason to prefer Chrome over Firefox. It's not like the other Blink or Chrome based browsers are doing great, sure Brave and Vivaldi is getting some press, but they have even less users than Firefox. Sadly Firefox isn't pe…

> Exactly, people seems to only remember that Mozilla was a little behind Chrome some years back. That by no means the case anymore.

This isn't directly relevant in the larger context of this thread, but Firefox's sharp drop—even after the introduction of Quantum, which I've found to be a big improvement—is what makes their situation much more scary to me.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#152

Post by bunderbunder »

jolmg wrote: post #137
bunderbunder wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This feels like a false dilemma to me. Many, if not most, of the corners of the web that are devoted to disseminating knowledge are funded by means that don't involve tracking ads. It's the entertainment corner of t…

I think you're right. Wikipedia (and other WikiMedia projects), MDN, StackExchange sites, wiki sites like wiki.archlinux.org, wiki.osdev.org, wiki.c2.com, public forums like lambda-the-ultimate.org or news.ycombinator.com would probably still be free. I can't think of any place that I've learned significantly from that provides their content for advertising money. They all seem to be up primarily for altruistic reaso…

Stack Exchange advertises, but, to the best of my knowledge, they don't engage in any tracking-based advertising, so it doesn't really bother me.

I'll even click on those ads if I'm interested (crazy, right?), which is something I scrupulously avoid doing for ads that I suspect are fueled by tracking.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#153

Post by untog »

dmitriid wrote: post #117
Yizahi wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recent example is how Chrome broke audio on a lot of websites https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/15/17358752/google-chrome-66... I won't even link to the discussion in Chrome's bugtracker, Chrome team didn't even test the change, apparently. They also actively build "Chrome-only" websites.

IMO that's not an abuse of monopoly thing at all. It's not as if removing auto-play audio will push users towards some Google-only product, if anything it would mean fewer users choosing Chrome.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#154

Post by LamaOfRuin »

xte wrote: post #85
jolmg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm pretty sure that as far as lineage goes, Chrome was actually born more FOSS (KHtml) than Firefox was (Netscape). Firefox is certainly more FOSS in spirit now than Chrome has ever been, but Mozilla is certainly not immune from the kinds of shenanigans possible for any open source project that is entirely controlled by a single large organization.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#155

Post by untog »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #143
Yizahi wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Arguably Google is already abusing their monopoly power but in the way that people like. I'm talking about AMP. Do people actually like AMP? I hate it and strongly wish I could disable it for all Google search results. It's supposed to make pages load in more quickly, but for some reason they always seem to be slower for me.

Broadly speaking, yes they do. It is faster in the vast majority of cases, and non-techie friends of mine speak enthusiastically about the lightning bolt icon. Of course, they don't understand the implications of it.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#156

Post by Izkata »

untog wrote: post #155
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Arguably Google is already abusing their monopoly power but in the way that people like. I'm talking about AMP. Do people actually like AMP? I hate it and strongly wish I could disable it for all Google search results. It's supposed to make pages load in more quickly, but for some reason they always seem to be slower for me.

Broadly speaking, yes they do. It is faster in the vast majority of cases, and non-techie friends of mine speak enthusiastically about the lightning bolt icon. Of course, they don't understand the implications of it.

> and non-techie friends of mine speak enthusiastically about the lightning bolt icon.

Which makes me think it's just confirmation bias. They expect it to be faster, and so perceive it as faster. Just like when Windows Vista was presented to users as the new Windows 7 (only the branding was changed for the experiment), and they openly stated it was noticeably better/faster than Windows Vista.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#157

Post by jolmg »

bunderbunder wrote: post #152
jolmg wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right. Wikipedia (and other WikiMedia projects), MDN, StackExchange sites, wiki sites like wiki.archlinux.org, wiki.osdev.org, wiki.c2.com, public forums like lambda-the-ultimate.org or news.ycombinator.com would probably still be free. I can't think of any place that I've learned significantly from that provides their content for advertising money. They all seem to be up primarily for altruistic reaso…

Stack Exchange advertises, but, to the best of my knowledge, they don't engage in any tracking-based advertising, so it doesn't really bother me. I'll even click on those ads if I'm interested (crazy, right?), which is something I scrupulously avoid doing for ads that I suspect are fueled by tracking.

> Stack Exchange advertises

Yeah, but I get the feeling that it didn't start with the purpose of advertising. Haven't really looked into its history to know for sure, though.

> I'm not really opposed to topical advertising. And I'm not even particularly opposed to targeting. Showing ads for Databricks alongside a Stack Overflow question about Apache Spark is fine by me (just so long as it isn't a popup or an auto-playing video). That's no creepier than advertising car stuff in a car magazine.

I wouldn't be opposed to tracking if that's all it ever amounted to, either. In fact, your example doesn't seem to involve tracking. Deciding what to show based on the content of the page doesn't imply using any knowledge of you from other sources.

EDIT: Anyway, what's worrying of tracking is that it makes the buying and selling of personal information a viable and profitable business. It's not worrying if you think that such a business can only be used for showing ads you're interested in everywhere you go. In fact, that's a benefit to anybody, and that's what makes it a good public justification for it by the companies that do this tracking.

However, that's not the only way people can apply your personal information. For example, businesses can also use it to personalize the prices for the products and services they offer based on indicators they bought of your purchasing power. Insurance companies can use a lot more than indicators of your purchasing power to know how to quote you, probably getting their hands on knowledge that by law they probably shouldn't be able to get their hands on to avoid unfair discrimination. There's regulations of what businesses can ask of employee candidates to avoid unfair discrimination, but they won't need to ask anymore if they can just buy the info online.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#158

Post by swebs »

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…

>People who use Firefox in the future will increasingly be people who do so consciously, presumably because they view Mozilla as helping them protect their privacy. Chrome is and will continue to be the default.

Honestly, the only reason I use Firefox is because it supports vertical tabs and Chrome doesn't. Maybe you should start advertising features that are more immediately visible than privacy.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#159

Post by Izkata »

organsnyder wrote: post #48
SamWhited wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

And they already have (at least) one they could use as a starting point: Containers

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#160

Post by Izkata »

dbolgheroni wrote: post #100
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…

As a long Firefox user, I did switch to Chrome/Iridium lately. When Firefox decided to attack the problem of market share with engineering, 2 things were happening (almost) at the same time[1]: 1) the deprecation of the old add-on engine and 2) the introduction of the new Quantum engine. For the 1), while I understand there are some reasons in doing so (it was not a stable API as it was always breaking the extensions…

> Of course everyone likes a responsible browser, but I actually didn't see that much difference.

Same here. The only difference I noticed was startup speed when restoring 200+ tabs; that was indeed far faster in Quantum, but I never noticed any other speed improvements. And it was something I only encountered once every couple of weeks anyway.

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