State of web browsers in 2018 • Hacker News Board

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#171

Post by adimitrov » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:11 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.

Yes. Yes, actually, I have. It's neither slow, nor do I find its interface bad. Actually, I think it's way better than Chrome on Android, because I like the way the new tab functionality works (and I sometimes keep around 20-30 tabs open on mobile.)

My phone isn't even some flagship. It's an OP3T, and it copes very well with FF.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#172

Post by dbrgn » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

akavel wrote: post #67

SamWhited wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would be curious about the websites indeed!

Me too. I've been using Firefox for quite a while now (on a Fairphone 2, which is rather slow) and it performs fine and never crashes.

I particularly love the possibility of opening multiple links at once in the background, and buffering them until I switch to the Firefox app.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#173

Post by ksec » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:29 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #145

dbolgheroni wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I said this up-thread, but Firefox Quantum made me switch back to Firefox, after years away. I noticed a marked speed improvement.

For Single Tab instances, Chrome and Safari still wins. For multiple Tabs, Firefox wins hands down.

But the majority of users rarely open more than a few.

Firefox will need to continue iterate, until it is as fast or even faster in every corner.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#174

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:40 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.

[deleted]

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#175

Post by ksec » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:47 PM UTC

May be I am in the extreme minority. I don't have problems with Safari. ( Judging from the 170 Comments so far and not a single supporter of Safari, I really think I am )

Instead of implementing every single iteration of Web Standard that Google dished out, kill it and rework much like all of their products, Safari decide to pick it up once everything has been stabilise.

Instead of trying to turn everything on the Web as Web App and give everything on the computer a Web API, they have been perfecting the Web Pages. ( Which in terms of publishing standard is still far from perfect )

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#176

Post by superkuh » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

tokyodude wrote: post #102

superkuh wrote: post #4

We're getting to the point where browsers are worthy of the decades old criticism Emacs has received. They have eventually become an OS with many fine features - simply lacking a good web browser. It's a large, sprawling project to make a good OS. Especially when the language of choice to run on it changes with such haste. Hopefully this nth re-imagining of dumb terminals dies off over the next few years and applicat…

Browsers to me are amazing. I can run untrusted code in my computer from all over the world and at least with Chrome the odds of my machine getting pwned are pretty low. The Chromium team fixes security issues quickly. For that I get this amazing environment where I can see things as incredible as Google Maps 3D, games, music apps, etc all sandboxed incredibly well. The whole thing is far far more secure than running…

This is getting worse and worse though as browsers expose more and more of their host operating system's functionality. The benefits of using a website instead of a native app are quickly disappearing, while the drawbacks have only been somewhat mitigated. And this leads back to my original post.

Additionally, it promotes the software as a service milking of fees and online only access. It prevents end users from ever being able to tell what code is going to be run on this computer since it changes on a whim. No hash checking of binaries is going to help you here.

There's no doubt browsers are supremely complex, amazing things. But that isn't good.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#177

Post by jchook » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:56 PM UTC

I want to switch to Firefox.

The few things preventing me seems small, but have made the transition unfriendly and/or tedious.

1. Chromium "Multiple Users" feature allows me to separate business and personal life very conveniently. Now that I have this feature, I cannot give it up. It seems Firefox has this functionality, but it's difficult to use without additional extensions and "Import from Chrome" doesn't support it.

2. 1Password and other extensions I use on a daily basis have inconvenient drawbacks on Firefox. For example, 1Password dropdown does not show in form fields like it does in Chromium.

3. Firefox UX still feels... meh. The ugly dotted focus ring around any link I click stands as a good example. I don't see any preference to turn it off. Menu navigation... there's no submenu peeking-- you have to click in then click back. The whole browser feels jerky compared to Chrome.

It's easier and more pleasant for me to ignore Chrome's lack of privacy and forget about Firefox.

I think Mozilla should give some serious thought and focus on making it incredibly easy and smooth to switch to Firefox.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#178

Post by bzbarsky » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #33

Even if some web sites don't care about cross-browser adoption, it seems like the browser vendors do, including people at Chrome who propose new standards? As long as this is the case, the web standards process is still working much as it always has. Apple and Firefox still have a veto.

As far as I can tell, people at Chrome have _very_ strong incentives to propose new standards and ship implementations of them in the browser. Incentives around then responding to feedback on those standards and getting them into a state where anyone else would implement them are much weaker. Incentives to not ship until this process has happened are nonexistent; in fact lack of interest from anyone else is very explicitly never a reason to not ship something for Chrome, as far as I can tell.

Disclaimer: I work on Firefox, but read the blink-dev list fairly regularly; the last sentence above is repeated pretty often on that list.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#179

Post by rdsubhas » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:20 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. Either there will eventually be a privacy/creepiness fiasco, or Google will attempt to use Chrome as leverage to squeeze a competitor out of a market.

They did recently. They force signed and associated every user to the Chrome identity, thereby linking everything users do in the web to their Google ID. Nobody seems to have bothered.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#180

Post by latexr » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 10:55 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…

Add AppleScript support to Firefox and I’ll switch today.

I don’t like Chrome’s dominance either, but what do you want me to do if your browser does not support a feature I use everyday, multiple times a day (and that was there but was removed, back in version 3)? You’re giving me a browser that is useless for my needs, so I can’t use it.

You bet I’m thinking of leaving Chrome behind (and will likely do so once I make a clean install to Mojave, that should happen soon) but my only real alternative is Safari. I’d rather that alternative be Firefox, but it isn’t. I rely on browser AppleScript control so heavily, I’d sooner stop using a web browser than switch to Firefox.

And if you think I’m alone in that, there’s a chunk of the macOS automators community you’re not visiting. We build our tools with support for major browsers (and some minor) but never Firefox, because it can’t do it. We don’t even mention it anymore. If someone asks why our tools don’t work on Firefox, we answer that it’s because you don’t support the necessary feature. The number of people asking is lower every year.

Every time there’s a Firefox thread on HN, you see the same complaints from macOS users: poor performance, missing features (I’ve seen lackluster Keychain support also mentioned).

Give me a browser I can use, and I will.

P.S.: Even if I could code enough to add what I need, it’s not even clear to me from your bug tracker if you’d take the addition. Last I looked, I couldn’t even decipher if AppleScript support is something desirable or not.