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State of web browsers in 2018

ferdychristant.com

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Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#181

Post by jaredcwhite »

This article's assessment of Safari is way off. It's an excellent browser, and my default browser as a web designer and application developer. The interface is night and day superior to Chrome, it's very very fast on macOS and iOS, and it's often been at the forefront of design-related improvements to the web.

The one area it's historically been behind on (progressive web apps) is the reason it gets knocked by people who care primarily about progressive web apps. Personally I'm more interested in the web primarily as a visual interface communications medium, and so in that sense, I'm actually against a number of decisions Google has made in its development of Chromium over the past few years (because Google has also prioritized PWA over other use cases for the web).

Anyway, if you don't care for Safari, that's your jam, but to state objectively that Safari is mediocre and Chrome is much better is simply unjustifiable and reveals the bias of the author.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#182

Post by skybrian »

bzbarsky wrote: post #178
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 expl…

Hmm, what do you think of Blink's feature launch process? [1]

(I'm no expert, but to me it seems impressively bureaucratic.)

[1] https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#183

Post by fiatjaf »

I don't understand why people don't use Firefox for Android. It's easily the best mobile browser: allows addons (like uBlock Origin) and connects with the desktop browser (share tabs etc).

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#184

Post by fiatjaf »

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…

Hey, install this _native!_ application powered by Electron!

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#185

Post by bzbarsky »

skybrian wrote: post #182
bzbarsky wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expl…

Hmm, what do you think of Blink's feature launch process? [1] (I'm no expert, but to me it seems impressively bureaucratic.) [1] https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features

I think it's a lot better than not having a process, for sure! The hearts of most of the people involved are in the right place, as far as I can tell, and they do listen to feedback some of the time. That said, they feel that if they think something is a good idea then that means they should do it even if others disagree. Which is understandable, of course.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#186

Post by wyclif »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #146
machiaweliczny wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true in my experience. I liked firefox on mobile for ability to use addons. But with some update it started being totally unresponsive and crashing my phone, so I switched back to chrome which happily displays ":)" with 100+ tabs open. On mac firefox is eating battery faster than chrome. I would like some alternative for phone - so I will maybe try vivaldi or brave or test firefox once again.

> On mac firefox is eating battery faster than chrome. If you're on a Mac and want better battery life when web browsing, Safari will do better than both Firefox and Chrome in most cases.

That's why the only time I ever use Safari on my MBP is when I'm away from a power source. Which isn't very often.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#187

Post by mr_toad »

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…

> 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.

Perhaps if it ever comes to that, people will look to an alternative means (than the web) of accessing documents and code.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#188

Post by tokyodude »

superkuh wrote: post #176
tokyodude wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

Well to each there own. For me I'd prefer everything in the browser. I hate having to trust native software. Native software can read/upload my entire home folder, all files, .ssh keys, browser history, password database, photos, videos, etc... Websites can't. Native apps have access to every open exploit on my machine. Webapps don't. Native apps can scan my network for other exploitable devices. Webapps can't. So, more webapps for me please.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#189

Post by johnny22 »

Izkata wrote: post #160
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…

> 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.

what OS though? It seems like only Windows users really saw speed improvements

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#190

Post by superkuh »

tokyodude wrote: post #188
superkuh wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

Well to each there own. For me I'd prefer everything in the browser. I hate having to trust native software. Native software can read/upload my entire home folder, all files, .ssh keys, browser history, password database, photos, videos, etc... Websites can't. Native apps have access to every open exploit on my machine. Webapps don't. Native apps can scan my network for other exploitable devices. Webapps can't. So, m…

Web apps that use electron (for example, Discord's desktop client) have full filesystem access and can do just what you say. Many people think it's safe because it's 'web'. It isn't. It's worse because of the misperception.

They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).

And with both remaining big browsers dev group announcing they'll be adding greatly expanded filesystem access to browsers for normal websites this will likely apply there too.

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