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Browsers

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41–50 of 316 posts

Re: Browsers

#41

This move is actually genius by Microsoft. They will negate the need to install Chrome on Windows. Microsoft will gain control of the browser market.

How so? I don't believe the layperson really cares all too much about the underlying engine, it's more a marketing thing. And the IE brand is forever tainted.

Word of mouth. Ads. The media. Plenty of avenues will quickly frame why Installing Chrome is so yesterday.

Re: Browsers

#42

This move is actually genius by Microsoft. They will negate the need to install Chrome on Windows. Microsoft will gain control of the browser market.

One of the linked posts spent a great deal of time differentiating between the browser interface and the engine itself. The average user doesn’t understand the difference, so being told “Edge is more like Chrome now” doesn’t actually make it Chrome for them. Other than tricking user agent checkers from putting up the inferior browser warning (is that still a thing?) this won’t stop people from using Edge to install Chrome.

Re: Browsers

#43
post #25

Meh. I don't buy it. First of all, individual boycotts will never, ever overcome a collective action problem, so a fundamentally futile solution is being proposed here. Plus, this is only bad if Google act destructively evil and no one steps in to change it. If the endgame is control of Chromium being passed from Google to a neutral foundation -- which I suspect it will be -- then everyone wins. It's always seemed in…

> It's always seemed inevitable to me that one browser engine will win out.

I think it should be that one competing _standard_ will win out. Ideally we can have infinite number of browser engines, as long as each one implements all widely used standards correctly. We already see this with most websites working fine whether in chromium or firefox. The only incompatibilities (in theory) should come from bugs or new standards/experiments which haven't been widely adopted or implemented yet.

The same for javascript - multiple implementations of a js engine is fine, as long as they all implement the ES* standard.

Also if everyone moves to a Chromium engine monoculture, what will happen to innovation? eg. Mozilla has made some major progress with it's work with Servo.

Re: Browsers

#44
post #40

Can I question the orthodoxy on this one? Suppose WebKit or Blink are the one engine that everyone uses. Do you know how much uncertainty and effort that will save around the world that goes into browser compatibility and quirks? Look at the x86 architecture or POSIX as well. Here is my serious practical question: this is open source, so if you want to make some extension, you should be able to distribute it. And if…

it's more complicated than that though.

Nobody is lamenting the loss of the edge engine. Things like choice of video codec, drm module, etc have shown is it's a good thing to have a few different vendors with a seat at the table for standards.

Most important of those is Firefox.

Re: Browsers

#45
I feel like I’m missing something, because I keep seeing blog posts that tell me a browser monoculture is bad (and the irony of Microsoft saying this is nearly too much), but none of them tell me why. I understand that it was bad in the IE6 days, but IE6 was also closed source and could only be run on Windows (see also the irony of Microsoft discontinuing IE on Mac, not wanting to compete with Safari, a browser made by the OS manufacturer). Chromium is open source - the only lock in is the decision to use it. Sure, Google may be at the reigns of where the project goes, but then differentiate on features, or fork it and make it different. Differentiate on the user interface, or integrations with other services, or go hard on privacy. Maybe the rendering engine should be more akin to the Linux kernel and less akin to Windows? One operating system would be bad, but one kernel has spawned many, many Linuxes. I guess I’m doing my part by using Firefox, but that’s more because I am worried about just how much Google knows about me, and not because I think Gecko is remarkably better than Chromium.

Re: Browsers

#46
People don't download Chrome because EdgeHTML-Edge sucks; they download Chrome because it's familiar, and ironically doesn't nag the person to enable half a dozen Microsoft's services one by one. There's two greater truths here: that some people are more comfortable using Google's services over those of Microsoft, and that the power of defaults matter, even when they feel skeevy to a part of the population. Google proved that defaulting to all the services enabled by default is reasonable not just with a discretionary application (like Chrome) but also when the user barely has any other choice on the device (like Android), and years of these defaults have resulted in a userbase that relies on them and seeks out the product for this reason.

It also shows that past precedent can lead you down a gauntlet of bad PR: Microsoft has tried to be pushy with many features of Windows 10 (telemetry, inking, online login, Cortana, always-online search) in the same vein that we've long seen from Google, but their strategy contrasts unfavorably against long legacy of a less invasive Windows. Google has pursued a policy of opt-out from the beginning, and by doing so they escape a fair bit a bad press.

Firefox has the worst of it: their users are the most discriminating, the hardest to please -- even if some of Mozilla's controversies were poor choices, the level of uproar was immense. Posts like this just encourage the migration of users driven by causes. This would be less of an issue if it were entirely community-supported, but Mozilla has paid developers and evangelists, and deriving revenues from a discriminating userbase is a challenge.

Re: Browsers

#47
post #29
post #4

Honestly I just see all this, even despite the author claiming taking time to "mull it over", as a knee-jerk reaction. There is little evidence that MS changing to Blink/V8 will have any tangible impact on the web. Microsoft has hardly offered much as far as competition and diversity goes since IE6, basically the only web "innovations" they're responsible for is a bunch of IE-specific APIs that didn't work in any oth…

> Microsoft has hardly offered much as far as competition and diversity goes since IE6, basically the only web "innovations" they're responsible for is a bunch of IE-specific APIs that didn't work in any other browser. I don't have much love for MS, but this is just wrong. XMLHttpRequest, the precursor to fetch, pretty much allowed "web 2.0" to exist. Now we use fetch, but they introduced it first. box-sizing: border…

There are thousands and thousands of APIs, properties, attributes, functions and so on for web programming. Holding up a few examples of past accomplishments from long ago is no defense for IE and the widely known vulgarities.

Re: Browsers

#48

I still remembered when i first time used Firefox in 2004, and it's like a life-saver to me to get out of the terrible Internet Explorer. What i want now, maybe from 2020, i could use Firefox, but as a replacement for Mobile App container.

I still remember when my Dad marched me over to his laptop, to boldly proclaim the new Internet Explorer 7 had TABS

He legitimately looked as though he'd unlocked some kind of arcane technology that mortal man should never have wielded

I still feel a little bad when I casually shrugged it off with "Firefox has had that for years". He looked legitimately shattered

Re: Browsers

#49
The web browser vendors have too much money. They have no incentive to keep the platform small. Google in particular, the cost to implement Blink is essentially meaningless to them, but it is beyond affordability for almost anyone else.

Re: Browsers

#50
post #12

Sometimes I still browse Digg (it's different now). Since the last Firefox update from a week ago which disabled Symantec certificates the site doesn't work anymore. I bet the day Chrome disables Symantec certificates they will immediately notice and fix it. It's sad that in one week not even one of their people opened it in Firefox, and not many of their users either (there was just a couple of mentions on Twitter a…

Chrome distrusted Symantec certs when 70 got pushed to stable (at the end of October)[1]. Digg shows NET::ERR_CERT_SYMANTEC_LEGACY error when I navigate to it. Firefox was supposed to remove the Symantec certs in 63 (also to be released at the end of October) but I guess they pushed it back a version[2].

All major browser coordinated to distrust the certs at the same time.

[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-dist...

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/07/30/update-on-the-d...

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