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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#121

Post by fixermark »

Blaiz0r wrote: post #47
dx034 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But as a web developer I don't necessarily care about standards. I want the page to work for as many users as possible. For the longest time this meant to support IE's way of doing things, now it means to support Chrome (unless you target Enterprise users). Even if you develop for Chrome, Firefox and Edge you'll just end up building workarounds for all 3, not adhering strictly to the standard.

Sorry to break this to you, but as a web developer you should only care about standards, otherwise you have no standards. The standards are a single source of truth for your production, if you build solely to a single browsers quirks (in this case Chrome) then those quirks can change at any time.

This point of view is as ignorant of reality as the grammarians that say Webster's English is the only true English. Every standard is a three-edged sword: the spec, the intent behind the spec, and the practical application of the spec in the real world (which all-too-often, unfortunately, includes things like "Yeah, that's what the spec says, but then scammers realized you could exploit that to use people's browsers to mine Bitcoin or something, so no browser actually does that").

A web developer codes against real machines, not the imagined, idealized, and non-existent machines the specs describe.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#122

Post by fixermark »

saagarjha wrote: post #96
fastball wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you build to the standards, it's possible that no actual browser implements them correctly. And then what?

You wait for them to do so, and are vocal whenever this happens.

"Wait for them to do so" is an answer that guarantees your team will get passed over in favor of a team that brought a working product to market today, to solve real problems real users have.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#123

Post by rootusrootus »

lxe wrote: post #66

> Ten years ago, we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free from corporate greed Firefox already did this. We needed Chrome because Firefox lagged behind in performance and was a memory hog.

So we all switched to Chrome, which makes the memory hog blush.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#124

Post by guitarbill »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #76
dccoolgai wrote: post #67

Other than AMP, I can't really think of a case that I would characterize as "Google abusing its position" w.r.t. Open Web. It was Chrome that led the push for PWAs, which I think is both great for the Open Web and consumers... The author complains about other vendors being "called laggards", which - let's be honest - we're really talking about how long Apple/Safari dragged their feet on Service Workers... and they _s…

It's laughable that the author suggests Apple as a viable alternative. Apple, the last company pushing license encumbered formats into web standards. Apple, the perennial laggard on standards support in general.

I agreed to your comment before you edited it, simply because on a price point, Apple stuff isn't viable for laptops and desktops for many people.

I don't agree with your weird rant, without any sources. Apple has shown with Safari that some people do like privacy features baked in, and while I can't say for sure, I hope it played a part in emboldening Firefox/Mozilla to focus a bit more on privacy.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#126

Post by rchaud »

leftyted wrote: post #35
ethelward wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from the pervasive advertisement campaigns, from the bundling strategy with other pieces of software, for the pre-installation on new computers or from the ads on Google SEarch homepage.

Chrome's main appeal was that it was much faster than firefox and IE. At everything. I had no technical knowledge when chrome came out, was using firefox, tried chrome, never looked back. It's not really possible to separate out the effects of advertising from the effects of the product actually being better. Maybe I installed chrome because I saw an ad, but I stopped using firefox because it was clear that chrome wa…

IIRC, it was faster than Firefox 3 specifically, which caused many FF users to migrate. Something happened between FF2 and FF3, since the latter appeared noticeably slower.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#127

Post by slivanes »

mapgrep wrote: post #7

I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Luckily…

For me, it was the unified bookmarks across all ones machines with Chrome. No more fiddling with copying bookmarks or syncing - it was done automatically and it worked.

No other browser had it built in at the time.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#128

Post by fixermark »

symlinkk wrote: post #50
dx034 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But as a web developer I don't necessarily care about standards. I want the page to work for as many users as possible. For the longest time this meant to support IE's way of doing things, now it means to support Chrome (unless you target Enterprise users). Even if you develop for Chrome, Firefox and Edge you'll just end up building workarounds for all 3, not adhering strictly to the standard.

I read comments like this all the time and I feel like I'm in a different world. I just write standards compliant ES6 code, put it through a transpiler and some polyfills, and my code runs on every browser. I haven't had to think about which browser I'm targeting for years.

It's often the case that this works fine. When you get into corner cases (i.e. if you try to stretch what animation APIs can do or you start to need to care deeply about the performance constraints of flex layout), you start to need to care about how the browsers actually work.

... but you can (and I'd argue in a lot of cases, looking around at the overly-complicated sites on the web, should) write a lot of fully functional web pages by keeping to the standard and trusting it's good enough. We are no longer in the bad old days where IE and other browsers deviated significantly---most of the browsers today adhere closely to the spec, and in the places they don't, it's often more like one browser handles a nasty corner case better than another because the browser built an optimization in for a critical path your page layout cares about.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#129

Post by jarjoura »

This is such a fairytale retelling of history. Firefox was well on the way to crushing IE. It was the whole reason Microsoft re-kick started IE development again. Firefox was the dominant browser in 2008.

Safari was the browser pushing ahead on performance and being lightweight except in JavaScript. So Google took WebKit and added their own JS engine to it so that Gmail and their office suite could compete with Microsoft's offerings.

It worked and all browsers started an arms race for JS performance.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#130

Post by LinuxBender »

jklinger410 wrote: post #55

Let me know when Firefox stops being an insane resource hog and I will switch.

One thing I found is that Firefox doesn't do gc/cc that often on it's own. I keep a tab open to "about:memory" and click on "gc / cc / reduce mem" ever so often and it keep the memory usage between 800MB and 1.2 GB with several tabs open (jira, slack, HN, misc other sites)
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