Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Need Chrome No More

redalemeden.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 536 posts

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#141

Post by jgon »

umvi wrote: post #4

> developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. That's me. Sorry, but I just can't be bothered to support every browser's quirks. I check Firefox every once in a while, but really, I don't mind losing a few users if it means significantly less maintenance and testing for me. It's like complaining that developers are…

The web is a global open standard platform for the free exchange of information. I would call it one of the great achievements of computing and mankind. To hear someone say "Meh I'd trade that to save myself a bit of effort" is deeply, deeply disappointing.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#142

Post by thanatropism »

arendtio wrote: post #104
dak1 wrote: post #34

Other browsers need to catch up to Chrome with their development tools. I'd be happy to use Safari or Firefox for development, but... - I can't disable CORS in Firefox (yes, sometimes you have to disable CORS rather than modify the Allow-Origin header response, for example if you need to test against a production backend) (and, no, CORS Everywhere is not a sufficient solution). - I can't inspect WebSocket frames in a…

I agree. While the Firefox dev-tools improved a lot over in recent years, they are still not up to where the chrome dev-tools are. Currently, I try to use the Firefox dev-tools as much as possible but keep chrome prepared for some special cases. From a consumer perspective, the story is very different: Any browser will probably do, but choosing Firefox has the best long term effect on the development of the internet.

You just said Chrome was the superior browser for developers.

> the best long term effect

What do you mean by this?

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#143

Post by chimeracoder »

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…

> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser

Chrome has never been process-per-tab - this is a common misconception. It's process per domain, except there are certain circumstances in which two tabs on different domains will still share the same process (such as opening a tab through a middle click).

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#144

Post by DannyBee »

hashhar wrote: post #13
umvi wrote: post #4

> developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. That's me. Sorry, but I just can't be bothered to support every browser's quirks. I check Firefox every once in a while, but really, I don't mind losing a few users if it means significantly less maintenance and testing for me. It's like complaining that developers are…

Developing against Chrome is exactly "support every browser's quirks" instead of developing against the actual standards (usually Firefox has the truest implementation of which).

Developers have never, in the history of the world, cared about standards. Nothing can be more blindingly obvious when strolling through history. You don't even have to look at the web. Look at SMTP, IMAP, you name it.

People don't write C++ and think about the standard, they write C++ and see if it compiles.

Should they operate this way? Of course not.

Are you going to change human psychology and cause this to happen anytime soon?

Nope.

If you want them to change, you'd have to provide a reason it matters, and very abstract long term notions of "goodness" are not gonna cut it for most developers, for better or worse.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#145

Post by jolmg »

justicezyx wrote: post #108
jolmg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by the public by technical users I imagine the general public still trusts them all the same or maybe even more.

Reads to me a descending attitude towards normal users. I was a non technical users when chrome come out. I was studying civil engineering then in college. I certainly like Google as a symbol of freedom and technology superiority in the more pure sense than msft.

Not condescending (if that's what you mean), it's more of an attitude of hopelessness. After all, it will be "normal" users that control where the market goes.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#146

Post by robbrown451 »

I'd be thrilled to use another browser if they worked.

In my case, the feature that is missing from every other browser is MIDI access. I can plug a digital piano into my computer, and Chrome can talk to it. This is a standard, but the other browsers talk about it but never do anything, it's been "coming any day now" in Firefox since 2015, when I first conceived of the project ( https://pianop.ly/, a web app for playing piano along with original music videos from YouTube, karaoke style). It sucks that I have to tell people to use Chrome or it won't work. (although technically they can use Brave, Opera or other Blink based browsers)

Regardless of that one feature, I'm curious why there aren't better alternatives based on Blink that allow you to get the Blink engine without all these things we hate about Google's decisions (related to the being an ad company, for one thing). I understand that we'd still have a monoculture, but I don't see that as nearly the problem it was when browsers worked so differently, for basic layout and such.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#147

Post by otterley »

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…

Here's the original announcement from Sundar Pichai - who was then the VP of Product Management, now CEO: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browse...

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#148

Post by ionised »

quest88 wrote: post #107
dak1 wrote: post #34

Other browsers need to catch up to Chrome with their development tools. I'd be happy to use Safari or Firefox for development, but... - I can't disable CORS in Firefox (yes, sometimes you have to disable CORS rather than modify the Allow-Origin header response, for example if you need to test against a production backend) (and, no, CORS Everywhere is not a sufficient solution). - I can't inspect WebSocket frames in a…

Yup, Chrome has the best devtools for what I need and I'll continue to use it until there's a better alternative.

What is the difference between the two?

I am primarily a back-end/services/middleware dev and don't do much front-end stuff these days.

When I do though, I use Firefox's dev tools and I don't know...I'm not sure what I'm missing?

I have Chrome on this machine too and have tried the dev tools there but I beyond layout I don't know what the differences are or what Firefox's dev tools are lacking.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#149

Post by tsbinz »

tzakrajs wrote: post #114
chmln wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed Arguably, with its market share dwindling fast, it's not enough to just be technically on par. Further, it is absolutely not up to par on Linux and from what I know, MacOS as well.

It’s got great performance on macOS, and I suggest that people try it again.

See jorvi's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19264960 there are some bugs that drive me back to chrome when I try it

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#150

Post by behringer »

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…

I've used firefox and never bothered with chrome as a daily driver. The speed issue is entirely marketing driven. Nobody cares about a few tenths of a second of load times until the ads were shoving stats down our throats that chrome was so much faster

Firefox is and has always been perfectly adequate, except maybe for a few html5 canvas type apps.

Post reply on HN