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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#181

Post by agumonkey »

perlgeek wrote: post #25
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…

> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled w…

I assumed it was in clear relationship to the gmail era of web applications trying to be a full desktop equivalent.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#182

Post by mixedCase »

iosonofuturista wrote: post #33
mixedCase wrote: post #3

Weird flex suggesting Vivaldi, given that it's proprietary and there are other open source Chromium forks.

Could you recommend some? From a quick search all I could find were things like Opera, Torch, Epic etc, which do not seem to be open source. I must I am quite happy with Vivaldi at the moment, but a true open source browser would make me even happier. I did try to use Firefox Developer Edition for a while, but despite being a step in the right direction, I must say I prefer the chromium developer tools.

I'm using the Brave developer channel on one of my machines. It's working well. Like Chromium, but without the creepier Google parts that had still managed to get their way in. I also like their theme a little better. Dark, and a little more compact.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#183

Post by brazzledazzle »

behringer wrote: post #150
leftyted wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It wasn’t entirely market driven. Chrome was collectively faster, smoother and tab crashes were isolated which was critical back then. My dad was firmly middle aged when it came out and was very attached to Firefox. After a few debates we did some very unscientific desktop-to-page render comparisons as well as loading some pretty js heavy sites and chrome beat Firefox handily.

He still took a while to come around and ultimately it was the tab isolation that convinced him. Tabs were a critical component to how he did research and a few crashes were all it took.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#184

Post by wnevets »

perlgeek wrote: post #25
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…

> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled w…

>Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason.

Chromes super fast start up speed and clean UI is what caused me to switch when it first came out.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#185

Post by agumonkey »

ethelward wrote: post #14
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…

> 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.

I beg to disagree. Chrome was also extremely lean, but very well thought out.

- a bit unrelated but installer was a shim, ~downloading it took 3 seconds and 500kB

- Few buttons

- Transient status bar

- Transient download widget

- Good ergonomics (easy to close tabs in rapid successions without moving your mouse, the next one would fall in place)

- Clear preference panel

- Maybe later: pdf support and print dialog

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#187

Post by jrochkind1 »

In retrospect the practical shifting of web-standards-setting from an at least possibly neutral standards body representing multiple interests (W3C) to a a body wholly controlled by browser-vendors (WHATWG)... may have been good for speed of "innovation" for a time, but was in the long-term not good for the "Web as an open platform."

> Making matters worse, the blame often lands on other vendors for “holding back the Web”. The Web is Google’s turf as it stands now; you either do as they do, or you are called out for being a laggard.

Indeed, I think it's the structural politics of WHATWG that make that hard to counter. WHATWG was almost founded on the principles of "not being a laggard" and "doing what we [browser vendors] do". When there were several browser-vendors with roughly equal market power they could counter-balance each other, and had an interest in compatibility with each other, but when there's an elephant in the room...

That is, the W3C folks that were accused of "holding back the web" while trying to keep standards-setting from going to WHATWG... were probably right.

You can disagree, but 10-15 years on, I think we're overdue a larger discussion and retrospective evaluation of the consequences of the WHATWG "coup". I haven't seen much discussion of this, many developers today may not even be aware of the history.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#188

Post by VBprogrammer »

perlgeek wrote: post #25
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…

> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled w…

I'm surprised there aren't more people on here who moved to chome for the dev tools. That is what moved me over there. Firebug was great in it's day but at some point Chrome's dev tools just became too much better to make staying on Firefox possible.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#189

Post by skybrian »

ionised wrote: post #158
skybrian wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This probably does explain why a lot of people tried it, but it doesn't explain why they kept on using it. Often, ad campaigns cause churn as people try a product but bounce off of it.

I don't think most average web users do a comparison of browsers. They pick one (or get told to use one) and stick with it because for their use cases, there isn't much differences between the browser anyway.

They probably aren't keen observers, but if the browser is slow or confusing and they get annoyed, maybe they wouldn't install it next time? It's not like people are completely oblivious to quality.

But we're just comparing impressions and I'd bet there is better data out there.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#190

Post by robin_reala »

ng12 wrote: post #95
Blaiz0r wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My standard is the browser ~95% of my users use. It's the only meaningful one. I still fix FF bugs when they come in (it seems to be a bigger offender than IE recently) but developing for Chrome first is the only approach which makes business sense.

95%? I haven’t seen less than 20% mobile Safari on any site I’ve worked on in the last few years, and that’s not even including Edge / IE / Firefox and desktop Safari.
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