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We Need Chrome No More

redalemeden.com

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191–200 of 536 posts

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#191

Post by bobajeff »

jarjoura wrote: post #129

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 Micro…

Firefox was never the dominant browser. Neither was it on its way to crushing IE. You my friend are recalling a fairytale.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#193

Post by djsumdog »

> Both Chrome and Chromium run Blink under the hood, the rendering engine that started as a WebKit fork in 2013 when Google grew dissatisfied with the Apple-led project

Wait, is this accurate? I remember back when Chrome was released, people were talking about how it used parts of both WebKit and Gecko, and the exact specs of which rendering was used changed based on the website.

I remember not liking Chrome the moment it came out. Google had poured money into Firefox for years and then suddenly came out with (an initially) closed source competitor. Sure it's open source now, but it didn't start that way, and was a slap in the face to the Mozilla project.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#194

Post by ken »

fredsted wrote: post #84
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 can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome. For what it's worth, WebSockets show up as type 'Other' in the inspector, and the frames are listed under 'Preview'. Edit: Safari.

It just says "WebSocket Connection Established", and then a list of "Binary Frame". Is there a way to inspect their contents? Just seeing that frames are being sent doesn't seem very useful for debugging.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#195

Post by cpeterso »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #173
andrewla wrote: post #43

Here's hoping. The proliferation of browser standards has made this appear a more daunting task as time has gone by. There was a point where if you built a good DOM, javascript engine, and a layout engine and had a reasonable ability to fetch resources, you could bootstrap a browser. That's how Konquerer got there. But now, I think we're past that point -- if your browser can't do native video conferencing and opengl…

I have a better idea: build a new browser for a new web that is designed with decades of hindsight and isn't as bogged down in all the stupid legacy crap that the current web is. Then port Chromium to it as a portal to the legacy web.

The most popular browsers in China take a similar approach: they're hybrids of Chromium and Microsoft's Trident engine for legacy pages that require NPAPI plugins. Many ecommerce and banking websites in China require proprietary NPAPI plugins so these hybrid browsers seamlessly switch to Trident for those websites.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#197

Post by cletus »

Chrome (from the consumer POV) wasn't about freeing us from "corporate greed". It was about:

- Isolating tabs

- Seamless upgrades (seriously, why does Firefox STILL ask on startup if I'd like to wait and install an update?)

- Syncing between devices

- Performance (which at the time was largely terrible)

Most of this still holds true, at least for me, so I see myself using Chrome for years to come.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#198

Post by ken »

> Within two years, Chrome accounted for 15% of all Web traffic on desktop—for comparison, it took Firefox 6 years to get there. Google managed to deliver a fast, thoughtfully designed browser that was an instant hit among users and Web developers alike.

It took 2 years for IE to get 20% [1], and I wouldn't describe IE 1-3 as "fast and thoughtfully designed". I think the lesson here is simply that big tech companies with an established channel for reaching users can boost market share faster than open-source non-profit projects.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#/media/File:...

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#199

Post by burtonator »

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…

I've been heads down building an app which relies on Google Chrome and I go back and forth on this.

Polar is an app for managing your reading. It also supports advanced features like caching web pages locally, annotating PDFs, tagging the documents you're reading, etc.

https://getpolarized.io/

It's based on Electron and I've been going deep into Chrome internals as well as experimenting with Chrome extensions.

It's definitely a double edges sword here but I think there's an overly negative view of Chrome and/or having one platform.

Chrome is owned by Google. However, Chromium is Open Source.

Electron wouldn't exist without Chromium and there are other browsers based on Chromium.

I don't really see the benefit of duplicating things for the sake of duplicating them.

A lot of Firefox fans here argue that Firefox provides an alternative to keep us safe.

Safe from what? Chromium? It's Open Source?

Do we really need a duplicated HTML renderer? It's not like Chromium is going to vanish.

There's the argument that most Chromium developers are employed by Google - but not if Mozilla employs them.

It's always possible for fork these things.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#200

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

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.

You would have loved IE6 back in the day.
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