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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#221

Post by Jldevictoria »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #106

The problem with these articles is that the recommendation always ends up just preaching to the choir: people who already switched away from Chrome nod in appreciation, but people who haven't switched literally get nothing out of these posts to convince them to switch to what is basically the same application made by a different company, with completely different conventions on where everything is, without any concre…

I gave Firefox a solid test last year (about 3 months of dedicated use at work + home) and I ended up coming back to Chrome. There are some really great things about Firefox. It has gotten so much better and faster than it was, but Chrome still struggles less with troublesome websites, and seems to load all pages faster overall.

I'm keeping my eye on Firefox, but Chrome still gets my business for now.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#222

Post by isostatic »

jwatt wrote: post #56
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 take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Indeed. When Chrome was first released Firefox had already broken the IE monopoly having reached around 33% of the browser "market share", and was still growing. Speed was the issue I seem to remember most people switching to Chrome for at the time.

Firefox started with a terrible backdrop (Netscape 4), but after it's mozilla and phoenix days it was fairly fast fairly quickly.

It then started adding bloat and terribleness, which Chrome didn't have.

It's recovered now though, and is far better than chrome. It saddens me that so many on HN champion google and actively push for competitors to fail.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#223

Post by Zarel »

CharlesColeman wrote: post #217
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?

> And if you build to the standards, it's possible that no actual browser implements them correctly. > And then what? Build to standards first , then accommodate quirks last. Building to Chrome first is just building to its quirks, and totally forgetting about standards.

I'm not sure what the difference is. It's not like people learn HTML from Chrome's source code. They learn HTML from places like MDN, which document web standards.

"Write HTML, test on Chrome" - what people do in practice - seems to fit "build to standards first, accommodate quirks last" just as well as "build to Chrome first".

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#224

Post by type-2 »

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.

Agreed, the google homepage wouldn't shut up about it.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#225

Post by cptskippy »

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…

I've been doing web development for almost 20 years now and I've used Firefox as my primary browser since it was Phoenix and before that I used the Mozilla Communicator Suite and Navigator.

I may not be rolling the latest features like WebSockets but I very rarely come across incompatibilities anymore. IE remains the biggest issue and honestly a lot of those are removing hacks and workarounds on older sites as after about IE9 they started to catch up with support.

Most of the "incompatibilites" that I fix are actually when our Junior Devs are using CSS attributes incorrectly and they've hacked their code until Chrome mostly works. In this era of Bootstrap it's not uncommon for developers to just throw CSS at the problem and 99% of the time that's what's caused the issue in the first place.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#226

Post by [deleted] »

djsumdog wrote: post #193

> 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 mome…

[deleted]

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#227

Post by guitarbill »

fixermark wrote: post #139
guitarbill wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure this is a commentary on the laziness of devs/why browser dominance is bad for standards, when taken in context: > The dominance of Chrome has a major detrimental effect on the Web as an open platform: 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. When you're following decently established standards (…

I haven't personally encountered this phenomenon. Can you give an example of an established standard that breaks on Chrome but FF / Safari handle?

Indeed I can, although one anecdote does not data make. The latest was using SVG sprites as background in CSS I think. Maybe I can throw up a demo during my lunch break, but honestly it isn't that exciting. It just doesn't work correctly in Chrome, the sprite is cropped/has a weird rendering artifact.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#228

Post by tenebrisalietum »

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 remember using Firefox in the pre 1.0 days.

It took slightly longer to launch than IE, but since it had tabs, I didn't care, because I wasn't opening a new instances constantly.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#229

Post by mattnewport »

misterman0 wrote: post #62

More like we need Google no more. You always find the smartest bunch in these threads. Proof: not a single downvoted comment so far. But with all your smarts why aren't you building search engines? Is it because you think that with superior tech we can't beat Google? I think it will come down to precisely that. Don't you see how easy it would be for someone who specializes in search to beat an opponent who specialize…

I'm using DuckDuckGo and don't miss Google for search. It's mostly a solved problem for me at this point. Google Maps is harder to replace but there are workable though generally not as good alternatives. YouTube is the hardest Google property to escape for me.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#230

Post by sstangl »

burtonator wrote: post #199
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 d…

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

Safe from monopoly control over Web standards.

The Web has been a consensus ecosystem, and Google does not have a track record of proposing reasonable standards. In my mind this is most grossly evident in the case of PNaCl, which was tied to their Pepper API and effectively impossible for non-Blink browsers to implement.

Google pushed for PNaCl to become a Web standard, and it was only through years of difficult effort that Mozilla was able to show AsmJS as a better solution, which eventually gave rise to the reasonable standard of WebAssembly.

Were Google in a monopoly market position back then, they would have pushed PNaCl, and non-Blink browsers would be unable to render the modern Web.

That might sound fine if you believe that Blink is the be-all-and-end-all of Web technology. But we have Servo now, and we already know better.

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