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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#241

Post by snek »

no_wizard wrote: post #151
snek wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

microsoft switched to chromium because they want better control/integration with electron apps and the windows store. firefox wasn't on the table for them.

I really don't think this is it, if I'm being completely frank, because they already have an enormous amount of up front work done with making Windows PWA friend: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/pwa I also am willing to surmise that they are going to put in alot of work re-working all their APIs that are exposed as Edge based interfaces into whatever engine they and up with here (namely chromium), so I…

This was the reason I was given from a dev on the edge team. Do with that what you will.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#244

Post by bobajeff »

tracker1 wrote: post #161
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…

Beyond even that, Firefox was already stripping market share away from IE at the time. Around 2010 or so it was really a 3-way split, which was really nice in terms of getting a lot of things worked out between the three (relatively speaking). A lot of people would have migrated away from IE, it just would have been more Firefox, less Chrome.

At one point Firefox's growth stopped or slowed considerably. Without Chrome I doubt many would've migrated away from Internet Explorer.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#245

Post by dofng8o43189 »

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…

I'm pretty cynical about the "Chrome Experiments" project. Google never explicitly claimed that only Chrome can run those Experiments properly, but that was the clear implication.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#246

Post by yesco »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #188
perlgeek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Even to this day Firefox doesn't have websocket frame inspection. Its very frustrating to me that dev tools aren't a higher priority for Firefox. As they are now, they are only slightly worse than Chromes which is unacceptable considering more and more websites are being developed with only Chrome in mind.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#247

Post by kmkemp »

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 non-technical users: faster pages, account syncing, google name recognition and default searching. For technical users: V8, dev tools, better privacy, evergreen, frequent updates, tabs as processes, fast implementations of new specifications. There were many reasons that Chrome rapidly gained market share.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#248

Post by misnome »

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

This was my main initial reason for switching - sick of constantly having one tab lock up the entire browser. It was also prettier, and I liked the combined search and URL bar.

Now, I have no reason to change. Plus, Firefox is on all the machines at work, and really badly handles multi-system user accounts - if logged in on one computer then you cannot use on any others without launching with a special command line flag and switching to an entirely new profile (where none of the settings/logins are kept). Last I checked they had no interest in fixing this.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#249

Post by jdietrich »

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 spent years stridently recommending Chrome to non-technical users, because it was by far the fastest and most secure browser available.

Google's primary objective for Chrome and Android was simply to get people to use the internet more, on the (entirely reasonable) assumption that they'd probably use Google and they would see a lot of AdSense units. They invested heavily in getting better software into the hands of as many users as possible. Of course they harvest a whole bunch of user data, but dragging up the quality of the browsing experience was a far bigger factor IMO.

Would Edge exist if Chrome had never happened? Would Firefox have a fast JS engine and proper sandboxing? What would the non-Apple smartphone market look like without Android? Whether you like Google's business practices or not, they've massively increased our expectations of browser software, in the same way that Starbucks created a world where you can buy a half-decent cappuccino in McDonalds.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#250

Post by uodtl »

rchaud wrote: post #126
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…

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.

YES! I remember Firefox 2 being so much faster than 3 that I kept using it until most websites started to break. Then I switched to Chrome.
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