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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#261

Post by Vinnl »

yesco wrote: post #246
VBprogrammer wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is frustrating, but the good news is that this is being picked up as part of (somewhat ironically) Google Summer of Code: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508#c49

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#262

Post by StevePerkins »

xattt wrote: post #160
tzakrajs wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Firefox still feels non-native on OS X as a result of its reliance on XUL. My main issues are around UI. The menu bar only fully populates once the browser is almost loaded, not when the browser is first opened. The other thing is that UI elements exist in an uncanny valley, where they are not quite native, but not quite foreign. Camino meant to fix that, but it has moved onto greener pastures.

> "Firefox still feels non-native on OS X..."

As opposed to Chrome? Or Opera, Vivaldi, etc?

Browsers are a class of application whose UI's have been "native" only to themselves for years now.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#263

Post by vokep »

Passthepeas wrote: post #12
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…

In my experience I can't stream video on firefox without the video freezing within the first 5 minutes, and it feels clunky even with non video webpages. I really hate google the company, and I'd love to stop using their software, but so far I have yet to see a browser that even comes close to chrome.

This, very noticeable with something like shadertoy.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#264

Post by pcwalton »

jorvi wrote: post #92
mushufasa wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to chrome before I became technically literate, because it seemed a lot faster and less prone to breaking. I couldn't describe why, but the effect was felt. Now, I still struggle to move to firefox as I'm on a retina MBP, where firefox riles up my cpu and drains my battery.

Yup. I'm using Firefox on macOS as well and suffering from the same bug. If you use your Macbook with the resolution set to 'scaled' Firefox absolutely murders your battery. On top of that there's a bug where H264 video doesn't get properly accelerated. Both these bugs have been in Firefox at least since FF62. Both have alternatingly been marked 'priority 2' or 'fix-optional' which is absolutely baffling to me consid…

It isn't a bug; it's the fact that Firefox uses a transparent window and doesn't yet use Core Animation, which offloads scrolling to the window server. Switching to CA involves heavy lifting inside the compositor and is not an easy task. My planeshift crate does some of the work needed to make the WebRender path use Core Animation.

In the meantime, setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config helps battery life significantly, at the cost of rounded corners and vibrancy.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#265

Post by pcwalton »

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…

I've never understood the "just fork Blink" argument in favor of a single renderer. Forking Blink results in multiple renderers that diverge over time: just look at what happened to WebKit and Blink. You can't have it both ways: either the entire Web is under control of Google management, or you have multiple competing renderers.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#266

Post by kough »

Jldevictoria wrote: post #221
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.

I use both regularly, and the only differences that I've noticed are related to Google web properties (particularly gmail and youtube), where Firefox has to rely on inefficient polyfills for chrome-specific features (I think, based on some googling one time, take this with a grain of salt.) What troublesome websites does Chrome work better on in your experience?

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#267

Post by pcwalton »

burtonator wrote: post #235
sstangl wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, a…

Right but Mozilla could still do this within the context of Chromium. They could fork it if necessary. And I definitely agree that Google is faltering on a lot of their execution lately. Most of the things they ship are like a 6/10 in terms of usability.

There would be a ton of pressure to adopt NaCl in a world in which it's just a configuration flag away. Absent other browser engines, we would be using NaCl and Dart everywhere.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#268

Post by thegayngler »

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.

Id argue it was a 4 way split honestly. Mobile Safari absolutely dominated the mobile browsing space which was growing by leaps and bounds at that time.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#269

Post by wwweston »

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…

This is a worthwhile point. I still consider Chrome handy and occasionally essential for development.

But it's no longer my day-to-day browser. Firefox became more than adequate for that with quantum, and I see no reason to enable a Google that has made absolutely sure to shape itself into a machine that will always have powerful incentives to do the wrong thing.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#270

Post by pcwalton »

cromwellian wrote: post #46
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…

It still is behind technically isn't it? Does Firefox support Site Isolation yet?

There are features Chrome has that Firefox doesn't. There are also features that Firefox has that Chrome doesn't, such as Stylo and WebRender.

You can argue that Site Isolation is more important than large performance improvements (I think that's a losing argument, given that Site Isolation as presently deployed in Chrome doesn't even defend against compromised renderers and as such is restricted to being another Spectre mitigation), but you're being way too glib here.

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