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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#291

Post by tempestn »

mbesto wrote: post #271
Jldevictoria wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here - made a switch and switched back quickly after. 1. Compatibility - random sites would just break...I reckon 15% of the time 2. Battery life - FF destroyed my battery life. To the tune of 8 hours on Chrome vs like 2 on FF.

Did you have add-ons in Firefox? I almost never have sites break—certainly not anywhere near 15% of the time. And at least 95% of the time I've had issues in the past, it has turned out to be an add-on causing problems, rather than the browser itself. (Ad blockers would be the first thing to check in the case of random breakages.)

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#292

Post by int_19h »

jolmg wrote: post #45
awill wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also add that 2008 Google was trusted by the public a lot more than 2019 Google.

> by the public by technical users I imagine the general public still trusts them all the same or maybe even more.

This stuff has been on the front pages of mainstream media for long enough. Ask your non-tech acquaintances what they think about Google, Facebook etc - you might be surprised.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#293

Post by int_19h »

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.

Didn't they get rid of XUL entirely several releases ago?

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#294

Post by ownagefool »

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…

If it was either, why wasn't it a patch set against firefox, rather than IP owned by google?

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#295

Post by Yoric »

gsnedders wrote: post #23
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…

> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time IE8 Beta 1 shipped March 5, 2008; Chrome's beta release wasn't till September. OK, admittedly, Chrome's stable release happened before IE8's, but MS was working on much the same thing.

I'm pretty sure that a very old version of IE (maybe IE4?) was released with multiprocess before Microsoft killed that project.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#296

Post by drilldrive »

As a user (non-developer), I never trusted Chrome and never installed it onto my computer. Half of that was laziness, but the other half was understanding that Chrome is driven by ad-revenue and so privacy options would be severely sub-optimal, at least compared to Firefox.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#297

Post by treis »

jdietrich wrote: post #249
ethelward wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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.

Google paid Apple 12 billion dollars last year to be the default search engine in Safari and another half billion to Firefox for the same. Google's primary objectives with Chrome was to lower that amount and to guard their monopoly on search.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#298

Post by ng12 »

robin_reala wrote: post #190
ng12 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Our users are almost exclusively professionals working on Windows desktops. Probably a fairly unique situation but the point is standards are relative.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#299

Post by zwaps »

Man, I can remember when Google was still an up-and-coming, underdog-ish and exciting tech company, where working was cool and people and "do not evil" was enshrined.

I was really happy and excited whenever Google announced something new, because it was always so diverse, new, clever and somehow helped the world.

Now things have taken a complete 180 degree turn. Google has become an ad company, and any innovation serves only to squeeze a little bit more data out of users. "Don't be evil" got deleted, and Google indeed seems to actively embrace "be evil". They are not even arguing with it anymore - anything that serves to close down the web, force tracking, breaches of privacy and so on...

What changed in google? Any insiders? Just greed? Did important people leave?

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#300

Post by intopieces »

mattmanser wrote: post #132
lern_too_spel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's laughable that the author suggests Apple as a viable alternative. Apple, the last company pushing license encumbered formats into web standards. Apple, the perennial laggard on standards support in general.

Probably because Apple take privacy seriously, which is a direct threat to Google's bottom line.

Apple sure hopes so, but do we know this from data? It seems like there are privacy scandals every week and yet Google seems to be swimming along fine.
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