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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#311

Post by bvanderveen »

No one is in this stinking bordel questions the underlying assumption that the web is an 'open standard' or that 'competition is good' or that somehow the democratization of browser implementations and 'standards-making' is a net win for humanity?

The web is an edifice of pressed shit-board that hasn't been designed so much as piled up. It isn't an open forum of freely-exchanged ideas and social goods so much as a tool in the arsenal of liberal capitalism to more completely atomize and subjugate the individual by forming his proper sense of obligation to have himself devoured by the fetischism of merchandise.

Pluck out thy phone and cast it from thee.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#312

Post by jolmg »

est31 wrote: post #301
jolmg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Technical users are multiplicators though.

multiplicators? You mean because we advocate with those near us? Normal users also advocate in favor of products based on features which are sometimes based on forsaking privacy.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#313

Post by jolmg »

int_19h wrote: post #292
jolmg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In general, they don't care. They care about the conveniences forsaking privacy brings. Haven't talked to everyone on this topic, though. So who knows, there might be some.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#314

Post by verdverm »

ressetera wrote: post #8

It left a sour taste in my mouth that Microsoft joined Chrome instead of investing in FireFox and helping them advance their multi-process architecture quicker.

Is having a Chromium "kernel" such a bad thing? We don't complain there isn't sufficient competition for the Linux "kernel"

More eyes and hands on a single open source code base is better use of resources and leads to a better output.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#315

Post by robocat »

clairity wrote: post #283
bobajeff wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

firefox had been taking market share from IE slowly, then when it started to make some real gains, chrome came around and swiped it all out from under firefox. i've mainly used the mozilla lineage of browsers (all the way through netscape and back to mosaic) and was really dismayed when this happened because even by then it was pretty obvious that chrome was part of google's wild west landgrab before regulations and…

> online surveillance

I think the drive behind Chrome was to compete with Microsoft, by making a browser that was good enough to deliver your applications, and so make your OS irrelevant.

They have succeeded to the point where the only thing I would use Windows for now is Excel (and sometimes some obsolete development tools).

Chrome (when not on Android) seems far more benign than most applications as far as "surveillance" goes.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#316

Post by gnicholas »

mixedCase wrote: post #182
iosonofuturista wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you recommend some? From a quick search all I could find were things like Opera, Torch, Epic etc, which do not seem to be open source. I must I am quite happy with Vivaldi at the moment, but a true open source browser would make me even happier. I did try to use Firefox Developer Edition for a while, but despite being a step in the right direction, I must say I prefer the chromium developer tools.

I'm using the Brave developer channel on one of my machines. It's working well. Like Chromium, but without the creepier Google parts that had still managed to get their way in. I also like their theme a little better. Dark, and a little more compact.

I’ve been doing the same. I noticed that their public release is now also chromium based, so I was going to switch over to that. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to port browsing history, etc from Brave dev, only from prior versions of Brave, or other browsers.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#317

Post by mthoms »

Longhanks wrote: post #17
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.

Or the fact that in the beginning it was just blazing fast and very hassle-free (single click installer, automatic updates, no "IE toolbar hell").

Good point. Auto-updates were a groundbreaking feature (at least in browsers) that most people have largely forgotten about.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#318

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

ionised wrote: post #148
quest88 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, Chrome has the best devtools for what I need and I'll continue to use it until there's a better alternative.

What is the difference between the two? I am primarily a back-end/services/middleware dev and don't do much front-end stuff these days. When I do though, I use Firefox's dev tools and I don't know...I'm not sure what I'm missing? I have Chrome on this machine too and have tried the dev tools there but I beyond layout I don't know what the differences are or what Firefox's dev tools are lacking.

Chrome DevTools is far more feature-complete than any of the alternatives. I consider it the gold standard for developer tools.

Every release they publish a blog post with new DevTools features, here's the latest one from January 2018 [0]. If you scroll to the bottom it has a section titled "Discover other DevTools features", which provides a long list of features they've been adding over time.

Their console autocomplete is just amazing. If you type `document.querySelectorAll('body')`, it shows you a preview of the result without even having to hit enter. Then if you type a period it shows you that the constructor is a NodeList, as well as its methods. They go over many of these features in their May 2018 [1] blog post. Keyboard navigation has continually been improving as well.

There's no huge killer feature, it's just very solid all-around. Over the years it has remained miles ahead of the competition. With that being said, I still use Firefox as my daily-driver, and I'm perfectly happy with their DevTools for many tasks. And they're actually superior for certain tasks, for example, when working with `display: grid` and `display: flex` [2]. I usually switch over to Chromium while I'm actively developing or debugging something, but I don't think there's any need to limit yourself to just one tool.

[0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/01/devtools

[1] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/05/devtools

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto...

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#319

Post by ambicapter »

groestl wrote: post #274
Aser wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a professional web developer, but in the experience I've had building a couple of JS heavy sites, I've actually found the Edge developer tools to be the best. If there's one thing microsoft knows how to do well, it's build developer tools.

> If there's one thing microsoft knows how to do well, it's build developer tools. This is probably very subjective, but I can absolutely not relate to that.

It seems like people consistently love or hate Visual Studio , and a lot of people seem to like VSCode.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#320

Post by rovolo »

pier25 wrote: post #254
bobajeff wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Indeed: http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-20090...

From that source, it looks like the story depends on the region though (for desktop). In order of decreasing use of firefox:

* Europe: Firefox overtook IE in 2011 with ~40%

* Africa: Firefox overtook IE in 2012 with ~40%. It looks like Firefox had the best chance of "crushing it" here.

* South America: Firefox overtook IE in 2015 with 12%. Peak was 32% in 2010

* Asia: Firefox overtook IE in 2016 with ~12%. Peak was 28% in 2011

* Oceana: Firefox overtook IE in 2017 with 12%. Peak was 32% in 2010

* North America: Firefox peaked at 30% in 2009 and was half as common as IE until 2015-2016. It still hasn't overtaken IE

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