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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#331

Post by cptskippy »

wnevets wrote: post #324
cptskippy wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you mean by this? Supporting Google/Chrome is supporting corporate interest over user interest. We've seen them already taking steps to remove support for 3rd Party Ad Blocking and to ignore privacy related features.

> remove support for 3rd Party Ad Blocking that's a bit misleading, no?

Google maintains plausible deniability but it's an odd coincidence that they first introduce their own Ad Blocker, and then soon after propose to remove an API that's necessary for 3rd Party Ad Blockers.

If you keep in mind that Google is an Ad company then adding an Ad Blocker to their product doesn't make sense until you consider that by doing so they diminish the need for 3rd party Ad Blockers. Once you can successfully argue 3rd Party Ad Blockers are unnecessary then the argument for removing an API they depend on to function is easier.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#332

Post by briffle »

_cs2017_ wrote: post #323

Hypothetically speaking, suppose we didn't care about privacy at all. In that case, what are the disadvantages of a single browser engine taking over the market? I suspect one disadvantage is that it's harder to innovate. Specifically, your new browser engine has no hope of sticking if all websites are heavily customized to Blink, rather than to open standards. It may seem that it's not a problem if Blink is open sou…

The vendor will make decisions that are not in your interest, but in theirs. have you have tried to install an ad-blocker in chrome mobile? they just work in firefox mobile, and in both desktop browsers, but not in chrome mobile. (unless you do some very weird things with rooting your phone, using VPN providers, etc)

Without using an ad-blocker, if I use chrome mobile on my older phone (original Pixel), any time I browse a web site, the whole phone appears to lock up for a few seconds, it starts getting warm, and then a whole page ad appears over the web-site, and half the time clicking the X in the corner loads up the ad in a new tab...

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#333

Post by robocat »

Shank wrote: post #41

I find posts like this kind of interesting. Chrome gained prominence because it had great performance improvements over the competition -- IE and Firefox. IE in particular was dog slow at all times, and Chrome ran everything at least as well and almost always better. Firefox didn't have process isolation when Chrome came onto the scene, and that kind of knocked it for security and stability. It's not as if people swi…

> Google can drop millions of dollars on a browser -- and few other companies can afford to do that. Certainly not Mozilla.

Mozilla Revenue: US$562.3 million (2017)

And personally I don't think it is just money. As a developer, I feel that the whole Chrome dev team are astoundingly competent developers. Mozilla has their bright spots, but overall I feel they struggle to compete technically in some areas.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#334

Post by _cs2017_ »

briffle wrote: post #332
_cs2017_ wrote: post #323

Hypothetically speaking, suppose we didn't care about privacy at all. In that case, what are the disadvantages of a single browser engine taking over the market? I suspect one disadvantage is that it's harder to innovate. Specifically, your new browser engine has no hope of sticking if all websites are heavily customized to Blink, rather than to open standards. It may seem that it's not a problem if Blink is open sou…

The vendor will make decisions that are not in your interest, but in theirs. have you have tried to install an ad-blocker in chrome mobile? they just work in firefox mobile, and in both desktop browsers, but not in chrome mobile. (unless you do some very weird things with rooting your phone, using VPN providers, etc) Without using an ad-blocker, if I use chrome mobile on my older phone (original Pixel), any time I br…

Ah yeah good point, ads isn't only a concern for privacy reasons but also for performance/annoyance reasons.

I personally expect that, for purely selfish business reasons, Chrome will eventually kill all ads that are especially annoying or cause performance issues. But you're right, situations where vendor and user interests are at odds may always come up.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#335

Post by gonehome »

I try to switch to Firefox (or even Safari) every few months or so.

Firefox was close this time, but there were still a few things that forced me to switch back:

- On Chrome I can type 'thisisunsafe' (previously 'danger' and 'badidea') to skip security warnings, sometimes I have to do this at work when testing things with invalid certs. On FF there's a class of these issues (HSTS I think?) that doesn't let you bypass the warning so it's unusable.

- FF still crashes more regularly (like when plugging or unplugging an external monitor.

Thankfully the other two main issues are no longer a problem:

- FF is now fast enough to be comparable

- The third party extensions I required (switchy omega) now exist for FF.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#336

Post by mnm1 »

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.

That was true back then, but the FF dev tools are much superior now. Chrome lags behind severely. Last I checked, clicking an XHR link in the console just took me to the network tab instead of actually showing that request. FF shows it inline in the console. Not to mention code caching bugs in Chrome even with the cache turned off. This is the primary reason I switched back to FF.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#337

Post by pojzon »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #153
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 growth was due to speed initially, but at least a decent chunk of it later was due to trickery. I've had to uninstall Chrome from my Mom's computer multiple times. It's one of the most popular bundleware apps out there. Free antivirus, games, system 'utilities', Adobe Flash updates, etc all got paid to employ dark patterns to sneak Chrome onto PCs and have it automatically set as the default and pinned to yo…

This reason alone is tragic enough to NEVER use Chrome.

And of course it has a complete garbage resources management which can be easly tested by opening few hundred empty tabs.. (mostly freezes whole OS around 180-270 tabs on modern desktops)

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#338

Post by pojzon »

kmkemp wrote: post #247
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.

> better privacy

Pardon ? Its completely opposite, same with performance, try to open more than 100 tabs on firefox and chrome..

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#339

Post by strokirk »

behringer wrote: post #150
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…

I've used firefox and never bothered with chrome as a daily driver. The speed issue is entirely marketing driven. Nobody cares about a few tenths of a second of load times until the ads were shoving stats down our throats that chrome was so much faster Firefox is and has always been perfectly adequate, except maybe for a few html5 canvas type apps.

No one is quite the overstatement, and I suspect it is completely wrong. Anecdotally, I and several people I know switched to Chrome when it came out due to it's blazing speed.

It would seem that was the case for many more people, see for example for a fairly old article: https://www.cnet.com/news/why-i-switched-from-firefox-to-chr...

Of course, many were using plugins with Firefox which contributed to the speed advantage of Chrome. But milliseconds matter, even program startup time.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#340

Post by AsyncAwait »

Laforet wrote: post #288
yesco wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it ironic that they kept lowering the priority since an extension already added the ability, yet that very same extension no longer works thanks to their recent API changes. Perhaps lowering the priority several times wasn't that best idea after all?

The decision to revamp their extensions API also cost a lot of goodwill from the community. FF today may be faster and more secure than two years ago, but from my perspective it has permanently lost some of its utility and appeal.

It could never deploy multi-process with XUL cruft. Then the argument would be that Firefox is too far behind. You can never win everybody.
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