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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#351

Post by el_cujo »

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…

>the switch would almost certainly make things worse because add-ons people relied on won't work and now you've burdened them with having to find new and unfamiliar alternatives to what they were comfortable with.

I have no data to back this up so you could say I'm just talking out of my ass, but I would guess that the non-technical users who makes up most of Chrome's userbase either don't use any add-ons at all or mainly use extremely popular ones that have equivalents in other web browsers like adblock.

I 100% agree with everything else though, the average user who uses a web browser exclusively for instagram and gmail does not see things like small performance increases or privacy as being worth changing habits for. Hell, some of the technical people I work with have no problem with companies/the NSA spying on them because they have "nothing to hide". I really think the only reason Chrome got so popular was because the meme that Internet Explorer sucks premeated our culture so strongly that basically everyone started to know that the first thing you do with a new computer is use IE to download a different browser, and what better to use than the one made by the search engine you use every day?

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#352

Post by Blaiz0r »

fixermark wrote: post #121
Blaiz0r wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to break this to you, but as a web developer you should only care about standards, otherwise you have no standards. The standards are a single source of truth for your production, if you build solely to a single browsers quirks (in this case Chrome) then those quirks can change at any time.

This point of view is as ignorant of reality as the grammarians that say Webster's English is the only true English. Every standard is a three-edged sword: the spec, the intent behind the spec, and the practical application of the spec in the real world (which all-too-often, unfortunately, includes things like "Yeah, that's what the spec says, but then scammers realized you could exploit that to use people's browsers…

If that were true then web developers would have never bothered supporting alternative browsers.

Regardless of browser matrices, it is the will of the developer to support the open web platform that made sure that Internet Explorer and thus Microsoft didn't own the web (browser) in the 2000s.

Anecdotally this point of view has done no harm to me and I'm not the only that shares it.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#353

Post by SomeHacker44 »

I would love to switch from Chrome to FF on my daily driver but I rely on the multi-profile thing that has no analog in FF. My work windows are separate from my personal ones, and I have different work windows for each company. Of course each is themed differently too, so I know at a glance which I’m in.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#354

Post by jorvi »

pcwalton wrote: post #321
jorvi wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious (genuine curiosity, not meant sarcastic), why is Firefox only now switching to CoreAnimation? AFAIK CoreAnimation has been around since Leopard which makes it nearly 12 year old, which is positively ancient in the tech world. Also, coincidentally, do you know what exactly causes the H264 problem on macOS? I've tried to track it down in bugzilla to no success, but I am 100% sure it is a bug. The energy imp…

> I'm curious (genuine curiosity, not meant sarcastic), why is Firefox only now switching to CoreAnimation? AFAIK CoreAnimation has been around since Leopard which makes it nearly 12 year old, which is positively ancient in the tech world. I think CA was only moved to the window server relatively recently. Before then, my understanding is that it simply used OpenGL in-process, so it had no energy advantages over Fire…

Thanks for clearing up the CA stuff

> I believe, but am not sure, that H.264 is decoded in software in Firefox but is decoded in hardware in Safari.

I am 100% certain it is (was?) on Firefox as well, because it would have been impossible to hit the aforementioned 60 energy impact without hardware acceleration. This is done through VideoToolBox, but that might have changed.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#355

Post by jonas21 »

jeena wrote: post #236
wnevets wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Chromes super fast start up speed and clean UI is what caused me to switch when it first came out.

I never switched because once upon a time I switched from Opera to Firefox because it was the most free (as in libre) browser and I haven't found a more free browser yet. I try to live after the maxim: freedom before convenience (at least in parts of my life).

Have you considered switching to lynx?

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#357

Post by kevyin »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #353

I would love to switch from Chrome to FF on my daily driver but I rely on the multi-profile thing that has no analog in FF. My work windows are separate from my personal ones, and I have different work windows for each company. Of course each is themed differently too, so I know at a glance which I’m in.

Firefox multi account containers.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#358

Post by brianpgordon »

gonehome wrote: post #335

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…

Yeah that HSTS issue is ridiculous, although to be fair the spec requires browsers to give users "no recourse" to bypass the error. I'm also still annoyed by https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85601

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#359

Post by cptskippy »

Anarch157a wrote: post #343
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.

For the 99.9% non-technical people out there, we're gonna need an easy to install and manage Pi-hole like program that can be deployed on Windows and automatically set Chrome's proxy to 127.0.0.1.

Google already ignores DNS in favor of hardcoded IPs or it's own DNS for certain things.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#360

Post by collinmanderson »

verdverm wrote: post #314
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.

I think the issue is that Google still has full control over the source. Maybe we just need to pull an io.js on chromium, though Microsoft would need to be on board.
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