371–380 of 536 posts
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> better privacy Pardon ? Its completely opposite, same with performance, try to open more than 100 tabs on firefox and chrome..
They're commenting on why "Chrome rapidly gained market share.", not commenting on the current situation.
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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.
The reason web developers care about those customers varies from dev to dev. Some believe there is value in a heterogeneous ecosystem of browser implementations. Some have a few high-value customers who refuse to switch (or, in the case of e.g. Microsoft, cannot switch because enterprise constraints are restricting what browser stack they're allowed to run).
But the point stands that when you support multiple browsers, you don't approach ideal user experience (in terms of performance and reliability) for all your customers by throwing your fingers in your ears and proclaiming "That browser is out of spec!" when you find a quirk---you do what you have to do to make your code run on, around, or in spite of the quirk.
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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.
What I expect is that Chrome will be designed to block all non-Google ads alone, so that Google doesn’t get affected. Google/Chrome then becomes the gatekeeper for what constitutes a decent ad for users. That would then arm twist publishers to switch to Google AdSense because that would be the only one providing revenues (or more revenues). Advertisers would then see their CPM/CPC costs increase, and they wouldn’t have many other choices. That would increase prices for consumers. I recall seeing stats recently that Google (still) is the largest in online advertising, with Facebook being second.
We’ve seen this kind of behavior before with Adblock Plus and the “acceptable ads” scheme.
There’s almost nothing to gain for the users. It will always drift (and only faster, with a monopoly) to satisfy the interests of the company.
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.
And honestly, at this point I don't even bother opening sites that struggle in one with the other: I just go "you clearly just didn't care to develop your website to work cross browser, good job, goodbye forever" and close the tab.
For almost everything, both browsers are identical except for the veneer their UIs present. They have different quirks, but a reasonably generated website or React app will work just fine in both. So while, if someone asked me to recommend one, I would absolutely tell them to get Firefox: not one asks for recommendations... everyone's already using either Chrome, or "the ios browser".
(and safari on iOS really _is_ the new IE6. I 100% disagree with the article's claim that Apple is making good strides, there. It needs to get out the shotgun and take Safari out to the back of the barn)
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> 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…
> Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. This was how I remember it as well. Not only that but the timing was very fortunate for Chrome because at the time Firefox had some very bad memory leaks which in my opinion really helped with Chrome adoption since people who use Firefox were more likely to be willing to switch browsers having already switched from another browser.
Breaking ad-blocking is sending me back to Firefox.
> developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. That's me. Sorry, but I just can't be bothered to support every browser's quirks. I check Firefox every once in a while, but really, I don't mind losing a few users if it means significantly less maintenance and testing for me. It's like complaining that developers are…
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…
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 m…
Chrome's campaign was a phenomenal example of a successful international product launch. Made even more impressive because it was for software, something most people /really/ don't care about.
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.
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As you alluded to at the start of your post, Chromes speed improvements were more technical than it was due to a lack of bloat. In fact Chrome consumed more memory than FF did at that time and that was down to it being multi-processed (ie one heavy page wouldn’t slow down the rest of the application in other tabs) but that came at a cost in terms of RAM used. Obviously the v8 stuff also made a massive difference too.
Honestly, I hate the term "bloat". Most of the times when I've seen bloat blamed, the real cause has been a bad algorithm somewhere. Just as was the case with Chrome, its often the case that using more RAM (and maybe more "bloat") can make things faster.
Less RAM = More CPU or more disk space (and much slower)
Less CPU = more disk or RAM
Less disk = more network, RAM and/or CPU