I'm afraid we are all way too far down the slippery slope here, you've piled so much garbage into web standards its no longer possible for any new players to enter the game without an unreal amount of financial backing.
We Need Chrome No More
381–390 of 536 posts
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#382Earlier 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.
I use both on a daily basis, and even I have no idea why I'd pick one over the other, except for power-user functions that 96% of the world couldn't care less about. In normal use, even standard dev work, they both do what I need them to do, and I (infrequently) run into bugs for both of them. And honestly, at this point I don't even bother opening sites that struggle in one with the other: I just go "you clearly jus…
I dev with Chrome for the dev tools and use firefox for literally everything else, the Tab containers thing was the latest in a long sequence of "man they make that so much easier than Chrome" features.
Used both for a long time.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#383I 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.
I don't doubt the technical competence at all, I doubt the management.
for example, we now have https://screenshots.firefox.com/ so that I can store my browser screenshots In The Cloud. The developer hours are going somewhere, to Screenshots, or Pocket integration, or taking away unsigned extensions, or whatever. It's not that the devs can't make something better, it's that management doesn't think that's the best investment of time?
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#384Earlier 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 had to use both on and off for years. My patience with software is small but I had few issues with Firefox except on Google properties. Not saying your experience didn't happen but it doesn't match mine. I even used to be a Google fan and without being able to pinpoint a date I have memories of trying (and failing to) start using Chrome as my default browser at least once. So I agree with GP and personally think…
Until the Firefox quantum update, the reason a lot of sites only worked in Chrome, was that it was the only browser with kind of decentish performance.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#385Earlier 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.
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.
I get to mandate the browser the work system supports (which is Chrome because that was what the majority of users used when I started so I went with what would cause the least amount of pain) but every feature I rollout works with Chrome, Firefox and mobile Safari (I test all three).
It adds very little extra work with the advantage of surfacing edge cases/issues that might have bitten me even if it was just Chrome in the mix.
Also from a business risk point of view tying the entire platform to a capricious vendor is dangerous and I've been around long enough to remember the days of IE5 then 6.
Once bitten, twice shy.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#386I'm an avid Firefox user, but I just can't ignore the fact that it's way less performant. Consequently, I use it for my personal life, but when it comes to all the web apps I need for work, I have to go with Chrome, or my computer slows to a crawl. I keep fairly extreme numbers of tabs open, but Chrome is significantly better at coping.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I used it for a month or something back when I couldn't get the graphics card working, but it was not fun.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#388I 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…
I switched back to Firefox before it was cool to switch back :-)
And no, for me if Chrome is superior, it’s absolutely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that I cannot trust Chrome and that Firefox has been good enough for quite some time.
Yes I know the general population doesn’t think like me. I also think that ignorance in tech is dangerous.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#389I 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…
It doesn't matter if Firefox has caught up if their usage share is still dropping. With Microsoft moving to a Chromium based browser as well, Firefox is very close to being irrelevant. More than 90% of the market will be Webkit or Blink.
In my opinion, despite their technical achievements, Firefox is currently headed down the same path Opera went down before they became essentially a Chromium reskin. Their dropping usage share is negatively affecting sites compatibility with Firefox, which is the only reason I went back to Chrome after giving Quantum a try.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#390If anyone's to blame it's mozilla's criminal laziness. There I said it. We were stuck with firefox 3 for 3 years (early 2008-2011), on a time where chrome was getting a +1 version every month or 2 months. I remember Mozilla "evangelist" employees hard at work, tweeting "version doesn't matter, it's the changelog that matters, chrome team could have changed two background colors and did +1 to the version counter". Gre…
Addressing your entire post would require further research on my part so I hope you'll excuse that I only address what I can recall off the top of my head. > Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that? That's just the code name for Firefox for Android. Ime it's fairly pleasant to use since flick scrolling was improved, and browser plugins on mobile are the selling feature. > FLASH TO JS CONVERTER Definitely sad to…
Thanks for commenting. My comment was meant to to be slightly exagerated but since your response is grounded, I 'll rephrase mine too :)
The evangelist tweets (I won't dig them because it's not cool) are 100% real, but keep in mind they were meant to be humorous and not official stance.
Firefox 3 got released in 2008, but firefox 3.5 (arguably the best browser at the time) was released a year later. Mozilla released many firefox updates in the meantime I believe they did so even after firefox 4 was released (no forced update from 3.5 to 4).
Firefox 4 was delayed to my understanding due to the whole html5 hype and trying to support as many of the new standards as possible (this info is from twitter so it might be wrong).
Lots of projects in limbo, not much different than google pushing NaCl, Dart, webkit prefixes. It looks bad only when paired with the general low activity. There were some chat logs leaked of mozilla people talking about adding webkit prefix support to firefox. Some where getting very angry over this. Today firefox supports the webkit prefixes :p must have been a multi-year argument.
Lack of mp4 support was due to MPEG LA owning the rights to h264. Mozilla didn't wanna pay the patent owners, in the end cisco created openh264 and mozilla used that, in 2014 nonetheless. Webm was not added because it wasn't a web standard. In my opinion both h264 and webm events got dealt in poor judgement but whatever.
The Yahoo change was due to an expensive multi-year contract between Mozilla and Yahoo. Money before users. I remember people defending it by saying that yahoo search is powered by Bing, not by yahoo themselves.
In general mozilla used to be this awesomely perceived company... no not company, foundation! They organized things like place giant firefox stickers in your city and gain online fame, and sending a cake to the IE team with every major release they did. Spearheaded the whole open web movement. It was Richard Stallman with Charisma 10! And then.. kinda suddenly stopped and became more like the Apache Foundation. Cool and all but slow and old.