We Need Chrome No More • Hacker News Board

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#431

Post by dandigangi » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 1:26 AM UTC

chrisweekly wrote: post #327

VBprogrammer wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. DevTools's superiority was the catalyst for me (and many other devs I worked with at the time).

Same here. Firebug started to feel "limited" to what I could do in DevTools and they finally got me to switch. I honestly feel like I need to get Firefox another shot since Chrome's perf tools are heavily focused around the V8 engine. (Even though there is a lot of cross over with general JS perf)

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#432

Post by dandigangi » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 1:27 AM UTC

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…

Did folks really switch because of the tab /per process? I honestly didn't know until I saw memory hogging + folks posting about it.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#433

Post by bobajeff » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 1:29 AM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #367

c-smile wrote: post #290

The post is missing one simple point: the complexity of browser's engine. The complexity of current web client stack is comparable with the average OS. Any modern browser has all components of Android OS for example - internal file systems, threads, VM, virtual native code execution, independent windowing and graphics stack, message routing, etc. That's like situation with Windows and WINE. Yes, you may run some win…

IMHO we got here because we chose the design-by-committee philosophy of organizations like the W3C over more of a waterfall approach built from first principles. I would like to see a core HTML/CSS/Javascript spec that is a union of features proven to be available and work consistently across all browsers. The spec should incorporate ideas that are obvious in hindsight, such as the DOM diffing optimizations in framew…

I think we got here because of Martian Headsets:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#434

Post by galfarragem » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 1:34 AM UTC

digibo wrote: post #307

VBprogrammer wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I vaguely remember all of those things as separate phases. - Moving away from IE, I fell in love with Opera (lots of built-in features), most others with Firefox - Chrome comes in, it's Google, it's lightweight, people try it and like it - Chrome gets really fast, it appeals to even more people - Meanwhile, Firefox has enough extension power to replace Opera for me (who can live with the tabs BELOW address bar or wit…

> It's going to be hard to change the status quo.

There's plenty of room to improve on privacy. Non technical people don't care too much about privacy issues yet, but they will.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#435

Post by ilikehurdles » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 1:52 AM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #287

VBprogrammer wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back when Chrome was new, I'd occasionally open Firefox for the debugging tools.

When I was a QA I’d use Firefox’s network inspector to edit and replay network requests easily, changing different parameters while being in an environment that stores all the necessary auth and cookies to use the APIs. I’ve had a lot of fun with that trying to reverse engineer websites without too much effort. Chrome still doesn’t do that.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#436

Post by austincheney » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 1:58 AM UTC

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 was the first browser to give each tab a unique subprocess but it did not start out with this. I think this may have been 2010.

Also when Flash crashed it would crash its container opposed to the outer page. Flash was also a separate process from the containing page.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#437

Post by romwell » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 1:59 AM UTC

c-smile wrote: post #290

The post is missing one simple point: the complexity of browser's engine. The complexity of current web client stack is comparable with the average OS. Any modern browser has all components of Android OS for example - internal file systems, threads, VM, virtual native code execution, independent windowing and graphics stack, message routing, etc. That's like situation with Windows and WINE. Yes, you may run some win…

>The complexity of current web client stack is comparable with the average OS.

I'm with you here, go on

>That's like situation with Windows and WINE.

Um, no. The situation is not, and has not ever been like that.

(If you think the analogy holds water, the burden is on you to argue that. I am not going to write an essay on how an airplane is unlike a cow; it simply is not.)

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#438

Post by austincheney » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 2:03 AM UTC

joecool1029 wrote: post #310

digibo wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vaguely remember all of those things as separate phases. - Moving away from IE, I fell in love with Opera (lots of built-in features), most others with Firefox - Chrome comes in, it's Google, it's lightweight, people try it and like it - Chrome gets really fast, it appeals to even more people - Meanwhile, Firefox has enough extension power to replace Opera for me (who can live with the tabs BELOW address bar or wit…

> Microsoft is trying to drive people away from IE, hoping for Edge adoption. Lolno, they gave up and are ditching Edge to use Chrome because Electron. https://9to5google.com/2018/12/03/microsoft-chrome-based-bro...

That is not correct. MS is ditching Trident for Blink but Edge and Chakra are still remaining technologies. This is unfortunate because Chrome is super slow on large CSS animations

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#439

Post by orliesaurus » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 2:05 AM UTC

9dev wrote: post #237

orliesaurus wrote: post #113

I have one bigger complaint: It blows my mind that web browsers take GBs of ram to run. I mean, c'mon, it's 2019 how can we not address that? It's probably the biggest concern I hear from everyone that uses Chrome and knows how to read their task/app manager

Leaving aside everything else, how is that even relevant? Even cheap laptops have 8gigs of ram these days, most have 16. Considering the browser is becoming the de-facto single application used at all for most people, what else would they need their ram for?

If you use machines in schools usually you end up having older laptops or netbooks. That's why matters IMHO. Definitely not for the person who is a dev and has fully decked out macbooks or thinkpads...

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#440

Post by maple3142 » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 2:05 AM UTC

earenndil wrote: post #79

rrggrr wrote: post #26

Extensions. I am now locked into Chrome because several services I use require Chrome extensions that aren't available elsewhere. The idea that Chrome can be unseated, or isn't needed, is unrealistic for the many users who rely on Chrome-exclusive extensions.

Firefox implements chrome's webextensions api, so it should be possible to run those extensions. Try chrome store foxified https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...

Firefox's webextensions api is a totally different thing from chrome's ones. Some of its api are either missing or work differently.