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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#441

Post by maple3142 »

mattnewport wrote: post #229
misterman0 wrote: post #62

More like we need Google no more. You always find the smartest bunch in these threads. Proof: not a single downvoted comment so far. But with all your smarts why aren't you building search engines? Is it because you think that with superior tech we can't beat Google? I think it will come down to precisely that. Don't you see how easy it would be for someone who specializes in search to beat an opponent who specialize…

I'm using DuckDuckGo and don't miss Google for search. It's mostly a solved problem for me at this point. Google Maps is harder to replace but there are workable though generally not as good alternatives. YouTube is the hardest Google property to escape for me.

I found that DuckDuckGo is still not competent enough for non-English users. The quality of its result in non-English language still worse than Google's ones.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#442

Post by SomeHacker44 »

kevyin wrote: post #357
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

I did investigate that, but it does not really work for my workflow. I literally want a window locked to a container, and all tabs in that window in exactly one, that container, and with each one with a different set of plugins, etc.

The plugin thing is really important so I can have some windows testing sites with different ad blockers and such.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#443

Post by quickthrower2 »

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

It's probably the web page causing that. I am sure a single chrome window with https://news.ycombinator.com inside it won't use GBs.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#445

Post by Aeolun »

eitland wrote: post #400
Aeolun wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is plain wrong. 1. Firefox worked very well, thank you and I'm no natural saint when it comes to patience with software. 2. I am frontend (and backend) developer so I should know the difference between using bleeding edge features that doesn't exist in all browsers yet, non standard quirks that developers abuse, and performance problems.

Very well is relative. Chrome is better, even now, from a feature and performance perspective, but the tradeoff has become acceptable for a sense of privacy.

That’s my opinion anyway.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#446

Post by bscphil »

PostOnce wrote: post #383
robocat wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 in…

They're sunsetting the cloud storage for screenshots, so I would suggest a better description would be that Mozilla management likes to spend time digging holes and refilling them.

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/01/24/clarifyin...

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#447

Post by _cs2017_ »

newscracker wrote: post #373
_cs2017_ wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I personally expect that, for purely selfish business reasons, Chrome will eventually kill all ads that are especially annoying or cause performance issues. 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…

> What I expect is that Chrome will be designed to block all non-Google ads alone, so that Google doesn’t get affected.

I assume you meant:

> What I expect is that Chrome will be designed to leave Google ads alone, so that Google doesn’t get affected.

I agree with your analysis, but I'm surprised with your conclusion. I think if there's a monopoly that decides which ads are decent, it will cause the overall level of the ads to be higher, which is better for users - at no extra cost to them.

My rationale (and I'm very interested in the opposite opinion, if you're willing to explain it) is this. A monopoly has too much to lose from frustrated or unhappy users. If too many people become too angry, they'll eventually cause a major damage to the ad industry through political action, greater popularity of ad blockers, people avoiding websites with too many ads, or people becoming desensitized to ads (leading to a dramatic reduction in ad value). A small company won't really care if its ads damage the industry -- it's not there for a long run, it just needs to push its products and long-term effects are something it worries about. A (near-)monopoly that controls 20-30% or more of the market worth $100B's a year is going to be really, really careful about even the slightest damage to the industry.

As to your other point, CPM/CPC costs are not dictated by Google. It's a marketplace with supply provided by publishers, and demand created by advertisers. Google influences the prices by choosing the auction rules and by saying which ads are acceptable, but any large shift in prices can only happen from a change in supply/demand. So I'm not sure why you think a monopoly would cause a rise in CPC. If anything, a monopoly would make the marketplace more efficient, taking out intermediaries who take a big cut, and lead to lower prices (as for example happened with Amazon in online retail).

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#448

Post by TheRealPomax »

noir_lord wrote: post #382
TheRealPomax wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm okay with the dev tools in either. Install the React dev tools addons in both browsers and you're basically 99% of the way there =P

(I like chrome's mobile 'simulation' better, but both still lack lots of things I wish I could do, like simulating tiny CPUs or limited RAM, actually tracing through setTimeout, etc)

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#449

Post by behringer »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #426
greglindahl wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like your Dad would not have switched without your advocacy.

It was less about advocacy and more about arguing with him. I was a teenager at the time eager to best him in any argument I could.

True as that may be, we're arguing that you would not have argued it had Chrome not been advertised the way it was.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#450

Post by pcwalton »

cromwellian wrote: post #370
pcwalton wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are features Chrome has that Firefox doesn't. There are also features that Firefox has that Chrome doesn't, such as Stylo and WebRender. You can argue that Site Isolation is more important than large performance improvements (I think that's a losing argument, given that Site Isolation as presently deployed in Chrome doesn't even defend against compromised renderers and as such is restricted to being another Spe…

I'm not being glib, my current work involves security and privacy, and so I'm more sensitive / concerned about those issues than rendering performance. Current JITs like V8 even give me the willies in terms of attack surface area, such that I'm willing to stomach something like a WASM interpreter for my use cases. I recognize that WebRender is a huge technique achievement and I absolutely love it when people achieve…

Even if all you care about is security, I don't think Site Isolation makes a real-world difference right now, as it's simply a defense-in-depth Spectre mitigation in case the first-line Spectre mitigations, which are deployed in both Chrome and Firefox, fail. At present, using Site Isolation to protect against compromised renderers is a TODO for both Chrome and Firefox. It's true that Chrome is closer to getting there, though.
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