501–510 of 536 posts
Privacy - maybe.
Security? I doubt it. Google does a lot for Chrome to stay safe.
Performance adn battery usage? Safari works only on once OS it is build for, so there is really no contest, Firefox on the other hand is still a great way to stresstest your CPU. At least on macOS.
Firefox user for many years.
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'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…
The added funtionality that the browser "needs", once added, is in practice overwhelmingly directed at commercial purposes, primarily advertising-supported businesses.
In theory it could be used for anything.
Correct me if wrong, but Netscape was originally intended to be a browser for commercial enterprise where companies would pay licensing fees.
And Firefox, whatever its purpose was (perhaps an alternative to another corporate browser from Microsoft), ended up being the precursor to Chrome, a browser written by an ad sales company, as the original Chrome developers were originally Firefox developers.
Following the ideal that the web is this wonderful open platform accessible to anyone, I would like to see more browsers, with reduced functionalty (and perhaps increased safety/privacy and freedom from ads), written not by companies nor organizations that try to compete feature-for-feature with those corporations. These simpler browsers could target the non-commercial web, e.g. the web as a free information source. A web where an individual page need not be a conglomeration of random third parties vying for user attention.
Methinks it should be more troubling to the HN crowd that "browsers" are not amongst the class of programs that can be easily written, edited and compiled by anyone. They could be, but the popular definition of "browser" needs to change, moving away from "all the features of Company's browser" or "all the features Working Group is discussing with input from Companies" and more toward what a given user (cf. company, advertiser), including non-commercial users, actually needs for a given task.
There will always be corporate-sponsored web browsers with corporate-friendly, advertising-friendly features. But we need non-corporate browsers too. They may be enough to accomplish the user's non-commercial tasks but not well-suited for web advertising, e.g. optional auto-loading third party resources.
I 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…
>It's not as if people switched just because it had Google branding. Everyone switched because it was quantifiably better. The knowledgeable minority, maybe. _Most_ people switched because Google pushed it like a piece of adware. Bundling it with other software installers, prompting you to use it whenever you use Google search or other products, and bundling it with an OS.
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95%? I haven’t seen less than 20% mobile Safari on any site I’ve worked on in the last few years, and that’s not even including Edge / IE / Firefox and desktop Safari.
only true in american markets
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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.
Web devs support multiple browsers for the same reason desktop and mobile software developers code against multiple operating systems: some of their customers prefer those systems, and when you ask a customer to switch their framework to support your product you risk they'll say "no." The reason web developers care about those customers varies from dev to dev. Some believe there is value in a heterogeneous ecosystem…
Writing to support one browser first was exactly what got everyone down in the deep hole writing code for IE only to find that it didn't work the same in Firefox and Chrome early on.
Also the Dev should be well aware that anything they write to support quirks could well be invalid code such as IE conditional comments.
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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 ther…
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PWA, WebComponents, File Access, Worklets and Houdini and everything else in HTML5/CSS3 still missing from ChromeOS are all being pushed by Chrome.
I don't see how those really benefit the end user. Firefox has developed Container Tabs, First Party Isolation, integrated Tracking Blocker, an early alpha for a password manager, Screenshots, Firefox Sync, DNS over HTTP and eSNI, not to mention that Mozilla lets addons do much more with the browser so an addon can really change how your browser works instead of being severely limited in what it can do.
For everything else there are network protocols, native apps and scripting.
Blocking ads, should be done at the network layer.
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I don't see how those really benefit the end user. Firefox has developed Container Tabs, First Party Isolation, integrated Tracking Blocker, an early alpha for a password manager, Screenshots, Firefox Sync, DNS over HTTP and eSNI, not to mention that Mozilla lets addons do much more with the browser so an addon can really change how your browser works instead of being severely limited in what it can do.
Firebug was probably the only add-on I ever cared. For everything else there are network protocols, native apps and scripting. Blocking ads, should be done at the network layer.
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Isolation isn’t a benefit for extensions: the whole point of extensions, bookmarklets, etc. is to be able to modify arbitrary aspects of the browsing experience in arbitrary ways.
It's a balance, right? If browser extensions had kernel access, I think we'd all agree that's bad. Now, that's obviously an extreme, but where is the line? Up until recently†, I'm not aware of a situation where a popular Firefox extension was unable to work in Chrome due to Google restrictions. †I'm purposefully excluding the whole adblock thing, as that's super recent and thus not relevant here.
I actually still think the API design was a good idea and am glad for the added security. Still, the API change took down some popular extensions for sure.
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> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from the pervasive advertisement campaigns, from the bundling strategy with other pieces of software, for the pre-installation on new computers or from the ads on Google SEarch homepage.
I think Chrome's design appeal is obvious just from looking at a screenshot of Chrome and Firefox in 2008: https://imgur.com/a/uyBcxI0 . Firefox and Edge eventually adopted Chrome's design choices to have more content area, no "File, Edit, View" menu bar and an integrated search and address bar. But for years Chrome was ahead.