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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#521

Post by darkarmani »

_ea1k wrote: post #162
laumars wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> a bad algorithm somewhere

Along the lines of a custom memory manager, that never releases memory back to the OS. If you open tons of tabs, closing them wouldn't release the memory back. Which is a decent guess - it used the memory once, it will probably need it again.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#522

Post by a1369209993 »

leftyted wrote: post #275
a1369209993 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that you're emphasizing ads over the very real performance advantages just means you've got an axe to grind. Alternatively, it could mean that, like me, they had NoScript installed when Chrome came out[0], making Firefox genuinely faster by dint of brute do-less-stuff-ism. 0: or when we heard about it anyway.

I'm not sure why so many HN posters feel the need to boast about not executing JavaScript. All that means is that you've opted out of the web that the rest of the world is using. Good for you. But people who have disabled JS make up such a small porportion of web users (~.2% of pageviews) that your experience is pretty much irrelevant to the question of general browser trends. I'd also bet that Chrome was faster at p…

> I'd also bet that Chrome was faster at painting pages than Firefox, so it wasn't just a JS engine advantge.

That may very well have been true, but if Chrome spends 10 cycles rendering the page and 100 cycles executing malware, and Firefox spends 20 cycles rendering the page and zero cycles executing malware, Chrome still loses despite being being twice as fast at the only thing that matters.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#523

Post by lern_too_spel »

millstone wrote: post #465
lern_too_spel wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't agree with your weird rant, without any sources. We are in a thread about browsers and web standards. Do I really need to explain that Apple pushed h.264 on the web, ultimately forcing a binary blob on Firefox? The lagging on web standards is a common complaint among web developers.

Apple's Intelligent Tracking Protection is another common complaint among web developers.

Most don't care. The people who want that just get the same thing in better browsers.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#524

Post by a1369209993 »

droidist2 wrote: post #491
peruvian wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more likely that most of the "critical thinkers" you speak of write JavaScript for money everyday. Even on HN the amount of JS blockers is tiny but it seems higher because they always have to mention they block JS.

So is "I block JS" the new "I don't own a TV"?

FWIW, I also don't use a TV[0]; I just don't bring it up often because it's rarely relevant. I brought up javascript because javascript is usualy the reason why is slower than . See "do less stuff".

0: unless you count monitors as TVs, or disassembly-for-parts as use.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#525

Post by gspetr »

bad_user wrote: post #393
Laforet wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision to revamp their extensions API also cost a lot of goodwill from the community. FF today may be faster and more secure than two years ago, but from my perspective it has permanently lost some of its utility and appeal.

As a long time Firefox user I think the change in its extensions APIs is one of the greatest moves they did and I’m glad they did it. Chrome’s extensions were isolated, easy to develop and had a permissions system in place. To this day Firefox is still lagging behind in its isolation. For example Chrome can disable extensions in Incognito, but Firefox does not. Also if you’re not paying attention, Chrome won and it’s…

Extensions are profile-specific.

Solution: change profile to launch another browser instance without extensions.

Go to "about:profiles" in the address bar, or configure shortcuts in your OS to launch browser with different profiles: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Mul...

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#526

Post by bad_user »

Vinnl wrote: post #487
bad_user wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long time Firefox user I think the change in its extensions APIs is one of the greatest moves they did and I’m glad they did it. Chrome’s extensions were isolated, easy to develop and had a permissions system in place. To this day Firefox is still lagging behind in its isolation. For example Chrome can disable extensions in Incognito, but Firefox does not. Also if you’re not paying attention, Chrome won and it’s…

> To this day Firefox is still lagging behind in its isolation. That is being worked on though: > The first batch of changes to not run extensions in private browsing mode by default landed, this is still behind a preference. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2019/01/31/these-weeks-in-f...

That's very good news.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#527

Post by ripsawridge »

readittwice wrote: post #506
pcwalton wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please correct me if am wrong: But I think both Chrome and Safari have disabled/removed their Spectre-mitigations in the JS engine.

For Chrome the TurboFan (jit optimizing compiler) Spectre mitigations are turned off when site isolation is on.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#528

Post by kkarakk »

robin_reala wrote: post #504
kkarakk wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only true in american markets

I was actually talking about UK and Sweden (haven’t been to the US in 15 years).

what's the difference? these countries are basically american markets, everything west of belarus is kinda a software monoculture

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#530

Post by tracker1 »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #363
clairity wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, chrome was part of google's hedge against microsoft, but microsoft poorly understand the web and badly bungled their internet strategy, to the point that it seemed that they were desperately trying to cede the leadership position to anyone but themselves. google really hadn't needed to worry about microsoft there. make no mistake, chrome's primary strategic purpose was to control the web in ways that extended an…

Microsoft has always been a non-innovator. Their whole MO has been to wait to see what innovations catch on, and then dominate that space. The software/products they create in these spaces tend to be competent but not brilliant. They are almost a market-follower which happens to gain significant market share due to shrewd business tactics and, eventually, their sheer size. They have always mostly taken a 'wait and se…

I don't entirely agree with that. Up until IE6, MS made a LOT of efforts towards making web apps work relatively well compared to alternatives. DHTML worked a lot better in IE5-6 than in the Mozilla counterpart at the time imho. It wasn't until around when Firefox (then firebird) came out that it started to really shift. IE was stagnant for what seemed like forever. IE7-8 were relatively insignificant shifts supporting some newer features, but still didn't resolve some of the huge memory holes with the JS engine and rendering engine separated by discrete COM layers. (separate issue)

I can agree with that in some regards, but I do think that MS has done a lot of things better. I think classic ASP was much better than PHP, though most of the unique functionality you might need was captured behind third party COM components. I think C# was/is a significant improvement over Java, and prefer .Net in general. .Net Core has been a very good shift, though some things seem more convoluted than they probably need to be.

As someone who tends to reach for Node first, I really do appreciate MS's efforts in that space to get things running as smoothly in windows as in Linux and Mac. As an early adopter (0.6/0.8 era) windows use was pretty painful. VS Code is imho was leaps and bounds ahead of brackets and atom at release. I also really do like MS Teams, though lack of a Linux build of the client is just stupid and short sighted.

I still use chrome first, but have ublock origin enabled, and tend to be picky about my exclusions, pisses me off to no end when sites just don't work with it enabled.

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