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Introducing a new HTML element – welcome

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Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#181

Post by mbreese »

mbreese wrote: post #79
Aeolun wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I type in ‘news.’ Firefox still gives me ‘hackernewsgrid.com’ as the first result, even though I haven’t visited that page in years, and in fact it is completely down. I’m not sure how the omnibar works, but I’m not extremely impressed.

When I type “n”, I’m likely either going to news.google.com or HN. Firefox will guess correctly that I’m thinking of HN and fills that in as the URL. However, the main HN URL and Google News are something like 8 and 9 in the list. Everything above those two is a mix of things that happen to have an “n” somewhere in the URL that I may have recently visited.

Note: this is different b/w the desktop and iOS versions too. The desktop seems to have gradually gotten better as it’s been trained more.

(And I have Firefox sync setup)

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#182

Post by Jach »

OnlyOneCannolo wrote: post #34
giancarlostoro wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been repeating the Chrome is the new IE meme for the last few years. I even had a boss that only cared about our code working on Chrome and would lose it when I was demoing / developing from FireFox. I only ever demoed in Chrome just to feed that illusion that I was adhering to Chrome but I honestly dont see anything special or better and I still made sure it behaved and worked the same in both. I know people…

I try switching from Chrome to Firefox at least once a year, but the UI design keeps me firmly entrenched as a Chrome user.

Have you tried customizing the UI? Last time I tried out-of-the-box Firefox it disgusted me pretty quickly due to how Chrome-like it was, but that's because I never liked the default Chrome UI. In any case I bring up customization since while I've never left Firefox, their last good out-of-the-box UI was like Firefox 1.4 or maybe 2. Firefox is incredibly customizable though (even if less so now) and so it looks and feels how I prefer which no other browser duplicates out of the box (not even Firefox) and no other browser even makes possible. I guess I'm a "power user" for wanting to fit the tool to my hands rather than my hands to the tool, and Firefox is the only browser that spares a thought for me.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#183

Post by module0000 »

couchand wrote: post #178
module0000 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Chrome, you also get Chromium, and the ability to see inside(and contribute!) to development. This did not exist in the IE-dominated era. Link to chromium dev: https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

I'm not going to give any assistance at all to Google, and I'd caution others to think carefully before doing so.

> I'm not going to give any assistance at all to Google

Neither am I, but I wanted to point it out anyway. If things like chromium-dev had existed back then, maybe we wouldn't have had the IE fiasco we all remember. Or maybe we would have anyway, who can tell :)

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#184

Post by rurp »

nonbirithm wrote: post #157
JoshTriplett wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What aspect of the Firefox UI bothers you?

The search bar in Firefox always assumes you're attempting to visit a URL if you type two words separated by a dot. It's incredibly frustrating trying to search things like "table.sort" and being redirected to a URL that doesn't resolve to anything and will almost certainly not for a while. Chrome doesn't have the same behavior (it ships with a list of valid TLDs). I get that you can work around it easily by typing a…

One Firefox option I love but don't see used much is the optional search bar you can add next to the url bar. I MUCH prefer to use that for searching for two main reasons:

1. It always "just works". I've run into problems with both Chrome and Firefox getting confused by a search term I entered into the URL bar.

2. The search string persists even after clicking on results. This is particularly helpful when I'm having trouble finding a good result and want to make a slight change to my previous search string, or I want to remember exactly which search term brought up a specific result.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#185

Post by jazoom »

Jach wrote: post #182
OnlyOneCannolo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try switching from Chrome to Firefox at least once a year, but the UI design keeps me firmly entrenched as a Chrome user.

Have you tried customizing the UI? Last time I tried out-of-the-box Firefox it disgusted me pretty quickly due to how Chrome-like it was, but that's because I never liked the default Chrome UI. In any case I bring up customization since while I've never left Firefox, their last good out-of-the-box UI was like Firefox 1.4 or maybe 2. Firefox is incredibly customizable though (even if less so now) and so it looks and f…

Even extensions in Firefox can't customise the page you see when you open the browser! I used a "new tab" extension, but for some reason Firefox doesn't treat the first tab you open as a "new tab"(1). I quickly noticed heaps of annoyances like that when I recently tried to switch to Firefox.

1. I'm pretty sure there is an issue for this in their tracker but they don't seem to think it's important enough to fix.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#186

Post by robocat »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #16
moreira wrote: post #13

The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whateve…

I have been repeating the Chrome is the new IE meme for the last few years. I even had a boss that only cared about our code working on Chrome and would lose it when I was demoing / developing from FireFox. I only ever demoed in Chrome just to feed that illusion that I was adhering to Chrome but I honestly dont see anything special or better and I still made sure it behaved and worked the same in both. I know people…

> Hell it was Mozilla and not Google that gave us WebAssembly through asm.js

And that shows why Chrome is not IE... Chrome jumped in and supported WebAssembly even though they already had a mature equivalent (pNaCl) which they have now deprecated.

I just don't understand why there is so much hate for Chrome out there. Sure, we don't always get our way.

To me the Chrome team seems to listen to developers and users, and to put the effort in to follow standards, and to keep improving Chrome in ways that I care about as a developer.

IE6 did none of that.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#187

Post by marcthe12 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #25
moreira wrote: post #13

The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whateve…

There is a difference though: when Firefox was launched, it was still possible to develop a browser from scratch (like Opera was doing back then), and hence lively competition. Nowadays, with WHATWG HTML's feature creep (the HTML "living standard" spec alone weighing in at 1250 pages and 13.3 MB as a PDF, plus tens of CSS specs all over the place, and JavaScript a moving target), that's infeasible for even a nation-s…

Today is the last opportunity actually thanks to polyfills for IE11. Also it must be modular architecture using several independent libraries. Once one is done, others can use and aid maintenance. But it's still very difficult.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#188

Post by tech2 »

vimslayer wrote: post #66
tech2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly I try Chrome once every which and go right back to Firefox for exactly the same reason. I find the Chrome UI intolerable. Tiny tabs, inflexible GUI, less interesting extensions, etc. I also tend to use _many_ tabs (grouped by topic I'm working on) so maybe I'm a bit of an unusual case.

I'm the opposite with tabs, I try to keep them as minimal and just away as much as possible. Thankfully ff is pretty customizable so my setup is fine now, but the default top bar felt just gigantic and distracting coming from Chrome.

I have window title bar, minimal location bar, and tree style tabs (collapsible/hideable). The UI is about as minimal as it can get :)

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#189

Post by WorldMaker »

munk-a wrote: post #173
iforgotpassword wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you didn't. You had to code exactly one copy: for IE6. Nobody cared about anything else. Just like nowadays more and more pages only get coded for chrome and might or might not work on Firefox.

Except that IE6 didn't die when IE7 came out - it stuck around. I was working at a company that still had to support IE6 when IE8 was coming out - and firefox was quite popular by that point - we ended up dropping support for it shortly after chrome got popular. IE6 outlived it's expected lifetime by leaps and bounds due to lots of customers stuck on machines locked into running old version of windows due to financia…

Ever listen to Android web developers? The matrix of versions of Chrome to test if you need to "properly" support Android due to financial or corporate policy reasons is fascinating. It's not as bad today as supporting IE6 and IE11 side-by-side due to idiot corporate policy, but the wind shifts one way or another and it certainly could.

(Fun spitballing doomsday scenarios: LineageOS gets more traction and needs to harder fork; or, Huawei is forced into a hard fork and takes the entire Chinese market with it, which could snowball other markets across; or, some Android worm causes friction with the major carriers and they get back into the version/upgrade micromanagement game even worse than before.)

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#190

Post by mcguire »

ChrisSD wrote: post #100
friedegg wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously every Google product is different, but how many Google products have reached maturity only for Google to basically stop, and then eventually discontinue it after eliminating the competition in the interim?

Chrome and AMP do seem to be part of Google's long term strategy. I don't see them dropping either anytime soon. Well ok they may drop AMP if they finally get it all integrated into the various web specs. but that's a distinction without a difference.

Chrome still has some competition. So does AMP, if you count, you know, HTTP.
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