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Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

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Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#111

Post by AJ007 »

elagost wrote: post #100
yogthos wrote: post #69

At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced. A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today, but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up. However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and ve…

At that point, IE was so technically far behind that you could easily point to reasons why Firefox was better: Add-ons, usable tabbed browsing, incredible speed increases, more customization, and websites actually working. Nowadays, we're asking people to choose, for all appearances, a slower browser that's not as technically advanced in some ways, with no clear merits and a lot of changes to workflow. The choice tod…

Going from IE 6 to Phoenix was a profound increase in speed. It was one of those moments where it felt like web browsing could suddenly be fun again.

I was actively using chrome, chromium, and Firefox for a long time. This was probably more because of what I do for work than a personal preference. More recently it’s been 98% Firefox since Chrome has just added too many weird things.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#112

Post by MaxBarraclough »

elagost wrote: post #100
yogthos wrote: post #69

At one point IE was just as dominant as Chrome is today, and it got displaced. A lot of people seem unable to imagine how Chrome could be displaced today, but that can happen pretty rapidly. For example, Google restricting ad blockers on Chrome will almost certainly drive Firefox market share up. However, the only reason this is possible is because we have web standards that are independent of a single browser and ve…

At that point, IE was so technically far behind that you could easily point to reasons why Firefox was better: Add-ons, usable tabbed browsing, incredible speed increases, more customization, and websites actually working. Nowadays, we're asking people to choose, for all appearances, a slower browser that's not as technically advanced in some ways, with no clear merits and a lot of changes to workflow. The choice tod…

> we're asking people to choose, for all appearances, a slower browser

Is this still true with modern Firefox?

Personally I don't see a noticeable performance difference between Firefox and Chrome.

Netflix on (pre-Chromium) Edge, really is insufferably slow. General browsing in Firefox though seems perfectly fine; it's not purely an ideological charity-case.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#113

Post by pjmlp »

roca wrote: post #45
ximm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google controls Chromium because they do the heavy lifting Google already controls the web standardization process with its manpower. So standardizing on chromium would not change that issue, it would just move it to another level. I am not saying that this is great. I just think the argument is invalid.

Google has a lot of power in the Web platform but it's definitely not complete. If it was just a matter of manpower then they would have forced (P)NaCl/Pepper and Dart down everyone's throats and we would have been stuck with Web Components v0. Sentiments such as "Google controls everything, there is nothing we can do" are inaccurate and also counterproductive.

Mozilla was more relevant back then, and mobile Web wasn't as strong.

Nowadays for most consumers it is whatever Safari or Chrome support.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#114

Post by elagost »

feanaro wrote: post #107
elagost wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point, IE was so technically far behind that you could easily point to reasons why Firefox was better: Add-ons, usable tabbed browsing, incredible speed increases, more customization, and websites actually working. Nowadays, we're asking people to choose, for all appearances, a slower browser that's not as technically advanced in some ways, with no clear merits and a lot of changes to workflow. The choice tod…

The are definitely merits: fingerprinting protection, containers, less memory usage, soon a state-of-the-art parallel rendering engine (Webrender), soon-to-be better adblockers, etc. More novel things will trickle down from Servo in the future. It's unclear to me Chromium is still significantly faster in any meaningful way. They certainly feel roughly the same.

If I asked my dad what the technical merits of Chrome or Firefox were or why he used what he used, he wouldn't have an answer for me. He'd say "I use Chrome because you told me a few years ago to use it and it still works."

The reason we switched from IE was because IE just straight up did not work. Sites were broken. Now it doesn't really matter but for these invisible things that normal people don't see or care about. Most people are like my dad.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#115

Post by qwerty456127 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #72
icebraining wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. And then Google will start extending that standard, then sites will start depending on those extensions, and any browser that refuses or is unable to implement them will be extinguished/irrelevant.

The only reason to extend the standard if you can't implement required functionality with acceptable performance within this standard. That is the weak point for web platform: JavaScript is too slow and does not have access to drivers, you can't implement GPU-accelerated H.264 video codec within browser, so you have to implement it with C++ in browser. That means that proposed standard should be Turing-complete, prov…

I could never understand why does a browser even have to know what codec is used in a video (let alone implement it) when there are ffmpeg, DirectShow and whatever the Apple alternative is. Same thing with picture formats: if I were developing a browser I would just support them all via ImageMagick or something like that.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#116

Post by Yizahi »

Author assumes that Chrome is for some reason different entity than Chromium. He also assumes that Google stuff is separate from pure browser code. And he assumes that 3rd party "modders" (let's be honest, chromium based browsers are simply mods) would want to separate Google stuff from the pure browser even if it is possible. None which I suspect is true. And privacy is not the only concern with Google. I'm more concerned with anti-privacy enabling "framework", in a way of inventing and pushing "standards" disregarding everyone else.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#117

Post by enraged_camel »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #73
enraged_camel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Who really needs that in the browser? Enterprise IT departments, for one. IT people hate having to install, maintain, update and troubleshoot desktop applications, for obvious reasons. It’s orders of magnitude easier to simply install the app on a web server and have users run it in their web browsers.

As an IT guy, I disagree, because too many times I've seen things that use a web interface break for esoteric reasons made possible by the ridiculous number of layers involved. Applications people use for work are pretty easy to deal with by comparison, we just bake them into the image and update them only when we need to for a feature or fix. Even then it's usually just a matter of overwriting the application instal…

I’m simply saying it as someone who has been selling software to enterprise for 15 years. Whenever we tell them that our software has a full-featured web client, it earns a lot of points over the competition.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#118

Post by bobajeff »

The_rationalist wrote: post #92
jefftk wrote: post #56

The premise of Mozilla's Servo is that there are major performance and security issues in all the current browsers that are very hard to fix without a full rewrite. Because we have multiple competing browsers and solid standards, instead of a single widely used reference implementation, it's possible that Servo may succeed at this. If we switch to an open source browser engine monoculture we lose competition among re…

If anything, Servo has shown that nobody needs to rewrite an entire engine for improving the state of the art. Servo is modular and can integrate it's style engine or it's layout engine or it's rendering engine into other engines. Btw it use Firefox spidermonkey for js. If mozilla wanted to bring a new inovative layout/anything module into chromium they just could, but they don't want to improve chromium, sadly. Rein…

That's actually a very good point. If Mozilla used Chromium as a base they would be free to invest all their manpower into Servo development.

Then again they would have to work pretty closely with Google on integrating Servo with Chromium. Otherwise they'll get into the situation that Google did with apple over Webkit and then they be at square minus one with a foreign codebase.

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#119

Post by OrgNet »

mda wrote: post #65
OrgNet wrote: post #41

If only there could be no traces of Google inside Chromium... I'll stick with Firefox.

Firefox uses Google services as well.

yes, for the default settings... but I disabled google search, Phishing and Malware check, etc on mine ... I think I got everything (too bad it isn't the default settings).

Re: Chromium and the Browser Monoculture Problem

#120

Post by mda »

OrgNet wrote: post #119
mda wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox uses Google services as well.

yes, for the default settings... but I disabled google search, Phishing and Malware check, etc on mine ... I think I got everything (too bad it isn't the default settings).

Not a good idea to remove malware checks. Google is probably your best option when it comes to security.
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