121–128 of 128 posts
You're wrong and sorry to be blunt. If you think Chromium is pure technical code and no Google hooks, you're wrong.
1. I've been working on it for over a year and it's rife with Google hooks. 2. When we have a thriving project named Ungoogled Chromium, you'd start believing point 1.
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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.
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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.
I doubt the problem is too few developers. Google has over $100 billion, it can hire as many people as it wants. And didn't you already say at the beginning, "Google is huuuuuuuuge. They just have so many people working there."
Rather I wonder if there are just only so many people who can collaborate on a codebase, there are just only so many features you can push through at a time. If all the Firefox developers moved to Google, I doubt we would see features faster. I bet we would see features come out at the exact same pace. It is not a matter of labor but of leadership, and each project will prioritize features differently. Therefore this is an argument for more than one implementation.
Is this not the subject of the famous book The Mythical Man Month, by Fred Brooks? Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. I know that Google is a massive company, but I wonder how many employees literally write code for Chrome.
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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.
I never migrated from Firefox to Chrome, but Firefox has been in a constant state of "soon we will be faster/better than Chrome" for almost 10 years.
In what way do you still feel Chrome is better/faster?
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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 abo…
Perhaps sites aren't as broken in Chrome now as they were with IE, but you can bet the web itself will change in ways you and I would consider broken if Google is left to become the sole, unchecked steward and helmsman of the web.
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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.
AFAIK until recently there was no support for H.264 in DirectShow. So your browser would not be very useful. Also you wouldn't be able to control video from JavaScript (get current time, get current loaded amount, play, pause, stop, etc).
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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.
for me it isn't...