Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Browser Monopoly

blairreeves.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 197 posts

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#21

Post by basch »

albits wrote: post #14
basch wrote: post #3

>Chrome introduced a lot of neat new features (Porn “Incognito Mode,” multithreaded memory changes, tabs and more). Now chrome is getting credit for in private browsing and tabs? (Safari and Opera respectively. Phoenix/Firefox popularized them long before Chrome was a twinkle.) >It is mind-boggling that basic tools like these are not yet standard features in browsers. How long have browsers offered to save passwords?…

Regarding saving password in browser, the author probably means an encrypted password manager such as KeePass or 1Password, and not the current implementation which does not have a master password

Firefox has a master password that encrypts the data. I dont use it, but doesnt a Sync account also sync the passwords between instances of your browser?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-master-password-pro...

That said, can you still copy the profile to a new computer and have it autofill? Physical access to data on a hard drive is often end of game, unlike cloud only hosted stuff that streams. Im guessing you cant copy a firefox profile with lastpass or 1pass or dashlane and have the new computer start autofilling without reentering the master password?

Firefox also has Firefox Lockbox now for storing passwords in the cloud.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#22

Post by wpietri »

basch wrote: post #12
kgwxd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to believe that spam filtering is a solved problem that could be cheaply self-hosted. Is that not true?

Its a perpetual arms race, if the spammers have access to the blocking software they can work around it. Anti-evil works best when the evil cant see the inner workings.

As somebody who runs their own mail server, I think it's also just a problem of time and relative importance. The full-time job of a spammer is to spam, while I adjust my anti-spam solution only when the spam gets bad enough to prompt action in my spare time.

At this point I'd love to turn running my mail server over to a paid service that I trusted, because they could have full-time people dealing with spam proactively. But Google's free service means a lot of people no longer pay, so the market seems to be very limited.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#23

Post by aluren »

I don't get why people (I mean technically minded people who are aware of privacy issues and so on) don't just use firefox. They are pretty much at feature parity (Firefox may even get the edge due to the fantastic extensions ecosystem), except one spies on you and the other doesn't. Why do people find the switch so hard?

In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to block ads, unless you want to fiddle with hosts files or pi-holes or something.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#24

Post by dragonsh »

I made Firefox as the primary browser even though battery usage during conference call and some webapps is much higher than chrome on a Mac.

I do it on principle and make sure my apps work on Firefox besides chrome. Although many friends and fellow developers tell me why I spend extra efforts.

Web components created a lot of issue when trying to make them run on both Firefox and chrome. But I went ahead with it and my front end team need to put a lot of additional efforts. I don't know why it's so hard to stick to standards. Both chrome and Firefox will behave bit differently for CSS and JavaScript.

Developing a PWA which works good on both browser feels like developing native apps for Android and iOS using cross platform toolkits, which at times require a lot of additional code and testing just so that they work predictable. Still results in not so good experience.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#25

Post by kgwxd »

basch wrote: post #12
kgwxd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to believe that spam filtering is a solved problem that could be cheaply self-hosted. Is that not true?

Its a perpetual arms race, if the spammers have access to the blocking software they can work around it. Anti-evil works best when the evil cant see the inner workings.

Does no one offer a solution that uses data from "voluntarily" monitored emails which can be self-hosted?

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#26

Post by dkersten »

basch wrote: post #9
abtinf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding tabbed browers: they are ancient. I remember the first time I used tabs with a wrapper for IE 4 or 5 back in the mid-90s. I think it was called NetCaptor or NetRaptor or something. It was magical. Of course, back then, no one knew anything about the privacy implications of something like that.

Apparently InternetWorks and Netcaptor came before Opera. I shouldnt be so cocky. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-tabbed-browsing

Its fine, its a minor mistake compared to those the article is making.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#27

Post by realshowbiz »

My only use for chrome is to interact with the google web apps that don’t work well in firefox or safari. Otherwise it wouldn’t be installed.

IMO Google softly requires you to use chrome because their tools, in my experience, are unstable in other browsers (I’m looking at you meet)

The cynic in me is doubtful that this is entirely by accident.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#28

Post by rwbhn »

abtinf wrote: post #5

I was shocked to see the browser market share graph. Chrome appears to be collapsing on itself, dropping from from an all-time high of 65.4% to 55.4% in just 16 months, effectively losing all share gains since 2016. But then I looked closer at the data, noticing that only net 120 basis points of the change can be explained by share changes in the other browsers. The rest of the data seems to be missing, as the number…

Here's a different source that shows no such drop. These stats are highly dependent on how/where one measures. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#29

Post by darklion »

mcv wrote: post #20

I recently ditched Chrome and switched back to Firefox, at home and on my mobile, only to discover that a surprising number of sites don't work in Firefox. In particular: Twitter doesn't work on Firefox Mobile. Most work fine, but still, I ended up switching to Safari, to discover that it's just not quite as good an experience as Firefox or Chrome.

> I ended up switching to Safari, to discover that it's just not quite as good an experience as Firefox or Chrome.

IMO, I find it to be just the opposite--neither Firefox nor Chrome are as good an experience as Safari.

Maybe the difference is that when a particular site does not work in a given browser, I don't blame the browser, I blame the website.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#30

Post by badhombres »

aluren wrote: post #23

I don't get why people (I mean technically minded people who are aware of privacy issues and so on) don't just use firefox. They are pretty much at feature parity (Firefox may even get the edge due to the fantastic extensions ecosystem), except one spies on you and the other doesn't. Why do people find the switch so hard? In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to blo…

Because when I run Firefox on my mac, the FAA calls me to let me know that I'm not allowed to be running jet engines inside of my house
Post reply on HN