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The Browser Monopoly

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Re: The Browser Monopoly

#81

Post by TeMPOraL »

abtinf wrote: post #39
basch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> I shouldnt be so cocky. Off-topic, but I don't think its about being cocky. For me, the most difficult thing to keep in mind about information technology is that it is entirely a construct of the human mind and we haven't yet devised methods to validate it against reality. We see things as they are now and think "well, of course it has to be that way." That kind of view is true in a lot of fields--a rocket ship has…

> The idea that computing can and should be fundamentally reinvented has been the most exciting discovery of my life.

This was one of the more depressing discoveries of mine.

"Reinvention" works by the main stream of this industry having knowledge half-life on the order of decade or less. Instead of building on top of prior work, we keep reinventing the old stuff; sometimes better, but usually very poorly - I attribute this to bad incentives. In the 70s they had time to think about what they're actually doing. In 2010s we have constant race to the market, and "move fast and break things" culture, which leads to layers of crappy abstractions that keeps relative performance of our software on the level of 1980s while delivering little usability on top.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#82

Post by nwah1 »

realshowbiz wrote: post #40
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…

I’ve been having a good experience with safari + ublock origin. Firefox tends to consume a lot of system resources on my pretty modest machine.

My understanding is that Firefox previously had some specific problems on Mac that were mostly resolved. Might be worth re-evaluating.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#83

Post by onevu »

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…

It's slower, which is practically all I care about now that all browsers have the same extension API.

>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.

On Android, Blokada, or any browser like Brave. On iOS, Safari has a builtin content filter.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#84

Post by lazylizard »

kgwxd wrote: post #25
basch wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Vipuls razor?

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#85

Post by nerdkid93 »

skrowl wrote: post #56
The_rationalist wrote: post #37

The number of features that gecko (Firefox) lack vs blink (chromiums) is growing everyday... In a factual sense, mozilla slow down the evolution of the web and what it allow web masters to create. But it is nothing in comparison of safari which is pathetically behind blink and gecko feature wise. It's a shame that the most popular websites don't team up to block safari and ask to install a browser that supports web s…

For most front-end web devs, iOS Safari is the new IE6.

Truth, mobile Safari is far and away the worst of the "modern" browsers, and it's basically impossible to test unless you have a spare Apple device or you pay for BrowserStack :/

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#86

Post by zvrba »

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?…

> Im gonna feel really bad breaking the QUIC / HTTP/3 news.

According to this research article [1], QUIC is unfair towards TCP and consumes more than twice its fair share of bottleneck bandwidth.

[1] [PDF] https://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2017/papers/imc17-final3...

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#87

Post by csande17 »

zvrba wrote: post #86
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?…

> Im gonna feel really bad breaking the QUIC / HTTP/3 news. According to this research article [1], QUIC is unfair towards TCP and consumes more than twice its fair share of bottleneck bandwidth. [1] [PDF] https://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2017/papers/imc17-final3...

That's the whole point, isn't it? Google wants web sites to load more quickly without needing to reduce the size or number of resources they send. Consuming more bandwidth seems like the only way to square that circle.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#88

Post by basch »

ro0ster wrote: post #80
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…

How would you compare your Firefox experience to Brave? I'm not technically minded but Brave seemed to be easiest mobile ad blocking browser.

and now youre back to using Chromium, and driving marketshare back towards a monosphere of Chromium influence on the web.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#89

Post by CoolGuySteve »

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?…

Chrome had the nifty break away title bar tabs before anyone else.

But the major improvement that made everyone switch was process separation for each tab. One tab could crash while the others stayed functional and a security vulnerability in one tab would have a more difficult time compromising the others.

It's also one of the reasons Chome uses so much memory, they failed to keep optimizing their copy-on-write paging behaviour so that tabs would share more memory among themselves.

Nowadays Firefox has process separation for tabs AND it's not written by an advertising company, so I like it better.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#90

Post by theboulevardier »

I have recently returned to Firefox for my personal browsing after using Chrome since about 2014 and it works great. However...

In work I'm stuck using Chrome due to the amount of time I spend in Google Apps (Docs, Sheets, Google Analytics, Search Console & Data Studio) as they break certain functionality on Firefox, which makes me less productive.

Google has too much power. I work in Search Engine Marketing and it wasn't so long ago that we optimised sites for different search engines, now no-one cares about any search engine other than Google.

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