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The Browser Monopoly

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Re: The Browser Monopoly

#121

Post by saagarjha »

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.

uBlock Origin will stop working with Safari 13.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#122

Post by saagarjha »

onevu wrote: post #83
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.

> On iOS, Safari has a builtin content filter.

Not really. Safari provides the API that content blocker extensions you install can use.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#123

Post by johnsea »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #89
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 pagi…

> the major improvement that made everyone switch was process separation for each tab

In addition I also consider the marketing reach and the success of Android as important. Fwiw I never switched completely to chrome and quite regularly got a hint to try out a better/optimised browser.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#124

Post by onevu »

saagarjha wrote: post #122
onevu wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> On iOS, Safari has a builtin content filter. Not really. Safari provides the API that content blocker extensions you install can use.

Sure. You can choose from a myriad of ad blockers, like in any other browser. Firefox Klar or AdGuard are free.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#125

Post by muststopmyths »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #89
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 pagi…

But the major improvement that made everyone switch was process separation for each tab

Which IE8 had around the same time (It may have launched after Chrome, but in the contemporaneous betas, they both had the feature)

What made people switch was a combination of everything google did having the sheen of "cool" around it, and the fact that I.E development was slow and shoddy.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#126

Post by dao- »

pmikesell wrote: post #55
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'm a technically minded person. I've been using web browsers since NCSA Mosaic. I switch browsers probably once per decade (mosaic -> netscape navigator -> firefox -> chrome). At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war because content creators were continually accidentally making things work in IE only. (By "accidentally" I mean that the standards were very conf…

> At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war [...]

This is false. Firefox's market share was continuously rising until Chrome came along (and Google marketed it aggressively). IE was still strong but already losing.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#127

Post by shawnz »

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

Chrome indeed also uses a master password and keeps saved passwords encrypted end to end, just like 1Password, LastPass and Firefox Sync.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#128

Post by no_wizard »

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.

I never understood this trope. I have not found this to be the case.

I think people who weren't around developing for the majority IE days are the ones saying this. It was just so much worse

For instance, before Edge adopted Chromium, it didn't have support for the web components/custom elements specification. Safari was one of the first browsers to have it properly (I think even before FireFox) beside Chrome (which had a reasonable interest in having it)

Also Safari mostly supports newer CSS standards, and they even propose some very good ideas to the W3C/WHATWG groups (like their Template Instantiation proposal [0])

[0]https://github.com/w3c/webcomponents/blob/gh-pages/proposals...

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#129

Post by no_wizard »

nerdkid93 wrote: post #85
skrowl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :/

Why not use https://webkit.org/ to test against it? you can usually just get the version of webkit that mobile safari is based on and build it

Yes, it is a hassle, but it works well in my experience.

Also this:

https://webkit.org/blog/9395/webdriver-is-coming-to-safari-i...

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#130

Post by mtgx »

no_wizard wrote: post #118
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?…

I agree with your points over all, but I'm still bitter and will take the time every time to sound my bitterness about the fact that Microsoft didn't back Firefox/servo (the rust implementation of their rendering engine) Why am I bitter? 1. It hands a lot of power over to chromium, regardless of how much it gets forked by Microsoft. 2. It would have put some very talented engineers onto a Chrome competitor, which I a…

Not to mention Microsoft's Windows team is already considering rewriting some Windows components in Rust to get rid of memory bugs:

https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe...

I guess Microsoft was tired of losing the browser game, so it decided to back the winning worse this time. But I still believe it will be a mistake long-term, as Google will start controlling Chromium's direction with more of an iron fist.

I believe someone else mentioned in a previous HN comment about the ad-blocking API that it doesn't matter if Edge, Brave, or other Chromium-based browsers can "continue to support a Chromium API if Google wants to kill it", because in the end if their combined market share is tiny, most developers will stop supporting that API anyways.

I imagine the Chromium browsers will be going in the direction of Android, where "anyone can fork Android" but in practice you're dead in the market if you don't back Google's Android.

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