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
I think iCab also had tabs right from the start (so '99)
I too believe this was a very short-sighted move on Microsoft's part. There might have been some very good short-term reasons for building off of Chromium rather than Firefox or servo, but long-term entrenching the Google monopoly is going to cost them big time.
It's almost gotta be a new guard of developers that though it was easier to force blink on the windows team, than abandon what they they grew up using. Microsoft could have written any browser engine it wanted and then placed iOS/Safari like rules on other browsers, such as... "if you want us to allow your app to run in Battery Friendly mode, you must ONLY use our OS provided web engine."
I think that behavior could get construed into a lawsuit though. It’s a little in bad faith with their anti trust history
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 can be added to Palemoon and it makes a great browser. If a website doesn't work in Palemoon then too bad for them. I've had a great break from twitter since their new UI doesn't work. And recaptchas can go captcha themselves.
I run NoScript + UBO in Pale Moon(1) on the desktop. UBO Legacy does not block Javascript. On mobile, PM is dead and Waterfox w/ newer JS blocking UBO works great.
(1) it's a PIA to manage both extensions, I'm using WF more & more on Desktop these days. I hope Pale Moon can survive, evolve or one-up their lack of Web Extension APIs.
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 m…
What I've heard is that Chrome shipped an unfinished early version of the web components spec, and now there are sites relying on it because it works in Chrome and that's good enough. I think the spec has been more or less finalized now? I'm not sure whether it's shipping in both browsers, though. Something is (eg for firefox it's since 63), but I don't know exactly what.
I believe YouTube uses a whole framework based on the preratified spec?
My perspective on browser history is a little different. I've been following and using Firefox since before it was Firefox. At one point in time, I was working in a computer store. IE6 - 8 was letting ActiveX controls and other scripts run rampant, infecting people like crazy. 99% of our business was malware cleanup and removal due to IE. Once you explained to people what happened, they were appaled and were happy to…
I seem to remember at the time Chrome was faster than FF.
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.
It's share was definitely stagnating around the time Chrome came out. I advocated heavily for Firefox at the time, but it was not enough. Not a surprise that many Firefox engineers went on to create Chrome at Google, Firefox codebase was still carrying the burden of old Netscape and it took them 10 years to modernize it.
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 o…
@mtgx your account has been shadowbanned you may want to contact YC to sort it out (hn@ycombinator.com).
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 m…
What I've heard is that Chrome shipped an unfinished early version of the web components spec, and now there are sites relying on it because it works in Chrome and that's good enough. I think the spec has been more or less finalized now? I'm not sure whether it's shipping in both browsers, though. Something is (eg for firefox it's since 63), but I don't know exactly what. I believe YouTube uses a whole framework base…
Even though the spec is finalized there are enough variation on support on different browsers leading to substantial efforts to make a web components based pwa work on multu-browser.
If it had been worked out properly there's isn't any need of react or angular except for a state management library, since the views and components is taken care of by the browser directly.
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 o…
@mtgx your account has been shadowbanned you may want to contact YC to sort it out (hn@ycombinator.com).
> 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.
It's share was definitely stagnating around the time Chrome came out. I advocated heavily for Firefox at the time, but it was not enough. Not a surprise that many Firefox engineers went on to create Chrome at Google, Firefox codebase was still carrying the burden of old Netscape and it took them 10 years to modernize it.
> Not a surprise that many Firefox engineers went on to create Chrome at Google,
Google paid a bunch of engineers to work on Firefox, then pulled them to create Chrome. They weren't given a choice. So yeah, not surprising at all.