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

The endless browser wars

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 242 posts

Re: The endless browser wars

#141

Post by lolive »

gtk40 wrote: post #130
CivBase wrote: post #111

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of…

Yeah I've had some disappointments with Mozilla over the years, but as this point I use it as my main browser in part because I don't want there to be a monopoly with Blink (and Webkit) rendering engines. And Firefox is honestly still quite good. I have to open up another browser once in a while, but I use Firefox for 99% of my browsing on macOS, Linux, and Windows (mainly Linux these days), including a lot of web ap…

I second that. Reinstalling Ubuntu, I decided not to install Chrome, just to see. And honestly, everything is going fine (except for some DevTools minor issues).

Re: The endless browser wars

#142

Post by sdeframond »

> having to retry broken web sites in Chrome is a ritual that many Firefox users have had to get used to.

I, for one, have been using Firefox both on desktop and mobile for years without ever having to install Chromium, or even any Webkit-based browser.

Where does the idea that the web does not work well with Firefox come form exactly ?

Re: The endless browser wars

#143

Post by simlan »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #64

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. The creators of web sites have responded by not caring about Firefox; having to retry broken web sites in Chrome is a ritual that many Firefox users have had to get used…

True for desktop Firefox. Mobile FF not so much but likely the combination of adblock and mobile FF is not ideal if you want usual commercial sites to work.

Corporate IT is a whole other story. It has been IE only but chrome somehow managed to be compatible with most of the crap they came up with to secure the intranet. Firefox could never complete there... Just too much Microsoft specific 'extras'.

Re: The endless browser wars

#144

Post by scaladev »

mortehu wrote: post #140
aquova wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what is it that makes Firefox 5% worse than Chromium-based browsers in your eyes?

Not GP, but I decided to try Firefox again last week, and had to give up because I couldn't navigate to intranet URLs without explicitly typing http:// Strangely foo/ works (goes to http://foo/ ) while foo/bar does not (instead does a web search for foo/bar).

about:config → keyword.enabled → set to false

You'll have to prefix your searches with a key (in my case it's w for wikipedia, g for Google, and so on), but that's what I prefer personally anyway.

Also set browser.fixup.alternate.enabled to false to prevent Firefox from retrying whatever you have typed in with a .com suffix.

Re: The endless browser wars

#145

Post by eitland »

CivBase wrote: post #111

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of…

> I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going.

Totally agree. You'll see me criticize Mozilla harshly but I still use FF because

1. the alternative is worse

2. secondary: technically speaking Firefox has always had an edge one way or another

Re: The endless browser wars

#146

Post by Wowfunhappy »

I actually switched to Chromium as my main browser a few days ago. I'm using this branch[1], which follows upstream except for a handful of patches to retain support for older versions of OS X, which I prefer.

I was somewhat surprised to see that all the syncing features seem to still exist in this close-to-stock Chromium. It encourages you to sign into a Google account to sync data, use and to use Google for search suggestions, and to install extensions from the Chrome Web Store. Does anyone know how that's possible?

I'd actually be quite pleased if all of this stuff just got stripped out of Chromium. As it is, I spent quite a bit of time going through and turning off as much of it as I could, in some places via semi-confusing defaults write commands.

1: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy

Re: The endless browser wars

#147

Post by pwdisswordfish6 »

majewsky wrote: post #100
pwdisswordfish6 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These browser war threads always attract the worst kind of pundits: ones who have strong opinions but no idea what they're talking about. > That's true, but Safari uses a closed source JavaScript engine. No.

These thread always attract the worst kind of commenters: ones who make strong claims without providing any explanation or evidence.

It's good that we agree.

Re: The endless browser wars

#148

Post by tjoff »

MR4D wrote: post #128
m45t3r wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, just changing to a Chromium based browser is not sufficient. Google still takes most of the decisions in where Chromium is going, and downstreams either accept them or workaround them (but for every workaround they do it is more things to keep maintaining in the long run). So yeah, using a non Chromium browser is the only way to ensure that the Web is still healthy (i.e.: not controlled by only Google) in the l…

I think natural entropy will solve that problem over time. Give Microsoft another year or two, and I think we’ll see a hard fork. Looking back at WebKit, Google forked that into Blink. I don’t know why Firefox couldn’t do the same. I suppose in a couple years we’ll be able to check this post to see if Microsoft has done a hard fork or not. Will be interesting to see.

I don't know why we'd want Firefox to do that...

Re: The endless browser wars

#149

Post by da_big_ghey »

CivBase wrote: post #111

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of…

I've tried to use Firefox, even though I don't like Mozilla's direction. But it just sucks too much. The new updates have made it worse, not better: these days, it leaks CPU. What do I mean? If I leave it running for too long with a bunch of tabs open, it will eat more and more of my CPU until it's hogging it all. Killing and re-opening solves it, but I can't do that all the time.

Surf, Midori, and Qutebrowser are all good options (webkit-based) that I'd encourage others in similar situations to explore.

Re: The endless browser wars

#150

Post by sfink »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #149
CivBase wrote: post #111

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of…

I've tried to use Firefox, even though I don't like Mozilla's direction. But it just sucks too much. The new updates have made it worse, not better: these days, it leaks CPU. What do I mean? If I leave it running for too long with a bunch of tabs open, it will eat more and more of my CPU until it's hogging it all. Killing and re-opening solves it, but I can't do that all the time. Surf, Midori, and Qutebrowser are al…

That would be a bug. I use it all day with hundreds of tabs (sometimes thousands, but I'm getting better about pruning back) and don't see this. I know many, many people who could say the same.

If you have time, please file it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi . If you're willing, include a profile ( https://profiler.firefox.com is pretty easy to use). You can look at about:performance (or in newer versions, about:processes, but I don't think that's in release yet.) When you file the bug, you will probably be asked if it still happens in safe mode (which would probably blame an addon).

Post reply on HN