The endless browser wars • Hacker News Board

Re: The endless browser wars

#201

Post by hackerfromthefu » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 8:52 PM UTC

jjav wrote: post #188

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. A very key point. I may rage against the occasional anti-user decisions Mozilla makes every now and then, but objectively Google and thus Chrome are 100x worse in every aspect. Mozilla still does respect privacy and user choice mostly, even if they blunder sometimes. Google is an adverti…

I think you're conflating different issues here. Usability, vs privacy. Chrome usability is actually better, 'not 100x worse'. I've stopped using Chrome because of the privacy issues, but let's be accurate about the issues so we build better community understanding and possibly solution.

e.g. By realising that Mozilla has better (than Chrome, but still flawed) privacy, but also issues with usability, a nice solution suggests itself: another user-focussed organisation could maintain patches to Firefox to produce a better browser fixing the regular anti-user things Moz does.

Re: The endless browser wars

#202

Post by ornxka » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 8:58 PM UTC

Nobody is addressing the elephant in the room, which is the reason why there are only two viable browsers in the first place - because the endless and ever-growing list of specifications and standards web browsers must comply with has grown to the point where it is apparently impossible to build a browser without the budget of a nation state. For example, https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.... has done some calculations, and has found that "the total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing." Good luck implementing that, if you're not Google!

A lot of things could be done to simplify the amount of labor it takes to build a web browser. If you look at the architecture of the web, there is no reason for things to be this complicated - the web doesn't need a complicated high-level language runtime when it could have bytecode a la WASM, for example. But that's exactly the problem, because the reason why things have become so complicated is not because that's just how complicated the problem space is that a web browser attempts to solve, but because the people in charge of the web actually have a vested interest in things being as complicated as possible. When you already have the budget of a nation state, there is not only no benefit to your job requiring less labor to perform, it actually harms you because now competitors need that many fewer resources to compete with you. That's the real problem - they don't want it to be simple and easy, they want it to be complicated and hard, and the present problem of lack of browser diversity is just a consequence of that.

This is the real reason why things have gotten this bad in the browser space, and it's never going to get any better without first addressing this fact and then by breaking basically the entire web by decimating the volume of standards documents web browsers have to follow. There is no other option. Nobody is going to sift through 114 million words of specification documents to build another web browser for the web that exists today.

The web can't be saved. Its replacement will have to start from scratch.

Re: The endless browser wars

#203

Post by dblohm7 » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 8:58 PM UTC

dkdk8283 wrote: post #178

xg15 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel? OT, but I think this is an interesting psychological phenomenon that occurs in a lot of settings, in particular politics: People, services, products etc are not judged by objective (or even just common) standards but by the standards they announce for themselves . So someone who claims…

Firefox laid off the majority of their security teams last year. I don’t trust Google but I trust Firefox less.

False.

(I am a Mozilla employee)

This is what I know about what happened there:

There were two enterprise IT teams with similar duties but different purviews. When management was deciding on layoffs, they decided to unify those two teams. Unfortunately that meant that there were redundancies.

My heart goes out to those who lost their jobs, and they have every right to be upset.

But the inferences being made as a result of the resulting tweets just weren't true: this notion that all security teams were wiped out is false. And there are now others assigned to threat management.

Furthermore, the security teams that work on Gecko and Firefox were left mostly if not entirely intact.

I work on security hardening for Gecko on Android, and I’m still here. So is our entire hardening/sandboxing team: https://twitter.com/gcpascutto/status/1293519587967983616

TL;DR: Don’t base your understanding of an organization’s capabilities off of one tweet.

Re: The endless browser wars

#204

Post by hackerfromthefu » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

aquova wrote: post #136

maceurt wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could stomach firefox, but everything about it just absolutely infuriates me. Even with a bunch of addons it is bothersome to run. The issue is that most people spend majority of their time on a PC in a web browser, including myself. Even a 5% worse product is still going to add up to a sizable amount of wasted time/ unneeded frustration. I personally spend hours tinkering with my OS to make it better for me…

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

Slightly slower page loads (5% times all day remember)

Less usable ctrl+tab behaviour for managing lots of tabs

20 second pause to start if not already running on many of my locked down systems over the years, seems to have been fixed in last year or so but perennial problem that was infuriating in the same way nag-ware delays are

F** with the extensions

Ongoing 'minor' user-unfriendly decisions to the actual users of the products to the point where it seems motivated to provide a not-quite-ideal result. In basketball there's a saying, watch the waist not the ball, which translates as watch what they are doing not what they are saying, and by doing this I've begun to realise the regular nature of these snafus is probably intentional (at a high level) and I theorise it's to keep Google's money flowing in by not being a serious competitor to average users who want the best usability.

etc etc

Re: The endless browser wars

#205

Post by hackerfromthefu » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

1MachineElf wrote: post #156

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…

If not leaving Firefox, what is the preferred way to signal to Mozilla that we aren't happy with their leadership's choices?

Their leadership has sold their soul to Google already. Checkout the executive pay issues, and how 95% of the money comes from Google. Moz is just a lightning rod for Google these days. Change has to come from the top, and if Firefox became a serious competitor by fixing their usability issues then Google would kneecap them, subtly and privately at first by exerting pressure on the executives about whether the money spigot would dry up ..

Re: The endless browser wars

#206

Post by toyg » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

arpyzo wrote: post #185

I wish more people with give Firefox a honest try. I've been using it for years and I love it. It's very rare that I need to pull up Chrome to use a site, and frankly I blame the website developer. How hard is it to write a web application that works in Firefox? IMO, one has to be pretty sloppy or lazy to wind up creating a Chrome-only site. Firefox allows me to customize it exactly that way I want, and it's reached…

Yeah, I use Firefox and every time I see these pessimist statements like “omg i have to open a site in Chrome _constantly_” I shake my head.

I’ve not touched Chrome in years, on Windows and MacOs, and I surf my fair amount of the wavy web. I even uninstalled it on my personal laptop. If one in a billion sites doesn’t work in FF (which, again, has not happened to me in years, except for intranet sites meant to work only with IE6...), just have a dedicated launcher for it, or even better tell their support you’re dropping them because of that. And if that broken site is a Google property: it’s well-known that they do it on purpose, you’re literally giving in to the school bully shaking you down for lunch money. Grow a spine.

Re: The endless browser wars

#207

Post by dblohm7 » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

tjoff wrote: post #148

MR4D wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

As a Firefox developer, I'm not sure why we'd want to do that.

Forking isn't cheap if you want to make significant changes to that fork. We'd be better off staying with Gecko.

(Oh, and we're still all-in on Gecko)

Re: The endless browser wars

#208

Post by lostmsu » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

1MachineElf wrote: post #155

dimitrios1 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another angle here I think you are missing > If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel? It's because it's not enough to be wrong about something (according to certain people), but you must be punished for being wrong. And narcissists can't handle a company not being "100% right" so they punish them by going to their compe…

How about Brave as a Chromium-based alternative to Firefox that isn't worse for the cause?

Can you install extensions on Brave for Android?

Re: The endless browser wars

#209

Post by mitchdaily » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

zingplex wrote: post #180

eitland wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

What would you say their technical edge is now?

Not eating memory like it's candy for starters.

Re: The endless browser wars

#210

Post by toyg » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

Lev1a wrote: post #132

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…

Adding to the sibling comment, MEGA download of large files apparently only works if you use a Chromium-based browser since those quasi-standardised a feature that IIRC allows websites direct access to local storage. W.T.A.F.

Define “large file”, that’s not my experience (but I’ve not used MEGA in a while, they might have broken something...)