A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team • Hacker News Board

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#111

Post by tarsinge » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:40 AM UTC

tommiegannert wrote: post #64

mrtksn wrote: post #57

Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE, IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. On IE's case, MS probably stagnated it to prevent competition against its desktop Apps business and on Go…

IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." Now, this is from the perspective of the web developer. I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective. Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. The "new IE" hat still belongs…

Depends which of the two period: first it evolved a lot with custom features non available for competitors (that’s the phase Chrome is in). Then once everything was IE specific code and it achieved domination it stopped evolving. When people say Chrome is the new IE is to mean it’s on the same trajectory (IE early mid 00’s), not that it’s already at the IE6 in 2010 phase.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#112

Post by puzzlingcaptcha » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:42 AM UTC

twistedcheeslet wrote: post #28

XorNot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is my daily driver as is Linux. It is perfectly performant.

From my experience hardware acceleration has been quite lacking on Ubuntu (especially noticeable when watching YouTube).

VA-API has been enabled by default for linux builds in Firefox 115 (at least for Intel GPUs).

Keep in mind you also need to have the intel-media-driver installed (for Broadwell+)

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#113

Post by NicoJuicy » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:46 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #57

Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE, IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. On IE's case, MS probably stagnated it to prevent competition against its desktop Apps business and on Go…

Safari was always behind on Web specs that could replace apps in the app store.

It's all about the $$$. Apple is no different than Google in that regard :)

- Apple: Asking premium price and reducing alternatives

- Google: Free for the end-user, get money from other means if possible ( eg. ads)

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#114

Post by Const-me » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:50 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #57

Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE, IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. On IE's case, MS probably stagnated it to prevent competition against its desktop Apps business and on Go…

> departure from standards

There were no new HTML standards between 4.0.1 in 2000, and 5.0 in 2014.

> enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share

Modern web is only possible because Microsoft implemented non-standard XMLHttpRequest in IE5. However, they didn’t do that to enforce a vision. The goal was practical — save network bandwidth for their Outlook Web Access product.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#115

Post by irthomasthomas » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:51 AM UTC

jfk13 wrote: post #20

irthomasthomas wrote: post #17

Firefox is unusable on Linux. Way too slow. But Brave browser is very snappy. It's the fastest chrome fork, and has great features, like vertical tabs, which have become essential to me.

> Firefox is unusable on Linux. Way too slow. That may be true for you, but not in general. Perhaps there's something about your system configuration that it doesn't handle well.

Believe me, I want to use Firefox, but I've tried it on multiple PCs and a dozen different distros, and it is always significantly slower than chrome. I actually benchmarked startup time and page load times a few weeks back and found it was 2-3x slower. Since then Brave has gotten even faster.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#116

Post by irthomasthomas » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:53 AM UTC

ahartmetz wrote: post #30

irthomasthomas wrote: post #17

Firefox is unusable on Linux. Way too slow. But Brave browser is very snappy. It's the fastest chrome fork, and has great features, like vertical tabs, which have become essential to me.

Firefox on Linux is just fine, no idea what you are talking about. It is fine on Android, too (uBlock Origin!).

Have you compared it to other browsers? What distro do you use? I've benchmarked performance on Arch, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu and found that Firefox was 2-3x slower than most chrome forks.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#117

Post by pydry » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:54 AM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #104

mrtksn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious what "its own vision" was The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently, the websites were displayed correctly only on IE or only on other browsers. People put text that says "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6" at the bottom of the page or straight out blocked users from displaying the page in other browsers and encouraged them to download IE - just the same thing we have with Chrome today when…

Also ActiveX, which brought a lot of "desktop only" capabilities to the web, at the cost of the ultimate lock-in. We should probably be glad that Microsoft basically stopped all IE investment when the dot-com crash happened (IE6 came out 2001), if they had kept investing the internet might still be dominated by MS

Probably had more to do with the DoJ antitrust suit than the dot com crash. Microsoft approached anything that sniffed of antitrust violations with trepidation for a good 5-7 years.

But yes, ultimately a good thing.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#118

Post by jeroenhd » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:55 AM UTC

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #112

twistedcheeslet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience hardware acceleration has been quite lacking on Ubuntu (especially noticeable when watching YouTube).

VA-API has been enabled by default for linux builds in Firefox 115 (at least for Intel GPUs). Keep in mind you also need to have the intel-media-driver installed (for Broadwell+)

If you use an Nvidia GPU (i.e. a gaming machine or ML desktop) you'll have to force a whole bunch of settings to use it through a compatibility layer that isn't particularly stable, or accept the CPU hit of about 1 core per video file at 1080p. It's not unusable but very annoying when the fallback behaviour accidentally triggers on a laptop and your CPU ends up constantly boosting, draining the battery.

Firefox on my Intel iGPU + Nvidia dGPU likes to pretend the iGPU doesn't exist. Very annoying but I've given up on trying to get it to work on desktop. Chrome seems to do a lot better for somme reason.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#119

Post by irthomasthomas » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:56 AM UTC

Propelloni wrote: post #68

irthomasthomas wrote: post #17

Firefox is unusable on Linux. Way too slow. But Brave browser is very snappy. It's the fastest chrome fork, and has great features, like vertical tabs, which have become essential to me.

I respect your individual experience, Firefox may be slow for you on Linux. It's not for me. That being said, I don't believe this kind of performance is the deciding factor in choosing your web browser any more. All of them are doing at least "Okay" in browsing the web. Other things seem to be more important, at least to me. For example, Firefox (and Mozilla) are not without faults, but they surely are one of the fe…

I've put up Firefox as my default for a long time. But the gap in performance is so big, now, that I find it painfully slow to use. Recommend you try the latest brave, just so you can see for yourself what performance is possible, and how much nicer it feels to have a snappy browser.

All Mozilla need do is fix the longstanding performance issues and they'll win me back.

Re: A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

#120

Post by lmm » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:57 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #57

Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE, IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. On IE's case, MS probably stagnated it to prevent competition against its desktop Apps business and on Go…

Standards were never the real problem; they were always a joke. I don't think Netscape/Mozilla ever once changed their behaviour to match a standard; rather the standards "committee" was in their pocket for some reason, and would rubber-stamp any proposal from their side no matter how stupid, from the box model onwards. Every "standard" from 4.0 onwards was a step backwards; eventually they approved enough pointless unimplementable nonsense that the WhatWG took over and we got some sanity.

Web developers preferred Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox because it had better development tools and ran on Linux. Chrome is the heir of that. The web has always succeeded in spite of standards committees, not because of them. You're the one who doesn't know your history.