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

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

#241
post #228
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They often say they don't use problematic features.

That's like people who don't like what Chromium does, but still uses it along with uBlock. It feels to me like the web needs another engine, not chromium reskins, to stay healthy.

it'd be a step in the right direction if one of the "new" browsers trying to do cool things were using gecko (firefox's engine)

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

#242
post #207
post #142

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users. Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia , there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would inclu…

For a Mac M1 user who wants a lightweight browser, what would you recommend: 1. Safari (with this, I have trouble with some websites, particularly Google ones) 2. Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past) 3. Brave (like that it's Chromium, but I worry about the odd features like crypto) 4. Edge (I just downloaded it. leaning toward this choice)

Brave and Edge. I can't take you seriously now.

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

#243
post #207
post #142

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users. Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia , there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would inclu…

For a Mac M1 user who wants a lightweight browser, what would you recommend: 1. Safari (with this, I have trouble with some websites, particularly Google ones) 2. Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past) 3. Brave (like that it's Chromium, but I worry about the odd features like crypto) 4. Edge (I just downloaded it. leaning toward this choice)

I suggest not using Edge personally, unless you're big into the MS ecosystem. Edge has become a bloated mess, with MS adding all sorts of random crap (bing everywhere, telemetry, a buy-now-pay-later "feature", shopping, click bait news, etc). Yes you can disable most of it and pare it down, and you're sending your data to MS instead of Google, but it has left an extremely bad taste in my mouth. I'd rather just use Chrome in that case.

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

#245
post #142

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users. Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia , there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would inclu…

I need translate on iOS. Chrome and Edge are the only browsers which offer that, and Chrome is much better than Edge. I hope Firefox brings native translation to iOS soon. I'll be making the jump when they do.

Safari has translate webpage for me

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

#246
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…

> Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE

It wasn't because they had poor feature adoption. It was because they'd tend to adopt features in a way that's incompatible with other browsers (of the top of my head, handling of localStorage in private browsing). It was a bit of a "fuck you" to devs since you often had to do browser detection for Safari (much like you used to have to do for IE) and have special branches or polyfills for Safari.

> What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web

Apple is just as guilty of this. They crippled and bastardised a bunch of features just to push for a more native adoption (depends on how cynical you are, but some say it's for more control over device usage patterns, and some say it's for longer battery life)

It's gotten better and more aligned with other browsers now, though. But alas, I know most are just chromium clones these days

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

#247

Unless a big enough competitor comes along, they'll not change.

The solution for the current web browser situation isn't another competitor. There will probably never be another big competitor. The reason is that merit isn't the primary reason how Chrome won the majority market share.

There was a twitter thread that I have been trying to dig up ever since the WEI debates began. It was from a Firefox developer who explained how Chrome managed to get its users. Many Google websites used to intentionally provide bad UX for months on Firefox compared to on Chrome. When Mozilla calls this out, Google devs would pretend that it's an honest mistake and would enable full performance on Firefox. However, many users would have ditched Firefox and migrated to Chrome by that time, never to return to Firefox again. These oopsies happened so many times.

How is any new competitor going to overcome the lack of cooperation from such huge services on the net? The problem really is that the users let themselves be manipulated. The solution here lies with the users, not the competitors.

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

#248
post #74
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 caused me by far the most issues, back when I was doing frontend in ~2017/2018, in terms of how it complied with web standards (I wasn't as fussed at the standards it didn't support - at least I knew!) and rendered the web application I was working on across desktop, iPad and iPhone. I spent more time chasing Safari bugs and rendering idiosyncrasies than I did dealing with IE11, frankly.

I’m sorry but just no. I’ve been developing on the web since IE6 and while Safari has a few quirks it doesn’t even start to compare to IE at any stage.

The worst I deal with in Safari is lack of certain features (often things that weren’t standardized and Chrome just added) and some minor CSS quirks. In some of those cases when I dig into the “issue” it appears that Safari is handling it in a way that makes more sense. The only Safari issue that I have run into multiple times and disliked is the viewport height issue but new CSS units (dvh I think?) should fix that.

On the other hand IE11 had a whole slew “Why isn’t this working?” Issues that made zero sense. I _loved_ the bugs that would not reproduce if you had dev tools (or what passed for IE dev tools) open or things related to cross-origin that just behaved differently for no good reason. QA found way more issues in IE browsers than Safari in my experience.

And while IE11 was the least bad of the IEs I don’t think you get to use it as a goalpost. IE6-10 (and 11) caused me immense pain and frustration. Have we all forgotten using images to display a rounded corner? A 1px wide image to display a gradient? Or just images as buttons in general since CSS support was shit?

The gross hacks I did for IE do not compare to what I need to do for Safari and anyone who says differently either didn’t live through that period (as a developer) or has a short memory.

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

#250
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 different things to different people. To developers, IE was the browser for which you had to spend hours debugging issues. Sounds like Safari to me. Considering you have to buy a whole device to use Safari, I’d argue it’s worse than IE was. (Sent from my Safari browser)

> Considering you have to buy a whole device to use Safari, I’d argue it’s worse than IE was.

Until Edge (which is just Chrome essentially) the only way to run IE was on a windows computer. Not sure how that’s different.

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