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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

#351

Post by insanitybit »

another_bear wrote: post #326
insanitybit wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manifest v3 has been delayed and was/is pretty legitimate, I don't think most people really know wtf they're talking about when it comes to v3. JPEGXL doesn't exactly seem like that big of a deal and is now being developed again - sounds fine, Chrome went "seems like no one wants this" and then people said "we want this" and now it's being worked on. WEI isn't even properly proposed yet, it's so early. So these 3 thi…

[flagged]

(I'll just copy/paste from a previous comment)

1. Under her leadership Mozilla has lost virtually all of its users. It has been reduced to less than 10% of what it had before, maybe worse - I haven't kept up.

2. At the beginning of Covid, a time when remote work was on the rise and tech valuations were through the roof, a time when the browser was more important than ever, she took her largest payout and fired hundreds of employees. She was compensated at over $5M dollars, enough money to pay a team of engineers for years.

3. Firefox has utterly failed to capture Enterprise market, where Chrome has managed to dominate. I doubt most people are even aware that a corp managed Firefox is an option, they have done such a poor job marketing it.

4. Every initiative Mozilla has come out with has completely failed to gain traction. Something like a VPN could have been a great fit for Mozilla but they did nothing with it. Mozilla has been incapable, organizationally, of capitalizing on technology - the thing they're kinda supposed to do exclusively.

She has failed in every conceivable way as a CEO. She has failed in terms of the mission, she has failed her employees, she has failed her users, she has failed to be an example as a leader.

I am not betting on Mozilla's future, I'm not going to assume that they're capable of competing at all let alone competing while maintaining a vision of the open web. They're dysfunctional and it starts right at the top.

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

#352

Post by insanitybit »

kybernetikos wrote: post #300
insanitybit wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manifest v3 has been delayed and was/is pretty legitimate, I don't think most people really know wtf they're talking about when it comes to v3. JPEGXL doesn't exactly seem like that big of a deal and is now being developed again - sounds fine, Chrome went "seems like no one wants this" and then people said "we want this" and now it's being worked on. WEI isn't even properly proposed yet, it's so early. So these 3 thi…

> Mozilla won't earn me as a user until their CEO is removed Is this because of your opinion on the fairness of her salary, or some other issue?

Answered in a sibling comment. It's her salary and more.

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

tgv wrote: post #55
dbish wrote: post #3

The problem is there are almost 0 alternatives beyond Firefox so if you don’t like their UX you’re stuck. All the “new” browsers are just chromium skins (edge, arc, etc.) Are there any real competitors building a new browser?

What would you think the problem with Firefox' UX that keeps so many people from switching is? I think it's not UX, but pure marketing.

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by stiray »

consentreality wrote: post #336
sph wrote: 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…

The biggest blocker for me has been the lack of convenient profile switching. It's an important part of my workflow to have a separate profile for home/work/other, with history, bookmarks, etc. Container tabs are not a good replacement. Worse, I get irritated with the fact that Firefox fully supports this under the hood, but seems to push back against actually implementing a convenient way to use it. I'm currently do…

Run firefox binary with -P switch.

This might also interest you: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...

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

#355

Post by b112 »

bartread wrote: post #145
tommiegannert wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm curious what "its own vision" was Well, back in the late 90s it was all about ActiveX and integration with other Windows components and applications in order to shove all other browsers out of the marketplace, gain dominance over the web, and further bolster the Windows hegemony by doing so. So, as one trivial example, you could export a Word document as a web page, open it up in IE and it would look great. But…

And then Microsoft just sort of gave up: they moved Edge to Chromium which, at the time, I thought was a mistake and bad for the browser landscape and, no surprise, so it has turned out to be.

I personally loath Microsoft, and came up through the Commodore tract, into Linux. Never could stand the company, their products.

I won't blindly dislike, I had my reasons, but it's been a long time since the early years. So I tried Edge for android, back when Microsoft was going on about not being an ads platform like Google.

I thought, OK, maybe they've ripped out Google's tracking. Made it less invasive, maybe they'll even enable pinch zoom and reflow, like Opera does.

Nope. None of that. And the amount of phone home I saw with tcpdump was mind bogglng.

So sad. They could have taken chrome, made it non-invasive, added pinch zoom and reflow, and lots of other such things. I'd have used it, been happy with it, sing their praises.

But instead, it's the same old, short range, junk.

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

#356

Post by brookst »

lesuorac wrote: post #346
mrtksn wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple probably have similar motives to MS when it comes to crippling the browser and enforcing its own rendering engine in iOS and that is to protects its app market. However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use its dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff. With the IE situation, you couldn't just download Firefox and live happy thereafter because every website was made…

> However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use it's dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff. Flash would like a word with you.

Flash was a web standard?

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

#357

Post by eis »

Terretta wrote: post #237
hliyan wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Not on your list: Orion Browser by Kagi. Very fast. Zero telemetry. Lightweight, natively built with WebKit, made for you and your Mac. Industry-leading battery life, privacy respecting by design and native support for web extensions. https://browser.kagi.com/ Note that Edge is more or less Chrome except account / telemetry going to Microsoft not Google.

I'm giving Orion a try every couple months because the premise is great but unfortunately for me it's so buggy that it's unusable. But then again I rely on a lot of very modern web APIs like WebRTC. Hopefully one day it'll get there but it's a very long road ahead. Not sure where those bugs come from either because Safari doesn't suffer from the same issues.

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

#358

Post by MatthiasPortzel »

blackoil wrote: post #232
burai wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the problems I faced in the projects I work are caused by developers working only and exclusively with Chrome and not bothering to check their work on Safari and Firefox. The issues that were found with Safari were easy to fix or work around. Nothing compares to the painful process during ~2005-2010 when it came to support IE6.

Safari testing requires a mac/iP*

Safari’s UI is based on mac-platform components, but the WebKit team provides builds of the WebKit rendering engine with a GTK-based UI.

=> https://webkit.org/downloads

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

#359

Post by baggy_trough »

realusername wrote: post #63
worrycue wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly Firefox is barely a hedge against Chrome. When it comes to things like JPEG-XL they are in lock step with Chrome. Safari ended up being JPEG-XL’s unlikely champion. I kind of wished Apple would release Safari for other platforms again.

> I kind of wished Apple would release Safari for other platforms again. It's barely maintained even on their own platforms. If they could stabilize and not break localStorage, indexdb or forms every other week, that would already be a great start before thinking of other platforms.

> It's barely maintained even on their own platforms.

That is really an absurd claim. Check the webkit blog.

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

#360

Post by croisillon »

sph wrote: 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…

the city i work for has 100k employees, admittedly not everybody office based, but still: they only allow chrome and edge (except on iphone) because it would be too much work to maintain features for other browsers
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