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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

#371

Post by _ea1k »

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…

Tech people are their own worst enemey. Switch to Chrome, GMail, and Google Drive, they are so powerful!

Next frame... "Why is Google so powerful and doing evil things?"

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

#373

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

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

As an example of that lock-in... It's 2023, and my Fortune 250 corporate laptop image still has IE (along with Edge, Firefox, AND Chrome), because we STILL have web applications that were tied to ActiveX, and still need it.

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

#374

Post by andrewla »

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…

> It's 2023, Safari and Firefox have been very good for a while.

This has not been my experience. Every once in a while I try to make the switch (to Firefox because I'm not generally a mac user, but I use safari on iOS and I'm basically resigned to its limitations)

Slow rendering is for sure a problem.

Buggy rendering is very common -- maybe the site, or maybe the browser, who knows, but anecdotally I've had a lot of bad experiences, including lost work filling out multi-page forms.

And I hate to mention it, but aesthetically I find Firefox to be very clunky and ugly.

Yes, Chrome is terrible for even more reasons than the ones shown here -- the direct integration of Google sign-on into the browser is awful, and the in-page text highlighting through (#:~:text=) is a big anti-feature (that now is being copied by the others, oh well), and after I spent so much effort trying to prune down the stupid buttons on my address bar only to find that they keep adding new, useless ones that are un-removeable ("reading panel"? why are they doing this?). But even with those things it's still the most performant and capable browser.

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

#375

Post by tedivm »

profmonocle wrote: post #311
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…

For me it's the ecosystem. I like my desktop browser syncing with my Android browser, and I really like built in chromecast support in my browser. I know that Firefox has a mobile version with sync, but last time I tried it, I didn't care for it. I know there have been some attempts to bring chromecast support to Firefox via extensions, but last I tried it it was very buggy. But it's been many years since I tried eit…

Firefox mobile sync has gotten really, really good. If that's what's holding you back you should check it out again.

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

#376

Post by theyeenzbeanz »

ShamelessC wrote: post #83

As someone who hates Google’s behavior here, this “list” (3 whole items!) is deeply underwhelming to the point that I would say it’s some of the laziest social media activism (essentially the easiest form of activism) I’ve ever seen.

Google running sites poorly or broken in non chrome browsers should be on the list too. Half the time the back button only changes the url on youtube, and doesn’t go back to the previous page.

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

#377

Post by hbn »

izacus wrote: post #362
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 already implements Manifest V3 (it never had anything else to block ads) and DRM. So what the heck are you talking about? Safari is leading the charge on all those hostile changes. (Not to mention all the other ways how they undermine the web, like refusing to properly support PWAs and forcing you to go through Apple reviewed process for apps.) This strange narative how Safari (the only browser you're ever all…

> (it never had anything else to block ads)

I've used Wipr for a long time on both my Mac and iPhone, this isn't true.

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

#378

Post by cesarb »

j1elo wrote: post #315

Firefox had been underperforming during part of its life, but deep internal improvements meant those days are over. There is a huge difference in memory and CPU usage between older Firefox and the one we have today. Sadly, lots of people still think that Firefox never changed. I did a quick memory usage test, just for having my personal anecdote and some numbers to show. The result was that Firefox uses an average of…

> HN frontpage and this entry opened in tabs: 386 MiB.

Am I the only one who still remembers when high-end desktop computers came with 128 MiB of RAM or less? Using three times that, with just a couple of tabs from a very light site like this one, feels like a lot of memory usage.

(I have used Firefox's ancestor on a computer with 8 MiB of RAM, so needing hundreds of megabytes just to start the browser already feels crazy to me in the first place.)

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

#379

Post by blibble »

Timber-6539 wrote: post #202

Browser wars tend to get preachy at times and border on religious fanaticism. Chromium is free to fork. That's the only thing that matters. I'm not going to give up sweet convenience so that I can make a claim that am sticking it to the man. That's ridiculous.

you won't be free to fork with WEI

only Google Chrome (and maybe Edge) will remotely attest

despite the open source nature: the world will be completely locked in

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

#380

Post by joshstrange »

Klonoar wrote: post #365
joshstrange wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sens…

Gradients could be done via base64 css if you triggered the Outlook rendering engine under the hood. ;)

Haha, I don't think I ever used that trick but on a number of projects I know I dropped in a `generateGradient.php`-type file that had it's output cached so that in CSS we could just do `background: url(/generateGradient.php?start=XXXXXX&end=XXXXXX)` (and maybe some other params as time went on) to make changes easier.
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