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

#381

Post by rjmunro » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:53 PM UTC

tux1968 wrote: post #370

consentreality wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The biggest blocker for me has been the lack of convenient profile switching. Switching profiles can be as easy as restarting the browser. For instance, you could create an icon on your desktop for each profile, or just a single icon to run : firefox --ProfileManager And you'll get a menu to choose which profile you want to use. > I also can't open links in anything but the default profile Interesting. Running on L…

"can be as easy as restarting the browser"

That is nothing like "convenient profile switching".

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

#382

Post by joshstrange » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:53 PM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #361

joshstrange wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are quick to forget the pain of things like table-based-layout. I’ll never forget in 2006-2008-ish I developed a website for my computer repair business (I was in High School) and was very proud of it. Then I opened it in IE (I had developed it in Firefox) and it all fell apart (I was using floats IIRC). I then rewrote the whole thing using tables because I knew my target audience would not be running Firefox.…

Years of obscure CSS targeting tricks to fix IE6/IE7/etc. Codebases littered with star html hacks that effectively rendered an alternate layout. Safari is fine in comparison.

I had almost purged the

    
    Styles/elements here

hacks from my brain but this brought it all back.

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

#383

Post by insanitybit » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:53 PM UTC

burkaman wrote: post #368

insanitybit wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 hundre…

Do you have any concerns about Google's CEO's salary ($226 million) or failed products ( https://killedbygoogle.com/ )?

> Do you have any concerns about Google's CEO's salary ($226 million) or failed products (https://killedbygoogle.com/)?

The question here isn't "is Google's CEO bad?" it's "Should I be using Firefox on the assumption that it will help create a 'free' web?". I don't care about anyone else's salary.

And no I don't care about their other failed products, it's totally irrelevant.

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

#384

Post by lol768 » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:53 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #248

lol768 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sens…

> And while IE11 was the least bad of the IEs I don’t think you get to use it as a goalpost.

I compared the versions of Safari I had to support in 2017/2018 to the versions of IE I had to support in 2017/2018 (11) for that specific contract. There is definitely no contest when it comes to the older versions.

I find it interesting that folks assume I was comparing to Chrome - I have used Firefox as a daily driver for nearly two decades now. That's what everything got tested in first, and yes - even Chrome had a number of stupid flex bugs at that point in time.

> Have we all forgotten using images to display a rounded corner?

I hope you didn't forget that HTC file to make transparency work...or you'll have nice grey backgrounds on your rounded corners!

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

#385

Post by realusername » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:55 PM UTC

baggy_trough wrote: post #359

realusername wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have spent enough time fixing nonsense bugs in Safari to say that. Sure the devlog might look full but there's a very wide gap between Chrome or Firefox. Maybe it's not a priority compared to their revenue stream, I don't know.

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

#386

Post by concordDance » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:55 PM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #225

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)

> Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past) I use Firefox for almost everything, and as much as I like it, it's sadly back to being a memory hog. The reason seems to be the process-per-origin-site thing that was introduced to protect against some attack, which causes my Firefox to have 20-50 processes, each with significant memory usage.

Can't you have Firefox unload old tabs?

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

#387

Post by bjord » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:55 PM UTC

goku12 wrote: post #277

bjord wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I agree with the sentiment. But the main reason I have heard from browser builders is that Gecko isn't as easy to integrate as Blink. Nyxt browser, for example, is engine-agnostic. They still have trouble integrating Gecko. Servo, on the other hand, is designed with embedding in mind. They have picked up some pace after joining the Linux Foundation. Libweb (Ladybird's engine) is also a candidate. Let's hope that curr…

I'd been under the impression that most of the useful stuff from servo had already been integrated back into gecko, but I just checked their git and was glad to see that development continues, despite mozilla's layoffs

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

#388

Post by postmodest » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:55 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #248

lol768 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sens…

A lot of the things people bitch about in Safari end up being security things, like the viewport. Arguably, the page shouldn't be able to mimic the browser chrome without some user interaction first, and being able to hide the chrome and convince the user that they've just typed their bank url into the browser is an anti-pattern. So, yeah, good job Safari.

Most bugs I've found aren't bugs but valid "defense in depth" agains the bastards who want to steal my grandma's money.

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

#389

Post by cesarb » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:56 PM UTC

have_faith wrote: post #106

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?

This a problem for me. I've been a long time Firefox user, but the UI/UX has stagnated (like all browsers) for so long. I'm enjoying using Arc at the moment because it's rethinking a lot of things that bug me about the traditional browser UI paradigm but I also know that it's a trendy startup that could either: explode, decide to change features radically at the drop of a hat (pivot), or simple do something distastef…

> but the UI/UX has stagnated (like all browsers) for so long.

What some people call "stagnation", others call "stability".

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

#390

Post by joshstrange » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:58 PM UTC

lol768 wrote: post #384

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…

> And while IE11 was the least bad of the IEs I don’t think you get to use it as a goalpost. I compared the versions of Safari I had to support in 2017/2018 to the versions of IE I had to support in 2017/2018 (11) for that specific contract. There is definitely no contest when it comes to the older versions. I find it interesting that folks assume I was comparing to Chrome - I have used Firefox as a daily driver for…

>> And while IE11 was the least bad of the IEs I don’t think you get to use it as a goalpost.

> I compared the versions of Safari I had to support in 2017/2018 to the versions of IE I had to support in 2017/2018 (11) for that specific contract. There is definitely no contest when it comes to the older versions.

Fair, your comment makes more sense when I reread it through that lenses.

I remember the "cut" step I would do in a lot of designs when I got a PSD from a designer. I'd go through the file looking for all the things (assets) I needed and export the PNGs for use. Nowadays I get a Figma and I rarely have to grab anything directly from the figma except for SVGs (and of course looking at things like font-size, border-radius, etc).