Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mastodon.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 602 posts

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

#431

Post by simondotau »

_ea1k wrote: post #366
threeseed wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been making this tired argument for literally over a decade. Mobile web apps failed because they are inherently worse in every single way than native apps. There will never be some magical feature e.g push notifications or installation on Home Screen that will change this. Apple even was going to use web apps instead of native until they too realised how bad they are. So no there is no conspiracy by Apple…

And yet a lot of us avoid the Reddit app and use the mobile web version instead. Lots of apps are just thin web wrappers too, and I bet most users don't even notice.

When the service you're offering is a website, it's not surprising that sometimes a website might be better than an app.

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

#432

Post by JohnFen »

onurcel wrote: post #159
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…

To be accurate, IE was not hated by "end-users". It was hated by web developers (understandably) reluctant to support non-standard apis and by informed people.

It was also hated by many end users.

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

#433

Post by j1elo »

cesarb wrote: post #378
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…

I do remember those times :-) and I guess back then, memory was a free-for-all wild west of direct access and no protections whatsoever...

Today, you're using a much more developed 64-bit architecture. On that, an OS that attempts to protect applications from each other (I'm thinking of ASLR but there are maybe more mechanisms). On that, a web browser that creates and manages multi-process working arenas (sandboxes) to protect tabs from each other. On that, add-ons that load in memory thousands of block rules (I mean uBlock), to protect users from commercial incentives of providers.

All that stack must be difficult to bring up with just 8 MiB of RAM :-) (probably the ad blocker alone needs more than that)

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

#434

Post by creata »

Kiro wrote: post #211
JulianWasTaken wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is taking away your freedom. They're pointing out you're not helping by making the choice you've made. You're free to choose not to help.

My games, which are not using any special Chrome features, work horribly on Firefox and not at all on Safari. Until that is fixed no amount of bullying will make me switch. Not that it's a successful tactic to begin with.

> My games

Can you link to these games?

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

#435

Post by sandinmyjoints »

tedivm wrote: post #375
profmonocle wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. I use it multiple times daily.

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

#436

Post by rpdillon »

hbn wrote: post #377
izacus wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wipr says it uses Safari's Content Blocking API, which has restrictions similar to those found in MV3. I think this is what GP was referring to, since it means Wipr/MV3 is limited in what they can block compared to, say, UBO on Firefox.

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

#438

Post by andrewla »

r00fus wrote: post #414
andrewla wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Name the sites because I find Firefox to be faster and more compliant

The most recent data loss incident was when I was trying to use the New York DMV website to upgrade to a RealID driver's license at the same time that I was changing my address. Validation error on one page became unrecoverable (fixing the problem didn't fix it) and going back started me at ground zero.

I then tried the same flow on Chrome (including the validation error) and couldn't get it to repro; things just worked. Totally possible that the actual failure was unrelated to the browser -- I never tried to establish a consistent reproduction on Firefox.

The other one was using SAP Concur for an expense report in a corporate environment. This is a horrible experience regardless of browser, but I ended up closing out Firefox and finishing the report in Chrome because things kept giving me strange errors.

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

#439

Post by jauntywundrkind »

bagacrap wrote: post #420
tomrod wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * #WebEnvironmentIntegrity a.k.a. #DRM for whole websites would hurt the web, #opensource browsers and OSes What really blew my mind was how out of touch the dev guiding the WEI proposal is, in relation to how dangerous this implementation would be.

It's one dev, out of hundreds/thousands! At least one web platform lead from the Chrome team is on record saying that the proposal could never move past the experimentation phase. Do you think it's impossible for one bad^H^H^H clueless apple to slip through the interview process? Isn't it a good thing that a company as large as Google still allows individuals to experiment with their ideas?

Isn't Yoav overall Chrome Lead?

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

#440

Post by brucethemoose2 »

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 also doesn't support AV1 or AVIF.

A cynical part of me thinks Safari supported JPEG-XL for pure tribal warfare, as its the "anti" AVIF. That would be so petty...

Post reply on HN