Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#171

Post by callahad » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 3:59 AM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #154

callahad wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not hindered by Google's politics. Opera is actually based on Blink, Google's fork of WebKit, so it does inherit Google's politics, and contributes to Google's monopolization of web standards.

> contributes to Google's monopolization of web standards Make sure to let all the Opera devs working on web standards know this. It'll save them a bunch of hassle to know they're just wasting their time! You can't advance the open web with FUD.

> Make sure to let all the Opera devs working on web standards know this.

I don't mean to denigrate their work, nor have I forgotten Opera's role in the fight for web standards, but in the case of Blink, their contributions pale in comparison to Google's. Check the graph at http://browserg.nom.es/#commitsByOrganization, and note that the vertical axis is not linear.

Opera's commit volume to Blink is 7% of Google's. Hell, Samsung is landing nearly twice as many commits.

An implementation monoculture is bad for openness and interoperability. We've been there once with Microsoft, and we legitimately risk going there again with Google. See, for instance, Google unilaterally shipping Shadow DOM, on by default, before standardization. "Chrome will be shipping Shadow DOM publicly. [...] If you want to suggest name changes, as we brainstormed a bit at the f2f, do so RIGHT NOW or forever hold your peace." http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Feb/0103.h... (HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184912)

I don't want a web where any vendor has that much weight to throw around.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#172

Post by frozenport » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 4:09 AM UTC

npsimons wrote: post #131

dochtman wrote: post #2

Seems like that has no doubt been an important part of the deal that Yahoo! and Mozilla made. It's an interesting way to get back at Google's heavy promotion of Chrome on their properties.

To be perfectly honest, I'm sick of Chrome being pushed down my throat at every turn (including in emacs-w3m; if I'm using emacs-w3m, I'm pretty damn sure I know what Chrome is and I consciously choose not to use it). Yes, I know it's their baby, yes I know it's their SE; but this headline brought a wry smile to my face. Turnabout is fair play :P

And i'm sick of bad search results! Frankly, I was a lot more annoyed using Yahoo compared to seeing a Chrome advertizement.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#173

Post by cbd1984 » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 4:17 AM UTC

ultramancool wrote: post #150

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's JS is pretty speedy too though, and it's faster than Chrome for things compiled with emscripten due to asm.js, like every Humble Mozilla Bundle game, anything made with Unity or Unreal Engine, anything using stuff like sql.js or other C libraries, etc.

Yeah, I think the main benefit of Chrome these days is mainly about UI performance more than anything else. They achieve that extremely well with the process isolation. Firefox is moving in that direction to with their electrolysis project, so it'll be interesting to see where that goes.

IME, Chrome is slower in terms of UI responsiveness, especially when starting up (massive disk usage) and switching tabs/making new tabs (pegs at least one core of my CPU, whole browser goes catatonic).

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#174

Post by singlow » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 4:34 AM UTC

cbd1984 wrote: post #173

ultramancool wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think the main benefit of Chrome these days is mainly about UI performance more than anything else. They achieve that extremely well with the process isolation. Firefox is moving in that direction to with their electrolysis project, so it'll be interesting to see where that goes.

IME, Chrome is slower in terms of UI responsiveness, especially when starting up (massive disk usage) and switching tabs/making new tabs (pegs at least one core of my CPU, whole browser goes catatonic).

IME chrome is faster when I have enough RAM. I have a notebook with 16G of memory and Chrome runs great on it- seems quicker than Firefox. But on my workstation I only have 8G and usually have more things fighting for it. When memory is low Chrome gets unusable but Firefox keeps going along at its not-quite-as-fast-as-chrome-with-enough-memory pace.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#175

Post by azakai » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 4:55 AM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #157

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's JS is pretty speedy too though, and it's faster than Chrome for things compiled with emscripten due to asm.js, like every Humble Mozilla Bundle game, anything made with Unity or Unreal Engine, anything using stuff like sql.js or other C libraries, etc.

Benchmarks tell me that Firefox's throughput is better at this point, and I have no reason to doubt it, but I also know from direct experience that variance in performance is far, far higher with Firefox. I don't think I've ever run any asm.js other than demos. PS: I just ran Octane 2.0. The SplayLatency test looks like it's designed to test what I'm talking about; I get 25k in Chrome, but only 9k in FF. http://devel…

Yet in the other latency test in Octane, MandreelLatency, Firefox does about 50% better than Chrome.

Perceived performance depends on a lot of things, not just JS speed and consistency - also graphics, UI responsiveness, etc. Chrome has had an advantage in some of those areas, but the difference is pretty small at this point, especially if you are on Firefox Nightly.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#176

Post by jimmaswell » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 5:00 AM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #116

glaslong wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that I've gotten used to them, I really like the !bang operators. They're incredibly convenient. A few of the ones I abuse constantly: !g - google !bi - bing image !yt - youtube !so - stackoverflow !w - wikipedia !py - python docs The exhaustive list is here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

I tried DDG for a while (a month, but probably a year ago now) but found I was always doing "!g ". So I just went back to using the address bar for searching and just the standard FF shortcuts (called "search engine keywords" IIRC) + a few extras I've added over the years. On Firefox I have g - google ddg - duckduckgo yt - youtube w - wikipedia etc. easy to type without the bang at the front (Google and Wikipedia are…

A nice thing about these is that they work on Firefox Mobile if you sync it.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#177

Post by 674266966223478 » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 5:05 AM UTC

barbs wrote: post #164

Mikeb85 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to say it, but Linux Mint is a buggy mess. Chrome works fine on the vast majority of Linux distros. Even if a page hangs, Chrome doesn't crash...

I'm running Linux Mint and I don't have this problem. Chrome runs pretty well for me.

How is that relevant? It doesn't matter if it works for you. It doesn't work for somebody else, which means there is a problem of some sort.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#178

Post by tszming » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 5:06 AM UTC

I always joke to my friends that why Chrome didn't bring extension support to Android - Because extension support will hurt Google's mobile ads revenue so deeply if you can install adblock with one click.

So, please also consider support a non-profit organization like Mozilla, when their products are actually not weaker.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#179

Post by Karunamon » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 5:08 AM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #169

aikah wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it has always been about the spam filter(gmail is way better at it) ,and the fact that I didn't have to pay to read my mails in outlook with gmail.Maybe it has changed but the "forwarding" was a paid feature in yahoo mail.

Oddly the lack of a decent spam-filter was the reason I left gmail. It had way too many false positives for me, including some very problematic ones. The last straw was when it flagged an email from my landlord as spam, with the explanation that it was flagged because it was written in Danish, a language I don't normally communicate in. It's true that I don't normally write in Danish. But I do live in Denmark, so it…

I've had the opposite experience - demos of hosting mail elsewhere lead to me getting absolutely overwhelmed by spam. I think being a gmail user since it was initially released has given it a really long time to train to the spam I normally receive.

Very few false positives too. Maybe one or two a month.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#180

Post by Karunamon » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 5:09 AM UTC

mynameisvlad wrote: post #144

nosefrog wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this apply when all the major browsers (save IE, though it's been a while) update unobtrusively?

Yes, it would. It's not based completely on performance gains you may see in new updates. Profiles bloat up over time with data (history, cookies, cache, etc) and the bigger it is, the more the browser has to process. So, over time, your browser will slow down. A fresh install of a new browser would result in all this data not existing. If it doesn't have to parse hundreds of megs of files, it'll generally be faster.

All of those things are easily cleared, however. If I do a clear history/cache/cookies in Firefox, there's still a lot of miscellaneous data floating around in my profile, to the point where, last I recall, the Firefox team still recommends you outright dump your profile in case of difficulties.