Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

I'm personally of the opinion that Chrome has jumped the shark with it's emphasis on perf benchmarking and profiling tools. There's no doubt that Chrome's Dev Tools are superior to anything else out there, but real-world usage has suffered. I've seen instances where certain layouts (eg: position: fixed) cause the visible UI to get out of sync with the DOM, then 'magically' correct itself as soon as you inspect element - no doubt an artifact of over-optimizing repaints. Chrome's Pepper Flash plugin is also considerably less performant than Adobe's plugin, with multiple Chromium tickets spanning over a year. As one of the comments lower down indicates, it's awesome if you're running the latest MBPro with 16G RAM, but should you really need that for a browser? And don't even get me started on Chrome/Windows - have they finally decided to render custom fonts in a way that doesn't look like absolute crap? The Chromium thread on that bug was very insightful as to how the Chrome devs view their user base. Additionally, when it comes to rendering CSS3 effects (gradients, shadows, etc) Chrome really performs poorly compared to Firefox or Safari. Radial gradients esp. suffer from extreme banding, even on Retina displays.

> that they are shipping shadow dom in conjunction with Mozilla

With my Mozilla developer hat on, that happens not to be the case. Which you would have known had you either read the entire linked-to thread, or even just read the mail that was linked to, which points that out explicitly in the "notwithstanding your apparently inaccurate statement about Mozilla" bit.

> That was literally the next statement where you cut your quote.

It was also a misrepresentation of what's actually going on. Quite common out of Google these days, unfortunately; we've had to call them on it publicly a number of times. Not that this is stopping them from continuing to claim that others are OK with something they're doing when that happens to not be true.

> but all the talking and consensus building was done

The only thing discussed at the CSS working group f2f was the cat and hat combinators, not the entire shadow DOM spec. And even for those, serious issues were raised later by people who were not present at the f2f.

For shadow DOM as a whole, there is no consensus at all. Mozilla is not really on board with the spec in its current form (and we've said so repeatedly and publicly, though we do at least have a plan for how to get the spec to something that we'll be OK shipping... which won't match what Google is shipping). Apple is very definitely not on board at all with the spec in its current form, and Google is not even trying to get them on board. Microsoft has basically said nothing apart from having concerns.

In addition to that, the spec doesn't match Google's implementation at all, in all sorts of ways that are obvious if you actually stop to read what the spec says.

Basically, Google implemented and shipped whatever they felt like and made a sort of attempt at specifying something or other which totally doesn't match what they shipped. And other UA vendors at best (Mozilla) plan to ship something somewhat different from what Google has shipped and at worst (Apple) think the whole thing needs to go back to the drawing board because it's just broken by design.

If you don't think that's unilaterally shipping before standardization, I'm not sure what you think it is, exactly.

Firefox uses compartments per domain instead, which is a great alternative to process per tab: "Some readers might wonder how compartments compare to per-tab processes as they are used by Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Compartments are similar in many ways, but also very different. Both processes and compartments shield JavaScript objects against each other.

The most important distinction is that processes offer a stronger separation enforced by the processor hardware, while compartments offer a pure software guarantee. However, on the upside compartments allow much more efficient cross compartment communication that processes code.

With compartments cross origin websites can still communicate with each other with a small overhead (governed by certain cross origin access policy), while with processes cross-process JavaScript object access is either impossible or extremely expensive.

In a modern browser you will likely see both forms of separation being applied. Two web sites that never have to talk to each other can live in separate processes, while cross origin websites that do want to communicate can use compartments to enhance security and performance."

You can read more about how that works at http://andreasgal.com/2010/10/13/compartments/

correct