Chrome is the new IE all over again. Remember that it was IE that saved us from Netscape's slow performance and advancements of new web technologies.
Jump ahead 20 years, low an behold Google Earth - Chrome only!
We Need Chrome No More
131–140 of 536 posts
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#132Other than AMP, I can't really think of a case that I would characterize as "Google abusing its position" w.r.t. Open Web. It was Chrome that led the push for PWAs, which I think is both great for the Open Web and consumers... The author complains about other vendors being "called laggards", which - let's be honest - we're really talking about how long Apple/Safari dragged their feet on Service Workers... and they _s…
It's laughable that the author suggests Apple as a viable alternative. Apple, the last company pushing license encumbered formats into web standards. Apple, the perennial laggard on standards support in general.
Probably because Apple take privacy seriously, which is a direct threat to Google's bottom line.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled w…
You would need to break web standards compatibility to fight the current bloat cycle on the web. But it might happen, a simpler, faster web.
Or you could block the trackers, which are most of the bloat.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
But as a web developer I don't necessarily care about standards. I want the page to work for as many users as possible. For the longest time this meant to support IE's way of doing things, now it means to support Chrome (unless you target Enterprise users). Even if you develop for Chrome, Firefox and Edge you'll just end up building workarounds for all 3, not adhering strictly to the standard.
I read comments like this all the time and I feel like I'm in a different world. I just write standards compliant ES6 code, put it through a transpiler and some polyfills, and my code runs on every browser. I haven't had to think about which browser I'm targeting for years.
I'm tempted to say JS is not the biggest problem between browsers, but CSS... the fact that valid CSS code behaves differently and that it cannot be fixed without changing most of it. Not even mentioning if you actually need to change your DOM structure to make a layout work.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#135Let me know when Firefox stops being an insane resource hog and I will switch.
Now you’ll receive dozens of responses of people saying that Firefox is much faster and leaner than Chrome for them. But that’s not the case for me or anybody I know. Chrome continues being faster for me.
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Re: We Need Chrome No More
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from the pervasive advertisement campaigns, from the bundling strategy with other pieces of software, for the pre-installation on new computers or from the ads on Google SEarch homepage.
Chrome's main appeal was that it was much faster than firefox and IE. At everything. I had no technical knowledge when chrome came out, was using firefox, tried chrome, never looked back. It's not really possible to separate out the effects of advertising from the effects of the product actually being better. Maybe I installed chrome because I saw an ad, but I stopped using firefox because it was clear that chrome wa…
> The fact that you're emphasizing ads over the very real performance advantages just means you've got an axe to grind.
Alternatively, it could mean that, like me, they had NoScript installed when Chrome came out[0], making Firefox genuinely faster by dint of brute do-less-stuff-ism.
0: or when we heard about it anyway.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#137I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Luckily…
> has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed Arguably, with its market share dwindling fast, it's not enough to just be technically on par. Further, it is absolutely not up to par on Linux and from what I know, MacOS as well.
I use a 2017 Macbook Pro in work, on which I use Firefox as my main browser.
I also have Firefox on my Windows 10 gaming machine at home and while I haven't run any performance anaylsis, I can;t tell the difference between the two in terms of speed and responsiveness.
The Mac version has crashed on me a few times though whereas my Windows 10 version hasn't.
Other than the OS they are on the two browser instances are set up exactly the same way.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#138Let me know when Firefox stops being an insane resource hog and I will switch.
Now you’ll receive dozens of responses of people saying that Firefox is much faster and leaner than Chrome for them. But that’s not the case for me or anybody I know. Chrome continues being faster for me.
It performs okay (except for a few versions a while back when the helper processes would periodically lock up in kernel mode and it would take a reboot to fix), but 980MB of memory to have one tab open to Hacker News is definitely not lean.
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#139> If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship A great step Firefox could take in this space is improving the transparency and performance auditing of its own engine. Debugging rendering performance issues between browsers is still an absolute nightmare. If Firefox can provide a better developer experience than Chrome, it might increase the likelihood that web developers would use FF as their first-choice de…
I'm pretty sure this is a commentary on the laziness of devs/why browser dominance is bad for standards, when taken in context: > The dominance of Chrome has a major detrimental effect on the Web as an open platform: developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. When you're following decently established standards (…
I haven't personally encountered this phenomenon. Can you give an example of an established standard that breaks on Chrome but FF / Safari handle?
Re: We Need Chrome No More
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from the pervasive advertisement campaigns, from the bundling strategy with other pieces of software, for the pre-installation on new computers or from the ads on Google SEarch homepage.
Chrome's main appeal was that it was much faster than firefox and IE. At everything. I had no technical knowledge when chrome came out, was using firefox, tried chrome, never looked back. It's not really possible to separate out the effects of advertising from the effects of the product actually being better. Maybe I installed chrome because I saw an ad, but I stopped using firefox because it was clear that chrome wa…
I've had to use both on and off for years.
My patience with software is small but I had few issues with Firefox except on Google properties.
Not saying your experience didn't happen but it doesn't match mine.
I even used to be a Google fan and without being able to pinpoint a date I have memories of trying (and failing to) start using Chrome as my default browser at least once.
So I agree with GP and personally think the real story is more that Chrome:
- had massive marketing budgets and misleading campaigns
- won a number of benchmarks (but nothing to write home about on my Linux or Windows boxes)
- sometime between 2009 and now web developers forgot what we fought for when we fought against IE until 2009: that sites should work in all mainstream browsers. We didn't fight so much to kill IE as to let everybody else live.
- Suddenly sites started showing up that only worked in Chrome. Every new browser including modern versions of IE is more capable than anything we had back then and we also have polyfills and whatnot and so if someone cannot be bothered to do basic testing in more than one browser then I don't know what.
- I cannot say that Google was the worst but they certainly have had their "weird issues that doesn't affect Chrome". And I cannot say they did it on purpose and everyone is innocent until proven guilty but let me say that for a company that almost prints their own money their QA departement might have been slightly understaffed :-P