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State of web browsers in 2018

ferdychristant.com

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Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#141

Post by Wowfunhappy »

The author of this article hand-waves away the speed advantages of one browser engine over another.

I'd be inclined to agree, except, am I the only one who has seen a marked speed advantage in Firefox Quantum over other browsers? I'm reminded of how I felt about Chrome in the early days. Everything just seems to load in ever-so-slightly more quickly.

I still use Safari on macOS due to Apple's nice touchpad gestures, but on Windows I'm now Firefox all the way. Not just because I like what Firefox represents, but because I find the experience markedly superior.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#142

Post by jolmg »

curlypaul924 wrote: post #127
jolmg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't looked into Brave in years, but the original idea I remember was that the trend of having the web be free for the public and funded by advertising (mostly the single entity, Google) was bad for the general public in terms of privacy. Therefore, it would be better if people financially supported the sites they visited and benefit from, so as to extinguish the need to give so much power to the advertising ind…

Advertising isn't fundamentally bad for privacy, otherwise newspapers and movies would be bad for privacy; it's targeted advertising (which requires keeping a profile for each user) that is fundamentally at odds with privacy.

Well, advertisers are going to do their job as well as they can, defined by the amount of money their methods bring. They can't track in newspapers or movies because there's no feasible way to do so. If you want a business to not do something that brings it more money, you'll have to introduce legal liability that makes that something not worthwhile. That's probably GDPR, in a nutshell.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#143

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Yizahi wrote: post #46
sstangl wrote: post #11

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in…

Arguably Google is already abusing their monopoly power but in the way that people like. I'm talking about AMP. In the future AMP/regular page boundary will blur and Chrome/GSearch/AMPpages will merge in the ubiquitous googlenet hosted on google servers (because it will work better than regular internet pages). Almost everybody will be happy after this and Mozilla will fall into obscurity. Basically you can't create…

> Arguably Google is already abusing their monopoly power but in the way that people like. I'm talking about AMP.

Do people actually like AMP?

I hate it and strongly wish I could disable it for all Google search results. It's supposed to make pages load in more quickly, but for some reason they always seem to be slower for me.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#144

Post by Wowfunhappy »

kenhwang wrote: post #133
larrik wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I use Hangouts in Firefox...

The chat or the video? The video hasn't worked in long time now.

I haven't tried Firefox, but Hangouts with video works in Safari for me.

I had to bookmark a Hangouts room URL though, which I think I opened from within GMail some time ago. If I try to just load hangouts.google.com, it won't work.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#145

Post by Wowfunhappy »

dbolgheroni wrote: post #100
sstangl wrote: post #11

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in…

As a long Firefox user, I did switch to Chrome/Iridium lately. When Firefox decided to attack the problem of market share with engineering, 2 things were happening (almost) at the same time[1]: 1) the deprecation of the old add-on engine and 2) the introduction of the new Quantum engine. For the 1), while I understand there are some reasons in doing so (it was not a stable API as it was always breaking the extensions…

I said this up-thread, but Firefox Quantum made me switch back to Firefox, after years away. I noticed a marked speed improvement.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#146

Post by Wowfunhappy »

machiaweliczny wrote: post #116
CWuestefeld wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until Mozilla gets the performance problems under control Performance is 1/2 of the reason that I prefer Mozilla. As one of those people that typically has 50-100 tabs open, the Firefox model for memory management is vastly superior. The other half of the reason is TreeStyleTab, again because I'm one of those zillion-tab users. Vertically-stacked tabs in a sidebar is the only way to manage that mountain of tabs - hor…

Not true in my experience. I liked firefox on mobile for ability to use addons. But with some update it started being totally unresponsive and crashing my phone, so I switched back to chrome which happily displays ":)" with 100+ tabs open. On mac firefox is eating battery faster than chrome. I would like some alternative for phone - so I will maybe try vivaldi or brave or test firefox once again.

> On mac firefox is eating battery faster than chrome.

If you're on a Mac and want better battery life when web browsing, Safari will do better than both Firefox and Chrome in most cases.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#147

Post by sincerely »

bad_user wrote: post #59
jolmg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't looked into Brave in years, but the original idea I remember was that the trend of having the web be free for the public and funded by advertising (mostly the single entity, Google) was bad for the general public in terms of privacy. Therefore, it would be better if people financially supported the sites they visited and benefit from, so as to extinguish the need to give so much power to the advertising ind…

People are bitching and moaning about Mozilla pulling an extension that works around paywalls from addons.mozilla.org, so do you honestly think that people are willing to " financially support the sites they visited "? Without hitting a paywall that can't be worked around, hell will freeze over before that happens ;-)

People would be willing to if they had a choice that wasn't "Buy a year's subscription to our newspaper to read the one article you want"

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#148

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

sstangl wrote: post #11

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in…

> We will largely be defined in opposition to Google.

Looking at the Financial Report for 2017 https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...

it seems that the the vast majority of Mozilla revenue is from Royalties ($539M out of $562M). In addition in the report there is a statement to the effect that 93% of Royalties were from search engine deals. We know that Mozilla entered into a search engine deal with Google at the end of 2017.

It looks like that the vast majority of Mozilla's revenue is from Google and will be for the next several years at least. It will be interesting to see Mozilla positioning themselves in opposition to Google when Google provides the vast majority of their revenue.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#149

Post by Wowfunhappy »

dmitriid wrote: post #117
Yizahi wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably Google is already abusing their monopoly power but in the way that people like. I'm talking about AMP. In the future AMP/regular page boundary will blur and Chrome/GSearch/AMPpages will merge in the ubiquitous googlenet hosted on google servers (because it will work better than regular internet pages). Almost everybody will be happy after this and Mozilla will fall into obscurity. Basically you can't create…

A recent example is how Chrome broke audio on a lot of websites https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/15/17358752/google-chrome-66... I won't even link to the discussion in Chrome's bugtracker, Chrome team didn't even test the change, apparently. They also actively build "Chrome-only" websites.

The Chrome audio thing really, really bothers me.

The change broke a ton of neat, interesting games that are never going to be updated. And given Google's aggressive autoupdates, running an older version of Chrome to experience a specific old website is non-trivial.

The change signals a blatant disregard for preserving pieces of art, culture, and shared history.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#150

Post by jolmg »

bad_user wrote: post #59
jolmg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't looked into Brave in years, but the original idea I remember was that the trend of having the web be free for the public and funded by advertising (mostly the single entity, Google) was bad for the general public in terms of privacy. Therefore, it would be better if people financially supported the sites they visited and benefit from, so as to extinguish the need to give so much power to the advertising ind…

People are bitching and moaning about Mozilla pulling an extension that works around paywalls from addons.mozilla.org, so do you honestly think that people are willing to " financially support the sites they visited "? Without hitting a paywall that can't be worked around, hell will freeze over before that happens ;-)

I don't think they would on their own, but Brave's efforts to ease that path still seem commendable.
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