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

Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

magiclasso.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 316 posts

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#181

Post by yoavm »

ajross wrote: post #169
yoavm wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google would have to make TONS of hostile moves for that fact to change I think the biggest issue with IE6 was not the hostile moves Microosft did, it is that it didn't do anything. The browser was just frozen. That's why it was relatively easy for Firefox to take a marketshare. Frankly, with some of the APIs Google are adding to Chrome, I'd rather they'd do a little less.

So, no, the problem with IE was 100% Microsoft's hostile competition tactics. Yes, part of that was trying to deprecate the "world wide web" as a platform, so yes, IE6 got very crufty toward the end of its days. But by that point it was clear it was already dying and IE7 et. al. were introduced late as an attempt to catch up. During the period when the real bullets were flying, IE6 was actually a really great browser…

I would say that the 30% market-share Firefox had in 2009 was breaking the monopoly much more than the 3% Chrome had a time.

Sure IE6 had many non-standard APIs, but even the fact that all hobbyist browsers back then were implementing tabs and IE6 never had that, speaks to its stagnant development. To be honest I'd prefer some things Google is now pushing through th W3C as standards to be left as Chrome specific APIs and leave the rest of us alone.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#182

Post by olig15 »

lxgr wrote: post #98
fellowniusmonk wrote: post #96

No not even close by every single possible measure. I was there, I suffered through it, Google would have to make TONS of hostile moves for that fact to change. I have no interest in the arguments of a closed source subscription service that wants me to switch to the bundled browser of the wealthiest company on earth's most popular consumer OS, lecturing me about using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser th…

> using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser that I freely installed. 99% of the time I use Chrome it's because some site does not support Firefox (and that often includes Google sites/apps). (The 1% are for APIs that Firefox, consciously or out of resource constraints, does not support.) In what sense am I "freely installing" Chrome in this situation? Just today I had a family member reach out to me, unable…

I see this argument a lot. I use Firefox on my Mac, iPhone and my Windows work PC. I can’t remember the last time there was a website that was broken because of Firefox.

Do you happen to have any examples? I’m curious to see how broken/what the issues are.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#183

Post by bityard »

olig15 wrote: post #182
lxgr wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser that I freely installed. 99% of the time I use Chrome it's because some site does not support Firefox (and that often includes Google sites/apps). (The 1% are for APIs that Firefox, consciously or out of resource constraints, does not support.) In what sense am I "freely installing" Chrome in this situation? Just today I had a family member reach out to me, unable…

I see this argument a lot. I use Firefox on my Mac, iPhone and my Windows work PC. I can’t remember the last time there was a website that was broken because of Firefox. Do you happen to have any examples? I’m curious to see how broken/what the issues are.

Not who you are replying to, but before I switched to Vivaldi (a Chromium fork), I saw lots.

Among them: Logging into some of my financial accounts doesn't work on Firefox. Enterprise software and gear like VMware and management UIs of various devices on the network. (They foolishly hard-coded their devices to reject any UserAgent strings that weren't Chrome, IE, or Edge.) Sites that use some kind of poorly-implemented tracking/fingerprinting to make sure you're a human. (I would routinely get stuck in infinite CAPCHA loops even on normal sites.) For a while, Slack video/audio calls did not work on Firefox because Slack chose to use codecs that FF didn't support. Video calls on FF are still hit-and-miss on various platforms, ran into it on Facebook just the other day.

These are all just off the top of my head, of course. There are plenty more that I've forgotten.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#184

Post by samatman »

purplejacket wrote: post #84
taf2 wrote: post #53

Not even close. IE 6 didn’t get any updates or new web features for years. It was closed source. It was dead and everyone used it. float:right; zoom:1; was a common necessity… to compare them is an insult to the immense progress and effort spent over the last 24 years… (yes chrome started in 2007, but the teams from Firefox get credit too, many of them went on to build chrome ). The open source movement won, IE is de…

Ummm ... 2024 - 2007 = 17

Blink is a fork of WebKit, itself a fork of KHTML and KJS.

2024 - 1998 = 26

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#185

Post by asddubs »

SquareWheel wrote: post #125
asddubs wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you want a really old example, pnacl. If you want a slightly recent one, FLoC. Not saying those are the best examples, they are just what comes to my head first. I don't really keep up super closely.

pnacl was an example of Google throwing away their homebrewed solution in favour of a common standard (Web Assembly). That seems like a strong argument that they don't push proprietary extensions.

it was an example of them pushing proprietary extensions and eventually removing them again. If I start beating you and then eventually someone calms down and I stop, it's not an example of me not beating you

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#186

Post by peutetre »

sowut wrote: post #144
darknavi wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> eventually i start using chrome on certain sites because of ublock origin. uBO works fine on Firefox for what it's worth. Maybe even better because of the lack of Manifest v3 restrictions.

i'll have to give firefox another look, it has been years.

uBlock Origin works best on Firefox: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#187

Post by ericwood »

JimDabell wrote: post #179
ericwood wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see so many ideological arguments around "X is the new IE" that neglect one of the worst pieces of IE 6's reign of terror: the stagnation. Working around all of its quirks and non-standard behavior had an extremely long half-life; the venn diagram of things that worked correctly across all major browsers at the time was very complex and messy. Even with the release of IE7 it took many years for people to adopt it,…

> one of the worst pieces of IE 6's reign of terror: the stagnation. This is the thing that I think developers today don’t seem to be able to get their head around. There was a fourteen year time period between Internet Explorer 6 being released and when it dropped out of usage worldwide. Even if you only had to support the USA, it was still eleven years. People could go their entire careers without ever knowing what…

Deprecating it if your site had much traffic was like pulling teeth! I worked at a company that had IT professionals as its main demographic in 2011 and it was a constant struggle. Lots of corporations were locked into IE6 because they had developed internal applications that relied on ActiveX controls or other non-standard APIs. IE7 was still pretty terrible, and it took even longer to drop support.

CSS was pretty bad but at least well-documented; debugging JS was a whole other hell. There was no such thing as dev tooling, and you got a small alert in the status bar when the page had errors, which opened a pop up that gave you the line number and very little other information. Supposedly you could connect it to VisualStudio and get a full debugging experience, but I never had the luxury. Lots of guessing and checking. Firebug was a huge deal when it launched.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#188

Post by sleepybrett »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #50
sleepybrett wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've run into exactly zero sites, that don't want to update some firmware on some piece of hardware over usb, that don't work on firefox.

Congratulations. Maybe in the future in lieu of additional testing, the development team should just check in with you, and if you declare it sunshine and rainbows, ship it.

Maybe in the future you can stop spreading fud about how everything only works in the most consumer hostile browser on the market.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#189

Post by carlosjobim »

onion2k wrote: post #156
pjmlp wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely is, I was also there, just like everyone was doing IE only sites, not only plenty of people do the same with ChromeOS vision of the Web, they ship Chrome alongside Electron crap. Safari is the last man standing before a ChromeOS world.

Safari is the last man standing before a ChromeOS world. Except it isn't. Maybe I'm being slightly obtuse here, but the world is not "Chrome Vs Safari". It's "Chrome Vs Safari Vs native apps". If Safari dies we'll be in a world of "Chrome Vs native apps", and that is what Apple wants. Browsers represent a way to deliver software to users that's outside of Apple's revenue mechanisms. Apple have every incentive to keep…

Native apps have always been better than browser/cloud based solutions. The only people who prefer the cloud are lazy developers, tech companies who want to sell software as a subscription, and corporate IT who finds it easier than dealing with native software on the computers.

The end user is always served better by native apps.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#190

Post by jasode »

vetinari wrote: post #180
jasode wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What exactly are these exotic sites you are visiting that break in Firefox? In my case, an example of a non-exotic site is Youtube streaming 4k 60fps videos. I tried with latest Firefox a few months ago and it was still stuttering and glitchy. But Chrome plays smoothly with no issues. I previously mentioned that 4k playback has been a long-standing issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28783904 On one hand, my…

Never seen this; however, youtube prefers pushing VP9 over H.264. Maybe your computer cannot use hardware decode for VP9 and can for H.264? (Since you mentioned, it is an older one). Maybe the h264ify extension would help. What firefox cannot do and chrome can is HDR playback.

> however, youtube prefers pushing VP9 over H.264. Maybe your computer cannot use hardware decode for VP9 and can for H.264?

No, even if I download the 4k 60fps file using yt-dlp with forced h264 codec settings locally to my harddrive, Firefox still can't play the mp4 file smoothly.

So it's not really a streaming issue or h264 vs VP9 codec issue. The Firefox core engine doesn't seem optimized to playback 4k and 8k high-frame-rate videos with low cpu utilization. Even VLC for 4k and 8k isn't as smooth as Chrome. I don't know what the Chrome team did but they really optimized that code path to play back hi-res videos.

Post reply on HN