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State of web browsers in 2018

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Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#201

Post by dtech »

xte wrote: post #95
dtech wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty bad argument, as exactly the same can be said for the Servo/Firefox codebase

See above: it's true, but at least FOSS born and evolved projects may be known by "early" devs that see project evolution during it's time, on contrary when a company release million SLOC no one really know anything... Anyway, in general my line is that all "modern browsers" must die, because browsers should be browsers, not "platforms" and websites should be hypertext, not application... I really dream a modern Plan…

> See above: it's true, but at least FOSS born and evolved projects may be known by "early" devs that see project evolution during it's time, on contrary when a company release million SLOC no one really know anything...

Do you know the history of Blink? It was forked from Webkit, which was forked from KDE's KHTML and remained open source all the way. So you argument also explains to Blink.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#202

Post by newscracker »

laumars wrote: post #107
organsnyder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the IE-6 dark ages of the early 2000s, Mozilla's browser (the Mozilla suite, then standalone Firebird, finally renamed to Firefox) was positioned in a similar way: it was the niche browser for people who cared about an open web. It stayed that way for quite a few years, slowly gaining traction by implementing features—tabbed browsing, popup blocking—not found in the dominant IE browser. I could see a similar a…

> the Mozilla suite, then standalone Firebird, finally renamed to Firefox I believe it was originally called Phoenix. Though you're right it was then called Firebird and renamed again to Firefox afterwards. I think each time was due to trademark disputes? Going to your point though, I hope you're right but I'm a bit more sceptical. Chromium, being open source, means anyone who doesn't like the stagnation of Chrome wo…

> I'd love to see Gecko take off in the same way kHTML, webkit and blink have done. In fact I'm surprised it hasn't. I don't suppose anyone more familiarity with the code base of these rendering engines are able to offer possible reasons why?

Not familiar with the code base of the engines, but one factor that distinguishes Gecko vs. the other engines is that Mozilla killed the ability to embed Gecko in other applications in 2011. Read about the detailed reasoning in this mailing list thread. [1] This effectively tied Gecko solely to Firefox, and has made using it with other applications or browser chrome (lowercase, not Chrome the browser) impossible (AFAIK). So it cannot take off like the other engines unless Mozilla puts in work to allow that to happen.

[1]: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embedd...

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#203

Post by kiriakasis »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #143
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…

> 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.

In my experience it is the google search app that is extremely slow (android on a underpowered nokia 6) I installed duckduckgo search because google hangs my device for a few second every 5-6 keypresses

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#204

Post by kiriakasis »

untog wrote: post #153
dmitriid wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMO that's not an abuse of monopoly thing at all. It's not as if removing auto-play audio will push users towards some Google-only product, if anything it would mean fewer users choosing Chrome.

Disagree. It can be a push for web developers and amateur site-buildign-people-that-have-not-that-much-interest-in-the-web-shenanigans to use google-approved APIs.

Not by promoting google as better but by simply promoting a view of google-web and other-web.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#205

Post by kiriakasis »

Izkata wrote: post #196
SamWhited wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love containers, and I'm sure webvr is great, but I can't see the majority of people caring at all about either one. Their existing niche of privacy aware people who don't like Chrome and are tech people who like to play with trendy new technology will be happy about both of those, but random people off the street probably won't.

Then don't talk about it from a privacy angle; I use containers so I can be logged in to my home and work accounts at the same time.

For most uses they are a long-lived incognito session.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#206

Post by kiriakasis »

xte wrote: post #62

IMO the actual state of web browsers is: "there is NO browsers.", we have labeled as browsers awful monsters that are a sort of OS-cancer that try to reduce OS itself as a mere kernel and basic userland needed to run that monster. Actual size of those project is so big that practically no one, their devs included, can know the entire big picture, there are so any day new critical security vulnerabilities and a consta…

Which is part of the reason for Microsoft switch. To bring new life to the desktop via vastly better electron performance.

Which can be seen as the best and worst of both world at the same time. For sure we live in interesting times.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#207

Post by simfoo »

Semaphor wrote: post #130
SamWhited wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually really interesting; I don't tend to have a ton of tabs, but coworkers always told me Firefox did a terrible job with 100+ tabs and that Chrome worked better. This always made sense to me because of the multi-process architecture of Chrome, but I've never seen it myself. So you're suggesting that Firefox actually performs better now? Maybe all my coworkers complaining about it are just repeating lore t…

I don't understand how anyone can claim FF is faster. I love FF and I switched completely from chrome. But Chrome is far faster. I don't know maybe it is because I have an abundance of RAM (32 GB) and others don't and that's why they think FF is faster. But for me, it's easy to test. Go to http://addic7ed.com/ and open the (very long, nearly 5k entries) [Select a TV Show] drop-down. On FF (and IE/Edge FWIW) there is…

Just did the test with the drop-down menu on Chromium 71.0.3578.80 and Firefox 63.0.3 both running on Ubuntu 18.10. I can confirm the difference in performance, FF takes at least 1s longer to open the menu

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#208

Post by seba_dos1 »

Semaphor wrote: post #130
SamWhited wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually really interesting; I don't tend to have a ton of tabs, but coworkers always told me Firefox did a terrible job with 100+ tabs and that Chrome worked better. This always made sense to me because of the multi-process architecture of Chrome, but I've never seen it myself. So you're suggesting that Firefox actually performs better now? Maybe all my coworkers complaining about it are just repeating lore t…

I don't understand how anyone can claim FF is faster. I love FF and I switched completely from chrome. But Chrome is far faster. I don't know maybe it is because I have an abundance of RAM (32 GB) and others don't and that's why they think FF is faster. But for me, it's easy to test. Go to http://addic7ed.com/ and open the (very long, nearly 5k entries) [Select a TV Show] drop-down. On FF (and IE/Edge FWIW) there is…

I have 8GB RAM. It doesn't matter to me that Chrome would be faster if it could eat 4 times the whole RAM I have - what matters is that it's not.

Also, it's a pretty weird test case to compare performance, probably not related to anything that actually matters. What's more, Firefox tries to style the drop-down to match with the system UI, while Chrome doesn't even bother.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#209

Post by bzbarsky »

Semaphor wrote: post #130
SamWhited wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually really interesting; I don't tend to have a ton of tabs, but coworkers always told me Firefox did a terrible job with 100+ tabs and that Chrome worked better. This always made sense to me because of the multi-process architecture of Chrome, but I've never seen it myself. So you're suggesting that Firefox actually performs better now? Maybe all my coworkers complaining about it are just repeating lore t…

I don't understand how anyone can claim FF is faster. I love FF and I switched completely from chrome. But Chrome is far faster. I don't know maybe it is because I have an abundance of RAM (32 GB) and others don't and that's why they think FF is faster. But for me, it's easy to test. Go to http://addic7ed.com/ and open the (very long, nearly 5k entries) [Select a TV Show] drop-down. On FF (and IE/Edge FWIW) there is…

I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1513256 to track that drop-down issue, which is quite easily reproducible.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#210

Post by TMWNN »

lousken wrote: post #199
ksec wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Single Tab instances, Chrome and Safari still wins. For multiple Tabs, Firefox wins hands down. But the majority of users rarely open more than a few. Firefox will need to continue iterate, until it is as fast or even faster in every corner.

exactly what i saw - i regularly use over 200 tabs and in Chrome the performance goes to hell above that number (even on i7 6700k - also managing tabs is PITA), while Firefox just keeps chugging without any problems

I use ~1200 tabs. I used to deal with what you and ksec experienced in Chrome by periodically killing all Google Chrome Helper processes, and a few months ago switched to Firefox (less sluggish) from Chrome. Last week I decided to try Chrome again and was pleased to find that (with the same tab set) Chrome 71 is amazingly fast; new tabs open instantly, I can immediately enter a search query or URL, and the browser remains stable over time. So it's back to Chrome for me; it is now only slow when starting for the first time, when it processes the 1200 tabs for a few minutes.

(I do use The Great Discarder, but did so before switching to Firefox, too.)

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