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Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox

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Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox

#201

Post by pgt »

A valuable lesson I learned from @dhh was: never put your customer back in a buying position[^1]. For example, if you discontinue your legacy[^2] 1.0 product, and force them to switch to your shiny/better/faster 2.0 product, when 1.0 was working just fine for them, you are forcing them back into a buying position. And this time, they might choose your competitor.

Chrome was way ahead, but by overreaching against ad-blockers, they forced their users back in a buying position, and this time Firefox had gotten way better. Unless Google messed with the status quo, their users would never consider switching. The only thing pushing me toward Fastmail is that Google keeps messing with Gmail/Inbox.

This death-cycle seems to be unavoidable for MBA-types who inherit working products, and I bet you could build a business around this idea, or at least design a consistent enterprise takeover strategy.

[^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJkiCpPeYuI [^2]: Legacy = any code you can't (safely) change.

Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox

#202

Post by house9-2 »

chank wrote: post #34

Tried out Firefox again a few days ago. Still prefer chrome. If add blocking becomes an issue with chrome, I'll definitely make the switch because of that and just hate it or go back to safari and hate it just as much

I also prefer Chrome; it has always felt more stable on Mac OSX; I often find myself with 50+ tabs open and it is no issue with Chrome, Firefox can't even come close.

Have you checked out Brave Browser?

https://brave.com/

Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox

#203

Post by gorhill »

bambax wrote: post #17

The state of the debate is unsatisfactory. Google employees such as Justin Schuh are aggressively defending the move on tech/security principles and denying commercial motivations, while uBlock Origin dev (Raymond Hill) says the change will cripple or kill uBO on Chrome and evil motives are its raison d'être . It's good that mainstream media articles raise the awareness of the issue, but a good technical discussion b…

> evil motives

Nowhere did I ever say "evil motives". I merely pointed out that Google has a duty to its shareholders.

Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox

#204

Post by thecrazyone »

hpcjoe wrote: post #179
rusticpotato wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sticking to the apple ecosystem will essentially avoid this fiasco with relying on electron apps. Basically i see three developer types right now: windows, apple, Linux for primary (personal and office). Sticking to apple allows you to sidestep this windows cluster f of expensive apps and shitty electron apps, and the Linux void of polished apps.

Not sure of your meaning of "Linux void of polished apps." Do you mean commercial apps running natively on linux? FWIW, I've been running Linux as my primary desktop through 4 companies and 20+ years thus far. I'm not at a loss for applications, native or hosted, that I use in my day to day work. I'm actually quite happy that I no longer need to worry about installing Microsoft office (current day job uses this suite…

Not sure about the website you run but there might be a corelation to Linux users and your site. It could be either due to your network and the way people came to know about the site or it could be the content among other things

Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox

#205

Post by Nursie »

gshdg wrote: post #57
Nursie wrote: post #2

I have one system I still use chrome on - my late-2013 Macbook Pro. The reason I use chrome as my main browser there is because Firefox and Slack do not seem to be friends on MacOS. I use slack in the browser rather than the native app and FF seems to get copy and paste functionality all messed up. I would use Safari, but some quirk of the office webmail (Outlook of some sort) means that email from Safari gets flagge…

I’ve got the same generation MBP. Why not just use the slack desktop app? I’ve never had a problem running that side by side with Firefox. And performance for both is nearly as good as on my current model laptop at work.

IIRC when I first tried that about a year and a half ago, it didn't work properly :/

Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox

#206

Post by Nursie »

zkomp wrote: post #11
Nursie wrote: post #2

I have one system I still use chrome on - my late-2013 Macbook Pro. The reason I use chrome as my main browser there is because Firefox and Slack do not seem to be friends on MacOS. I use slack in the browser rather than the native app and FF seems to get copy and paste functionality all messed up. I would use Safari, but some quirk of the office webmail (Outlook of some sort) means that email from Safari gets flagge…

See this comment a lot but absolutely disagree. Firefox works and is only getting better on MacOS. (And if being friends with MacOS is the point, then why not use Safari, does not get more friendly than that)

I love FF, really do, but as I said I have two specific issues keeping me on chrome right now.

I hope they can be sorted out.

Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox

#207

Post by treis »

josefx wrote: post #188
treis wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With Microsoft switching to Chromium, Firefox is now the only viable (cross platform) alternative. FF gaining back a solid amount of market share is critical for the browser ecosystem in the future Why are multiple rendering and JS engines critical for the browser ecosystem? Everyone would be much better off if we standardized on one.

The next Chrome standard manifest says that ad blockers are a deprecated feature since they hurt Googles business. Looking a bit further (into possible future business needs of Alphabet) you might see that chrome will refuse to serve anything not based on Googles AMP standard and globally remove anything that hurts their partnership with the Chinese government. This is the single standard JS engine we are looking for…

>The next Chrome standard manifest says that ad blockers are a deprecated feature since they hurt Googles business.

Ad blocking isn't part of the rendering or JS engine.

>Looking a bit further (into possible future business needs of Alphabet) you might see that chrome will refuse to serve anything not based on Googles AMP standard and globally remove anything that hurts their partnership with the Chinese government.

>This is the single standard JS engine we are looking forward to.

This is just unsubstantiated fear mongering and mostly flat out wrong. If worst came to worst and Google rammed something like that into Chromium everyone else could just fork it and remove the offending parts. A Google Chromium and a Non-google Chromium fork is still way better than what we have now today with four distinct engines in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE.

Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox

#208

Post by treis »

tiles wrote: post #182
treis wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standards are open. The problem is that browsers don't implement them 100% the same and they add in their own features. Settling on a single implementation fixes that issue. Different browsers can compete based on ancillary features like Linux distros do.

> Settling on a single implementation fixes that issue. When Microsoft was in a monopoly position, they ignored the standards and pushed ActiveX plugins. Chrome this year wanted to push other browsers to adopt obsolete U2F specifications because they used them in Google products. If there's a single implementation, and the gatekeepers are majority from one company, standards and interoperability become irrelevant.

>If there's a single implementation, and the gatekeepers are majority from one company, standards and interoperability become irrelevant.

That's a good thing. What's the point of maintaining four separate software projects who's ideal purpose is to literally do the exact same thing. It's much better to settle on one open source project. If we think Google is the boogeyman then settling on a Chromium fork is still light years better than what we have now.

Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox

#209

Post by seabrookmx »

dmitriid wrote: post #119
seabrookmx wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a web developer, I like my browser to implement internet standards correctly so websites actually work. People aren't trashing Safari because it's cool.. generally Apple provides a great software experience. But Safari is a bug ridden mess. Here's an example that broke many many sites that use OAuth2 Auth Code Flow for login (including the main UI portal my company provides clients): https://bugs.webkit.org/show_b…

Safari generally implements standards as they mature. Chrome generally implements everything new and shiny, no matter how underspecified it is, and with blatant disregard to whether or not it breaks the web.

I don't disagree with regards to new standards, but that doesn't change the fact that existing, well established standards are often broken in Safari (see the bug I linked in the parent comment). These bugs are much more likely to break the web than Chrome's half baked bleeding edge features because there's already a huge body of web software that relies on them.

Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox

#210

Post by rusticpotato »

hpcjoe wrote: post #179
rusticpotato wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sticking to the apple ecosystem will essentially avoid this fiasco with relying on electron apps. Basically i see three developer types right now: windows, apple, Linux for primary (personal and office). Sticking to apple allows you to sidestep this windows cluster f of expensive apps and shitty electron apps, and the Linux void of polished apps.

Not sure of your meaning of "Linux void of polished apps." Do you mean commercial apps running natively on linux? FWIW, I've been running Linux as my primary desktop through 4 companies and 20+ years thus far. I'm not at a loss for applications, native or hosted, that I use in my day to day work. I'm actually quite happy that I no longer need to worry about installing Microsoft office (current day job uses this suite…

There’s a ton of cool apps for productivity, time management, health, note taking, all in iOS due to iPad ecosystem. Apple pulled a smart one and democratized file extension monopolies by making App Store ecosystem relatively cheap for customers. This incentivized a ton of high quality lower cost apps that now all have their own file extensions on top of importing stuff like pdf and psd, and the iOS share menu has basically turned apps into Linux command line tools where you set up your own work flow chain. Apple has now positioned iOS libraries in next OS X to be importable into OS X, thus now all these iOS apps can be posted easily into OS X. Essentially, iOS has now liberated the user from .doc, .ppt, .xls, .psd dependencies and soon it will spread into OS X.

Linux has no such source of ample high quality apps that don’t cost hundreds of dollars in fees like in windows (office 365 and adobe, I’m looking at you)

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