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Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

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Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#231

Post by Mandatum »

fergie wrote: post #38

PSA: if you are not already using it, and you care about the future of humanity, then give Firefox a(nother) go. Its actually quite good these days.

Moved back to Firefox after the Quantum release in Jan 2018. There were a few hiccups, and I still have to use Chrome or Safari or Edge for some of my local DRM-infested video streaming sites, but by about Q3 2018 I've never had any reason to use another browser.

Containers is a game-changer, paired with Sync I've been able to easily segregate work, personal, and client environments with ease. I work for many large organisations under NDA at any one time - and being able to colour-code and name my tabs has been invaluable to me. Also the Dev Tools, are great for debugging or sniffing traffic. I'm not a web developer but often need to debug client implementations that consume API's and it's just as good as Chrome. (Imagine that, FireBug used to be the standard, then Chrome came along and became "just as good", now Firefox has natively caught up.)

Finally - speed. Quantum finally killed Chrome's performance for me, and they've finally caught up on power-consumption on MacOS which as someone who regularly has to take multi-hour flights without charge ports available is a god-send.

The DRM issues piss me off, but it's the modern version of browser-restrictive Flash or Silverlight apps. I'll wait for someone else to get fucked off enough to create a bypass for Firefox, or maybe I'll get to a stage where I develop something to do so.

Chrome is dead, long live Firefox.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#232

Post by drewg123 »

nikofeyn wrote: post #218
drewg123 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox As a firefox user, the thing that annoys the hell out of me is the inability to use the mouse menu for cut and paste in Google Docs unless you're using chrome. I don't understand why it forces you to use the keyboard shortcut. I'm an emacs user, and find the windows-y keyboard shortcuts foreign, so I have to think about them, and p…

> I'm an emacs user, and find the windows-y keyboard shortcuts foreign, so I have to think about them, and prefer just using the right-click mouse menu. it's a little surprising to me that you can't remember cut, copy, and paste that works on any computer in the last two decades but can remember all of the esoteric emacs shortcuts, which include references to a key that doesn't even exist.

Emacs is unchanged muscle memory for the last 30+ years. Cut is ctrl-k (or ctrl-w depending on your perspective), yank is ctrl-y. How many WYSIWYG editors have risen and died in that time? How many desktop environments?

And the "cut copy and paste that works on any computer" -- on a windows pc its ctrl-blah, and on a mac its cmd-blah.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#233

Post by flipchart »

fergie wrote: post #38

PSA: if you are not already using it, and you care about the future of humanity, then give Firefox a(nother) go. Its actually quite good these days.

My major issue switching to FF is still the lack of a Chrome-style translate function. I live in a country where I don't speak the language, so rely heavily on translating. Copy/pasting into Google translate is too slow for general browsing, and being able to switch between translated and un-translated near instantly means that I can still navigate the site when inevitably the translation breaks the JS navigation. Switching also allows me to very slowly learn the language. I'd love to use FF, but this is still a blocker

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#234

Post by drewg123 »

kingofpandora wrote: post #118
drewg123 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox As a firefox user, the thing that annoys the hell out of me is the inability to use the mouse menu for cut and paste in Google Docs unless you're using chrome. I don't understand why it forces you to use the keyboard shortcut. I'm an emacs user, and find the windows-y keyboard shortcuts foreign, so I have to think about them, and p…

I used to have this problem but the behaviour has changed and it works fine now.

I just got it today, with firefox 73

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#235

Post by Symbiote »

fizixer wrote: post #200
josteink wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm using Ubuntu 14.04, and this has been happening consistently for the last 5+ years. Might help updating to a modern version of Ubuntu with a modern kernel and modern (and less buggy) GPU drivers? Browsers are increasingly using GPU-acceleration these days. If your GPU drivers are buggy, that can probably cause a whole lot of “fun”.

Or I could be a happy camper of Chrome/Chromium for as long as I like.

Ubuntu 14.04 is no longer supported by Canonical. No security patches etc.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#237

Post by Zelizz »

dkns wrote: post #51
pingyong wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're ever wondering how much data Chrome sucks out of you, the amount of effort Google goes through to try to keep people from using even Chrome-Edge, let alone Firefox, should give you a rough idea. Microsoft probably won't be much better though in the long run...

I reckon Microsoft can be even worse considering how much data they gather about you through telemetry built in Windows. Imagine if you're web dev using windows and edge along with vscode. Oof.

I work on Windows (speaking informally here, these are my own opinions and not those of my employer, etc.)

We care a lot about GDPR and privacy, and there's been a big top-down push to reduce the amount of telemetry collected, including giving good justifications for anything we want to keep collecting. We have to make sure all the data is kept in GDPR-compliant systems that can handle the deletion and security policies, and we regularly take training to tell us what is and isn't compliant use of customer data. My team uses it mostly for seeing the success rate of our feature across different hardware, firmware and OS versions, which helps us identify issues and poke certain partners to improve ecosystem reliability. I can't speak for the Edge/Bing/Whatever teams, but I'd hope they take it as seriously as us.

I definitely wish users had more control over data collection without resorting to group policy, and I wish users had more visibility and control over more of the OS in general, but I feel we've learned the wrong lessons from Apple so everything must be unconfigurable and only give vague feedback like, "Something is happening..." (but I digress). In terms of caring about privacy I'd still give Apple the crown, but I don't think it'd be unfair to give Microsoft second place.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#238

Post by SirLotsaLocks »

msla wrote: post #212
AaronFriel wrote: post #191

This is just like when Google Maps was blocked on Windows Phone[1] and when they decided to block YouTube as well[2]. Microsoft now finds themselves in the same position their competitors found themselves in the IE6 era. Google is behaving, if anything, worse, and using its massive reach and user base to stifle competition. This is deeply disappointing, and all the more reason Microsoft never should have adopted Chro…

https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i... > "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'" Microsoft isn't the gorilla it used to be, but never forget it is a gorilla, and knows how to play th…

I generally dislike this, and it's still not a great situation but I'd be down to see google to be put in their place to be honest.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#239

Post by InitialLastName »

SXX wrote: post #137
ptah wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are they taking open standards and putting extensions on them that are proprietary so users can only access certain services with chrome? if not, then they are not doing any microsofting of any kind

Google don't need to keep their in-home standards proprietary. For them it's enough to pump as much different features into Chrome as possible. No one except them can implement those standards simply because no one have development team of comparable size. Then they just going to state something like: our service dont support Firefox because Chrome-only feature X is not fully implemented.

Right, Google is going the "regulatory capture" route of standards, where they're the only place capable of meeting the standards they wrote.

Re: Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side

#240

Post by dblohm7 »

aksss wrote: post #221
msla wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code > The AARD code was a segment of code in a beta release of Microsoft Windows 3.1 that would determine whether Windows was running on MS-DOS or PC DOS, rather than a competing workalike such as DR-DOS, and would result in a cryptic error message in the latter case. This XOR-encrypted, self-modifying, and deliberately obfuscated machine code used a variety of undocumented DOS str…

I think question was about ie6 era, which is like 2001.

In 2001 US v Microsoft was still ongoing and Microsoft was just about to sign their consent decree with the USDOJ[1]. Those kinds of shenanigans weren't really possible for them until the consent decrees expired.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

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