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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#321

Post by pcwalton »

jorvi wrote: post #308
pcwalton wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't a bug; it's the fact that Firefox uses a transparent window and doesn't yet use Core Animation, which offloads scrolling to the window server. Switching to CA involves heavy lifting inside the compositor and is not an easy task. My planeshift crate does some of the work needed to make the WebRender path use Core Animation. In the meantime, setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config helps…

I'm curious (genuine curiosity, not meant sarcastic), why is Firefox only now switching to CoreAnimation? AFAIK CoreAnimation has been around since Leopard which makes it nearly 12 year old, which is positively ancient in the tech world. Also, coincidentally, do you know what exactly causes the H264 problem on macOS? I've tried to track it down in bugzilla to no success, but I am 100% sure it is a bug. The energy imp…

> I'm curious (genuine curiosity, not meant sarcastic), why is Firefox only now switching to CoreAnimation? AFAIK CoreAnimation has been around since Leopard which makes it nearly 12 year old, which is positively ancient in the tech world.

I think CA was only moved to the window server relatively recently. Before then, my understanding is that it simply used OpenGL in-process, so it had no energy advantages over Firefox's built-in compositor. There was also a long time when the APIs to host CA content in the window server were private APIs and only Safari could use them.

> Also, coincidentally, do you know what exactly causes the H264 problem on macOS?

I believe, but am not sure, that H.264 is decoded in software in Firefox but is decoded in hardware in Safari.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#322

Post by TheOperator »

mapgrep wrote: post #7

I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Luckily…

I certainly feel the gap between chrome and firefox has narrowed. I struggle to think of a reason NOT to use firefox anymore. I do find myself clicking on that red fox more and more. I've sort of made firefox my incognito "browser".

If the firefox vs IE wars taught me anything its that tech savvy users have a huge impact on adoption. If you win over the nerds they will install firefox absolutely everywhere. They will develop their stuff to work well with firefox.

Chrome hasn't quite become ie6 yet but I feel like if trends continue Firefox will become power users favored browser. Firefox even today is still more extensible and customizable. It also has a more credible reputation for privacy. I believe even now the threat of Firefox is what makes Google hesitate to do things like kill ad blocking.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#323

Post by _cs2017_ »

Hypothetically speaking, suppose we didn't care about privacy at all. In that case, what are the disadvantages of a single browser engine taking over the market?

I suspect one disadvantage is that it's harder to innovate. Specifically, your new browser engine has no hope of sticking if all websites are heavily customized to Blink, rather than to open standards. It may seem that it's not a problem if Blink is open sourced. However, writing a new engine that works exactly like some legacy engine is nearly impossible, even if that legacy engine is open sourced. OTOH, writing a new engine to the specifications of well-designed standards is much more realistic, since presumably those standards are (a) clearly spelled out, (b) written with the idea that they can be implemented without a million lines of legacy code.

Of course, this assumes that the community can create high quality and efficient standards. It's not obvious, given how difficult it's been to achieve in the past, when there was more competition between browsers.

Does it sound about right? Any other disadvantages I haven't thought of?

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#324

Post by wnevets »

cptskippy wrote: post #207
thanatropism wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just said Chrome was the superior browser for developers. > the best long term effect What do you mean by this?

> What do you mean by this? Supporting Google/Chrome is supporting corporate interest over user interest. We've seen them already taking steps to remove support for 3rd Party Ad Blocking and to ignore privacy related features.

> remove support for 3rd Party Ad Blocking

that's a bit misleading, no?

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#325

Post by wnevets »

mattmanser wrote: post #132
lern_too_spel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's laughable that the author suggests Apple as a viable alternative. Apple, the last company pushing license encumbered formats into web standards. Apple, the perennial laggard on standards support in general.

Probably because Apple take privacy seriously, which is a direct threat to Google's bottom line.

>Probably because Apple take privacy seriously,

by making google the default search engine on iOS?

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#326

Post by llampx »

jeena wrote: post #236
wnevets wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Chromes super fast start up speed and clean UI is what caused me to switch when it first came out.

I never switched because once upon a time I switched from Opera to Firefox because it was the most free (as in libre) browser and I haven't found a more free browser yet. I try to live after the maxim: freedom before convenience (at least in parts of my life).

If there's one thing that Google does well, it's convince the relevant people that their software is open source.

See: Chrome and Android

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#327

Post by chrisweekly »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #188
perlgeek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled w…

I'm surprised there aren't more people on here who moved to chome for the dev tools. That is what moved me over there. Firebug was great in it's day but at some point Chrome's dev tools just became too much better to make staying on Firefox possible.

Yes. DevTools's superiority was the catalyst for me (and many other devs I worked with at the time).

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#328

Post by Technetium_Hat »

fastball wrote: post #58
TicklishTiger wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googles browser offers functionality to Googles websites that it does not offer to any other website. When you log into an Google owned site, it interacts with the browser so that you are 'logged into your browser' with that Google account. That is not pushing standards into a direction. That is blatant exploitation of ther market position.

You're already logged into sites you're already logged into. I'm not exactly sure how advantageous you think this is.

Yeah, all that really happens is that it shows your profile picture, and autofills passwords, when it detects the google login cookie. Nothing that other browsers couldn't implement themselves.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#329

Post by throwaway66666 »

If anyone's to blame it's mozilla's criminal laziness. There I said it. We were stuck with firefox 3 for 3 years (early 2008-2011), on a time where chrome was getting a +1 version every month or 2 months.

I remember Mozilla "evangelist" employees hard at work, tweeting "version doesn't matter, it's the changelog that matters, chrome team could have changed two background colors and did +1 to the version counter".

Great battle move. Then, Firefox 4 got released and everyone hated the new interface. Even ex-mozilla cofounder JWZ complained that it feels beta even though it's a fully mature product out for a decade now and that's unacceptable. Also, No mp4 support. Oh yeah. They added it in Firefox 20 finally (then no webm support. They finally added it in January 2019. Good job)

In the meantime, Mozilla engineering kept fooling around with projects that went nowhere. Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that? THE JAVASCRIPT PHONE! FLASH TO JS CONVERTER, where is that now? That JS only Video Codec ORBX.js? that Eich said "I saw the future today" 10 years ago, and it's still not out yet. PDF JS (in it's first release made opening large PDF files on Firefox impossible) etc etc. Many good things came of from it too, like asmjs (ancestor of wasm), but in general there seemed a direction of everywhere, neither arriving here nor there.

Mozilla then switched the default search engine of Firefox to Yahoo! At a time when Yahoo was in the spotlight for rapidly dying and looking for a pity-acquisition!! It also came bundled with great bugs that kept resetting the default search engine back to yahoo - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1206101

To give praise where praise is worth, Mozilla did realize their mistakes got back from their 9 year vacation (2009-2018) and Firefox today is finally very stable and relatively fast compared to Edge and Safari.

I know I am sounding trollish and bitter, but the truth is that I am just sad at how Firefox fell. What happened? Did people get lazy as their savings grew? Where key individuals poached away by Google and Apple? Did they burn out? Something surely must have happened...

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#330

Post by eridius »

ken wrote: post #194
fredsted wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- I can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome. For what it's worth, WebSockets show up as type 'Other' in the inspector, and the frames are listed under 'Preview'. Edit: Safari.

It just says "WebSocket Connection Established", and then a list of "Binary Frame". Is there a way to inspect their contents? Just seeing that frames are being sent doesn't seem very useful for debugging.

I just tested Safari 12.0.3 on macOS 10.14.3 with https://websocket.org/echo.html and it works for me. In the inspector it has a Sockets folder with the socket, and when I select it, it shows the textual content of each frame.

Edit: This is of course textual frames. I don't know where to find a site that demonstrates binary frames. I do notice that if I right-click the textual frame it has "Log Frame Text" as an option; maybe with a binary frame you can ask it to log the binary frame contents?

Edit 2: Ok I found a binary websocket test and unfortunately there is no option to log the binary info. That sucks. I recommend filing a bug report at bugreport.apple.com requesting better tooling around this. It's also worth checking the Safari Technical Preview to see if they've already added any better tooling.

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