We Need Chrome No More • Hacker News Board

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#341

Post by isostatic » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 9:26 PM UTC

bobajeff wrote: post #191

jarjoura wrote: post #129

This is such a fairytale retelling of history. Firefox was well on the way to crushing IE. It was the whole reason Microsoft re-kick started IE development again. Firefox was the dominant browser in 2008. Safari was the browser pushing ahead on performance and being lightweight except in JavaScript. So Google took WebKit and added their own JS engine to it so that Gmail and their office suite could compete with Micro…

Firefox was never the dominant browser. Neither was it on its way to crushing IE. You my friend are recalling a fairytale.

In 2004 95% of browsers were IE, firefox was on 2.7% (TheCounter.com)

By 2009 this had dropped to 70%, with Firefox and Safari on 20% and 6%. Chrome hadn't even launched.

The hard work had been done -- people were using things other than IE, and it was growing.

Firefox then plateaued and Chrome built on this, in 2012 not a single browser had more share than 33% share.

After that things started going pear-shaped, and chrome started snowballing into monopoly

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#342

Post by clairity » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #315

clairity wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

firefox had been taking market share from IE slowly, then when it started to make some real gains, chrome came around and swiped it all out from under firefox. i've mainly used the mozilla lineage of browsers (all the way through netscape and back to mosaic) and was really dismayed when this happened because even by then it was pretty obvious that chrome was part of google's wild west landgrab before regulations and…

> online surveillance I think the drive behind Chrome was to compete with Microsoft, by making a browser that was good enough to deliver your applications, and so make your OS irrelevant. They have succeeded to the point where the only thing I would use Windows for now is Excel (and sometimes some obsolete development tools). Chrome (when not on Android) seems far more benign than most applications as far as "surveil…

yes, chrome was part of google's hedge against microsoft, but microsoft poorly understand the web and badly bungled their internet strategy, to the point that it seemed that they were desperately trying to cede the leadership position to anyone but themselves. google really hadn't needed to worry about microsoft there.

make no mistake, chrome's primary strategic purpose was to control the web in ways that extended and solidified google's reach in search, ad views, and personal data. they flanked it with a suite of tools (e.g., gmail, maps), content (e.g, youtube), and platforms (e.g., android) and made them work best on chrome (à la microsoft with IE).

chrome phones home constantly and uses increasingly intrusive techniques to identity us (like requiring a google account). whether you believe it's benign or not, that's surveillance. they're slowly boiling the pot and we're the frogs.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#343

Post by Anarch157a » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 9:32 PM UTC

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.

For the 99.9% non-technical people out there, we're gonna need an easy to install and manage Pi-hole like program that can be deployed on Windows and automatically set Chrome's proxy to 127.0.0.1.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#344

Post by zanny » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 9:33 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #198

> Within two years, Chrome accounted for 15% of all Web traffic on desktop—for comparison, it took Firefox 6 years to get there. Google managed to deliver a fast, thoughtfully designed browser that was an instant hit among users and Web developers alike. It took 2 years for IE to get 20% [1], and I wouldn't describe IE 1-3 as "fast and thoughtfully designed". I think the lesson here is simply that big tech companies…

Immediately after Chrome released Google was having it bundled with every freeware program under the sun and bribed every major PC vendor to start including it as the default browser in new consumer Windows PCs being sold.

Mozilla never had the raw revenue to just dump millions into forcing Chrome onto everyones desktop like that.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#345

Post by collinmanderson » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 9:35 PM UTC

pojzon wrote: post #338

kmkemp wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For non-technical users: faster pages, account syncing, google name recognition and default searching. For technical users: V8, dev tools, better privacy, evergreen, frequent updates, tabs as processes, fast implementations of new specifications. There were many reasons that Chrome rapidly gained market share.

> better privacy Pardon ? Its completely opposite, same with performance, try to open more than 100 tabs on firefox and chrome..

They're commenting on why "Chrome rapidly gained market share.", not commenting on the current situation.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#346

Post by botverse » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

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…

> Firefox, arguably among the most "free from corporate greed" of the browsers, has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed (in my experience)

I’m sad to say that I hope that was my experience, but I’ve being trying Firefox (again) for the last 6 months and I still manage to make it irresponsive while developing, and very slow when using plugins like dark reader. So I had to revert to Chrome but I’ll try again in a few months.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#347

Post by ravieira » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

Yet Another Post Against Chrome. Yes it's bad and it spies on us but it's also damn good for web development and so far I've found no decent replacement :)

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#348

Post by brianpgordon » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

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.

That's their PR position, but I don't see them taking privacy particularly seriously in reality. They tolerated predatory behavior from darling apps like Facebook for ages.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#349

Post by craftinator » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

leftyted wrote: post #275

a1369209993 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that you're emphasizing ads over the very real performance advantages just means you've got an axe to grind. Alternatively, it could mean that, like me, they had NoScript installed when Chrome came out[0], making Firefox genuinely faster by dint of brute do-less-stuff-ism. 0: or when we heard about it anyway.

I'm not sure why so many HN posters feel the need to boast about not executing JavaScript. All that means is that you've opted out of the web that the rest of the world is using. Good for you. But people who have disabled JS make up such a small porportion of web users (~.2% of pageviews) that your experience is pretty much irrelevant to the question of general browser trends. I'd also bet that Chrome was faster at p…

I surmise it is because HN attracts a higher percentage of critical thinkers than many other boards. A startling amount of JS on the web falls into the following categories: 1) Advertisement 2) Tracking 3) Useless animation I don't care for any of those things. I generally prefer simple html pages that load <1 second, take very few resources, do not track any information about me, and don't use any mouse-reactive animations while I'm trying to get work done.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#350

Post by microcolonel » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

perlgeek wrote: post #25

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…

> 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…

> They start off lean, gain features over time

I'm pretty sure there's a copy of MooTools in the Chromium repository.