411–420 of 536 posts
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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.
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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
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> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from the pervasive advertisement campaigns, from the bundling strategy with other pieces of software, for the pre-installation on new computers or from the ads on Google SEarch homepage.
I beg to disagree. Chrome was also extremely lean, but very well thought out. - a bit unrelated but installer was a shim, ~downloading it took 3 seconds and 500kB - Few buttons - Transient status bar - Transient download widget - Good ergonomics (easy to close tabs in rapid successions without moving your mouse, the next one would fall in place) - Clear preference panel - Maybe later: pdf support and print dialog
With all due respect, none of the pluses you mentioned would be a reason for a random, tech-illiterate, using-a-computer-for-FB person to install Chrome.
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> 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…
If it was either, why wasn't it a patch set against firefox, rather than IP owned by google?
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Indeed: http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-20090...
From that source, it looks like the story depends on the region though (for desktop). In order of decreasing use of firefox: * Europe: Firefox overtook IE in 2011 with ~40% * Africa: Firefox overtook IE in 2012 with ~40%. It looks like Firefox had the best chance of "crushing it" here. * South America: Firefox overtook IE in 2015 with 12%. Peak was 32% in 2010 * Asia: Firefox overtook IE in 2016 with ~12%. Peak was 2…
Another point to reinforce this argument is that in many of those regions Firefox peaked around 2010 and started losing users too.
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> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from the pervasive advertisement campaigns, from the bundling strategy with other pieces of software, for the pre-installation on new computers or from the ads on Google SEarch homepage.
Chrome's main appeal was that it was much faster than firefox and IE. At everything. I had no technical knowledge when chrome came out, was using firefox, tried chrome, never looked back. It's not really possible to separate out the effects of advertising from the effects of the product actually being better. Maybe I installed chrome because I saw an ad, but I stopped using firefox because it was clear that chrome wa…
No, it means I have a mother, siblings, friends, colleagues, ... that understand next to nothing to computers and would probably not even notice if I switched them from Chrome to Edge. And if any of them use Chrome, it is definitely not out of a conscious choice.
With all due respect, the single fact that you are commenting here on HN makes you more tech-literate than an overwhelming majority of the Web users. For a simple experiment, got to see your mom/dad, and just ask them what browser they are using, and why. IME, in every case, they will tell you they use ‶Google″, because they are not even necessarily aware of the whole browser concept, just accessing ‶The Internet″ – and I say it without any contempt; I'd be unable to do the tenth of what they are able to do in other fields.
Once again, I'm not saying that Chrome had/has not technical advantages; I'm saying that they were not decisive in making people switch.
I'm an avid Firefox user, but I just can't ignore the fact that it's way less performant. Consequently, I use it for my personal life, but when it comes to all the web apps I need for work, I have to go with Chrome, or my computer slows to a crawl. I keep fairly extreme numbers of tabs open, but Chrome is significantly better at coping.
I am on Windows 10.
1. Developer's time is not a commodity. The time you spend testing in alternative browsers is time you can spend in tasks that will make life less painful to the people who work with you such as writing tests, documentation, or new code.
2. A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not exist. The business should be the one who dictates which browsers should be supported, and it should be a rational decision based on data such as reviewing your own analytics. Nobody has infinite resources.
3. Using a website is a privilege, not a right. The same way you are free to choose your favorite browser, a website owner is free to choose which users to serve, the same way we can say "Are you still using IE8 in 2019? tough luck buddy, the site is broken", we can also say "Sorry dude, I didn't care enough to support Firefox because X feature was broken".
4. When you as a user decide to choose Firefox because "my ideological reasons", you are also choosing to deal with the negative aspects such as broken websites, broken extensions, lack of features, loss of mindshare, etc., etc., if you don't like dealing with them the alternative is pretty simple: Use Chrome, that's what the end users do anyway.
The reason Chrome has gained lots of mindshare is because we all love convenience, and there are less-painful alternatives to push the "we don't like Google" agenda such as forking Chromium. The "we don't track you" is a huge competitive advantage against Google, why should you give up everything that Chromium does right? The resources that Mozilla spends maintaining Gecko could be used more intelligently to build for example a security team to alleviate the concern of having a huge common attack area.
Wasn't "test once, run everywhere" the holy grail? Or now we like O(N) instead of O(1)?
I'll write an unpopular opinion: 1. Developer's time is not a commodity. The time you spend testing in alternative browsers is time you can spend in tasks that will make life less painful to the people who work with you such as writing tests, documentation, or new code. 2. A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not exist. The business should be the one who dictates which browsers sho…
I think the only scenario where that's acceptable is experimental/nightly features that haven't yet made their way to the majority of browsers.
> Using a website is a privilege
Some would dispute that. My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical branches. Is it considered a privilege to access my funds via website?
I'll write an unpopular opinion: 1. Developer's time is not a commodity. The time you spend testing in alternative browsers is time you can spend in tasks that will make life less painful to the people who work with you such as writing tests, documentation, or new code. 2. A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not exist. The business should be the one who dictates which browsers sho…
Websites work better with these features, not worse. And so long as Chrome is dominant, these protection features will continue to be effective, because there's not much incentive to defeat them.
It's a bit like the blissful period when IE was dominant and still allowed popup windows. The div-style popups didn't take over until IE's popup blocker.