Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Need Chrome No More

redalemeden.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 536 posts

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#481

Post by zaarn »

pjmlp wrote: post #256
lucb1e wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't remember what the last time was Chrome introduced some cool new feature in Chrome. Maybe the PDF reader?

PWA, WebComponents, File Access, Worklets and Houdini and everything else in HTML5/CSS3 still missing from ChromeOS are all being pushed by Chrome.

I don't see how those really benefit the end user.

Firefox has developed Container Tabs, First Party Isolation, integrated Tracking Blocker, an early alpha for a password manager, Screenshots, Firefox Sync, DNS over HTTP and eSNI, not to mention that Mozilla lets addons do much more with the browser so an addon can really change how your browser works instead of being severely limited in what it can do.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#482

Post by TeMPOraL »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #463
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isolation isn’t a benefit for extensions: the whole point of extensions, bookmarklets, etc. is to be able to modify arbitrary aspects of the browsing experience in arbitrary ways.

It's a balance, right? If browser extensions had kernel access, I think we'd all agree that's bad. Now, that's obviously an extreme, but where is the line? Up until recently†, I'm not aware of a situation where a popular Firefox extension was unable to work in Chrome due to Google restrictions. †I'm purposefully excluding the whole adblock thing, as that's super recent and thus not relevant here.

> It's a balance, right? If browser extensions had kernel access, I think we'd all agree that's bad. Now, that's obviously an extreme, but where is the line?

It is, and it boils down to the usual security vs. utility tradeoff - beyond some point, more secure means less useful. Kernel access is a stretch, but then again, I could make my computing experience much more pleasant if I had a deeper ability to control and inspect the browser from external software running on my computer.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#483

Post by TeMPOraL »

bad_user wrote: post #473
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isolation isn’t a benefit for extensions: the whole point of extensions, bookmarklets, etc. is to be able to modify arbitrary aspects of the browsing experience in arbitrary ways.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust all the extensions that I want to use. Especially in Private/Incognito Mode I only want extensions for blocking ads/trackers + 1Password and that’s it. Also being able to see what the extension does is really valuable to me, because allowing an extension to read the data on all websites you visit is really suspicious for a majority of extensions. Mozilla has had a good review…

> I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust all the extensions that I want to use.

That's fair, but this dynamic drags down usefulness of the whole platform. Browsers could offer extended permissions allowing extensions arbitrary control over the browsing experience, but they can't trust extension authors not to get greedy about privileges, and can't trust regular users to be smart about it. It's what happened with Android: applications requested every possible permission, users learned to just accept it.

> Also being able to see what the extension does is really valuable to me, because allowing an extension to read the data on all websites you visit is really suspicious for a majority of extensions.

That's true, and I wish there was an easy way to transparently run a I/O trace on an extension, and to have super-fine-grained user-level control over its permissions. I use a bunch of extensions that modify the contents of sites; I wish I could manually restrict them to a whitelist - and sometimes blacklist. Like, e.g. I don't need Cloud2Butt to work on my banking site.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#484

Post by josteink »

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…

Not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but...

> 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.

I never saw a site crash my browser/tab until I used chrome.

To me it seemed like a workaround to a immature code-vase, because Firefox never had issues like this.

Either way: not really a selling point to me, at least.

WRT crashing stuff: I’ve used mostly Windows and Linux. Is unstable web browsers just a Mac thing?

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#485

Post by josteink »

leftyted wrote: post #35
ethelward wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Maybe I installed chrome because I saw an ad

Or maybe you did because it was drive-by installed with other software, like common malware, something Google paid millions for.

Imagine if MS did anything similar with any of their products. There would be no end to the outrage.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#486

Post by kkarakk »

c-smile wrote: post #303
andrewla wrote: post #43

Here's hoping. The proliferation of browser standards has made this appear a more daunting task as time has gone by. There was a point where if you built a good DOM, javascript engine, and a layout engine and had a reasonable ability to fetch resources, you could bootstrap a browser. That's how Konquerer got there. But now, I think we're past that point -- if your browser can't do native video conferencing and opengl…

Better idea: To move Chrome development to some non-commercial "free world" institution. Like UN for example. That's the only option to have a) security first and b) free browser. No other options for free browser. Web client stack is so complex that to finance its development it should be a company that gets income from each browser instance installed. How they do that is a rhetoric question I think.

yeah and then the UN would bloat up the browser with non browser concerns like blocking loli cartoons or whatever their current excuse is to waste time

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#487

Post by Vinnl »

bad_user wrote: post #393
Laforet wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision to revamp their extensions API also cost a lot of goodwill from the community. FF today may be faster and more secure than two years ago, but from my perspective it has permanently lost some of its utility and appeal.

As a long time Firefox user I think the change in its extensions APIs is one of the greatest moves they did and I’m glad they did it. Chrome’s extensions were isolated, easy to develop and had a permissions system in place. To this day Firefox is still lagging behind in its isolation. For example Chrome can disable extensions in Incognito, but Firefox does not. Also if you’re not paying attention, Chrome won and it’s…

> To this day Firefox is still lagging behind in its isolation.

That is being worked on though:

> The first batch of changes to not run extensions in private browsing mode by default landed, this is still behind a preference.

https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2019/01/31/these-weeks-in-f...

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#488

Post by kkarakk »

robin_reala wrote: post #190
ng12 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My standard is the browser ~95% of my users use. It's the only meaningful one. I still fix FF bugs when they come in (it seems to be a bigger offender than IE recently) but developing for Chrome first is the only approach which makes business sense.

95%? I haven’t seen less than 20% mobile Safari on any site I’ve worked on in the last few years, and that’s not even including Edge / IE / Firefox and desktop Safari.

only true in american markets

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#489

Post by kkarakk »

zaarn wrote: post #481
pjmlp wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PWA, WebComponents, File Access, Worklets and Houdini and everything else in HTML5/CSS3 still missing from ChromeOS are all being pushed by Chrome.

I don't see how those really benefit the end user. Firefox has developed Container Tabs, First Party Isolation, integrated Tracking Blocker, an early alpha for a password manager, Screenshots, Firefox Sync, DNS over HTTP and eSNI, not to mention that Mozilla lets addons do much more with the browser so an addon can really change how your browser works instead of being severely limited in what it can do.

i'm a developer and i find it hard to give a shit about any of that, container tabs are cute but they end up breaking a lot of websites, the rest is not even a blip on my radar

as for addons changing how my browser works - no thanks, i'd rather have a consistently nice browser experience than have to re-install addons everywhere

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#490

Post by eitland »

Aeolun wrote: post #445
eitland wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is plain wrong. 1. Firefox worked very well, thank you and I'm no natural saint when it comes to patience with software. 2. I am frontend (and backend) developer so I should know the difference between using bleeding edge features that doesn't exist in all browsers yet, non standard quirks that developers abuse, and performance problems.

Very well is relative. Chrome is better, even now, from a feature and performance perspective, but the tradeoff has become acceptable for a sense of privacy. That’s my opinion anyway.

Won't argue about the performance, you might very well be right and I cannot prove anything.

Feel free to expand on what features you still miss in Firefox that exists in Chrome though.

Looking from the other side Chromes extension API looks like a toy compared to Firefox, even after Mozilla "nerfed" it. (And ours is improving while Chrome is actively trying to remove even some of the most used features from theirs.)

Post reply on HN