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State of web browsers in 2018

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Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#51

Post by zeveb »

Y_Y wrote: post #31
adimitrov wrote: post #20

Firefox for mobile is an excellent browser, and the only one I use. It supports extensions, such as uBlock without rooting the phone. The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Honestly, I don't know why people aren't using it. I think most people just don't care, and just use what the system provides. As Google gets more invasive and evil, I hope that people will start to care, and Fi…

It also syncs nicely with the desktop version sharing tabs and passwords and whatnot. Even if Chrom* was as good as firefox there, the mobile aspect would make the difference

Sadly, the sync functionality is gated behind an insecure authentication system, so one really shouldn't use it. This is a pity, because Chrome's sync is even less secure.

Compounding the pity, Firefox used to have a more secure auth system, which they threw away. I'm still appalled by that.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#52

Post by zbraniecki »

skybrian wrote: post #33

Even if some web sites don't care about cross-browser adoption, it seems like the browser vendors do, including people at Chrome who propose new standards? As long as this is the case, the web standards process is still working much as it always has. Apple and Firefox still have a veto.

Our power to influence standards is linked to our marketshare.

At Mozilla we say that we have a different reason to strive for marketshare than most companies in the world. We need it to have a seat at the table.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#53

Post by CalRobert »

gilrain wrote: post #36
Reinmar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative to Google. That sounds realistic and I hope it will be able to team up with bigger companies which would like to compete with Google (instead of helping it). However, that made me think about Brave ( https://brave.com/ ). What are your thoughts about it? It's also privacy oriented, but it's actually built on top of Chromium. What is even more interesting,…

Brave is rent-seeking the entire Internet and doesn’t deserve serious mention.

So is cURL for that matter.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#54

Post by bad_user »

From TFA:

>> "For developers, it’s one less browser engine to worry about"

>> "For the open web: it’s complicated. If I were to put on the hat of a pragmatic developer, I fail to see the big gain in having competing browser engines."

The author does not understand web standards and probably doesn't remember IExplorer's monopoly and the era of "works best in IExplorer" websites. And what fewer and fewer people remember is that IExplorer 5 was the best browser of its generation, the Chrome of its days.

And actually I fail to see what this article is doing on HN. Surely there must be better rants around.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#55

Post by SamWhited »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #47
SamWhited wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why people aren't using it. Like the article said: no one cares (more or less) about how good the browser is. If you have to go install a new browser, that's more work than just using the builtin one, and Google can force every Android phone to install Chrome out of the box. Also, though I use Firefox mobile out of a desire to not be a part of the Chrome problem (even though I know it's useless and I'm…

Until Mozilla gets the performance problems under control Performance is 1/2 of the reason that I prefer Mozilla. As one of those people that typically has 50-100 tabs open, the Firefox model for memory management is vastly superior. The other half of the reason is TreeStyleTab, again because I'm one of those zillion-tab users. Vertically-stacked tabs in a sidebar is the only way to manage that mountain of tabs - hor…

That's actually really interesting; I don't tend to have a ton of tabs, but coworkers always told me Firefox did a terrible job with 100+ tabs and that Chrome worked better. This always made sense to me because of the multi-process architecture of Chrome, but I've never seen it myself.

So you're suggesting that Firefox actually performs better now? Maybe all my coworkers complaining about it are just repeating lore that no longer exists?

Many tabs aside though, I still have a lot of performance problems with Firefox (although it's getting better; Quantum was fantastic, I was getting really fed up with Firefox for a while before that).

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#56

Post by nix0n »

Comparing default Chrome vs default FireFox it's easy to think they're similar, and say "Chrome is ok."

But FireFox-with-blockers is in a class by itself in terms of speed and usability on both desktop and mobile.

Most of the things that work on Chrome but not Firefox end up being blocked and I don't even notice they're gone.

The recent change to make tracker blocking default in FireFox gives me hope.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#57

Post by always_good »

superkuh wrote: post #4

We're getting to the point where browsers are worthy of the decades old criticism Emacs has received. They have eventually become an OS with many fine features - simply lacking a good web browser. It's a large, sprawling project to make a good OS. Especially when the language of choice to run on it changes with such haste. Hopefully this nth re-imagining of dumb terminals dies off over the next few years and applicat…

What about the good qualities that websites have, like the ability to link (and deep link) people to specific parts of it?

The re-trending of the local application is a step back in this regard. And "when will this internet fad die off so we can return to native applications" throws a lot of baby out.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#58

Post by StyloBill »

Yizahi wrote: post #50
PurpleRamen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Ever used chrome or some other browser on android? The droidfox is quite infamous for it's slowness and backward interface.

I used Chrome and Samsung one and Firefox. There is no perceptible difference in speed of the browser, only in speed of mobile internet. I switched to FF a year ago as a main mobile browser and it works just fine.

> There is no perceptible difference in speed of the browser

No difference that maybe you can perceive, but I for one find the scrolling a lot more sluggish on FF than on Chrome, and that's on a SD 845 device, which is the latest and supposedly greatest Qualcomm chip. I just can't use FF on Android, and that's a shame because the desktop version is very good.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#59

Post by bad_user »

jolmg wrote: post #49
gilrain wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is rent-seeking the entire Internet and doesn’t deserve serious mention.

I haven't looked into Brave in years, but the original idea I remember was that the trend of having the web be free for the public and funded by advertising (mostly the single entity, Google) was bad for the general public in terms of privacy. Therefore, it would be better if people financially supported the sites they visited and benefit from, so as to extinguish the need to give so much power to the advertising ind…

People are bitching and moaning about Mozilla pulling an extension that works around paywalls from addons.mozilla.org, so do you honestly think that people are willing to "financially support the sites they visited"?

Without hitting a paywall that can't be worked around, hell will freeze over before that happens ;-)

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#60

Post by snaky »

Kye wrote: post #9
snaky wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox is irrelevant on mobile That's pretty sad, considering the fact it's the only mobile browser not only with the support of extensions, but the same extensions as the desktop version. Future might not be that grim for mobile Firefox actually, with more and more modern Android smartphones and tablets support more and more RAM, and 4GB is pretty much standard.

Mobile Firefox didn't support all extensions last I checked. It at least has uBlock Origin on Android, but almost everything else I looked for wasn't available. Firefox on iOS doesn't support them at all.

I think most of extensions that are not listed as compatible with Android version of Firefox is due the developer's lazyness to test it on Android and check the additional checkbox submitting it to the store. There are some differences in API, but they are minor https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
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