701–710 of 774 posts
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Do you mind listing mainstream sites that have serious glitches on Firefox? It's my main browser, and I can't remember one single mainstream site that glitches on FF.
New gmail is pretty awful in FireFox.
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It's a different source of tracking, and frankly speaking, we know why Microsoft wants to track us - the same reason they always have. Microsoft wants to sell us more of their own products, generally speaking. It's not about throwing all private data to the open market for the highest bidder. I'd rather have M$ out there looking to sell their own products and services to me than Google looking to sell me to their adv…
> Microsoft wants to sell us more of their own products, generally speaking. It's not about throwing all private data to the open market for the highest bidder. This is increasingly not true. Between Bing and adding ads[1] to various parts of Windows 10, I expect Microsoft’a long term business strategy will be increasingly ad-heavy. And you can’t make them un-collect the data they’ve already collected on you. [1] htt…
What other options do they have? Even on HN you hear "I use Egde to download Chrome". Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. At the same time Microsoft is getting the heat that Windows 10 is unstable and the last major update shows that it is. Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10 by doing everything they can to make it more stable. Changing the browser engin…
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Yeah, this is just depressing and honestly a little baffling. Seems contrary to Microsoft's interests - why let Google control this aspect of the Web? (Obviously, MS will maintain their own fork and can permanently fork away whenever they want/need to, I guess, so it's not like they've locked themselves in forever, but still) I actually wasn't aware of the problems with Edge. This is the first I've heard of them... I…
I don’t think they intend to let Google control anything — least of all the future of the web. They have been burned too badly by them for that. They are more likely to do what Google did — they used WebKit in the early years of Chrome and then forked it to create Blink once it had gained enough traction. Microsoft is likely to do the same at some point — assuming their browser gains traction. And I, for one, hope it…
Maybe someday they'll do that but it's hard for me to believe that's the plan they're starting off with.
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I am not an expert on this, but I believe Chrome downloads a new exe waiting to be copied over when it is launched. The Firefox updater on the other hand is a whole progress bar experience where a lot of things seem to have to happen to perform an update.
This is correct. Chrome handles updates via a completely separate .exe that runs via the Windows Task Scheduler. I know this because my company pushed out a Group Policy update a while back that removed the ability of users to add/remove scheduled tasks and it broke Chrome updates across the company. Also, this problem (not being able to patch a running app) is unique to Windows because of its terrible file locking i…
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> If Google annoys enough people, people can take Webkit and do whatever they want. Not sure if that should have been Blink, or if you're making a subtle point about how Blink was forked from WebKit (which was in turn forked from KHTML). Personally, while I can see why some may react to this news with concern about a monoculture, I find it hard to feel sorry about the end of the last significant closed source browser…
It also demonstrates that forks are irrelevant and no one cares about them unless they come from major players with enough money and political power to push them.
As with anything, you always need somebody (or a group of somebodies) to help something new gain traction. There's no magic pixie dust that will let you develop a major new platform without commensurate resources. What open source does do is lower the cost of entry and make it easier to build up to a level where you can make an impact.
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It's not really better though - having only two real browsers is not good for open standards or the open web. This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it , and starts using Chromium too. Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't…
While I'm with you on the variety side, lest not forget that Chromium is at least open source, permitting other vendors to do a move like this instead of being left in the cold (and in this way probably committing back to the project). The flip side here is that building a fully featured browser engine from scratch that is "just" good enough to render 80% of pages correctly is a herculean, almost impossible task in 2…
> building a fully featured browser engine from
> scratch that is "just" good enough to render 80%
> of pages correctly is a herculean, almost impossible
> task in 2018.
> I think we're already well off with two fully
> featured and completely open source browser engines.
Which is apparently something developers want, since apparently none of them were working in the industry the last time we had a monoculture.
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I can't quite put my finger on it but something feels wrong about blaming the general populace for Edge's failure as a browser. Microsoft is one of the wealthiest companies on Earth. They've had every opportunity to use every marketing channel and dump resources into the team to make Edge an obvious winner. But they didn't.
Edge is a terrible product: it's a poor clone of its competitors and it has no distinguishing feature. Microsoft needed to actually innovate here and they didn't. Nor did they find an unmet need. Edge exists because everyone hates IE, not because it has something new for the user.
What other options do they have? Even on HN you hear "I use Egde to download Chrome". Many of you here don't test your own work in Edge. At the same time Microsoft is getting the heat that Windows 10 is unstable and the last major update shows that it is. Very urgently, I imagine, Microsoft is trying to change the perception of Windows 10 by doing everything they can to make it more stable. Changing the browser engin…
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It gives the Chromium project massive power over web standards. This happened with IE6 and was a bad time for the web.
It was a complete and totally different time for the web. I was waiting for folks to claim an open source project with outside contributors is the same as a proprietary company moving fast internally and shipping anything and evetything without following a standards process.
> proprietary company moving fast internally and shipping anything and evetything without following a standards process.
It won't be as overt as Microsoft ramming shitty versions of IE down people's throats for a decade, but please rest assured that Google's goal is profit and domination. I'm not saying they are worse than any other for-profit corporation, but they are a for-profit corporation.
> It was a complete and totally different time for the web
20 years ago: Microsoft was doing a pretty good job with the web! IE3/4/5 were consistently better than Netscape. Developers generally welcomed the IE monoculture because developing for both Netscape and IE was a real pain in the ass.
10 years ago: Microsoft had a stranglehold on the web and it suffered greatly, to the point where governments had to intervene (the EU mandating browser choice, etc)
Today: Google is doing a pretty good job with the web!
10 years from now: ????????????