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), and is rapidly adding privacy and content blocking features and defaults that Chrome lacks. If it were still behind Chrome technically, as it was in 2008, it probably wouldn't matter that Mozilla is more trustworthy than Google.
> 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 with.
There seems to be a bloat cycle with many products, browsers being one of them. They start off lean, gain features over time, and then they are or feel so heavy that a lean new competitor can feel like a fresh breeze.
Remember when Firefox was the fresh breeze, compared to the Netscape suite? I remember Chrome being perceived the same way when it came out.
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 growth was due to speed initially, but at least a decent chunk of it later was due to trickery. I've had to uninstall Chrome from my Mom's computer multiple times. It's one of the most popular bundleware apps out there. Free antivirus, games, system 'utilities', Adobe Flash updates, etc all got paid to employ dark patterns to sneak Chrome onto PCs and have it automatically set as the default and pinned to your task bar.
I think the focus was technical-- stability, speed, security being the main focuses. There is an element of breaking away from proprietary software in the comic too. (Rather ironic, to my mind, considering that it's Google's Internet now... >sigh<)
Beyond even that, Firefox was already stripping market share away from IE at the time. Around 2010 or so it was really a 3-way split, which was really nice in terms of getting a lot of things worked out between the three (relatively speaking). A lot of people would have migrated away from IE, it just would have been more Firefox, less Chrome.
> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time
IE8 Beta 1 shipped March 5, 2008; Chrome's beta release wasn't till September. OK, admittedly, Chrome's stable release happened before IE8's, but MS was working on much the same thing.
I switched back to Firefox before it was cool to switch back :-)
And no, for me if Chrome is superior, it’s absolutely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that I cannot trust Chrome and that Firefox has been good enough for quite some time.
Yes I know the general population doesn’t think like me. I also think that ignorance in tech is dangerous.
Back when I first started using Chrome (I think in 2008), I used to describe it as a weekend race car with all the seats, upholstery, and HVAC stripped out. Fast, no frills.
Firefox, on the other hand, was your 1970s custom van with a cool wizard painted on the side, really comfortable seats, and lots of room for further customization. Not fast, but certainly versatile and designed to your liking.
In my experience I can't stream video on firefox without the video freezing within the first 5 minutes, and it feels clunky even with non video webpages. I really hate google the company, and I'd love to stop using their software, but so far I have yet to see a browser that even comes close to chrome.
I certainly feel the gap between chrome and firefox has narrowed. I struggle to think of a reason NOT to use firefox anymore. I do find myself clicking on that red fox more and more. I've sort of made firefox my incognito "browser".
If the firefox vs IE wars taught me anything its that tech savvy users have a huge impact on adoption. If you win over the nerds they will install firefox absolutely everywhere. They will develop their stuff to work well with firefox.
Chrome hasn't quite become ie6 yet but I feel like if trends continue Firefox will become power users favored browser. Firefox even today is still more extensible and customizable. It also has a more credible reputation for privacy. I believe even now the threat of Firefox is what makes Google hesitate to do things like kill ad blocking.
That's living in a bizarro fantasy world where any meaningful number of people evaluate anything on technical merits. Even the speed argument below is suspect. People can't tell the difference between their browser and their internet connection.
Chrome was widely adopted because it didn't suck and because google--a brand they already learned to trust for search--was constantly beating them over the head to upgrade.
IE wasn't just bad on technical grounds. It genuinely sucked for everyone. It was constantly getting infected with toolbars, popups, and generally crashing all to hell. It was confusing for people to use even when it wasn't any of those things.
Chrome was adopted by the majority of users because it worked at all. IE just didn't.
Other browsers need to catch up to Chrome with their development tools. I'd be happy to use Safari or Firefox for development, but...
- I can't disable CORS in Firefox (yes, sometimes you have to disable CORS rather than modify the Allow-Origin header response, for example if you need to test against a production backend) (and, no, CORS Everywhere is not a sufficient solution).
- I can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome.
- Safari does not allow self-signed certs over WSS (and there's no way to override it).
- Safari does not respect System-wide APC Config for Proxies.
There's a handful of other issues. Both Safari and Firefox do do things well, and often better than Chrome. For example, Firefox tends to actually handle standards correctly, whereas Chrome tries to be overly forgiving. And Safari's Develop and Debug menus are easily the best and quickest way to disable CORS or JavaScript, and examine service workers.
Unfortunately, some of the above issues are blockers.
I can test with Firefox on staging or in production, but not being able to test up front during development really impacts compatibility testing.
If another browser was as good or better for development, I'd be happy to use it.
I agree. While the Firefox dev-tools improved a lot over in recent years, they are still not up to where the chrome dev-tools are. Currently, I try to use the Firefox dev-tools as much as possible but keep chrome prepared for some special cases.
From a consumer perspective, the story is very different: Any browser will probably do, but choosing Firefox has the best long term effect on the development of the internet.
This is a worthwhile point. I still consider Chrome handy and occasionally essential for development.
But it's no longer my day-to-day browser. Firefox became more than adequate for that with quantum, and I see no reason to enable a Google that has made absolutely sure to shape itself into a machine that will always have powerful incentives to do the wrong thing.
I switched recently to using Safari for all my browsing except when I need DevTools, then I just fire up a Chrome window. Only having one Chrome tab open instead of dozens seems to help performance and battery life on my MacBook as well.
I cannot use the Firefox dev tools because they completely choke on the Angular app I'm working on, while Chrome chugs along like nobodies business.
I am using Firefox as my daily driver, because the browser itself is fast. But the dev tools just don't deliver. Waiting for a breakpoint to hit and open takes forever.
Yep. Chrome chugs on super long minified JS lines, but is fine after pretty printing. Meanwhile Firefox will crash on those minified lines, and even when they are non-minified, the size of the files causes FF devtools to run so slowly they are unusable.
totally agree. There's one thing that safari has and (afaik) noone else: you can visually inspect all canvas elements on the site even if they are offscreen
The problem with these articles is that the recommendation always ends up just preaching to the choir: people who already switched away from Chrome nod in appreciation, but people who haven't switched literally get nothing out of these posts to convince them to switch to what is basically the same application made by a different company, with completely different conventions on where everything is, without any concrete perceived benefits (security and tracking are invisible problems, you don't sell someone on switching by saying they won't have them anymore, no matter how important you think that is). And to boot, the switch would almost certainly make things worse because add-ons people relied on won't work and now you've burdened them with having to find new and unfamiliar alternatives to what they were comfortable with.
Chrome's main problem isn't that it's overstayed its welcome and is strangling the web (whatever you want that to mean), it's that it's so pervasive that people have become accustomed to it to such a degree that you're now faced with needing to convince people to give up what they're accustomed to. And that's a _much_ harder sell. Using chrome needs to literally be a grating or even damaging experience before someone will voluntarily switch to a different browser.
I find posts like this kind of interesting. Chrome gained prominence because it had great performance improvements over the competition -- IE and Firefox. IE in particular was dog slow at all times, and Chrome ran everything at least as well and almost always better. Firefox didn't have process isolation when Chrome came onto the scene, and that kind of knocked it for security and stability.
It's not as if people switched just because it had Google branding. Everyone switched because it was quantifiably better. From benchmarks to design, Chrome was a winner, and has enjoyed its success.
Now, Chrome is doing things that could be seen as "IE-like." Manifest v3 -- even with relaxed changes towards ad blocking -- will not necessarily enable uBlock Origin to continue exactly as it does today. The forced user system is another move in the direction of anti-consumer behavior.
I've tried to switch back to the competition. I'm using Firefox right now. Pages render faster and compact mode is great. But Handoff myseteriously doesn't work on my Mac when it does with Chrome (added in Firefox 65). I had to enable U2F support with an about:config flag. I had to turn off the spell checker to fight mysterious input latency in average textboxes.
I'm reluctantly staying because I ultimately like what I see, but there's an undeniable truth somewhere in here. It's really hard for Firefox to match Chrome simply based on resources. Google can drop millions of dollars on a browser -- and few other companies can afford to do that. Certainly not Mozilla.
In retrospect the practical shifting of web-standards-setting from an at least possibly neutral standards body representing multiple interests (W3C) to a a body wholly controlled by browser-vendors (WHATWG)... may have been good for speed of "innovation" for a time, but was in the long-term not good for the "Web as an open platform."
> Making matters worse, the blame often lands on other vendors for “holding back the Web”. The Web is Google’s turf as it stands now; you either do as they do, or you are called out for being a laggard.
Indeed, I think it's the structural politics of WHATWG that make that hard to counter. WHATWG was almost founded on the principles of "not being a laggard" and "doing what we [browser vendors] do". When there were several browser-vendors with roughly equal market power they could counter-balance each other, and had an interest in compatibility with each other, but when there's an elephant in the room...
That is, the W3C folks that were accused of "holding back the web" while trying to keep standards-setting from going to WHATWG... were probably right.
You can disagree, but 10-15 years on, I think we're overdue a larger discussion and retrospective evaluation of the consequences of the WHATWG "coup". I haven't seen much discussion of this, many developers today may not even be aware of the history.
Other than AMP, I can't really think of a case that I would characterize as "Google abusing its position" w.r.t. Open Web. It was Chrome that led the push for PWAs, which I think is both great for the Open Web and consumers... The author complains about other vendors being "called laggards", which - let's be honest - we're really talking about how long Apple/Safari dragged their feet on Service Workers... and they _should_ be called out for that because it was an incredibly cynical thing to do to protect their walled App garden from the Open Web.
The post is missing one simple point: the complexity of browser's engine.
The complexity of current web client stack is comparable with the average OS. Any modern browser has all components of Android OS for example - internal file systems, threads, VM, virtual native code execution, independent windowing and graphics stack, message routing, etc.
That's like situation with Windows and WINE. Yes, you may run some win progs on Wine but original Windows will always be better for them.
So we will have just one browser. That's the reality, want we that or not.
Until either one of these:
1. The spec of Web Client will be reduced to bare minimum. With unified extensions mechanism, think about <applet> but more flexible - based on universal bytecode VM free from licensing issues.
2. Or users will pay for the browser application, instead of having it for free - giving up their private data instead of money. So browser vendors will be able and motivated to provide better, privacy first browsers.
IMHO we got here because we chose the design-by-committee philosophy of organizations like the W3C over more of a waterfall approach built from first principles.
I would like to see a core HTML/CSS/Javascript spec that is a union of features proven to be available and work consistently across all browsers. The spec should incorporate ideas that are obvious in hindsight, such as the DOM diffing optimizations in frameworks like React, or running each tab in its own process.
I think that it should also take a broad perspective approach on things like padding and margin. For example, use simpler abstractions from layout engines like Qt or the layout-as-a-matrix-solver math behind iOS's Auto Layout constraints.
Find the commonalities to give us a high-level abstraction over all the div/span/table concepts of the web, then show a mapping from the abstraction to the quirks of how a div flows, for example. Maybe we could allow one transpiler to go from the solvable/predictable rules to the quirks of say HTML5.
The steps in this process could be relatively tiny and easy to test. It should render the DOM at > 60 fps on a Pentium 100 or equivalent, since games used to do that before they even had OpenGL.
I don't see any step of this process that is intractable. Once we had that, it should be relatively straightforward to build an open source browser as a base spec implementation. This is the sort of thing I fantasized about working on before I got so burned out.
>The complexity of current web client stack is comparable with the average OS.
I'm with you here, go on
>That's like situation with Windows and WINE.
Um, no. The situation is not, and has not ever been like that.
(If you think the analogy holds water, the burden is on you to argue that. I am not going to write an essay on how an airplane is unlike a cow; it simply is not.)
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 and music apis and SVG animations and canvas support it might as well be a steaming turd.
I'd love to see someone try; to build a browser with third-party cookies excluded by design rather than policy (so that all off-domain fetches come from a blank "incognito" context), to build a React-style shadow DOM as the primary DOM and have the W3C DOM implemented as a polyfill, with client certificates integrated more naturally, completely killing the notion of allowing windows to open programmatically (I mean, how can pop-ups still be a problem? Any sane site is now using on-page popups if they need the UX), and some sort of model for integrating new web APIs and content handlers.
But combining all of that with a smooth and well-polished UI that works on multiple platforms is rapidly becoming something that only a large software corporation can pull off, and even there, mostly pull off badly. For now, I think Chrome is here to stay.
I have a better idea: build a new browser for a new web that is designed with decades of hindsight and isn't as bogged down in all the stupid legacy crap that the current web is.
Then port Chromium to it as a portal to the legacy web.
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.
> 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 with an established channel for reaching users can boost market share faster than open-source non-profit projects.
It left a sour taste in my mouth that Microsoft joined Chrome instead of investing in FireFox and helping them advance their multi-process architecture quicker.
> An ecosystem that doesn’t seem concerned with performance, user experience, privacy, or pushing computing forward.
What? Chrome was more performant that any browser at the time it was released and it's still pretty good. It also became the gold standard for browser UX so much so that all other browsers copied a lot of it. Chrome also brought with it multi-process tabs and the V8 Javascript engine, how is that not "pushing computing forward"?
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 Microsoft's offerings.
It worked and all browsers started an arms race for JS performance.
I'd be thrilled to use another browser if they worked.
In my case, the feature that is missing from every other browser is MIDI access. I can plug a digital piano into my computer, and Chrome can talk to it. This is a standard, but the other browsers talk about it but never do anything, it's been "coming any day now" in Firefox since 2015, when I first conceived of the project ( https://pianop.ly/, a web app for playing piano along with original music videos from YouTube, karaoke style). It sucks that I have to tell people to use Chrome or it won't work. (although technically they can use Brave, Opera or other Blink based browsers)
Regardless of that one feature, I'm curious why there aren't better alternatives based on Blink that allow you to get the Blink engine without all these things we hate about Google's decisions (related to the being an ad company, for one thing). I understand that we'd still have a monoculture, but I don't see that as nearly the problem it was when browsers worked so differently, for basic layout and such.
> How? It never stops puzzling me why anyone thoght Chrome would be any different.
It is different! Microsoft never released even a single line of IE. Chromium on the other hand is completely open source, and we have that to thank for all the fun things that came of it from VSCode, to Brave browser, to Puppeteer. Things are WAY better now than in the dark IE days.
It was open source from start. Yes, Firefox as well, but it had Google as a brand behind it which put lots of trust in it because of the engineering talent they have.
Google's motto used to be "don't be evil," and there was a time when people honestly believed they meant it. Hell, I think there was a time when Google did honestly mean it.
If anyone's to blame it's mozilla's criminal laziness. There I said it. We were stuck with firefox 3 for 3 years (early 2008-2011), on a time where chrome was getting a +1 version every month or 2 months.
I remember Mozilla "evangelist" employees hard at work, tweeting "version doesn't matter, it's the changelog that matters, chrome team could have changed two background colors and did +1 to the version counter".
Great battle move. Then, Firefox 4 got released and everyone hated the new interface. Even ex-mozilla cofounder JWZ complained that it feels beta even though it's a fully mature product out for a decade now and that's unacceptable. Also, No mp4 support. Oh yeah. They added it in Firefox 20 finally (then no webm support. They finally added it in January 2019. Good job)
In the meantime, Mozilla engineering kept fooling around with projects that went nowhere. Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that? THE JAVASCRIPT PHONE! FLASH TO JS CONVERTER, where is that now? That JS only Video Codec ORBX.js? that Eich said "I saw the future today" 10 years ago, and it's still not out yet. PDF JS (in it's first release made opening large PDF files on Firefox impossible) etc etc. Many good things came of from it too, like asmjs (ancestor of wasm), but in general there seemed a direction of everywhere, neither arriving here nor there.
Mozilla then switched the default search engine of Firefox to Yahoo! At a time when Yahoo was in the spotlight for rapidly dying and looking for a pity-acquisition!! It also came bundled with great bugs that kept resetting the default search engine back to yahoo - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1206101
To give praise where praise is worth, Mozilla did realize their mistakes got back from their 9 year vacation (2009-2018) and Firefox today is finally very stable and relatively fast compared to Edge and Safari.
I know I am sounding trollish and bitter, but the truth is that I am just sad at how Firefox fell. What happened? Did people get lazy as their savings grew? Where key individuals poached away by Google and Apple? Did they burn out? Something surely must have happened...
> developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship.
That's me. Sorry, but I just can't be bothered to support every browser's quirks. I check Firefox every once in a while, but really, I don't mind losing a few users if it means significantly less maintenance and testing for me.
It's like complaining that developers are increasingly shunning other OSes - if it works on Windows, it's ready to ship. Yet people do this all the time for video games and most Linux users understand that making a game that runs equally well on Windows and Linux and Mac is no simple task.
There is an important difference between Google and Microsoft. Google is using their market dominance to push their opinions on the open standards bodies; Microsoft used their market dominance to ignore standards bodies completely.
I don't particularly like the manifesto style of this post. The author attempts a hard sell by first admitting that the world needed Chrome and then after it succeeded he suggests throwing it to the depths after the wish came true.
> Chrome is effectively everywhere you look. And that’s bad news.
Why? It's the dream you wanted 10 years ago, but it comes with Google now. Ooops for you if you dislike Google, but the vast majority of people doesn't care. Use Safari, Firefox or anything, but calling out ditching Chrome is for the greater good is ridiculous.
H mentions 60% as a dominant position which is not how I would describe it in my dictionary.
As others have said here, I think the article mischaracterizes why stakeholders were enthusiastic about Chrome back in the day. It was a technically compelling browser which joined Firefox in pushing web standards in a way that Microsoft (and Apple) wouldn't.
I think the dominance of Webkit is concerning, but I don't think we can reuse the justifications of ten years ago to say why. Chrome continues to be technically strong (though perhaps not as much) and continues to push web standards (though perhaps too many supporting Google). The situation just isn't as bad today as it was. There is a lot less friction in the everyday experience of developers and users who want to use cutting-edge web standards.
Monoculture is bad, but it's hard to get people excited about challenging it when the monocultural product isn't awful.
[+] [-] mapgrep|7 years ago|reply
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), and is rapidly adding privacy and content blocking features and defaults that Chrome lacks. If it were still behind Chrome technically, as it was in 2008, it probably wouldn't matter that Mozilla is more trustworthy than Google.
[+] [-] perlgeek|7 years ago|reply
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 with.
There seems to be a bloat cycle with many products, browsers being one of them. They start off lean, gain features over time, and then they are or feel so heavy that a lean new competitor can feel like a fresh breeze.
Remember when Firefox was the fresh breeze, compared to the Netscape suite? I remember Chrome being perceived the same way when it came out.
[+] [-] ethelward|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|7 years ago|reply
Examples: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
[+] [-] EvanAnderson|7 years ago|reply
I think the focus was technical-- stability, speed, security being the main focuses. There is an element of breaking away from proprietary software in the comic too. (Rather ironic, to my mind, considering that it's Google's Internet now... >sigh<)
[+] [-] tracker1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsnedders|7 years ago|reply
IE8 Beta 1 shipped March 5, 2008; Chrome's beta release wasn't till September. OK, admittedly, Chrome's stable release happened before IE8's, but MS was working on much the same thing.
[+] [-] bad_user|7 years ago|reply
And no, for me if Chrome is superior, it’s absolutely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that I cannot trust Chrome and that Firefox has been good enough for quite some time.
Yes I know the general population doesn’t think like me. I also think that ignorance in tech is dangerous.
[+] [-] NittLion78|7 years ago|reply
Back when I first started using Chrome (I think in 2008), I used to describe it as a weekend race car with all the seats, upholstery, and HVAC stripped out. Fast, no frills.
Firefox, on the other hand, was your 1970s custom van with a cool wizard painted on the side, really comfortable seats, and lots of room for further customization. Not fast, but certainly versatile and designed to your liking.
IE7, naturally, was a Yugo.
[+] [-] Passthepeas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheOperator|7 years ago|reply
If the firefox vs IE wars taught me anything its that tech savvy users have a huge impact on adoption. If you win over the nerds they will install firefox absolutely everywhere. They will develop their stuff to work well with firefox.
Chrome hasn't quite become ie6 yet but I feel like if trends continue Firefox will become power users favored browser. Firefox even today is still more extensible and customizable. It also has a more credible reputation for privacy. I believe even now the threat of Firefox is what makes Google hesitate to do things like kill ad blocking.
[+] [-] ianamartin|7 years ago|reply
Chrome was widely adopted because it didn't suck and because google--a brand they already learned to trust for search--was constantly beating them over the head to upgrade.
IE wasn't just bad on technical grounds. It genuinely sucked for everyone. It was constantly getting infected with toolbars, popups, and generally crashing all to hell. It was confusing for people to use even when it wasn't any of those things.
Chrome was adopted by the majority of users because it worked at all. IE just didn't.
[+] [-] dak1|7 years ago|reply
- I can't disable CORS in Firefox (yes, sometimes you have to disable CORS rather than modify the Allow-Origin header response, for example if you need to test against a production backend) (and, no, CORS Everywhere is not a sufficient solution).
- I can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome.
- Safari does not allow self-signed certs over WSS (and there's no way to override it).
- Safari does not respect System-wide APC Config for Proxies.
There's a handful of other issues. Both Safari and Firefox do do things well, and often better than Chrome. For example, Firefox tends to actually handle standards correctly, whereas Chrome tries to be overly forgiving. And Safari's Develop and Debug menus are easily the best and quickest way to disable CORS or JavaScript, and examine service workers.
Unfortunately, some of the above issues are blockers.
I can test with Firefox on staging or in production, but not being able to test up front during development really impacts compatibility testing.
If another browser was as good or better for development, I'd be happy to use it.
[+] [-] arendtio|7 years ago|reply
From a consumer perspective, the story is very different: Any browser will probably do, but choosing Firefox has the best long term effect on the development of the internet.
[+] [-] quest88|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wwweston|7 years ago|reply
But it's no longer my day-to-day browser. Firefox became more than adequate for that with quantum, and I see no reason to enable a Google that has made absolutely sure to shape itself into a machine that will always have powerful incentives to do the wrong thing.
[+] [-] fredsted|7 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, WebSockets show up as type 'Other' in the inspector, and the frames are listed under 'Preview'.
Edit: Safari.
[+] [-] rhlsthrm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sammi|7 years ago|reply
I am using Firefox as my daily driver, because the browser itself is fast. But the dev tools just don't deliver. Waiting for a breakpoint to hit and open takes forever.
[+] [-] valtism|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aloer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheRealPomax|7 years ago|reply
Chrome's main problem isn't that it's overstayed its welcome and is strangling the web (whatever you want that to mean), it's that it's so pervasive that people have become accustomed to it to such a degree that you're now faced with needing to convince people to give up what they're accustomed to. And that's a _much_ harder sell. Using chrome needs to literally be a grating or even damaging experience before someone will voluntarily switch to a different browser.
[+] [-] Shank|7 years ago|reply
It's not as if people switched just because it had Google branding. Everyone switched because it was quantifiably better. From benchmarks to design, Chrome was a winner, and has enjoyed its success.
Now, Chrome is doing things that could be seen as "IE-like." Manifest v3 -- even with relaxed changes towards ad blocking -- will not necessarily enable uBlock Origin to continue exactly as it does today. The forced user system is another move in the direction of anti-consumer behavior.
I've tried to switch back to the competition. I'm using Firefox right now. Pages render faster and compact mode is great. But Handoff myseteriously doesn't work on my Mac when it does with Chrome (added in Firefox 65). I had to enable U2F support with an about:config flag. I had to turn off the spell checker to fight mysterious input latency in average textboxes.
I'm reluctantly staying because I ultimately like what I see, but there's an undeniable truth somewhere in here. It's really hard for Firefox to match Chrome simply based on resources. Google can drop millions of dollars on a browser -- and few other companies can afford to do that. Certainly not Mozilla.
[+] [-] jrochkind1|7 years ago|reply
> Making matters worse, the blame often lands on other vendors for “holding back the Web”. The Web is Google’s turf as it stands now; you either do as they do, or you are called out for being a laggard.
Indeed, I think it's the structural politics of WHATWG that make that hard to counter. WHATWG was almost founded on the principles of "not being a laggard" and "doing what we [browser vendors] do". When there were several browser-vendors with roughly equal market power they could counter-balance each other, and had an interest in compatibility with each other, but when there's an elephant in the room...
That is, the W3C folks that were accused of "holding back the web" while trying to keep standards-setting from going to WHATWG... were probably right.
You can disagree, but 10-15 years on, I think we're overdue a larger discussion and retrospective evaluation of the consequences of the WHATWG "coup". I haven't seen much discussion of this, many developers today may not even be aware of the history.
[+] [-] dccoolgai|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c-smile|7 years ago|reply
The complexity of current web client stack is comparable with the average OS. Any modern browser has all components of Android OS for example - internal file systems, threads, VM, virtual native code execution, independent windowing and graphics stack, message routing, etc.
That's like situation with Windows and WINE. Yes, you may run some win progs on Wine but original Windows will always be better for them.
So we will have just one browser. That's the reality, want we that or not.
Until either one of these:
1. The spec of Web Client will be reduced to bare minimum. With unified extensions mechanism, think about <applet> but more flexible - based on universal bytecode VM free from licensing issues.
2. Or users will pay for the browser application, instead of having it for free - giving up their private data instead of money. So browser vendors will be able and motivated to provide better, privacy first browsers.
[+] [-] zackmorris|7 years ago|reply
I would like to see a core HTML/CSS/Javascript spec that is a union of features proven to be available and work consistently across all browsers. The spec should incorporate ideas that are obvious in hindsight, such as the DOM diffing optimizations in frameworks like React, or running each tab in its own process.
I think that it should also take a broad perspective approach on things like padding and margin. For example, use simpler abstractions from layout engines like Qt or the layout-as-a-matrix-solver math behind iOS's Auto Layout constraints.
Find the commonalities to give us a high-level abstraction over all the div/span/table concepts of the web, then show a mapping from the abstraction to the quirks of how a div flows, for example. Maybe we could allow one transpiler to go from the solvable/predictable rules to the quirks of say HTML5.
The steps in this process could be relatively tiny and easy to test. It should render the DOM at > 60 fps on a Pentium 100 or equivalent, since games used to do that before they even had OpenGL.
I don't see any step of this process that is intractable. Once we had that, it should be relatively straightforward to build an open source browser as a base spec implementation. This is the sort of thing I fantasized about working on before I got so burned out.
[+] [-] romwell|7 years ago|reply
I'm with you here, go on
>That's like situation with Windows and WINE.
Um, no. The situation is not, and has not ever been like that.
(If you think the analogy holds water, the burden is on you to argue that. I am not going to write an essay on how an airplane is unlike a cow; it simply is not.)
[+] [-] andrewla|7 years ago|reply
But now, I think we're past that point -- if your browser can't do native video conferencing and opengl and music apis and SVG animations and canvas support it might as well be a steaming turd.
I'd love to see someone try; to build a browser with third-party cookies excluded by design rather than policy (so that all off-domain fetches come from a blank "incognito" context), to build a React-style shadow DOM as the primary DOM and have the W3C DOM implemented as a polyfill, with client certificates integrated more naturally, completely killing the notion of allowing windows to open programmatically (I mean, how can pop-ups still be a problem? Any sane site is now using on-page popups if they need the UX), and some sort of model for integrating new web APIs and content handlers.
But combining all of that with a smooth and well-polished UI that works on multiple platforms is rapidly becoming something that only a large software corporation can pull off, and even there, mostly pull off badly. For now, I think Chrome is here to stay.
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|7 years ago|reply
Then port Chromium to it as a portal to the legacy web.
[+] [-] c-smile|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] steve76|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ken|7 years ago|reply
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 with an established channel for reaching users can boost market share faster than open-source non-profit projects.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#/media/File:...
[+] [-] ressetera|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlosdp|7 years ago|reply
What? Chrome was more performant that any browser at the time it was released and it's still pretty good. It also became the gold standard for browser UX so much so that all other browsers copied a lot of it. Chrome also brought with it multi-process tabs and the V8 Javascript engine, how is that not "pushing computing forward"?
[+] [-] jarjoura|7 years ago|reply
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 Microsoft's offerings.
It worked and all browsers started an arms race for JS performance.
[+] [-] robbrown451|7 years ago|reply
In my case, the feature that is missing from every other browser is MIDI access. I can plug a digital piano into my computer, and Chrome can talk to it. This is a standard, but the other browsers talk about it but never do anything, it's been "coming any day now" in Firefox since 2015, when I first conceived of the project ( https://pianop.ly/, a web app for playing piano along with original music videos from YouTube, karaoke style). It sucks that I have to tell people to use Chrome or it won't work. (although technically they can use Brave, Opera or other Blink based browsers)
Regardless of that one feature, I'm curious why there aren't better alternatives based on Blink that allow you to get the Blink engine without all these things we hate about Google's decisions (related to the being an ad company, for one thing). I understand that we'd still have a monoculture, but I don't see that as nearly the problem it was when browsers worked so differently, for basic layout and such.
[+] [-] perfunctory|7 years ago|reply
How? It never stops puzzling me why anyone thoght Chrome would be any different. Somehow less corporate.
[+] [-] umvi|7 years ago|reply
It is different! Microsoft never released even a single line of IE. Chromium on the other hand is completely open source, and we have that to thank for all the fun things that came of it from VSCode, to Brave browser, to Puppeteer. Things are WAY better now than in the dark IE days.
[+] [-] kowdermeister|7 years ago|reply
It was open source from start. Yes, Firefox as well, but it had Google as a brand behind it which put lots of trust in it because of the engineering talent they have.
[+] [-] Merad|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perfunctory|7 years ago|reply
It hasn’t shifted. It’s always been there.
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway66666|7 years ago|reply
I remember Mozilla "evangelist" employees hard at work, tweeting "version doesn't matter, it's the changelog that matters, chrome team could have changed two background colors and did +1 to the version counter".
Great battle move. Then, Firefox 4 got released and everyone hated the new interface. Even ex-mozilla cofounder JWZ complained that it feels beta even though it's a fully mature product out for a decade now and that's unacceptable. Also, No mp4 support. Oh yeah. They added it in Firefox 20 finally (then no webm support. They finally added it in January 2019. Good job)
In the meantime, Mozilla engineering kept fooling around with projects that went nowhere. Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that? THE JAVASCRIPT PHONE! FLASH TO JS CONVERTER, where is that now? That JS only Video Codec ORBX.js? that Eich said "I saw the future today" 10 years ago, and it's still not out yet. PDF JS (in it's first release made opening large PDF files on Firefox impossible) etc etc. Many good things came of from it too, like asmjs (ancestor of wasm), but in general there seemed a direction of everywhere, neither arriving here nor there.
Mozilla then switched the default search engine of Firefox to Yahoo! At a time when Yahoo was in the spotlight for rapidly dying and looking for a pity-acquisition!! It also came bundled with great bugs that kept resetting the default search engine back to yahoo - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1206101
To give praise where praise is worth, Mozilla did realize their mistakes got back from their 9 year vacation (2009-2018) and Firefox today is finally very stable and relatively fast compared to Edge and Safari.
I know I am sounding trollish and bitter, but the truth is that I am just sad at how Firefox fell. What happened? Did people get lazy as their savings grew? Where key individuals poached away by Google and Apple? Did they burn out? Something surely must have happened...
[+] [-] umvi|7 years ago|reply
That's me. Sorry, but I just can't be bothered to support every browser's quirks. I check Firefox every once in a while, but really, I don't mind losing a few users if it means significantly less maintenance and testing for me.
It's like complaining that developers are increasingly shunning other OSes - if it works on Windows, it's ready to ship. Yet people do this all the time for video games and most Linux users understand that making a game that runs equally well on Windows and Linux and Mac is no simple task.
[+] [-] NotANaN|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kowdermeister|7 years ago|reply
> Chrome is effectively everywhere you look. And that’s bad news.
Why? It's the dream you wanted 10 years ago, but it comes with Google now. Ooops for you if you dislike Google, but the vast majority of people doesn't care. Use Safari, Firefox or anything, but calling out ditching Chrome is for the greater good is ridiculous.
H mentions 60% as a dominant position which is not how I would describe it in my dictionary.
[+] [-] aeturnum|7 years ago|reply
I think the dominance of Webkit is concerning, but I don't think we can reuse the justifications of ten years ago to say why. Chrome continues to be technically strong (though perhaps not as much) and continues to push web standards (though perhaps too many supporting Google). The situation just isn't as bad today as it was. There is a lot less friction in the everyday experience of developers and users who want to use cutting-edge web standards.
Monoculture is bad, but it's hard to get people excited about challenging it when the monocultural product isn't awful.
[+] [-] cletus|7 years ago|reply
- Isolating tabs
- Seamless upgrades (seriously, why does Firefox STILL ask on startup if I'd like to wait and install an update?)
- Syncing between devices
- Performance (which at the time was largely terrible)
Most of this still holds true, at least for me, so I see myself using Chrome for years to come.