Anecdotal observation: A few years ago, I made a video game for an early 1960s computer, the PDP-1, running in an homegrown emulator in web technology. [1] Amazingly, the game runs at 60 frames per second (yes, you could do this with early 1960s tech), and, amazingly, browsers were able to render the emulation, including a rather complex simulation of the dual-phosphor screen, at 60 fps (you could do this in 2016). Admittedly, Chrome wasn't the fastest browser then, skipping a frame now and then, but caught up with others browsers over the next year. That is, until a few revisions ago, when something inside Chrome went terribly wrong, causing the browser to grind over the emulation in single-digits frame rates. Other browsers, like Firefox and Safari, are still running the emulation (which is as of 2012) happily at 60 fps, but these combine just about 15% of the intended desktop audiences. So for all measure and market concentration, the project is dead by now, due to a bug in the dominant browser. More importantly, it fails to deliver the proof it was intended to provide, namely that you could do a video game at 60 fps around 1960, because you randomly can't do so today.
Update: Apparently, the problem is related to hardware acceleration. At least, disabling it works fine for me. The page in question has been updated to include a note on this.
Thanks to everyone who reported their experiences and helped to track down the issue!
On a more general level, the argument about all the eggs and a single basket still stands. (Knowing why a particular basket fails doesn't help the eggs.)
In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular.
However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important.
Both Opera and Microsoft's Edge are now powered by Chromium. Chromium is a project controlled by Google. Its redeeming quality, in terms of its open source nature, is the ability to fork, however competitors such as Microsoft proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser.
At this point the only remaining alternatives are Firefox and Safari.
I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.
"They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular."
They did make a good browser. However, their market share is not down to better browser or "some advertising." They use their other assets (search, youtube, android, docs..) to make chrome the "default" option.
It's a dominance breeds dominance cycle... a hallmark of modern monopoly.
Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good browser. It is good. But, I don't think it could have been that kind of wipeout without leveraging google's greater web dominance.
There was a time when IE was a good browser and the default one. They dominated. A few years later, Mozilla had the better browser. Firefox slowly climbed to the middle, by being very good. They never got to 50% of the market.
IMO, during the IE6_v_FF days the feature and quality gap between browsers was at its highest. Much bigger than Chrome_v_FF ever was. Still Chrome today is far more dominant than FF or anything ever was... except IE in its monopoly day.
>In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular.
Where "did some marketing" equals "unethically abused monopoly position to aggressively push through dark patterns", sure. I think I can still blame them for that.
"Some marketing", ha. It was prominently advertised with a message that almost made it seem required, all by itself, on the otherwise almost blank Google search page. One of the most, if not the most visited pages on the planet.
Purposely slowing down websites on competing browsers, breaking web-standards on cutting edge tech, abusing their other products, using slower codecs on other browsers on YT, not allowing some websites use certain features of google-doc, constantly showing popups to switch to Google Chrome on google docs - this all anti-competitive behavior to squeeze more data from your life and browsing habits.
> competitors such as Microsoft proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser
This is incorrect. They absolutely can as demonstrated by the fact that former Edge works great, has better hardware acceleration than Chrome, and consumes less power.
However, they are not willing to anymore, which is a huge concern for future innovations in that domain.
> In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular.
They spammed it massively as in
- adding it to other popular downloads
- ads everywhere on their properties, including on the front page where no one else has ever been allowed to buy ad spots
- lies: would shamelessly present itself as a better browser not just for users of old IE versions but also for users of Firefox and probably Opera as well.
>I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.
Agreed. Firefox is really fast, and I love it. Been using it for a couple years now. But even if Chrome was demonstrably, objectively faster, I would still use Firefox.
Microsoft has the resources to fork Chromium if necessary, much like Google forked WebKit (after sending patches upstream for a while) and Apple forked KHTML. This is just how open source works and isn't a problem in itself.
By doing this, Microsoft gets compatibility with the world's websites on day one, and they can take it from there. It's a smart move that many people seem to be misinterpreting.
A lot of "third party browsers" like Opera, Vivaldi and Brave choose to go for Chromium as their engine, would they be able to use Firefox's engine the same way? If yes, why does it seem that no one actually does it? I personally don't particularly enjoy Firefox as a browser, but I don't have anything against their engine. If there was a version of Vivaldi that implemented that I would probably choose it over the Chromium version.
> They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular
In initial days of chrome, it wasn't that better. It grew in popularity because of the bundle model of advertising they employed which was initially used to distribute spyware and the browser started growing.
i tried firefox, and loved the experience, but ran into a few minor bugs related to css that just made absolutely no sense.
also, it regularly ran my cpu at max throttle when doing anything video-related within the browser (watching netflix, on a video chat, etc), while chrome is much more cpu-friendly with those things (don't know why that is).
I tried Opera, as well, and ran it as my main browser for months (almost a year, actually), but there is a wierd bug in windows related to the browser bar expanding when the machine wakes up from sleep, where the only way to fix it is to restart the browser entirely.
>However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important.
Are they though?
Adherence to standards is very good across the board. It isn't like it was in the 90s when standards were seen as mere guidelines and suggestions.
Safari is going strong. FF is going to be around but they are certainly struggling - and it's their fault. They have had the uncanny ability to make the wrong decision every time. They are hamstrung by their legacy architecture that they are just starting to break out of. Their side projects (Firefox OS, Pocket, Reality) were/are a total waste of time. And of course, they promoted and then fired Eich over nothing - which leads one to wonder what kind of a circus they run internally.
Microsoft is interesting and for now they are using a packaged version of Chromium - but I could see them do a hard-fork in the same way that Google forked WebKit because at some point a trillion-dollar company won't want to be tied to another trillion-dollar company's roadmap.
The web is a mature platform at this point, it's not really surprising everything has consolidated towards a single implementation, the economics of actually producing websites dictates that's an inevitability.
I do not trust Google, but I do not trust Mozilla either. An overwhelming majority of Mozilla funding comes from Google, Microsoft, and other giants it directly competes with. Added to that, many of it's battles (at the W3C and like) prioritize philosophy over customer satisfaction and ease of use.
99.9% of browser users don't care or don't even know if their browser is open source - what they want is convenience and ease of use. I hope Mozilla prioritizes the ones that actually matter - the users, over whatever philosophy it claims to live by, that often times isn't rooted in customer centricity.
Google is a clear monopoly, there's no doubt about it. It has a 70% browser market share, 70% market share in the search ecosystem. Even though their service is good and people are happy, I think they need to be broken down for the sake of keeping an open internet. Even Facebook for that matter. That's my opinion
Those 70% numbers undersell it. It's basically impossible to use the internet today without touching Google servers. Even if you, personally, completely eschew all Google services, almost everyone you want to communicate with will be on a Google service. Sending an email? Watching a video? Reading a blog? Chances are good that Google's involved.
I don't know what you can do about browsers besides use Firefox.
But as far as other stuff, I hope people will give distributed p2p possibilities some consideration in terms of usage or development.
For example YaCy works pretty well as a p2p search engine. There are some others that I haven't tried.
Back to the browser stuff. The problem is the browser has a full operating system in it at this point. There are too many APIs to compete.
What could make competing browsers viable might be something like the following. Imagine a web browser that does not support JavaScript. Instead it emphasize fast rendering, has a state of the art web assembly implementation, and some kind of ABI/API for things like UI, UDP, etc. such as OpenGL (or a simpler UI system). It only allows a subset of CSS and HTML, maybe only Flexbox or something. It it could be just restricted to old-fashioned HTML rendering. But anyway it won't be able to have the scope of Firefox and Chrome.
I guess the biggest problem is if you don't support the whole ginourmous HTML5 featureset (starting with JavaScript) then most websites will not work at all. They either will not load or will be totally scrambled.
Maybe some kind of p2p content-centric web could become popular and have it's own streamlined and simplified browser.
Or maybe there could be a new browser tailored for augmented reality that could become popular and compete with Chrome.
AdWords and other Google platforms have more reach than that, even Microsoft serves up Adsense ads on MSN. Analytics is so heavily tied to AdWords, it's practically impossible to run an effective campaign without it. I'm more concerned about the advertising market Google has a strangle on. Analytics is everywhere, they have so much behavioral data that everyone pales in comparison, and no one can give as much insight into the ad market.
Im surprised facebook was an afterthought for you. I immediately think of facebook whenever i think of bad things involving the internet. Google doesn't even really cross my mind, it's just the most prominent internet thing so of course it's bad in some ways, that's just entropy.
Has this course of action ever actually worked? I can't say US telecoms are a great example of competition. I'm not anti-regulation but it seems like simply enforcing open standards might be more effective.
Just having dominant marketshare, especially in the presence of easily-accessible competitors (e.g. Safari, Mozilla, Opera, etc.), is definitively not a monopoly.
Antitrust law is, I suspect, hopelessly outdated... both the laws and the understanding of monopolies/trusts that are baked into them.
These laws were based on 19th-century competition. The problems att were price fixing, predatory pricing (eg price low to kill competition then raise prices), supply chain bottlenecking (how you gonna sell your ore without my trains) ... industrial era trust stuff.
The precedents and laws are hair-splitting and specific. It's just not the kind of system that can "think" high level and apply abstract principles to totally new problems.
Google & Facebook mostly have no prices to fix. The ad markets where they make their money are competitive bid-based, ostensibly the opposite of a "monopolistic pricing" structure.
The economic/theory just doesn't match the pratices anymore. For example: Facebooks' revenue.
Imagine that tomorrow morning BMW's revenues are cut in half. BMW would need to produce fewer cars. Cars cost X to produce. Cut X in half, and you can expect half the volume.
What would happen if we did the same to FB. My guess is that they'd still make the same FB. If you take path dependency^ out of the mix (that it's hard to fire people and adjust downward), It's scary to think how big a company is required to make FB. Doesn't seem like a stretch to speculate that it can be done on a $5-$10bn budget... 1/10th of their current revenue. After all, Facebook was Facebook on that budget not long ago.
^By path dependency I mean imagine that FB's revenue had just never gotten to $80bn in the first place, the sahare price had never gotten so high. Etc.
IDK what exactly that implies about what antitrust laws should be, but it does mean that the theoretical foundation for the current ruleset is totally off. The way monopolistic power conerts to money in 2019 is fundamentally different from 1891... I mean genuinely fundamental, I'm not using it as a superlative. The definition of monopoly, benefits of owning one, the reasons why they're bad (or not).
> Facebook was Facebook on that budget not long ago.
Facebook was Facebook, but it wasn't Facebook+Whatsapp+Instagram, and "mergers and acquisitions that substantially reduce market competition" have been impermissible under the US anti-trust law for over 100 years, since the Clayton Act, and I'm not sure you need more than that.
Breaking up a monopoly requires that said monopoly be bad for society, and it's adverse effects can't be fixed via markets due to reasons like size and reach.
Monopoly in its own is neither good nor bad.
Facebook has a monopoly in social network. Is that bad? What is the effect of the monopoly? Is Facebook's monopoly having an adverse effect, or is the adverse effect inherent in the way social networks work (and breaking the monopoly won't help).
Simply being a monopoly is an unreasonable reason to break it up.
I installed Firefox as my daily driver last year and have been completely happy with it. Great dev tools, good performance, and I agree with Mozilla's stance on privacy. All wins for me. I'll still occasionally open up Chrome for dev purposes -- but for the sake of browser diversity and maintaining an open internet, I encourage all my friends to give Firefox a try.
Just wanted to add a +1. I use FF with strict content blocking enabled which means that things like YouTube videos and captchas are often randomly missing from pages, as are images hotlinked from third-party servers. I see this as a feature rather than a bug and it's easily temporarily disabled if it causes an issue.
Of course, I use uBlock Origin as well.
Performance-wise I have no complaints and the sync across devices works just as well as it does in Chrome.
What's the steelman argument for Google withholding Widevine from Samuel Maddock? Electron packaging with Widevine is a thing so this seems unusual. If you are Google and you're the good guy, why are you doing this?
With that decision they aimed a very big gun straight at their foot and pulled the trigger. They proved:
1. That they are in a monopoly-like position where they have the power to decide over other web tech projects
2. That they have a very hostile process, not getting properly back to the developer for months. That alone is sabotaging of other projects.
3. That they make the wrong decision, seemingly only protecting their own position, without providing a proper reasoning.
Hear that? That was the antitrust investigator laughing. You can do that if it's about some random tech. You can't do that if the tech is linked to a browser controlling how 60% of internet users access the web, and worse, getting full access to popular stuff/success qualifying content like Netflix for all browser. They wanted that monopoly position when they pushed for DRM, now they have to handle it. Big mistake.
The steelman is that Widevine is a DRM platform; to tell the difference between a browser and a ripper application it needs a lot of knowledge about the context in which it's meant to run, and how to tell the difference between a 'real' Chrome that follows the licensing rules and a fork of Chrome that doesn't. It should have been obvious to Maddock that he wouldn't be allowed to do this: I'm not sure why it's come up as an issue as a result.
To enable video playback with this new restriction, castLabs has created a fork that has implemented the necessary changes to enable Widevine to be played in an Electron application if one has obtained the necessary licenses from widevine.
So there's a fork of Electron that enables you to embed Widevine, if and only if you have the necessary licenses (otherwise presumably your Electron fork would be detected as a stream ripper).
Thus I'm not sure you're right about that. At any rate, if Electron became a back door to extract content, it'd be remotely detected and disabled. That's the entire point of the Widevine system.
As for "the good guy", gah, please, are we all 10 years old here? Content licensing and copyright enforcement is not a good vs evil fight. Some content producers choose to upload their video as WebM files to free hosting providers and let anyone who wants to watch them. Others stick it on YouTube and ask YT to monetize (means, no ad blocking). Still others want viewers to pay for the content (means, no content ripping). All these are valid economic models that are widely used, and Google obviously wants to support them because otherwise the answer is not "no DRM", it's "no in-browser Netflix".
My problem with Chrome extends to Google's general stewardship of the web, including search.
I wish to qualify my complaint by acknowledging that Google have done tonnes of brilliant stuff, Chrome included. However, one can be over-awed by the brilliance and not see what is being missed.
A few years ago HTML5 came along with better elements than the humble div to describe content in a page. These new elements, e.g. section, aside, article, main, header, footer and nav, are what web pages should be written with. But Google are okay not really caring about HTML elements. They can sift through tag soup for search and therefore how well a page is written is of no consequence for them.
Chrome does support the new elements absolutely fine but the dev tools that we use and the things like Lighthouse are about metrics that matter to Google and don't concern quality HTML. This enforces a cargo cult mentality and we have 99% of the web bloated by markup that is quite hard to write and to debug. If Lighthouse audit reminded you that the div element was 'element of last resort' according to the spec and knocked a few percentage points off your score for accessibility if your page only used divs then that would encourage people to write decent HTML using the full element vocabulary.
The real problem is that regardless how much we trust Google and Chrome nobody can make guarantees about future government or corporate politics so it should be really important to us to keep the browser market competitive.
Firefox made a lot of strategic error mostly because they were arrogant. Not implementing the Filesystem API is one of many. The world will simply move on without you. It’s very unfortunate how bad decisions screwed up the web.
It's hard to believe what a behemoth Chrome has become when it was only announced in 2008. What makes this even more amazing is it did this when IE/Edge ships as standard on Windows (which seems to be ~80% marketshare) and Safari ships as standard on OSX/iOS. It wasn't until Android 4.1 (2012) that Chrome even shipped on Android.
Chrome did several things really well out of the gate:
- Auto update. Words can't adequately describe just how freeing and refreshing this was (and is). Doesn't FF STILL ask you when you open it to install an update? In 2019? Really? For non-technical people, auto update is what you want. For technical people, it's also what you want.
- The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is beyond me.
- N-Gram completion of searches in the Omnibar
- This was a big one: while tabs existed before Chrome, Chrome was the first major browser to have one process per tab to isolate crashes and performance issues. This was huge at the time.
- Javascript performance initially was night and day between Chrome and everyone else.
- Chrome was standards compliant.
- Chrome ran across multiple platforms
- (This came later) Chrome Sync is hugely convenient.
- (Also later) I'm not sure when this one started exactly but Chrome took a fairly aggressive stance against ISP DNS hijacking.
Where once MS leveraged their desktop OS dominance to kill Netscape, the fact that Chrome essentially forced MS to kill Edge in favour of rebranding Chrome is... astounding. This also goes to show just how problematic antitrust application is in tech because its amazing how quickly market dominance can disappear or cease to be relevant.
I find it laughable that some here and elsewhere attribute Chrome's rise to dark patterns or they throw around terms like "antitrust" without really knowing what that means (seriously, look deeper into Standard Oil) when there were and are a ton of good reasons to use Chrome that other vendors have been unable or unwilling to replicate.
Just take cross-platform as one. This made Safari and Edge a nonstarter for me from day one (despite Safari's brief venture into Windows support).
All this alarmist Butwhatifism about alleged market dominance is (IMHO) not only unhelpful, it's counterproductive. It's the boy who cried wolf. It makes people numb.
> - The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is beyond me.
Privacy. Google doesn't worry about privacy, of course, but firefox tries to avoid sending all the URLs you ever type to google or your alternate search suggestion provider.
Regarding your first 2 points, it sounds like you haven't used firefox in a long time...
1. Firefox does automatically download and apply updates like chrome does (at least on Windows), and has for some time.
It notifies you when update is downloaded and applied (I think it's just a notification badge on the hamburger menu), but user interaction is not required... the update would automatically get applied the next time the user happens to restart the browser, just like chrome.
2. Firefox has the equivalent of Chrome's omnibar for some time now... you can still add the second search box via the customize screen, but it's optional and is no longer the default...
Chrome was and unbelievably still is the most developer friendly. Our Opera extension has been languishing for 7 months for approval or a response to our emails (we gave up) and snooty FireFox put us through the ringer to get our extension (they call it an add-on) approved and more than 2 months. Chrome is amazing for developers. Maybe unless you are an adblocker. That might be the opportunity for MS Edge Chromium.
Great time for Microsoft to open source its Edge engine. It sure seems like it works great and has no Google related problems so it can form base for future foss adventures.
Considering Edge is just an evolved Trident engine, open sourcing it would probably be very difficult. A 24-year-old proprietary software project may have commercially licensed parts inside it that aren't subject to open sourcing; MS has certainly made such deals in the past like the ZIP support in Windows Explorer being licensed from a third party.
I really don't like how browser vendors have become extension gatekeepers, strongly discouraging any integration they disapprove of. I like what Gab has done with the Dissenter Browser (fork of Brave) after being removed from the Google/Firefox stores.
as a software dev, not having to deal with other browsers is a blessing. countless hours wasted on debugging various browsers gets massively reduced.
second point, moving the conversation from "<browser x> hasn't caught up" to "everyone's caught up" helps the web focus on technologies more so than before. discussions should now concentrate almost exclusively around the next web technologies, no more competition regarding web engines, more competition regarding web technologies. clear win imo.
as a biz dev, it's a bit saddening to see a lot of browser competitors go down the drain. but this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?
As a software dev you probably don't remember, or haven't lived the days of Internet Explorer. Diversity and browser standards is what made the web a good platform to develop for.
Just to give a recent example, if Google would dictate what gets implemented, instead of WebAssembly, the standard, you would have gotten PNaCl.
> this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?
I fail to see how the creation of a monopoly can be a win for business. For Google's business, for sure.
The problem is if Chrome finally wins it all (we're almost there) and at some point they decide to remove a functionality that we all love, or they stop improving as there is no competition, or they decide to make you pay a little fee for developing a website with an extra functionality, or they decide that Chrome does not run on Mac anymore....
The problem with monopolies is that they control all the power, for the good or the bad decisions, and without competition they are not forced to look for the costumers benefit...
>not having to deal with other browsers is a blessing.
So you just ignore the 30 percent of the market that isn't Chrome? Internet Explorer had 70+ percent of the market share until 2010. Was it good for consumers and the internet as a whole for devs to ignore non-IE browsers in 2009?
Agreed. As a web developer, I want browsers to adhere to the same specs and I want them evergreen. I do not want to deal with browser inconsistencies. Catering to different browsers quirks takes a lot of joy out of the work.
masswerk|6 years ago
[1] https://www.masswerk.at/icss/
dTal|6 years ago
masswerk|6 years ago
Thanks to everyone who reported their experiences and helped to track down the issue!
On a more general level, the argument about all the eggs and a single basket still stands. (Knowing why a particular basket fails doesn't help the eggs.)
masswerk|6 years ago
(And for a description of Computer Space, see https://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/02.html)
shawabawa3|6 years ago
inflatableDodo|6 years ago
milesokeefe|6 years ago
N3cr0ph4g1st|6 years ago
bad_user|6 years ago
However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important.
Both Opera and Microsoft's Edge are now powered by Chromium. Chromium is a project controlled by Google. Its redeeming quality, in terms of its open source nature, is the ability to fork, however competitors such as Microsoft proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser.
At this point the only remaining alternatives are Firefox and Safari.
I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.
dalbasal|6 years ago
They did make a good browser. However, their market share is not down to better browser or "some advertising." They use their other assets (search, youtube, android, docs..) to make chrome the "default" option.
It's a dominance breeds dominance cycle... a hallmark of modern monopoly.
Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good browser. It is good. But, I don't think it could have been that kind of wipeout without leveraging google's greater web dominance.
There was a time when IE was a good browser and the default one. They dominated. A few years later, Mozilla had the better browser. Firefox slowly climbed to the middle, by being very good. They never got to 50% of the market.
IMO, during the IE6_v_FF days the feature and quality gap between browsers was at its highest. Much bigger than Chrome_v_FF ever was. Still Chrome today is far more dominant than FF or anything ever was... except IE in its monopoly day.
dTal|6 years ago
Where "did some marketing" equals "unethically abused monopoly position to aggressively push through dark patterns", sure. I think I can still blame them for that.
jjeaff|6 years ago
akerro|6 years ago
noname120|6 years ago
This is incorrect. They absolutely can as demonstrated by the fact that former Edge works great, has better hardware acceleration than Chrome, and consumes less power.
However, they are not willing to anymore, which is a huge concern for future innovations in that domain.
reitanqild|6 years ago
They spammed it massively as in
- adding it to other popular downloads
- ads everywhere on their properties, including on the front page where no one else has ever been allowed to buy ad spots
- lies: would shamelessly present itself as a better browser not just for users of old IE versions but also for users of Firefox and probably Opera as well.
josteink|6 years ago
And paid lots of third party software vendors to bundle it as a drive-by installation 100% malware style.
There’s a good reason many of my technically inclined friends still today don’t trust Chrome.
It’s malware after all.
lunchables|6 years ago
Agreed. Firefox is really fast, and I love it. Been using it for a couple years now. But even if Chrome was demonstrably, objectively faster, I would still use Firefox.
skybrian|6 years ago
By doing this, Microsoft gets compatibility with the world's websites on day one, and they can take it from there. It's a smart move that many people seem to be misinterpreting.
adito|6 years ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/btz1lc/youtube_mat...
duiker101|6 years ago
gingabriska|6 years ago
In initial days of chrome, it wasn't that better. It grew in popularity because of the bundle model of advertising they employed which was initially used to distribute spyware and the browser started growing.
All the nice things came later.
holtalanm|6 years ago
also, it regularly ran my cpu at max throttle when doing anything video-related within the browser (watching netflix, on a video chat, etc), while chrome is much more cpu-friendly with those things (don't know why that is).
I tried Opera, as well, and ran it as my main browser for months (almost a year, actually), but there is a wierd bug in windows related to the browser bar expanding when the machine wakes up from sleep, where the only way to fix it is to restart the browser entirely.
jakeogh|6 years ago
macspoofing|6 years ago
Are they though?
Adherence to standards is very good across the board. It isn't like it was in the 90s when standards were seen as mere guidelines and suggestions.
Safari is going strong. FF is going to be around but they are certainly struggling - and it's their fault. They have had the uncanny ability to make the wrong decision every time. They are hamstrung by their legacy architecture that they are just starting to break out of. Their side projects (Firefox OS, Pocket, Reality) were/are a total waste of time. And of course, they promoted and then fired Eich over nothing - which leads one to wonder what kind of a circus they run internally.
Microsoft is interesting and for now they are using a packaged version of Chromium - but I could see them do a hard-fork in the same way that Google forked WebKit because at some point a trillion-dollar company won't want to be tied to another trillion-dollar company's roadmap.
dageshi|6 years ago
writepub|6 years ago
99.9% of browser users don't care or don't even know if their browser is open source - what they want is convenience and ease of use. I hope Mozilla prioritizes the ones that actually matter - the users, over whatever philosophy it claims to live by, that often times isn't rooted in customer centricity.
ishan1121|6 years ago
dTal|6 years ago
ilaksh|6 years ago
But as far as other stuff, I hope people will give distributed p2p possibilities some consideration in terms of usage or development.
For example YaCy works pretty well as a p2p search engine. There are some others that I haven't tried.
Back to the browser stuff. The problem is the browser has a full operating system in it at this point. There are too many APIs to compete.
What could make competing browsers viable might be something like the following. Imagine a web browser that does not support JavaScript. Instead it emphasize fast rendering, has a state of the art web assembly implementation, and some kind of ABI/API for things like UI, UDP, etc. such as OpenGL (or a simpler UI system). It only allows a subset of CSS and HTML, maybe only Flexbox or something. It it could be just restricted to old-fashioned HTML rendering. But anyway it won't be able to have the scope of Firefox and Chrome.
I guess the biggest problem is if you don't support the whole ginourmous HTML5 featureset (starting with JavaScript) then most websites will not work at all. They either will not load or will be totally scrambled.
Maybe some kind of p2p content-centric web could become popular and have it's own streamlined and simplified browser.
Or maybe there could be a new browser tailored for augmented reality that could become popular and compete with Chrome.
partiallypro|6 years ago
WilliamEdward|6 years ago
malms|6 years ago
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unknown|6 years ago
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jayd16|6 years ago
bduerst|6 years ago
dalbasal|6 years ago
These laws were based on 19th-century competition. The problems att were price fixing, predatory pricing (eg price low to kill competition then raise prices), supply chain bottlenecking (how you gonna sell your ore without my trains) ... industrial era trust stuff.
The precedents and laws are hair-splitting and specific. It's just not the kind of system that can "think" high level and apply abstract principles to totally new problems.
Google & Facebook mostly have no prices to fix. The ad markets where they make their money are competitive bid-based, ostensibly the opposite of a "monopolistic pricing" structure.
The economic/theory just doesn't match the pratices anymore. For example: Facebooks' revenue.
Imagine that tomorrow morning BMW's revenues are cut in half. BMW would need to produce fewer cars. Cars cost X to produce. Cut X in half, and you can expect half the volume.
What would happen if we did the same to FB. My guess is that they'd still make the same FB. If you take path dependency^ out of the mix (that it's hard to fire people and adjust downward), It's scary to think how big a company is required to make FB. Doesn't seem like a stretch to speculate that it can be done on a $5-$10bn budget... 1/10th of their current revenue. After all, Facebook was Facebook on that budget not long ago.
^By path dependency I mean imagine that FB's revenue had just never gotten to $80bn in the first place, the sahare price had never gotten so high. Etc.
IDK what exactly that implies about what antitrust laws should be, but it does mean that the theoretical foundation for the current ruleset is totally off. The way monopolistic power conerts to money in 2019 is fundamentally different from 1891... I mean genuinely fundamental, I'm not using it as a superlative. The definition of monopoly, benefits of owning one, the reasons why they're bad (or not).
icebraining|6 years ago
Facebook was Facebook, but it wasn't Facebook+Whatsapp+Instagram, and "mergers and acquisitions that substantially reduce market competition" have been impermissible under the US anti-trust law for over 100 years, since the Clayton Act, and I'm not sure you need more than that.
chii|6 years ago
Monopoly in its own is neither good nor bad.
Facebook has a monopoly in social network. Is that bad? What is the effect of the monopoly? Is Facebook's monopoly having an adverse effect, or is the adverse effect inherent in the way social networks work (and breaking the monopoly won't help).
Simply being a monopoly is an unreasonable reason to break it up.
lprd|6 years ago
SmellyGeekBoy|6 years ago
Of course, I use uBlock Origin as well.
Performance-wise I have no complaints and the sync across devices works just as well as it does in Chrome.
huy-nguyen|6 years ago
scarejunba|6 years ago
onli|6 years ago
1. That they are in a monopoly-like position where they have the power to decide over other web tech projects
2. That they have a very hostile process, not getting properly back to the developer for months. That alone is sabotaging of other projects.
3. That they make the wrong decision, seemingly only protecting their own position, without providing a proper reasoning.
Hear that? That was the antitrust investigator laughing. You can do that if it's about some random tech. You can't do that if the tech is linked to a browser controlling how 60% of internet users access the web, and worse, getting full access to popular stuff/success qualifying content like Netflix for all browser. They wanted that monopoly position when they pushed for DRM, now they have to handle it. Big mistake.
repolfx|6 years ago
As for Electron, are you sure? I found this page:
https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/testing-widevine-cdm
It says:
To enable video playback with this new restriction, castLabs has created a fork that has implemented the necessary changes to enable Widevine to be played in an Electron application if one has obtained the necessary licenses from widevine.
So there's a fork of Electron that enables you to embed Widevine, if and only if you have the necessary licenses (otherwise presumably your Electron fork would be detected as a stream ripper).
Thus I'm not sure you're right about that. At any rate, if Electron became a back door to extract content, it'd be remotely detected and disabled. That's the entire point of the Widevine system.
As for "the good guy", gah, please, are we all 10 years old here? Content licensing and copyright enforcement is not a good vs evil fight. Some content producers choose to upload their video as WebM files to free hosting providers and let anyone who wants to watch them. Others stick it on YouTube and ask YT to monetize (means, no ad blocking). Still others want viewers to pay for the content (means, no content ripping). All these are valid economic models that are widely used, and Google obviously wants to support them because otherwise the answer is not "no DRM", it's "no in-browser Netflix".
martin_a|6 years ago
What if you aren't actually the good guy?
Theodores|6 years ago
I wish to qualify my complaint by acknowledging that Google have done tonnes of brilliant stuff, Chrome included. However, one can be over-awed by the brilliance and not see what is being missed.
A few years ago HTML5 came along with better elements than the humble div to describe content in a page. These new elements, e.g. section, aside, article, main, header, footer and nav, are what web pages should be written with. But Google are okay not really caring about HTML elements. They can sift through tag soup for search and therefore how well a page is written is of no consequence for them.
Chrome does support the new elements absolutely fine but the dev tools that we use and the things like Lighthouse are about metrics that matter to Google and don't concern quality HTML. This enforces a cargo cult mentality and we have 99% of the web bloated by markup that is quite hard to write and to debug. If Lighthouse audit reminded you that the div element was 'element of last resort' according to the spec and knocked a few percentage points off your score for accessibility if your page only used divs then that would encourage people to write decent HTML using the full element vocabulary.
b-3-n|6 years ago
mothsonasloth|6 years ago
woranl|6 years ago
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-in-f...
cletus|6 years ago
Chrome did several things really well out of the gate:
- Auto update. Words can't adequately describe just how freeing and refreshing this was (and is). Doesn't FF STILL ask you when you open it to install an update? In 2019? Really? For non-technical people, auto update is what you want. For technical people, it's also what you want.
- The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is beyond me.
- N-Gram completion of searches in the Omnibar
- This was a big one: while tabs existed before Chrome, Chrome was the first major browser to have one process per tab to isolate crashes and performance issues. This was huge at the time.
- Javascript performance initially was night and day between Chrome and everyone else.
- Chrome was standards compliant.
- Chrome ran across multiple platforms
- (This came later) Chrome Sync is hugely convenient.
- (Also later) I'm not sure when this one started exactly but Chrome took a fairly aggressive stance against ISP DNS hijacking.
Where once MS leveraged their desktop OS dominance to kill Netscape, the fact that Chrome essentially forced MS to kill Edge in favour of rebranding Chrome is... astounding. This also goes to show just how problematic antitrust application is in tech because its amazing how quickly market dominance can disappear or cease to be relevant.
I find it laughable that some here and elsewhere attribute Chrome's rise to dark patterns or they throw around terms like "antitrust" without really knowing what that means (seriously, look deeper into Standard Oil) when there were and are a ton of good reasons to use Chrome that other vendors have been unable or unwilling to replicate.
Just take cross-platform as one. This made Safari and Edge a nonstarter for me from day one (despite Safari's brief venture into Windows support).
All this alarmist Butwhatifism about alleged market dominance is (IMHO) not only unhelpful, it's counterproductive. It's the boy who cried wolf. It makes people numb.
javagram|6 years ago
Privacy. Google doesn't worry about privacy, of course, but firefox tries to avoid sending all the URLs you ever type to google or your alternate search suggestion provider.
bwat49|6 years ago
1. Firefox does automatically download and apply updates like chrome does (at least on Windows), and has for some time.
It notifies you when update is downloaded and applied (I think it's just a notification badge on the hamburger menu), but user interaction is not required... the update would automatically get applied the next time the user happens to restart the browser, just like chrome.
2. Firefox has the equivalent of Chrome's omnibar for some time now... you can still add the second search box via the customize screen, but it's optional and is no longer the default...
notlukesky|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
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majkinetor|6 years ago
javagram|6 years ago
gfosco|6 years ago
stephenr|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
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kmlx|6 years ago
as a biz dev, it's a bit saddening to see a lot of browser competitors go down the drain. but this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?
bad_user|6 years ago
Just to give a recent example, if Google would dictate what gets implemented, instead of WebAssembly, the standard, you would have gotten PNaCl.
> this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?
I fail to see how the creation of a monopoly can be a win for business. For Google's business, for sure.
kuu|6 years ago
The problem with monopolies is that they control all the power, for the good or the bad decisions, and without competition they are not forced to look for the costumers benefit...
Causality1|6 years ago
So you just ignore the 30 percent of the market that isn't Chrome? Internet Explorer had 70+ percent of the market share until 2010. Was it good for consumers and the internet as a whole for devs to ignore non-IE browsers in 2009?
azangru|6 years ago