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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

I feel like people don't remember how terrible IE 6 was for so long.

You can criticize Google for any number of things, but they certainly want browsers to be as good and as capable as possible.

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The issue is not a technical one. It's politics...

I don't really think people are criticizing google for not wanting browsers to be capable when they say that chrome is the new IE

I agree, and that's why I think it's not the new IE.

Like I said, it is very fair to criticize google and fear the monopoly of Chrome, but it won't be like the monopoly of IE.

I don't know what other people think, but IE to me is synonymous with a browser that was good, but then stopped improving in any meaningful way for years. The first version of Chrome showed that there was still immense worthwhile improvements that could be made in browsers. If anything, the rate of improvements to Chrome is accelerating, even after they established marketshare dominance.

When Chrome came out I had been using Netscape -> Mozilla -> Firefox for about 10 years. Then Chrome seemed to blow it out of the water in terms of speed improvements. I switched virtually over night.

So true. The introduction of Chrome was nearly as big as the jump from MapQuest to Google Maps. The potential for a vastly better experience had been there for a long time, but no one was taking advantage of it.

Wasn’t Chrome also the start of browsers keeping each tab in its own process? I remember the Chrome “comic” mentioning this.

I remember when IE got tabs, a crash would bring down the whole instance. After all, there’s no point segregating the tab from the chrome (no pun intended) when it was single “tab” only.

Possibly, but I'm not sure they did that at the begining. I remember sometimes a tab would crash with a little unhappy face with a squiggle mouth (or something like that) and all the tabs would go down like that. But then again the whole app didn't come crash and I could refresh the other tabs to get them back without losing everything I had open.

Agreed, but I feel like people also don't remember how good IE 6 was when it was new.

That's why there are no plugins on mobile Chrome?

The excess and non-obvious battery drain that can come from plugins is probably a large part of their reasoning. Fortunately, because of the openness of Chromium, you can install browsers like Kiwi browser that support extensions. Even Firefox only barely supports extensions right now on mobile.

Firefox has support for a lot of extensions but they removed most of the support now which is a shame. It allowed me to play YouTube on the background, a feature that make people actually pay YouTube premium music. I wonder if there's a similar extension for kiwi? Basically it just nerds to disable the page visibility and full-screen API + some tweaks

just install "New pipe" from f-droid, it really rocks. Allows you to play videos in background, download video or audio - practically everything. The only issue is that it sometimes breaks when youtube changes its protocol

No, New pipe can only play background videos on picture in picture which is very annoying. Is there a way to get true background playing on newpipe?

BTW you should take a look at YouTube Vanced.

> New pipe can only play background videos on picture in picture which is very annoying.

This is not the experience I have. Are you sure you're on the latest version?

Thanks I misused it. One actually has to touch the headphone icon which is not very accessible but it works!

That's after Fenix release... before that' there was plenty of supported plugins. It's only a matter of time when other plugins will support new UI. As for Chromium, I'm more than sure the battery issue is just a nice excuse to toss ad blockers out of the window.

Kiwi browser has backported them and brave browser is currently merging the kiwi browser changes. Only a matter of time before this get on the radar of Edge too

I used netscape whenever possible. That was most of the time, but there were plenty of ::sigh:: have to view this site in IE moments.

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