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Comment by slivanes | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to figure out which browser is the biggest cancer for the WWW.

On the one hand, you have Safari whom has a parent company that isn't interested in making it have useful feature parity with the others because it'll then allow escape from their gravy train app store (fully working PWA's, non-compete with rendering engines in iOS). Their lack of keeping up is starting to look a bit like IE6 days.

And on the other, you have Chrome whom has a parent company that claims it wants to improve privacy (FLoC), but to me it is more of a "pulling the ladder up on everyone else" because they have so many other methods to track you (DNS, GA, Android, etc.) that limiting everyone would be disingenuous. Pushing AMP is another example of bullying behavior.

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I think Safari, flaws and all, is pretty much the only browser that has any weight against Chrome.

Tell your manager that you want the web site to support Firefox or Brave or something else, and they'll tell you it's a waste of time.

Tell them that the web site won't work on their MacBook, and it's a four-alarm fire.

In a lot of ways, I wish Safari would deviate even more from Google's "standards" just so that maybe it would pull Big G back to the center some how.

Isn't Brave essentially a Chromium skin?

No. They provide a lot of extras and privacy protections. It's actually a pretty good browser, although I prefer Firefox with my favorite 3 or 4 plugins. I use Brave sometimes just to see where it's at and the occasional site that can't be used with Firefox (even with user agent swapping).

Yes, it is, regardless of what it adds on top.

I use Brave so I can “use Chrome” without google.

Microsoft Edge is gaining some serious ground and is closing in on Safari [0]. Their aggressive conversion tactics seem to be paying off.

The problem with Safari is that they either simply haven't, and, in some cases, even flat out refuse to implement certain standards that they themselves have had a hand in establishing. And then most of what is available comes half-arsed, undocumented, and is not supported/iterated upon.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

iPad Safari should count as desktop Safari in those statistics. They are basically the same since last year.

Edge is now another Chrome-clone.

Just because Google adds something to Chrome doesn't make it a standard.

That is a fact (one that Google is trying very hard to make people forget [0]).

I was actually referring to the proper global standards that are set forth by the W3C [1] and WHATWG organisations (now merged... I think). Both of which all major browser vendors are registered and actively contributing members of.

[0] https://web.dev/

[1] https://www.w3.org/

[2] https://whatwg.org/

> I think Safari, flaws and all, is pretty much the only browser that has any weight against Chrome.

This is a terrible argument. That an inferior, proprietary, broken browser made by a company trying to cripple the web to protect their lucrative walled garden should be more popular in order to prevent Google from having more market share just for reasons?

Chrome became popular and is popular because it works. It's cross-platform, it implements all the newest standards, it's just a good product.

It's your opinion that Safari is inferior and broken. IMO desktop Safari is better on UI, privacy, and features like autofilling SMS 2FA codes. It's "behind" on APIs like WebUSB or Idle Detection, and that's another plus: I don't want that stuff.

> Chrome became popular and is popular because it works.

Google promotes Chrome by leveraging the most valuable real estate on the web: the google.com homepage, and GMail popups. This ad space is unavailable to everyone else. They also bundled Chrome with Adobe Flash installers.

I agree Chrome is a good product, but Google uses their influence in search and email to gain Chrome market share. That's fine, it's their prerogative, but it means Chrome's rise is not pure organic growth based on its technical merit.

It's more reality than an argument, apple has a lot of high end users that most companies don't want to alienate whereas there is much less worry about breaking things for lower market share browsers like Firefox, etc.

an inferior, proprietary, broken browser made by a company trying to cripple the web to protect their lucrative walled garden

Wait... are you talking about Apple and Safari? Sounds like a description of Google and Chrome.

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