Google is clearly trying to shape the internet for themselves and that is way too much power. (Not that the other companies don't sometimes have ulterior motives, but the impact of those motives just happen to align with my privacy preferences)
I would like to counter that and say that diversity is better for the ecosystem than any gain you might find in using Chrome. Use Brave, Firefox… any other of the new browsers… anything really that brings more choice and less power to Google. It’s about balance.
Nobody wants to go back to IE6 - part 2.
Indeed. The IE dominance and then stagnation set back web development for half a decade at least.
That's a good thing. People figured out how to do more with less, and make it compatible cross-browser too.
I use Chrome because it's fast and it gets out of my way. Firefox on the other hand is slower (not slow, but slower than Chrome) and shows ads every now and then. Other browsers are Blink-based so they are as fast as Chrome but there are concerns about ads too (think Brave, Opera, etc).
So maybe Firefox should get their act together? Why are you blaming users? Is it our fault that things are this way? We do what we can with the tools we have.
And some "farther from the tree" variants like Vivaldi are not as shady as, say, Opera.
I agree with the parent comment's observation that it's no good blaming users; other browsers need to make a compelling case. There's a saying in YC lore that a new app has to be an order of magnitude better for people to switch, but I think other browsers are approximately as good as chrome (but not 10x better).
The greatest concern for me is privacy; I presume the org who makes the browser sees a list of every action I do on the internet, so I have to be able to 1. know who they are and 2. trust them (or, distrust them less than I do Google).
There's probably also some 'safety in numbers' heuristic to browser choice too.
Vivaldi is awful. They rewrote the UI in javascript and it's slow and buggy.
At least on my computers I don't see any performance difference between Firefox and Chrome, at work I have to use both, and right now I have 3 Chrome windows and 2 Firefox ones open, all of them with multiple (like dozens) of tabs, no noticeable difference.
Last month, for example:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-stops...
I'm not defending the ads in Firefox, it's just that when it comes to advertising we're really in a place of choosing the lesser of evils.
You have to go into about:config and set browser.vpn_promo.enabled to false to disable them. No way to turn them off for regular users.
Where? I don't see ads absolutely anywhere.
>they can hamstring ad blockers with things like Manifest V3
I've been hearing about this for years and it still hasn't happened. When the change occurs, if I begin seeing ads, I will abandon Chrome. But until then I will keep using it.
A small thing that annoys me: ctrl/cmd + click on bookmark doesn't behave like the same click on a web page (opening in the background). There are changes that can be made to about:config, but it's a mess, behaviour is different between a bookmark and bookmark folders, sometimes it switches you to the new tab, etc.
I've also noticed that JS performance isn't as good on some sites. For example, the hash step on VirusTotal takes way longer for larger files on Firefox than it does on Chrome.
The messy profile switch is also annoying, especially when they've supported the feature for years. And no, containers are not a replacement for profiles.
So I agree that Firefox needs to improve. The average user won't use it just because it supports the "open web"... do they even know what that means?
I don't use it as my primary browser and it I use it at an absolute minimum, but more and more I see popups of being unsupported in Firefox or needing a critical plugin for a workflow at work.
I do worry that we are seeing a repeat of that situation, a bit different but the same idea. A browser having too much control and shaping things their way.
The obvious suggestion here is to use a Chromium-based browser that is not Google Chrome. Like Brave.
* Afaik they aren't really staffed up to maintain a fork so much as tweak settings and repackage
Not incredibly relevant, I suggested to use a different browser. If you don't like my suggestion, input your own valid replacement to Google's Chrome. Talk about being a contrarian.
You also seem to mistakenly believe that Brave is a child of Google Chrome. Brave is a child to Chromium, and Google Chrome is a child to Chromium. This article states that the Topics API is being added to Google Chrome. I made my suggestion on the assumption that they would have said that Google added the Topics API to Chromium if they added it to Chromium. If the article worded this poorly and they actually meant to say that Google has sunk this in to upstream Chromium, then I cheekily alter my suggestion to W3m or Lynx.
Suggesting Lynx as an alternative clarifies that your remarks are unserious, or you are out of touch with reality --- charitably I will assume the former.
I, for one, like Google moves and like Chrome. I think that web will be better with a single engine. Safari is alternative and I hate it because it always breaks complex layouts and requires additional work.
Linux is a single server OS and it's good.
IE was bad because Microsoft is bad.
For me making sites that work on other engines is the job!
I'm gonna use Chrome fork or previous version. Chromium is open source
Chrome was targeted at developers from the outset. The comic explains "why Chrome" in a way that makes very little sense to a lay person but shows why Chrome is far better than what developers were developing against up until that point. Google sold Chrome on its technical merits, and technical people could easily sell it to friends and family because everyone already used Google and liked it. They had a compelling story for what was wrong with existing browsers and they had strong name recognition.
I think the problem with efforts to compete with Chrome so far is that they miss both these things. I'm a privacy fan myself, but it's pretty clear that privacy alone isn't enough of a selling point the way "a browser that works like an operating system" was. There has to be something else to set the browser apart. And then once you have that distinguishing feature to appeal to the technical crowd, you need some way to make it easy to recommend the friends and family. That's especially difficult in today's browser environment.