A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team | Hacker News Reader

A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team

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1,074 pointsluu585 comments

Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE, IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. On IE's case, MS probably stagnated it to prevent competition against its desktop Apps business and on Google's case it's going to be in the name of data collection and ad business.

Chrome is the new IE.

But yeah, that's what you get when you don't know history.

> Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE

It wasn't because they had poor feature adoption. It was because they'd tend to adopt features in a way that's incompatible with other browsers (of the top of my head, handling of localStorage in private browsing). It was a bit of a "fuck you" to devs since you often had to do browser detection for Safari (much like you used to have to do for IE) and have special branches or polyfills for Safari.

> What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web

Apple is just as guilty of this. They crippled and bastardised a bunch of features just to push for a more native adoption (depends on how cynical you are, but some say it's for more control over device usage patterns, and some say it's for longer battery life)

It's gotten better and more aligned with other browsers now, though. But alas, I know most are just chromium clones these days

Apple probably have similar motives to MS when it comes to crippling the browser and enforcing its own rendering engine in iOS and that is to protects its app market.

However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use its dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff.

With the IE situation, you couldn't just download Firefox and live happy thereafter because every website was made to work in IE and any other browser would simply fail to display the webpages properly either due to the way HTML/CSS is handled or due to some proprietary technology. Apple hasn't done that, maybe only because its tiny marketshare compared to the alternatives but that's how it is. Unfortunately, due to the marketshare of Google Chrome, they can pull an IE and there are signs of it.

The hate towards Safari comes from the Web devs who are angry that they can't send push notifications and have to pay 99$ to Apple to embed their webpage into a WebView to pass as an app.

There's no much hate towards Safari in its userbase, it's by far the most convenient Web browser in Apple's ecosystem, by far the most battery efficient and the performance is top notch too.

Completely different situation with the tragedy of IE.

It could also be argued that right now Google's domination of the web allows them to throw their weight around and introduce bad "standards" just so everything can be moved to the web, which again, they basically own.

For example the "standard" implementation of web push is straight up bad. I don't think websites should be able to throw popups asking users with enable notifications, because users are so used to accepting TOS agreements and cookie prompts that they just click "ok" and "accept" on everything, and now your grandma has gambling app ads in her notifications because she accepted notifications from some sketchy site she was linked to on Facebook.

Apple made the right move by requiring you to add a website to your home screen before it's allowed to send you push notifications.

I love how sites are now taking the mobile strategy of checking first and then showing a sugary popup explaining that they’re about to pop the native prompt for perms, and why. It brings me joy to click affirmative on those so I can permablock by clicking no on the native prompt.

> However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use its dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff.

Excuse me? We are talking about "App store" Apple here, right? The Apple that prevents any 3rd party browsers on their platform so devs have to support safari? The Apple that refused to support progressive web apps to push devs into their store?

The Apple which literally won't let users install software they don't approve of, Apple? That Apple?

That's the company you're picking as "didn't attempt to divide the web"? Ooof.

You've been drinking so much Kool-aid your tongue is purple.

We are talking about browsers actually. The grunge that web developers have against App Store is baseless because its what saved the open web so far.

Check out the linked article, the moment Chrome have its way into iOS, the web will die because Google will have IE level dominance. The web as we know it goes away, the browser becomes an AppStore where everything is optimised for data collection and ad serve. We already have an AppStore, let's keep having a WWW.

And about the anger towards the AppStore? Well, you should be able to overcome it by drinking some herbal tea.

>you couldn't just download Firefox ... Apple hasn't done that

Apple has banned any browser engine except Safari from iOS.

> However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use its dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff.

Of course they didn't, because they outright want to kill the web so all your content is locked into Apple reviewed and taxed apps. Why would they divide the web when their goal is to make sure it's not a viable platform for their newest devices?

> because every website was made to work in IE and any other browser would simply fail to display the webpages properly either due to the way HTML/CSS is handled or due to some proprietary technology.

Ah. I know of this, but I've never experienced it first hand.

This is more of a nuisanc for users than devs though, but I see what you meant now.

Maybe I am too young, but I vaguely remember using IE5.5/6 and it already slowly being slowly phased out. I also remember the struggles as it tried to stay relevant. I can't even remember a website that was made "for IE"; all I remember is sites saying IE is poorly supported and to download literally anything else lol

Safari doesn't feel battery efficient to me. If a web site has video ads, I can watch my battery drain to zero in real time. Orion does better since it doesn't play these ads, but it would be better if I could disable whatever video type is causing this behavior altogether.

> However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use it's dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff.

Flash would like a word with you.

IE was super strict on the standards it seemed. Can't remember the specifics anymore but it seemed something would work in CSS or JS on Chrome but not IE. Then I would look up & IE was correct but Chrome was adding features that made sense & made life easier.

When TypeScript came out the type support was what made me become a very early & passionate adopter even though it was very bleeding edge & a pain to use with other libraries. The cuts were worth it because they always saved much greater pain later. It was also an easier sell than something like Elm.

IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward."

Now, this is from the perspective of the web developer. I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective.

Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. The "new IE" hat still belongs to Safari.

> I'm curious what "its own vision" was

The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently, the websites were displayed correctly only on IE or only on other browsers. People put text that says "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6" at the bottom of the page or straight out blocked users from displaying the page in other browsers and encouraged them to download IE - just the same thing we have with Chrome today when anything that's using some advanced API.

IE was hated after the fact of cornering the whole marketshare and making the web developers build all the websites to work on IE only.

Initially, IE was very innovative browser too and they were the inventor of technologies like Ajax, introduced in IE5. Back in the pre-hate days, the web developers loved IE and it's innovative ways that let them to cool stuff.

Chrome being still innovative doesn't mean much. Once they make sure that websites are built to work in Chrome only, they can relax and stop spending money on it and increase profits and stock prices by rent seeking.

Also ActiveX, which brought a lot of "desktop only" capabilities to the web, at the cost of the ultimate lock-in.

We should probably be glad that Microsoft basically stopped all IE investment when the dot-com crash happened (IE6 came out 2001), if they had kept investing the internet might still be dominated by MS

As crazy as that sounds, IE had a better development team until IE6 basically killed off its competition. It was more stable than equivalent browsers, it had more features, I think it was even developed faster than competitors.

Which sounds a lot like Chrome, except closed source. Those considering how big and cumbersome browsers are... does open source that matter that much in the grand scheme of things? Just browser complexity is a HUGE moat, there are probably 5-10 organizations that can sustain leading edge browser development 10+ years.

The IE block model was better though, and everyone is using it today with box-sizing: border-box. I still maintain that the pragmatic and sensible thing to do was to just modify the standard – "best viewed in IE" was a self-inflicted wound.

Also remember the context: Netscape was just as gung-ho with standards as IE and everyone was kind of figuring out what did and didn't work on the fly. To just ossify a standard at some point just made no sense, and to keep bashing on IE for their better box model "because Micro$hit bad" made even less sense. Good standards respond to what's going on in reality.

> The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently

This was required for compatibility with Netscape. Developers coded for the Netscape box model when it was dominant, so Microsoft had to follow the same model to prevent the pages from breaking when viewed in Internet Explorer.

>IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward."

IE6 was the best for a long time, also it had

VML which it kept in place and didn't move on SVG for a looooonnnnnngggg time, because of course VML was integrated in office products as the vector markup format and probably because it was made in MS.

So they had a vision for a vector image markup, and that was what they did.

SMIL-like extensions to HTML, and the use of behaviors in css were also part of their "vision" https://www.jb51.net/shouce/dhtml/time2/time.html

visions, like ideas, are a dime a dozen - in a browser market it matters if your visions are standards because if not they break the web.

IE's visions were not standardized and not supported by other browsers, they tried to instead do an end run around standardization. Chrome is the new IE. Chrome removing JPEG XL seems a pretty good indicator of that.

Also Safari had advanced color profiles before the other browsers, Safari does better work on accessibility than the other browsers, if most web developers thinks Safari is the new IE and Chrome is great then I think they aren't paying more than superficial attention to things.

>Also Safari had advanced color profiles before the other browsers, Safari does better work on accessibility than the other browsers, if most web developers thinks Safari is the new IE and Chrome is great then I think they aren't paying more than superficial attention to things

Apple seem to be better than most at accessibility features and have been since day one. It's a shame that the best in business for accessibility is a private company.

IE6 had a lot of bugs (not different vision of standards, but bugs). A kind of bugs that looked like developers were lazy to cover all possible cases.

As an example, take "double margin bug" [1]. It cannot be explained by alternative standards.

I remember there were more bugs of this type, but can't google them quickly.

[1] https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time...

> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much.

Of the items in the link, only one is “adding functionality”.

The others are (1) not supporting an image file format and (2) removing functionality from extensions.

> IE was absolutely hated for not evolving

IE was also hated for activex along with a number of non-standard extensions added to support Microsoft use cases. See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ie-5-5-anger... for adding new html elements and a new system of dhtml behaviors as an example of syntax only supported by IE.

It might be surprising, but that is not an exhaustive list of what Chrome has been doing "recently".

Thanks for that link. Though I'm a bit confused by the date, wasn't IE6 already out by then?

> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it

They do? That's quite a claim. I work with a number of people who were simply told that installing chrome is part of setting up your computer and don't really have any opinion -- "chrome" is the word for looking at a web page and "chrome is just how computers work". At least for the {desk,lap}top, I think that's the vast majority.

Depends which of the two period: first it evolved a lot with custom features non available for competitors (that’s the phase Chrome is in). Then once everything was IE specific code and it achieved domination it stopped evolving. When people say Chrome is the new IE is to mean it’s on the same trajectory (IE early mid 00’s), not that it’s already at the IE6 in 2010 phase.

>I'm curious what "its own vision" was

Making Windows a requirement for the web. Things like ActiveX.

Perhaps the issue here is age? At the start IE was cutting edge, then MS didn't do anything useful with it for 10 years. Filters were certainly part of its own vision, AIR.

MS seemed to innovate most in breaking hacks that helped to work around their "quirks".

> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much

First time seeing it, I personally don't like how much power Google is getting with ownership of Chrome, and they already try to force direction of whole world into places that benefit them at cost of whole mankind (ie wasm, tracking everybody to hell, trying to fight adblocks).

Having 1 core browser and no competition is plain bad, Google wins and everybody else loses down the road. That's enough to get opinion and use Firefox + ublock origin. Getting a better version of Internet via that is a nice bonus.

Microsoft actually laid off most of their IE developers after IE6 if I recall correctly, they had no vision for the future, it was finished, they'd won (for a while)

I'm pretty sure they just moved them to new teams, since it was understood they had put their best on making IE win it would be insane to lay them off afterwards.

> IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward."

IE introduced DHTML and made designing webpages way easier than just using the DOM , IE also introduced AJAX. Sure it stagnated at some point but IE contributed a lot to the web.

> I'm curious what "its own vision" was

Well, back in the late 90s it was all about ActiveX and integration with other Windows components and applications in order to shove all other browsers out of the marketplace, gain dominance over the web, and further bolster the Windows hegemony by doing so.

So, as one trivial example, you could export a Word document as a web page, open it up in IE and it would look great. But then you'd open it up in Netscape and you're left wondering "WTF?" because it looked terrible and the images were horribly degraded - intentionally degraded, as it turned out.

You'd open up the page source to figure out what was going on and you'd see a bunch of ActiveX crap for the images that would only work in IE. And, IIRC, the images themselves were BMPs, rather than JPEG or GIF (can't remember if PNG was supported at this point in any browser, but it certainly wasn't by IE or Office apps). So the images would look high quality in IE (and have massive file sizes, because BMP), whereas Netscape and other browsers didn't support ActiveX or BMP so they were just displayed as low-quality (IIRC) GIFs with extremely low colour depth. They could have displayed high quality images if they'd used a more suitable format, like JPEG, but they deliberately chose the most crappy image format, so that photos would look terrible in anything other than IE and people would think IE was a better browser as a result.

Once the EU's antitrust case against Microsoft gained pace, IE development really stalled, and that's when it stopped evolving. This was around the time of late IE4/early IE5 era. You'd be hard pressed to spot any substantive differences between IE5 (released in, what, 1999?) and IE6 (release, I think, in 2001). So then, fast forward to the 2010s and IE6 is still around all over the place: doesn't support PNG, doesn't support HTML5, doesn't support much of CSS, polyfills can only cover up so much, etc.

You had IE7, IE8, and IE9 as well, which were also dogshit (IE9 marginally less so), and didn't implement standards properly or had some MS-centric view of functionality implemented (old habits die hard, even though the battle was lost by that stage).

IE10 was starting to feel like Microsoft were taking web standards seriously, but still didn't support loads of recent APIs (Web Audio springs immediately to mind). Same with IE11: better but still too far off.

Edge was better again but caught in the middle: it still wasn't as good as Chrome and Firefox but now it had also removed all vestiges of IE support, for addins and suchlike, so it had alienated that crowd too.

And then Microsoft just sort of gave up: they moved Edge to Chromium which, at the time, I thought was a mistake and bad for the browser landscape and, no surprise, so it has turned out to be.

Now you have all the Chromium based browsers (including Brave), and Firefox (which is substantially funded via Google), and there aren't really any other mainstream capable browser engines out there. And, no surprise, Google are abusing their effective monopoly power because that's what effective monopolies always do.

Chrome actually is the new IE because with it Google are doing (much more successfully) what Microsoft tried to do with IE in the late 90s.

And then Microsoft just sort of gave up: they moved Edge to Chromium which, at the time, I thought was a mistake and bad for the browser landscape and, no surprise, so it has turned out to be.

I personally loath Microsoft, and came up through the Commodore tract, into Linux. Never could stand the company, their products.

I won't blindly dislike, I had my reasons, but it's been a long time since the early years. So I tried Edge for android, back when Microsoft was going on about not being an ads platform like Google.

I thought, OK, maybe they've ripped out Google's tracking. Made it less invasive, maybe they'll even enable pinch zoom and reflow, like Opera does.

Nope. None of that. And the amount of phone home I saw with tcpdump was mind bogglng.

So sad. They could have taken chrome, made it non-invasive, added pinch zoom and reflow, and lots of other such things. I'd have used it, been happy with it, sing their praises.

But instead, it's the same old, short range, junk.

In the 90s many things were only possible with ActiveX or Java Applets. ActiveX just had the nice side effect of only running on Windows and IE. But, it's important to remember browsers were much much less capable than they are today. I was writing 'webapps' and manipulating the dom and javascript was sloooow (on both IE or FF). One hack I did was have the server dynamically writing js code (instead of doing something on the client) and doing htmx like we see making a comeback today.

Do end users hate Chrome? Or is this just the perspective bias of the crowds that frequent HN?

It still has a broad market share, and even Chromium forks are not making a dent. They are evidently doing something right.

Its pretty clear that isn't the case since there are viable alternatives and people have to go out of their way to install Chrome to begin with. If most people hated it, they would just install Firefox instead (or use Edge or Safari)

The thing they are doing right is being imposed upon people at every turn by every Google property, no?

To be accurate, IE was not hated by "end-users". It was hated by web developers (understandably) reluctant to support non-standard apis and by informed people.

It was also hated by many end users.

If the API was used by 90%+ of the internet, then it was the standard.

When I learned html as a kid in 1998 IE was better than Netscape in my mind.

Netscape had lame <blink> while IE had the very cool <marquee> instead.

Touché, the blink vs marquee was a big thing.

> I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective.

Yep, for various usability reasons, I used IE as my daily driver until Windows updates disabled it. Never liked Chrome. Using Firefox now.

> IE was absolutely hated for not evolving.

Chrome is doing worse than not evolving ...

... it is evolving towards evil.

Compared to this, stasis would be a blessing.

No it was not hated for evolving. It was hated because it made banks and many web sites enforcing people to use Windows. Chrome is nowhere near it.

"It was hated because it made banks force people to use Windows"?

For all IE's weaknesses, it didn't "make" banks do any such thing. They chose that.

Later, IE was also hated for being tied to the OS (which was related but different to the "not evolving"). Another thing Safari has. So yeah, I also fully agree. Safari is still the new IE.

The reason IE was hated for being tied in the OS was because the OS was crashing due to the IE bugs. That's not the case with macOS or iOS at all, just because the OS provides a JS engine out of the box doesn't make it Windows Me grade.

On a somewhat funny, somewhat related note:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

It doesn't disprove your point, it's just a cute bit of trivia.

IE was hated for being unreliable, lax on security and lacking in modern features. Safari / WebKit is incredibly performant and reliable with a modern feature set. Personally I’m not a fan of the UI but I guess it gets the job done.

If you downvote me, please tell me why my comment is wrong. Otherwise, no one learns anything.

Safari caused me by far the most issues, back when I was doing frontend in ~2017/2018, in terms of how it complied with web standards (I wasn't as fussed at the standards it didn't support - at least I knew!) and rendered the web application I was working on across desktop, iPad and iPhone.

I spent more time chasing Safari bugs and rendering idiosyncrasies than I did dealing with IE11, frankly.

I’m sorry but just no. I’ve been developing on the web since IE6 and while Safari has a few quirks it doesn’t even start to compare to IE at any stage.

The worst I deal with in Safari is lack of certain features (often things that weren’t standardized and Chrome just added) and some minor CSS quirks. In some of those cases when I dig into the “issue” it appears that Safari is handling it in a way that makes more sense. The only Safari issue that I have run into multiple times and disliked is the viewport height issue but new CSS units (dvh I think?) should fix that.

On the other hand IE11 had a whole slew “Why isn’t this working?” Issues that made zero sense. I _loved_ the bugs that would not reproduce if you had dev tools (or what passed for IE dev tools) open or things related to cross-origin that just behaved differently for no good reason. QA found way more issues in IE browsers than Safari in my experience.

And while IE11 was the least bad of the IEs I don’t think you get to use it as a goalpost. IE6-10 (and 11) caused me immense pain and frustration. Have we all forgotten using images to display a rounded corner? A 1px wide image to display a gradient? Or just images as buttons in general since CSS support was shit?

The gross hacks I did for IE do not compare to what I need to do for Safari and anyone who says differently either didn’t live through that period (as a developer) or has a short memory.

A lot of the things people bitch about in Safari end up being security things, like the viewport. Arguably, the page shouldn't be able to mimic the browser chrome without some user interaction first, and being able to hide the chrome and convince the user that they've just typed their bank url into the browser is an anti-pattern. So, yeah, good job Safari.

Most bugs I've found aren't bugs but valid "defense in depth" agains the bastards who want to steal my grandma's money.

> And while IE11 was the least bad of the IEs I don’t think you get to use it as a goalpost.

I compared the versions of Safari I had to support in 2017/2018 to the versions of IE I had to support in 2017/2018 (11) for that specific contract. There is definitely no contest when it comes to the older versions.

I find it interesting that folks assume I was comparing to Chrome - I have used Firefox as a daily driver for nearly two decades now. That's what everything got tested in first, and yes - even Chrome had a number of stupid flex bugs at that point in time.

> Have we all forgotten using images to display a rounded corner?

I hope you didn't forget that HTC file to make transparency work...or you'll have nice grey backgrounds on your rounded corners!

Gradients could be done via base64 css if you triggered the Outlook rendering engine under the hood. ;)

Most of the problems I faced in the projects I work are caused by developers working only and exclusively with Chrome and not bothering to check their work on Safari and Firefox. The issues that were found with Safari were easy to fix or work around. Nothing compares to the painful process during ~2005-2010 when it came to support IE6.

Safari testing requires a mac/iP*

Satisfied Safari user here. Chrome had me chasing shiny, shiny but nowadays if something doesn't run right in Safari, life goes on, and Apple ecosystem integration more than compensates. Disclaimer: I am not a web dev.

And bugfixes always took 6 months til the next OS update.

Holding back Notifications and other PWA-related specs left a sour taste to me because it meant I couldn’t build a PWA …but you could buy Apple hardware a developer license and make a native app (even if it was mostly CRUD).

Yeah, they usually do their own thing. Not only in following specs, though. Like how if you use self-signed cert for HTTPS (e.g. for local development and tests while playing with WebRTC), all browsers will show a Warning page with an escape hatch that can be clicked to ignore the problem. You can grab your personal phone, or ask anyone to lend you their phone in a pinch, and check your marvelous web creation.

Did I say "all browsers"? Sorry, not quite. iOS Safari outright refuses connecting. And it won't say why. I had to connect the damn iPhone with a cable to an Xcode machine, to open up browser console and see the error there. Turns out Safari is a special snowflake that requires doing some preparation ahead of time (no less than 3 steps!) 1) getting the Root CA into the phone, 2) install it in the cert storage, by the way you won't be able to do it if used a non-Apple app for step 1; and 3) enable full trust in the new CA. All that for a phone that I quickly borrowed from my flatmate. Thanks but no thanks! Not all developments are enterprise projects with proper laboratory devices.

The dramatic (RED ALERT DANGER !!!) certificate error messages are completely over the top. Safari is worse than others, but all are bad. The browser vendors are acting as if HTTPS with certificate issues is a hundred times worse than plain unencrypted HTTP, which it is not.

Nothing compares to IE6. That was a hellscape.

I’ve been saying this for years (on HN and elsewhere).

In my mind, there are two types of “IEs”. There is the IE that didn’t follow standards and did whatever they wanted and there is the IE that was slow to adopt new standards. Chrome is the former and Safari is the latter. Also, Safari is no where near as slow as IE was to adopt standards so I don’t find it great comparison.

Additionally, Safari at least has the fundamentals in place — IE couldn’t even render transparent PNGs properly without Windows-specific filter trickery until around version 9 or so which was released in 2011, around a decade after Gecko based browsers, WebKit-based browsers, and even Microsoft’s own Tasman-based IE for Mac did.

People are quick to forget the pain of things like table-based-layout.

I’ll never forget in 2006-2008-ish I developed a website for my computer repair business (I was in High School) and was very proud of it. Then I opened it in IE (I had developed it in Firefox) and it all fell apart (I was using floats IIRC). I then rewrote the whole thing using tables because I knew my target audience would not be running Firefox.

In Safari sometimes things aren’t aligned correctly but nothing to the degree of hacks I’ve done over the years for IE. Gradients, transparent pngs, rounded corners, the list goes on.

Yeah, people just mean different things when they put the label on chrome and safari. It gets a little tiring to have this pointless discussion about what is in essence a metaphor that is being interpreted differently over and over again.

IE was terrible at first. It wasn’t until Netscape started proposing dynamic HTML and making a play to take over the desktop experience that Microsoft threw itself behind making a better browser, bundling it with the operating system, and giving it away for free (Netscape was free for end users but required commercial licensing). The only point of IE was to kill Netscape, and it did. Netscape got the last laugh by open sourcing the browser, which is todays Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla was the Netscape mascot FWIW. Mission accomplished Microsoft pivoted to destroying other innovative companies and let IE languish until it was replaced by the malware browser Edge as a competitor to the malware adware browser Chrome. Fortunately Firefox, Safari, Brave, opera continue to exist.

No, this is a LARP. People hated IE for many reasons but the main one is having to do a bunch of extra work to support it. When IE did depart from the standards most severely, it wasn't like most other browsers were super compliant, it's just that IE didn't update, so it stayed in its same non-compliant state for many years.

IE6 lasted from 2001 to 2006 in terms of being the latest browser, which is eons. But worse is that due to the fact that browsers were not evergreen, supporting IE6 remained relevant for far longer. Well into 2010 many sites still had to support the dinosaur of a browser due to its still-relevant marketshare. In fact, I bet IE6 in that era had more marketshare than Firefox does now!

Squabbles over standards like this are nothing particularly new either. The only reason Safari was? the new IE is because you have to test in it. caniuse says you can use Wasm, but the commonly-used initiateStreaming API came over a year later in Safari than it did other browsers.

What Chrome is today is far worse than the new IE. IE did a lot of dumb garbage, and even some kind of sabotage, but they never had the opportunity to do the kinds of things Google is working on now.

Safari sabotaged its own content blocking extensions long before Google did — uBlock Origin for Safari was killed years ago — and Safari also implemented web attestation before Chrome: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-att...

Safari already implements Manifest V3 (it never had anything else to block ads) and DRM. So what the heck are you talking about? Safari is leading the charge on all those hostile changes.

(Not to mention all the other ways how they undermine the web, like refusing to properly support PWAs and forcing you to go through Apple reviewed process for apps.)

This strange narative how Safari (the only browser you're ever allowed to use on iOS) is somehow better than Chrome is outright bizarre. It's worse in every single way... and you're not even allowed to use Firefox to fix it.

> Safari already implements Manifest V3 (it never had anything else to block ads)

This isn't entirely accurate. Confusion on the issue abounds.

From 2010 to 2019, the safariextz format had support for webRequest BlockingResponse https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... and indeed there was a Safari version of uBlock Origin. This was eliminated in Safari version 13.

The "newer" (2015) Safari content blocker API is similar to Chrome's declarativeNetRequest. However, Manifest V3 is far broader than just eliminating webRequest BlockingResponse, though that's what people tend to focus on. For example, there are strict limits on script execution that also cause problems for userscript extensions.

Safari web extensions (2020) will continue to support Manifest V2, albeit without webRequest BlockingResponse, which Safari web extensions never supported. Apple is in the process of adding MV3 support to Safari web extensions without deprecating MV2 (just like Firefox).

In a sense, Manifest V3 and delcarativeNetRequest are separate issues. After all, delcarativeNetRequest is also supported in Chrome MV2. Chrome took the "opportunity" to eliminate webRequest BlockingResponse in MV3. Safari took the opportunity to eliminate BlockingResponse much earlier. But MV3 could have supported BlockingResponse if Google had wanted; there's nothing inherent to MV3 that precludes the API, other than an arbitrary decision.

It also doesn't support AV1 or AVIF.

A cynical part of me thinks Safari supported JPEG-XL for pure tribal warfare, as its the "anti" AVIF. That would be so petty...

Safari already supports AVIF.

Actually Safari added support for three new image formats at the same time: JPEG XL, AVIF and HEIC.

> (it never had anything else to block ads)

I've used Wipr for a long time on both my Mac and iPhone, this isn't true.

Wipr says it uses Safari's Content Blocking API, which has restrictions similar to those found in MV3. I think this is what GP was referring to, since it means Wipr/MV3 is limited in what they can block compared to, say, UBO on Firefox.

Yes and no - IE was hated in part for deviating from standard/showing weird behaviour. But more than that it was dragging its feet on implementing new CSS and JS standards so they couldn't be used for years after introduction. It was nightmare.

> What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?)

Google is of course much smarter than Microsoft. Google avoids this by declaring everything Chrome does to be a standard. And then far from being criticised from departing from the standard, their competitors get criticised for not implementing whatever thing Chrome came up with yesterday.

That was what made IE dangerous: everything Microsoft did in IE was the standard for a bunch of years. They built things like XHR and the concept of "AJAX". The CSS model of IE was eventually enshrined as box-sizing: border-box, because designers loved it and it was easier to work with.

For many years in IE4/5/6 every browser was criticized for not supporting IE standards.

That's how IE6 got a huge marketshare and then kept that marketshare for far longer than it ever should have.

That's why those of us that remember browser history worry that Chrome is the new IE. It's defining the standards. It has crazy momentum behind it. People are (victim) blaming Safari and Firefox for not "keeping up with standards", even though the standards they aren't keeping up with are often things Google decided to do without finishing the standards process first. That's what IE did.

People remember the years after the interregnum of the web slowly cleaning up that mess. Of standards finally getting passed and IE being the one incompatible. They don't remember as well that IE was the problem child so much because it defined standards for years and that's what cemented its huge marketshare and inability to go away quietly when it came time to clean things up. Cleaning things up was so hard because it had defined so many standards. Worrying about "Chrome is the new IE" now is trying to prevent that mess from happening a second time.

> Chrome is the new IE.

That sounds exactly right to me, at this moment.

I would add that Firefox -- which has been improving noticeably in recent years, -- is "the new Chrome."

I mainly remember 1) IE being quite idiosyncratic in how it followed html/css standards and 2) being able to use things like firebug to debug FF, but having an alert window pop up with a cryptic, unhelpful message when trying to debug IE. It seemed "make it work in IE6" was like 30% of time spent in my work back then. Also, it stuck around for a _long_ time, so that was especially annoying as long after other browsers, including IE, had moved on, a lot of effort still went into supporting IE6.

IE6 was hated for being the only popular browser where standard features didn't work, or worked differently. It's the exact same situation with Safari now.

I don't expect my almost 70 year old mother to know the history of internet browsers. She just wants to browse the internet.

I blame Google instead.

>But yeah, that's what you get when you don't know history.

The author of that phase, and those that commented on issue at the time admitted they wasn't even programming during IE era. And falsely claim IE era as IE 7.....

Not only that. A lot of people actually quite like IE 5.5. I would even argue IE hate wasn't even because of enforcing its own standard ( Although that is certainly an issue ). It was because they conquered 95+% market share and stop innovating when there were insane amount of low hanging fruit and bugs.

But yeah. Most vocal engineers of today joined the industry in post iPhone era. One reason why Silicon Valley are full of people continue to reinvent the flat tire.

IE lost because Microsoft thought they had won forever and stopped devoting resources to its development. By the time they reformed a team to improve it, it was too late. The reason we hate it is not the reason it became hated by most consumers.

I'm not sure how pronounced it was for others, but one of my personal dislikes with IE was that there was no feasible way to uninstall IE, on top of the dreadful choices it made regarding web standards, documentation, and the overall "feel" of it - not to say that Netscape, etc. were much better at the time, but there was that very real sensation of being forced to have a piece of software I did not want installed on an Operating System that I used solely for compatibility reasons.

The standards yes. But everybody was targeting IE first so that wasn't a huge issue for the end user. What I remember made people move away from it was its willingless to just execute everything from the web (i.e ActiveX) and how insecure it had become due to this.

> What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share.

Everyone hated IE because once they won the browser war Microsoft stopped improving their browser. Why bother? There was no market to gain.

Recent Safari deserves credit for listening to developers and catching up with many standards.

Safari was always behind on Web specs that could replace apps in the app store.

It's all about the $$$. Apple is no different than Google in that regard :)

- Apple: Asking premium price and reducing alternatives

- Google: Free for the end-user, get money from other means if possible ( eg. ads)

People have been making this tired argument for literally over a decade.

Mobile web apps failed because they are inherently worse in every single way than native apps. There will never be some magical feature e.g push notifications or installation on Home Screen that will change this. Apple even was going to use web apps instead of native until they too realised how bad they are.

So no there is no conspiracy by Apple to prevent the rise of web apps.

I think it’s possible to develop a reasonably good web app or PWA. I’ve seen a small handful, but the vast majority I encounter don’t meet that bar. Truly great web apps are rare.

There’s so many little things that need to be gotten right for a mobile app of any kind to feel good to use, and on the web it’s all entirely up to the developer since it’s “bring your own everything” with no shared known-good foundation and scaffolding to rely on (even React doesn’t really fit with the wildly different ways it can be used). There’s so many variables at play that the average incidence of papercuts is markedly higher.

The other thing is that to make a great web app, the developer needs to care a lot about delivering quality and polish, which is somewhat rare. This can probably be attributed to the web as a platform often being chosen to keep costs down (multiplatform, large pool of devs) — while in theory the savings from not having to maintain codebases for separate platforms could instead be invested in quality of the web app, it’s usually not, instead being put towards more marketable things as the app is forever stuck at “technically works” in all its janky glory.

What's the chicken and what's the egg?

Did apple go for web apps before or after the app store?

Note: PWA's were after the app store fyi and I mostly use the web, not apps.

In comparison, there aren't many SAAS with apps, eg. Azure, AWS Portal, ...

And yet a lot of us avoid the Reddit app and use the mobile web version instead. Lots of apps are just thin web wrappers too, and I bet most users don't even notice.

When the service you're offering is a website, it's not surprising that sometimes a website might be better than an app.

IE was different things to different people.

To developers, IE was the browser for which you had to spend hours debugging issues. Sounds like Safari to me. Considering you have to buy a whole device to use Safari, I’d argue it’s worse than IE was.

(Sent from my Safari browser)

> Considering you have to buy a whole device to use Safari, I’d argue it’s worse than IE was.

Until Edge (which is just Chrome essentially) the only way to run IE was on a windows computer. Not sure how that’s different.

The difference is that Microsoft did not sell computers and did not sue anyone trying to run their OS on non-Microsoft hardware.

Safari can only be run on Apple machines manufactured by Apple.

You can run linux builds of WebKit, which should be enough to debug Safari rendering issues: https://webkit.org/downloads/

You had to buy a whole Windows computer to use IE.

Chrome is the new IE 4 & 5, when MS were still doing the extend and extinguish thing, implementing crap their way, standards be damned.

Safari is the new IE 6, when MS stagnated because they had won in large enough areas not to really care any more and designers were forced to hold back on using things for compatibility's sake. If we're more generous, maybe Safari is more like IE 9/10/11 when MS at least tried to be more up-to-date but were behind and non-compliant enough to be a significant pain. Though for us IE11 is still the current IE11 as one or two clients still have a few users on it, we can say “not supported” all we like, but we'll still get complaints if things flat out don't work (display issues and slowness we can tell people to deal with, dysfunction we can't).

> IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. It ended up a turd browser with it's own unique quirks bundled everywhere by a company with a vested interest of hindering the web.

I believe Chrome was about web apps (e.g. Gmail, Maps) in the first place,and yes, it was an undermine of Windows domination on desktop. Data collection and ads outside search came later.

google is the new microsoft. has been for a few years now.

Chrome is the Desktop IE Safari is the mobile IE

It's also what you get, when you know history and allow it to repeat.

Safari doesn't even support adblockers. It's a DOA browser.

Where've you been the past 13 years?

Strange then that I use it with ad blockers both on MacOS and iOS.

> Remember the "$BROWSER is the new IE" narrative?

Yes, it's always been much like the "Everyone I Don't Like Is Hitler" meme.

"Chrome is the new IE" is laughable. Apparently you know nothing about history. Chrome has its sins but it is no where near comparing the evil of MS shoveling their OS and Office to peoples throats.

You mean, like Android and EEE? Chrome spying on everything the user has? Their search engine and phones tracking the user's life as our worst nightmare of the 90's?

Private mail servers becoming near impossible to setup on our own because of GMAIL and DKIM witchcraftery with mail servers?

With the main online media tracking the user preferences on music and video too, minus the porn?

They cut down Gtalk/Jabber integration, too.

Heck, Google is what we were afraid of MS in late 90's/early 2000's on galaxy levels.

> departure from standards

There were no new HTML standards between 4.0.1 in 2000, and 5.0 in 2014.

> enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share

Modern web is only possible because Microsoft implemented non-standard XMLHttpRequest in IE5. However, they didn’t do that to enforce a vision. The goal was practical — save network bandwidth for their Outlook Web Access product.

ES5, 2009, CSS 2.1, 2011. HTML is not the only standard for a web browser

Also in that period, Microsoft was failing to comply with the standards for CSS 2, standardised in 1998, ES3, standardised in 1999, and PNG, standardised in 1996.

Standards were never the real problem; they were always a joke. I don't think Netscape/Mozilla ever once changed their behaviour to match a standard; rather the standards "committee" was in their pocket for some reason, and would rubber-stamp any proposal from their side no matter how stupid, from the box model onwards. Every "standard" from 4.0 onwards was a step backwards; eventually they approved enough pointless unimplementable nonsense that the WhatWG took over and we got some sanity.

Web developers preferred Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox because it had better development tools and ran on Linux. Chrome is the heir of that. The web has always succeeded in spite of standards committees, not because of them. You're the one who doesn't know your history.

There is some truth in this. IE had a box model a bit like TeX's. Divs stacked inline and spans sat side by side so you easily make very sophisticated layouts. Navigator's box model was dumb as a rock in comparison. Divs started a new vertical context like they do now. So Navigator's model was standardised as the lowest common denominator. It would have been pretty much impossible at the time to retrofit IE's model into Navigator, and it was years before inline blocks were supported in Firefox. It's not so surprising that Microsoft didn't downgrade their browser to meet the standard.

It's also useful to note that much of what people loved about the IE box model got immortalized into the standards as box-sizing: border-box. That bit of "required" boilerplate in almost every "Reset CSS" and CSS framework is a forever ode to IE had an easier box model to design with, and now it's the "opt-in standard" that most wild CSS opts in to.

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users.

Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia, there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would include a lot of tech workers running Chrome with uBlock enabled.

It's 2023, Safari and Firefox have been very good for a while.

1: in fact, in the Divina Commedia the lazy ones that can't take a stance are kept just outside of Hell, as they are so detestable not even Satan itself would want them around.

For me it's the ecosystem. I like my desktop browser syncing with my Android browser, and I really like built in chromecast support in my browser.

I know that Firefox has a mobile version with sync, but last time I tried it, I didn't care for it. I know there have been some attempts to bring chromecast support to Firefox via extensions, but last I tried it it was very buggy. But it's been many years since I tried either of those, maybe I'll give it another shot.

I also just realized neither of these conveniences are relevant on my work laptop. Firefox is approved by my company IT and a lot of my coworkers use it. I'm going to switch today.

The biggest blocker for me has been the lack of convenient profile switching. It's an important part of my workflow to have a separate profile for home/work/other, with history, bookmarks, etc. Container tabs are not a good replacement. Worse, I get irritated with the fact that Firefox fully supports this under the hood, but seems to push back against actually implementing a convenient way to use it.

I'm currently doing my yearly attempt to switch, using the Profile Switcher extension [0]. It works well enough, but requires external software running and I fully expect it to break eventually. I also can't open external links in anything but the default profile (vs Chrome opening in the profile most recently active, a nice convenience).

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

> It's 2023, Safari and Firefox have been very good for a while.

This has not been my experience. Every once in a while I try to make the switch (to Firefox because I'm not generally a mac user, but I use safari on iOS and I'm basically resigned to its limitations)

Slow rendering is for sure a problem.

Buggy rendering is very common -- maybe the site, or maybe the browser, who knows, but anecdotally I've had a lot of bad experiences, including lost work filling out multi-page forms.

And I hate to mention it, but aesthetically I find Firefox to be very clunky and ugly.

Yes, Chrome is terrible for even more reasons than the ones shown here -- the direct integration of Google sign-on into the browser is awful, and the in-page text highlighting through (#:~:text=) is a big anti-feature (that now is being copied by the others, oh well), and after I spent so much effort trying to prune down the stupid buttons on my address bar only to find that they keep adding new, useless ones that are un-removeable ("reading panel"? why are they doing this?). But even with those things it's still the most performant and capable browser.

Tech people are their own worst enemey. Switch to Chrome, GMail, and Google Drive, they are so powerful!

Next frame... "Why is Google so powerful and doing evil things?"

Manifest v3 has been delayed and was/is pretty legitimate, I don't think most people really know wtf they're talking about when it comes to v3. JPEGXL doesn't exactly seem like that big of a deal and is now being developed again - sounds fine, Chrome went "seems like no one wants this" and then people said "we want this" and now it's being worked on. WEI isn't even properly proposed yet, it's so early.

So these 3 things aren't really that insane, WEI is easily the worst of them.

In the meantime,

a) Chrome does everything I need while providing the highest security value.

b) Mozilla won't earn me as a user until their CEO is removed

It's not laziness, I make the conscious choice to use Chrome because I think it's the best browser right now. I use Brave on Mobile and I haven't switched on my laptop yet because I haven't evaluated it.

Many of my work tools require a browser extension that's only compatible with Chrome. The publishers don't plan to support Firefox or any other browser.

I can do without these tools (not an easy task) but not my coworkers.

I'm afraid to switch because:

- Chrome dev tools is consistently amazing and I use several extensions on it

- I use google password manager which is also amazing and it works seamlessly on all my android devices, even filling passwords into android apps (although most people don't seem to know it exists)

Sooner or later, I will get around to switching back to FF, but it's daunting. I used FF before Chrome came out.

I've been trying out Firefox on MacOS this week. Been using Chrome since ~2009, Firefox before that. Here are some annoyances so far:

- No download bar to show actual downloads (downloaded files are hidden under a menu icon)

- No built-in page translate

- Search: is in bottom left rather than top-right which is pretty standard in most UIs.

- Search: would be nice if "Highlight All" were on by default (though it's caused me problems on Chrome with large documents so I can see off by default having some advantage.)

- Search: most of those options should probably be hidden under "advanced" or some expandable menu.

- I don't like the scrolling tab view where I can only see less than 10 tabs at once. I'd rather they get really tiny like on Chrome rather than totally hidden. Otherwise it's unclear to me at a glance how many tabs I have open.

- Youtube seems to have higher CPU usage compared to chrome (at least on MacOS x86, non-fullscreen)

- Tabs are too easy to mute and seem less intuitive which ones are playing.

- Dev tools doesn't have the “lighthouse” audit tool.

- Would be nice if cmd+shift+n shortcut matched webkit/blink behavior. I'm slowly learning to use cmd+shift+p instead, but being consistent with all the other browsers would be nice.

I would love to use Firefox, Brave, even Safari, but I'm quite literally locked into the Google eco-system. My work emails are G-Suite, so having chrome means I can sync data from sheets, slides, docs etc. I stupidly moved everything personal to a Gmail address too back in 2016 when things weren't looking so grim, and cloud only was a hype so I'm kind of locked into using chrome for personal use too as I can't get away from not having Google account sync functionality.

De-googling is incredibly hard. I've used my Gmail address for everything from government voting registration, to companies house, to services I can't even remember signing up for. At this stage, I'm kind of stuck. Bonus: I own an android phone and Google services are essential. Please don't preach to me about grapheneOS or whatever, they suck without the play store.

I've been wanting to switch to Firefox for a while, but there is a single bug I filed ~6 years ago [1] that has prevented me from making the leap. I've always wanted to investigate and see if I can pull a fix together but haven't been able to find the activation energy to get a dev environment set up to do so.

The bug is that Firefox on Windows doesn't play nice with virtual desktops. Clicking on a link in one virtual desktop may focus a Firefox window several VDs away. I'm a heavy user of virtual desktops, so this is a dealbreaker for me. Chromium browsers don't have this issue, so I'm stuck in Chromium land.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423768

For a Mac M1 user who wants a lightweight browser, what would you recommend:

1. Safari (with this, I have trouble with some websites, particularly Google ones)

2. Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past)

3. Brave (like that it's Chromium, but I worry about the odd features like crypto)

4. Edge (I just downloaded it. leaning toward this choice)

Some points on why I switched from Firefox to Chrome:

- It "failed" while trying to use Google Meet for work. I don't remember the details of the incident, but it was embarrassing enough that it made me switch, at least for work stuff

- No Chromecast support

- Buggier than Chrome in general: last I remember was an issue with page scaling when printing

- No desktop integration of PWAs (i.e. launcher icon, standalone window). This is what I missed the most as a Linux desktop user.

- Worse performance than Chrome, at least on Android. Firefox was freezing often and even causing my phone to... restart randomly. This is unacceptable.

I wouldn’t mind being in that circle. At least I’d be with people who are smart and practical. Not extremists or complete ignoramuses.

Whatever chrome doesn’t or does doesn’t matter to me. I just use it to do my job and occasionally shop on Amazon or watch Netflix. Or come here on HN. I visit maybe ten unique websites.. If chrome starts to suck big like IE back in the day then I’ll use some other browser that works best for all the sites I visit.

As long as it works best for most sites I visit, that’s fine by me.

I have a life outside the computer, which is funded by the computer. I can just turn it off after work and do an infinite number of other things.

I tried to switch a few times but I can't replicate my custom search experience on Firefox and I really miss browsing without it. On a new tab

'a product' and I've got an Amazon search for the product.

'w topic' and I've searched Wikipedia for the topic.

'wt place' and I've searched for the weather at a place.

'm place' and I've searched Google maps for the place.

'd topic' and I've searched DuckDuckGo for the topic.

etc.

I use Firefox at home, but my work (large company) has standardized on everyone using Chrome to the point of writing custom Chrome extensions. So at work I use Chrome because it is essentially required. I wonder how many enterprise workers are in the same boat, even just due to security folks wanting to focus on a single browser and thus getting the company to mandate the use of Chrome.

As many others have mentioned, Safari is worse. It restricted content blocking to not support uBlock Origin many years ago, and it has already deployed remote attestation. On top of that, it is behind on support for APIs that people want, and those that it has implemented are often riddled with bugs, which are fixed slowly if ever. Firefox is a reasonable alternative.

I do not use Chrome, but I recommend it to my tech illiterate friends or relatives because it's sadly probably the most secure browser among user friendly ones. In large part to Google Zero. (Ofc I try to also remember to warn against installing random extensions)

Chrome lets me install extensions using "git clone". Firefox doesn't, they need to come from AMO, or I need to reinstall them every time I relaunch Firefox.

I only use Chrome for web dev things. Been living for decades and I still don't understand how people can be so fking stupid.

Dev experience in chrome is a lot better. But for personal browsing I use safari and mainly only because of how it uses keychain.

the city i work for has 100k employees, admittedly not everybody office based, but still: they only allow chrome and edge (except on iphone) because it would be too much work to maintain features for other browsers

Firefox dropped support for PWAs. :(

my excuse is that my company VPN is tied to chrome.

Why would I need an excuse? I'm free to use whatever I want.

Chrome renders websites as the site esigners designed. It's a game theory dilemma.

I need translate on iOS. Chrome and Edge are the only browsers which offer that, and Chrome is much better than Edge. I hope Firefox brings native translation to iOS soon. I'll be making the jump when they do.

Missing in the list:

- https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-will-let-you-opt-out-of-ch...

Google Will Let You Opt Out of Chrome 'Forced Login' (2018)

Remember? They tried to force everyone to login completely.

Quote from article:

The tweak was made to address a privacy uproar over the latest iteration of Google's browser, Chrome 69. Earlier versions of the browser let you log into a Google service, say Gmail, without logging into Chrome. But the tech giant decided to change that in Chrome 69, which arrived earlier this month. Signing into a Google service via the browser will now automatically log you into Chrome as well.

* The "Manifest v3" sabotage of content blocking extensions: https://archive.is/i2vGD

* The attempted sabotage of #JPEGXL: https://archive.is/2ihEV

* #WebEnvironmentIntegrity a.k.a. #DRM for whole websites would hurt the web, #opensource browsers and OSes: https://archive.is/S912x

That's a pretty short list. I would argue the list should start 7 years ago with AMP.

AMP was Google's Search team, not Chrome team, and the Chrome team wasn't very happy about it.

> * #WebEnvironmentIntegrity a.k.a. #DRM for whole websites would hurt the web, #opensource browsers and OSes

What really blew my mind was how out of touch the dev guiding the WEI proposal is, in relation to how dangerous this implementation would be.

It's one dev, out of hundreds/thousands!

At least one web platform lead from the Chrome team is on record saying that the proposal could never move past the experimentation phase.

Do you think it's impossible for one bad^H^H^H clueless apple to slip through the interview process?

Isn't it a good thing that a company as large as Google still allows individuals to experiment with their ideas?

Need to mention WebUSB[1] too since it's only implemented and forced on Chromium.

[1]: https://caniuse.com/webusb

WebUSB is a hostile move? It's pretty awesome tbh.

Expected a huge list and there's only 3 items there, and one of them, JPEG XL, is kinda moot because it didn't seem viable until recently after Safari started supporting it...

Feel that the list could have had much more substance with the addition of webUSB, webSerial and such features which Chrome just strong armed.

In the current form the list and toot don't really drive the point home...

I mean it was always viable. Chrome did an opt-in experiment that no one heard of and than used it as a justification for ceasing its development. As a format it is just a win-win situation. Most of the companies that deals with images spoke for JXL. I think Google tried to push its own format in favour of JXL. So I really don't think it is moot.

JPEGXL was (co)authored by Googlers so it's also their "own" format.

WebUSB is pretty useful though, I know people who've used it to control all sorts of devices in an easily accessible way.

Google themselves use it for updating Android devices, via making an ADB connection from their update webpage.

I don't see how it could be classified as hostile, as it's adding a feature rather than taking features away.

I’ve seen keyboards that allow firmware upgrades & configuration over WebUSB. This covers not just Linux but even smaller OSs as well as the audience using Android tablets as a PC or whatever.

Very cool, let's train users to give websites root access to their devices.

yeah it's an easy way to update firmware on microcontrollers

Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if JXL gets implemented in Chrome after Safari and Firefox implementations are stabilized.

I lost trust with Chromium back when v70 they removed chrome://net-internals/#sockets

It allows you to live debug what traffic has been made outside devtool. e.g. account sync, tracking, etc.

The problem is there are almost 0 alternatives beyond Firefox so if you don’t like their UX you’re stuck. All the “new” browsers are just chromium skins (edge, arc, etc.) Are there any real competitors building a new browser?

What would you think the problem with Firefox' UX that keeps so many people from switching is? I think it's not UX, but pure marketing.

People have all kinds of weird excuses for not using Firefox.

Sometimes it feels like "Sure, Chrome sold my kids data to human traffickers. But I can't switch to Firefox because I really _need_ MIDI-2 over websocket support"

Sure, FF is not perfect but a lot of issues is due to sites being optimised for webkit and that will not change as long as Chrome has 80% marketshare. You need to sacrifice a little for freedom.

I'm a Firefox user but there have been plenty for me over the years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18117216

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442618

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014968

These days the big ones for me are profile switching and the things leaked between containers.

For a while FF on Mac was using a huge amount of CPU. For me it's fixed but YMMV.

There's a risk of them shutting down

Frankly Firefox is barely a hedge against Chrome. When it comes to things like JPEG-XL they are in lock step with Chrome.

Safari ended up being JPEG-XL’s unlikely champion.

I kind of wished Apple would release Safari for other platforms again.

HN is weirdly obsessed with jpeg-xl. The logic for removing it totally made sense.

We can see exactly Mozilla’s position on JPEG-XL: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#jpegxl

JPEG-XL includes features and performance that might differentiate it from other formats, but the benefits it provides are not significant enough on their own to justify the cost of adding another raster image format to the Web.

Mozilla's made no such position as removing the experimental JPEG XL code.

JPEG-XL is a feature the web can live without. But unlike Chrome, Firefox won't kill ad blockers or introduce DRM.

> I kind of wished Apple would release Safari for other platforms again.

It's barely maintained even on their own platforms. If they could stabilize and not break localStorage, indexdb or forms every other week, that would already be a great start before thinking of other platforms.

I wonder if it really needs to be Safari or if there would be any demand for a WebKit+JavaScriptCore browser on other platforms?

Web for Gnome/Pantheon is WebKit based.

I wish Safari would stop breaking the web. Every new iOS version requires me to change how to handle scrolling and fight new position bugs for days/weeks

This a problem for me.

I've been a long time Firefox user, but the UI/UX has stagnated (like all browsers) for so long. I'm enjoying using Arc at the moment because it's rethinking a lot of things that bug me about the traditional browser UI paradigm but I also know that it's a trendy startup that could either: explode, decide to change features radically at the drop of a hat (pivot), or simple do something distasteful to please investors.

Extensions technically fill in the gap on the Firefox side, like Containers, but the UX is just an afterthought.

Out the box the squashed tabs vs the silly tab scroll thing on Firefox is horrible. But it reminds me I have too many tabs open anyway. I mainly use FF, but the UI really is behind the times. Notice MS marketing stuff like chatGPT in their browser. They are tooling it up. I want my browser to help me. The tab/workflow/history/sandboxing, I feel could all be a bit more ingrained in the desktop OS/UI.

Google is the plugin on Chrome. If you unwittingly walk blindfold into using it on say Android etc. You'll have all that Google stuff activated, and it's a real boon. Difficult to give up. Heck hard enough to sign out. You unknowingly can sign in.

Yeah there are different options, and yeah there are extensions. But why would I install an extension that basically says it can spy on every tab in my browser? And why would I even trust Google in my browser?

> but the UI/UX has stagnated (like all browsers) for so long.

What some people call "stagnation", others call "stability".

Arc is neat but since it’s built on chromium you’re still beholden to their decisions.

Aa long as chromium is open source and various entities are able to build and remove/modify anti-user features, i don't see a problem with alternatives being a "skin". If Google makes moves to make it difficult to modify chromium then browser maintainers will quickly migrate to other engines.

Yes, it's not a problem. For now. There are so many software projects that depend on chromium for their basic functionality, and so many users that indirectly rely on chromium. It's hard to switch to an alternative if the need arises. So when Google inevitably turns chromium into a problem, you don't have enough time to switch, no matter how badly you want to. It's time to preventatively switch to a project that's more reliable. Give Firefox's Gecko engine a chance, it has all the features you need. It would take a lot of effort, but we'd be protecting ourselves from a pretty realistic scenario where Google just pushes through whatever they want.

WEI will make chromium effectively unusable

yes you'll have the source, but it won't remotely attest unless you're Google/MS

so it is effectively closed source

Other engines? There must be a reason everybody is building on Chromium nowadays...

Once upon a time Lineage OS had Privacy Guard settings. You could feed an app fake data for things like location and contacts, leaving you with the best of both worlds: apps that "require" location will open, but you remain anonymous.

Over time, AOSP became harder and harder to build this feature back in to. AOSP (and Chromium) is Open Source in name only. One may view, download, and build the source, but maintaining modifications long-term isn't feasible without massive amounts of dev time and/or cash.

What other engines?

I have been using Brave for about a year. Dont miss Firefox or Chrome.

Brave is built on chromium. Cool concept, but not a new browser

I have a serious question about Brave. I would be glad to use it, but I am a bit scared of the fat that it is linked to a crypto (I didn't dive in the tokenomics, but maybe the team is driven by the money ? or other shady things ?), and also the fact that I go ads for this browser. Getting an ad for the browser make me question: what are their incentives ? Why would they invest money to attract people ? What is their business model ? The fact that it's a for-profit, just like the other browsers (except Firefox), make me think that they might push things for money, not for the users despite all their claims of being so focused on the user safety, privacy etc.

And which engine does Brave use? Take a wild guess.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36983812

Brave is just a privacy scam. And it's also Chromium based

So you might as well be using Chrome.

There is Ladybird.

Nice. This is legitimately a new browser. Hadn’t heard of them. Will check it out.

> Are there any real competitors

"Real" competitors as in having any amount of market share, no. But there are a few projects, like ladybird, palemoon (which is a fork of ancient FF which does have original implementations of things that came since) and Servo is being revived.

i’ve been a happy safari user (desktop and mobile) for years now.

What adblock do you use with Safari? Last time I've tried, I couldn't find one and returned back to Firefox.

if you don't like their UX you make your own, ff is the only browser that actually lets you customize

I would add these to the list:

- Removing "http://" from URLs. This was partially fixed several years later on Desktop, as now you can right-click the URL bar and check "Always show full URLs"

- Replacing the linear tab view on Android with a 2D grid (so the first tab is hardest to reach with your thumb), and gradually removing all the workarounds as people discovered them.

- Lack of extensions (e.g. ad blocking) on Android

- When using a bluetooth mouse on a Chromebook, the scroll wheel has been really janky for years, and it can only be temporarily fixed using "gesture_prop" in the crosh console. Not sure if this is intentional or just laziness.

Webmasters should really fight back and show annoying popups when the user agent equals Chrome. These popups could nudge the user towards e g. Firefox.

Perhaps EFF.org could provide a reference implementation of such popups.

Serious question: does the concept of a webmaster still exist in 2023? Sites are developed and built in dtap, deployed by gated processes, and in many instances nobody but the deployment agents have access to the actual production servers.

My aunt was one of the first "webmasters" in Denmark, getting their municipality information online. In Danish, aunt is "moster", so when she helped me and my mom make a website for my mom's business, the footer said "Webmoster" instead. She also helped me set up an e-mail. I called myself mats_pc, because having PC in my name like she did felt cool and techy. Only later did I realize she had _pc as that was her initials after getting married. So I basically changed my name to hers, hehe. Good memories.

It has been years since I ever heard the term “webmaster” indeed, but I guess the point was “people who are in control of websites”, and not the concept as we knew it from the 90s (“that one dude who manages our corporate website”).

Web development is still wildly varied in execution. I think we can end up with blinders based on our work, but websites still get deployed in ways that would make a webmaster role relevant. Not sure you would call them a webmaster these days, but the role is there.

Maybe not, but you could be in a bit of a bubble regarding the average website deployment method. In my experience as a webdev most website are still very much deployed in a way that’s controllable by those who would put up such an alert. The problem is rather political. Any organization with a website relevant enough to make such a popup worthwhile would never agree to have such a popup alienating its largest share of visitors. Small independent sites would, but they would be pretty much preaching to the choir.

"We detected you are using an insecure browser. Please upgrade to a secure browser such as Mozilla Firefox." would do it. :)

Punishing users for the browser they use when it can render the site perfectly fine is so hostile. They may not even have the choice of browser installed on the machine they use.

/More/ popovers and popups?

What about just making the site slower?

If you're going to do something in protest, people have to know that you're protesting and that you want them to take an action in support of it.

And if you degrade their service, they won't blame Chrome, they'll blame you.

This is one of the ways Chrome obtained its market share. I remember years back when working at one of the biggest Flash/HTML5 game platforms at the time, we where paid serious money by Google to include a banner to switch to Chrome when we detected a different browser.

Some one suggested using the WEI API to block access to chrome. It wouldn't really work but it was amusing, until I realized the censorship potential of the whole thing on the world stage.

I added one last month already :)

Firefox had been underperforming during part of its life, but deep internal improvements meant those days are over. There is a huge difference in memory and CPU usage between older Firefox and the one we have today. Sadly, lots of people still think that Firefox never changed.

I did a quick memory usage test, just for having my personal anecdote and some numbers to show. The result was that Firefox uses an average of 10 MiB for each open (and active) tab. Not bad at all!

First, what I'm testing:

* Firefox 115, on Linux Mint 20.3 (which essentially is Ubuntu 20.04).

* 13 extensions installed. Some are uBlock Origin, Amazon Unsponsor, Bookmark Search Plus, DeArrow, Multi-Account Containers, Keepa, One-Click Wayback, Tree Style Tab (guys try this one out for a great vertical tab tree!).

* 90 tabs open. Tree Style Tab makes me open lots of tabs, because it is then so convenient to open/close subtrees for different topics... but I digress.

* Tabs include: 4 videogame stores, which are heavy on graphics and dynamic content. 10 shopping tabs in various shops, including Amazon. 10 YouTube videos (buffering preloaded). 14 Google Drive / Google Docs tabs (heavy on JS usage). Various documentation pages, and too many HN threads to admit.

* Firefox configured to remember all tabs when closed, and restore them when opening. Upon firstly starting, Firefox doesn't actually load the tabs. They are in suspended, inactive state, until opened for the first time.

RAM usage results:

* Cleanly started, only HN frontpage loaded: 372 MiB.

* HN frontpage and this entry opened in tabs: 386 MiB.

* Third HN tab opened: 394 MiB.

* Went through ALL 90 tabs to force them loading: 954 MiB.

Conclusion: Firefox uses around 10 MiB per loaded tab.

Screenshots of Btop++:

* In the middle of loading all 90 tabs. CPU is busy! https://pasteboard.co/Bxf2TI9P8YT2.png

* After all tabs have been successfully loaded. Resource usage is back to being stationary. https://pasteboard.co/m3tVzYNMtDmD.png

(The reason for this post is all those comments here and in other entries, claiming that Firefox was a resource hog for them a while ago, and that's why they nowadays are committed Chrome users. In light of recent events, we really need to collectively reduce Chrome usage numbers!)

> HN frontpage and this entry opened in tabs: 386 MiB.

Am I the only one who still remembers when high-end desktop computers came with 128 MiB of RAM or less? Using three times that, with just a couple of tabs from a very light site like this one, feels like a lot of memory usage.

(I have used Firefox's ancestor on a computer with 8 MiB of RAM, so needing hundreds of megabytes just to start the browser already feels crazy to me in the first place.)

I do remember those times :-) and I guess back then, memory was a free-for-all wild west of direct access and no protections whatsoever...

Today, you're using a much more developed 64-bit architecture. On that, an OS that attempts to protect applications from each other (I'm thinking of ASLR but there are maybe more mechanisms). On that, a web browser that creates and manages multi-process working arenas (sandboxes) to protect tabs from each other. On that, add-ons that load in memory thousands of block rules (I mean uBlock), to protect users from commercial incentives of providers.

All that stack must be difficult to bring up with just 8 MiB of RAM :-) (probably the ad blocker alone needs more than that)

An additional test that may be worth trying out is BrowserBench [1] Varies heavily by computer specs. My daily driver is an ancient PC running Linux still fast enough for me but my newer mini-PC's leave this old thing in the dust regardless of what browser I use.

[1] - https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.1/

Did that test with the same Ubuntu and Firefox install mentioned in my post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36985276)

Results:

* Firefox 115: 120

* Firefox without uBlock: 130

* Firefox without any addon: 135

* Chromium 114: 135

* Chromium without uBlock (only addon installed): 150

* Edge 109: 122

Which means that all are in the same ballpark. I feel this test is more about CPU. It is also constantly (re)loading contents from browserbench.org, which tells me that the test itself might be very sensible to (and thus invalidated by) the network conditions at the moment of the test. Should be easy and would be much more reliable to preload all assets, and then do the benchmark.

EDIT: Adding values without uBlock Origin and without all extensions. We can see how having to parse all pages to check if there are elements to block, has its toll in CPU usage in the benchmark. For real-world cases of less CPU-intensive web browsing, blocking unwanted elements is immensely worth it.

As someone who hates Google’s behavior here, this “list” (3 whole items!) is deeply underwhelming to the point that I would say it’s some of the laziest social media activism (essentially the easiest form of activism) I’ve ever seen.

Google running sites poorly or broken in non chrome browsers should be on the list too. Half the time the back button only changes the url on youtube, and doesn’t go back to the previous page.

As someone working in the ad fraud detection space, Google has been hostile for quite a while. Making things extra difficult just to get more ad spend quota on their platforms. First User-Agent reduction (I agree with some points). Later making a perfect Headless automated browser that shows no difference against a real browser (making bot detection nearly impossible without captcha's). Last weeks by removing any kind of WebView signal in the browser so it makes impossible to detect between in-app traffic/fraud/Chrome Mobile. Could write a lot more about other stuff and the implications but the whole picture is not looking great.

I don't understand the JPEG XL frackus, but that's partly because I think the Web platform should not continue being an enormous ball of mud, with everything built into the browser with no layering.

Make a Wasm module (use SIMD and threads if you want) that can decode the format and render to an immutable canvas and then let the browser engine manage the pixels after that. Wasm is close enough to native speed now that it no longer makes sense to bake this into the native browser binary anymore.

That sounds like a lot more work than just allowing <img src=“my image.jxl”>. Are you proposing that every website comes with their own set of WASM libraries to allow its content to be rendered (each with their own bugs)? Why stop there? Just have the browser manage the canvas and deliver your own HTML rendering engine via WASM?

No, it's a fail if every website renders itself to the canvas. I think there's a middle ground where, for example, unknown mime/image types can be handed by "application level"--actually middleware or library-level--codecs supplied as Wasm extensions. The browser doesn't have to ship with them, and it doesn't have to trust them the way it does plugins, but they can hook into key places in ways that maximizes the benefit of having a rendering/layout engine, yet is extensible, fast, and secure.

Across the dozens of Chrome threads over the last week, I haven't seen discussion about the impact of businesses' usage of Google Workspace. I'm sure this is relevant to the discussion on moving away en masse from Chrome; I use Firefox primarily but need to use Chrome for various organizations.

There's quite a few really useful features for Workspace org admins, from blocklists and telemetry to provisioning browser extensions and adding bookmarks, and most of these features require end users to use Chrome. In fact, you can configure security policy such that end users can only use Chrome to login to their company account, and there are multiple reasons from a corporation's perspective to enforce these types of policies.

Microsoft 365 is the most dominant player, and I assume Google Workspace is second in enterprise user account management. Are there any prominent, stable open-source business cloud stacks that meaningfully compete here?

I would add their moves to put things behind codes of conduct. Not the first time I've seen them deployed purely to stifle criticism but I've never seen it done as overtly as this.

How is jpeg xl “hostile”, it’s just a new format. Does Chrome really need to support every new image format?

It was/is a very well thought-out format that had a lot of industry signalling they were willing or even enthusiastic about supporting it, which happens virtually never for new image formats. All the major browsers were working on support, many image processing pipelines were being updated.

Everyone agreed that it was not just a major improvement, but actually the best option out of all the contenders out there. Even the Chrome team. The only ones who didn't agree were the AVIF team at Google, who had developed a competing standard. Well, whoever was on that team had some pull, because not long after Chrome landed JXL support in stable and everything was about to pick up some serious pace, they suddenly landed a commit that reverted everything to do with JXL support in Chrome, and that was that.

An immense, cross-industry effort undone by internal Google politics. That's what's hostile about this situation. JXL is still limping along, but Google's unilateral reversal hurt everyone's confidence in the project but also the entire process. Apparently it doesn't matter what everyone in the world thinks is the most appropriate format. What matters is Lord Google's favour.

> Everyone agreed that it was not just a major improvement, but actually the best option out of all the contenders out there.

Wikipedia tells me the first of four parts of the jpeg xl standard was finalized less than two years ago, and the last part (barely) less than a year ago.

The idea that

a) browsers are bad if they're not adding a year-old image format to the web forever and

b) "everyone" knows what they're talking about with an image codec finalized less than a year ago

is pretty ludicrous.

It's a good format, it'll gain adoption.

A possible reason might be some patents owned by Microsoft: https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/

That's also a good reason for others to drop support until licensing of these patents is clarified.

Can you expand on what you mean? As it stands your questions seem in incredibly bad faith, especially considering the market share Chrome has in the browser space.

The article says Chrome sabotaged JPEG XL.

I am saying that JPEG XL is a new format, which it is; any additional format that is supported means more code, more potential for bugs, more security issues (format parsing is one of the biggest sources of security issues).

Chrome had experimental support for it and then they dropped it. They still support PNG, normal JPEG.

I agree with the arguments against the current DRM and Manifest 3 content blocking was kind of misdirected (however… look at how Safari does it, it’s essentially the same)

Also I don’t think the same argument applies for Chrome as for OSes for example. You are not really locked in. Just use a different browser. It’s just web.

I'm just waiting to see which (non google of course) website will be the first that is "you must have WebIntegrityAPI enabled to use this website" ..

Switch to SerenityOS and use Ladybird ;)

(or build it for your favorite OS)

> stop using #Chromium / #GoogleChrome and use #Firefox or #Epiphany

> * The attempted sabotage of #JPEGXL: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/chrome

Remind me, does Firefox support JPEG XL?

It’s behind a flag for Nightly. Some Fx forks like LibreWolf allow enabling it even not on Nightly.

Sounds like the thing about "ad blocker sabotage" is about replacing the Web Request API with something called declarativeNetRequest. I've been sifting through documentation but have had trouble seeing why this is any kind of a downgrade for ad blockers. Can someone explain?

It removes the ability to run custom logic to decide whether a net request should be allowed to go through, switching Chrome to a system like Safari's where you can only declaratively specify what you would like blocked.

While Google claims it is a change they are making for security and performance, a lot of people are worried that it is actually intended to make ad blocking harder.

Chrome is the new IE, its become such a dominant thing people forget there's other web engines out there.

As soon as there's a monopoly on how the web is viewed, especially by a company who's best interest isn't in an open web, all bets are off on how they operate.

Browser wars tend to get preachy at times and border on religious fanaticism. Chromium is free to fork. That's the only thing that matters.

I'm not going to give up sweet convenience so that I can make a claim that am sticking it to the man. That's ridiculous.

Both Firefox and Chrome owe their existence to people who were religiously fanatical about building better browsers than the status quo. Without those people, you wouldn't have your convenience in the first place.

Whats to say history cannot repeat in this case?

These days browsers are good at following standards, but it's very important what's actually in the standards. There is potential for Google to use Chrome's market share to move the standards in a user hostile way.

Chromium being open source is good, but it's not everything.

> Chromium is free to fork. That's the only thing that matters.

Yet, we see browser after browser dropping their own engines and migrating to blink. The fact is, something being free to fork no longer means that it is practical to do so. These ostensibly open code bases are massive monoliths backed by morbidly bloated standards. It isn't practical for even big companies to fork and maintain. Aggravating this is the fact that these are developed primarily by just one company who rarely listens to its users and often silences them with CoC. Such code appear open, but not in spirit.

> Browser wars tend to get preachy at times and border on religious fanaticism.

> I'm not going to give up sweet convenience so that I can make a claim that am sticking it to the man. That's ridiculous.

People are calling for the use of any alternative due to an imminent threat to the open nature of the web. And yet, there are attempts like these to bill them as preachy and fanatic. It's not wrong to care about freedom! Convenience - if any (I don't feel inconvenienced on Firefox) - is no longer an excuse to neglect the seriously wrong turn the web has taken.

you won't be free to fork with WEI

only Google Chrome (and maybe Edge) will remotely attest

despite the open source nature: the world will be completely locked in

Can I sound a little whiny and say "the new Downloads experience"?

I'm a little peeved that the UX suddenly changed with no warning and I want my Downloads bar back, something I won't be allowed to have, because the Chromium team Said No.

AMP should be on this list

We need a way to directly fund firefox development: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-donate-money...

The attempted sabotage of #JPEGXL.

Well no one else is supporting or using that format, how come it is a sabotage?

If you read the Chromium bugtracker comments (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...) and see the messages of support from e.g. Facebook, Adobe, Intel, VESA, Krita, etc then I think it is quite clear that "no one else is supporting that format" is not quite a correct assessment of the situation.

For me, it's the tying of the new-tab page to your search engine choice. That's perhaps the most valuable real-estate in the browser; I just want it to be about:blank and not do any funny phoning-home stuff.

My entourage definitely is not impressed by any of these three obscure details of web development. I think they might have a hard time even grasping what the web platform is.

Unless a big enough competitor comes along, they'll not change.

The solution for the current web browser situation isn't another competitor. There will probably never be another big competitor. The reason is that merit isn't the primary reason how Chrome won the majority market share.

There was a twitter thread that I have been trying to dig up ever since the WEI debates began. It was from a Firefox developer who explained how Chrome managed to get its users. Many Google websites used to intentionally provide bad UX for months on Firefox compared to on Chrome. When Mozilla calls this out, Google devs would pretend that it's an honest mistake and would enable full performance on Firefox. However, many users would have ditched Firefox and migrated to Chrome by that time, never to return to Firefox again. These oopsies happened so many times.

How is any new competitor going to overcome the lack of cooperation from such huge services on the net? The problem really is that the users let themselves be manipulated. The solution here lies with the users, not the competitors.

> a twitter thread that I have been trying to dig up

https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871245021220875

> to explain why they should stop using #Chromium / #GoogleChrome and use #Firefox or #Epiphany as their main #web #browser

Or use Brave.

Why is brave shilled so much ? I don't think I recalled seeing as many ads from a browser other than brave. Using a browser that claims to be the new savior of the internet, "security and privacy focused", while being related to a crypto and heavily marketing their product... Meh.

It is my main browser in android. Never seen any add except some new stuff hard-coded. Yes there is something about crypto but I never used it. I am a pretty happy user. I don't understand why they market their product, I don't know any other alternative that blocks adds and is that fast on android.

Users concerned about security and privacy should use TOR. It is very useful to browse websites blocked in my country.

> while being related to a crypto

There is your answer

>Why is brave shilled so much?

It is the only good Chromium based browser. It is also open source unlike Vivaldi and Opera/Edge etc.

All the crypto shit can be turned off, annoying yes, but perfectly doable in the standard options menu.

Are you even aware that Brave uses Chromium basically? it uses Blink engine.

Near enough everyone here knows that. Are you even aware that Chromium is open source and Brendan Eich has said Brave won't be supporting WEI?

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1684561924191842304

Baby, bathwater, etc.

> The Brave Browser is built on the open-source Chromium Web core and our own client code is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 .

If you are on mac, you can use Orion, it’s written by the kagi team.

> Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser.

https://archive.is/yy2Yf

What's funny is the earliest seed of Chrome is ad blocking: the Google IE toolbar with popup blocker.

A "no-hire" list?

Are there any browsers better than firefox at the moment?

There are plenty of Gecko & WebKit forks out there if you don’t like what base Fx gives you.

At one point I thought jpeg XL was just jpeg 2000.

As of passing by: 666 points by luu 6 hours ago

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Firefox is unusable on Linux. Way too slow. But Brave browser is very snappy. It's the fastest chrome fork, and has great features, like vertical tabs, which have become essential to me.

> Firefox is unusable on Linux. Way too slow.

That may be true for you, but not in general. Perhaps there's something about your system configuration that it doesn't handle well.

Believe me, I want to use Firefox, but I've tried it on multiple PCs and a dozen different distros, and it is always significantly slower than chrome. I actually benchmarked startup time and page load times a few weeks back and found it was 2-3x slower. Since then Brave has gotten even faster.

Firefox on Linux is just fine, no idea what you are talking about. It is fine on Android, too (uBlock Origin!).

Have you compared it to other browsers? What distro do you use? I've benchmarked performance on Arch, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu and found that Firefox was 2-3x slower than most chrome forks.

I respect your individual experience, Firefox may be slow for you on Linux. It's not for me.

That being said, I don't believe this kind of performance is the deciding factor in choosing your web browser any more. All of them are doing at least "Okay" in browsing the web. Other things seem to be more important, at least to me. For example, Firefox (and Mozilla) are not without faults, but they surely are one of the few obstacles remaining to prevent a Chromium monoculture and a fall-back into IE4 times.

I've put up Firefox as my default for a long time. But the gap in performance is so big, now, that I find it painfully slow to use. Recommend you try the latest brave, just so you can see for yourself what performance is possible, and how much nicer it feels to have a snappy browser.

All Mozilla need do is fix the longstanding performance issues and they'll win me back.

Firefox is my daily driver as is Linux. It is perfectly performant.

From my experience hardware acceleration has been quite lacking on Ubuntu (especially noticeable when watching YouTube).

There was a time, some years ago, when Firefox on Linux had become very slow, so I had to switch to Chrome as my main browser.

Regardless which is my main browser, I have to keep both around, because they have different bugs, so there are rare cases with some sites that work well only with one of them.

A few months ago something happened with Chrome, which abruptly (after a version upgrade) has begun to start only after a very long and annoying delay. Perhaps it attempts to connect to some Internet address blocked by the firewall and it gives up only after a timeout.

In any case, this sudden slowdown of Chrome made me switch back to Firefox as my main browser, which is OK now, because Firefox on Linux has become fast again and it no longer has any noticeable speed difference vs. Chrome. Also some problems that Firefox had when playing YouTube videos have been solved.

I am only using Firefox on Linux (ok Chromium for some crappy Webex stuff) and it is working great.

Your problem may come from your hardware combination together with Wayland/X11.

How is it unusable? I've no issue with Firefox on Linux and you've got multiple options for vertical tabs (Sidebery, Tree Style Tab…).

I agree that chromium based browsers are significantly snappier on Linux than Firefox. I also switched to Brave from Firefox and I benchmarked them every once in a while to see if Firefox was improving. On a Mac Firefox seems to perform better, although still slower than Brave.

Firefox isn't unusable on Linux but it should have first class performance and it's a shame it does not.

Color me surprised, after having used firefox on linux exclusively for last twenty or so years. I think it's fast enough.

Firefox is usable on Linux. I'm using it right now, no problems.

This is just a list of antichrome rhetoric which isn't based off truths, but rather are propagated by people who hate Google.

>The "Manifest v3" sabotage of content blocking extensions:

Manifest v3 does not change anything that would sabotage content blocking extentions.

>The attempted sabotage of #JPEGXL

Chrome did not sabotage JPEGXL. The chromium team didn't think the format was worth supporting due to lack of broad interest and support costs. They recommend using a WASM based decoder if you would like to use JPEGXL.

>#WebEnvironmentIntegrity a.k.a. #DRM for whole websites would hurt the web, #opensource browsers and OSes

The current web is what you get when there is no environment integrity. The web is already hurting from bad actors. Adding signals attesting to environment integrity could help the web fight against the harms caused by bad actors. It isn't DRM either.

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