
We Need Chrome No More - kaishin
https://redalemeden.com/blog/2019/we-need-chrome-no-more
======
mapgrep
I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially
adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's
appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash
without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and
it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less
stable than they are today.

Luckily, Firefox, arguably among the most "free from corporate greed" of the
browsers, has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed (in my
experience), and is rapidly adding privacy and content blocking features and
defaults that Chrome lacks. If it were still behind Chrome technically, as it
was in 2008, it probably wouldn't matter that Mozilla is more trustworthy than
Google.

~~~
perlgeek
> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and
> could crash without taking down the entire browser.

Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the
javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working
JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled
some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled with.

There seems to be a bloat cycle with many products, browsers being one of
them. They start off lean, gain features over time, and then they are or feel
so heavy that a lean new competitor can feel like a fresh breeze.

Remember when Firefox was the fresh breeze, compared to the Netscape suite? I
remember Chrome being perceived the same way when it came out.

~~~
VBprogrammer
I'm surprised there aren't more people on here who moved to chome for the dev
tools. That is what moved me over there. Firebug was great in it's day but at
some point Chrome's dev tools just became too much better to make staying on
Firefox possible.

~~~
Aser
I'm not a professional web developer, but in the experience I've had building
a couple of JS heavy sites, I've actually found the Edge developer tools to be
the best. If there's one thing microsoft knows how to do well, it's build
developer tools.

~~~
groestl
> If there's one thing microsoft knows how to do well, it's build developer
> tools.

This is probably very subjective, but I can absolutely not relate to that.

~~~
davnicwil
Me neither. It may or may not be true in Edge, I've never tried, but it
absolutely wasn't true in _any_ IE so I wouldn't naturally expect it to be
true in Edge.

I certainly see where GP is coming from, Microsoft _do_ have an awesome legacy
in dev tooling that lives on to this day with products like VSCode, but
browser tooling might be the glaring exception to this - perhaps since
Microsoft never really was or became an 'internet' company.

------
dak1
Other browsers need to catch up to Chrome with their development tools. I'd be
happy to use Safari or Firefox for development, but...

\- I can't disable CORS in Firefox (yes, sometimes you have to disable CORS
rather than modify the Allow-Origin header response, for example if you need
to test against a production backend) (and, no, CORS Everywhere is not a
sufficient solution).

\- I can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome.

\- Safari does not allow self-signed certs over WSS (and there's no way to
override it).

\- Safari does not respect System-wide APC Config for Proxies.

There's a handful of other issues. Both Safari and Firefox do do things well,
and often better than Chrome. For example, Firefox tends to actually handle
standards correctly, whereas Chrome tries to be overly forgiving. And Safari's
Develop and Debug menus are easily the best and quickest way to disable CORS
or JavaScript, and examine service workers.

Unfortunately, some of the above issues are blockers.

I can test with Firefox on staging or in production, but not being able to
test up front during development really impacts compatibility testing.

If another browser was as good or better for development, I'd be happy to use
it.

~~~
fredsted
>\- I can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome.

For what it's worth, WebSockets show up as type 'Other' in the inspector, and
the frames are listed under 'Preview'.

Edit: Safari.

~~~
ken
It just says "WebSocket Connection Established", and then a list of "Binary
Frame". Is there a way to inspect their contents? Just seeing that frames are
being sent doesn't seem very useful for debugging.

~~~
eridius
I just tested Safari 12.0.3 on macOS 10.14.3 with
[https://websocket.org/echo.html](https://websocket.org/echo.html) and it
works for me. In the inspector it has a Sockets folder with the socket, and
when I select it, it shows the textual content of each frame.

Edit: This is of course textual frames. I don't know where to find a site that
demonstrates binary frames. I do notice that if I right-click the textual
frame it has "Log Frame Text" as an option; maybe with a binary frame you can
ask it to log the binary frame contents?

Edit 2: Ok I found a binary websocket test and unfortunately there is no
option to log the binary info. That sucks. I recommend filing a bug report at
bugreport.apple.com requesting better tooling around this. It's also worth
checking the Safari Technical Preview to see if they've already added any
better tooling.

------
TheRealPomax
The problem with these articles is that the recommendation always ends up just
preaching to the choir: people who already switched away from Chrome nod in
appreciation, but people who haven't switched literally get nothing out of
these posts to convince them to switch to what is basically the same
application made by a different company, with completely different conventions
on where everything is, without any concrete perceived benefits (security and
tracking are invisible problems, you don't sell someone on switching by saying
they won't have them anymore, no matter how important you think that is). And
to boot, the switch would almost certainly make things worse because add-ons
people relied on won't work and now you've burdened them with having to find
new and unfamiliar alternatives to what they were comfortable with.

Chrome's main problem isn't that it's overstayed its welcome and is strangling
the web (whatever you want that to mean), it's that it's so pervasive that
people have become accustomed to it to such a degree that you're now faced
with needing to convince people to give up what they're accustomed to. And
that's a _much_ harder sell. Using chrome needs to literally be a grating or
even damaging experience before someone will voluntarily switch to a different
browser.

~~~
Jldevictoria
I gave Firefox a solid test last year (about 3 months of dedicated use at work
+ home) and I ended up coming back to Chrome. There are some really great
things about Firefox. It has gotten so much better and faster than it was, but
Chrome still struggles less with troublesome websites, and seems to load all
pages faster overall.

I'm keeping my eye on Firefox, but Chrome still gets my business for now.

~~~
mbesto
Same here - made a switch and switched back quickly after.

1\. Compatibility - random sites would just break...I reckon 15% of the time

2\. Battery life - FF destroyed my battery life. To the tune of 8 hours on
Chrome vs like 2 on FF.

~~~
tempestn
Did you have add-ons in Firefox? I almost never have sites break—certainly not
anywhere near 15% of the time. And at least 95% of the time I've had issues in
the past, it has turned out to be an add-on causing problems, rather than the
browser itself. (Ad blockers would be the first thing to check in the case of
random breakages.)

------
Shank
I find posts like this kind of interesting. Chrome gained prominence because
it had great performance improvements over the competition -- IE and Firefox.
IE in particular was dog slow at all times, and Chrome ran everything at least
as well and almost always better. Firefox didn't have process isolation when
Chrome came onto the scene, and that kind of knocked it for security and
stability.

It's not as if people switched just because it had Google branding. Everyone
switched because it was quantifiably better. From benchmarks to design, Chrome
was a winner, and has enjoyed its success.

Now, Chrome is doing things that could be seen as "IE-like." Manifest v3 --
even with relaxed changes towards ad blocking -- will not necessarily enable
uBlock Origin to continue exactly as it does today. The forced user system is
another move in the direction of anti-consumer behavior.

I've tried to switch back to the competition. I'm using Firefox right now.
Pages render faster and compact mode is great. But Handoff myseteriously
doesn't work on my Mac when it does with Chrome (added in Firefox 65). I had
to enable U2F support with an about:config flag. I had to turn off the spell
checker to fight mysterious input latency in average textboxes.

I'm reluctantly staying because I ultimately like what I see, but there's an
undeniable truth somewhere in here. It's really hard for Firefox to match
Chrome simply based on resources. Google can drop millions of dollars on a
browser -- and few other companies can afford to do that. Certainly not
Mozilla.

~~~
TremendousJudge
>It's not as if people switched just because it had Google branding. Everyone
switched because it was quantifiably better.

The knowledgeable minority, maybe. _Most_ people switched because Google
pushed it like a piece of adware. Bundling it with other software installers,
prompting you to use it whenever you use Google search or other products, and
bundling it with an OS.

~~~
ng12
If that was the deciding factor we'd still be using IE.

~~~
ionised
No we wouldn't.

Microsoft was legally prevented from doing that, remember?

Why Google has been allowed to get away with it I have no idea.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> Microsoft was legally prevented from doing that, remember?

> Why Google has been allowed to get away with it I have no idea.

Wasn't Microsoft only legally prevented from doing that due agreements made
when they settled their antitrust case?

There needs to be another anti-trust case against Google, especially for the
cases where it's used its monopoly in search to push its other products like
Chrome, since that shouldn't even be controversial under current antitrust
interpretations.

------
jrochkind1
In retrospect the practical shifting of web-standards-setting from an at least
possibly neutral standards body representing multiple interests (W3C) to a a
body wholly controlled by browser-vendors (WHATWG)... may have been good for
speed of "innovation" for a time, but was in the long-term not good for the
"Web as an open platform."

> Making matters worse, the blame often lands on other vendors for “holding
> back the Web”. The Web is Google’s turf as it stands now; you either do as
> they do, or you are called out for being a laggard.

Indeed, I think it's the structural politics of WHATWG that make that hard to
counter. WHATWG was almost founded on the principles of "not being a laggard"
and "doing what we [browser vendors] do". When there were several browser-
vendors with roughly equal market power they could counter-balance each other,
and had an interest in compatibility with each other, but when there's an
elephant in the room...

That is, the W3C folks that were accused of "holding back the web" while
trying to keep standards-setting from going to WHATWG... were probably right.

You can disagree, but 10-15 years on, I think we're overdue a larger
discussion and retrospective evaluation of the consequences of the WHATWG
"coup". I haven't seen much discussion of this, many developers today may not
even be aware of the history.

------
dccoolgai
Other than AMP, I can't really think of a case that I would characterize as
"Google abusing its position" w.r.t. Open Web. It was Chrome that led the push
for PWAs, which I think is both great for the Open Web and consumers... The
author complains about other vendors being "called laggards", which - let's be
honest - we're really talking about how long Apple/Safari dragged their feet
on Service Workers... and they _should_ be called out for that because it was
an incredibly cynical thing to do to protect their walled App garden from the
Open Web.

~~~
lern_too_spel
It's laughable that the author suggests Apple as a viable alternative. Apple,
the last company pushing license encumbered formats into web standards. Apple,
the perennial laggard on standards support in general.

~~~
mattmanser
Probably because Apple take privacy seriously, which is a direct threat to
Google's bottom line.

~~~
brianpgordon
That's their PR position, but I don't see them taking privacy particularly
seriously in reality. They tolerated predatory behavior from darling apps like
Facebook for ages.

------
c-smile
The post is missing one simple point: the complexity of browser's engine.

The complexity of current web client stack is comparable with the average OS.
Any modern browser has all components of Android OS for example - internal
file systems, threads, VM, virtual native code execution, independent
windowing and graphics stack, message routing, etc.

That's like situation with Windows and WINE. Yes, you may run some win progs
on Wine but original Windows will always be better for them.

So we will have just one browser. That's the reality, want we that or not.

Until either one of these:

1\. The spec of Web Client will be reduced to bare minimum. With unified
extensions mechanism, think about <applet> but more flexible - based on
universal bytecode VM free from licensing issues.

2\. Or users will pay for the browser application, instead of having it for
free - giving up their private data instead of money. So browser vendors will
be able and motivated to provide better, privacy first browsers.

~~~
zackmorris
IMHO we got here because we chose the design-by-committee philosophy of
organizations like the W3C over more of a waterfall approach built from first
principles.

I would like to see a core HTML/CSS/Javascript spec that is a union of
features proven to be available and work consistently across all browsers. The
spec should incorporate ideas that are obvious in hindsight, such as the DOM
diffing optimizations in frameworks like React, or running each tab in its own
process.

I think that it should also take a broad perspective approach on things like
padding and margin. For example, use simpler abstractions from layout engines
like Qt or the layout-as-a-matrix-solver math behind iOS's Auto Layout
constraints.

Find the commonalities to give us a high-level abstraction over all the
div/span/table concepts of the web, then show a mapping from the abstraction
to the quirks of how a div flows, for example. Maybe we could allow one
transpiler to go from the solvable/predictable rules to the quirks of say
HTML5.

The steps in this process could be relatively tiny and easy to test. It should
render the DOM at > 60 fps on a Pentium 100 or equivalent, since games used to
do that before they even had OpenGL.

I don't see any step of this process that is intractable. Once we had that, it
should be relatively straightforward to build an open source browser as a base
spec implementation. This is the sort of thing I fantasized about working on
before I got so burned out.

~~~
bobajeff
I think we got here because of Martian Headsets:

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-
headsets/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/)

------
andrewla
Here's hoping. The proliferation of browser standards has made this appear a
more daunting task as time has gone by. There was a point where if you built a
good DOM, javascript engine, and a layout engine and had a reasonable ability
to fetch resources, you could bootstrap a browser. That's how Konquerer got
there.

But now, I think we're past that point -- if your browser can't do native
video conferencing and opengl and music apis and SVG animations and canvas
support it might as well be a steaming turd.

I'd love to see someone try; to build a browser with third-party cookies
excluded by design rather than policy (so that all off-domain fetches come
from a blank "incognito" context), to build a React-style shadow DOM as the
primary DOM and have the W3C DOM implemented as a polyfill, with client
certificates integrated more naturally, completely killing the notion of
allowing windows to open programmatically (I mean, how can pop-ups still be a
problem? Any sane site is now using on-page popups if they need the UX), and
some sort of model for integrating new web APIs and content handlers.

But combining all of that with a smooth and well-polished UI that works on
multiple platforms is rapidly becoming something that only a large software
corporation can pull off, and even there, mostly pull off badly. For now, I
think Chrome is here to stay.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I have a better idea: build a new browser for a new web that is designed with
decades of hindsight and isn't as bogged down in all the stupid legacy crap
that the current web is.

Then port Chromium to it as a portal to the legacy web.

~~~
cpeterso
The most popular browsers in China take a similar approach: they're hybrids of
Chromium and Microsoft's Trident engine for legacy pages that require NPAPI
plugins. Many ecommerce and banking websites in China require proprietary
NPAPI plugins so these hybrid browsers seamlessly switch to Trident for those
websites.

------
ken
> Within two years, Chrome accounted for 15% of all Web traffic on desktop—for
> comparison, it took Firefox 6 years to get there. Google managed to deliver
> a fast, thoughtfully designed browser that was an instant hit among users
> and Web developers alike.

It took 2 years for IE to get 20% [1], and I wouldn't describe IE 1-3 as "fast
and thoughtfully designed". I think the lesson here is simply that big tech
companies with an established channel for reaching users can boost market
share faster than open-source non-profit projects.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#/media/File:...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#/media/File:Internet-
explorer-usage-data.svg)

~~~
zanny
Immediately after Chrome released Google was having it bundled with every
freeware program under the sun and bribed every major PC vendor to start
including it as the default browser in new consumer Windows PCs being sold.

Mozilla never had the raw revenue to just dump millions into forcing Chrome
onto everyones desktop like that.

------
ressetera
It left a sour taste in my mouth that Microsoft joined Chrome instead of
investing in FireFox and helping them advance their multi-process architecture
quicker.

~~~
verdverm
Is having a Chromium "kernel" such a bad thing? We don't complain there isn't
sufficient competition for the Linux "kernel"

More eyes and hands on a single open source code base is better use of
resources and leads to a better output.

~~~
collinmanderson
I think the issue is that Google still has full control over the source. Maybe
we just need to pull an io.js on chromium, though Microsoft would need to be
on board.

------
carlosdp
> An ecosystem that doesn’t seem concerned with performance, user experience,
> privacy, or pushing computing forward.

What? Chrome was more performant that any browser at the time it was released
and it's still pretty good. It also became the gold standard for browser UX so
much so that all other browsers copied a lot of it. Chrome also brought with
it multi-process tabs and the V8 Javascript engine, how is that not "pushing
computing forward"?

------
jarjoura
This is such a fairytale retelling of history. Firefox was well on the way to
crushing IE. It was the whole reason Microsoft re-kick started IE development
again. Firefox was the dominant browser in 2008.

Safari was the browser pushing ahead on performance and being lightweight
except in JavaScript. So Google took WebKit and added their own JS engine to
it so that Gmail and their office suite could compete with Microsoft's
offerings.

It worked and all browsers started an arms race for JS performance.

~~~
bobajeff
Firefox was never the dominant browser. Neither was it on its way to crushing
IE. You my friend are recalling a fairytale.

~~~
pier25
Indeed: [http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
share#monthly-20090...](http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
share#monthly-200901-201902)

~~~
rovolo
From that source, it looks like the story depends on the region though (for
desktop). In order of decreasing use of firefox:

* Europe: Firefox overtook IE in 2011 with ~40%

* Africa: Firefox overtook IE in 2012 with ~40%. It looks like Firefox had the best chance of "crushing it" here.

* South America: Firefox overtook IE in 2015 with 12%. Peak was 32% in 2010

* Asia: Firefox overtook IE in 2016 with ~12%. Peak was 28% in 2011

* Oceana: Firefox overtook IE in 2017 with 12%. Peak was 32% in 2010

* North America: Firefox peaked at 30% in 2009 and was half as common as IE until 2015-2016. It still hasn't overtaken IE

~~~
pier25
Yeah but in most cases that happened during the rise of Chrome which could
suggest that Firefox didn't really overtake IE, but IE lost users to Chrome
and Firefox happened to lose less users.

Another point to reinforce this argument is that in many of those regions
Firefox peaked around 2010 and started losing users too.

------
robbrown451
I'd be thrilled to use another browser if they worked.

In my case, the feature that is missing from every other browser is MIDI
access. I can plug a digital piano into my computer, and Chrome can talk to
it. This is a standard, but the other browsers talk about it but never do
anything, it's been "coming any day now" in Firefox since 2015, when I first
conceived of the project ( [https://pianop.ly/](https://pianop.ly/), a web app
for playing piano along with original music videos from YouTube, karaoke
style). It sucks that I have to tell people to use Chrome or it won't work.
(although technically they can use Brave, Opera or other Blink based browsers)

Regardless of that one feature, I'm curious why there aren't better
alternatives based on Blink that allow you to get the Blink engine without all
these things we hate about Google's decisions (related to the being an ad
company, for one thing). I understand that we'd still have a monoculture, but
I don't see that as nearly the problem it was when browsers worked so
differently, for basic layout and such.

------
perfunctory
> Ten years ago, we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free from corporate
> greed

How? It never stops puzzling me why anyone thoght Chrome would be any
different. Somehow less corporate.

~~~
umvi
> How? It never stops puzzling me why anyone thoght Chrome would be any
> different.

It _is_ different! Microsoft never released even a single line of IE. Chromium
on the other hand is completely open source, and we have that to thank for all
the fun things that came of it from VSCode, to Brave browser, to Puppeteer.
Things are WAY better now than in the dark IE days.

------
throwaway66666
If anyone's to blame it's mozilla's criminal laziness. There I said it. We
were stuck with firefox 3 for 3 years (early 2008-2011), on a time where
chrome was getting a +1 version every month or 2 months.

I remember Mozilla "evangelist" employees hard at work, tweeting "version
doesn't matter, it's the changelog that matters, chrome team could have
changed two background colors and did +1 to the version counter".

Great battle move. Then, Firefox 4 got released and everyone hated the new
interface. Even ex-mozilla cofounder JWZ complained that it feels beta even
though it's a fully mature product out for a decade now and that's
unacceptable. Also, No mp4 support. Oh yeah. They added it in Firefox 20
finally (then no webm support. They finally added it in January 2019. Good
job)

In the meantime, Mozilla engineering kept fooling around with projects that
went nowhere. Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that? THE JAVASCRIPT
PHONE! FLASH TO JS CONVERTER, where is that now? That JS only Video Codec
ORBX.js? that Eich said "I saw the future today" 10 years ago, and it's still
not out yet. PDF JS (in it's first release made opening large PDF files on
Firefox impossible) etc etc. Many good things came of from it too, like asmjs
(ancestor of wasm), but in general there seemed a direction of everywhere,
neither arriving here nor there.

Mozilla then switched the default search engine of Firefox to Yahoo! At a time
when Yahoo was in the spotlight for rapidly dying and looking for a pity-
acquisition!! It also came bundled with great bugs that kept resetting the
default search engine back to yahoo - [https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/questions/1206101](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1206101)

To give praise where praise is worth, Mozilla did realize their mistakes got
back from their 9 year vacation (2009-2018) and Firefox today is finally very
stable and relatively fast compared to Edge and Safari.

I know I am sounding trollish and bitter, but the truth is that I am just sad
at how Firefox fell. What happened? Did people get lazy as their savings grew?
Where key individuals poached away by Google and Apple? Did they burn out?
Something surely must have happened...

~~~
PrototypeNM1
Addressing your entire post would require further research on my part so I
hope you'll excuse that I only address what I can recall off the top of my
head.

> Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that?

That's just the code name for Firefox for Android. Ime it's fairly pleasant to
use since flick scrolling was improved, and browser plugins on mobile are the
selling feature.

> FLASH TO JS CONVERTER

Definitely sad to see Shumway die, but I think in retrospect it will be clear
it was a forward thinking decision. WASM will obviate a lot of the effort for
what has clearly become a historical feature.

> Mozilla did realize their mistakes got back from their 9 year vacation
> (2009-2018)

The origin of modern Firefox could be dated back to the origin of Servo in
2012 since it layed all the groundwork. I think this is the clear turning
point in Mozilla's refocus, maybe push it back to 2015 when Firefox OS was
dropped.

~~~
throwaway66666
Thanks for commenting. My comment was meant to to be slightly exagerated but
since your response is grounded, I 'll rephrase mine too :)

The evangelist tweets (I won't dig them because it's not cool) are 100% real,
but keep in mind they were meant to be humorous and not official stance.

Firefox 3 got released in 2008, but firefox 3.5 (arguably the best browser at
the time) was released a year later. Mozilla released many firefox updates in
the meantime I believe they did so even after firefox 4 was released (no
forced update from 3.5 to 4).

Firefox 4 was delayed to my understanding due to the whole html5 hype and
trying to support as many of the new standards as possible (this info is from
twitter so it might be wrong).

Lots of projects in limbo, not much different than google pushing NaCl, Dart,
webkit prefixes. It looks bad only when paired with the general low activity.
There were some chat logs leaked of mozilla people talking about adding webkit
prefix support to firefox. Some where getting very angry over this. Today
firefox supports the webkit prefixes :p must have been a multi-year argument.

Lack of mp4 support was due to MPEG LA owning the rights to h264. Mozilla
didn't wanna pay the patent owners, in the end cisco created openh264 and
mozilla used that, in 2014 nonetheless. Webm was not added because it wasn't a
web standard. In my opinion both h264 and webm events got dealt in poor
judgement but whatever.

The Yahoo change was due to an expensive multi-year contract between Mozilla
and Yahoo. Money before users. I remember people defending it by saying that
yahoo search is powered by Bing, not by yahoo themselves.

In general mozilla used to be this awesomely perceived company... no not
company, foundation! They organized things like place giant firefox stickers
in your city and gain online fame, and sending a cake to the IE team with
every major release they did. Spearheaded the whole open web movement. It was
Richard Stallman with Charisma 10! And then.. kinda suddenly stopped and
became more like the Apache Foundation. Cool and all but slow and old.

------
umvi
> developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and
> bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship.

That's me. Sorry, but I just can't be bothered to support every browser's
quirks. I check Firefox every once in a while, but really, I don't mind losing
a few users if it means significantly less maintenance and testing for me.

It's like complaining that developers are increasingly shunning other OSes -
if it works on Windows, it's ready to ship. Yet people do this all the time
for video games and most Linux users understand that making a game that runs
equally well on Windows _and_ Linux _and_ Mac is no simple task.

~~~
hashhar
Developing against Chrome is exactly "support every browser's quirks" instead
of developing against the actual standards (usually Firefox has the truest
implementation of which).

~~~
dx034
But as a web developer I don't necessarily care about standards. I want the
page to work for as many users as possible. For the longest time this meant to
support IE's way of doing things, now it means to support Chrome (unless you
target Enterprise users).

Even if you develop for Chrome, Firefox and Edge you'll just end up building
workarounds for all 3, not adhering strictly to the standard.

~~~
Blaiz0r
Sorry to break this to you, but as a web developer you should only care about
standards, otherwise you have no standards.

The standards are a single source of truth for your production, if you build
solely to a single browsers quirks (in this case Chrome) then those quirks can
change at any time.

~~~
ng12
My standard is the browser ~95% of my users use. It's the only meaningful one.

I still fix FF bugs when they come in (it seems to be a bigger offender than
IE recently) but developing for Chrome first is the only approach which makes
business sense.

~~~
robin_reala
95%? I haven’t seen less than 20% mobile Safari on any site I’ve worked on in
the last few years, and that’s not even including Edge / IE / Firefox and
desktop Safari.

~~~
kkarakk
only true in american markets

~~~
robin_reala
I was actually talking about UK and Sweden (haven’t been to the US in 15
years).

~~~
kkarakk
what's the difference? these countries are basically american markets,
everything west of belarus is kinda a software monoculture

------
NotANaN
There is an important difference between Google and Microsoft. Google is using
their market dominance to push their opinions on the open standards bodies;
Microsoft used their market dominance to ignore standards bodies completely.

~~~
TicklishTiger
Googles browser offers functionality to Googles websites that it does not
offer to any other website.

When you log into an Google owned site, it interacts with the browser so that
you are 'logged into your browser' with that Google account.

That is not pushing standards into a direction. That is blatant exploitation
of ther market position.

~~~
fastball
You're already logged into sites you're already logged into.

I'm not exactly sure how advantageous you think this is.

~~~
Technetium_Hat
Yeah, all that really happens is that it shows your profile picture, and
autofills passwords, when it detects the google login cookie. Nothing that
other browsers couldn't implement themselves.

~~~
jessaustin
For what sites would other browsers do this? Would those browsers be paid by
those sites?

------
kowdermeister
I don't particularly like the manifesto style of this post. The author
attempts a hard sell by first admitting that the world needed Chrome and then
after it succeeded he suggests throwing it to the depths after the wish came
true.

> Chrome is effectively everywhere you look. And that’s bad news.

Why? It's the dream you wanted 10 years ago, but it comes with Google now.
Ooops for you if you dislike Google, but the vast majority of people doesn't
care. Use Safari, Firefox or anything, but calling out ditching Chrome is for
the greater good is ridiculous.

H mentions 60% as a dominant position which is not how I would describe it in
my dictionary.

~~~
MivLives
Realistically, would we have cared if IE was everywhere if it wasn't garbage
in supporting web standards?

I'm not arguing for a lack of competition. It's just that someone needs to be
on top of the heap. Might as well be a company that's invested in having their
pages load fast rather than an OS maker with no incentive to improve their
browser.

I wish Google would go back to funding Mozilla like they used to. At one point
they were 90% of Mozilla's revenue.

~~~
kowdermeister
> Realistically, would we have cared if IE was everywhere if it wasn't garbage
> in supporting web standards?

No, I would have been perfectly happy if IE was a developer friendly,
standards compliant browser, but they created a huge opportunity by ignoring
this. I remember when I was super excited for a little floating JavaScript
debug tool that you had to include in HTML and you could inspect variables
without alerting them. I was amazed by it :)

> I wish Google would go back to funding Mozilla like they used to.

I think that's still the case:

[https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-
gives-m...](https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-
mozilla-more-money-to-push-privacy/)

------
aeturnum
As others have said here, I think the article mischaracterizes why
stakeholders were enthusiastic about Chrome back in the day. It was a
technically compelling browser which joined Firefox in pushing web standards
in a way that Microsoft (and Apple) wouldn't.

I think the dominance of Webkit is concerning, but I don't think we can reuse
the justifications of ten years ago to say why. Chrome continues to be
technically strong (though perhaps not as much) and continues to push web
standards (though perhaps too many supporting Google). The situation just
isn't as bad today as it was. There is a lot less friction in the everyday
experience of developers and users who want to use cutting-edge web standards.

Monoculture is bad, but it's hard to get people excited about challenging it
when the monocultural product isn't awful.

------
cletus
Chrome (from the consumer POV) wasn't about freeing us from "corporate greed".
It was about:

\- Isolating tabs

\- Seamless upgrades (seriously, why does Firefox STILL ask on startup if I'd
like to wait and install an update?)

\- Syncing between devices

\- Performance (which at the time was largely terrible)

Most of this still holds true, at least for me, so I see myself using Chrome
for years to come.

------
fixermark
> If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship

A great step Firefox could take in this space is improving the transparency
and performance auditing of its own engine. Debugging rendering performance
issues between browsers is still an absolute nightmare. If Firefox can provide
a better developer experience than Chrome, it might increase the likelihood
that web developers would use FF as their first-choice development platform
for simplicity and utility of tools. If it doesn't, it may still decrease the
odds that when faced with a nasty performance bug, developers will throw up
their hands and say "Chrome does it right; I guess FF still just sucks for
performance in this corner case."

FF has been making impressive strides in this space, but their toolchain still
feels clunky and slow relative to Chrome Developer Tools.

~~~
guitarbill
I'm pretty sure this is a commentary on the laziness of devs/why browser
dominance is bad for standards, when taken in context:

> The dominance of Chrome has a major detrimental effect on the Web as an open
> platform: developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their
> testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s
> ready to ship.

When you're following decently established standards (not bleeding edge), it's
usually Chrome that breaks now, not Firefox or Safari. Chrome truly is the new
IE.

~~~
fixermark
I haven't personally encountered this phenomenon. Can you give an example of
an established standard that breaks on Chrome but FF / Safari handle?

~~~
guitarbill
Indeed I can, although one anecdote does not data make. The latest was using
SVG sprites as background in CSS I think. Maybe I can throw up a demo during
my lunch break, but honestly it isn't that exciting. It just doesn't work
correctly in Chrome, the sprite is cropped/has a weird rendering artifact.

------
mixedCase
Weird flex suggesting Vivaldi, given that it's proprietary and there are other
open source Chromium forks.

~~~
iosonofuturista
Could you recommend some? From a quick search all I could find were things
like Opera, Torch, Epic etc, which do not seem to be open source.

I must I am quite happy with Vivaldi at the moment, but a true open source
browser would make me even happier.

I did try to use Firefox Developer Edition for a while, but despite being a
step in the right direction, I must say I prefer the chromium developer tools.

~~~
mixedCase
I'm using the Brave developer channel on one of my machines. It's working
well. Like Chromium, but without the creepier Google parts that had still
managed to get their way in. I also like their theme a little better. Dark,
and a little more compact.

~~~
gnicholas
I’ve been doing the same. I noticed that their public release is now also
chromium based, so I was going to switch over to that. Unfortunately, there’s
currently no way to port browsing history, etc from Brave dev, only from prior
versions of Brave, or other browsers.

------
zwaps
Man, I can remember when Google was still an up-and-coming, underdog-ish and
exciting tech company, where working was cool and people and "do not evil" was
enshrined.

I was really happy and excited whenever Google announced something new,
because it was always so diverse, new, clever and somehow helped the world.

Now things have taken a complete 180 degree turn. Google has become an ad
company, and any innovation serves only to squeeze a little bit more data out
of users. "Don't be evil" got deleted, and Google indeed seems to actively
embrace "be evil". They are not even arguing with it anymore - anything that
serves to close down the web, force tracking, breaches of privacy and so on...

What changed in google? Any insiders? Just greed? Did important people leave?

------
fossuser
I try to switch to Firefox (or even Safari) every few months or so.

Firefox was close this time, but there were still a few things that forced me
to switch back:

\- On Chrome I can type 'thisisunsafe' (previously 'danger' and 'badidea') to
skip security warnings, sometimes I have to do this at work when testing
things with invalid certs. On FF there's a class of these issues (HSTS I
think?) that doesn't let you bypass the warning so it's unusable.

\- FF still crashes more regularly (like when plugging or unplugging an
external monitor.

Thankfully the other two main issues are no longer a problem:

\- FF is now fast enough to be comparable

\- The third party extensions I required (switchy omega) now exist for FF.

~~~
brianpgordon
Yeah that HSTS issue is ridiculous, although to be fair the spec requires
browsers to give users "no recourse" to bypass the error. I'm also still
annoyed by
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85601](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85601)

------
lxe
> Ten years ago, we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free from corporate
> greed

Firefox already did this. We needed Chrome because Firefox lagged behind in
performance and was a memory hog.

~~~
closetohome
Oh right, that's why I switched to Chrome. At the time Firefox had that horrid
memory leak that would consume gigs of RAM if you left a tab open long enough.

------
wespiser_2018
Where we are now, it's not hard to look at Chrome in a negative light, for all
the reasons the article states. However, I still remember where I was when I
first saw the Chrome "speed test" ad, and thought "wow, this is what a browser
should be!
[https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/film/google_chrome_speed...](https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/film/google_chrome_speed_tests)

------
_cs2017_
Hypothetically speaking, suppose we didn't care about privacy at all. In that
case, what are the disadvantages of a single browser engine taking over the
market?

I suspect one disadvantage is that it's harder to innovate. Specifically, your
new browser engine has no hope of sticking if all websites are heavily
customized to Blink, rather than to open standards. It may seem that it's not
a problem if Blink is open sourced. However, writing a new engine that works
_exactly_ like some legacy engine is nearly impossible, even if that legacy
engine is open sourced. OTOH, writing a new engine to the specifications of
well-designed standards is much more realistic, since presumably those
standards are (a) clearly spelled out, (b) written with the idea that they can
be implemented without a million lines of legacy code.

Of course, this assumes that the community _can_ create high quality and
efficient standards. It's not obvious, given how difficult it's been to
achieve in the past, when there was more competition between browsers.

Does it sound about right? Any other disadvantages I haven't thought of?

~~~
briffle
The vendor will make decisions that are not in your interest, but in theirs.
have you have tried to install an ad-blocker in chrome mobile? they just work
in firefox mobile, and in both desktop browsers, but not in chrome mobile.
(unless you do some very weird things with rooting your phone, using VPN
providers, etc)

Without using an ad-blocker, if I use chrome mobile on my older phone
(original Pixel), any time I browse a web site, the whole phone appears to
lock up for a few seconds, it starts getting warm, and then a whole page ad
appears over the web-site, and half the time clicking the X in the corner
loads up the ad in a new tab...

~~~
_cs2017_
Ah yeah good point, ads isn't only a concern for privacy reasons but also for
performance/annoyance reasons.

I personally expect that, for purely selfish business reasons, Chrome will
eventually kill all ads that are especially annoying or cause performance
issues. But you're right, situations where vendor and user interests are at
odds may always come up.

~~~
newscracker
> I personally expect that, for purely selfish business reasons, Chrome will
> eventually kill all ads that are especially annoying or cause performance
> issues.

What I expect is that Chrome will be designed to block all non-Google ads
alone, so that Google doesn’t get affected. Google/Chrome then becomes the
gatekeeper for what constitutes a decent ad for users. That would then arm
twist publishers to switch to Google AdSense because that would be the only
one providing revenues (or more revenues). Advertisers would then see their
CPM/CPC costs increase, and they wouldn’t have many other choices. That would
increase prices for consumers. I recall seeing stats recently that Google
(still) is the largest in online advertising, with Facebook being second.

We’ve seen this kind of behavior before with Adblock Plus and the “acceptable
ads” scheme.

There’s almost nothing to gain for the users. It will always drift (and only
faster, with a monopoly) to satisfy the interests of the company.

~~~
_cs2017_
> What I expect is that Chrome will be designed to block all non-Google ads
> alone, so that Google doesn’t get affected.

I assume you meant:

> What I expect is that Chrome will be designed to leave Google ads alone, so
> that Google doesn’t get affected.

I agree with your analysis, but I'm surprised with your conclusion. I think if
there's a monopoly that decides which ads are decent, it will cause the
overall level of the ads to be higher, which is better for users - at no extra
cost to them.

My rationale (and I'm very interested in the opposite opinion, if you're
willing to explain it) is this. A monopoly has too much to lose from
frustrated or unhappy users. If too many people become too angry, they'll
eventually cause a major damage to the ad industry through political action,
greater popularity of ad blockers, people avoiding websites with too many ads,
or people becoming desensitized to ads (leading to a dramatic reduction in ad
value). A small company won't really care if its ads damage the industry --
it's not there for a long run, it just needs to push its products and long-
term effects are something it worries about. A (near-)monopoly that controls
20-30% or more of the market worth $100B's a year is going to be really,
really careful about even the slightest damage to the industry.

As to your other point, CPM/CPC costs are not dictated by Google. It's a
marketplace with supply provided by publishers, and demand created by
advertisers. Google influences the prices by choosing the auction rules and by
saying which ads are acceptable, but any large shift in prices can only happen
from a change in supply/demand. So I'm not sure why you think a monopoly would
cause a rise in CPC. If anything, a monopoly would make the marketplace more
efficient, taking out intermediaries who take a big cut, and lead to lower
prices (as for example happened with Amazon in online retail).

------
quacked
It's bizarre to see the number of comments on this thread adamantly insisting
that Chrome became and stayed popular because of an ad campaign. I was a high
school student when Chrome was released. I saw an ad for it, downloaded it,
and found that it was much faster and much cleaner-looking that Firefox, so I
stayed with it.

------
shoulderfake
Whenever Firefox comes out with a new version I try to use it for a week and
realize it just doesn't perform as well as Chrome. Theres always one or two
sites like twitch where it just LAGS to death whereas in Chrome its smooth as
butter. At this point I just go back to it. Sigh...

~~~
ionised
Are you using mostly Google pages or services? That might explain why Firefox
runs worse.

Anecdotally, of the three browsers I have on my dev machine Chrome is the
biggest resource hog.

~~~
rhlsthrm
Resource hog != lag.

The reason Chrome doesn't lag is probably due to the fact that it uses so much
RAM. I personally use Safari because of the OS integration but for some sites
I do have to fire up Chrome just for performance.

------
ridiculous_fish
Google still pushes Chrome very aggressively. Gmail shows a popover
advertising Chrome when I log in. It also puts Chrome ads in security alerts
about new logins (!!).

[https://imgur.com/a/eAOCL3J](https://imgur.com/a/eAOCL3J)

------
tschellenbach
Chrome is just a better browser. Also, Google already has all my information,
so who better to trust with my browsing history?

Firefox has >10% market share, it's not like anybody can ignore 10% of users.
So this article to me sounds like pure content marketing for Firefox.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Article recommends Vivaldi and Safari too.

------
jklinger410
Let me know when Firefox stops being an insane resource hog and I will switch.

~~~
kabwj
Now you’ll receive dozens of responses of people saying that Firefox is much
faster and leaner than Chrome for them. But that’s not the case for me or
anybody I know. Chrome continues being faster for me.

~~~
rootusrootus
It performs okay (except for a few versions a while back when the helper
processes would periodically lock up in kernel mode and it would take a reboot
to fix), but 980MB of memory to have one tab open to Hacker News is definitely
not lean.

------
xenadu02
Firefox and Safari broke IE's dominance of the web. Chrome came along much
later.

Safari killed flash in favor of HTML 5.

How quickly everyone likes to forget.

------
remir
Do we know why Google grew dissatisfied with Apple and forked Webkit?

~~~
ams6110
Do we know why Google grew dissatisfied with sites serving their own content
and developed AMP?

~~~
fastball
Because sites serving their own content were generally slower, and slower load
times means fewer ad clicks.

Google making the web faster is a mutually beneficial arrangement.

------
freedman1611
Look, some misguided individuals seem to hate Chromium because they think it
doesn't respect their privacy or out of abject hatred for Google. But a lot
are not actually looking from an engineering point of view. Browser's are the
1# security risk on any computer system due their complexity and access to the
outside world. Chromium was the first (and mabye only) web browser that was
designed from the ground up with privsep in mind. Firefox on the other hand
did not have privsep for a long time, it was only implemented later after the
fact. Not only that, Chromium now supports unveil, and new security innovation
that blocks the browser's access to all files folders on the system except for
what specified in settings.

------
drilldrive
As a user (non-developer), I never trusted Chrome and never installed it onto
my computer. Half of that was laziness, but the other half was understanding
that Chrome is driven by ad-revenue and so privacy options would be severely
sub-optimal, at least compared to Firefox.

------
johnmarcus
yeah....Apple, thats the solution to ending corporate ownership of the web.
:smacks head:

------
newsgremlin
I almost regret invariably suggesting chrome in every conversation back when
IE was leading, such is hindsight.

Perhaps instead of telling people what to use we should be telling them how to
use, or more accurately how to change. Once people are invested in a platform
or service it's hard to get them to change their mindset, especially over
issues taken for granted like privacy.

There's a lot more attention to social media on the same issue of privacy,
this would be the ideal time to bring chrome into this discussion to work on
the 'detachment', self-imposed roadblocks, logging out, deleting apps,
disabling notifications.

------
amiga-workbench
I'm afraid we are all way too far down the slippery slope here, you've piled
so much garbage into web standards its no longer possible for any new players
to enter the game without an unreal amount of financial backing.

------
zmix
Should someone dare the major task of writing a new web browser, please, make
it fully XML aware, so, as to be able to use it as just another component in
an XML pipeline, for rendering.

A setting to convert all HTML to XHTML. This would allow easy XPath queries
while browsing, then XPath 3.1 support, XSLT 3.0 support, XML Catalogs and
XQuery in the browser would be cool as well. I am aware, that this is _lots_
of work, but it would be nice to have something, that keeps the document
centric web alive, and does not play to the rumor web, that we have become.

------
exodust
> _" developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and
> bug-fixing routines..."_

Not me. I use Chrome to briefly test my builds, then close it and get the hell
out of there.

I don't know why developers didn't or don't see the conflict of interest with
a Google branded browser. I was unsettled by this from the moment they
released the browser. Google uses manipulative design patterns as much as any
of the big guns. Chrome is not immune to those efforts to manipulate user
behavior for business agenda reasons at every tick.

------
lucideer
If the desired effect is to make people consider not using Chrome, painting
Chrome's origins in such rose-tinted light is unlikely to achieve that.

Google engaged in exclusionary "embrace-extend-extinguish"-esque tactics from
a very early stage in Chrome's life, and on web properties that predated
Chrome's public launch in their development. Painting Chrome as "break[ing]
the Web free from corporate greed" is a pretty disparaging insult to those who
genuinely have worked for years to try and do that.

------
carapace
FWIW, something like 80% to 90% of Mozilla's income comes from Google. The
non-naive interpretation is that Mozilla/Firefox is a _figleaf_ over Google's
hegemony.

------
untangle
I did not find the author's points very compelling wrt the "we need chrome no
more" link-baity title. Clearly, many users -- mostly devs -- do need Chrome.

But more importantly I think that articles such as this deflect from the real
abuse-of-power that Google wields and that's in advertising. Google can and
has shut down whole businesses by withholding access to its ad platforms. I'm
not sure that Google has ever hurt anybody by denying access to Chrome.

------
3xblah
"We Need Chrome No more" appeared on HN five months ago, and there was a
comment that confirmed there is interest in an alternative search engine
written by djb.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053163)

It was obviously a joke as no one serious about text-only browsing would
suggest lynx over the alternatives (w3m, links, links2, etc.)

------
zepearl
Am I the only one on the planet that never had stability nor speed problems
with Firefox?

(e.g. on Linux when I start Firefox it displays all tabs, but it
refreshes/loads only the "last"/current tab - other tabs are refreshed/loaded
only if I switch to them. On the other hand when I start Chrome, all tabs are
refreshed/downloaded immediately, and all of them start running their code
whatever it is)

------
KangLi
Edge: Hi I'm Edge, I'm better than IE. User: I dismiss you on the fact that
your icons look identical. Edge: But wait Im diff.......

------
konart
> They are even noticeably ahead in areas such as performance, battery usage,
> privacy, and security.

Privacy - maybe.

Security? I doubt it. Google does a lot for Chrome to stay safe.

Performance adn battery usage? Safari works only on once OS it is build for,
so there is really no contest, Firefox on the other hand is still a great way
to stresstest your CPU. At least on macOS.

Firefox user for many years.

------
SomeHacker44
I would love to switch from Chrome to FF on my daily driver but I rely on the
multi-profile thing that has no analog in FF. My work windows are separate
from my personal ones, and I have different work windows for each company. Of
course each is themed differently too, so I know at a glance which I’m in.

~~~
kevyin
Firefox multi account containers.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/containers](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers)

~~~
SomeHacker44
I did investigate that, but it does not really work for my workflow. I
literally want a window locked to a container, and all tabs in that window in
exactly one, that container, and with each one with a different set of
plugins, etc.

The plugin thing is really important so I can have some windows testing sites
with different ad blockers and such.

------
roystonvassey
The only reason I use Chrome is because I have a chromecast and they only
allow Chrome to native cast

------
ignoramous
It isn't about developer tools anymore than it is about privacy or the open-
web. Sadly, just like with IE6, Chrome is the default pre-installed browser in
most used handheld OS. Plus, it is in-your-face-advertised on the front page
of world's most popular website, in case you don't happen to have it installed
on a Mac or a PC.

There's very little individuals can do to reverse the trend, short of websites
and OEMs coming together to start reversing Chrome's stranglehold in an
unified campaign (which doesn't seem likely).

The fall of IE6 was due to innovation from Mozilla and Google putting it's
weight behind Firefox... What could Safari/Firefox do now? Get all or several
of Microsoft/Facebook/Amazon/Apple on-board? Investment from these companies
is the only way I see out, frankly, if history is any indicator (OpenStreetMap
vs GMaps).

That said, tech needs to keep improving and so Firefox Quantum was a great
first step in the right direction, imo.

------
arnaudsm
As someone that loves clean UI and blink's speed, is Chromium a trustworthy
alternative ?

------
Aldo_MX
I'll write an unpopular opinion:

1\. Developer's time is not a commodity. The time you spend testing in
alternative browsers is time you can spend in tasks that will make life less
painful to the people who work with you such as writing tests, documentation,
or new code.

2\. A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does
not exist. The business should be the one who dictates which browsers should
be supported, and it should be a rational decision based on data such as
reviewing your own analytics. Nobody has infinite resources.

3\. Using a website is a privilege, not a right. The same way you are free to
choose your favorite browser, a website owner is free to choose which users to
serve, the same way we can say "Are you still using IE8 in 2019? tough luck
buddy, the site is broken", we can also say "Sorry dude, I didn't care enough
to support Firefox because X feature was broken".

4\. When you as a user decide to choose Firefox because "my ideological
reasons", you are also choosing to deal with the negative aspects such as
broken websites, broken extensions, lack of features, loss of mindshare, etc.,
etc., if you don't like dealing with them the alternative is pretty simple:
Use Chrome, that's what the end users do anyway.

The reason Chrome has gained lots of mindshare is because we all love
convenience, and there are less-painful alternatives to push the "we don't
like Google" agenda such as forking Chromium. The "we don't track you" is a
huge competitive advantage against Google, why should you give up everything
that Chromium does right? The resources that Mozilla spends maintaining Gecko
could be used more intelligently to build for example a security team to
alleviate the concern of having a huge common attack area.

Wasn't "test once, run everywhere" the holy grail? Or now we like O(N) instead
of O(1)?

~~~
btmiller
> A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not
> exist

I think the only scenario where that's acceptable is experimental/nightly
features that haven't yet made their way to the majority of browsers.

> Using a website is a privilege

Some would dispute that. My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical
branches. Is it considered a privilege to access my funds via website?

~~~
Aldo_MX
> My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical branches. Is it considered a
> privilege to access my funds via website?

Glad you made this question. I'm a customer from BBVA and years ago, when
Opera recently launched its Chromium-based fork I got a nag: You're using an
unsupported browser

I was infuriated: "How the f*ck are you targeting the new Opera?!?!?!?! I
mean, even the user agent looks like Chrome, to display this nag you had to
explicitly target the new Opera WTF?!?!?!"

Now I ask you the following question: Can you access your bank account with
Lynx? Curl? Where do you draw the line between which browsers to support?

Where do you draw the line between telling a user "Use Chrome" or having the
user to complain at your call center because the website broke specifically in
Brave browser? (pretty unlikely but not unrealistic scenario)

Years ago many banks and government agencies even required you to install Java
to access their service. So yeah, it is a privilege to access your funds in a
non-supported mean, if you complain at their call center they'll probably tell
you "just use Chrome", or "install the Android app", or a similar alternative.
If a bank thinks it is a competitive advantage to let you access in Mosaic,
then it will push their development team to support even Mosaic.

------
nadim
No mention in this thread so I'm just going to throw this out there,
qutebrowser is an excellent choice in 2019:
[https://www.qutebrowser.org](https://www.qutebrowser.org)

------
writepub
There certainly is a danger of monopolization with chrome garnering an
overwhelming majority of user share. However, I'm yet to see the negative in
testing with chrome and shipping (assuming you're only using W3C APIs), as
most of the time, chrome is fully compliant with W3C, and other browsers
simply aren't. Apple is the worst, most guilty of the others, that
purposefully cripples iOS Safari to goad users and developers towards the app
store. Microsoft probably intended to be fully W3C compliant with Edge, but
for whatever reason, they always lagged. And with Mozilla/Firefox, it's always
an obtuse, unreasonable argument when they don't comply, they claim it to be
in the best interest of the open web, but it is usually a philosophical, more
than technical opposition.

------
marcrosoft
I agree with the author's sentiment but Chrome/chromium is just so much better
than the alternatives. I've tried to switch to Firefox many times and always
came back.

They seem to be doing something right.

------
dade_
Chrome is the new IE all over again. Remember that it was IE that saved us
from Netscape's slow performance and advancements of new web technologies.

Jump ahead 20 years, low an behold Google Earth - Chrome only!

------
revskill
Chrome has some great extensions now: Great Suspender is one of the best.
Before Chrome killed my computer with too many tabs, now it's fine! Chrome is
the best product of Google to me.

------
jonotime
Out of curiosity, what Google Apps work better in Chrome? I use plenty of
Google services entirely in Firefox and have never had problems. I only fire
up chrome when using Chromecast.

------
redsavagefiero
Never liked Chrome, but I liked Google as an idea once upon a time.

------
ravieira
Yet Another Post Against Chrome. Yes it's bad and it spies on us but it's also
damn good for web development and so far I've found no decent replacement :)

------
babkayaga
> we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free Maybe true for the author. But
> most people use Chrome to browse the web.

------
charliedevolve
When I upgraded to FF 60.0.2 the energy use on my Mac went off a cliff. Maybe
you should try re-creating your FF profile?

------
stackzero
Harvey Dent put it best- "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To
See Yourself Become The Villain"

------
bbb91
Profiles are the only thing stopping me moving to Firefox right now. They're
so easy to use on Chrome.

~~~
timw4mail
Container tabs don't require new windows for that cookie/account separation.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/containers](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers)

------
gedassan
Firefox Dev tools Network tab still does not allow to resize columns. It's why
I hate to use them...

------
turdnagel
OP - the footnotes seem to be reversed.

------
acjohnson55
I'm an avid Firefox user, but I just can't ignore the fact that it's way less
performant. Consequently, I use it for my personal life, but when it comes to
all the web apps I need for work, I have to go with Chrome, or my computer
slows to a crawl. I keep fairly extreme numbers of tabs open, but Chrome is
significantly better at coping.

~~~
starik36
In what way is it less performant? The start up is faster on Firefox on both
PCs that I use. When there are a ton of tabs, both browsers eat on all RAM,
but I wouldn't say that Firefox drags the system down anymore than Chrome.

I am on Windows 10.

~~~
acjohnson55
I'm on Mac OS. It bogs down all the time. I have very little in the way of
add-ons. Don't know why I've been downvoted, because this is just my
experience. I've been and remain a user since Firefox 2.

------
meh206
Chrome is nothing more to me than a launchpad for (google) ads and a vehicle
for surveillance.

------
wmnwmn
I find the opposite - many websites still don't seem to test properly on
chrome.

------
gedassan
Firefox Devtools Network tab still does not allow to resize columns in 2019...

------
kdmedev
Just use Opera or Brave right?

Aren't those browsers just chromium reskinned and customized

------
chacha2
Clicking the RSS or JSON link goes no where and then breaks the back button.

------
kerng
One thing that people seem to forget is the extreme amount of marketing and
push that happened. If you used any Google product (even today) it's basically
annoyance not to use Chrome, because of all the "popups" and messages you see
on screen to switch to Chrome.

------
orliesaurus
I have one bigger complaint: It blows my mind that web browsers take GBs of
ram to run. I mean, c'mon, it's 2019 how can we not address that? It's
probably the biggest concern I hear from everyone that uses Chrome and knows
how to read their task/app manager

~~~
9dev
Leaving aside everything else, how is that even relevant? Even cheap laptops
have 8gigs of ram these days, most have 16. Considering the browser is
becoming the de-facto single application used at all for most people, what
else would they need their ram for?

~~~
orliesaurus
If you use machines in schools usually you end up having older laptops or
netbooks. That's why matters IMHO. Definitely not for the person who is a dev
and has fully decked out macbooks or thinkpads...

------
satoshisvision
Firefox mobile on android is shit

Cant even render wikipedia properly

I hope mozilla staff reading this

------
keithtom
Really? No one going to mention brave.com. It’s chromium based.

------
NeoBasilisk
We never needed Chrome. Firefox has been around since 2002.

------
graphememes
Back to firefox, few years later, back to chrome.

------
temporallobe
One of the reasons I stay with Chrome is because of the superb dev tools,
which are even better than in the Firefox Developer Edition

------
appsonify
Chrome is poised to comletely monopolize the browser share market.

You can't fault them either for doing this, this is just what pubic companies
do, maximize returns for shareholders and monopolies are the hen that lays
golden eggs.

This article will not be seen beyond HN. The fact is the vast majority of
Chrome users don't care that other browser exists, and don't want it as long
as it is convenient for them (to keep using a familiar platform thats worked
well).

Anyways, this is just my two cents. I just don't see myself using Firefox
anymore, it's no longer deserving of my attention because I am not concerned
about Google's goals, we get a lot of shit for free from Google, and we gave
up our privacy. Whether this is beneficial or not is up for debate.

------
MentallyRetired
Vivaldi and Firefox user, here. Nothing more to say, just wanted to lend my
support.

What do you all use?

------
bvanderveen
No one is in this stinking bordel questions the underlying assumption that the
web is an 'open standard' or that 'competition is good' or that somehow the
democratization of browser implementations and 'standards-making' is a net win
for humanity?

The web is an edifice of pressed shit-board that hasn't been designed so much
as piled up. It isn't an open forum of freely-exchanged ideas and social goods
so much as a tool in the arsenal of liberal capitalism to more completely
atomize and subjugate the individual by forming his proper sense of obligation
to have himself devoured by the fetischism of merchandise.

Pluck out thy phone and cast it from thee.

------
stackzero
Harvey Dent said it best "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To
See Yourself Become The Villain"

------
rrggrr
Extensions. I am now locked into Chrome because several services I use require
Chrome extensions that aren't available elsewhere. The idea that Chrome can be
unseated, or isn't needed, is unrealistic for the many users who rely on
Chrome-exclusive extensions.

~~~
earenndil
Firefox implements chrome's webextensions api, so it should be possible to run
those extensions. Try chrome store foxified [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/)

~~~
maple3142
Firefox's webextensions api is a totally different thing from chrome's ones.
Some of its api are either missing or work differently.

------
djsumdog
> Both Chrome and Chromium run Blink under the hood, the rendering engine that
> started as a WebKit fork in 2013 when Google grew dissatisfied with the
> Apple-led project

Wait, is this accurate? I remember back when Chrome was released, people were
talking about how it used parts of both WebKit and Gecko, and the exact specs
of which rendering was used changed based on the website.

I remember not liking Chrome the moment it came out. Google had poured money
into Firefox for years and then suddenly came out with (an initially) closed
source competitor. Sure it's open source now, but it didn't start that way,
and was a slap in the face to the Mozilla project.

~~~
delroth
> Wait, is this accurate? I remember back when Chrome was released, people
> were talking about how it used parts of both WebKit and Gecko, and the exact
> specs of which rendering was used changed based on the website.

You are misremembering. Chrome never used Gecko.

> I remember not liking Chrome the moment it came out. Google had poured money
> into Firefox for years and then suddenly came out with (an initially) closed
> source competitor. Sure it's open source now, but it didn't start that way

This is completely false. Chromium and its associated source code were
released to the public at the same time as Chrome. See e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#2008](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_\(web_browser\)#2008)

------
misterman0
More like we need Google no more.

You always find the smartest bunch in these threads. Proof: not a single
downvoted comment so far.

But with all your smarts why aren't you building search engines? Is it because
you think that with superior tech we can't beat Google? I think it will come
down to precisely that. Don't you see how easy it would be for someone who
specializes in search to beat an opponent who specializes in ads?

Edit: I should clarify. What I meant was, start specializing in search, or
we're all dead. Dead meat. By the hands of the Android.

~~~
mattnewport
I'm using DuckDuckGo and don't miss Google for search. It's mostly a solved
problem for me at this point. Google Maps is harder to replace but there are
workable though generally not as good alternatives. YouTube is the hardest
Google property to escape for me.

~~~
maple3142
I found that DuckDuckGo is still not competent enough for non-English users.
The quality of its result in non-English language still worse than Google's
ones.

~~~
mattnewport
I can believe that. English is my first language though and I find it works
well for me with English searches.

