
Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward a Chrome-only Web - Vinnl
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/microsofts-new-skype-for-web-client-an-early-taste-of-the-browser-monoculture
======
cies
I use FF as my daily driver on all devices. It is a very, very, competitive
browser compared to Chrome and it's offshoots. In some area's, or with some
plugins, it wins, and in other's it looses. I also really like the that
Mozilla is actively involved in activism and thereby does a huge service to
our safety/privacy online (refer to the recent DarkMatter story).

I'm sad FF share is declining. I wonder what I can do to counter this trend.

~~~
samcday
Keep using Firefox! Encourage everyone you know (without being too obnoxious
of course) to switch. Help them switch if they’re receptive to the idea.
Support them in staying with Firefox if they have extension requirements,
workflow concerns, whatever.

The pitch for Firefox should be easy nowadays. Talk about how it’s privacy-
focussed while still being competitive with Chrome in performance and ease of
use. A lot of people know that Fa$ebook is evil and gobbling up all their
data, but they don’t feel like there’s that much they can practically do.
Switching to Firefox and using Containers is something anyone can do easily.

Of course there’s probably bigger things that you could do. But thinking
locally (if you’re not already) is absolutely required before you then think
globally, IMO.

~~~
eykanspelgud
I wish I could agree, and if I were experiencing a different situation, I
would be in the same camp.

Firefox 65 keeps crashing on my Linux box. I've tried downgrading to 64 and
below. But whatever updates were installed when I installed FF65 also crash
FF64 and under.

It was either change OS or let FF go. I've since moved to brave browser, but
would happily go back to FF if/when I figure out and troubleshoot the issue.

~~~
cbsks
Firefox has been rock solid on my Linux box for the past 6 years or so. Are
you downloading it from Mozilla, or from your distro’s package manager?

~~~
eykanspelgud
I've done both. Same issue. :(

------
_bxg1
I've made multiple attempts recently to switch to Firefox as my primary
browser, but I never could stick with it.

1) It's simply not as responsive. They've worked really hard to keep up with
Chrome, and I respect that, and the recent overhaul did make a big difference.
But Chrome just feels like a piece of physical machinery, where Firefox still
feels like a piece of software.

2) The dev tools are just not quite as good. As with general performance,
they've always been very close, but there's just something about them that's
off. Enough to disrupt my work.

3) Firefox mobile, at least on Android, has weird high-friction scrolling
behavior that doesn't match the rest of the OS and feels terrible, and there's
no way to turn it off.

I use Firefox for casual browsing on my gaming desktop, but that's about it.
I'm rooting for them, but there are just improvements that still need to be
made.

On the bright side, Chromium is 99% OSS (as opposed to Android, which is like
70% OSS). I think a fork could become a competitor if Google took the project
in a direction that was just really egregiously bad. Let us not forget that
Chrome's rendering engine, Blink, was itself a fork of Safari's WebKit.

~~~
ilmiont
Find the exact opposite (except for devtools, unfortunately that's still a
real issue).

Firefox for me is MUCH faster on all hardware I use it on, without or without
extensions.

Chrome feels bloated and sluggish... Firefox just flies, and never slows down.
I don't understand where complaints of FF performance come from... personally,
I've never experienced an issue, on my i7 desktop or my horrible m3 Surface.

To me, it's Firefox that feels like the physical machinery, while Chrome is a
piece of software, and a bloated, creepy, predatory one at that.

~~~
_bxg1
It could be a platform difference. I mostly use macOS; sounds like you're on
Windows.

~~~
hellofunk
Yes, it has been quite widely reported here and elsewhere such as the Firefox
bug trackers, that the Firefox performance on Mac is quite inferior. Which
makes me very sad. Though it does not seem to affect all Mac users

~~~
_bxg1
You know, I wonder if it's GPU-bound. Macs often have weaker GPUs than Windows
machines, and this could explain the inconsistent results people are
mentioning in the thread.

~~~
_bxg1
Ah-hah!

"What if we stopped trying to guess what layers we need? What if we removed
this boundary between painting and compositing and just went back to painting
every pixel on every frame?

This may sound like a ridiculous idea, but it actually has some precedent.
Modern day video games repaint every pixel, and they maintain 60 frames per
second more reliably than browsers do. And they do it in an unexpected way…
instead of creating these invalidation rectangles and layers to minimize what
they need to paint, they just repaint the whole screen.

Wouldn’t rendering a web page like that be way slower?

If we paint on the CPU, it would be. But GPUs are designed to make this work."

[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-
maximum-f...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-fps-
how-webrender-gets-rid-of-jank/)

~~~
Quekid5
Are you being sarcastic? I can't tell.

Any modern CPU and GPU can do a lot of DMA and copying of memory in a very
short amount of time, but that doesn't mean it'll be efficient wrt. power...
which is what I think you were 'complaining' about?

------
jfk13
It's been discussed in the past, but I'll just leave this here as a reminder:
[https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-
or-l...](https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-later-you-
wont.html)

~~~
userbinator
I think Firefox/Mozilla is still a bit on the "too big" side, and they've done
some mollycoddling/anti-user-freedom stuff in the past too.

IMHO if you want to "protest" the browser monopoly, use something more like
Dillo or NetSurf. They have no JS, so web apps are out of the question, but
work well for the document-centric sites.

~~~
O1111OOO
> I think Firefox/Mozilla is still a bit on the "too big" side

One of the machines I use is an old Dell Latitude D620 (2006, Intel Core2 CPU
T7200 2.00GHz[0]) on a debian base. I can tell you from personal experience,
on this machine, that Mozilla's latest Quantum Browser is heads above Chrome
and their "clones".

It is so quick to load (even loaded with extensions), it replaced Pale Moon as
the default browser for this laptop. I was stunned at the performance
improvements in Quantum. I remain surprised, every single day, that the modern
web has been made available on a laptop that's 13 years old.

All other Chrome-like browsers (Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, etc) take much
longer to load, cause the cpu to throttle (fans kick in) which can lead to
overheating and shutdown issues. They are essentially unusable on that
machine. Firefox Quantum, otoh, is snappy on this machine.

I say this because I'm genuinely curious by the "too big" comment. I honestly
find it puzzling (unless you're comparing a modern, full-featured browser to
Dillo or Links2/GUI: both of which are favs of mine for their use cases).

I had turned my back on Firefox for a few years because of performance issues,
caching problems. They didn't just correct these issues, they've done so in a
way few software upgrades have ever managed to do in my experience (dating
back three decades) and have blown past their competitors from a purely
performance standpoint.

[0]
[https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+T72...](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+T7200+%40+2.00GHz&id=927)

~~~
PetahNZ
Anecdotally I have the opposite experience. On my 2 computers (MBP/Win10
Desktop) Chrome starts up near instantly and Firefox has a noticeable delay. I
just tried it and it took about 5 seconds to load. Not that this is really a
deal breaker anyway. On my MBP it also makes the fans spin up.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> On my 2 computers (MBP/Win10 Desktop) Chrome starts up near instantly and
> Firefox has a noticeable delay.

You may be experiencing OS caching. If you normally use Chrome, Chrome is
already cached in memory by the OS and will open faster than something you
haven't started recently.

> On my MBP it also makes the fans spin up.

I've noticed that Chrome tends not to do this while still being slower. This
may be related to the way it uses more processes, which consequently requires
more resources per operation (and thereby higher visible latency) but splits
the load better between cores so that no individual one gets hot enough to
require additional cooling.

In theory this could be "better" if the browser actually needed to use 8+
cores for some reason, but in general if that is happening it is some kind of
anomaly or defect (like some adspam mining Bitcoin in javascript) rather than
any normal behavior. And Firefox does use other threads/processes for most of
the few things that actually benefit from it.

------
panic
One thing the article doesn't mention is the effect of Apple's browser engine
policy on iOS. Forcing everyone to use WebKit may be anticompetitive, but it's
also the main thing keeping the Chrome/Blink monoculture at bay.

~~~
Vinnl
Yeah, I've started to grow conflicted on that too. I used to hate it because
Safari was lagging behind so far and users couldn't switch, but it also forces
web developers to test for interoperability with at least one other browser
engine, making it more likely to work in others as well.

Safari has caught up a bit, luckily, but it'd be great if it would actually
compete with other browsers on features. Unfortunately, I guess if Apple
opened up iOS to other browser engines, it'd also compete against Google's
marketing machine and reach.

~~~
eridius
I too wish Safari was better about feature parity, but I console myself with
the fact that WebKit is significantly more power-efficient than Blink, which
is extremely valuable in a battery-powered portable electronic device. Maybe
not as important for a desktop computer, but even there using less CPU means
the browser works better when my computer is under heavy load (such as when
I'm compiling).

------
mrgriffin
I downloaded an extension to spoof my user agent this morning, haven't tried
doing much yet, but messages certainly seem to work and that's 99% of what I
do anyway.

I don't know why I couldn't have be treated to a "this might not work 100%
warning" instead of being completely locked out.

~~~
emilfihlman
It's a top down decision, probably, and probably related to internal quality
requirements of software and support.

Also possible (but unlikely) is that Firefox doesn't support some certain
thing, the absence of which might corrupt some state or data (error handling
ain't exactly a thing javascript land, unfortunately.

~~~
jakub_g
This is like a highway operator saying "You can only enter our highway with a
ford or a fiat. We didn't take time to test if an opel can properly ride our
highway, so opels are not allowed".

(Yeah I get it that they don't want to have people complaining that a niche
corner case that was never tested in Firefox doesn't work. But this is a
ridiculous way to do it.)

~~~
akvadrako
Not really - it's about the surface area of the interface. It's pretty easy to
know if a car will work on a road - it needs tires and the ability to control
it's own movement.

But if the road had thousands of different connections to the car, there
certainly would need to be testing for each manufacturer.

------
samfisher83
If the government didn't step in microsoft might still have 90% of the browser
market. I think its time they came in and forced google to not push chrome in
android.

~~~
anth_anm
Google pays their bribes.

Microsoft didn't.

~~~
s3r3nity
I was going to down-vote this, but then did some research into how much
Alphabet and Microsoft spend on lobbying. In 2018:

Google spent $21.7M, all in the "Internet" industry. Microsoft spent ~$9.5M,
and only $70k of that in "Internet." The rest went to "Electronics Mfg and
Equipment."

Sources:
[https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000067823)
[https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000011...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000115)

~~~
anth_anm
Compare it to what microsoft spent before their anti-trust lawsuits.

------
jdlyga
The entire reason why I switched to Firefox in 2003 was because of its
superior user interface (tabbed browsing) and performance. Likewise, the
reason I switched to Chrome in 2011 was because of performance, syncing, and
auto-updating. For me, it was never about privacy, breaking monopolies on
rendering engines, or open source. It was always a pragmatic decision based on
what browser gave me the best experience.

~~~
anoncake
Theres nothing pragmatic about not caring about privacy, monopolies and
freedom.

------
hd4
All the more reason for any Linux distro maintainers to include Firefox as the
default browser.

~~~
ktjfi
Isn't that what they already do?

~~~
solarkraft
Not all. Many include WebKit based browsers (pretty much all except Firefox
are, and Firefox is too heavy for many).

~~~
ktjfi
I also blame the Mozilla Corporation for that: including WebKit in your
software is a piece of cake. So that's what the default browsers of
GNOME/KDE/etc do. Gecko not so much (in fact, has there been any effort in
this arena, after XULRunner was discontinued?)

~~~
alex_duf
Gnome is literally running using Firefox's technology

~~~
solarkraft
Please elaborate. I don't know any project embedding Gecko.

------
Semaphor
At least in Germany, Firefox still has nearly 25% according to statcounter
[0]. It has fallen (used to be at 30% last year), but it's still big.

[0]: [http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
share/desktop/germa...](http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
share/desktop/germany/#monthly-201802-201902)

~~~
pjmlp
I still test on Firefox because it has been my main browser since the Netscape
days (pre-Firefox), but for most customers Chrome, Safari (on iOS) and IE 11
make the bulk of our RFPs browser acceptance matrix (in Germany).

~~~
Semaphor
According to GA, on our site, FF is the most used browser, followed by Chrome
desktop. 3rd is Chrome mobile and then Safari mobile, tablet, desktop. Only
after those, it's IE11 and then Edge. Uniting mobile, tablet and desktop still
makes FF 3rd with a 6% lead on IE+Edge.

------
wtmt
> Further, users who have tried changing their user-agent—the identification
> string, sent by browsers, that tells Web servers what version of which
> browser they are—have reported that much of the app works in both Safari and
> Firefox, with reports that even voice and video calls work in Firefox. It's
> not clear that everything works, and WebRTC is arguably persnickety enough
> that Microsoft would have to explicitly test and perhaps tweak its code to
> work in Firefox or Safari. But ultimately, none of this appears to be a
> fundamental tech issue.

Goes to show that companies will cut corners in silly ways whenever possible.
Unless MS is called out on this repeatedly, it won't change. The noise needs
to be louder on supporting Firefox (and other non-Chrome browsers). Otherwise
everybody could lose.

------
rwc
"IE's hegemony presented an enormous challenge for the upstart Firefox
browser, which was built to support Web standards rather than Microsoft's
particular spin on those standards."

A bit of revisionist history here. Firefox, nee Phoenix, was a branch of
Mozilla because its authors felt (correctly) Mozilla was too bloated. I
remember 1-2 minute load times when trying to open Mozilla back in the day.

~~~
benj111
Which bit of the quote is revisionist?

What you're saying doesn't seem to contradict it?!?

~~~
Vinnl
I think GP interprets the quote as meaning that supporting standards was the
primary goal of Firefox, rather than just something they did instead of
supporting Microsoft's implementation.

~~~
benj111
That could make sense. Thanks.

------
SUr3na
You need around 70mb of sheer complexity to render a page fully correct and
you need millions of dollars to build a competitor that would lose because
level of complexity is increasing daily .By the time you cover what you
thought the web was ,the most used browser chrome had already came up with
more complexity to add to the web.Web sucks and this helps the monopoly.

~~~
snaky
What if some browser would exist that could render only 90% of pages fully
correct, but would be twice as fast as Chrome and use 30% of memory?

~~~
wmeredith
You just described my user experience with Brave.

~~~
dest
Huh, is'nt Brave built on libChromium?

------
spystath
I would still like to know what kind of features are unavailable in Firefox to
warrant a complete block on the browser. This would also help Firefox
developers to implement them or fix the bugs. I mean I always see "Firefox
does not implement all the features we need for our cutting edge web app" but
I've yet to see anything more specific. Do any of you with more frontend
experience care to comment?

~~~
dfrage
A competent session manager. The old "Session Manager" died in the transition
to Quantum, and several developers of quasi-replacements, who acknowledge they
don't come very close to it, maintain a list of two dozen or more bugs and
missing features compared to Chrome they need to do better, like Chrome's
Session Buddy.

If I couldn't simply copy my entire configuration as I upgrade versions of
Linux I'd be making a painful one time change completely to Chrome and
Chromium, which I'd really rather avoid.

The bottom line is that Mozilla let Firefox's market share decline so much
that the only two reasons people kept using it were it's not Chrome, and the
extension ecosystem. Which is reported to have included a superior debugger,
which indirectly made sure a lot of sites implicitly supported Firefox because
they were developed using it.

Users don't give the slightest damn that keeping the old XPI ecosystem was
hard, and had serious security issues. A huge number of extensions that they
depended on have become roadkill on the information superhighway, even if some
made the transition with significant changes. Making Firefox into an inferior
version of Chrome means for most that the only reason to use it is that it's
not Chrome.

~~~
dTal
While possibly valid criticisms, these all seem rather irrelevant to the
comment you are replying to, which was asking about _server-facing_ features,
of the type whose absence would justify discriminating on the basis of user
agent and not even attempting to run $FANCY_WEB_APP.

------
jammygit
I recently switched to brave because I'm tired of having to trust 5-10
extension authors who may or may not sell their extension one day (adblock had
to fork to ublock iirc because of something like that). Most of what my
extensions do is baked into brave, so its both idiot proof and requires less
trust.

If Firefox sold a privacy version of Firefox, I'd buy (edit: ie, with my
privacy features/extensions built in)

~~~
kgwxd
Then you have to trust Mozilla won't sell your data one day, and once they do,
all your privacy tools need to be replaced at once. Except, there won't be any
to switch to because there was no competion. Multiple competing, single-
purpose, composable modules is best. It keeps the developers honest as long as
the users call them out on any bad move they make, the second they make it.
Too many users let Google slide on ever shitty move they've made and now here
we are, again.

------
guilhas
It just proves they keep breaking Skype updates, nothing new.

Kind of ironic coming from the people who gave us IE/EDGE, the browser with
the most incompatibility issues.

One thing they got right, Linux/Firefox people are probably not their target
audience so why bother. Especially after year of broken Skype updates in
Linux. There are better alternatives now.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
What's your best Skype alternative for non-techy people?

~~~
guilhas
[https://jitsi.org/](https://jitsi.org/)
[https://jami.net/](https://jami.net/)
[https://signal.org/](https://signal.org/)
[https://tox.chat/](https://tox.chat/)
[https://linphone.org/](https://linphone.org/)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I can come up with a list too, and many more sites have lists
alternativeto.net and slant.co are my go-tos. The point of asking here is to
get a thoughtful response with a genuine user preference from someone
technically inclined; your comment really doesn't help.

------
robbrown451
I wish the open source world would wrap Blink into a usable browser product
that doesn't have all the things we might not like about Chrome (or at least
that allows a lot of settings for removing them and customizing it in ways
that Google may not want to do with Chrome, because they don't think it is in
their corporate interest).

It's a lot easier than building a whole browser from scratch. I salute what
Mozilla is doing but I still don't want to use their browser because it just
isn't as good, in my opinion. (Firefox also does't support the MIDIAccess API
yet, which I need)

Obviously a lot of people agree that Chrome is better. I'm a lot more likely
to use Microsoft's Blink browser than I was to use Microsoft's fully
proprietary browser, but even better would be a fully open source, community
steered "UnGoogled Chrome".

~~~
sfotm
It exists: [https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
chromium](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium)

The general concern about projects along these lines, e.g. IceWeasel, is that
they won't keep up with security patches as quickly as the project it's
forking. Maybe that's less of a concern here since they aren't trying to
recreate an older version but are just tearing out some "phone home" calls and
changing some defaults.

~~~
duskwuff
> they won't keep up with security patches as quickly as the project it's
> forking

And they often take a baby-with-the-bathwater approach to removing Google from
the picture. For instance, that project completely disables Safe Browsing,
requires a convoluted process to install extensions, and breaks automatic
extension updates -- in each case, because the functionality depends on a
Google-hosted service.

~~~
effie
What is the purpose of removing Google from the browser, if you do not remove
it from all parts of the browser? There only needs to be one automatic
communication channel to Google to make such effort worthless.

~~~
duskwuff
I don't know. What _is_ the purpose of removing Google from the browser? Is it
to prevent specific types of tracking, or is it simply to erase Google's name
from the project?

~~~
robbrown451
Personally my preferred approach would be to make a version that makes a ton
of features optional, but if you want them, you can have them.

------
nr0mx
I would prefer not to contribute to Chrome's increasing dominance, but I feel
like I don't get much of a choice. I want to choose a browser on its merits.
For me that is currently Vivaldi. Where is the Firefox-based Vivaldi
equivalent?

Mozilla does not really seem to be addressing the fact that they provide one
browser - Firefox - that is competing against an increasing array of Chrome-
based browsers, all providing different user experiences. Why has no one built
an interesting browser on top of Firefox?

It stands to reason that Chrome cannot be all things to all people. Neither
can Firefox. The difference is that alternative browsers are increasingly
Chrome-based, with the single exception of Firefox. Unless Mozilla (or someone
else) can reverse this trend, I think this battle is lost.

------
cutler
Oh the irony to hear Microsoft complaining about browser monopolies. Somewhat
akin to their "embracing Linux" posturing whilst perpetuating their Linux
patent racket. Remember this - Microsoft only embraces open standards as a
last resort.

~~~
tracker1
Microsoft isn't complaining... Edge is moving to Blink/Chromium even.

------
edgarvaldes
I never left Firefox. Not even in the first bright days of Chrome. I have both
installed, but my daily use is in FF.

------
la_fayette
I use FF and duckduckgo. I spend a lot of time on the web and i cannot
complain about anything... I only use chrome for web development and google
for SEO optimization...

------
jacquesm
Over my dead body.

~~~
ktjfi
You better arrange for your suicide, because it seems inevitable. The terrible
mismanagement of the Mozilla Corporation is to blame.

~~~
bsaul
Mismanagement : could you give some details ? I was under the impression that
mozilla was doing quite amazing things on the contrary : keeping firefox the
only really usable alternative to chrome (when even microsoft didn't manage to
do it), and even innovating in PL space with Rust.

What do you think they should have done differently ?

~~~
ktjfi
They made the same mistake IE made: around Firefox 3, they allowed their
browser to become terribly slow, and so Chrome ate their lunch. Because let's
be honest, Chrome was and still is so much faster than Firefox, and that's why
they won. You could argue that Chrome has infinite ad budget, and that
obviously helps, but I'm a Google hater and I'd gladly use Firefox if it was
better or at least on par with Chrome, but it's not.

I understand fixing something like that takes a lot of effort, but they lost a
lot of time and money in projects that had no chance of working out, such as
FirefoxOS (really? making an entire OS using the slowest browser engine that
there is on the cheapest ARM hardware they could find?), Hello, Persona, etc.
They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive, the same way I
will never forgive Google for abandoning Reader. Servo is a nice project but
the chances it will be abandoned after years in development are over the roof.

So now they are focused on their privacy improvements, but they can't stop
shooting themselves in the foot (sending your browsing history to the
advertisement company Cliqz, remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr.
Robot show, installing Pocket by default...)

Then, if it is slower, and they don't seem to be able to take my privacy
seriously despite their claims to the contrary, why in hell should I use
Firefox?

~~~
pythux
Hey, Cliqz employee here. I'd like to clarify a few things since I don't think
your comment is accurate.

1\. Cliqz is not an advertising company, it's a search company and we push
hard for privacy protection in everything we do (private search, antitracking,
adblocking, etc.) 2\. Privacy policies are legally binding, and in ours we
state that no personal data is collected. We designed our features and
products to not require collection of any private data (that includes our
search engine). 3\. I'd like to point out that in Firefox, _by default_ , your
queries are sent to advertising company Google. So I don't understand all the
heat when Mozilla tries to find more privacy-friendly alternatives to Google.
In this case, they replaced Google by Cliqz (again, an independent German
search company focusing on privacy, building its own index: no Bing results
involved) in Germany, for 1% of the users. That seems to perfectly fit in
Mozilla's mission of protecting users' privacy.

~~~
ktjfl
1st, Cliqz is majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media, an advertising and media
company. You don't set the fox to guard the henhouse.

2nd, sending the user's complete browsing history to a 3rd party which is
owned by an advertising and media company without telling the user was a
terrible idea. It's simply mismanagement by the Mozilla Corporation.

[https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-
cliqz-i...](https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-
firefox/)

>This experiment also includes the data collection tool Cliqz uses to build
its recommendation engine. Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz
will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of
pages they visit.

~~~
pythux
Fortunately for our users, the way our technology was communicated by Mozilla
is not accurate. Cliqz has never collected the "complete browser history" of
any of our users (and it's the last thing we want to do). We have some data
collection in place and it is limited to collected anonymous information about
search results found on SERP page. If you want to know more about how we do it
without putting user privacy at risk, feel free to read this document:
[https://gist.github.com/solso/423a1104a9e3c1e3b8d7c9ca14e885...](https://gist.github.com/solso/423a1104a9e3c1e3b8d7c9ca14e885e5)

~~~
jammygit
Is there something a person could do to objectively settle the disagreeing
statements about what Cliqz was sent? Your document there is impressive, but
Firefox was fairly explicit in its statement. We're in a case of he said she
said

I enjoyed the read BTW, somebody put some real time into that sort of system

------
snaky
How many users do know what their Chrome browser phones home?

~~~
j16sdiz
Depends on what "phones home" meant.

Instant search on "omnibar" is useful. Spellcheck is great too.

But not everybody aware data are sent to google server for those functions...

------
rezeroed
I only use firefox. That isn't going to change. I'm done with google.

------
KorematsuFred
I use both chrome and firefox. On my surface pro I mostly use edge. Honestly I
think all the three browsers are pretty good and unless you are trying to use
hangouts they all seem to perform nearly equally.

------
everybodyknows
Assuming this was a strategic, long-term policy decision from on high, what
are the chances that Microsoft's next addition to their "unsupported on
Firefox" list turns out to be ... Github?

~~~
Flip-per
Pretty much zero. Except if they want to shut down github and need a bandwagon
full of bad press and furious developers.

------
metta2uall
I've been quite happy using Firefox for all personal and most web development
work. Unfortunately though we've had to recommend Chrome to users of our web
application since Firefox doesn't support speech recognition..

To catch up I think Firefox needs

\- More funding - I think large tech companies should donate heavily to avoid
a chrome monopoly..

\- Perhaps more focus on core browser features like speech instead of various
side projects? (like Firefox Color and Price Wise.. though I must admit I
really like Screenshots).

~~~
jonas21
> More funding - I think large tech companies should donate heavily to avoid a
> chrome monopoly..

Mozilla has $560M in annual revenue, and Firefox is their only widely-used
product. How much more do they need?

------
intellix
I've noticed that a lot of authors complaining that the lack of diversity in
web browsers will lead to developers only testing in one browser aren't
actually web developers themselves. As a web developer: I don't want to have
to check my work in 3 different interpretations of the spec.

If you don't like Google Chrome then you're welcome to use many of the other
usages of the open source Chromium

------
mr_toad
Microsoft only cares about enterprise.

Enterprise IT only installs Chrome because IE and Edge have problems with many
sites.

Once Enterprise IT is finally forced to move to Windows 10 and blink based
Edge I can see them not bothering to install Chrome.

Enterprise will be happy, MS will be happy, and the only people using Skype
will be wage slaves working for corporations too cheap to install actual
phones.

------
partiallypro
I use Firefox almost exclusively, but it freezes up a lot on me. The new
engine they use cuts back on RAM usage but it seems CPU usage has increased. I
will probably give the new Edge a chance when it comes out, because it gives
the best of two worlds. One that isn't tightly wound to the Google ecosystem,
and yet still is highly compatible.

------
alexeiz
I used Firefox before, but I stopped because 1) it was and continues to be dog
slow on Linux, 2) stupidly restrictive policies for extensions. It's obvious
to me that Firefox developers don't care about its users. And also at some
point they expelled somebody for political views. That was plain stupid on
their part.

~~~
hsbaut76
I disagree completely.

People who choose chrome because of a view UX enhancements, or choose Google
because Gmail syncs better than iCal/idav, or decide to use Google search over
duckduckgo because of blah, is the reason why Giant Corporations rule the
planet.

Why not support the underdog that actually cares about your privacy and
liberties, rather than choosing an option that feeds the beast and sends us
down a path to a dystopian future complete with global surveillance?

~~~
wsgeorge
> Why not support the underdog that actually cares about your privacy and
> liberties, ...

I don't think many people use products because of their politics. They use
what works for them. Chrome seems to be doing so extremely well, despite its
flaws and questionable competitive practices.

I have three browsers on my laptop. I hate Chrome because it is a
battery/memory/data hog. But I can't comfortably switch profiles (work/various
orgs/non-profits/personal) on FF like I do with Chrome. The feature is
actually in FF, but it isn't available in the interface for whatever reason.

This feature is nonexistent on Safari.

Despite the alternatives on FF, this one feature is what keeps me on Chrome.
Had FF had that, I probably would've switched by now.

Nothing political (unless the politics suddenly begins to matter)

------
ComputerGuru
Since everyone is using this thread to talk all things Firefox - does anyone
else have an issue with Netflix videos randomly hanging or stuttering with
Firefox? It happens to me once or twice an episode and I have to un-fullscreen
the player to get it to stop, then I can full screen it again.

~~~
pcurve
I remember watching 1080p youtube videos on really old machine. It wasn't even
that slow to come to think of it. Q6600 core 2 duo. Youtube always performed
better in Chrome in full screen. FF would drop frames consistenty

------
mung
It pisses me off that MS would detect a browser and block it when they have
done as much as they can do to prevent web developers from detecting IE/Edge
for much the same reasons: that it's not up to the job and will cause a bunch
of support calls.

------
ksajadi
I think Apple should step in and really help Mozilla with funding and more.

------
marricks
I wonder if people could get momentum behind big sites doing a day of “only
works on Firefox” black out to bring notice to this.

Going back to ie6 days would be awful...

------
guilhas
In 2017 Firefox 52 stopped supporting 'Skype for business' for their reliance
on legacy NPAPI plugins interface.

~~~
tlynchpin
Have you heard the Good News?!? Waterfox is FF before it dropped support for
well loved extensions like Tab Mix Plus. It is actively maintained with
security patches.

[https://www.waterfoxproject.org/](https://www.waterfoxproject.org/)

------
kgwxd
Microsoft only further proved that Skype and the team building it suck and
everyone should continue not using it.

------
crb002
This seems really short sighted, but also remember that Firefox has huge
Google financial backing.

------
guilhas
Thanks Microsoft for all those great times downloading other browsers.

------
astrostl
MS Teams doesn't support OPEN IN APP REDIRECTS in Safari :-|

------
ginko
Why is it even legal to exclude a standards compliant browser?

------
fxfan
Are all chrome extensions available by default on firefox?

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
Of course the answer is no, or "it depends," but it goes both ways. Because of
my company's goofy proxy situation, I'm using FoxyProxy on Firefox. There's a
Chrome version, but it doesn't work. I like that Chrome bundles Flash, but I
need FoxyProxy more.

------
TheLuddite
Microsoft should push a Windows Update that won't allow you to install/run
Chrome on WindowsOS

------
bwb
So irony :). Microsoft complaining about a browser monopoly!

~~~
StavrosK
Microsoft aren't complaining, they're supporting it.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I rather think they're embracing it, actually.

~~~
ld00d
Will they be extending it now?

~~~
maxxxxx
I wouldn't be too surprised if they did after a while.

------
Tsubasachan
Hilariously while all those idiots were fighting the last war against evil
Microsoft a new and much more powerful enemy was quietly taking over.

------
alexandernst
A +15 year web-dev guy here.

> One of the greatest fears (...) is that Web developers would increasingly
> take the easy way out and limit their support and testing to Chrome

Now, I must ask, why should we (web developers) be the responsible for making
everything work with every browser? It's literally the same thing as asking
application-oriented developers to code and test their apps for every major
compiler out there.

We can't be the responsible for making every webpage compatible with every
browser. Period. There are standards, and it's not really our problem that
Chrome implements them in a week, while Firefox takes 6 months, Edge 2 years,
Konqueror 10 years, and so on.

It takes a lot of time and energy to build and test websites for 3 or 4
different browsers. And it takes even more time to implement workarounds for
every browser that doesn't support that thing that your boss asked you to
implement. And "shit must be done by the end of the day".

Don't take me wrong. Go go browser diversity! But not if that means that I
should take the burden.

~~~
llukas
+15 year? Where have you been when everybody standardized on IE6 and this
_was_ a _bad_ thing?

I thought it is new generation that reinvents the wheel but it seems I'm
mistaken.

~~~
alexandernst
Sure. But you're missing a point here. IE6 was bad because it didn't follow
any standards. You had to, literally, "code the IE6 way".

Chrome on the other hand is starting to be a problem because it's too damn
fast at implementing new stuff (which are accepted as standard). Web-
developers then start using those new features and the code they write
suddenly doesn't work on other browsers, because those browser just don't
support those new features yet.

That's why we got webpack. That's why we got babel and polyfills. And that's
why frontend development sucks a lot lately. Because you have the choice of
doing X the easy and fast way, that currently works only with Chrome, because
no other browser implemented that yet. Or, you can do it the hard and slow
way, that works with all browsers.

And this is not something that I'm pulling out of thin air. This has been
discussed several times here, in HN.

~~~
sergiosgc
A standard is only a standard when there is more than one implementation.
Chrome DRM or Chrome RTC are no better than ActiveX, except for hindsight
(_now_ it is obvious ActiveX is crap).

The central point is avoiding lock-in, with the long term objective of
maintaining a competitive browser landscape. Code for one browser, and we'll
be collectively screwed when Chrome development reaches Google Reader status.

~~~
alexandernst
A standard is whatever goes into
[https://html.spec.whatwg.org](https://html.spec.whatwg.org) . Period.

CSS Flex is a standard. If Konqueror, Firefox, Edge, or whatever other browser
doesn't support it (I know they support it now, but that wasn't the case 2 or
3 years ago), it's not any of my business. I'll keep using Flex because it's
an accepted standard. And my webpages will work on any browser that supports
that standard. If that means that my website works only on Webkit-based
browsers, well, then that's really not up to me to fix, isn't it? That is
something that the people behind other browsers should fix, by implementing
"Flex".

~~~
dagw
This is just the latest iteration of the age old "fix your code" vs "no, fix
your compiler" argument.

 _it 's not any of my business._

So what is your business?

