
Browser diversity starts with us - ccnafr
http://www.zeldman.com/2018/12/07/browser-diversity-starts-with-us/
======
tyingq
We lost some diversity when Microsoft decided to adopt chromium[1].

I assume, though, that Google will eventually make some change that Microsoft
doesn't want, and they'll be forced to fork chromium.

The recent proposals from Google[2] that hobble ad blockers and extensions
like tampermonkey might even be enough.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18125238/microsoft-
chrome...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18125238/microsoft-chrome-
browser-windows-10-edge-chromium)

[2] [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome-
extens...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome-extension-
manifest-v3-may-break-ublock-origin-content-blocker/)

~~~
Yoric
> I assume, though, that Google will eventually make some change that
> Microsoft doesn't want, and they'll be forced to fork chromium.

This assumes that Microsoft still has a browser _engine_ division by then. I
suspect that adopting Chromium was largely a cost-cutting measure and this
division is on the chopping block already.

~~~
Touche
They're implementing some features in Chromium, so they still have that
division.

~~~
Yoric
Well, I know one-person teams who implement individual features in a browser.
Maintaining a fork, on the other hand, takes a much larger team.

------
deca6cda37d0
I recently replaced chrome on every company computer for Firefox. We shared a
google account with passwords that everyone needed. But some fools that don’t
understand their actions properly start deleting password by accident as the
cleared the browsing history. Yes I know you have options when you clear
history.

In Firefox passwords and browsing history / data is separated. So they can
delete browsing history and they don’t accidentally delete the passwords
anymore. And with a Firefox account all our passwords that employees need are
synced safely.

In one day 150 employees changed to Firefox :D

~~~
throwmeback
>We shared a google account with passwords that everyone needed.

I am speechless.

~~~
berkes
I'm intrigued by the `needed` in there. Why would that ever be a necessity?

~~~
tyingq
There's mundane stuff, like letting a small group of people log into Gmail for
support@mysmallbiz.com

There's ways around that, but for some orgs, it would be unneeded overkill,
and not protecting anything notable.

~~~
berkes
> but for some orgs, it would be unneeded overkill, and not protecting
> anything notable.

I can honenstly not think of a single venture where "support@" is not one of
the most critical resources wrt privacy and security. On top of that,
"support@" is typically the account that has a high churn rate. Where people
move on and new people are hired. Of all the cases, I'd say that "support@"
ranks amongst the top for need of proper account management.

That said, it's dead simple to grant jane@ and john@ access to an inbox in
Google. Researching how to do this may take 30+ minutes. But getting it
configured afterwards is really a two minute job.

The only reason I've came across why people shared Google accounts was "we
have a business domain and we need to pay for every extra seat". Which is a
valid excuse. I'd argue that its not a good enough excuse to lower your
security for, but valid nontheless. For one, 2fa is almost impossible when
sharing accounts.

Which is why having a "pay per seat" model for any SAAS is perpendicular to
having proper security practices. You are not rewarding good security, but
rather punishing it by letting organisations with proper separation of
accounts pay more then the ones that choose to have as few as possible.

~~~
tyingq
I've seen functionality where one gmail account can send an email so that it
appears to be from another email address.

I haven't seen anything that allows a seamless view of the inbox/outbox, and a
way of sending that doesn't accidentally use their normal email address if
they forget to click a drop down.

------
mooreds
How about downloading and installing Firefox and seeing if it meets your
needs? I totally understand if it doesn't, and then you should keep using
chrome or safari or whatever, but I am a back end web dev and Firefox (+ edge)
meet all my desktop needs.

Give it a try, you might like it.

And that'll have a lot more impact than testing cross browser regularly.

~~~
irrational
At my work I only work in Firefox, another Dev only works in Chrome, etc. By
each developer only working in one browser all the time we get pretty good
cross browser testing. This has led me to only using Firefox at home too since
it works really really well.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Same here. When I joined my current team, I was told I should use Chrome,
because nobody really tested the site on Firefox, so there may be some
breakage. That made me double-down on Firefox use, just so that I could report
if any problem actually occurs.

------
simula67
> Chromium will be the web’s de facto rendering engine

I think Blink is the rendering engine. Chromium is Chrome without Google
branding

I think that the problem with Firefox right now is that it does not have
something unique to offer. Before moving to the new plugin model, there were
plugins that were not available on Chrome which was available for Firefox :
DownThemAll, Tab wheel scroll etc. But in their desire to chase Chrome they
threw it away.

I also seem to have an annoying bug in mobile where after a while long tap on
link no longer opens the contextual menu. I wonder if I should report it since
last time I reported a defect it turned out to be a problem with uBlock and
this one takes a while to reproduce.

I think it might be a good idea for Mozilla to invest in good extensibility.
It helped them a lot last time and is therefore a battle hardened tactic

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _I also seem to have an annoying bug in mobile where after a while long tap
> on link no longer opens the contextual menu._

I encountered a bug matching this description on my S7. So far I discovered
that it's correlated to the number of tabs open; around 70 tabs, the context
menu appears after perceptible delay, which increases with the number of open
tabs. I think I reached something around 90 tabs before I couldn't long-tap on
links any more. Closing tabs makes the problem go away.

I'd say "go ahead and report it", but I too have uBlock installed, so I can't
say if it's unrelated. uBlock was the very reason I switched to Firefox on
Android anyway.

~~~
solarkraft
> I also seem to have an annoying bug in mobile where after a while long tap
> on link no longer opens the contextual menu

I thought I was the only one. I don't have uBlock installed, but also don't
really bother reporting bugs because mobile Firefox doesn't appear like a
supported project to me at all (where can I find ANY documentation?).

It happens to me occasionally, but I can't say anything about my number of
open tabs because it just displays "∞" (wtf man?).

------
g45y45
Stop using Google Spyware Browser. Google has abused its market position for a
long time now, and we are seeing the impact. Forced browser logins, and now
proposed deprecation of Ad Blocking API's are the two that bother me the most.
The Fox is cool again, Mozilla has your back.

~~~
denniskane
>Mozilla has your back

That's kinda funny when you consider where Mozilla came from... the ashes of a
thing called Netscape... who tried to rule the world while a couple grad
students were busy plugging away at Stanford, doing it the right way.

~~~
ohithereyou
Okay, please state the supposed crimes of the ashes of Netscape because I
think a lot of people here aren't following your line of reasoning.

------
mastrsushi
You guys can do whatever you want to "diversify" internet browsers, but the
writings on the wall. Not only is the majority using Chrome, but all
minorities other than Firefox are now derivatives of Chromium. The average
tech illiterate consumer isn't going to say "You know what, this isn't right!
We can't let Google take control as the dominant layout engine!". They want
something relevant that performs well, and Firefox hasn't been relevant in
years. Stop wasting your time and drop it. You're ancient browser will crumble
just like Netscape, IE, and Mosaic.

~~~
paulryanrogers
This critique amounts to "it's not working so give up". Thankfully minorities
in the past haven't always been so hopeless.

Every vote counts.

~~~
mastrsushi
Yes but this isn't an election, it's a choice of software. Regular people do
not care enough about internet browser dominance. Software projects like these
are largely supported by the size of their user space and corporate backing.
Your voice will never be heard.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Much like voting in politics our usage does add up. If a significant portion
of users abandon a browser then the producers will notice.

It's only hopeless if we all agree to do nothing.

------
MagicPropmaker
I use Edge and ( seriously ) all you guys did was mock me for it.

------
tln
What's the best way to port a puppeteer-based suite to one that uses Firefox?

Is there an npm package that will include up-to-date versions of all
components without further environment setup or use of external services?

Ideally, with great support for taking snapshots and running headless or
headed in simple fashion?

~~~
zakember
[https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/tree/master/experi...](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/tree/master/experimental/puppeteer-
firefox)

~~~
tln
I use this now, and love the ease of installation and api. If it's up to
developers to use Firefox it'd be great to port our test suites.

------
chriswarbo
I've been a happy Conkeror user for years. Recent changes to Firefox seem to
have broken it, so I'm sticking with the older version for now.
Chrome/IE/Edge/Safari/etc. aren't FOSS so I don't touch them.

Firefox and Chromium are getting increasingly slow and bloated, plus their
chrome takes up a bunch of screen space, doesn't follow the system theme
particularly well, and they rely far too much on the mouse (there are
extensions which help, but they're still not particularly good).

Out of the two I would still recommend Firefox over Chromium, since Mozilla
seem more ethical than Google, contribute less bloat and churn to Web APIs,
etc.

------
dehrmann
If you insist on using Chrome but back this cause, set your user agent to
Firefox.

------
superkuh
You gotta be the change you want to see. Stop using
Chrome/Chromium/Opera/Brave/etc/etc. Stop using Firefox. Start using forks.

------
Karupan
This rings true with me. I _want_ to use Firefox and ditch chrome, but until
it gets less laggy on macOS, I don’t think I have a choice. I do use safari
for day to day browsing and move to chrome only for development.

Multiple successful browsers is a good thing for the web. I hope that doesn’t
just die away.

------
phn
I agree with the post, but it should be noted that there's a _big_ difference
between Chromium -- an open source project -- and IE 6 being the de-facto
browser engine on the web.

~~~
AlexandrB
I think the difference is mostly theoretical. Consider the proposed extension
changes: no one seems to like them, but Google will be able to push them
through anyways. Maintaining a Chromium fork is a huge undertaking that only a
few companies would be willing to invest in.

~~~
zzzcpan
Maintaining a fork is much less of an undertaking, than reimplementing all
Chromium quirks. Hence plenty of Chromium forks exist, but only one last
barely competing browser.

~~~
jonathanyc
No nontrivial Chromium forks exist, to my knowledge. Do you know of any?

~~~
zzzcpan
I don't think Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Yandex browser are trivial by any
measure. Heck, even something small and independent, like ungoogled-chromium,
is in no way trivial.

~~~
Yoric
I haven't checked, but it was my understanding that – outside of the UX –
these are all very shallow forks.

Does anyone know more about this?

~~~
jonathanyc
Yes, these are all very shallow forks that mostly “just” change UI. That guy
doesn’t understand what nontrivial means.

------
kome
I never ever used chrome: I used Opera, and after Opera 12 I am using Firefox.
What am I missing?

------
lj3
This could be a huge opportunity. We have a web monoculture now. It's only
going to get increasingly so over the next few years. Google will let the
platform stagnate, as it has little to no reason to compete. It's time to come
up with something better. Something designed for both documents and
applications.

~~~
Yoric
Do you have any starting point?

~~~
lj3
Maybe something similar to what we have now, but exposes much lower level
aspects of the browser and gives you more fine grained control over it. WASM
is a good starting point in that it lets you use whatever language you want.
Now, we need a browser API that will let us draw directly to the window if we
want to. I think a lot could be accomplished by creating the UI portions of a
site programatically then dumping the content into a "renderMarkdown()"
function.

That's just my idea, though. Hopefully, the current sad state of the web and
the coming browser monoculture will spur others to experiment too. I know some
gaming companies have experimented with the distributing and executing of x64
binary executables using the browser. I know others are looking into ways to
chop up and do progressive loading on binary executables.

------
kkarakk
lol, no one complains when apple shoves webkit down your throat or google does
the same with mobile chrome. the battle has already been lost mostly-who uses
mobile firefox really?

on play store, by installs firefox - 100million+,chrome - 1billion+. firefox
is great but it's awkward focus on freedom over usability has led to it's
downfall imo

~~~
bgarbiak
It's obviously a matter of money, politics, and things beyond my imagination
but I can't understand why Firefox didn't double down on Servo (and friends)
for mobiles.

At one point there was talk about Samsung being a partner and Firefox/Servo
becoming the default browser on the Samsung phones. Which would make a perfect
sense, since every non-Apple phone gets its performance from multi-core SoC,
and Firefox would be the only browser taking advantage of that. Now, after
Google getting their hands slapped by the UE regulators, this Samsung/Firefox
marriage could be even more fruitful. And yet, the Servo team got assigned to
some pointless VR experiments, and it turned out Android was never a priority.
Again: I can't understand why, oh, why.

~~~
PrototypeNM1
Servo was a test bed, a place to experiment with new technologies on a
minimalist browser. The successful underlying technology was/is being moved
into Firefox (desktop and mobile).

There's also a new (I think?) mobile browser in progress. I'm not sure how it
fits into the larger picture and information is a bit scarce, they just
started releasing beta builds.

