> I started Firefox OS in 2011 because already back then I was convinced that desktops and browsers were dead. Not immediately–here we are 6 years later and both are still around–but both are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential going forward.
I don't understand this perspective. Browsers are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential? What?
I feel like the web dominates our lives more than ever, and everyone uses a laptop or desktop for any actual work they have to do, professional or hobby. While people use their phones for internet access throughout the day as they move about, it must be one in 1000 or fewer who uses their phone or tablet for real work.
Does someone see a replacement on the horizon for the supposedly "legacy" laptop/desktop power combo?
The mobile thing is just mass distraction. Everybody says "mobile" is eating the world, but when you look at it, 99 in 100 mobile core users are stupid facebookers who don't even know what is the internet and wouldn't be using the internet at all if it wasn't for Facebook, Instagram or whatever share-your-stupid-life network they may be using.
Because the things that tend to be the most valuable to society tend to also be hard to achieve. If you could be a good person by doing what is easy and immediately gratifying, there would be no trouble in the world.
I have secretly held this opinion for years. 4 out of 5 times that I look over someone's shoulder at their phone on the train, they're rapidly scrolling through a feed of photos, memes, and emote-filled status updates, endlessly.
It scares me, to be honest. I wonder where this tendency in people will lead in the very long run, particularly when you consider the ideas suggested by companies like Neuralink. It brings Black Mirror to mind.
Will people permanently have an inexhaustible feed of vapid garbage playing in their mind while they ignore most of everything going on in reality, in their actual real life?
However, this is unrelated to the original point. Just a side thought.
> Will people permanently have an inexhaustible feed of vapid garbage playing in their mind while they ignore most of everything going on in reality, in their actual real life?
Is that not already how it is? Each time I've been the new kid at school or new guy at the office, it seems there's nothing for people to talk about if you don't know all the TV shows or all the memes or all the movies or music or the celeb gossip or latest sports happenings or news or video game releases or this weeks anime developments or whatever it is each person chooses to fill their thought process with other than the world immediately around them.
It seems it's probably comforting to be consumed by external things over which you have no power, instead of being sober about closer things - some of which you could influence given significant effort, some of which you are powerless to influence with any amount of effort.
> It scares me, to be honest. I wonder where this tendency in people will lead in the very long run, particularly when you consider the ideas suggested by companies like Neuralink. It brings Black Mirror to mind.
No, I don't. I will concede that I believe there's vastly more to learn from HN than from a social media feed, and I will "concede" that I believe your time is better spent on something educational than something solitary and mildly amusing that just idly passes the time and is then forgotten. But I do not seek to force that perspective on anyone.
I just wish people didn't ignore the world all the time in favor of carrying their computer (phone) around with them and staring into it all day long.
Well, personally I read books. I think I learn more and remember more from the books than I or they do from social media feeds, which I think are a lot like putting your mind on hibernate to get from point A to point B in a temporal sense.
I don't ask that everyone read books, god forbid, but it would be nice if people weren't using their phones to put themselves into hibernate nearly all of the time. The phrasing of your question implies that the train is an isolated circumstance, but in my experience I see people out on dates with both people on their phones ignoring each other, and even whole groups of friends out together, all on their phones.
> which I think are a lot like putting your mind on hibernate to get from point A to point B in a temporal sense.
I was interested to find that in India, things are named in a way that brings out little points like this. For example, Indians call the little snacks you can buy on trains (like roasted, spiced peanuts) 'timepass.' A way to put the mind on hibernate and pass the time until the next desirable experience, presumably.
Maybe that's just what people want most of the time? The world can't always be the way we'd like it to be, and we're just passing time in a way that takes minimal effort. To get to the next desirable experience.
For most, the phone is where they go when a situation becomes uncomfortable or unfavourable. It's easier to do that than meet and correct the situation (if it's correctable at all). Or learn to see beauty in the mundane.
We need to build a culture of reasoned, purposeful existence, rather than one that is constantly buckling to the whims and fancies of our immediate demands.
If you do, then you must agree that you could replace every moment in your life that had been spent reading a book with you perusing your phone, and you would be the same person today.
I've been taking public transportation from before the era people had their smartphones with them. What I used to see where people reading tabloid newspapers, celebrity magazines, or cheap novels; here and there the rare person who was reading something interesting and insightful, and most people staring out of the window with their eyes glazed over. What I see now is lots of instagram, snapchat, facebook and mobile games, with a rare person here or there who is reading actual long-form articles, and with a minority of people staring out the window with their eyes glazed over. I don't think the difference is all that big to be honest, except that fewer people stare out the window.
What amuses me is when I see someone reading an actual physical book. It is so rare, and it is almost every time someone trying to be hip.
> What amuses me is when I see someone reading an actual physical book. It is so rare, and it is almost every time someone trying to be hip.
Reading a book is an almost entirely introverted activity. How is the motivation to be hip going to be enough to sustain one's attention across the length of an entire book?
> 99 in 100 mobile core users are stupid facebookers who don't even know what is the internet and wouldn't be using the internet at all if it wasn't for Facebook, Instagram or whatever
And that's precisely why mobile is eating the world. Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms drive a lot of traffic.
Maybe regional or depending on what bank you have. Here in Sweden you can do most things from your phone, so there isn't much of a reason to go to the desktop site usually. It's also marginally more convenient to log in on the phone app, as the authentication can be done on the phone.
Bills become much easier to pay via the phone, as you can scan the information from the invoice with your camera (for those companies that refuse to make electronic invoices available). Many invoices now use QR codes as well, so you only have to scan one thing to get all the information needed.
None that I can share, but my source is the major US bank's software that I work on. More than two thirds of our traffic is handled on mobile devices now.
You read hackernews, which alone suggests you are in the far, far tail of average developed country consumer. Most people hate, and always hated computers. Most people don't even have college degrees, and don't need heavy utility computing to do their jobs. Compare PC sales vs. Mobile.
> Does someone see a replacement on the horizon for the supposedly "legacy" laptop/desktop power combo?
Even on a phone/tablet, communication often includes web hyperlinks. The obsession with mobile is a reflection of business model. If you are in the advertising / surveillance capitalism business, mobile ("sensor phone") devices provide non-desktop signals that can be monetized.
Unfortunately, desktop software was hurt by piracy, with a few large ISVs making the most money. Today, Apple makes money on desktop hardware rather than desktop software. Microoft has tilted Windows 10 towards hosted services and data collection, but ISVs cannot abandon the large incumbent Win32 device market.
As laptop/desktop security improves, operating sytems could be reducing desktop software piracy and improving the profitability of ISVs. Instead, "app stores" are following two leaders who don't care about ISVs: Apple (hardware revenue, 30% ISV tax = tiny ISVs) and Google (data revenue, "free" apps).
We have the security technology and social network/marketing experience to design laptop/desktop software ecosystems that protect data/IP and support new ISVs. If Mozilla/Firefox wants to help, they can make it easier for web/extension developers and content creators to get paid.
Yes, Apple make money by taxing software, not selling software directly. There is a long list of complaints by Apple software developers about the lack of marketing support that they receive from Apple, in return for the 30% tax that is yielding the app store revenue cited above. Apple can enforce iOS ISV tax because of hardware control.
From that article, the top 10 mobile "apps" by revenue can be mapped to the modern equivalent of TV, radio and telecom services. None of these are creative software apps like those from large ISVs on desktops/laptops. Instead we have many mobile ISVs who are not very profitable.
Read what you wrote (in the context of the current discussion). Desktop software is alive and well. I don't like the size of the Apple Tax any more than you do, but to suggest this market doesn't exist is laughable.
Was your link about desktop app store or mobile app store revenue? I was differentiating between:
- pre-app-store (side loaded / direct download) desktop revenue on Windows and Mac
- "app store" desktop revenue on Windows and Mac
The former is subject to software piracy. The latter enforces software licensing but has a huge tax and poor marketing support. Nevertheless, Windows (on desktop) is following Apple's lead (on mobile) with app store business models.
Where the 30% tax exists in a distribution model, there are few successful ISVs that use only that distribution model. Where sideloading remains on Mac/Windows desktop, there are successful ISVs even with software piracy. On iOS, there is no alternative to the software distribution tax. Developers have been given an artificial choice between software piracy and 30% tax.
Both mobile and desktop ISV software revenue could be improved by app stores that enforced software licensing and provided optional marketing services that added up to 30%. Over time, the relative uptake of those optional services would lead to developer-oriented capabilities in app stores, i.e. serving the needs of the people paying the 30% tax.
You have to make wacky statements like this to pull off the "visionary" schtick. All of the hotshots were talking Post-PC world in 2011.
The reality is that computers are still computers. Mobile is the new TV.
I run EUC in a large diversified enterprise. We have about 0.05% pure mobile users, mostly iPad based. That is growing quickly, but probably won't exceed 3% in the next 5 years based on the current pipeline. There are exceptions, iirc Comcast has 50k iPads. Other field service orgs are similar.
Server based computing is a thing though. There's alot of BYOD and thin clients in our future. Thin clients are approaching $100 and going lower. VDI/Citrix has a positive ROI for me.
I think the future looks more like Issac Asimov's multivac.
Do end users get full Windows desktops or only access to selected apps? Assuming a 3-year amortization for $100 thin client desktop hardware, what's the annual cost per user when you include server/cloud hardware & VDI/OS software licensing? Which thin client do you recommend?
Right now it's a split of app and desktop. If you have the leverage on the OEMs, teradici clients are cheapest, but they are at the edge of not having sufficient lifespan for us. There are newer Intel devices that are getting close that we're using on a trial basis.
I can't get into specific dollars, but all-in the cost for VDI delivery is about 10% more, and we end up in the black with a longer client device cycle (which basically skips a rollout cycle) and dropping field service contracts -- FedEx is cheaper than a tech.
We're big enough that the component makers are willing to discount parts like CPUs for us though. Our pricing is generally 18 months cheaper than the market.
My MacBook is my work life. My phone is super important to me, but given some devil's choice, I'd go back to a StarTac before giving up the laptop!
My wife is the opposite. For her, in both professional and personal contexts, the computer is more like a screwdriver -- just another tool. The phone is where the computing happens, and you'd have to pry it out of her cold dead fingers.
I installed Chrome on my kid's laptop the other day because the web app they were using in class didn't work in Edge or Firefox.
Another time she had tried to open a link to a Word Doc and didn't realize it downloaded it. I showed her where it was in the downloads folder and she proceeded to upload it to Google Drive to open it instead of using Word.
Very few functions kids do these days require a specialist app, just a particular browser.
Her sister was complaining about having to log into Netflix and I suggested she install the App. Her response was "I don't like Apps, I prefer websites."
I was also at Mozilla during the time period Andreas outlines--I worked on the Firefox OS test team, for that matter, almost from the beginning of it graduating from Boot2Gecko as a Labs project until right before it got killed.
While my perspective isn't as strategic or metrics-driven as his, I had a lot of time to observe and think as both a community member and Mozilla employee. FxOS also wasn't my baby, so there's that. Note also that I speak for myself here and my own observations and paraphrases--whatever I say that pisses someone off is something I'm saying, not that Mozilla said verbatim.
My primary takeaways were twofold:
(Long, TL;DR at bottom)
1) I agree with you. Desktop and mobile are two separate markets, period. The first mostly serves a workplace audience and the second a personal audience, but most people with a desk job at the very least will use a web browser as part of their day. Desktop may be a minority of the overall, but it's a minority that won't go away anytime soon and so will continue to influence HTML and standards disproportionate to pure market share.
That's important because Mozilla's gambit for preserving the open web was pretty simple (I say was because I think they're just not that focused at this point):
Have enough people using your browser that websites absolutely have to support the emerging standards that browser relies on-- and perhaps in doing so make it less attractive for site providers and browser providers to spend time on proprietary tech that isn't significantly better than those standards, thereby making other browsers move to those standards too.
Doesn't mean these people have to use it everywhere, or that it has to be a majority share (10%+ was what I commonly heard as "enough") or otherwise "win". But it does have to be enough that people will complain if the website doesn't support their browser and that testers are influenced to test the site against it.
(BTW, as a test professional, the fact that Firefox no longer appears in most test matrixes I encounter due to lack of a blip on analytics is very telling, and Firefox has a serious risk growing around site incompatibility or instability in their browser).
That brings me to my second takeaway:
2) The grand majority of people don't use a web browser because of the browser itself; they use it for one of a few reasons:
a) It's default on their system.
You will not win these people over because they're not there for any reason other than it being the easiest or most integrated path. Note that this is pretty much the whole mobile market, and why it was a dire mistake for Mozilla to conflate the two markets, decide mobile was more important due to combined market share, then go tilting at windmills.
It's also, any altruistic reasons aside, why the moonshot was to create an OS so Firefox could be the default mobile experience.
b) Ethics/Community. This was a relatively small but very vocal part of Firefox's userbase. Probably more people were there "against Chrome" than "for Firefox," but whatever. Firefox succeeded in the first place because of "against Internet Explorer" so it's a valid reason to be there. The nice thing about these people is they pull in more people.
Unfortunately, one side effect of Firefox OS as a project was working with proprietary partners who emphasized confidentiality such that you couldn't share with the community in the way Mozilla did before. When Mozilla diverted most of their effort to Firefox OS, it froze out a lot of the community efforts.
I think Mozilla-the-org also became less skilled at working with community, both for that shift and perhaps because they brought in a lot of people from the mobile and other sectors who didn't have that background.
Whatever the case, this base wasn't well-maintained, and I don't think operates as a core in the same way it might once have, at least for...
Having been a contributor (mostly to Thunderbird, though) for a decade, I hold that Mozilla's biggest mistake was effectively killing off embedding and stable extension APIs. They merrily took the opportunity afforded by the Gecko 2 transition to kill all the compatibility, which is understandable, but the task of providing a simple frozen or at least not-going-to-change-soon API kept falling off the radar. It meant that technology experiments like Node.js or Electron--which is the sort of thing that was entirely in line with Mozilla's philosophy--couldn't be effectively built on Gecko and SpiderMonkey, at that means ceding a large captive market.
The extension ecosystem was always one of the strongest distinguishing facets of Firefox. I think Mozilla panicked when Chrome threatened Firefox's market share, and started trying to compete hard on things like being at the forefront of new technology adoption at the expense of the existing extension ecosystem. And in the process, Mozilla lost control of the messaging and it came to be seen as constantly doing little more than aping Chrome. The Web Extensions stuff is an example of the marketing issue. Mozilla new as far back as 2010 that extensions were the biggest stumbling block to getting multiprocess working. What they should have done was start developing the new extension APIs that far back, and made Firefox use multiprocess mode only if no legacy extensions were installed.
I see WebExtensions as taking a good/easy API that the Chromium team has created and proven and standardizing it like they standardized the web.
I never worked on the previous Firefox extension API but I find it ridiculously easy to have a cross platform extension that works on Chromium and Firefox. That counts for something.
In terms of usage and leverage, it doesn't seem to be moving a needle. It's been around for quite awhile and still has an awfully small market share.
That said, Firefox for Android is a great technical accomplishment, and a valuable project. The fact that they are able to differentiate themselves with extensions is very powerful.
The fact that this awesome accomplishment hasn't made much impact in share probably proves that "customization" isn't going to significantly outweigh "default" in that market, though my guess is it would still be a leading factor for the very small number of people who aren't using the default browser.
I don't mean to say that Mozilla should avoid mobile efforts entirely. Fennec is necessary, and I think Firefox OS would have been a fantastic reference implementation if Mozilla hadn't chased partnerships and commercial releases in combination with it.
The problem wasn't that Mozilla put time or resources into these things, it was that Mozilla bet on these things to the detriment of their core competencies and, frankly, mission.
Looking back on that era from here (only a handful of years later) it really looks like the desktop-is-dead-all-hail-the-smartphone crowd were just huffing paint.
And those fume hallucinations inspired the 'convergence' bandwagon which lead Canonical/Ubuntu, the Gnome project and Microsoft astray for years before they finally started rolling back those dumb decisions.
The markets for smartphones and tablets are now at absolute saturation point and, to a first approximation, no-one is abandoning their laptops/desktops en-masse in favour of working off of a 6 inch screen.
If I used this argument 16 years ago it would have meant "Internet Explorer won". Browsers will rise and fall and eventually a series of bad decisions by Google will pave the way for a new leader.
I will never leave Firefox as long as Mozilla fights the good fight. As internet privacy becomes an increasingly public issue, Google will face evermore scrutiny over Chrome and all it takes is one fuckup on their part for people to realize they've been supporting the wrong company.
If web browsers won't matter in the near future why all the fuss about Javascript, ES6, ES7, ES8 and whatever? What about WebRTC and all its implications? What about new exciting new API getting shipped to browsers everyday? What about CSS improvements and so on?
Do you think all this people is wasting their efforts in trying to make web apps much more like native apps?
I use Chrome / Chromium with uBlock Origin, and am basically ad free. uBlock Origin works great on Firefox too, and I'm a Firefox user on Android solely because this extension exists, and Chrome for Android refuses to run extensions.
Heck, even Microsoft Edge can run ad blockers now. There's no shortage of options if ads are the primary thing keeping you away from competitors.
Especially on Android, where Chrome doesn't have uBlock or extensions, and Firefox does.
Not to mention the million hooks Google's apps put into Chrome search, browsing history, etc. If you use the Google Search launcher to open an app, it sends which app and the time it was opened to Google!
I'm disappointed that the death of Firefox OS and Ubuntu phone leaves us with little choice for FOSS smartphones.
Android is not FOSS.
The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is, but that excludes all the closed Google apps upon which more and more Android apps rely on.
Almost every smartphone ships with Android, not AOSP, therefor there really isn't a FOSS smartphone market.
Funny to see this. I just downloaded Vivaldi [1] today. I still have all my work stuff in Chrome, but I'm giving Vivaldi a second shot now that a more stable version has been released. I like the idea of a browser with more features for developers (as they put it, a browser for our friends). I'm hoping it lives up to expectations.
This motivated me to go even further. I'm sick of the 1999 style popups and redirects I get on mobile sites, especially the Android webviews that so many applications have. I'm setting the AdBlock Browser to my default and disabling in-app web browsers where possible. Until I can trust mobile sites to have respectable ads, they lose revenue.
The more I think about this, the more annoyed I'm getting. The Youtube app has also been redesigned to have a less 'friction free' UI. You now open a video, see an ad first. Ok, that's fine. Back out of a video, it minimizes and you view 'suggested videos' (which feel like more ads). Swipe video away, you're still on the ad screen. Back out of Youtube. I want to watch a video and get out, maybe be pestered by 1 skippable ad for a relevant product. Not hit back 8 times and swipe a video away.
The time might be right for disruption. On the other hand, I might just be spoiled by debt supplemented user acquisition strategies that have very low monetization. We'll see.
I've been using Vivaldi as my daily driver for about two months or so and I'm about to switch away. I'm not impressed with the performance on any level. In fact, ATM, the only thing I like about it is the bookmark handling, which is not really all that unique.
It's a tossup for me whether I'll go back to Chrome or Safari (there's positives and negatives for both of them in my case).
Here are two ways that Mozilla could have a lot of impact:
- If it is indeed too challenging for Firefox to compete against Chrome with a separate browser, there might be value in Mozilla maintaining an open-source fork of Chrome. This would allow Mozilla to borrow the good bits of Chrome for relatively low effort, and focus development effort on the the things that Google might not value so much (e.g privacy). It would also be a hedge against a Google monopoly by having an open source competitor available.
- I'd love to see a solid open source clone of Android—including a full clone of Google Play Services. I think Mozilla could help a lot here, especially if they integrated their fork of the browser.
Isn't that what Chromium is? Or did you want Firefox to fork Chromium and be reliant on Google and keep pulling in all changes they pushed?
As for an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called Replicant. Mozilla already tried the mobile OS thing and failed. Not sure why you think they would suddenly have success. It's all about ecosystems in the mobile space and Mozilla doesn't have it nor will they ever.
> did you want Firefox to fork Chromium and be reliant on Google and keep pulling in all changes they pushed?
I guess I was thinking that Mozilla could both contribute to the core browser (Blink?) and maintain a fork similar to Chromium, but perhaps with more independent features.
This is obviously not ideal for the ecosystem, compared to having a separate browser engine. However it could be a useful approach if Firefox has trouble getting enough users to be relevant, because at least it would mean that Mozilla is influencing the web and its development.
> an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called Replicant
I don't think Mozilla needs to start an independent project. They could fund, promote and improve one of the existing open source forks of Android.
"there might be value in Mozilla maintaining an open-source fork of Chrome."
Then that would mark the day when I no longer use Mozilla's software. There'd be no point.
The world doesn't need yet another Chromium-based browser. Firefox's continued development of Gecko and new development of Servo are among the main forces (alongside Safari, maybe) preventing Chrome from becoming the next Internet Explorer.
What you're describing is more or less what Opera ended up doing. The upshot is that they have no leverage at all in standards discussions and pretty limited control, if any, over changes to Chrome that might break whatever features they've built on top of it.
https://microg.org is a clone of Play Services and it works very well. Of course it's not 100% full but it works as a client for notifications and location (and some other things), and I don't need all of the other Google garbage.
In fairness to Firefox, at this point I'm just waiting for their dev tools to get as good as Chrome's before I seriously consider switching, and other efforts like Quantum certainly make the prospect even more attractive. Once they have me on desktop, I'll want to switch on mobile as well for the state syncing benefits.
I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable portion of Chrome users were in a similar boat, quietly waiting for some small aspect of Firefox to improve.
All the older administrative workers at my office, who have used IE for years (often because their enterprise apps required it) are pretty grumpy about Edge.
I think it's mainly just because it's different. A lot of people don't like gratuitous change (something most tech companies don't understand at all). I'm sort of in that camp myself. I basically abandoned Office when they came out with the Ribbon UI, and I still haven't liked any new Windows compared to the "classic" NT desktop.
2 things keep me on Chrome. First, the overly large titlebar on Linux. I've tried some addons to make it more like Chrome but they all look like shit. And second, the dev tools. I find dev tools in Firefox clumsy to use. I believe I originally switched to Chrome for the dev tools when I ventured into frontend development.
Just installed Chromium to compare. When maximized, the Chromium title bar is 65px high on my system, whereas Firefox's takes 70px. I should note, though, that I have set my window manager to hide the default window decoration on maximized windows, which helps.
I even develop stuff on Chrome where I'm planning for the final deployment to be to embedded web views on other platforms (e.g. embedded WebKit on Apple platforms). The dev tools are just that much better. Fixing the occasional incompatibility is more than outweighed by the superiority of the Chrome developer console.
Err correction, looks like 3,294 of those FF hits are from a bot trying to break into my fake wp-login.php page with an agent id of "Firefox/34". But still, minus those hits, FF is neck and neck with Chrome.
I don't understand the graphs. Chrome's growth seems to be slowing according to the raw data part of the graph, yet the trend line suggests Chrome's growth to be speeding up. The trend line basically doesn't seem to fit the data at all in the case of Chrome, aside from the fact that both point more-or-less upward.
It's a classic example of someone who hasn't had to deal with "hard" statistics thinking that just drawing a trendline (and dismissing biases out-of-hand) is all that statistics is.
The author is right that Chrome has a massive share, but everyone knows that. Any analysis more specific than that requires more than just overplotting exponentials on a graph.
I have to agree. The fact that he was their tech leader and was running things when Chrome took over is especially damning .
The entire article he didn't take any ownership for this failing and then goes on to mention how he is heading up another company.
> All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users.
I call BS. When Chrome came out it was a lot better experience than Firefox. That is IMO how chrome got so much velocity. Chrome was more stable and faster. Now that may not be true now but it was the early technical failure of Firefox that caused a great deal of uptake of chrome.
But once you make it to the top these days even after failure you still get funding and get to to lead another company.
Andreas is rightfully very impressive but maybe he shouldn't be an executive.
This is what I came here to post, and you can see that, in the mobile chart, Chrome and Safari already seem to be levelling off. Maybe a better model would be like an ADSR (attack decay sustain release) envelope in sound synthesis where the logistic curve represents the attack / initial adoption phase, possibly followed by a mirror logistic curve representing mature saturation then eventual replacement by competitors. That said, some products do come back from the dead, like Mozilla itself; the Apple Mac is another example.
Saying "Chrome won" now feels like saying "IE won" in 2002 or so. Look at the chart here:
What strikes me is the diversity. Chrome has mostly been stealing market share from IE; Safari is growing too and is by no means dead; FF has been declining, but not that much. There are 4-ish strong browsers in the market now when before there was only 1 (IE) and a half (Mozilla). Certainly a different picture from the chart in the article.
To me on the Desktop only graph it looks like Chrome is meant to be a logarithmic growth curve not an exponential one. It seems he wanted the data to fit the projections rather than the projections fit the data.
>Browsers are a commodity product. They all pretty much look the same and feel the same. All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users.
Not really. Buy a cheap laptop and see Firefox freeze all the time rendering pages while Chrome keeps up like a champ.
All your remaining users are the die-hard users like me, who stay because they like the addons, or some other thing. But Mozilla has decided they'll remove those too, so...
I use firefox for entirely idealistic reasons, but it's hard to ignore the fact that it is slower. There are times when it just feels so bloated, though thankfully a quick restart gets it running smoothly again. I know firefox team has had passes of perf improvements in the past, but it seems like it still isn't a high priority. When it comes to browsers, speed is the #1 feature.
Honestly, recently I've consistently noticed Firefox running faster than Chrome for my usage scenario. It might be bias, but I find browsing on Firefox a more enjoyable experience and uses a lot less of my system resources.
I stuck with Firefox through the times where it was much slower than Chrome for idealistic reasons as well, but now I feel like speed is less of an issue because they are both pretty even.
It might be a placebo effect, but I find that I switch back and forth between Chrome and Firefox every 6-12 months after the one I'm using feels slow and the other feels faster. Maybe they're actually leapfrogging each other in performance, maybe not. I'm currently on my Chrome phase.
I switched from Firefox to Chrome just last week. I was using Firefox for years until it began crashing multiple times per day. Chrome is far faster at browsing. Tabs close quicker.
This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.
Don't kid yourself. Firefox was losing long before Eich left and was even more technically inferior relative to its competitors at the time of his departure.
I don't buy it. Eich was hardly a wunderkind capable of carrying a browser on his shoulders alone. And in a market for engineers that currently favors labor, do you really want to be on the wrong side of the social issues that your staff generally care about? Maybe they would have left to work on Chrome if Eich had stayed. That doesn't even speak to the myriad technical and resource issues that Mozilla faced prior to that particular incident.
You're letting your personal politics cloud the facts. Firefox was struggling well before that point, not because it was bad but because Google was pouring enormous amounts of money into Chrome and the only way you don't lose in that situation is if the competition screws up.
Firefox had a big decade because Microsoft put IE on a starvation diet after Netscape folded but Google shows no sign of making a similar level of error. Firefox has never been better technically but at the end of the day they're fighting on the wrong side of a war which will be decided by budgets.
Unlike the post linked below, I am not anonymous (it's very easy to figure out who I am) and I am verifiably a former employee of the Mozilla Corporation.
And if you think it's as simple as "political correctness"... I don't even know how to begin talking to you.
Remember: we're not talking about someone "just expressing an opinion" here (as many discussions tried to claim at the time). Brendan didn't just say something, or write something: he actively worked to have his personal opinion -- of whose lifestyle was acceptable and whose lifestyle wasn't -- written into the fundamental law of the state where Mozilla is headquartered. And that opinion, once it became law, hurt employees of the company he was trying to lead, and told them they were effectively second-class citizens.
Such a complete and utter lack of regard for one's fellow humans is disqualifying no matter how much "technical prowess" someone might have. His only choices at that point were to come back in line with the bare-minimum requirements of a free society (such as equality of all people before the law), or be shown the door. And any attempt to dismiss that as "political correctness" reveals a lot about the nature of the person attempting to dismiss it.
Stop spreading misinformation. Brendan Eich left Mozilla of his own free will. You're lying when you claim he was "forced out". Quite the contrary. They begged him to stay.
"Since then, there has been a great deal of misinformation. Two facts have been most commonly misreported: 1. Brendan was not fired and was not asked by the Board to resign. Brendan voluntarily submitted his resignation. The Board acted in response by inviting him to remain at Mozilla in another C-level position. Brendan declined that offer. The Board respects his decision." [1]
The only people who were "forced out" against their will were the Californian citizens who were forced out of their existing legal same-sex marriages, thanks to the anti-gay propaganda than Brendan Eich willingly and unapologetically paid for.
You're the one who is choosing to propagate the political correctness of homophobic politicians fighting against marriage equality, by misstating the facts and parroting lies to make a politically motivated point in the defense of bigotry, then projecting your own political correctness onto other people.
And you're also wrong to believe that he could have steered the ship away from where it was inextricably headed. Or do you honestly believe that homophobes are the growth market for web browsers, so as a high profile anti-gay-marriage pro-Prop-8 poster child, his bigotry-inclusive outreach to countries like Indonesia, which he claims have many oppressed gay-marriage opponents who support him but don't "have quite the megaphone", could have turned the ship around? [2]
"Now, in his first interview on the subject, Eich is responding with a message that Mozilla is at its core inclusive -- not just of gay-marriage supporters but also of people like him or gay-marriage opponents in Indonesia who also are part of the Mozilla cause."
"For Mozilla, it's problematic because of our principles of inclusiveness, because the Indonesian community supports me but doesn't have quite the megaphone."
Eich also stressed that Firefox worked globally, including in countries like Indonesia with "different opinions," and LGBT marriage was "not considered universal human rights yet, and maybe they will be, but that's in the future, right now we're in a world where we have to be global to have effect." [3]
"Actually, Mr. Eich, right now we’re in a world where you have to not be a bigot if you want to be an effective leader of an organization like Mozilla. And it’s about time."
Thank god, before chrome run using firefox on linux has a frustrating experience. Sites often targeted IE or even mozilla. Trying to file taxes, connecting to a school website, libraries, etc often hit various snags. Some would work but you'd have to lie about your agent.
These days with chome being so popular linux users can feel like a first class citizen. Reminds me of the comic showing a dog using a computer and "On the internet nobody knows you are a dog". With chrome nobody on the internet knows you are running linux.
You can even gasp use office/adobe clouds based apps.
I disagree with the horse / car metaphor. Each platform is different, radio or TV is a better metaphor for still being popular but different. I highly doubt PCs will be relegated to a novelty few dozen in a cities.
Roc has a similar comment in the comment section. I agree and disagree. Desktop PCs will be around, but the vast majority of interaction minutes will be on mobile (and maybe in the future elsewhere). Most of the 6bn people or so who arrived online once the Web took off don't have PCs, and don't need it. Its a geographic/infrastructure issue (lots of LTE in Africa and Asia but no landlines etc), and also a generational one. Kids grow up with smartphones. Why use a PC if the phone works? PC won't go away, but if 90% or 95% or online minutes are mobile, do PCs still matter?
And beyond the mobile vs desktop, even on mobile I don't want to install an apps just to read an article, view an image or buy an airplane ticket. The one app I use the most on my phone is a browser.
What I find most heart breaking is that too many people who stick around here helped it to prosper. Web site not fast enough, use Chrome, web site broken in other browsers, use Chrome. Google services suspiciously slow in other browsers, use Chrome.
Firefox was my browser of choice on desktop, but its overall decline in performance forced me to switch. Now I use Safari when I care about saving battery life, and Vivaldi for everything else.
Vivaldi is basically Chrome without the annoying Google bits.
I still use Firefox occasionally, but mostly for testing.
I agree with this blog post. But I don't think Mozilla lost.
I worked for Mozilla for a few years, after seeing John Lily (CEO at the time) speak. It was right after Chrome started getting popular, and a smug person in the crowd asked him about how he felt about Chrome.
John's response was awesome. "This is the web that we wanted. We exist not because we want everyone to use Firefox, but because we wanted people to have a choice" Firefox was a response to a world of "best viewed in IE" badges, and it changed the browser landscape.
Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox. There's a lot of options out there, and they're all standards compliment. And that's thanks to Mozilla.
So, in my mind, Mozilla won. It's a non-profit, and it forced us into an open web. We got the world they wanted. Maybe the world is a bit Chrome-heavy currently, but at least it's a standards compliment world.
I hope Mozilla sees that. I hope they take credit, and move on to what's next: privacy and net neutrality. Our privacy is under attack, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that can (and would want to) help. I know, I know. Nobody cares about privacy. Nobody cared about web standards, either, but Mozilla bundled it into an attractive package and it worked. It's time for Mozilla to declare victory, high five the Chrome team, and move on to the next big challenge.
We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song.
-----
EDIT: Hey cbeard - My email is in my profile; I'd love to talk.
The problem is we're moving extremely fast to a chrome only world. If it wasn't for corporate sites and the success of the iPhone chrome would probably be dominating the way IE used to.
I definitely run into sites that only work on chrome and not in any other browser.
In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to. Unlike IE and FireFox and Safari it comes from a company that is notorious for wanting to know everything about you.
The time to celebrate victory was a few years ago. Now it's starting to look like the new boss is the same as the old, maybe worse.
On windows firefox does everything in one thread while chrome opens many. Depending on the usage both can be fast or slow. Firefox handles multiple tabs better. Chrome handles multiple tabs of videos better
This ultimately was what made me switch back to Firefox after I had used Chrome for a couple of years. I regularly have several hundred tabs opened in my browser, and Chrome was completely unusable in that situation, at least back then.
Honest question: why do you use hundreds of tabs at the same time? Why not bookmarks and leave a couple of the most important ones open? I have never understood the use case for "hundreds" of browser tabs
If you want to be 10x, you need at least 10 stackoverflow tabs open to copy and paste from.
I've always assumed people talking about having hundreds of tabs open just don't understand how to properly use a browser. My grandmother, for example, usually has 100 or so open by the time I get a call about her having computer problems.
There's no logical reason I can come up with for doing this instead of using bookmarks.
I have a lot of tabs open. Not multiples of hundreds at the moment, but probably around 100. I use the same computer for work and personal, so I have different contexts I switch through at least once a day. Increasingly, things are becoming web apps, so I have a dozen just to do basic tasks these days: email, multiple chat clients, music player, code repository, issue tracker, Twitter, online office suite, etc. Sure, I could bookmark and close and re-open every time, but that's a waste of time when I want to quickly switch back to something. And not every app has sensible bookmarking semantics.
Then throughout the course of the day I end up looking up API docs, get linked to blog posts, news articles, and YouTube videos, and read articles which themselves have relevant links to follow. Most of these I just open in a background tab to check out later in the day. These accumulate until I have time to go through and quickly review them. Those that I want to read and don't have the time currently go to Pocket. The rest get read or summarily closed out. I find bookmarks to be a terrible way to triage tabs.
This workflow works for me (and evidently others). It's faster than bookmarking. It's less prone to failure, in my experience (I've suffered bookmark corruption more than once). And a modern computer ought to handle many background tabs just fine. Moreover, if browsers aren't expected to be used in this fashion, they really should set an upper-limit on the number of tabs that can be opened.
Hopefully this gives you some perspective on alternative use cases. It sounds like your workflow works out well for you. I've tried it and couldn't get it to stick. If that means I don't know how to use a browser, so be it. At this point, there's enough of us (your grandmother included) that maybe the browser vendors should just find a way to cope with it better.
This is my flow as well, I have 3 monitors in a pyramid formation, each monitor is both a personal and a business chrome browser running on separate desktops.
Each browser instance is tabbed completely across, I keep them open until I read the page fully, and then save it in keep to keep forever.
By Friday I can have hundreds of tabs that I go through and clean up. Web apps are a huge pain to constantly log in.
I run Korora with 24GB RAM and an I 7, Chrome is never a system hog for me, and most of the time it surprises me how well it handles my use.
My issues with Chrome and tab management is that the tabs become progressively smaller, to the point of being unusable. There's likely an add-on for that, but Firefox handles it nicely with the Tab Center feature in Test Pilot. Also, if I need to restart the browser, Chrome loads every tab at startup and that's far from ideal. Firefox will only load the active tabs.
Because unlike other browsers Firefox will actually search existing open tabs and present those as possible results (and open the tab if you choose it).
I have hundreds of tabs open at a time. Instead of searching for something, then going to the Google page, clicking and waiting for it to load, in Firefox I search for what I want in the bar, it presents the tab as a result and opens it instantaneously.
In addition with the vertical tab bar extensions I can see a list of about 40-50 tabs open at a time, using the additional horizontal space monitors provide that web pages don't use to keep an easily visible list of tabs.
> If you want to be 10x, you need at least 10 stackoverflow tabs open to copy and paste from
I open pages that interest me, I might read them later like I did this discussion or just drop them. Add in open tickets, reference pages, the build server, youtube, etc. and the number grows over time.
> My grandmother, for example, usually has 100 or so open by the time I get a call about her having computer problems.
Maybe she should use Firefox instead of Chrome?
> There's no logical reason I can come up with for doing this instead of using bookmarks.
I did this when I started, by now I only use bookmarks for high interest pages, no point in bookmarking everything.
This hasn't been true since last August when it hit release. Multi-process (which I'm assuming you meant instead of multi-thread) has been enabled by default since January, except in specific cases where it's likely to cause compatibility issues. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule
I find it shameful they ever let it become such an incredible energy hog in the first place. It's been well known for years among mini Mac people that you can get drastically better battery life by using Safari. I mean it wasn't like it was a 10 or 15% problem, it's orders of magnitude.
It's nice there working on it, but why didn't they ever care before?
Chrome being faster and less bloated was their sales pitch. Keep in mind that Chrome came out as a counterpoint to IE and Firefox in what was then still a very desktop centered market. No one was talking about battery life back then. The solution to battery life on laptops was to create better power profiles, lower powered hardware, and shove in bigger batteries.
Chrome is still a huge improvement compared to the browsers it was competing against. Chrome changed the market and now the other browsers are competing in the world Chrome created. So while Chrome might fall behind in some areas now, it's naive to say that it's become what they made fun of.
The sad thing is you can't trust chromium since it takes effort to keep the Google out. We already had one black box DRM module sneak its way in via background download because the commits aren't checked for sneaky code.
"The problem is we're moving extremely fast to a chrome only world. If it wasn't for corporate sites and the success of the iPhone chrome would probably be dominating the way IE used to."
"Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again." -- Gandalf
Well its not the same boss again. Sure Chrome has a massive market share. But even Today's MS Edge is not open. I used to work for the Edge team and the directors never really gave Open Source a serious thought. It was too tied to windows. I am glad Edge doesn't have the market share that Chrome has.
Chrome works on every platform. It hogs memory but its fast. Chromium & v8 are open. This is the kind of things that gave us Electron, nodejs and everything that is built on top of it. I appreciate Google for working on it.
Regarding privacy, I totally agree. Would be nice if the most popular web browser wasn't developed by the world's biggest ad company. I still think they do a descent job of isolating the two orgs. I can technically install extensions that stop much of the ad invasions.
Except anything MIPS-based. Or Power. Or in fact anything that isn't x86 or ARM.
And it's not just a matter of compiling it for those platforms. There's a bunch of architecture-specific porting that would have to be done (e.g. you _have_ to implement a V8 backend; there is no platform-independent way to run V8 just with a C++ compiler).
But they are tracking and spying on their users and using strong arming tactics to keep the "Chrome" branding. Firefox has been faster and uses less resources for a good while now and Opera is at least offering Mobile mode to say power while on battery (Even though it's powered by the Blink engine).
An what Chrome is giving out is "Tier1" search results only fed to their browser (Thus search results are more accurate using Chrome.... and now Google Earth is "Chrome Only" which uses WebGL and the latest tests show Firefox is still over 3x as fast with WebGL content then Chrome.
Electron is HORRIBLE, enabling people to write apps in Javascript while using all your PC"s resources is insane. "Etcher" a program written in electron who's sole purpose is simply an "ISO USB Writer" comes with a payload of 180mb's on disk and over 200MB's of RAM and runs like an old dog with cancer... along with the other electron apps. This could have been written with something we had for decades with little overhead and small payload, it's called Python...
Some developers don't have python in their toolbox/skill set. The alternatives in many cases are Electron or nothing (due to higher development costs etc). The right tool for the job is not always that which gives you the best product, but what gives you A product in the shortest time.
I use Firefox and haven't run into this problem. I guess I've been lucky. Why Firefox rather than Chrome? On my Google Chromebook (original Pixel), Chrome (the last versions I tried) are almost completely unusable - it hogs all the CPU until it crawls to a stop and needs to be killed. Even if they fix that, I'm not going back, however, because Firefox's handling of text is so immensely superior. It was bad years ago¹ and it's still terrible. One contemporary example: hyphenation support.
The most specific example I can think of is the sears credit card site, I couldn't pay the bill with Firefox, so I keep a Chrome installation handy for the occasion a site doesn't work.
Google products, which I can't get away from, are starting to fail completely on Firefox.
I've run into several other complex sites that fail on Firefox. It's sad, because I've used it for years. I'm using it right now. But my default just switched to Chrome because I started having too many Firefox issues.
Firefox is my next item up the chain if PM has trouble. Trouble with individual browsers isn't my biggest problem; my work blocks so many things. Youtube has stopped working. Most of the cool ShowHN demo projects don't work (when they do once I get home, I mean).
I find that Firefox works well enough for my normal need. My other two browsers are SeaMonkey & PaleMoon (sense a pattern?). The only alternative browser I use is Links.
The real problem is not that Firefox has issues, but that it's a small enough market share now that more and more web services can get away with not bothering to test on it.
I hate how, as a web developer, I've probably been part of the problem. My workflow has somehow ended up being 'do everything in chrome and only at the end test if it all works in firefox and safari'. More than once I forgot that step and ended up making small fixes for Safari on request, but not Firefox because nobody reported issues.
Once I became aware of this, I've been trying to be more diligent about thoroughly testing things on Firefox.
I wonder how many other developers are in a similar situation, where Chrome is their default browser and/or their main debugging environment. Part of the problem for me is that I find the Chrome dev tools superior, and that makes it so much easier to just forget about the rest (not that I'm justifying my behavior, btw).
FWIW, I'm exactly the opposite. I dev on firefox, only bother with chrome at the last minute (although I'll check it's responsive mode a little earlier) and get somebody else to check safari.
I think Firefox's Developer Edition has been providing better dev tools than Chrome for some time. But then I've never been entirely happy with Chrome's Dev Tools having grown up on Firebug and relatives for Firefox. But then I've never liked Chrome and I only have Chrome installed because my corporate environment has become one of those that mandates Chrome because that's the only thing IT at large can be bothered to test for internal facing sites. As a developer of externally facing sites, I laugh/cry in their general direction.
(Also, I think a lot of people discount how good Edge's Dev Tools have gotten. There too my corporate mandated environment is mostly stuck with Windows 7 and an intentionally broken IE 11 due to Oracle and using their terrible software internally.)
It's so weird (I don't know if you've left this thread or not). I'm working on a virtualbox linux at home and chrome doesn't work on drop-down menus. I only discovered this because I was trying out a browser called vivaldi (which I really like but it has chrome dna) and it didn't work there. So I tried chrome and- indeed- it doesn't work in chrome either. Works fine in firefox.
Upon googling, I discovered that drop-down menus have been an issue in chrome (even not using vbox). I'm using zurb foundation for the menu js/css, fwiw.
I generally like Chrome dev tools better, but Firefox (and Firebug, RIP) has some unique tricks, in practice I use both at times. But I agree a lot of people take your approach of Chrome as default, Firefox/other for testing, and that's part of the problem. (If you haven't heard of Selenium+SauceLabs, they can help with your automated testing of multiple browsers.)
I still use Firefox as default, both for developing and for general web browsing. It and my set of extensions fit my preferences too nicely and have no equivalent in Chrome. I use Chrome at work primarily for Google Hangouts / Meet, the occasional debug session, or just to have another session. (Trying to get into Chrome's Profiles feature too.) At home I just use Chromium from time to time, mostly because my computer is starting to age and I notice the performance difference for certain things.
Why not switch to developing in Firefox, like, now? As long as the debug tools are usable, why throw out the baby with the bath water for getting a tiny bit more a tiny bit sooner? Let's have some love for our future selves..
The real problem is not that people don't test on all browsers, but that people have to test, still, on multiple browsers. The standardisation does not work well, new stuff is out constantly, vendors not independent experts control the process.
It's even worse. I would sometimes accidentally write infinite recursion in chrome and it would lock the computer. I think this happens if your recursion involves the DOM because chrome unsafely uses privileged resources to accelerate layout. The same code in Firefox would only slow to a crawl and be recoverable.
>Unlike IE and FireFox and Safari it comes from a company that is notorious for wanting to know everything about you.
That's not true. Microsoft has now gotten into the spying business, and is infamous for the Windows 10 telemetry. They're basically copying Google.
Firefox and Safari are the only ones that come from companies that aren't notorious for wanting to know everything about you. And Firefox doesn't try to get you to spend scads of money on massively overpriced but mediocre hardware that locks you into their ecosystem.
Firefox has its warts, but it's the only choice that really makes sense if you care about privacy and freedom and avoiding vendor lock-in.
There is no clear line to be drawn between the two, and it really depends on the use to which the data is put, something that's opaque to end users.
Sure, error reporting feeding in to a QA database is one thing. But is there the capability to target Win10 OS ads to, say, folks with old video cards? I'd be very surprised if someone in Redmond didn't think of that.
Not "DOM" but a hashes of the URL or a part of it, to check if the domain or URL is "safe." Also downloads are checked. And AFAIK it's more nuanced, there's also a database that can be checked and allow "offline" checks. But it would still be interesting to find one independent serious analysis of the behavior.
It's named client side detection and it sends the DOM model(actually hashes of it) to Google. I found about it on HN too. Obviously you may check FF/Chrome source too. I would love to be proven wrong. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5971403
Both Chrome and Firefox use the same techniques as far as the client side detection is concerned if not even the same code. Both send the data to Google.
> One of the most persistent misunderstandings about Safe Browsing is the idea that the browser needs to send all visited URLs to Google in order to verify whether or not they are safe.
> While this was an option in version 1 of the Safe Browsing protocol (as disclosed in their privacy policy at the time), support for this "enhanced mode" was removed in Firefox 3 and the version 1 server was decommissioned in late 2011 in favor of version 2 of the Safe Browsing API which doesn't offer this type of real-time lookup.
> The problem is we're moving extremely fast to a chrome only world. If it wasn't for corporate sites and the success of the iPhone chrome would probably be dominating the way IE used to. I definitely run into sites that only work on chrome and not in any other browser.
This hasn't happened to me in a while, except for occasionally government or bank sites which require "IE or Chrome". In many cases, spoofing the user agent works just fine for those. I agree it's bad, though.
The one exception I've noticed is Yubikey (U2F) support for Google services. Firefox has an add-on that provides Yubikey support, but last I checked, Google blocked access to those (I believe even if you spoof the user-agent).
I'm continually upset by this. If you know you rely on, for example, the fetch() api, test for the fetch api[0]. Whitelisting browser user agents just means chasing your tail for forever.
By all means, politely warn a user that "your browser is not tested". It's getting to feel like a marketing driven decision, where pages just about say "our site is so powerful, we only work with the greatest browser ever, Chrome, so come back when you have it".
I've had this on sites that switch domain for the checkout process while I had cookie killer installed. Leaving the first domain dumped the cookies and hence the basket.
I do wonder how much of that is the browser's fault, and how much is because of website developers not understanding that we have a website obesity problem[0], nor the concept of "optimizing for fan noise"[1].
I'm fairly conscientious about this myself since I'm working on plotting data, and the dumb client-side number crunching involved is actually pretty good at eating CPU cycles.
Most plotting libraries want to show off how smooth and incredible their animations are. What I really want to know however is: does your library keep updating the canvas at 60FPS, or does it only refresh when the data does and idle otherwise?
Both, since browser these days don't even show the number of connections and download speed for a loading page, much less an indicator for high CPU usage. I'm not saying displaying this stuff would be enough by itself, but hiding what is going on just so we can have a slightly bigger viewport into unicolor surfaces with huge padding and line spacing certainly doesn't help.
I know there are all sorts of flags etc, but consider old Opera, where switching the status bar between none, simple and advanced was right there in one of the main menus. That was a good start, that stuff would be compact and super useful by now if we'd just keep going.
F12 has becomes something of the universal key for Dev Tools in the browsers. It's not compact, but it is super useful and does have all the information and more. Most browsers even offer Profilers to get detailed stats on CPU and Memory usage.
Sure, it doesn't explain to average users why the webpages they view might be slow, but average users don't care.
Average users don't care about encryption either, yet we still have the padlocks for those who do. More importantly, average users are not creating browsers, and the people who know better can't hide behind them.
The average smoker probably doesn't want to hear smoking is unhealthy. Does that mean doctors should adjust their advice respectively? At what point does "professional" really mean nothing other than "gets money for it, like a carpenter or a thief or a drug dealer might"?
We don't even have the right to "just give people what they want without any judgement on our part", but we certainly don't have the right to ignore those with legitimate concerns because ignorant or apathetic people are more in numbers. That goes for everything, everywhere. That goes to how you are supposed to look out for little siblings when parents are away, and it goes for expert knowledge or intellect.
"This website is running long running scripts", "This website is not responding": those are already equivalents to the smoker warning that show up from time to time.
But what is any user supposed to do with a blinkenlight telling them what they already mostly know: that a website is bloated/slow/eating their machine slowly? If there was an alternative website, maybe they'd already be using it. If they thought complaining to the site's owners about it, maybe they already had or are already aware that they'd be shouting into a careless corporate void. That mostly just leaves uselessly blaming their browser for a blinkenlight that tells them something they already know and can't care about.
"I do wonder how much of that is the browser's fault, and how much is because of website developers not understanding that we have a website obesity problem[0], nor the concept of "optimizing for fan noise"[1]."
I think some of it is also that the web has numerous things about it that are fundamentally expensive operations, going back to things like "the default table sizing algorithm reacts to the flow of the content within it, which also depends on how the table decides to format it". It's not hard to create a pure HTML page that has no interesting images or scripts or anything, but still is fundamentally slow to render. (You probably wouldn't want to write it by hand, but I've accidentally written programs that output such pages over the years.)
You really nailed it with that first sentence. I can't tell you how many times I've done custom layout operations with absolute positioning that should be slow because they're being executed entirely in JS, but are much faster than the built-in layout operations. A good case in point is YouTube and its fixed header and left-hand menu: IE11 and Edge both have real problems with these fixed elements bouncing when scrolling down on the page. This is a trivial thing to implement without any visual artifacts when using absolute positioning.
I wouldn't put this on the developer's shoulders always. I work for a major online retailer in my country and I'm always surprised of the amount of crap the people from business add to our site. All kind of tracking tools, surveys, push notifications, etc.
If saving battery life is your goal then run Safari, nothing can touch it. Although Opera does now have a mobile energy saving mode you should check out.
> Unlike IE and FireFox and Safari it comes from a company that is notorious for wanting to know everything about you.
Are you suggesting that Chrome gathers data about you? Because unless you tick that box (which they show pretty prominently) it doesn't. It doesn't by default in most linux distribution packages.
> Unlike IE
I don't know if you've been following, but Microsoft is now the king of knowing everything about you. They record things about their customers' computer activity which should horrify anyone. Sometimes they don't respect user selections either, even all the way up to Enterprise editions (where it is often mission-critical not to send competitive information to Microsoft by accident in a core dump), which is infuriating.
> In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to.
My impression is that at this point, most unique performance problems in Chrome are either an inherent cost of multi-process, a mediocre implementation choice in that model, or a performance tradeoff toward better application latency at the cost of heavy initialization. Chrome could display many pages more quickly if they ignored the GPU, but they use it across the board so that they don't have to restart into "GPU mode" when they realize there is a lot of compositing on the page. Chrome has converged toward other browsers recently, they'll now run multiple tabs on the same process as long as they share a FQDN (sites that host together, crash together), I suspect they do this to save memory.
If we're talking about runtime speed of real web apps and sites, Chrome has everyone matched or beat.
> The time to celebrate victory was a few years ago. Now it's starting to look like the new boss is the same as the old, maybe worse.
The problem with IE6 was not Microsoft, or IE6 itself. Microsoft did not win by literally forcing people to use IE6. The problem was, and probably always will be, greedy unscrupulous web developers (and their managers) who want all the cool new toys at any cost. Microsoft was doing the cool, "html5, bro!" type browser innovation that google is doing now, and developers (and their managers) lapped it up. People forget that Microsoft made box-model: border-box, XMLHttpRequest, favicons, <ruby>, and bi-directional text on the web. They did this all in IE5, this put IE6 ahead, and people loved it too. Microsoft did the right thing and didn't break compat for honest customers who just wanted their webpage to work, so IE5 quirks are the way of the web.
The problem is not that nobody likes the boss, the problem is that everyone likes the boss.
No, I didn't forget. But you forgot to say that MS did all that with draft specifications or even no spec at all (XMLHttpRequest), just to beat everyone to market, then refused to correct their implementation once the standard was revised and agreed by others. And they sprinkled ActiveX on top, for good measure.
> developers (and their managers) lapped it up
Disagree. Developers were the ones that pushed Mozilla and then Firefox (and then Chrome) as soon as they could.
> Microsoft did the right thing and didn't break compat
Microsoft did the right thing for their own bank account: they smashed the competition with bundling then left IE to flounder, even obliterating their dedicated team, because they had reached their objective, which was to dominate the web so that they could sell what they really cared about: ActiveX and other Windows-only technologies.
> the problem is that everyone likes the boss.
No, the problem is that people are lazy. IE won with OEM bundling on Windows. Chrome is winning with OEM bundling on Android. As long as the default is good enough, people won't switch, especially 15 years ago when downloads took a degree of effort (waiting several minutes, restarting after failure etc etc) and now on mobile where it is awkward and/or completely forbidden to switch browser. This is basically what the article says as well: they couldn't push a browser, they had to push an OS with a browser bundled. If people don't switch, developers can't build for alternative browsers, because their managers won't allow the additional time and effort.
>the DOM put into IE was legitimately better than that in the old NN
Where did I mention Netscape? I didn't.
IE5 is from 1999, IE6 from 2001, and they were undoubtedly better than Navigator; but the first 0.x releases of Mozilla with the new Gecko engine are from late 2000/early 2001, and were better than IE (although the suite was slow and bloated). Firefox was branched out in 2002 and took off very quickly because it was a great engine without the bloat of full Mozilla. That's why people pushed it (or rather Phoenix) right off the bat.
If you were pushing IE6 over Mozilla or Firefox in 2001/2002, you weren't paying attention. Navigator all but died in 1999.
You may have your timelines incorrect then. By the time Mozilla and Firefox came around MS had already won that war and it was businesses who were making the decision to target IE, not developers.
When developers were pushing IE was when it was IE vs NN.
That's mostly a function of the popularity of Android: people switch so that they can have their IDs synchronised with Android, which is now their primary device.
No. Microsoft had a non-standard box model which was an utter pain in the ass, regardless of their box model being more sensible than everybody else's in theory[0] (and ultimately standardised as an option circa 2010) having to code for a single standard documented box-model is way the fuck easier than coding for two different box models.
Also it's box-sizing not box-model.
[0] because in practice MSIE's layout engine was a buggy pile of shit
Don't forget that Netscape originally used the same box model as IE. They were the one who changed the way boxes worked when they released NN6 (the one that couldn't correctly render Netscape.com when it came out because of that silly new "standard" box model).
The sane way of doing boxes pre-dated the "standard", which in hindsight appears as though it was specifically crafted to spite Microsoft.
I think a "Chrome only" world like the IE-only world we had years ago is a long way away. I don't know how long Chrome has been out, but in that time I have literally never used it. I've never needed to. I could not have made that statement about IE during its heyday. It was nearly impossible to use PCs in any way without using Microsoft. If you never got to experience the Internet in the late nineties, early 2000s, you have no idea how dominant Microsoft was.
> I think a "Chrome only" world like the IE-only world we had years ago is a long way away.
"Microsoft has lost over 300 million browser users in 2016, mostly to Chrome, tracking site shows"
Not going to take very long at this rate. Appears to be accelerating. Personally just use Chrome as for me extremely stable and when tried Edge it was not stable. I do a lot of surfing and often times have a lot of tabs open and can not remember the last time a tab crashed.
I run into it occasionally, but it is usually caused by plugins. If I just cannot be bothered to try to figure out which of the 100+ JS files needs to be allowed or what ublock green / red / + / - bit I have to click (I admit I have no idea what they refer to) sometimes I just quickly open the page in chrome.
I switched to Opera recently. Got sick of finding Chrome hogging insane amounts of resources. I'm quite happy with it (built in VPN and Adblock!) I don't feel like anyone is trying to force me back to Chrome. Choice and competition are key. Chrome and Firefox did great things, but never forget that competition is the real hero.
I switched to Opera recently. Got sick of finding Chrome hogging insane amounts of resources. I'm quite happy with it (built in VPN and Adblock!) I don't feel like anyone is trying to force me back to Chrome. Choice and competition are key. Chrome and Firefox did great things, but never forget that competition is the real hero.
We cannot possibly be talking about the same Google. This is the Google of AMP et al. You think they won't do the exact same thing Microsoft did with IE when they find themselves in a similar dominant/monopolistic position in the market? You're sorely mistaken. We already find many examples of websites and Web apps that work only on chrome or the chrome "web store". This not to mention the surveillance and privacy nullifiying "features" they impose, which is even more important to me personally than standards compliance.
A world with Google owning a monopoly on web browsing isn't any less bad than if it were Microsoft.
The only sites I've seen that only work on Chrome are generally due to the developers being lazy and only targeting the top platform. It's similar to many games only being available on iOS a few years ago, or many programs only being available on Windows.
Now with the web, it's much easier to make something work across all platforms, except at the bleeding edge, which is generally where you'll find those sites. Almost all the ones I've seen were tech demos of new browser tech that wasn't available everywhere yet.
Google Inbox didn't work on Edge for the longest time. Claim was because edge didn't support some feature they needed, but when the agent was spoofed it worked fine.
>The only sites I've seen that only work on Chrome are generally due to the developers being lazy and only targeting the top platform.
That was the case with sites only working on IE 6. What did you expect?
And after some market share point, it's not about laziness either, it makes business sense to not waste time for a small percentage of users (100% reach is not always better than 90% reach -- there's this thing called "opportunity cost").
> And after some market share point, it's not about laziness either, it makes business sense to not waste time for a small percentage of users (100% reach is not always better than 90% reach -- there's this thing called "opportunity cost").
A lot of companies that thought short term like that our paying through the nose for the decision now because they are still stuck on IE6. There is a business case for avoiding vendor lock in, but it's not quantifiable so it gets ignored.
That was for using special IE-only features, like Active-X and co, that were never part of the standards.
Not about not caring to test/optimize for other browsers, or using standard stuff some browser gets out faster -- which is what some companies do today with Chrome.
Their intention doesn't matter. Companies can strive for a monopoly without breaking rules. The point is that at this moment, they don't have it and there is high competition (although oligopolies) in both mobile and desktop preventing them from having a platform monopoly.
Your comment that I replied to, didn't talk about intentions, and neither did I.
You said "Microsoft owned the whole stack" (OS, Office Suite, Browser). My response is, that Google is trying to achieve the same thing: The blurred O/S+Browser that is Chrome, and browser based software like Google Apps.
You're right, that what they intend to do with said monopoly is not relevant to that specific point. The point is that both saw an advantage of some kind that made it worthwhile having control over a large portion of the software their user's ran.
Where it does matter though, is that in the Microsoft monopoly, it was a monopoly of defaults and business contracts only. Nothing technically prevented someone from installing a separate browser, a separate office suite, etc., on their computer.
With a Chromebook, which Google is pushing heavily in education, what options do you have when it comes to installing an office suite? What options do you have when it comes to installing a different browser?
If your answer is "Android Apps", I suggest you read up on Google's own docs, which show that just 10% of devices support that functionality, only 7% support it without using a Beta.
Compare the scale of Google's Scandals to Microsoft's scandals?
Microsoft lied to the Justice department, microsoft intentionally broke software on other system, microsoft actively tried to kill open source, microsoft tried to co-opt standardization bodies, microsoft has bought competitors only to fire their staff, microsoft has...
Microsoft has a plethora of criminal charges levied against it.
Google.... Reads your email if send to or from Gmail and sometimes some of its things don't work in FireFox and even then they try to fix it. Google open sources a bunch of things, even when there is no obvious profit motive or requirements to do so.
There is a world of difference. Google's shit doesn't smell like roses, but they are only human and not overtly evil.
EDIT - If you downvote me, please comment so I can know what part of what I said was wrong.
Closed source is a boolean. Chrome is distributed only as a binary. I.e. it is totally closed source.
It currently has a very large relation to the open source Chromium project. But Google could change that tomorrow if they wanted to - they could also gradually move more and more to their closed source Chrome builds (as they have done with Android).
Vivaldi isn't open source but you can read the source code, which is better than nothing....
There is some debate inside Vivaldi about making it open source and it would be easy enough to do. I'd guess that it probably doesn't make economic sense while it has such a small market share, but I don't know if that's true.
Nah, it's different. Google's evil is directly on the opposite side of the coin from their generosity. Google essentially "wastes" money just to promote the web itself. This is because the web is a fairly terrible platform, but they must promote it because they've capitalized on its flaws.
If the internet exploded and we had to rebuild it from the ground up, there would be no html/web, and no 3rd party search engine which attempts to reconstruct the web by viewing it as a blackbox. We would build search into DNS, since that's basically what DNS is supposed to be for, and along with the monetization of search (register your site for x search keywords, pay the root DNS for additional keywords.) All of Google's revenue is but a hack of a patch on a chaotically formed system.
Google needs the web, but the web is terrible. It's made for showing static documents with hyperlinks to other static documents. But that's clearly not what people want to view or build, they want apps. So we have 1 million javascript frameworks trying to vie for support on various browsers on various operating systems. All this infrastructure to support 'web apps' that can only call into http and dom manipulation apis. Mobile apps have proven there are other ways to make apps, with security and containerization and allowing full (but secured) access to all OS apis, and easier compatibility. All Google's endearing endeavors to create cool, web-based tech, are just efforts to prop up the terrible web platform, to prevent it from being superseded by a better open system. Facebook (which uses the web only non-exclusively) shows us a better system is possible, but it is not open.
So, back on topic, Google won't stop being good to the web, because the greatest evil of Google is that they're good to a platform which doesn't deserve it.
In your hypothetical from-scratch internet, there's probably still a confy place for Google's flagship search engine. It's the ranking, it has always been the ranking. Nobody is interested in a rank of who paid the most for each keyword.
Sorry, the point was you can still rank them but you can build it into the system itself instead of having to parse it out or reverse engineer any information.
Agreed that Mozilla's original mission has been accomplished in spades, but I wouldn't count Mozilla out of the browser race just yet.
Servo and Webrender[0] will completely shake up the browser landscape, and will allow web apps to match (maybe even surpass?) native mobile apps in terms of rendering performance. Unless Chrome, IE, and Safari can develop an answer to Servo and Webrender by the time those technologies are ready for prime time, I wouldn't be surprised to see "Best viewed in Firefox" badges start popping up everywhere.
Servo won't be ready for quite some time. (I'm thinking maybe 5 years) Project Quantum might be out sooner but it won't be that big of a leap ahead of other browsers.
Fair point, and I'm not suggesting that other browser vendors can't possibly have an answer to Servo and Webrender by the time they're ready, but just that I haven't heard about any such efforts from them yet.
So it's not entirely unreasonable to suggest that Mozilla's next-gen engine efforts could be first-to-market, and that everyone else might have to play catch up.
Mozilla has had "we'll be #1 again once X is launched!" things since I was there 5 years ago (and servo was one of those things back then). It won't happen.
Mozilla won the browser war. Firefox lost the browser fight. But there's many wars left to fight, and I hope Mozilla dives into a new one.
Yes, but even five years ago people acknowledged that it was going to take more than five years to write a browser engine from scratch. I'm on the record as stating in ~2012 not to expect a usable Servo any sooner than 2017 at the earliest (basing my estimation on the time it took to write V8 from scratch). And that was indeed optimistic, but we are seeing bits of Servo (most importantly WebRender and Stylo) being integrated into Firefox this year.
Hey, you weren't totally wrong. If you want to use a simple and fast web-browser on the bleeding edge of development, you can use Servo today. On all the computers I've tried it on it's been really fast, though with plenty of rendering issues.
It started in 2012. It was a total toy for most of that year, though. I would barely consider it a real engineering project in that state--heck, for quite a while it was a readme and nothing else :)
"Mozilla won the browser war. Firefox lost the browser fight. But there's many wars left to fight, and I hope Mozilla dives into a new one." Very poetic way of putting it. Couldn't agree more!
The Mobile OS war can still be continued. Mozilla should join forces with Lineage OS instead of wasting time with their own. Do the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with Android.
Secure messaging is also still a hot topic. Join forces with Signal or Wire or Matrix or XMPP. For example, Wire intends to open source their server code and enable federation [0].
Voice control requires some weight for an Open Source solution. Specifically, we could use something which does not rely on the internet. PocketSphinx is an ok foundation, but needs more work.
A vast majority of Android users know nothing about custom ROMs.
However I would say that among those who do know, Lineage OS has a fairly good reputation for quality. You wouldn't be targeting mass adoption with this, you'd be targeting the influencers.
I bet all the OEM manufactures do. Its not that they care at all about users installing custom ROMs. They will be looking for options to not be tied to Google forever (assuming they have looked at the history of IBM and Microsoft). The problem is they never have to actually release a Lineage OS/Tizen/${insert other phone OS here} they just need a viable option for what they would use instead when they talk to Google about licensing (E.g. Samsung and Tizen).
Apple lost it by getting boxed into a market share corner by android. Google lost it by losing control over android. Android OEM's lost it by getting stuck in a cutthroat competition. Microsoft lost it by being microsoft. Users lost it by having no good choices left (either go with the golden cage iphone, or go with the privacy and security mess android).
> Apple lost it by getting boxed into a market share corner by android.
Apple was never likely to license iOS to other manufacturers, nor were they likely to have enough capacity to satisfy the whole market. I reckon they are where they always wanted to be: owning a very profitable and locked-in niche.
Profits and usage are different categories. Apple might be taking more money home, but that's not what is being discussed. The points being made were about having control and influence over the ecosystem.
Our team has become more and more focused on supporting two platforms with our App Development effort, Apple and Samsung. 75% of our users have an iPhone 5S or newer. The remaining 25% is a mix of Android, other iOS devices and older iPhones. Of the Android users, 80% are using some Samsung device.
Google regained control of Android many years ago by progressively moving every bit that matters from AOSP to Google Apps and Google Play Services.
Now OEM have to obey to Google because losing the Google apps and services licence (thus losing the Play store and the whole ecosystem) basically means they're dead as an Android manufacturer.
Android is pretend-open. Technically, you have to use Google Play to use the Android name. If you use AOSP then you lose the store and Google's proprietary apps, so you have to build an alternative store and plead for third-arty app support.
That works in China because Google is relatively weak there. It also works for Amazon, which has its own store for Fire products.
I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel yet, though that's certainly a sentiment I hear a lot of around town :-)
As technology shifts to a world where most people do not have a monitor on their home computer or a screen on their phone, what it means to be a browser will dramatically change. Certainly, we could post-it the current user experience into whatever we will have tomorrow, but if VR, AR, Speech, and AI and ample cheap private computing power don't excite people for the future of browsers and user agency, I don't know what will.
I know we've been working on tech such as Servo for a long time, but sometimes even just being "better" isn't enough, especially when there's a large legacy gap to close. You also need to get lucky with a point where consumers are making massive changes and open to new things.
I think that time is much sooner than the "always 5--10 years quoted", and you're going to see mind-blowing things on the web in general and supported by the browser and related services specifically. And I'm betting (at least with my current career) that Mozilla will lead the charge.
The Vivaldi browser has copied the original Firefox user interface and stole the best ideas from the Firefox extension makers so if you want the Chromium web rendering engine with the original Firefox user interface you are served by the Vivaldi browser. Hopefully they will become profitable and release their modification under a free software license.
The Vivaldi browser has copied the original Firefox user interface and stole the best ideas from the Firefox extension makers so if you want the Chromium web rendering engine with the original Firefox user interface you are served by the Vivaldi browser. Hopefully they will become profitable and release their modification under a free software license.
No, I'm not actually assuming that, because I realize there is only negligible difference between major browsers today in terms of rendering performance, and none can approach the rendering performance of native UI frameworks on mobile.
But I am assuming that a browser offering a gigantic leap in UX through native-like rendering performance will entice web app developers to recommend that browser over others, because it's nigh impossible to build a consistently 60fps non trivial app with native-like interactions and transitions on the web today, while Servo and Webrender aim to make 60fps on the web the norm rather than the exception.
I occasionally run Firefox (out of nostalgia, idealism, or the need to test a site), and the fact that it is so slow is absolutely what stops me from switching back to it.
Nah. One piece of rendering I particularly care about is interactive SVG performance, and -- while, as another thread says, we can't expect smooth 60 FPS experiences from current desktop browsers -- the difference between Chrome and Firefox is the difference between 15 FPS and 1 FPS.
Recently all toolbar icons in Firefox have been converted to SVGs [1] and in the process several performance problems were found and fixed or are in the process of being fixed [2]. You may want to try out a recent Nightly build.
I adopted chrome because of the speed, but I keep using it because I'm used to it and it works fine. I know my way in and out of chrome's dev tools. On firefox it would be a struggle to figure out a web development routine.
Major browser engines all have about 20 years of development history. Web specs are ever growing and piled higher and higher. Major web browsers have large engineering team and lot resources. It's unlikely Servo can catch up.
Servo is already a runnable browser, and I'm amazed how fast it is. It still has rendering issues with plenty (any reasonably complicated media-heavy site, i.e.: cnn.com) of sites, but even then, it's already an amazing piece of technology. On top of that, the point of Servo isn't to be a brand new full on browser, it's to be a proving ground for a next-gen engine.
And it's proving to be fast, safe, and the future of browsers.
> Servo is already a runnable browser, and I'm amazed how fast it is
First of all, I think the idea behind Servo is awesome, and I follow it. But I've been testing it on Mac OS and Windows, and it is not a runnable browser, nor fast (as expected!). CPU is often fully pegged and it's very iffy if any UI elements or page loads work. Not to say they won't get there, but it's still very, very early and buggy.
Yeah, we don't track perf regressions like released browsers so often we land something that negates the performance benefit. The current servo releases are just alpha, so it's not too important to stay on top of, but we should probably start caring about this more.
We had a similar issue with Stylo (Servo style system in gecko) recently where there were bugs in the parallelism code making us slower than gecko. Fixed, now we're faster again. We only recently started tracking performance properly, and it was caught and fixed in a few weeks.
>Servo and Webrender[0] will completely shake up the browser landscape, and will allow web apps to match (maybe even surpass?) native mobile apps in terms of rendering performance.
Unless Firefox (and Servo) gets it GUI to not feel alien and clunky, it wont matter if it has a faster rendering engine. Rendering engines are plenty fast as it is anyway, it's CPU use and battery impact that matters to users. And when performance does matter, it's mostly Javascript performance, which Servo doesn't address.
It also wont matter for mobile, since Android will still keep Chrome browser, and iOS will still keep Mobile Safari -- they're both made by the platform's creators.
> it wont matter if it has a faster rendering engine [...] its CPU use and battery impact that matters to users
You make it sound like these are two orthogonal aspects. When rendering is faster, CPU usage obviously goes down. As does battery impact, since the CPU can go back to a sleep state faster.
>You make it sound like these are two orthogonal aspects. When rendering is faster, CPU usage obviously goes down.
Only as much as its the rendering, and not the core logic that consumes the CPU.
Degenerative case: a page with a single text entry field, where you enter a number and it calculates e.g. the fibonnaci sequence up to that number or factor primes etc. There's hardly any rendering, but lots of CPU.
Actually JS performance isn't the bottleneck in the vast majority of cases now. JS is more than fast enough, it's the DOM that's slow. And that is what Servo is going to help with.
And as for Firefox on Android, I have plenty of hope for it. I'm seeing more and more people switch to alternative browsers for speed (the most common one is samsung's "browser" which everyone says is "super fast" but really only is a weird hack to make scrolling smooth which breaks a few standards).
Ios is another story, but at least on android if they make a damn good product, people will use it.
> Rendering engines are plenty fast as it is anyway, it's CPU use and battery impact that matters to users.
That's at odds with almost every single sentiment I've seen regarding native vs. Web apps. Take one look at any HN thread about the two.
> And when performance does matter, it's mostly Javascript performance, which Servo doesn't address.
If that were true, then there wouldn't be a performance differential between native and Web, since Objective-C and Dalvik are slower than modern JS engines. (Look at how method call dispatch works in Objective-C!)
Besides, a lot of what shows up as "JS performance" in a profiler is actually blocking on DOM operations. With off-main-thread layout, these operations can be done in the background, resulting in improved DOM performance.
>That's at odds with almost every single sentiment I've seen regarding native vs. Web apps. Take one look at any HN thread about the two.
If we're talking about e.g. Electron apps, the problem I see mentioned (and felt myself) is almost always the memory hogging, the GC-pauses, the battery impact and such -- not the rendering speed. Although, there is talk of getting to 60fps web apps etc.
For something like Atom, is the slow redrawing because "DOM is slow" or because "doing the calculations needed for a sizable file, with syntax highlighting regexes, compiler checks, freeing memory, etc takes lots of processing time"?
>If that were true, then there wouldn't be a performance differential between native and Web, since Objective-C and Dalvik are slower than modern JS engines. (Look at how method call dispatch works in Objective-C!)
That's not entirely true, as Objective-C dispatch was thoroughly optimized [1]. Besides, the performance differential is also in the time to process logic (and the network latency) which you don't address. And of course, aside from rendering (which often is just "show a few forms, buttons and lists" for most apps) a part of the heavy logic in Objective-C for lots of tasks is done in C or C++ frameworks at much faster speeds than modern JS engines.
> If we're talking about e.g. Electron apps, the problem I see mentioned (and felt myself) is almost always the memory hogging, the GC-pauses, the battery impact and such -- not the rendering speed.
I see the opposite. VS Code feels somewhat slow, mostly because of rendering—it doesn't hit 60 FPS.
You cite GC pauses. One of the best ways to mitigate GC pauses is to move the noticeable rendering logic off the main thread so that your app doesn't freeze during GCs, which is precisely what Servo is designed to do.
> For something like Atom, is the slow redrawing because "DOM is slow" or because "doing the calculations needed for a sizable file, with syntax highlighting regexes, compiler checks, freeing memory, etc takes lots of processing time"?
The performance differential is because of many things, but regex performance and freeing memory relative to native aren't among them. JS engines' regex engines are best in class and easily exceed the performance of popular C regex libraries; this is a side effect of SunSpider and V8 including regex benchmarks. Memory deallocation in popular JS engines is faster than in native, because sweeping takes place all at once and generational GC nursery evacuation is very fast.
> That's not entirely true, as Objective-C dispatch was thoroughly optimized [1].
Those numbers are precisely what I'm referring to. In most cases, JS method dispatch is more like a C++ method call or an IMP-cached message send than a slow hash table lookup. Often it's even better, because the inliner kicks in, while inlining is very difficult in Objective-C. Objective-C's "fast path" is the slowest path in JavaScript, one that's only hit for megamorphic call sites.
> Besides, the performance differential is also in the time to process logic (and the network latency) which you don't address.
Pure computation in most apps is not appreciably slower for the end user in JS than it is in Android or iOS. And if it is, there's always Web Assembly! We're doing lots of work to improve JS performance; it's just not all under the Servo umbrella.
> And of course, aside from rendering (which often is just "show a few forms, buttons and lists" for most apps) a part of the heavy logic in Objective-C for lots of tasks is done in C or C++ frameworks at much faster speeds than modern JS engines.
That same "heavy logic"—by which I assume you mean audio/image/video decoding, JSON/XML parsing, image filters, vector graphics work—is also done in native code in browsers. And it's those very same tasks that we're optimizing in Servo.
Modern JS is pretty fast yeah, but I still don't think it rivals Objective-C does it? If we stipulate it's 1/2 as fast as Swift, it's still much faster than v8 on the benchmarks game [1]. Can you be trickier with JS code than those toy programs are?
Well now that I think about it, maybe in the context of your original argument a comparison against Swift makes sense. It's hard for me to see JS ever being competitive with Swift or a similar compiled language.
>> We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality.
Well said.
I certainly hope it is not a PR stunt, but WordPress is probably the other big player in the fight for the open web. It might actually benefit all of us if Automattic starts making a lot of noise about privacy.
And ultimately, its not as if anyone wants any of these tech giants to completely fail (well, maybe Facebook). What we want is to not have the nature of the web changed to suit the whims of a handful of companies.
At the moment, there are only two kinds of employees at Facebook. Those who care and are getting irritated each time these issues are raised on HN (see here [1]), and the dregs who bury their heads in the sand. I bet there is someone who works there who is reading this and realizing that either they will have to change their attitude, or soon the company will turn into another Enron. We don't still have Enron in our midst anymore, do we?
Once one company goes down, it is only a matter of time before the rest fall in a domino sequence because people will start wondering about the practices of its peers. I would like to think that these companies are a little more sensible than to imagine they are somehow infallible, its better for them to change now before it gets to the point where they are made to.
Heh after switching to Edge for about a year, I'm actually pushing back to Firefox. Microsoft keeps introducing new bugs to Edge and Firefox massively fixed their performance issues.
Firefox mobile is the only browser with actual ad blocking.
Adblocking is more than pure resource blocking (which afaik Brave, Samsung, iOS et. al.) currently implement. In fact, the smaller amount of ads I would see would be blocked this way.
I have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, reddit and in the past Tumblr ad free due to element hiding capabilities that are non-present in any other browser I know except Firefox mobile with ublock origin.
Edit: I replied to the wrong comment. I guess it's early.
>Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox. There's a lot of options out there, and they're all standards compliment. And that's thanks to Mozilla.
I think the idea of TFA is that soon we wont have as many options, since Chrome seems to be dominating. Opera is also using Chrome's engine, ditto for Brave, so they're basically just sells. And Safari is from the same DNA, and only really relevant on Mobile and OS X.
So Windows users basically have just Chrome and Firefox, and Linux users basically have just Chrome, Firefox and Edge. And even in Windows, Chrome dominates, almost to the point that IE dominated back in the day.
So where's the choice? If it's just about availability of other rendering engines, people still had choice in the "optimized for IE" days. But it's mostly about rendering engines having competing market shares, and nowadays they increasingly do not.
Plus, who will keep paying search placement money to Firefox if it gets to small single digits of use? And without those, how will development be continued?
Yes, except that "best viewed with IE" was there (at least initially) as part of a campaign where Microsoft was paying web sites to put in stuff that was incompatible with Netscape/Mozilla, and "best viewed in Chrome" is there because web developers are lazy.
Sorry, a quick search doesn't turn it up. This is from memory. Microsoft's strategy - from their own memos (maybe the Halloween memos?) - was to "try to make using Netscape a jarring experience". They were paying (maybe in equipment or some kind of freebies) websites that included at least three IE-only elements in their pages.
This was not just competition. This was a deliberate campaign to break the web in a way where IE would work but Netscape would not.
As I said, this is from memory, and I can't find the source. I have read a copy of the Microsoft memo, though (but you only have my word for it...)
My memory is different, obviously. The IE team took great pains to implement Netscape additions even when they were not standards so that the IE rendering was as good. I never heard of any attempt to make Netscape look worse. That doesn't mean it never happened, but I followed the story very closely at the time.
Microsoft was much more co-operative than Netscape in the early days. It was one of Microsoft's advantages when Netscape was winning and running on pure arrogance. See How the Web Was Won, High Stakes No Prisoners and a few other books for details.
Microsoft did introduce ActiveX, which Mozilla considered supporting, and then decided not to.
I think Microsoft tried to make everything that worked on Netscape work on IE. This was going the other direction - making stuff that worked on IE but didn't work on Netscape, and trying very very hard to get people to write pages that used those things. By having a strict superset, and getting people to use parts that were in the superset but not in the base set, they could effectively make the web IE-only.
I was following it very closely and didn't see that. It seems to me that if Microsoft was implementing Netscape's additions, Netscape could have implemented Microsoft's.
One of the facts of the case is that Microsoft got as close to the standards bodies as it could, and part of its marketing was that it was making IE more standards compliant than Netscape. This is actually very common in computer history (the market leader does whatever it wants to innovate, while the losers band together around standards).
In the end, of course, it didn't matter. Microsoft out-programmed Netscape and then Netscape made several disastrous decisions that amounted to browsercide.
As I said, if you've got any evidence, I'm interested. Specifically, what did Microsoft add that was non-standard and that Netscape couldn't have added?
As far as I know, not even ActiveX qualifies. I discussed this with Mitchell Baker, and she clearly said that Mozilla could have implemented ActiveX if they had wanted to.
> I hope Mozilla sees that. I hope they take credit, and move on to what's next: privacy and net neutrality. Our privacy is under attack, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that can (and would want to) help.
"Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox. There's a lot of options out there, and they're all standards compliment. And that's thanks to Mozilla."
i disagree. Google built chrome to protect their monopoly in search. and they have protected that monopoly well, and added another one: browser.
i dont disparage Google for doing it, in fact both are great products that I use. But to say mozilla did it to 'give people a choice' and that they 'won' doesnt seem right to me.
About fighting for our privacy and 'someone' has to do it.
>> We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song.
I deeply care about privacy. I fight for privacy. I work in information security. Every day I help my customers write code a little more securely. I educate them about implementing end to end encrypted communication systems. I am slowly migrating away from systems that don't respect privacy or can't function at scale without violating privacy.
You have made a great point, and we do need big organizations to fight for privacy too. But the "someone" also has to be you and me. We have to reject operating systems like Windows 10. We have to make Linux and open source tools the ones we want to use. Even merely quitting Macbooks, which trendy firms and developers are so fond of, even if just one more person does that /today/ matters.
We have to claw our data back. Byte by byte, we must earn it back and never accept being the product again. We must suffer the almost inconceivable inconvenience of perhaps not using Amazon for every online purchase. Amazon, Facebook, Google... they are slowly eating the world and even if they are "good" that sort of absolute domination enforces a mono-culture onto the world.
I'm curious, why is quitting MacBooks good for privacy? I know a lot of people who say Apple may be bad for having a walled garden, but that they are great for privacy. That Apple's business model is selling hardware, not your secrets.
MacOS integrating Siri is just another piece of the trend of private data hoovering. Along with routing people much harder into iCloud with Sierra. It felt invasive for the first time and I abandoned ship. The walked garden and SIP also reduce my ability to control my privacy and my own computer (I know SIP can be disabled, but it is a real pain)
"All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users."
Faster browsing and less memory use is the only reason I've ever heard anyone switch browsers outside of privacy issues. If Servo is significantly faster and uses less memory, and if it can keep that up for years like Chrome did, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this flipping in a few years. Thankfully, he's no longer CTO at Mozilla so this actually has a chance of happening.
Most of my non-tech friends really don't know what ram is or how to check the usage. And they're not the type to actually do repeatable measurement to know if it's actually faster or not. Tech users are I'd be 10% of the total browser user base these days. So I doubt your statement having any sway on these numbers.
I finally switched to Chrome from Firefox just last week. I just couldn't take the hang ups anymore. Here I am with an absurdly beefy game development workstation and it's hitching switching tabs and scrolling pages. Absolutely unacceptable. Moving everything over to Chrome took about 2 minutes since the importer pretty much grabbed everything and it wasn't hard to get the extensions I needed. The only thing that annoys me is that clicking on links/bookmarks while on a pinned tab opens the link/bookmark on the pinned tab and not in a new tab like Firefox does. Makes pinned tabs less permanent and I have to remember to middle click these things but it's a minor inconvenience compared to just how slow and unresponsive Firefox had gotten.
I had the opposite experience. I used Firefox the last 48 hours on Mac and it works really well. I can't find a reason to not use it, but also no reason to use it. Commodity products. I think this is the choice most users face. Add a lot of marketing dollars and defaults on Android and you can explain Chrome's growth curve.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadI'm hoping Servo will change that.
I don't understand this perspective. Browsers are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential? What?
I feel like the web dominates our lives more than ever, and everyone uses a laptop or desktop for any actual work they have to do, professional or hobby. While people use their phones for internet access throughout the day as they move about, it must be one in 1000 or fewer who uses their phone or tablet for real work.
Does someone see a replacement on the horizon for the supposedly "legacy" laptop/desktop power combo?
It scares me, to be honest. I wonder where this tendency in people will lead in the very long run, particularly when you consider the ideas suggested by companies like Neuralink. It brings Black Mirror to mind.
Will people permanently have an inexhaustible feed of vapid garbage playing in their mind while they ignore most of everything going on in reality, in their actual real life?
However, this is unrelated to the original point. Just a side thought.
Is that not already how it is? Each time I've been the new kid at school or new guy at the office, it seems there's nothing for people to talk about if you don't know all the TV shows or all the memes or all the movies or music or the celeb gossip or latest sports happenings or news or video game releases or this weeks anime developments or whatever it is each person chooses to fill their thought process with other than the world immediately around them.
It seems it's probably comforting to be consumed by external things over which you have no power, instead of being sober about closer things - some of which you could influence given significant effort, some of which you are powerless to influence with any amount of effort.
15 Million Merits isn't about the future.
I just wish people didn't ignore the world all the time in favor of carrying their computer (phone) around with them and staring into it all day long.
I don't ask that everyone read books, god forbid, but it would be nice if people weren't using their phones to put themselves into hibernate nearly all of the time. The phrasing of your question implies that the train is an isolated circumstance, but in my experience I see people out on dates with both people on their phones ignoring each other, and even whole groups of friends out together, all on their phones.
I just wish people would engage more.
I was interested to find that in India, things are named in a way that brings out little points like this. For example, Indians call the little snacks you can buy on trains (like roasted, spiced peanuts) 'timepass.' A way to put the mind on hibernate and pass the time until the next desirable experience, presumably.
Maybe that's just what people want most of the time? The world can't always be the way we'd like it to be, and we're just passing time in a way that takes minimal effort. To get to the next desirable experience.
For most, the phone is where they go when a situation becomes uncomfortable or unfavourable. It's easier to do that than meet and correct the situation (if it's correctable at all). Or learn to see beauty in the mundane.
We need to build a culture of reasoned, purposeful existence, rather than one that is constantly buckling to the whims and fancies of our immediate demands.
> I just wish people would engage more.
Some people loose themselves in their phone, others loose themselves into a book.
They're both the same.
If you do, then you must agree that you could replace every moment in your life that had been spent reading a book with you perusing your phone, and you would be the same person today.
Do you believe that to be true?
The most popular TV shows are of things with similar content or at least content quality.
What made you think that the internet or mobile would be any different? :)
What amuses me is when I see someone reading an actual physical book. It is so rare, and it is almost every time someone trying to be hip.
Reading a book is an almost entirely introverted activity. How is the motivation to be hip going to be enough to sustain one's attention across the length of an entire book?
And that's precisely why mobile is eating the world. Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms drive a lot of traffic.
I don't know anyone who does banking on their phone -- it's all desktop. Granted, I haven't taken a formal survey or anything.
Bills become much easier to pay via the phone, as you can scan the information from the invoice with your camera (for those companies that refuse to make electronic invoices available). Many invoices now use QR codes as well, so you only have to scan one thing to get all the information needed.
On light days about an hour.
I'm usually on a laptop/desktop for 8-10 hours a day.
Even on a phone/tablet, communication often includes web hyperlinks. The obsession with mobile is a reflection of business model. If you are in the advertising / surveillance capitalism business, mobile ("sensor phone") devices provide non-desktop signals that can be monetized.
Unfortunately, desktop software was hurt by piracy, with a few large ISVs making the most money. Today, Apple makes money on desktop hardware rather than desktop software. Microoft has tilted Windows 10 towards hosted services and data collection, but ISVs cannot abandon the large incumbent Win32 device market.
As laptop/desktop security improves, operating sytems could be reducing desktop software piracy and improving the profitability of ISVs. Instead, "app stores" are following two leaders who don't care about ISVs: Apple (hardware revenue, 30% ISV tax = tiny ISVs) and Google (data revenue, "free" apps).
We have the security technology and social network/marketing experience to design laptop/desktop software ecosystems that protect data/IP and support new ISVs. If Mozilla/Firefox wants to help, they can make it easier for web/extension developers and content creators to get paid.
Uh, App Store? http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/01/13/revenue-from-apple...
From that article, the top 10 mobile "apps" by revenue can be mapped to the modern equivalent of TV, radio and telecom services. None of these are creative software apps like those from large ISVs on desktops/laptops. Instead we have many mobile ISVs who are not very profitable.
Read what you wrote (in the context of the current discussion). Desktop software is alive and well. I don't like the size of the Apple Tax any more than you do, but to suggest this market doesn't exist is laughable.
Where the 30% tax exists in a distribution model, there are few successful ISVs that use only that distribution model. Where sideloading remains on Mac/Windows desktop, there are successful ISVs even with software piracy. On iOS, there is no alternative to the software distribution tax. Developers have been given an artificial choice between software piracy and 30% tax.
Both mobile and desktop ISV software revenue could be improved by app stores that enforced software licensing and provided optional marketing services that added up to 30%. Over time, the relative uptake of those optional services would lead to developer-oriented capabilities in app stores, i.e. serving the needs of the people paying the 30% tax.
The reality is that computers are still computers. Mobile is the new TV.
I run EUC in a large diversified enterprise. We have about 0.05% pure mobile users, mostly iPad based. That is growing quickly, but probably won't exceed 3% in the next 5 years based on the current pipeline. There are exceptions, iirc Comcast has 50k iPads. Other field service orgs are similar.
Server based computing is a thing though. There's alot of BYOD and thin clients in our future. Thin clients are approaching $100 and going lower. VDI/Citrix has a positive ROI for me.
I think the future looks more like Issac Asimov's multivac.
Right now it's a split of app and desktop. If you have the leverage on the OEMs, teradici clients are cheapest, but they are at the edge of not having sufficient lifespan for us. There are newer Intel devices that are getting close that we're using on a trial basis.
I can't get into specific dollars, but all-in the cost for VDI delivery is about 10% more, and we end up in the black with a longer client device cycle (which basically skips a rollout cycle) and dropping field service contracts -- FedEx is cheaper than a tech.
We're big enough that the component makers are willing to discount parts like CPUs for us though. Our pricing is generally 18 months cheaper than the market.
I wish people on HN would use less unexplained acronyms.
Thanks for this. It summarizes succinctly my uneasy observations of large numbers of mobile users.
For desktop power users, however, the mobile is somewhat an extension of their desktop.
My MacBook is my work life. My phone is super important to me, but given some devil's choice, I'd go back to a StarTac before giving up the laptop!
My wife is the opposite. For her, in both professional and personal contexts, the computer is more like a screwdriver -- just another tool. The phone is where the computing happens, and you'd have to pry it out of her cold dead fingers.
Another time she had tried to open a link to a Word Doc and didn't realize it downloaded it. I showed her where it was in the downloads folder and she proceeded to upload it to Google Drive to open it instead of using Word.
Very few functions kids do these days require a specialist app, just a particular browser.
Her sister was complaining about having to log into Netflix and I suggested she install the App. Her response was "I don't like Apps, I prefer websites."
for netflix, the website has more features, so yeah.
While my perspective isn't as strategic or metrics-driven as his, I had a lot of time to observe and think as both a community member and Mozilla employee. FxOS also wasn't my baby, so there's that. Note also that I speak for myself here and my own observations and paraphrases--whatever I say that pisses someone off is something I'm saying, not that Mozilla said verbatim.
My primary takeaways were twofold:
(Long, TL;DR at bottom)
1) I agree with you. Desktop and mobile are two separate markets, period. The first mostly serves a workplace audience and the second a personal audience, but most people with a desk job at the very least will use a web browser as part of their day. Desktop may be a minority of the overall, but it's a minority that won't go away anytime soon and so will continue to influence HTML and standards disproportionate to pure market share.
That's important because Mozilla's gambit for preserving the open web was pretty simple (I say was because I think they're just not that focused at this point):
Have enough people using your browser that websites absolutely have to support the emerging standards that browser relies on-- and perhaps in doing so make it less attractive for site providers and browser providers to spend time on proprietary tech that isn't significantly better than those standards, thereby making other browsers move to those standards too.
Doesn't mean these people have to use it everywhere, or that it has to be a majority share (10%+ was what I commonly heard as "enough") or otherwise "win". But it does have to be enough that people will complain if the website doesn't support their browser and that testers are influenced to test the site against it.
(BTW, as a test professional, the fact that Firefox no longer appears in most test matrixes I encounter due to lack of a blip on analytics is very telling, and Firefox has a serious risk growing around site incompatibility or instability in their browser).
That brings me to my second takeaway:
2) The grand majority of people don't use a web browser because of the browser itself; they use it for one of a few reasons:
a) It's default on their system.
You will not win these people over because they're not there for any reason other than it being the easiest or most integrated path. Note that this is pretty much the whole mobile market, and why it was a dire mistake for Mozilla to conflate the two markets, decide mobile was more important due to combined market share, then go tilting at windmills.
It's also, any altruistic reasons aside, why the moonshot was to create an OS so Firefox could be the default mobile experience.
b) Ethics/Community. This was a relatively small but very vocal part of Firefox's userbase. Probably more people were there "against Chrome" than "for Firefox," but whatever. Firefox succeeded in the first place because of "against Internet Explorer" so it's a valid reason to be there. The nice thing about these people is they pull in more people.
Unfortunately, one side effect of Firefox OS as a project was working with proprietary partners who emphasized confidentiality such that you couldn't share with the community in the way Mozilla did before. When Mozilla diverted most of their effort to Firefox OS, it froze out a lot of the community efforts.
I think Mozilla-the-org also became less skilled at working with community, both for that shift and perhaps because they brought in a lot of people from the mobile and other sectors who didn't have that background.
Whatever the case, this base wasn't well-maintained, and I don't think operates as a core in the same way it might once have, at least for...
The extension ecosystem was always one of the strongest distinguishing facets of Firefox. I think Mozilla panicked when Chrome threatened Firefox's market share, and started trying to compete hard on things like being at the forefront of new technology adoption at the expense of the existing extension ecosystem. And in the process, Mozilla lost control of the messaging and it came to be seen as constantly doing little more than aping Chrome. The Web Extensions stuff is an example of the marketing issue. Mozilla new as far back as 2010 that extensions were the biggest stumbling block to getting multiprocess working. What they should have done was start developing the new extension APIs that far back, and made Firefox use multiprocess mode only if no legacy extensions were installed.
I never worked on the previous Firefox extension API but I find it ridiculously easy to have a cross platform extension that works on Chromium and Firefox. That counts for something.
This point is proven again by Mozilla forcing the new extension API before the extensions are ready.
What do you think about Firefox mobile, the only browser that supports add-ons , could it use it to get some relevance or is that battle lost too ?
That said, Firefox for Android is a great technical accomplishment, and a valuable project. The fact that they are able to differentiate themselves with extensions is very powerful.
The fact that this awesome accomplishment hasn't made much impact in share probably proves that "customization" isn't going to significantly outweigh "default" in that market, though my guess is it would still be a leading factor for the very small number of people who aren't using the default browser.
I don't mean to say that Mozilla should avoid mobile efforts entirely. Fennec is necessary, and I think Firefox OS would have been a fantastic reference implementation if Mozilla hadn't chased partnerships and commercial releases in combination with it.
The problem wasn't that Mozilla put time or resources into these things, it was that Mozilla bet on these things to the detriment of their core competencies and, frankly, mission.
And those fume hallucinations inspired the 'convergence' bandwagon which lead Canonical/Ubuntu, the Gnome project and Microsoft astray for years before they finally started rolling back those dumb decisions.
The markets for smartphones and tablets are now at absolute saturation point and, to a first approximation, no-one is abandoning their laptops/desktops en-masse in favour of working off of a 6 inch screen.
If I used this argument 16 years ago it would have meant "Internet Explorer won". Browsers will rise and fall and eventually a series of bad decisions by Google will pave the way for a new leader.
I will never leave Firefox as long as Mozilla fights the good fight. As internet privacy becomes an increasingly public issue, Google will face evermore scrutiny over Chrome and all it takes is one fuckup on their part for people to realize they've been supporting the wrong company.
Do you think all this people is wasting their efforts in trying to make web apps much more like native apps?
Heck, even Microsoft Edge can run ad blockers now. There's no shortage of options if ads are the primary thing keeping you away from competitors.
Not to mention the million hooks Google's apps put into Chrome search, browsing history, etc. If you use the Google Search launcher to open an app, it sends which app and the time it was opened to Google!
I'm disappointed that the death of Firefox OS and Ubuntu phone leaves us with little choice for FOSS smartphones.
Removal of Firefox Hello took only 6 months: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1287827
This motivated me to go even further. I'm sick of the 1999 style popups and redirects I get on mobile sites, especially the Android webviews that so many applications have. I'm setting the AdBlock Browser to my default and disabling in-app web browsers where possible. Until I can trust mobile sites to have respectable ads, they lose revenue.
The more I think about this, the more annoyed I'm getting. The Youtube app has also been redesigned to have a less 'friction free' UI. You now open a video, see an ad first. Ok, that's fine. Back out of a video, it minimizes and you view 'suggested videos' (which feel like more ads). Swipe video away, you're still on the ad screen. Back out of Youtube. I want to watch a video and get out, maybe be pestered by 1 skippable ad for a relevant product. Not hit back 8 times and swipe a video away.
The time might be right for disruption. On the other hand, I might just be spoiled by debt supplemented user acquisition strategies that have very low monetization. We'll see.
1. https://vivaldi.com
It's a tossup for me whether I'll go back to Chrome or Safari (there's positives and negatives for both of them in my case).
YMMV.
- If it is indeed too challenging for Firefox to compete against Chrome with a separate browser, there might be value in Mozilla maintaining an open-source fork of Chrome. This would allow Mozilla to borrow the good bits of Chrome for relatively low effort, and focus development effort on the the things that Google might not value so much (e.g privacy). It would also be a hedge against a Google monopoly by having an open source competitor available.
- I'd love to see a solid open source clone of Android—including a full clone of Google Play Services. I think Mozilla could help a lot here, especially if they integrated their fork of the browser.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions
As for an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called Replicant. Mozilla already tried the mobile OS thing and failed. Not sure why you think they would suddenly have success. It's all about ecosystems in the mobile space and Mozilla doesn't have it nor will they ever.
I guess I was thinking that Mozilla could both contribute to the core browser (Blink?) and maintain a fork similar to Chromium, but perhaps with more independent features.
This is obviously not ideal for the ecosystem, compared to having a separate browser engine. However it could be a useful approach if Firefox has trouble getting enough users to be relevant, because at least it would mean that Mozilla is influencing the web and its development.
> an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called Replicant
I don't think Mozilla needs to start an independent project. They could fund, promote and improve one of the existing open source forks of Android.
Then that would mark the day when I no longer use Mozilla's software. There'd be no point.
The world doesn't need yet another Chromium-based browser. Firefox's continued development of Gecko and new development of Servo are among the main forces (alongside Safari, maybe) preventing Chrome from becoming the next Internet Explorer.
I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable portion of Chrome users were in a similar boat, quietly waiting for some small aspect of Firefox to improve.
We'll see.
I think it's mainly just because it's different. A lot of people don't like gratuitous change (something most tech companies don't understand at all). I'm sort of in that camp myself. I basically abandoned Office when they came out with the Ribbon UI, and I still haven't liked any new Windows compared to the "classic" NT desktop.
[1] https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center
Just installed Chromium to compare. When maximized, the Chromium title bar is 65px high on my system, whereas Firefox's takes 70px. I should note, though, that I have set my window manager to hide the default window decoration on maximized windows, which helps.
Edit:
Err correction, looks like 3,294 of those FF hits are from a bot trying to break into my fake wp-login.php page with an agent id of "Firefox/34". But still, minus those hits, FF is neck and neck with Chrome.
The author is right that Chrome has a massive share, but everyone knows that. Any analysis more specific than that requires more than just overplotting exponentials on a graph.
If you read the end though, he really is just using an attention grabbing headline and article to bring up his startup. Not very classy.
The entire article he didn't take any ownership for this failing and then goes on to mention how he is heading up another company.
> All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users.
I call BS. When Chrome came out it was a lot better experience than Firefox. That is IMO how chrome got so much velocity. Chrome was more stable and faster. Now that may not be true now but it was the early technical failure of Firefox that caused a great deal of uptake of chrome.
But once you make it to the top these days even after failure you still get funding and get to to lead another company.
Andreas is rightfully very impressive but maybe he shouldn't be an executive.
They're market shares & hence bounded by 0 and 1, so exponential seems pretty unrealistic. The logistic curve is a better starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_economics...
Saying "Chrome won" now feels like saying "IE won" in 2002 or so. Look at the chart here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_5
What strikes me is the diversity. Chrome has mostly been stealing market share from IE; Safari is growing too and is by no means dead; FF has been declining, but not that much. There are 4-ish strong browsers in the market now when before there was only 1 (IE) and a half (Mozilla). Certainly a different picture from the chart in the article.
Not really. Buy a cheap laptop and see Firefox freeze all the time rendering pages while Chrome keeps up like a champ.
All your remaining users are the die-hard users like me, who stay because they like the addons, or some other thing. But Mozilla has decided they'll remove those too, so...
I stuck with Firefox through the times where it was much slower than Chrome for idealistic reasons as well, but now I feel like speed is less of an issue because they are both pretty even.
This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.
How about Brave [1]?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)
Firefox had a big decade because Microsoft put IE on a starvation diet after Netscape folded but Google shows no sign of making a similar level of error. Firefox has never been better technically but at the end of the day they're fighting on the wrong side of a war which will be decided by budgets.
And if you think it's as simple as "political correctness"... I don't even know how to begin talking to you.
Remember: we're not talking about someone "just expressing an opinion" here (as many discussions tried to claim at the time). Brendan didn't just say something, or write something: he actively worked to have his personal opinion -- of whose lifestyle was acceptable and whose lifestyle wasn't -- written into the fundamental law of the state where Mozilla is headquartered. And that opinion, once it became law, hurt employees of the company he was trying to lead, and told them they were effectively second-class citizens.
Such a complete and utter lack of regard for one's fellow humans is disqualifying no matter how much "technical prowess" someone might have. His only choices at that point were to come back in line with the bare-minimum requirements of a free society (such as equality of all people before the law), or be shown the door. And any attempt to dismiss that as "political correctness" reveals a lot about the nature of the person attempting to dismiss it.
"Since then, there has been a great deal of misinformation. Two facts have been most commonly misreported: 1. Brendan was not fired and was not asked by the Board to resign. Brendan voluntarily submitted his resignation. The Board acted in response by inviting him to remain at Mozilla in another C-level position. Brendan declined that offer. The Board respects his decision." [1]
The only people who were "forced out" against their will were the Californian citizens who were forced out of their existing legal same-sex marriages, thanks to the anti-gay propaganda than Brendan Eich willingly and unapologetically paid for.
You're the one who is choosing to propagate the political correctness of homophobic politicians fighting against marriage equality, by misstating the facts and parroting lies to make a politically motivated point in the defense of bigotry, then projecting your own political correctness onto other people.
And you're also wrong to believe that he could have steered the ship away from where it was inextricably headed. Or do you honestly believe that homophobes are the growth market for web browsers, so as a high profile anti-gay-marriage pro-Prop-8 poster child, his bigotry-inclusive outreach to countries like Indonesia, which he claims have many oppressed gay-marriage opponents who support him but don't "have quite the megaphone", could have turned the ship around? [2]
"Now, in his first interview on the subject, Eich is responding with a message that Mozilla is at its core inclusive -- not just of gay-marriage supporters but also of people like him or gay-marriage opponents in Indonesia who also are part of the Mozilla cause."
"For Mozilla, it's problematic because of our principles of inclusiveness, because the Indonesian community supports me but doesn't have quite the megaphone."
Eich also stressed that Firefox worked globally, including in countries like Indonesia with "different opinions," and LGBT marriage was "not considered universal human rights yet, and maybe they will be, but that's in the future, right now we're in a world where we have to be global to have effect." [3]
"Actually, Mr. Eich, right now we’re in a world where you have to not be a bigot if you want to be an effective leader of an organization like Mozilla. And it’s about time."
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/au/news/mozilla-ceo-gay-marriage-firest...
[3] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/04/03/brendan_e...
These days with chome being so popular linux users can feel like a first class citizen. Reminds me of the comic showing a dog using a computer and "On the internet nobody knows you are a dog". With chrome nobody on the internet knows you are running linux.
You can even gasp use office/adobe clouds based apps.
Er, Firefox and Mozilla are/were both Gecko.
Vivaldi is basically Chrome without the annoying Google bits.
I still use Firefox occasionally, but mostly for testing.
I worked for Mozilla for a few years, after seeing John Lily (CEO at the time) speak. It was right after Chrome started getting popular, and a smug person in the crowd asked him about how he felt about Chrome.
John's response was awesome. "This is the web that we wanted. We exist not because we want everyone to use Firefox, but because we wanted people to have a choice" Firefox was a response to a world of "best viewed in IE" badges, and it changed the browser landscape.
Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox. There's a lot of options out there, and they're all standards compliment. And that's thanks to Mozilla.
So, in my mind, Mozilla won. It's a non-profit, and it forced us into an open web. We got the world they wanted. Maybe the world is a bit Chrome-heavy currently, but at least it's a standards compliment world.
I hope Mozilla sees that. I hope they take credit, and move on to what's next: privacy and net neutrality. Our privacy is under attack, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that can (and would want to) help. I know, I know. Nobody cares about privacy. Nobody cared about web standards, either, but Mozilla bundled it into an attractive package and it worked. It's time for Mozilla to declare victory, high five the Chrome team, and move on to the next big challenge.
We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song.
-----
EDIT: Hey cbeard - My email is in my profile; I'd love to talk.
I definitely run into sites that only work on chrome and not in any other browser.
In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to. Unlike IE and FireFox and Safari it comes from a company that is notorious for wanting to know everything about you.
The time to celebrate victory was a few years ago. Now it's starting to look like the new boss is the same as the old, maybe worse.
As for privacy you could use the open source chromium, there's a fork somewhere which has all the Google removed.
I've always assumed people talking about having hundreds of tabs open just don't understand how to properly use a browser. My grandmother, for example, usually has 100 or so open by the time I get a call about her having computer problems.
There's no logical reason I can come up with for doing this instead of using bookmarks.
Then throughout the course of the day I end up looking up API docs, get linked to blog posts, news articles, and YouTube videos, and read articles which themselves have relevant links to follow. Most of these I just open in a background tab to check out later in the day. These accumulate until I have time to go through and quickly review them. Those that I want to read and don't have the time currently go to Pocket. The rest get read or summarily closed out. I find bookmarks to be a terrible way to triage tabs.
This workflow works for me (and evidently others). It's faster than bookmarking. It's less prone to failure, in my experience (I've suffered bookmark corruption more than once). And a modern computer ought to handle many background tabs just fine. Moreover, if browsers aren't expected to be used in this fashion, they really should set an upper-limit on the number of tabs that can be opened.
Hopefully this gives you some perspective on alternative use cases. It sounds like your workflow works out well for you. I've tried it and couldn't get it to stick. If that means I don't know how to use a browser, so be it. At this point, there's enough of us (your grandmother included) that maybe the browser vendors should just find a way to cope with it better.
Each browser instance is tabbed completely across, I keep them open until I read the page fully, and then save it in keep to keep forever.
By Friday I can have hundreds of tabs that I go through and clean up. Web apps are a huge pain to constantly log in.
I run Korora with 24GB RAM and an I 7, Chrome is never a system hog for me, and most of the time it surprises me how well it handles my use.
I have hundreds of tabs open at a time. Instead of searching for something, then going to the Google page, clicking and waiting for it to load, in Firefox I search for what I want in the bar, it presents the tab as a result and opens it instantaneously.
In addition with the vertical tab bar extensions I can see a list of about 40-50 tabs open at a time, using the additional horizontal space monitors provide that web pages don't use to keep an easily visible list of tabs.
I open pages that interest me, I might read them later like I did this discussion or just drop them. Add in open tickets, reference pages, the build server, youtube, etc. and the number grows over time.
> My grandmother, for example, usually has 100 or so open by the time I get a call about her having computer problems.
Maybe she should use Firefox instead of Chrome?
> There's no logical reason I can come up with for doing this instead of using bookmarks.
I did this when I started, by now I only use bookmarks for high interest pages, no point in bookmarking everything.
So has cVim, but that has no relation to any of this.
https://iridiumbrowser.de/
It's nice there working on it, but why didn't they ever care before?
Chrome using less resources than Firefox and IE was their sales pitch.
Now they've become what they made fun of, while Firefox is smooth as a baby's butt.
Chrome is still a huge improvement compared to the browsers it was competing against. Chrome changed the market and now the other browsers are competing in the world Chrome created. So while Chrome might fall behind in some areas now, it's naive to say that it's become what they made fun of.
"Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again." -- Gandalf
Chrome works on every platform. It hogs memory but its fast. Chromium & v8 are open. This is the kind of things that gave us Electron, nodejs and everything that is built on top of it. I appreciate Google for working on it.
Regarding privacy, I totally agree. Would be nice if the most popular web browser wasn't developed by the world's biggest ad company. I still think they do a descent job of isolating the two orgs. I can technically install extensions that stop much of the ad invasions.
So you're saying that Chrome is but a Sauron to IE's Morgoth? ;-)
Except anything MIPS-based. Or Power. Or in fact anything that isn't x86 or ARM.
And it's not just a matter of compiling it for those platforms. There's a bunch of architecture-specific porting that would have to be done (e.g. you _have_ to implement a V8 backend; there is no platform-independent way to run V8 just with a C++ compiler).
Not sure about Chromium support on those platforms, but V8 support is pretty impressive.
An what Chrome is giving out is "Tier1" search results only fed to their browser (Thus search results are more accurate using Chrome.... and now Google Earth is "Chrome Only" which uses WebGL and the latest tests show Firefox is still over 3x as fast with WebGL content then Chrome.
Electron is HORRIBLE, enabling people to write apps in Javascript while using all your PC"s resources is insane. "Etcher" a program written in electron who's sole purpose is simply an "ISO USB Writer" comes with a payload of 180mb's on disk and over 200MB's of RAM and runs like an old dog with cancer... along with the other electron apps. This could have been written with something we had for decades with little overhead and small payload, it's called Python...
¹https://lee-phillips.org/google-chromeBadKerning/
I've run into several other complex sites that fail on Firefox. It's sad, because I've used it for years. I'm using it right now. But my default just switched to Chrome because I started having too many Firefox issues.
Once I became aware of this, I've been trying to be more diligent about thoroughly testing things on Firefox.
I wonder how many other developers are in a similar situation, where Chrome is their default browser and/or their main debugging environment. Part of the problem for me is that I find the Chrome dev tools superior, and that makes it so much easier to just forget about the rest (not that I'm justifying my behavior, btw).
(Also, I think a lot of people discount how good Edge's Dev Tools have gotten. There too my corporate mandated environment is mostly stuck with Windows 7 and an intentionally broken IE 11 due to Oracle and using their terrible software internally.)
Upon googling, I discovered that drop-down menus have been an issue in chrome (even not using vbox). I'm using zurb foundation for the menu js/css, fwiw.
I still use Firefox as default, both for developing and for general web browsing. It and my set of extensions fit my preferences too nicely and have no equivalent in Chrome. I use Chrome at work primarily for Google Hangouts / Meet, the occasional debug session, or just to have another session. (Trying to get into Chrome's Profiles feature too.) At home I just use Chromium from time to time, mostly because my computer is starting to age and I notice the performance difference for certain things.
That's not true. Microsoft has now gotten into the spying business, and is infamous for the Windows 10 telemetry. They're basically copying Google.
Firefox and Safari are the only ones that come from companies that aren't notorious for wanting to know everything about you. And Firefox doesn't try to get you to spend scads of money on massively overpriced but mediocre hardware that locks you into their ecosystem.
Firefox has its warts, but it's the only choice that really makes sense if you care about privacy and freedom and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Sure, error reporting feeding in to a QA database is one thing. But is there the capability to target Win10 OS ads to, say, folks with old video cards? I'd be very surprised if someone in Redmond didn't think of that.
(I highly doubt that there is any truth to this claim)
> One of the most persistent misunderstandings about Safe Browsing is the idea that the browser needs to send all visited URLs to Google in order to verify whether or not they are safe.
> While this was an option in version 1 of the Safe Browsing protocol (as disclosed in their privacy policy at the time), support for this "enhanced mode" was removed in Firefox 3 and the version 1 server was decommissioned in late 2011 in favor of version 2 of the Safe Browsing API which doesn't offer this type of real-time lookup.
Firefox 3 - That was 9 years ago.
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...
This hasn't happened to me in a while, except for occasionally government or bank sites which require "IE or Chrome". In many cases, spoofing the user agent works just fine for those. I agree it's bad, though.
The one exception I've noticed is Yubikey (U2F) support for Google services. Firefox has an add-on that provides Yubikey support, but last I checked, Google blocked access to those (I believe even if you spoof the user-agent).
By all means, politely warn a user that "your browser is not tested". It's getting to feel like a marketing driven decision, where pages just about say "our site is so powerful, we only work with the greatest browser ever, Chrome, so come back when you have it".
A local airbnb competitor currently does this.
[0] https://philipwalton.com/articles/loading-polyfills-only-whe...
God I miss the old Opera....
I'm fairly conscientious about this myself since I'm working on plotting data, and the dumb client-side number crunching involved is actually pretty good at eating CPU cycles.
Most plotting libraries want to show off how smooth and incredible their animations are. What I really want to know however is: does your library keep updating the canvas at 60FPS, or does it only refresh when the data does and idle otherwise?
[0] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
[1] http://prog21.dadgum.com/61.html
I know there are all sorts of flags etc, but consider old Opera, where switching the status bar between none, simple and advanced was right there in one of the main menus. That was a good start, that stuff would be compact and super useful by now if we'd just keep going.
Sure, it doesn't explain to average users why the webpages they view might be slow, but average users don't care.
The average smoker probably doesn't want to hear smoking is unhealthy. Does that mean doctors should adjust their advice respectively? At what point does "professional" really mean nothing other than "gets money for it, like a carpenter or a thief or a drug dealer might"?
We don't even have the right to "just give people what they want without any judgement on our part", but we certainly don't have the right to ignore those with legitimate concerns because ignorant or apathetic people are more in numbers. That goes for everything, everywhere. That goes to how you are supposed to look out for little siblings when parents are away, and it goes for expert knowledge or intellect.
But what is any user supposed to do with a blinkenlight telling them what they already mostly know: that a website is bloated/slow/eating their machine slowly? If there was an alternative website, maybe they'd already be using it. If they thought complaining to the site's owners about it, maybe they already had or are already aware that they'd be shouting into a careless corporate void. That mostly just leaves uselessly blaming their browser for a blinkenlight that tells them something they already know and can't care about.
I think some of it is also that the web has numerous things about it that are fundamentally expensive operations, going back to things like "the default table sizing algorithm reacts to the flow of the content within it, which also depends on how the table decides to format it". It's not hard to create a pure HTML page that has no interesting images or scripts or anything, but still is fundamentally slow to render. (You probably wouldn't want to write it by hand, but I've accidentally written programs that output such pages over the years.)
Are you suggesting that Chrome gathers data about you? Because unless you tick that box (which they show pretty prominently) it doesn't. It doesn't by default in most linux distribution packages.
> Unlike IE
I don't know if you've been following, but Microsoft is now the king of knowing everything about you. They record things about their customers' computer activity which should horrify anyone. Sometimes they don't respect user selections either, even all the way up to Enterprise editions (where it is often mission-critical not to send competitive information to Microsoft by accident in a core dump), which is infuriating.
> In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to.
My impression is that at this point, most unique performance problems in Chrome are either an inherent cost of multi-process, a mediocre implementation choice in that model, or a performance tradeoff toward better application latency at the cost of heavy initialization. Chrome could display many pages more quickly if they ignored the GPU, but they use it across the board so that they don't have to restart into "GPU mode" when they realize there is a lot of compositing on the page. Chrome has converged toward other browsers recently, they'll now run multiple tabs on the same process as long as they share a FQDN (sites that host together, crash together), I suspect they do this to save memory.
If we're talking about runtime speed of real web apps and sites, Chrome has everyone matched or beat.
> The time to celebrate victory was a few years ago. Now it's starting to look like the new boss is the same as the old, maybe worse.
The problem with IE6 was not Microsoft, or IE6 itself. Microsoft did not win by literally forcing people to use IE6. The problem was, and probably always will be, greedy unscrupulous web developers (and their managers) who want all the cool new toys at any cost. Microsoft was doing the cool, "html5, bro!" type browser innovation that google is doing now, and developers (and their managers) lapped it up. People forget that Microsoft made box-model: border-box, XMLHttpRequest, favicons, <ruby>, and bi-directional text on the web. They did this all in IE5, this put IE6 ahead, and people loved it too. Microsoft did the right thing and didn't break compat for honest customers who just wanted their webpage to work, so IE5 quirks are the way of the web.
The problem is not that nobody likes the boss, the problem is that everyone likes the boss.
No, I didn't forget. But you forgot to say that MS did all that with draft specifications or even no spec at all (XMLHttpRequest), just to beat everyone to market, then refused to correct their implementation once the standard was revised and agreed by others. And they sprinkled ActiveX on top, for good measure.
> developers (and their managers) lapped it up
Disagree. Developers were the ones that pushed Mozilla and then Firefox (and then Chrome) as soon as they could.
> Microsoft did the right thing and didn't break compat
Microsoft did the right thing for their own bank account: they smashed the competition with bundling then left IE to flounder, even obliterating their dedicated team, because they had reached their objective, which was to dominate the web so that they could sell what they really cared about: ActiveX and other Windows-only technologies.
> the problem is that everyone likes the boss.
No, the problem is that people are lazy. IE won with OEM bundling on Windows. Chrome is winning with OEM bundling on Android. As long as the default is good enough, people won't switch, especially 15 years ago when downloads took a degree of effort (waiting several minutes, restarting after failure etc etc) and now on mobile where it is awkward and/or completely forbidden to switch browser. This is basically what the article says as well: they couldn't push a browser, they had to push an OS with a browser bundled. If people don't switch, developers can't build for alternative browsers, because their managers won't allow the additional time and effort.
No, the DOM put into IE was legitimately better than that in the old NN. MS won that war because their browser was BETTER, period.
They then sat on their laurels and the rest of the world passed them by, so now they're still trying to play catchup.
But at the time? No, anyone who had any experience in the DOM of IE vs NN would hands down push IE. It was just better in every way.
Where did I mention Netscape? I didn't.
IE5 is from 1999, IE6 from 2001, and they were undoubtedly better than Navigator; but the first 0.x releases of Mozilla with the new Gecko engine are from late 2000/early 2001, and were better than IE (although the suite was slow and bloated). Firefox was branched out in 2002 and took off very quickly because it was a great engine without the bloat of full Mozilla. That's why people pushed it (or rather Phoenix) right off the bat.
If you were pushing IE6 over Mozilla or Firefox in 2001/2002, you weren't paying attention. Navigator all but died in 1999.
When developers were pushing IE was when it was IE vs NN.
"Microsoft has lost over 300 million browser users in 2016, mostly to Chrome, tracking site shows"
No. Microsoft had a non-standard box model which was an utter pain in the ass, regardless of their box model being more sensible than everybody else's in theory[0] (and ultimately standardised as an option circa 2010) having to code for a single standard documented box-model is way the fuck easier than coding for two different box models.
Also it's box-sizing not box-model.
[0] because in practice MSIE's layout engine was a buggy pile of shit
The sane way of doing boxes pre-dated the "standard", which in hindsight appears as though it was specifically crafted to spite Microsoft.
It was a silly time to be a developer.
"Microsoft has lost over 300 million browser users in 2016, mostly to Chrome, tracking site shows"
Not going to take very long at this rate. Appears to be accelerating. Personally just use Chrome as for me extremely stable and when tried Edge it was not stable. I do a lot of surfing and often times have a lot of tabs open and can not remember the last time a tab crashed.
You spend too much time working lurking around HN sites and young web developers.
May be.
I see this as truly the case of making the pie bigger.
All devices include 2 Billion Android devices. That's a bigger pie that Chrome owns now, but FireFox can target in future.
Watch out for Opera's add block, it works through a proxy to compress data, thus they know your every move online too...
A world with Google owning a monopoly on web browsing isn't any less bad than if it were Microsoft.
Now with the web, it's much easier to make something work across all platforms, except at the bleeding edge, which is generally where you'll find those sites. Almost all the ones I've seen were tech demos of new browser tech that wasn't available everywhere yet.
That was the case with sites only working on IE 6. What did you expect?
And after some market share point, it's not about laziness either, it makes business sense to not waste time for a small percentage of users (100% reach is not always better than 90% reach -- there's this thing called "opportunity cost").
This is what we want to avoid.
A lot of companies that thought short term like that our paying through the nose for the decision now because they are still stuck on IE6. There is a business case for avoiding vendor lock in, but it's not quantifiable so it gets ignored.
Not about not caring to test/optimize for other browsers, or using standard stuff some browser gets out faster -- which is what some companies do today with Chrome.
How many of them will remember the lessons?
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
You said "Microsoft owned the whole stack" (OS, Office Suite, Browser). My response is, that Google is trying to achieve the same thing: The blurred O/S+Browser that is Chrome, and browser based software like Google Apps.
You're right, that what they intend to do with said monopoly is not relevant to that specific point. The point is that both saw an advantage of some kind that made it worthwhile having control over a large portion of the software their user's ran.
Where it does matter though, is that in the Microsoft monopoly, it was a monopoly of defaults and business contracts only. Nothing technically prevented someone from installing a separate browser, a separate office suite, etc., on their computer.
With a Chromebook, which Google is pushing heavily in education, what options do you have when it comes to installing an office suite? What options do you have when it comes to installing a different browser?
If your answer is "Android Apps", I suggest you read up on Google's own docs, which show that just 10% of devices support that functionality, only 7% support it without using a Beta.
It is official, Google is the new Microsoft.
Microsoft lied to the Justice department, microsoft intentionally broke software on other system, microsoft actively tried to kill open source, microsoft tried to co-opt standardization bodies, microsoft has bought competitors only to fire their staff, microsoft has...
Microsoft has a plethora of criminal charges levied against it.
Google.... Reads your email if send to or from Gmail and sometimes some of its things don't work in FireFox and even then they try to fix it. Google open sources a bunch of things, even when there is no obvious profit motive or requirements to do so.
There is a world of difference. Google's shit doesn't smell like roses, but they are only human and not overtly evil.
EDIT - If you downvote me, please comment so I can know what part of what I said was wrong.
IE was (is) closed source
It currently has a very large relation to the open source Chromium project. But Google could change that tomorrow if they wanted to - they could also gradually move more and more to their closed source Chrome builds (as they have done with Android).
[0] https://www.brave.com/ [1] https://iridiumbrowser.de/
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/54kzpc/psa_...
There is some debate inside Vivaldi about making it open source and it would be easy enough to do. I'd guess that it probably doesn't make economic sense while it has such a small market share, but I don't know if that's true.
I disagree. There's a difference between having 99% of the source available and 0%.
If the internet exploded and we had to rebuild it from the ground up, there would be no html/web, and no 3rd party search engine which attempts to reconstruct the web by viewing it as a blackbox. We would build search into DNS, since that's basically what DNS is supposed to be for, and along with the monetization of search (register your site for x search keywords, pay the root DNS for additional keywords.) All of Google's revenue is but a hack of a patch on a chaotically formed system.
Google needs the web, but the web is terrible. It's made for showing static documents with hyperlinks to other static documents. But that's clearly not what people want to view or build, they want apps. So we have 1 million javascript frameworks trying to vie for support on various browsers on various operating systems. All this infrastructure to support 'web apps' that can only call into http and dom manipulation apis. Mobile apps have proven there are other ways to make apps, with security and containerization and allowing full (but secured) access to all OS apis, and easier compatibility. All Google's endearing endeavors to create cool, web-based tech, are just efforts to prop up the terrible web platform, to prevent it from being superseded by a better open system. Facebook (which uses the web only non-exclusively) shows us a better system is possible, but it is not open.
So, back on topic, Google won't stop being good to the web, because the greatest evil of Google is that they're good to a platform which doesn't deserve it.
Servo and Webrender[0] will completely shake up the browser landscape, and will allow web apps to match (maybe even surpass?) native mobile apps in terms of rendering performance. Unless Chrome, IE, and Safari can develop an answer to Servo and Webrender by the time those technologies are ready for prime time, I wouldn't be surprised to see "Best viewed in Firefox" badges start popping up everywhere.
[0]
https://github.com/servo/webrender/wiki
https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/
So it's not entirely unreasonable to suggest that Mozilla's next-gen engine efforts could be first-to-market, and that everyone else might have to play catch up.
Mozilla won the browser war. Firefox lost the browser fight. But there's many wars left to fight, and I hope Mozilla dives into a new one.
What's next isn't clear to me
Secure messaging is also still a hot topic. Join forces with Signal or Wire or Matrix or XMPP. For example, Wire intends to open source their server code and enable federation [0].
Voice control requires some weight for an Open Source solution. Specifically, we could use something which does not rely on the internet. PocketSphinx is an ok foundation, but needs more work.
[0] https://medium.com/@wireapp/open-sourcing-wire-server-code-e...
However I would say that among those who do know, Lineage OS has a fairly good reputation for quality. You wouldn't be targeting mass adoption with this, you'd be targeting the influencers.
https://lineageos.org/about/
Apple lost it by getting boxed into a market share corner by android. Google lost it by losing control over android. Android OEM's lost it by getting stuck in a cutthroat competition. Microsoft lost it by being microsoft. Users lost it by having no good choices left (either go with the golden cage iphone, or go with the privacy and security mess android).
Apple was never likely to license iOS to other manufacturers, nor were they likely to have enough capacity to satisfy the whole market. I reckon they are where they always wanted to be: owning a very profitable and locked-in niche.
You mean the corner where they are the premium smartphone vendor, taking 90% share of global profits? That's a great corner to be boxed into :)
Because iOS users are a significant source of potential profit.
Apple doesn't need to maximize usage in order to control the ecosystem - they just need to maximize profit potential.
Now OEM have to obey to Google because losing the Google apps and services licence (thus losing the Play store and the whole ecosystem) basically means they're dead as an Android manufacturer.
That works in China because Google is relatively weak there. It also works for Amazon, which has its own store for Fire products.
As technology shifts to a world where most people do not have a monitor on their home computer or a screen on their phone, what it means to be a browser will dramatically change. Certainly, we could post-it the current user experience into whatever we will have tomorrow, but if VR, AR, Speech, and AI and ample cheap private computing power don't excite people for the future of browsers and user agency, I don't know what will.
I know we've been working on tech such as Servo for a long time, but sometimes even just being "better" isn't enough, especially when there's a large legacy gap to close. You also need to get lucky with a point where consumers are making massive changes and open to new things.
I think that time is much sooner than the "always 5--10 years quoted", and you're going to see mind-blowing things on the web in general and supported by the browser and related services specifically. And I'm betting (at least with my current career) that Mozilla will lead the charge.
The Vivaldi browser has copied the original Firefox user interface and stole the best ideas from the Firefox extension makers so if you want the Chromium web rendering engine with the original Firefox user interface you are served by the Vivaldi browser. Hopefully they will become profitable and release their modification under a free software license.
The Vivaldi browser has copied the original Firefox user interface and stole the best ideas from the Firefox extension makers so if you want the Chromium web rendering engine with the original Firefox user interface you are served by the Vivaldi browser. Hopefully they will become profitable and release their modification under a free software license.
Not that anyone cares, because MathJax...
The web is better without JavaScript.
But I am assuming that a browser offering a gigantic leap in UX through native-like rendering performance will entice web app developers to recommend that browser over others, because it's nigh impossible to build a consistently 60fps non trivial app with native-like interactions and transitions on the web today, while Servo and Webrender aim to make 60fps on the web the norm rather than the exception.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347543 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1054016
And it's proving to be fast, safe, and the future of browsers.
First of all, I think the idea behind Servo is awesome, and I follow it. But I've been testing it on Mac OS and Windows, and it is not a runnable browser, nor fast (as expected!). CPU is often fully pegged and it's very iffy if any UI elements or page loads work. Not to say they won't get there, but it's still very, very early and buggy.
We had a similar issue with Stylo (Servo style system in gecko) recently where there were bugs in the parallelism code making us slower than gecko. Fixed, now we're faster again. We only recently started tracking performance properly, and it was caught and fixed in a few weeks.
As Servo would be a mobile app itself, I think no ;)
Unless Firefox (and Servo) gets it GUI to not feel alien and clunky, it wont matter if it has a faster rendering engine. Rendering engines are plenty fast as it is anyway, it's CPU use and battery impact that matters to users. And when performance does matter, it's mostly Javascript performance, which Servo doesn't address.
It also wont matter for mobile, since Android will still keep Chrome browser, and iOS will still keep Mobile Safari -- they're both made by the platform's creators.
You make it sound like these are two orthogonal aspects. When rendering is faster, CPU usage obviously goes down. As does battery impact, since the CPU can go back to a sleep state faster.
Only as much as its the rendering, and not the core logic that consumes the CPU.
Degenerative case: a page with a single text entry field, where you enter a number and it calculates e.g. the fibonnaci sequence up to that number or factor primes etc. There's hardly any rendering, but lots of CPU.
And as for Firefox on Android, I have plenty of hope for it. I'm seeing more and more people switch to alternative browsers for speed (the most common one is samsung's "browser" which everyone says is "super fast" but really only is a weird hack to make scrolling smooth which breaks a few standards).
Ios is another story, but at least on android if they make a damn good product, people will use it.
That's at odds with almost every single sentiment I've seen regarding native vs. Web apps. Take one look at any HN thread about the two.
> And when performance does matter, it's mostly Javascript performance, which Servo doesn't address.
If that were true, then there wouldn't be a performance differential between native and Web, since Objective-C and Dalvik are slower than modern JS engines. (Look at how method call dispatch works in Objective-C!)
Besides, a lot of what shows up as "JS performance" in a profiler is actually blocking on DOM operations. With off-main-thread layout, these operations can be done in the background, resulting in improved DOM performance.
If we're talking about e.g. Electron apps, the problem I see mentioned (and felt myself) is almost always the memory hogging, the GC-pauses, the battery impact and such -- not the rendering speed. Although, there is talk of getting to 60fps web apps etc.
For something like Atom, is the slow redrawing because "DOM is slow" or because "doing the calculations needed for a sizable file, with syntax highlighting regexes, compiler checks, freeing memory, etc takes lots of processing time"?
>If that were true, then there wouldn't be a performance differential between native and Web, since Objective-C and Dalvik are slower than modern JS engines. (Look at how method call dispatch works in Objective-C!)
That's not entirely true, as Objective-C dispatch was thoroughly optimized [1]. Besides, the performance differential is also in the time to process logic (and the network latency) which you don't address. And of course, aside from rendering (which often is just "show a few forms, buttons and lists" for most apps) a part of the heavy logic in Objective-C for lots of tasks is done in C or C++ frameworks at much faster speeds than modern JS engines.
[1] https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/performance-comparisons-of-co...
I see the opposite. VS Code feels somewhat slow, mostly because of rendering—it doesn't hit 60 FPS.
You cite GC pauses. One of the best ways to mitigate GC pauses is to move the noticeable rendering logic off the main thread so that your app doesn't freeze during GCs, which is precisely what Servo is designed to do.
> For something like Atom, is the slow redrawing because "DOM is slow" or because "doing the calculations needed for a sizable file, with syntax highlighting regexes, compiler checks, freeing memory, etc takes lots of processing time"?
The performance differential is because of many things, but regex performance and freeing memory relative to native aren't among them. JS engines' regex engines are best in class and easily exceed the performance of popular C regex libraries; this is a side effect of SunSpider and V8 including regex benchmarks. Memory deallocation in popular JS engines is faster than in native, because sweeping takes place all at once and generational GC nursery evacuation is very fast.
> That's not entirely true, as Objective-C dispatch was thoroughly optimized [1].
Those numbers are precisely what I'm referring to. In most cases, JS method dispatch is more like a C++ method call or an IMP-cached message send than a slow hash table lookup. Often it's even better, because the inliner kicks in, while inlining is very difficult in Objective-C. Objective-C's "fast path" is the slowest path in JavaScript, one that's only hit for megamorphic call sites.
> Besides, the performance differential is also in the time to process logic (and the network latency) which you don't address.
Pure computation in most apps is not appreciably slower for the end user in JS than it is in Android or iOS. And if it is, there's always Web Assembly! We're doing lots of work to improve JS performance; it's just not all under the Servo umbrella.
> And of course, aside from rendering (which often is just "show a few forms, buttons and lists" for most apps) a part of the heavy logic in Objective-C for lots of tasks is done in C or C++ frameworks at much faster speeds than modern JS engines.
That same "heavy logic"—by which I assume you mean audio/image/video decoding, JSON/XML parsing, image filters, vector graphics work—is also done in native code in browsers. And it's those very same tasks that we're optimizing in Servo.
[1] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...
Well said.
I certainly hope it is not a PR stunt, but WordPress is probably the other big player in the fight for the open web. It might actually benefit all of us if Automattic starts making a lot of noise about privacy.
And ultimately, its not as if anyone wants any of these tech giants to completely fail (well, maybe Facebook). What we want is to not have the nature of the web changed to suit the whims of a handful of companies.
I feel like we're ten years late for this concern.
At the moment, there are only two kinds of employees at Facebook. Those who care and are getting irritated each time these issues are raised on HN (see here [1]), and the dregs who bury their heads in the sand. I bet there is someone who works there who is reading this and realizing that either they will have to change their attitude, or soon the company will turn into another Enron. We don't still have Enron in our midst anymore, do we?
Once one company goes down, it is only a matter of time before the rest fall in a domino sequence because people will start wondering about the practices of its peers. I would like to think that these companies are a little more sensible than to imagine they are somehow infallible, its better for them to change now before it gets to the point where they are made to.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869759
sure, but if Chrome de facto controls standards does that really matter?
Sucks that they don't have an IOS version, but Apple is the problem there, not Mozilla.
Adblocking is more than pure resource blocking (which afaik Brave, Samsung, iOS et. al.) currently implement. In fact, the smaller amount of ads I would see would be blocked this way.
I have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, reddit and in the past Tumblr ad free due to element hiding capabilities that are non-present in any other browser I know except Firefox mobile with ublock origin.
Edit: I replied to the wrong comment. I guess it's early.
I think the idea of TFA is that soon we wont have as many options, since Chrome seems to be dominating. Opera is also using Chrome's engine, ditto for Brave, so they're basically just sells. And Safari is from the same DNA, and only really relevant on Mobile and OS X.
So Windows users basically have just Chrome and Firefox, and Linux users basically have just Chrome, Firefox and Edge. And even in Windows, Chrome dominates, almost to the point that IE dominated back in the day.
So where's the choice? If it's just about availability of other rendering engines, people still had choice in the "optimized for IE" days. But it's mostly about rendering engines having competing market shares, and nowadays they increasingly do not.
Plus, who will keep paying search placement money to Firefox if it gets to small single digits of use? And without those, how will development be continued?
I'd be interested to see the evidence for that....
This was not just competition. This was a deliberate campaign to break the web in a way where IE would work but Netscape would not.
As I said, this is from memory, and I can't find the source. I have read a copy of the Microsoft memo, though (but you only have my word for it...)
Microsoft was much more co-operative than Netscape in the early days. It was one of Microsoft's advantages when Netscape was winning and running on pure arrogance. See How the Web Was Won, High Stakes No Prisoners and a few other books for details.
Microsoft did introduce ActiveX, which Mozilla considered supporting, and then decided not to.
One of the facts of the case is that Microsoft got as close to the standards bodies as it could, and part of its marketing was that it was making IE more standards compliant than Netscape. This is actually very common in computer history (the market leader does whatever it wants to innovate, while the losers band together around standards).
In the end, of course, it didn't matter. Microsoft out-programmed Netscape and then Netscape made several disastrous decisions that amounted to browsercide.
As I said, if you've got any evidence, I'm interested. Specifically, what did Microsoft add that was non-standard and that Netscape couldn't have added?
As far as I know, not even ActiveX qualifies. I discussed this with Mitchell Baker, and she clearly said that Mozilla could have implemented ActiveX if they had wanted to.
Mozilla _is_ fighting that fight. See their posts here: https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/
i disagree. Google built chrome to protect their monopoly in search. and they have protected that monopoly well, and added another one: browser.
i dont disparage Google for doing it, in fact both are great products that I use. But to say mozilla did it to 'give people a choice' and that they 'won' doesnt seem right to me.
>> We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song.
I deeply care about privacy. I fight for privacy. I work in information security. Every day I help my customers write code a little more securely. I educate them about implementing end to end encrypted communication systems. I am slowly migrating away from systems that don't respect privacy or can't function at scale without violating privacy.
You have made a great point, and we do need big organizations to fight for privacy too. But the "someone" also has to be you and me. We have to reject operating systems like Windows 10. We have to make Linux and open source tools the ones we want to use. Even merely quitting Macbooks, which trendy firms and developers are so fond of, even if just one more person does that /today/ matters.
We have to claw our data back. Byte by byte, we must earn it back and never accept being the product again. We must suffer the almost inconceivable inconvenience of perhaps not using Amazon for every online purchase. Amazon, Facebook, Google... they are slowly eating the world and even if they are "good" that sort of absolute domination enforces a mono-culture onto the world.
Faster browsing and less memory use is the only reason I've ever heard anyone switch browsers outside of privacy issues. If Servo is significantly faster and uses less memory, and if it can keep that up for years like Chrome did, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this flipping in a few years. Thankfully, he's no longer CTO at Mozilla so this actually has a chance of happening.
Stability.
License, at least for me. I would only use a free as in speech browser.
Add-ons and success blocking ads.