dbish 2023-08-03 07:52 UTC link

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

amelius 2023-08-03 08:12 UTC link

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

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

yankput 2023-08-03 08:23 UTC link

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

Tepix 2023-08-03 08:24 UTC link

Missing in the list:

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

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

Remember? They tried to force everyone to login completely.

Quote from article:

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

nathan_phoenix 2023-08-03 08:28 UTC link

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

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

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

est 2023-08-03 08:34 UTC link

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

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

mrtksn 2023-08-03 08:42 UTC link

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

Chrome is the new IE.

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

ShamelessC 2023-08-03 09:14 UTC link

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

DrNosferatu 2023-08-03 09:25 UTC link

Switch to SerenityOS and use Ladybird ;)

(or build it for your favorite OS)

sph 2023-08-03 10:28 UTC link

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

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

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

--

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

tjpnz 2023-08-03 11:26 UTC link

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

omgmajk 2023-08-03 11:36 UTC link

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

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

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

luth0r 2023-08-03 11:48 UTC link

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

j1elo 2023-08-03 12:59 UTC link

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

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

First, what I'm testing:

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

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

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

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

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

RAM usage results:

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

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

* Third HN tab opened: 394 MiB.

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

Conclusion: Firefox uses around 10 MiB per loaded tab.

Screenshots of Btop++:

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

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

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

mrblampo 2023-08-03 13:09 UTC link

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

p1mrx 2023-08-03 14:03 UTC link

I would add these to the list:

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

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

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

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

account42 2023-08-03 14:14 UTC link

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

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

Remind me, does Firefox support JPEG XL?

titzer 2023-08-03 14:50 UTC link

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

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

aunterste 2023-08-03 15:50 UTC link

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

notjoshjames 2023-08-03 16:14 UTC link

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

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

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

colordrops 2023-08-03 07:56 UTC link

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

worrycue 2023-08-03 07:56 UTC link

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

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

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

ksey3 2023-08-03 08:05 UTC link

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

toxik 2023-08-03 08:19 UTC link

/More/ popovers and popups?

What about just making the site slower?

lodovic 2023-08-03 08:21 UTC link

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

DeathArrow 2023-08-03 08:23 UTC link

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

uoaei 2023-08-03 08:26 UTC link

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

tgv 2023-08-03 08:40 UTC link

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

tommiegannert 2023-08-03 08:53 UTC link

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

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

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

detuur 2023-08-03 09:03 UTC link

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

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

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

lol768 2023-08-03 09:06 UTC link

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

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

have_faith 2023-08-03 09:34 UTC link

This a problem for me.

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

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

dvtkrlbs 2023-08-03 10:06 UTC link

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

reilnin 2023-08-03 10:38 UTC link

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

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

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

fnordpiglet 2023-08-03 10:45 UTC link

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

spoiler 2023-08-03 12:03 UTC link

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

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

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

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

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

joshstrange 2023-08-03 12:17 UTC link

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

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

insanitybit 2023-08-03 12:22 UTC link

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

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

In the meantime,

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

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

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

tomrod 2023-08-03 12:24 UTC link

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

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

addandsubtract 2023-08-03 12:39 UTC link

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

styfle 2023-08-03 12:48 UTC link

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

profmonocle 2023-08-03 12:58 UTC link

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

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

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

aequitas 2023-08-03 13:09 UTC link

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

jefftk 2023-08-03 13:21 UTC link

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

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

consentreality 2023-08-03 13:22 UTC link

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

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

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

err4nt 2023-08-03 13:24 UTC link

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

LinuxBender 2023-08-03 13:31 UTC link

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

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

_ea1k 2023-08-03 13:44 UTC link

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

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

andrewla 2023-08-03 13:45 UTC link

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

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

Slow rendering is for sure a problem.

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

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

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

theyeenzbeanz 2023-08-03 13:47 UTC link

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

Editorial Channel

What the content says

Structural Channel

What the site does