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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

> on a personal note, the desktop client requiring chrome is pretty awful.

Why? I haven't had any issues with it.

I even have a shortcut on linux for dmenu, typing "signal" opens the chrome extension URL, opening the app in a new popup window (not a full browser, just the app in a chromeless window). So it functions just like a normal app to me. This is the `signal` bash script:

    #!/usr/bin/dash

    /opt/google/chrome-unstable/google-chrome-unstable --user-data-dir=/home/dmix/.config/google-chrome-unstable --profile-directory=Default --app-id=bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk

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I don't use chrome for a number of reasons, the main one being I can't imagine using a browser which doesn't support the blocking of ads, and on Android there are no plugins at all, and given that I use firefox on multiple desktops, all syncing passwords, tabs etc, I'm not about to make an exception for this or that chrome-only feature. I have no idea why chrome doesn't support plugins on Android; they said they'd do it years ago.

Why would you have to use Chrome? You just need Chrome as a platform to launch your chrome app...

I don't get it

Why would I want to use a browser to do non broswery things? It's bad enough that we have to use browsers in the first place. Wouldn't we be better starting from scratch and developing a secure, standards-friendly way of deploying text, images and video rather than taking something which was designed to display just text and try and make it useful?

Any ideas?

I don't really have any ideas. Software distribution should be a solved problem by now but even if we limit ourselves to GNU/Linux on x86-64 computers, we can't agree on a distribution mechanism. We are all over the place from the blessed apt and yum to oh just curl this url and pipe it to sh (I am a n00b so I may have said it incorrectly). There is no good way to make sure everyone gets updated. It is a mess.

I am typing this on Mozilla Firefox but I can see the draws of Chrome as a platform. I personally love the distraction that working on the plumbing on different platform involves but I would rather the people who work on secure communications -- that journalists, politicians, and policy makers, and social influencers in general can trust with their lives -- not be distracted by the fun plumbing.

The way I see it, we have to abstract it at some level. If systems folks can't agree on a standard, then applications will standardize on apps that live on top of them.

>the main one being I can't imagine using a browser which doesn't support the blocking of ads

This hasn't been true for... ~6 years? And even then, it could block them, it just couldn't block their network download until... like 6 years ago or longer.

>I have no idea why chrome doesn't support plugins on Android; they said they'd do it years ago.

Chrome is removing all support for all plugins [see the deprecation policy they're about to introduce for Flash], but I suspect you're talking about extensions. I suspect they're coming very, very soon. They've been changing the desktop extension UI slightly and slowly and I suspect it's about enabling extensions on other form factors.

Not to mention this discussion is about using an app written for Chrome, not about somehow being forced to use Chrome for day-to-day browsing. I could (and do) use Chrome apps at times without actually using Chrome. I flip flop between Chrome and Firefox for months sometimes.

Because some of us don't want to use Chrome? How is vendor lock-in at the browser level any better than at the OS or device level?

The script above basically acts like a wrapper script, launching in a small square chromeless window. So you don't even need to use Chrome, just launch that at startup so it runs in the background.

Small software companies have to make platform decisions. They chose the most popular browser (and notably most secure browser), allowing the app to work on all OSes.

I don't think you completely get how some of us feel about chrome.

Chrome is a good, modern browser but this constant pushing by google (telling me to download a "better browser" when I'm visiting their site in Firefox) as well as every lazy web developer annoys me (seriously, at least consider if you should test basic functionality in all major browsers even if you aren't directly paid for it) .

Wish I could remove the "lazy" part, my apologies webdevs!

Still: wish less companies would be fine with shipping web apps that break in one or more of modern browsers.

On what basis can "notably most secure browser" be asserted?

I think both aspects of this statement are definitely not clear - certainly not notably (reference?), and comparisons based on some searching seem to go one of numerous ways.

I would be happy to see a security expert's view on this though.

See also this link on Chrome devs essentially telling users that upgrading their kernel from 3.16 (not even > 7 months old at the time): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9164251. Thankfully better sense prevailed and it was resolved fast. So even in terms of OS support it is not unambiguously better than others.

To me it is personally annoying because so many people and esp developers seems to want Chrome to become the new IE: a subpar (yeah, until google give you nested vertical tabs ;-) browser that web developers have fallen in love with to the point where they forget anything else.

Anything that reinforces this automatically qualifies as bad (and I'm only partially joking here ;-)

This is exactly it! People are now making chrome apps instead of web apps.

How many times have you been to a webapp and it said "Your browser is not supported, for best results please use Google Chrome."

I use Firefox and hate Chrome. I don't see how this affected by how much you use Chrome

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