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Comment by mattparlane | Hacker News Reader

(2014)

And even more relevant today. Especially after yesterday's fiasco where Chrome doesn't allow installing self-made extensions permanently—forcing you to publish on the Chrome Web Store [0].

There were a few years (2010-2014) when Chrome was a clear industry leader: in design, web standards, resource consumption, and championing openness on the Internet. Not anymore, at least for me:

  * Firefox has built-in Reader mode and RSS, while Chrome still doesn't.
  * Firefox's ES-next compatibility is comparable to Chrome, and Safari Technology Preview is ahead [1].
  * Chrome hasn't embraced the WebExtensions specification (I'd love to be wrong on this).
  * Killing Chrome Apps [2].
  * Chrome displays an ambiguous/dissuasive popup when you attempt to enable Do Not Track [3].

I hope once Servo is production-ready, it performs far better than Chrome that the browser performance enthusiasts are also willing to switch.

That said, Chrome's Web Inspector is top-notch, and it is the only thing I miss from switching to Firefox.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13325507

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13133135

[2] http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/19/google-will-kill-chrome-ap...

[3] http://imgur.com/a/fHAyx

> * Chrome hasn't embraced the WebExtensions specification (I'd love to be wrong on this).

I'm by no means an expert on this, but aren't WebExtensions based on the chrome extension API? Says pretty much that on the developers page[0] of Mozilla as well.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions

Yes. But according to wiki.mozilla.org on WebExtensions [0]:

We strive for compatibility to make developers lives easier and are participating in a W3C community group to work on a standard.

Although Chrome is by no means obligated to, it would be nice to see a company such as Google—that claims to support openness on the Internet—adopt this more open standard. (That is, "browser.storage.local" instead of "chrome.storage.local").

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ#Are_they_compatib...

"Killing Chrome Apps" is actually a good thing, at least for the an open web. It means, that apps on the web are supposed to be on the web and not packaged in the browser. Google has said that this was a temporary measure.

Essentially, for those apps or websites it shouldn't matter if they run in Chrome, Safari, Edge, or Firefox.

I use Firefox on both mobile and desktop, they've made massive strides recently and it now feels lighter and faster than Chrome, however there is some sort of memory leak in either Firefox and one of my (limited) extensions and it slows down slowly until it no longer is responsive and I need to restart it.

I too can't wait for Servo, although the reality is that it's still an experiment and is miles away from being anywhere near feature complete or compatible with the years worth of edge cases coded into Gecko, I wouldn't hold my breath on Firefox being based on Servo in the medium term, however Servo will find a use in quite a few niches where the content is much more controlled, courtesy of it's compatibility with the CEF.

Even more important today with a share of around ~70% instead of ~60% back then (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/)

I'm not surprised with 70% for Chrome. Every Android phone comes with a Chrome browser. Too bad Mozilla mobile strategy didn't work. times and times again I said to whoever was in charge with the project :"Target hipsters, and hackers, not emergent economies and low hand devices, make it the phone for those who can afford a third one with good specs and are trend setters, or engineers, they'll develop cool shit for Firefox OS!", but no, they went with cheap and low end, ignoring the fact that a pure HTML/JS phone will perform worst than a phone that runs C apps and Java... People in third world countries don't give a f. about HTML/JS, they want their phone to run skype and whatsapp ...

For what it's worth, agreeing on a strategy with phone vendors and OEMs is much harder than it looks. Decision-makers in this domain have very different processes and goals than in software development. Plus it's very much a shark-eats-shark world.

So I don't actually know who took the decisions, but I wouldn't be so sure that it's Mozilla.

I wonder why countries aren't pursuing Apple and Google about the monopoly of their browsers on their platforms as they did with Microsoft over IE. Apple in particular is obviously extremely anti competitive, at least you can install a gecko based Firefox on Android, on iOS it's webkit based.

It's worse than the author even envisioned, we're seeing apps like notion and atomic be chrome only with no sign of Firefox support. So the exclusivity has extended beyond Google properties.

When you can't even use the browser it's very hard to keep marketshare.

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