Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bahamut | Hacker News Reader

Still Chrome - all the browsers have warts. As someone who uses a lot of Google services, the login ability in Chrome is valuable, and it stores my bookmarks too. The devtools are also king of the crop by far.

Firefox's devtools irritates me, and they have made some piss poor decisions, such as the switchover to geckodriver without it being stable for WebDriver support.

Safari is still lol, and has some awful UX, even on iOS. The browser is also home to some of the worst bugs I encounter on frontend these days. To its credit it does better on mobile for battery life & perf, but that's literally its only saving graces.

Edge is better than IE11, but still has its share of wtf bugs.

View on HN

I don't use Chrome for my daily browsing two reasons:

1) there are only 5 entries in the adress bar dropdown box. Firefox shows ~10. This used to be configurable a few years ago but they removed that option 2) Chrome fully loads every tab on startup which is very annoying if you use a lot of tabs (I think there are plugins for this?)

They all have wtf bugs. Think "JIT errors causing string concats to yield number objects and bitwise operators to fail when the code has run over 1000 times"-level wtf. I consider most of the "frontend" issues quite minor in that regard. Edge behaves very nicely, and for most intents and purposes. Older IE's were very much WTF: tickle it wrong - it could be as little as accessing the Math object at a bad time - and you got peculiar Access Denied exceptions (sometimes uncatchable, sometimes not), crashes, or other weird behaviour.

I agree on it mostly landing on ecosystem integration. I recently went from Safari to Chrome simply due to switching (back, after a few years away) to Android.

The only differences I feel after the switch is that Chrome's password integration is much quirkier than Safari's, and even quirkier when syncing to phone. Another difference is of course that the tab bar looks different, but that's basically it. Things sync to Google instead of to Apple. Maybe if I checked, I'd notice poorer battery life, but with battery life in the 7-10 hour range, I'm good.

What do you think about Chrome's privacy?

It seems in Goog's interest to mine browsers for as much as it can get out of the user: do we have any reason to think it's not happening?

Google's business model is profiling to learn more about the user, to (in the end) earn money via advertising. Google's OK with ad blocking (tho I thought in the past they weren't). Recently though, they've been blocking Ad Nauseam which fights back against advertising.

The Ad Nauseam authors respond to "if Google has lost your trust, as it has ours" in their FAQ with suggestions [1]. It boils down to: swap back to Firefox, try Opera, or try one of the Chrome-based browsers not by Google. Well, Opera is dead to me (Vivaldi might be alive, but I don't like it when a company calls a proxy a VPN.)

Chrome's going beyond some standards as well. Firefox is introducing sandboxing and a Rust-based rendering engine to replace Gecko. For me, this means it is time to slowly move back to Firefox as main browser. At least I know with Mozilla extensions related to advertising won't be suddenly removed. Finally, I think it is important I give something back to Firefox. Either development or a donation. Perhaps just a donation to an organisation related to Mozilla, like EFF.

[1] https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Install-AdNauseam-on...

They care a shit ton about preserving your privacy despite the insane amount of info they collect. That said, if you're concerned about this, use Chromium (which has that shit turned off) and a ad/tracker blocking VPN service like Disconnect.me or PIA with MACE

Reply on news.ycombinator.com