Remember when Chrome tried to innovate with how we use bookmarks? [1]
People cry out for innovation, but then freak out when said innovation happens. This is why disrupters are so successful - they can do something crazy and people will try it out and think - this is amazing. Because the mindset/psychology is that this is something new. But the market leader implements exactly the same thing and people won't give it a chance because it's a change and they can't handle change.
But I actually disagree that they are stagnant. They may be hesitant to change the UI, but there is a lot happening under the hood to make them more secure, faster, standards compliant, stable etc.
[1] http://www.omgchrome.com/new-bookmark-manager-chrome-disable...
Edit - Adding an example of recent Firefox innovation being rejected https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/hello-status
To play the devil's advocate, couldn't you argue that the reason the take-rate seems high is because only the people that want change are going to use the disrupter's thing, whereas those people represent a very small minority of people using the existing, uninnovative product?
For example, consider what Mozilla did when they first came out with Firefox. They didn't replace the main Mozilla browser; they built a new browser and offered it as an alternative. It took a long time for everyone to switch over, and that's completely OK.
Honestly I don't want new features on Chrome or Firefox. They are fine how they are -- though I wish Mozilla would take out the value-added services they just had to add. Release security updates and that's it
They could have improved on it without forcing people to use another Google service too.
Early adopters would flock to it, the comfortable majority would happily stick with what they know. Win win.
Also they kind of just did what you suggested with Duo,Allo and Hangouts.
I think this is a poor example, this does nothing to make the browser better at browsing the web. It's just a feature no one asked for, that has loads of alternatives already. Why do I need video calling built in?
Opera has a well established history of innovating web browsing. So many features we consider normal and must-have in modern browsers were pioneered by Opera. The innovation kind of stopped and a lot of features disappeared when they fired the Presto team and switched to webkit, unfortunately.
Google on the other hand, has a well established history of developing a pretty great idea and then at some point begin making it shittier with each update.
This may be a bias of an old Opera fanboy / IMHO; If you consider innovative features, between Opera (frozen just before they ditched Presto), versus where Chrome has innovated and been developed to today--Developer tooling maybe, but from a user point of view? Nowhere even close. Especially if you consider what was taken away (but then, the entire Presto engine and many of its unique features were taken away too).
Opera has had more of a "Yes, and" approach to innovation, but still they (barely) managed to avoid the "kitchen sink" problem. Old features almost never went away. I used to think the built-in torrent client was unnecessary bloat, but in hindsight was that really a bad idea? Main problem was torrent protocol itself was a bit heavy for computers at the time, making it feel bloaty. Unlike the built in IRC client, which was just another lightweight browser tab unlike Chrome (or Firefox) could ever manage. Still, Opera was also famous for it's tiny executable size.
I wouldn't call Firefox stagnant. It's just got E10S (multiprocess). The Quantum project promises to gradually improve both speed and stability (and consequentially security). They are working on replacing the traditional Firefox extensions archetecture with WebExtensions. Fennec (Firefox on Android) is an underappreciated gem.
I'm playing with Vivaldi now. It's nice, it's fast, there's a fair amount of UI innovation. But underneath, it's just Blink, so it's hard for me to get that excited about it.
Fennec is pretty great, yes. I've been using Firefox on ideological grounds for years, and it's getting harder and harder. I currently have a tab open that will just keep loading forever every time I load the browser, taking 100% CPU, until I go and press escape to stop loading. It's slow as hell and frequently freezes.
Ideology can only take you so far if the product is a piece of crap.
The rendering engine is fairly important for apparent speed and smoothness (e.g. with scrolling). These are issues where Firefox was traditionally not rated highly.
About that particular tab (which I guess you're sending a bug report about), maybe you want to try the same URL in a fresh Firefox profile?
> Why do you care what the rendering engine is?
then later you say
> I currently have a tab open that will just keep loading forever every time I load the browser, taking 100% CPU, until I go and press escape to stop loading. It's slow as hell and frequently freezes.
Do you not see that those two things may be related?
Then I guess you were never an IE6 user.
in future you can just ctrl-t then shortcut name to go straight to bookmark.
yeah, it's bookmarks under the hood, but being able to just go 'ctrl-t' then 'webmail' or 'workmail' or whatever saves the convolutions of smartcomplete and autocomplete and displaying history or suggestions and such in the url bar.
Both Firefox's awesomebar and Chrome's omnibox let you go to a shortcut by typing its name
In the end tabs are just like booksmarks, except that they keep state during a browsing session. I find it very weird that we keep those very similar concepts in completely different UIs. There's a lot of room for improvement in that area.
Agreed.
I'd not say that there's no room for improvement WRT bookmarks and tabs, but this has nothing to do with the comment thread I responded to.
Sounds interesting, which extension would that be?
On some pages browsing would slow down to a halt while CPU usage would spike to 100%.
But honestly I have no problems with "regular" browsing.
The features are good enough to live with the slowdown, as others have said Vivaldi can never be as fast as Chrome.
I don't think that's true. There's lots of innovation, but it's in things that aren't necessarily obvious to the end user until there's decent levels of adoption by developers. Websites can access gamepads, advanced hardware-accelerated 3D, bluetooth, accelerometers, different layout engines, P2P data sharing, push notifications ... the UI that doesn't change very often, but that's only a tiny aspect of what a browser is.
Which ironically doesn't happen until browsers agree on innovation.
Opera used to be really fast, but then it started to come with lots of other useless tools (email, bittorrent client tool) and try to be an internet package
So I jumped to Firefox which was simpler and Thunderbird was a separate client. Then that started to be clunkier, so I tried Chrome, which was faster.
Much like laptop getting thinner, the gains are in the wrong area.
What I want is a fast, secure browser that can remember history and bookmarks - everything else can be an add-on.
That said, this is perhaps the second time i have seen them unveil a concept browser for an Apple platform.
Really goes to show how big a fixture Apple is in web development. But then i hold that this can be attributed to when web development moved from the computing department to the media production department. As the latter had been a Mac stronghold since the intro of the original Mac in combo with Apple's laserwriter printer.
What do you think would happen if Google changed the Chrome UI (the little there is) around?
Non-user visible innovation in browsers does happen BTW. But you dont't see it :-)
Although I believe that was Microsoft's fault, but Google shouldn't have copied it. I've lost more data to that than any web browser bug over the years. Fortunately Chrome had an extension that let me turn it off!
Is the back that backspace goes back, or that the browser doesn't store text you've typed in a textarea?
And even Opera tried to keep that too, at least in many situations, to keep the history an actual history and you'd switch through snapshots of the DOM+state--at least that's what it felt like, I'm not sure that's what it really did, but I guess it helps with speed, too. A webpage generally isn't supposed to move or change at all unless you're interacting with it, so really after it's rendered, flipping through history or tabs should be instant, even on an old machine because it's just bitmaps, really. I remember a while ago there was an article here that sort of explained why this couldn't be done or didn't work for some reason, but it was a tradeoff to get some feature that, given the option no one in their right mind would trade for instant history and tab navigation.
That was the purpose of Chrome, I believe, to monopolize the browser market and make it very expensive for others to compete and innovate google's business model out of existence.
Features built into the browser that, currently, you use Google services for, which you wouldn't have to go through them for any more if they're built in?
What if, for example, a browser came out with orders of magnitude better ad-blocking built in? That browser could run Blink, benefiting from Google's engine, but directly undercut their business.
In fact, isn't that exactly what Brave[1] is? A Blink based browser that blocks ads and trackers, and includes their own payments platform for micropayments. I see at least a couple conflicts with Google there.
Or, hell, even just a Blink based browser that defaults to Bing search.
[1]: https://brave.com
In the browser space, yes. In the API and platform space, no. Every other browser has already resigned to just "do what Chrome does" instead of expecting Chrome to confirm to the standards as written.
Do you not see how this is a huge hedge for Google? You control the platform and APIs, you rule the world.
Microsoft used to understand this very well.
On top of that, if you have to compete in the browser space by forking off of Google's rendering engine and web platform, you're always going to be behind.
Why do you think I don't see that?
On top of that, if you have to compete in the browser space by forking off of Google's rendering engine and web platform, you're always going to be behind.
Why? That's certainly not what happened with Google's browser.
Because they can outspend you in engineering resources to push forward, and working with someone elses stack is a burden, not a blessing, if the other side moves more quickly (and forces you to rebase).
The little work that gets done is done by skunkworkers, volunteers or third party projects.
edit: see for yourself https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101637