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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

There are several other first-class browsers that you have a choice of if you don't like Chrome. The same was not true during IE's era of dominance.

Also, do you agree, in general terms, that sometimes changes can be good whereas other times changes can be bad?

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Most of those are rebranded chromium.

The only big ones that are independent are Safari (since Google forked Webkit to create Blink), Firefox, and IE/Edge.

And the impression i have is that Safari is lagging, Mozilla is directionless and struggling to keep Firefox relevant, and MS is, well, MS.

Ever since Opera folded and made their browser a Chromium clone, only Mozilla have been carrying the banner for standard correctness. And even they seem more and more bow to Google's decrees (whole virtually cloning the Chrome look and feel with each Firefox update).

Mozilla is directionless and struggling? Huh? They just came out with Firefox Quantum, which is a huge step forward, and I believe might have taken the web performance crown.

If you step back and look at Mozilla's performance, it looks like they have been struggling.

https://www.w3counter.com/trends

Hopefully they are on the upswing recently because they have found more focus and direction.

Quantum is a great improvement to Firefox. I'm running 57.0b14 ATM (normally I'm quite conservative with anything except Emacs) and quite pleased. The performance improvements are quite noticable. Though I do wish they created a more user-extensible browser, a bit a la Emacs.

Are you advocating for a second coming of browser wars era because we now have more options?

Have we not been there yet? Can we agree that that is a place of endless pain for developers, project managers and users as well?

Strong-arming the spec is bad.

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