Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are bringing back the browser wars | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are bringing back the browser wars

venturebeat.com

43 pointsjoeyespo26 comments

> Google is doubling down on the user experience by focusing on ads and performance, an opportunity I’ve argued its competitors have completely missed.

I don't agree they've missed the opportunity. Both Brave and Firefox have made the point that their built-in tracking protection can improve the user experience by cutting page load times in half:

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/tracking-protection-always-...

And this is something the article author himself reported on in 2015:

https://venturebeat.com/2015/05/24/firefoxs-optional-trackin...

Additionally, even with the change to WebExtensions, Firefox's add-on API offers more capability to developers of blocker add-ons than Chrome does. Giorgio Maone, the developer of NoScript, considers Firefox's add-ons API to be the best of any current browser:

https://hackademix.net/2017/11/21/noscript-1011-quantum-powe...

The ideal future of web browser evolution in my view:

- Brave overtakes chrome.

- Blockstack overtakes Brave.

Eventually (I hope) users will demand full control over both their data and the content they view.

Firefox's market share has not increased recently. According to the data I can find, it is slightly down over the past several months. Chrome is still just over 60% on both desktop and mobile.

So, why would Google be worried about Firefox? If anything, they would be worried about Safari, which is the primary mobile competitor to Chrome and is being marketed on the desktop as having increased performance and strong privacy features.

I’m not being coy by phrasing this as a conjecture; it is just a hypothesis: perhaps Google is worried that FF could gain mind share under technical people , who might then cause a ripple effect by installing it for everyone whose computers they “manage” or influence (friends & family). Which could up being a lot of people, in the end. I have a feeling that’s how MSIE originally got dethroned.

I'm pretty sure it was Chrome that dethroned IE, not Firefox. It had really good marketing, and nontechnical people started to adopt it rapidly because it had a really clean interface and was a lot faster than IE or Firefox were at the time.

Here's a chart of browser market share from 2009 to 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

It seems pretty clear from that chart that the rapid decline of IE was accompanied by the rapid rise of Chrome. Firefox seems to have peaked in popularity in 2010, when IE was still a lot more popular than Chrome. Chrome ate both their lunches.

People say that Firefox did the hard work, because back then the web was just entirely built for IE. It was much harder to steal market share from IE at that point, because the web that you were able to display, if you were not IE, was just broken. You had to be so much better than IE at everything else to get people to use your browser despite the web being broken. The small differences between browsers today would not suffice for that.

So, the total number of percentage points that Chrome ate up is bigger, but it would never have gotten off the ground, if Firefox had not shaved off market share beforehand.

> It had really good marketing

Good marketing? They put a freaking ad for it on Google.com! They still have it and there's no way to even disable the nagware. I've clicked "No" to it I don't know how many hundreds of times over these years.

Because Firefox is actually great now. I just switched back to Firefox as my primary browser. I suspect others will do as well.

So long as you don’t need to use the developer tools, because a 1950x and 64GiB of RAM aren’t enough to make that run snappy.

Firefox is excellent when it works. I've experienced pretty long loading times for a bunch of websites. I have experienced these for sites like gmail, youtube, a bunch of blog sites and Udacity. I know this is a Firefox problem because, the load times didn't persist when I immediately switched to Chrome. This is not consistent though, and Firefox is fast and really light on memory usage which is nice, as long as I can see the page in the first place.

Well, at least two of the sites that you mention are Google property, so it's not certain that Firefox is at fault there, just because it works better in Chrome.

While I can make a choice between Chrome and Firefox, I'm not really going to stop browsing some websites just because I switched browsers.

Are you basing this comment on Firefox since Quantum? Things have changed dramatically in the past few months.

Yes, I have the latest version.

Firefox market share is actually shrinking, though. It’s not even holding ground with the new features.

Switched to Firefox after Google supported inclusion of DRM into w3c standard and never looked back. It turned out latest Firefox is pretty decent browser.

So, you support an open web except not for people who want to protect their content?

How exactly does DRM facilitate an open web for anybody, including content creators?

It lets content creators put their content on the web without fear of everybody ripping it off? Why don't you explain wow it prevents an open web for anyone at all?

Regardless of your answer, I'm super glad that things didn't go the way that your crowd wanted them to. I got what I wanted and I'm so glad I can watch Netflix in my browser. :)

> It lets content creators put their content on the web without fear of everybody ripping it off?

It doesn't prevent anything, I can still rip off the content if I want to. DRM was never affective at anything, other than making life harder for everyone. Show me a single DRM technology that hasn't already been defeated.

> Why don't you explain wow it prevents an open web for anyone at all?

If Netflix won't release their binary blob to your platform/browser you won't be able to access it. You are forced to run code made by an organisation that doesn't have your best interest in mind.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

> I got what I wanted and I'm so glad I can watch Netflix in my browser. :)

You basically got Flash, that's what you got. :D

> It doesn't prevent anything, I can still rip off the content if I want to.

So, you should throw away the lock on your front door and your car too because anyone can break into those just as easily.

> If Netflix won't release their binary blob to your platform/browser you won't be able to access it.

I don't care about that at all.

> You basically got Flash, that's what you got. :D

What I got is the movie companies and the streaming companies sending me their content. If they want me to run the equivalent of Flash, that's fine with me.

A toddler would basically agree with my argument. Some big content creators want your web browser to be able to do certain things that you personally don't want them to be able to do. By not allowing them to do things the way they want, you're closing the web off to them.

Nobody is stopping you (or anyone else) from creating content and using non-DRM distribution. So you're actually arguing for a closed web, not me.

This is original browser war Netscape vs Microsoft and honestly, I don't see nothing like that today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEFu-B1wj1E

I tried to switch to Firefox recently but couldn't do it. Here are my main issues with Firefox:

- not all settings get synced across devices - All extensions are enabled in private mode without any way to turn it off. I like to sign in to another account in private mode without having my password manager auto-fill my accounts information.

As is the Beaker Browser! Next release coming in February.

yes, was about to mention this one :)

decentralized! (but based on Chromium, no?)

https://beakerbrowser.com/

Yep, chromium fork

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