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Comment by mscasts | Hacker News Reader

Google has won the browser battle (for now) and it sucks for all of us. Competition is a good thing.

> it sucks for all of us

Can you remember a time when we had better web browsers than today? For sure there's some anxiety about the future, but isn't the browser situation today better than it's ever been?

> isn't the browser situation today better than it's ever been?

No? Opera is gone, all we have now is Firefox, Chromium and a bunch of Firefox and Chromium skins. Some of them also bundle extensions for extra features.

You think Opera of a few years ago was better than Chromium and Firefox today?

Pretty sure opera.com still allows you to download recent versions of their web browser for most major platforms. How is it "gone"?

Have you used Opera before and after they switched to being a chromium clone? I used Opera back when it was good (10-12), and when they decided to sell out, I returned to Firefox.

Opera was great because it had lots of conveniences built in to the browser as well as bleeding edge features. They often beat other browser vendors to implement features, and they had a pretty good developer tool stack.

Now it's a shell of what it once was.

Not really, I can choose between Chromium and Firefox. It's like choosing between an iPhone and Android. Sure you technically could use an older phone but that is becoming an issue for everyday life, at least where I live.

Before there was Firefox, IE, Chrome and Opera which all had their own rendering engines.

i disagree. in my opinion we don't need more browsers. what we need is a single browser/platform where companies and individuals can compete while developing various features.

think of it like this: instead of a browser vendor implementing a feature and then the rest playing catch-up, that same feature will now be available for most users, no matter who has developed it.

edit: spelling

It's a good thing that you don't run the world then :) . I prefer choice to dictatorships. I certainly don't want google to be my dictator because lazy developers want it easy :).

What you say would definitely work for front-end features – the kind of things that could more or less be implemented by extensions already.

It would not work for back-end features, such as WebVR or WebAR, for instance, or WebPay, or WebGL, or wasm. All these features need low-level support and low-level patches that only Google may decide to accept or reject. For the moment, Google doesn't seem overly interested in WebVR/WebAR, for instance, so it doesn't seem that any of the Chromiumlings will be competing on that field.

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