Browser diversity starts with us
zeldman.com
zeldman.com
I assume, though, that Google will eventually make some change that Microsoft doesn't want, and they'll be forced to fork chromium.
The recent proposals from Google[2] that hobble ad blockers and extensions like tampermonkey might even be enough.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18125238/microsoft-chrome...
[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chrome-extens...
This assumes that Microsoft still has a browser engine division by then. I suspect that adopting Chromium was largely a cost-cutting measure and this division is on the chopping block already.
That set of proposed changes from Google looks like one to me, but it's possible they don't to MS.
Sticking to their own engine would have eventually killed both. Hard to get people to adopt your browser if webdevs are not testing sites with it. And webdevs don’t care if your market share is marginal.
I believe the alternative would have been most of the enterprises deploying Chrome on Windows to access their apps. With this move Microsoft might still retain control of the app level. This is valuable because then they can for example provide integrated windows authentication for the apps.
The API doesn't let you add to the list of blocked uris outside of posting a new release of an extension. Ouch.
I can only gather that the actual goal is very different from the stated goal.
I have Firefox on OSX already, and it runs smoothly. Unfortunately mobile Firefox (while supporting all those extensions), has a jittery scroll issue on Android, so I use the Chromium-based Kiwi Browser (for night mode) or Brave (for built in adblocking).
I was just starting to get that butterfly/stomach feeling for Edge, I don't think I'd ever leave FF for it but Edge was pretty attractive and I started to developed some warm fuzzy feelings for it. My initial revulsion has long since been replaced by a sort of curiosity which had the potential to grow into even more... That chromium news killed it though.
And, oh my god, how many times Google asked me to install Chrome. They are really annoying with those ads which never stop to appear. I suppose that for many users that might be the reason to switch to Chrome, to stop that insanity.
Interesting - I've never seen that in FireFox
In Firefox passwords and browsing history / data is separated. So they can delete browsing history and they don’t accidentally delete the passwords anymore. And with a Firefox account all our passwords that employees need are synced safely.
In one day 150 employees changed to Firefox :D
I am speechless.
There's ways around that, but for some orgs, it would be unneeded overkill, and not protecting anything notable.
I can honenstly not think of a single venture where "support@" is not one of the most critical resources wrt privacy and security. On top of that, "support@" is typically the account that has a high churn rate. Where people move on and new people are hired. Of all the cases, I'd say that "support@" ranks amongst the top for need of proper account management.
That said, it's dead simple to grant jane@ and john@ access to an inbox in Google. Researching how to do this may take 30+ minutes. But getting it configured afterwards is really a two minute job.
The only reason I've came across why people shared Google accounts was "we have a business domain and we need to pay for every extra seat". Which is a valid excuse. I'd argue that its not a good enough excuse to lower your security for, but valid nontheless. For one, 2fa is almost impossible when sharing accounts.
Which is why having a "pay per seat" model for any SAAS is perpendicular to having proper security practices. You are not rewarding good security, but rather punishing it by letting organisations with proper separation of accounts pay more then the ones that choose to have as few as possible.
I haven't seen anything that allows a seamless view of the inbox/outbox, and a way of sending that doesn't accidentally use their normal email address if they forget to click a drop down.
Not every password identifies a user.
Ignoring the myriad security issues with shared credentials auditing alone is completely ruined with shared creds.
We use 1password and have multiple vaults depending on what sort of clearance is needed. Need access to support emails? We'll add you to the appropriate vault. This way dev teams can be separate from marketing etc and no one can unexpectedly gain access to what they shouldn't be able to or wipe passwords they shouldn't have access to.
Yes I know other solutions are there. Like 1password and step by step I will get there. At the moment they are unwilling to move to a password managers.
A Firefox account with synced passwords is a huge step forward. Before that there was a excel file with all passwords. Or worse post-it’s.
Give it a try, you might like it.
And that'll have a lot more impact than testing cross browser regularly.
That depends entire on what you mean with "impact" here.
One site that does not work on Firefox has a great impact too. When that "one site" becomes every fourth site, then "we", the webdevelopers have handed Chrome their monopoly.
Fair enough. I meant that using Firefox regularly as a web developer would have a larger impact on keeping the web free than testing periodically on Firefox. Why? Because testing periodically won't exercise the browser quirks as thoroughly as every day use (and sometimes time intensive cross browser testing gets sacrificed to schedule concerns). There's also an additional bonus of keeping browser share up, but that's not the primary benefit in my mind.
I think Blink is the rendering engine. Chromium is Chrome without Google branding
I think that the problem with Firefox right now is that it does not have something unique to offer. Before moving to the new plugin model, there were plugins that were not available on Chrome which was available for Firefox : DownThemAll, Tab wheel scroll etc. But in their desire to chase Chrome they threw it away.
I also seem to have an annoying bug in mobile where after a while long tap on link no longer opens the contextual menu. I wonder if I should report it since last time I reported a defect it turned out to be a problem with uBlock and this one takes a while to reproduce.
I think it might be a good idea for Mozilla to invest in good extensibility. It helped them a lot last time and is therefore a battle hardened tactic
I encountered a bug matching this description on my S7. So far I discovered that it's correlated to the number of tabs open; around 70 tabs, the context menu appears after perceptible delay, which increases with the number of open tabs. I think I reached something around 90 tabs before I couldn't long-tap on links any more. Closing tabs makes the problem go away.
I'd say "go ahead and report it", but I too have uBlock installed, so I can't say if it's unrelated. uBlock was the very reason I switched to Firefox on Android anyway.
I thought I was the only one. I don't have uBlock installed, but also don't really bother reporting bugs because mobile Firefox doesn't appear like a supported project to me at all (where can I find ANY documentation?).
It happens to me occasionally, but I can't say anything about my number of open tabs because it just displays "∞" (wtf man?).
Sounds about right. Because they are not tied down by allegiance to a platform, they're going for an ideal. This might pass the smell test if Chrome was anywhere near IE6 share levels or was generally a bad web citizen, but they're not really - save for decisions that come from Google thinking about its ad businesses and how to enable more of that through Chrome.
That's kinda funny when you consider where Mozilla came from... the ashes of a thing called Netscape... who tried to rule the world while a couple grad students were busy plugging away at Stanford, doing it the right way.
Every vote counts.
It's only hopeless if we all agree to do nothing.
The exact same argument could be made about IE around 2000, yet now you list IE as ancient and crumbled, which completely undermines your argument.
Most websites are already broken, due to anti-adblocking, newsletter signups, GDPR consent, etc. I don't really care if most websites requires Chrome, most websites are broken anyway.
Plus this is Firefox. It has been down this patch before, heck it was born in it.
Is there an npm package that will include up-to-date versions of all components without further environment setup or use of external services?
Ideally, with great support for taking snapshots and running headless or headed in simple fashion?
Firefox and Chromium are getting increasingly slow and bloated, plus their chrome takes up a bunch of screen space, doesn't follow the system theme particularly well, and they rely far too much on the mouse (there are extensions which help, but they're still not particularly good).
Out of the two I would still recommend Firefox over Chromium, since Mozilla seem more ethical than Google, contribute less bloat and churn to Web APIs, etc.
Multiple successful browsers is a good thing for the web. I hope that doesn’t just die away.
Does anyone know more about this?
That's just my idea, though. Hopefully, the current sad state of the web and the coming browser monoculture will spur others to experiment too. I know some gaming companies have experimented with the distributing and executing of x64 binary executables using the browser. I know others are looking into ways to chop up and do progressive loading on binary executables.
If they do, they will be replaced, just like iexplore was. So they won't stagnate unless they are stupid and want Firefox to take over.
From a practical perspective, ten years of stagnation is not very different from indefinite stagnation. Even if there's a light at the end of the tunnel, we're going to have to spend a huge chunk of our lives suffering through it.
And with Google, stagnation is probably the best case. If they continue to "move things forward" as a browser monopoly, they'll probably force many user-hostile things (like their recent proposal to cripple ad blockers https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897...).
on play store, by installs firefox - 100million+,chrome - 1billion+. firefox is great but it's awkward focus on freedom over usability has led to it's downfall imo
Actually, that's more than I thought. I've always thought that Firefox on mobile is virtually nonexistent but it seems to have more users than any european country (except russia). In any other instance an install base of 100 mil would be wonderful.
(I use mobile Firefox myself, it's fine.)
At one point there was talk about Samsung being a partner and Firefox/Servo becoming the default browser on the Samsung phones. Which would make a perfect sense, since every non-Apple phone gets its performance from multi-core SoC, and Firefox would be the only browser taking advantage of that. Now, after Google getting their hands slapped by the UE regulators, this Samsung/Firefox marriage could be even more fruitful. And yet, the Servo team got assigned to some pointless VR experiments, and it turned out Android was never a priority. Again: I can't understand why, oh, why.
There's also a new (I think?) mobile browser in progress. I'm not sure how it fits into the larger picture and information is a bit scarce, they just started releasing beta builds.
Google lets any browser engine on Android but they're evil because their browser, Chrome, is #1
If you want a choice in browser the first place you should be pushing is to allow them on iOS. Every other platform, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, you get to choose. I for one would actually like to be able to run real Chromium on iOS to get access to the 100s of standards that Apple has yet to implement. I'm sure lots of Firefox lovers would also like to run real Firefox on iOS as well.