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Comment by kd913 | Hacker News Reader

I really disagree with this perspective. Frankly Google needs a counter-balance in the browser market.

Microsoft can easily act as Google's counter balance. Microsoft is one of the few companies that have the resources capable of maintaining a hostile fork of chromium (at a loss) and have it competitive enough that users will switch. Google has lost it's one advantage in the web-space too as now they can't exactly hamper the experience of edge without hampering chrome too.

Chromium needed this counter-balance.

If Microsoft chose a Gecko forked browser, they would dominate and take over. Like what Apple did with KHTML. This step is better.

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I agree, I think this is generally better. It feels like google needs some pressure to listen to people. Oddly enough Microsoft didn't do some things that would be instant wins, like support plugins on mobile so you can install things like ublock origin ( biggest reason why I use firefox on mobile ).

It's almost as if there are technical reasons for not supporting the current extension api on mobile! (Battery, performance, ...)

Forgive my skepticism that that is the reason Google doesn't make it available.

And yet extensions work on ChromeOS on machines with no more power or memory than my phone. In fact my phone beats my ChromeOS machine at many benchmarks, has the same amount of ram, and more storage.

And you probably need to run a virus scanner and it eats batteries for breakfast.

It’s all trade offs....

It takes some doing to get a virus on a Chromebook.

Larger laptop form factor provides better sustained performance due to better cooling, as well as larger batteries.

Also, even though you can run Android apps and Linux containers these days, Chrome OS is still built around using the browser in a way Android is not. Your phone has to balance the needs of the browser against other demands and apps.

Anecdotal, but my 4 year old Android phone (Sony Z5 Compact) runs Firefox and uBlock Origin with no issues at all.

Almost! But not quite. Extensions work fine on mobile Firefox and battery life and performance are improved when ads are blocked.

Ublock Origin/uMatrix on mobile significantly increase website performance and battery life on the average site, by blocking a a lot of advertising and tracking content.

Potential problems could be mitigated pretty easily by warning about or throttling extensions that use too much CPU/memory on mobile.

Not allowing extensions on Chrome for Android might have been an acceptable excuse in the early days of Android, with very weak single core CPUs. But not for years.

Probably not because both given reasons are plainly wrong.

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