Google Chrome's fear of Microsoft Edge is revealing its bad side
laptopmag.com
laptopmag.com
This is deeply disappointing, and all the more reason Microsoft never should have adopted Chromium. They will eventually have to maintain a hard fork, the differences will grow such that they eventually have to increase their engineering spend on it to keep pace with just managing the rebases and patches or reimplement features themselves, and despite all the good will they had for the Chromium team they will see none of it returned by the larger Google/Alphabet corporation.
They should have based Edge on Gecko and invested money in taking marketshare away from Chromium so that the W3C/WHATWG can operate as intended with multiple implementations for a single specification. Instead they embraced the Chrome monoculture and were either treated in bad faith or the Chromium team mistakenly believed everything would be fine with a reset in relations. The result will be that Google retains a veto on web technology that competes with them for the next decade or more.
Use Firefox, everyone.
[1] https://mashable.com/2013/01/05/google-maps-windows-phone/
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/16/4627342/microsoft-google-...
Could you please give some examples ? Did windows ever blocked a competitors product ?
> The AARD code was a segment of code in a beta release of Microsoft Windows 3.1 that would determine whether Windows was running on MS-DOS or PC DOS, rather than a competing workalike such as DR-DOS, and would result in a cryptic error message in the latter case. This XOR-encrypted, self-modifying, and deliberately obfuscated machine code used a variety of undocumented DOS structures and functions to perform its work, and appeared in the installer, WIN.COM, and several other executables in the OS.[1]
https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i...
> Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging the use of DR-DOS with Windows, one incorporated into "Bambi", the code name that Microsoft used for its disk cache utility (SMARTDRV) that detected DR-DOS and refused to load it for Windows 3.1. The AARD code trickery is well-known, but Caldera is now pursuing four other deliberate incompatibilities. One of them was a version check in XMS in the Windows 3.1 setup program which produced the message: "The XMS driver you have installed is not compatible with Windows. You must remove it before setup can successfully install Windows."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
I think the IE6 era was bad for the web for a lot of reasons, but fortunately the investigations into Microsoft made it harder for them to abuse their overwhelming marketshare.
> "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'"
Microsoft isn't the gorilla it used to be, but never forget it is a gorilla, and knows how to play the gorilla game.
If Google becomes sufficiently annoying, Microsoft can say "Well, sure, Google's Chrome isn't very fast on Windows, and crashes every so often. Google must be slipping. Here, Edge is just as good, being practically the same technology, and it's from us, your friend, so you know it won't crap out at the worst possible moment."
[1]: https://www.techradar.com/news/windows-10-gets-cheeky-with-a...
Microsoft can manipulate Windows to make Chrome look bad, but while this could have been useful fifteen years ago against other less popular software, now Windows has serious competition in the form of smartphones and tablets.
Microsoft can't do anything about Android. And people are using Android instead of Windows to browse the Web more and more every day.
Old Edge was already getting the same treatment from web developers as Firefox. If they picked up Gecko they might as well have just stayed with old Edge for even less effort.
This sounds dramatic but Microsoft is a company with 150000 employees. Maintaining a fork of Chromium while open source development continues is probably not an insurmountable feat, and I don't see why it is in principle more work than switching to and contributing to Gecko.
In terms of market share Chromium has essentially won. It's where all the addons are, it's what websites are being optimised for, and so on.
A hard fork of Chromium specifically for Edge might not be the worse thing ever. Having two independently maintained versions of that engine might be enough to force more standardization than in a Chrome-only world.
Two years ago Firefox was such a downgrade I concur.
One year ago the reverse was true and I switched to Firefox without regrets.
Just managed to finally make the switch.
As silly as it sounds, feature parity on selecting and moving groups of tabs between windows was a big factor.
I still use Chrome at work for development, though.
Google has always been this- they use OSS for PR and are bigger enemies of openness than Microsoft. They just had the luxury to pretend otherwise
I also tried using chrome as a "work" browser and firefox for the rest, but it's all a big mess. Not to mention that a lot of pages are not working well.
I am now using Brave to at least mitigate the privacy nightmare of Chrome.
as a user i want new features to work and be taken up quickly. i don't want to be told that a website doesn't work in my browser, or worse, have it fail silently.
different browser are fine for the UI, tab handling, bookmarks, extensions, etc. but rendering a website should work uniformly without fail.
the reason why we need multiple rendering engines is because monoculture is bad for security and it's also not a good idea to allow a single company to define how the web works.
however, most users or developers don't care to much about that.
if that rendering engine would be developed and maintained by an independent consortium like mozilla, then this would actually be sort of acceptable, as it would at least solve the monopoly problem (if a resource is best managed as a monopoly, then that monopoly must be owned by the community at large, and not by a company with selfish commercial interests.)
it wouldn't solve the security problem however.
I've seen Googlers responding to Edge developers about how they'll get some mishandling of Edge fixed internally at Google. But really, this is just the same story as before:
The "oops" have begun: https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
> "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said.
> "All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every time, they'd say, 'oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks.'
> "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?"
> "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done," Nightingale said.
You can do a lot more damage as a trusted friend than you can as a known enemy.
Why don't webdevs fight back and put "best viewed on Firefox" pop-ups on their pages (whenever the user is using Chrome).
Unfortunately, from my experience many third party web developers only test in Chrome, and hence actually encourage Chrome use even when there’s no incompatibility with Firefox or Edge.
Chrome/Chromium phones home, period. Last time I've personally checked this [1] was still true.
It's hard to argue that Google doesn't have an interest on collecting as much data it can. Especially, since their heavy focus on ML, where the algorithms are very data-hungry.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Chromium/comments/3fgabt/privacy_is...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla
But also, ime, Safari has the best UX of all the browsers I’ve tried.
And for the argument of Safari is the hated browser I’m more than okey with that at least they still test for it (I feel sorry for Firefox because the oups we didn’t test blablabla
Seems to be fairly common to see a “works on Chrome, my job is done” attitude. Especially with SPAs.
I worry that we’re going to see another generation of crappy line of business apps that only work (badly) in one browser because of this attitude.
Ironically, it seems Google did just that to the detriment of Mozilla. Browser Wars are such shit-shows.
Whoever said that didn't have many enemies.
- Stannis Baratheon
Is it though? It blows my mind how Google gets a pass on stuff like this. Way back when MS got slapped for monopolistic practices the key argument was that by bundling IE with Windows they were leveraging their dominant position in desktop OSs to gain an unfair advantage in another industry (browsers/web, via IE).
Meanwhile Google leverages their position in search, email, etc. to push Chrome and whatever else, and no one bats an eye.
I can't say I've ever seen that dialog, though.
That's besides the EU's investigation and fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#Andr...
As a firefox user, the thing that annoys the hell out of me is the inability to use the mouse menu for cut and paste in Google Docs unless you're using chrome. I don't understand why it forces you to use the keyboard shortcut. I'm an emacs user, and find the windows-y keyboard shortcuts foreign, so I have to think about them, and prefer just using the right-click mouse menu.
it's a little surprising to me that you can't remember cut, copy, and paste that works on any computer in the last two decades but can remember all of the esoteric emacs shortcuts, which include references to a key that doesn't even exist.
And the "cut copy and paste that works on any computer" -- on a windows pc its ctrl-blah, and on a mac its cmd-blah.
> "When Chrome launched...
... many of those same folks started to use Chrome, making it easier to miss Firefox bugs?
Jonathan Nightingale is claiming a company-wide conspiracy ("coordinated plan" in Jonathan's words) across "hundreds" of different product teams could be executed without any Firefox users or other internal Mozilla sympathizers picking up on it.
We're talking Google here: they have a hard enough time coordinating internally when they're openly trying.
This seems like a very complicated theory when the natural consequences of everyone switching to a different product provide an obvious and ready explanation for what we're seeing.
Ideally developers ought to test everything across different browsers, I agree, but we know in practice developers are only human and humans are lazy. And testing is still no substitute for using a browser day in and day out.
I want better support for Firefox and other browsers, but blaming lack of support on a conspiracy is an easy cop-out that doesn't help us address the real issues at stake.
Yet for some reason each oops only resulted in Google's favor. It's like slipping on banana peel and doing a perfect backflip. Every time.
Which is an interesting point here: is Google a drunken master pretending to be an incompetent but way more coordinated than they appear or is Google simply an incompetent company whose left hand never knows what its right hand is doing, but yet has been extremely lucky at pretending to be competent?
(Either way, given such history how can you trust anything about Google if they seem so uncoordinated and prone to so many "oops"?)
There’s not even much to argue about: web tech is standardized, and each vendor can (and should) be held to an objective measurement o how well they implement the spec. When MS chooses to make spec-compliant sites, they should be easily (and even publicly) able to say “hey your browser is out of spec, and this is why”.
Just so odd to think that these sort of classroom politics still happen.
Reminds me of the Young Pope's first episode.
"Friendly relationships are dangerous. They lend themselves to ambiguities, misunderstandings, and conflicts, and they always end badly. Formal relationships, on the other hand, are as clear as spring water."
Microsoft probably won't be much better though in the long run...
Windows is only now trying to level the playing field to that which Google already assumes.
For those who don't know about it, VSCodium is a community-delivered build of Visual Studio Code with telemetry removed.
We care a lot about GDPR and privacy, and there's been a big top-down push to reduce the amount of telemetry collected, including giving good justifications for anything we want to keep collecting. We have to make sure all the data is kept in GDPR-compliant systems that can handle the deletion and security policies, and we regularly take training to tell us what is and isn't compliant use of customer data. My team uses it mostly for seeing the success rate of our feature across different hardware, firmware and OS versions, which helps us identify issues and poke certain partners to improve ecosystem reliability. I can't speak for the Edge/Bing/Whatever teams, but I'd hope they take it as seriously as us.
I definitely wish users had more control over data collection without resorting to group policy, and I wish users had more visibility and control over more of the OS in general, but I feel we've learned the wrong lessons from Apple so everything must be unconfigurable and only give vague feedback like, "Something is happening..." (but I digress). In terms of caring about privacy I'd still give Apple the crown, but I don't think it'd be unfair to give Microsoft second place.
As you aren't management, I get that you can't really do much to impact that. But I think the idea that "seeing the success rate of our feature" can't possibly be worth the risks and harm to goodwill and trust that Microsoft's telemetry approach took.
Side note "Something happened" as an error message when trying to upgrade Windows 10 is my favorite go-to example of bad error messages. It didn't even give you the paradoxical 0x80000000 error code that you had to use a search engine to figure out what meant. It was just a notice that something went wrong.
The fact that so many of us in the development community, who are particularly sensitive to privacy concerns, unashamedly use Chrome continues to baffle me. I had one guy on Reddit tell me he feels really bad about knowing how little privacy he has using Chrome, but that he continues to use it because the font kerning on Chrome is slightly better.
— I am making no judgment calls on the validity of profit motive, nor am I saying that Google is any more evil for having one. It is the blatant doublespeak about what Google is and does that grates my nerves.
Try running gmail in firefox. It's abysmal. A single click takes a few seconds to open email. This is malice, not incompetence. And I'm not even going to get into the whole endless captcha on firefox 'feature'.
It knows my user agent. It knows very well that the Firefox extension is the relevant result. This is 100% done out of malice.
Nor are user-agents in any way reliable.
Reliable enough to constantly break, penalize and nag me for using Firefox in other ways, apparently. This happens and is well-documented, not a conspiracy theory.
It's not uncommon that I'll have a customer try to tell me that some search or selection algorithm in our product that I wrote is making use of unknowable information to bias it's results.
I think that the anger is justified but it doesn't justify making up poorly substantiated conspiracy theories. The hard facts are enough to see what Google is doing anyway, no need to write fanfiction.
I am not sure what exactly Gmail does on Firefox, but it makes using AOL.com in 2020 feel like a better email experience.
My old laptop fans go crazy when I launch chrome. It’s too much heavy for a mail client.
It’s remarkable how we suck at writing software in the past years.
You might enjoy this talk if you haven't seen it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452
Yep, that works too.
I can believe that they don't purposefully break Firefox for the sake of it, but it's clear that they make no effort to make their websites compatible and they don't appear to consider these issues like bugs. If it works on Chrome then it's good enough. I suspect that internally compatibility issues with Firefox are not even considered bugs at all, it's just the way it is and it's up to Mozilla to fix their browsers to be compatible with Chromium (I have no insider knowledge, but it's the way it feels from the outside).
Googlers push new code to production regularly, with the cycles getting faster all the time. It used to be biweekly (as the article alludes). Then it was weekly. Then it was daily. Then it was "push on every green build".
If you push to production literally the moment your test suite passes, then your browser compatibility is a function of two things:
1. What the engineers developing a feature use.
2. What is easiest to build automatic test suites with.
In both cases the answer was Chrome and Chrome. Firefox has never had good support for API driven embedding. Embedded Gecko never took off. The automated GUI test drivers that became popular were mostly WebKit/Chrome based, with some support for IE and using it via RDP to a VM. Nobody forces Googlers to use any particular browser but Chrome was the best so that's what they used.
Also, Google culturally is always on the bleeding/cutting edge of HTML stuff. So it's more likely to hit edge cases than others.
Result: occasional glitches where Firefox bugs or Google app bugs intersected. They always got fixed quickly when reported. Only crazy people would think this was some conspiracy involving tens of thousands of developers who mysteriously never leaked their evil plan.
Mozilla would have done themselves a world of benefit if they'd been pushing hard their own CI/integrated Gecko based test suite and made it the best.
Having been involved in a number of these reports, this is flat-out false. Basic "fix your CSS to not rely on this Chrome bug; here's the exact diff you want to make it work both in browsers that follow the CSS spec and in Chrome" things regularly take 2-3 months to apply on the Google side. Basic "your browser user-agent sniffing is broken _again_ in the same way as three months ago" things take a month or two to fix.
Disclosure: Mozilla employee, have been cced on far too many of these bug report threads over the years.
Disclosure: former Google employee, I did many pushes and fixed browser compatibility bugs whilst I was there.
In the timeframe we're talking about most products were on a biweekly push cycle. In the ideal case where there was no delay at all between you reporting a bug and it reaching the right person inside the company who could fix it, if that day happened to be on a branch cut day then that's a minimum of a two week delay to reach production unless the bug was so severe that the entire product was hosed for all Firefox users. Minor glitches in rarely used screens wouldn't count for a rollback or emergency push, for instance.
But sometimes pushes fail. There's a severe bug, attempts to fix it are too slow and the push window closes so the servers are rolled back. Now the latency is a month.
That's only software bugs. Now include the time taken for the bug report to be triaged, mis-directed, pinged, rerouted to the right person. Now include delays incurred if that person goes on holiday, gets sick or has other higher priority tasks, as bug handoff works about as well there as anyone else. That can easily add more time.
Finally, regressions are to be expected in an environment where the extent of browser testing is a function of engineer interest rather than centrally mandated. If they weren't testing Firefox well enough before they weren't testing it well enough after either. If Google had a central rule about which browsers had to be supported then I didn't know about it. There was just an assumption you'd try to support the browsers people used as best you could.
I'm not saying it was awesome or right, just that this sort of thing was not Firefox specific and there were plenty of IE or Safari compatibility bugs too.
And just to be clear, there are certainly cases when things got fixed quickly. But "always" is really stretching it; this was the exception, not the norm.
> regressions are to be expected in an environment where the extent of browser testing is a function of engineer interest rather than centrally mandated
Sure. The problem is the environment and corporate policy, not individual engineers. They're just responding to incentives as best they can, and in my experience are generally quite helpful within the constraints of the system.
> just that this sort of thing was not Firefox specific
Indeed, I don't think it was. It was not-Chrome specific.
Here's a thought experiment. Say someone at Google who did _not_ test in Chrome committed a change that degraded the visual experience of gmail in Chrome and it got shipped. How would fixing that be prioritized vs a similar visual degradation in Firefox or some other non-Chrome browser? Assuming there is no emergency push involved, if the fix was not ready by the next push cycle, would it just slide, or would the original commit get rolled back?
I can't quite recall the timelines, but I remember it felt like years before the Chrome team shipped a native Mac/Linux version. They also fixed a lot of bugs that broke features of the various apps, e.g. lack of printing was a big one for a while.
I imagine you're talking about later when Chrome got really big. But it's hard for me to say what would have happened because when the features are themselves being developed in Chrome there are hardly ever cases like that when it works in every browser except Chrome and this is somehow not noticed during the canary period.
Disclosure: xoogler with my name carved in stone outside Mozilla HQ.
I was there. That was the headline cause of their legal troubles, but far from the only thing Microsoft got up to. They intentionally broke other sites, threw misleading messages and tried to play games with standards.
In other words, many actions that look familiar today with different actors.
Not sure what the captcha on Firefox 'feature' refers to but nothing springs to mind as not working in that department either.
I had to help someone with something the other day and saw the current version of gmail in safari and I feel sorry for anyone that has to use that.
I actually got curious and tested Firefox with my personal gmail account (using it for >10 years, so it has tons of emails, filters etc). I did not notice any big issues, text rendering seems slightly different, maybe chrome version is slightly snappier but that's it.
You get a much better experience with a native app, like MailMate or Thunderbird.
I just don't understand people using webmail on their workstations, especially Gmail. It was cool doing that in 2004, but it got old.
That goes both ways. I’m categorically not replacing Firefox with Chrome, and when Gmail became unbearable in Firefox I switched to something else.
Gmail is hardly a unique product, nor uniquely good in 2020, and it haven’t been for quite a few years.
EDIT: because of microsoft decades long behaviour, they have good reason to be wary
Then they just going to state something like: our service dont support Firefox because Chrome-only feature X is not fully implemented.
And it'll happen often. An oops every few weeks. Every oops bleeds users to Chrome. Everytime a googler says "just a mistake" and they might not even be trying to be dishonest at it.
It's Google's corporate structure that enables this.
Anybody worrying about '90s Microsoft should be much more wary of Google by now, and anybody working at Google pretending this is not going on is simply deluded.
Their whole web developer advocate team is behind open web standards, and pushes it forward everyday. The engineering team actually working on Chrome is behind those standards, and pushes it forward. They work closely with other browser vendors. and try to make everything work everywhere.
Then there is the Chrome marketing team which has to goal (OKR) to increase the reach of Chrome. They might still support the open web, but their goal is to get more users using chrome.
I've never seen a company where both marketing and engineering agree on something. Marketing thinks we are a bunch of nerds and we think marketing floors have a much less density regarding neurons per square meter (so, in way we are both right).
By the way, marketing always win. They are closer to upper levels, the credit for success is (supposedly) theirs. They suggest all the bad tactics, technically and commercially. I can bet that a move like Chrome suggesting to ditch Edge is purely their idea, approved by upper levels and executed by engineers that can't say no.
You people seriously undermine the tech awareness of marketing teams, of Google no less.
I promise you the marketing team does serious competitive intel and probably knows more about the competitive landscape than the engineers themselves. That's true at my place of employment (also a bay area tech company), and I'd be shocked if it's not true at Google.
Presumably so users get Google as their default search engine, which translates into more revenue. Google isn't running a charity with Chrome.
The upper OKR's are usually things like "Product should make XX% more money", or "Become the foremost user-choice for task X". The lower OKR's are usually just things like "build feature X".
Sure, different teams might get in the way of each other now and then. But not at a strategic level and the managers don't let the veer too far off the main course. Unless I miss my guess, Chrome isn't just any product to Google. It had great strategic importance to them just like Android. I'm not sure if the main purpose of Chrome's existence is to drive open Web standards.
Imported my passwords and bookmarks and the transition couldn't have been smoother. I still have Chrome installed but haven't opened it more than a handful of times since.
What about your experience hasn't been great?
I use KeepPassXC, but Firefox PW is streamlined very well.
It's not my computer either - my work PC, at least, is a powerhouse.
Also, I find Chrome's dev tools to be marginally better - but I'm not sure if that's just my familiarity with them over Firefox's.
Quick edit: there are some other problems I have with Firefox, but they're all relatively minor and don't bother me nearly as much as the random slowdowns and short freezes.
That said, I don't think I use it much more often that I had to use `chrome:restart` when I had to use chrome.
Too much.
Web:
- Syncing:
1. Very often hangs on "slow" networks. Syncs for minutes at a time and stops the browser from loading new pages (annoying)
2. Mangles bookmarks. Merges folders I don't want merged and adds bookmarks I've deleted before
- RAM creep
1. Memory leak? Firefox consistently takes up more and more memory the longer I use it
2. Poor suspend/dump functionality on Linux. If you have multiple tabs open, Firefox can quickly freeze your entire system (swap makes no difference). I have to use a 3rd party addon to have inactive tabs "suspended" so my system doesn't freeze
3. Unlike chrome, I don't think Firefox runs seperate processes for tabs. OOM killer never triggers.
- Slow
1. It's just slow. Even on a great laptop with a gigabit connection, it's slow.
- Long startup (self-explanatory)
So, Firefox it is for me.
As well file and custom URIs are completely broken when installed as a snap. I cannot view any file on my system by manually typing in file://path/to/file whereas the uri functions fine in chrome. Custom application URIs require manually setting Firefox to open them in the given application, which is actually non trivial since it can't seem to find any application in the default browser, and it doesn't respect any system configuration.
Meanwhile chrome just works. These are issues I have only with Firefox on some installations, I can't seem to recreate them all the time.
I'm using Ubuntu 14.04, and this has been happening consistently for the last 5+ years.
Every. single. goshdarn. effing. firefox. release.
(sorry just wanted to vent. I've tried every solution I could find on askubuntu, stackoverflow, what not. Nothing fixes it. I know I should be filing a bug report, and/or upgrading my OS, but I don't have the time, patience to deal with that. I need to finish school first.).
Might help updating to a modern version of Ubuntu with a modern kernel and modern (and less buggy) GPU drivers?
Browsers are increasingly using GPU-acceleration these days. If your GPU drivers are buggy, that can probably cause a whole lot of “fun”.
Although I've experienced very rare crashes, like I have with Chrome/Chromium, my experience is that Firefox is stable and does everything I need, including some basic web dev/debug.
On desktop it isn't compatible with physical smartcards, so it is impossible to do my job using Firefox or a browser with an engine besides Blink.
I was wanting to contribute code but haven't found time for it yet.
However, what I can stand even less is a Blink monoculture and the web's standards being controlled by a single entity.
The real reason I switched to Firefox was because Google intends to make API deprecations to WebExtensions to make uBlock Origin incompatible, probably in order to retain more revenue in their ad business. At that point I would be forced to switch in the future anyway, so I decided to get used to Firefox's warts early on.
The exposes about Chrome automatically signing you in in the browser if you sign in with YouTube happened afterward, and I only felt more justified in switching. As a side note, I can no longer find the "identity consistency between browser and cookie jar" toggle that allows disabling this anymore.
My usage of Firefox is for political, not technical, reasons.
Containers is a game-changer, paired with Sync I've been able to easily segregate work, personal, and client environments with ease. I work for many large organisations under NDA at any one time - and being able to colour-code and name my tabs has been invaluable to me. Also the Dev Tools, are great for debugging or sniffing traffic. I'm not a web developer but often need to debug client implementations that consume API's and it's just as good as Chrome. (Imagine that, FireBug used to be the standard, then Chrome came along and became "just as good", now Firefox has natively caught up.)
Finally - speed. Quantum finally killed Chrome's performance for me, and they've finally caught up on power-consumption on MacOS which as someone who regularly has to take multi-hour flights without charge ports available is a god-send.
The DRM issues piss me off, but it's the modern version of browser-restrictive Flash or Silverlight apps. I'll wait for someone else to get fucked off enough to create a bypass for Firefox, or maybe I'll get to a stage where I develop something to do so.
Chrome is dead, long live Firefox.
https://about.imtranslator.net/tutorials/presentations/imtra...
Some of this is tricky, though. If you're Google in 2009, it's not unreasonable to tell IE6 users that their browser is a drag on the internet, and not in a way to drive users to Chrome--IE6 was just shit. Or if you're MS, Windows needs to ship with a browser, but what do you ship? Is there a setup option to switch to Chrome? How do you qualify to get on that list? What types of applications should this apply to? Did Windows Explorer unfairly kill Norton Commander? What about third-party solitaire developers?
Empirically, the source of msft's quality issues seem to be managerial / organizational.
My HN comment from over 5.5 years ago:
Microsoft Edge with Chromium engine has better scrolling in my opinion: it is relative to size of window. If I have smaller window it scrolls less. I switched to Microsoft Edge.
It's about the product for me, although I have turned all the knobs to prevent trackers etc.
I haven't spent much time with the new Collections feature, but it appears to be useful.
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/why-stadia-access-blocke...
Google is actively writing checks for the new Edge and implementing new scare tactics claiming their nearly identical browser that gives them data on you is more secure.
There's a conflict of interest at the heart of the issue.
Google offers a service which is supposed to be neutral (search) and then on top of that it also sells another (ads) which is at odds with search. Good search results should bring the best result but ads are a way to bypass that with cash.
Microsoft had the same problem with Windows (level playing field) + Microsoft made apps on top of Windows (which didn't want a level playing field).
> mozilla/5.0 (windows nt 10.0; win64; x64) applewebkit/537.36 (khtml, like gecko) chrome/76.0.3800.0 safari/537.36 edg/76.0.167.1
Certainly not an accident, unless they tried to save one byte by not checking on the full "Edge" token.
Thus, Google sites are explicitly targeting Chromium Edge because the only way to differentiate Chrome from Chromium Edge is for the server is to search the User-Agent string for "Edg". If they just searched for "Chromium", then Chromium Edge would be successfully match.
If it isn't, I'd actually choose Edge over Chrome on Windows as my daily driver.
This is not the default yet, even in Chrome. I hope Edge does not adopt this feature or, if they do, simply continue supporting the extension manifest v2.
I only use Chrome for Goggle related stuff anyway, all my browsing goes through Firefox.
Google owning the chromium development is what is going to make any sort of protocol-level privacy impossible, while Microsoft doesn't care much about internet add revenue.
It's really really concerning to have an internet ad company have this much control over the web.
Reducing Chrome market share is something we all should strive to achieve.
I personally use and recommend Firefox to everyone.
Is there a way to use Firefox and have some add-on or something that fixes those oopses? I suppose it's not only a matter of masking up user-agent strings.
Firefox and Edge have tracking prevention that harms Google. Edge implements the same default ad blocking as Chrome, which helps Google.
As such, wouldn't it be smarter for edge to use impersonate chromium to bypass the checks?
As shady as it sounds, this approach has tremendous precedent
As we've learnt, Chrome has a ton of google-specific code built into it(most notably the tracking id on youtube that was exposed few weeks ago) and a ton of background requests.
MS Edge is not that different. Sure it is cleaner Chrome but MS is the big daddy of tracking, just like google. they just call it "telemetry" instead of spying. their edge won't be any different.
Any other web browser out there is essentially derived from chrome. So I put zero trust in any of them. If mozilla would make FF into OS work that others could use to build web browsers off of, like chrome, it would be much better environment because there are no options left. Webkit has been superseded by chrome these days, gecko is slow and outdated(is it even public?) and so on. So the only way to sort of safely use your god damn web browser these days is to filter all the traffic manually(pihole, host file or advanced firewall) and use a ton of adblocking extensions that allow you to spoof referrer header and clean up headers and cookies altogether(google cdn, google captcha, google analytics, goodle dns, google this and google that).... even then google has so much data that just by ip address they have your persona pinpointed to a byte.
If you look at how much external resources the websites pull in these days, most if it has some sort of tracking in it, even if you do not see it directly(mostly cdn stuff).
tl;dr they are all bad. if it is free, you are the product. it's as simple as that. and they will make opting out so impossible that you just give up.