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Comment by stiray | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that Firefox HAS created a new rendering engine, but people don't switch. It has nothing to do with technology, people wont even try to switch. Some for fanboyism, some because they would have to adapt, some don't even know what browser is.

What I do consider staggering is how many technically capable people are not prepared to make a switch.

Google is slowly closing down the lock-down trap they have nurtured for so many years and now it should be obvious to anyone who is looking at "progress" (or decline?) of internet, but this is still not enough to at least stop using the chrome.

Ah, people... we will just never learn.

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Until recently, I used Firefox on my Mac, and had been for a couple of years. I got tired of the browser being a bit slow and consistently consuming 20-30% CPU even when not doing anything. My MacBook Pro's fan was running 100% of the time. I don't have many tabs open and never found an explanation.

Last week, I decided I had enough, and switched over to Chrome. Now the fan doesn't run anymore, and Chrome consumes much less CPU. I was also quite astounded by just how much faster Chrome is. Firefox feels fine when using it, but even with all the Rust stuff they've integrated, it still can't measure up to Chrome. It feels like I've upgraded my machine.

I don't miss anything from Firefox. I wouldn't mind having something like container tabs, but I can do without them. On the contrary, I discover things I prefer in Chrome. Like the really superior 1Password integration that fully enables form fields, or the way keyword searches work from the address bar.

I say this with some regret — I'd rather have Mozilla dominate the web than Google. But if they had thousands of people working on Firefox and still couldn't make it as good, I'm not holding out hope.

I did the same, but Chrome -> Safari. My battery life is considerably better.

I'd certainly prefer Safari (which I used for years), but it is unfortunately severely lacking in extensions.

Safari almost has no extensions, and is severely lagging on a workstation-grade Mac and I suspect it's the huge amount of bookmarks that I have.

Furthermore, invoking the list of tabs (actually a grid of tabs) is also very slow and feels like the machine is struggling doing it.

I like Safari. It's extremely lightweight. But it's not given proper attention by Apple, which is a big shame. They have the resources to make it as fast as Chrome is. But they don't. :(

I'm afraid Firefox has gotten to a point where it is too niche to recover. The last time I checked, 80+% of https://webcompat.com's reports were sites that were broken in FF, not because it is less standards compliant than the competition, but just because there was no testing.

Mozilla had been courting devs with MDN, ever improving dev tools and sexy tech (Servo) for years, with some success, although they weren't there yet.

Now they've completely dropped that ball (and fired the respective people working on these techs). Without Web dev on board, I don't think they'll ever catch up.

Degooglified Chromium was already the way to go since the June firings IMO, it's great that Google makes it easier to get that experience.

> Degooglified Chromium was already the way to go IMO, it's great that Google makes it easier to get that experience.

For now. Android has shown us exactly how Google treats their "open source" products once they have rid themselves entirely of viable competition.

Google really has become the late-90s, early-2000s Microsoft. First they "embrace" by releasing a product as open source. Then they "extend" by packaging the official release of the product with their own proprietary functionality. Then they "extinguish" by slowly siphoning functionality from the open source project into their own proprietary extensions (see Google Play Services).

Yes, it sucks. They've also pulled some form of EEE with the whole Web platform by allocating so much manpower to Chrome and related techs.

According to https://www.w3.org/community/wicg/participants Google has 168 employees working on incubating Web specs, vs 47 for Microsoft, 10 for Apple and 9 for Mozilla (maybe they require their employees to disclose their status in that page and others don't though, there are quite a few unaffiliated folks on that page).

> Some for fanboyism, some because they would have to adapt, some don't even know what browser is.

And some because they find Firefox unusable. On macOS, Firefox is a subpar browser—it’s awful for automation (no AppleScript support) and accessibility (with Voice Control on, say “show numbers” in both Safari and Firefox). I could go on in all the ways it lacks, especially if I referenced other HN threads where macOS users talk about Firefox. Many of us try to like Firefox, but Mozilla doesn’t make it easy.

I tried to switch multiple times but Firefox was unbearably slow and used a lot of memory. I guess I’m not the only one with that experience.

> Google is slowly closing down the lockdown trap they have nurtured for so many years

I think that forks of Chromium which have their own sync are easily thwarting this effort. If nothing else, you can always use Edge.

Chrome to Edge is just trading one monopolist vendor lock-in for another.

Have people forgotten that edge is chromium already?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/download-...

"Just trading one monopolist vendor lock-in for the same monopolist vendor lock-in, but now wearing a fake mustache."

I was originally pretty excited about Edge, even as a non-Windows user. I'm not sad to see IE go. But times have changed, and the balance of power has shifted. Now that IE is no longer dominant, simply losing it only worsens the browser oligopoly. Replacing it with a new rendering engine that's designed from the ground up to be standards compliant, though, makes things better. It could have meant that Firefox could once again have had an actual ally in trying to prop up a free and open Web.

Microsoft giving up on Edge's rendering engine and replacing it with Chromium, though, means that, ironically, the death of IE ultimately served to further exactly the bad situation that it once emblematized.

This is like saying why move from a dictatorship to democracy.

We're just trading one leadership figure for another.

It's so much more pernicious than that. As long as one company controls the One Rendering Engine to Rule Them All, one company de facto controls the Web itself, and everyone else is mostly just along for the ride.

It's worse even than that.

As long as one company controls the One Rendering Engine, all websites are tested against that One Rendering Engine (i.e. not the truth of the spec).

It becomes impossible to create a new rendering engine without actively copying the quirks behaviours.

It also - and this is why folks got so keyed up about the last browser monoculture - makes it impossible to create a successful alternative software platform without the support of the One Rendering Engine. So it becomes an agent of an overall software monoculture.

Sadly, I fear that the reason Free Software folks don't seem to be getting quite so keyed up about Chrome is that, at least for now, the One Rendering Engine happens to work on Linux. It seems that even principles can be mercenary.

This is true. The importance of a good browser to Linux cannot be overstated.

In other words, Flash is back.

Afaik, Mozilla didn't release any Firefox version with their new rendering engine. They just declared it a failure without any attempt to make it run.

I know, because I've been following its news and was eager to try anything that Mozilla declared beta quality. I just am not willing to go search for a hidden code repository and compile it myself.

Firefox Quantum did massively rework the browser engine and is presumably what the parent is talking about (multiprocess support, new CSS engine, various other bits and pieces)

I assume you mean Servo, which was a research project from the start and never intended to be a new production engine, but did produce side products like the CSS engine that are used.

Yes, the last major piece AFAIK was WebRender (hardware-accelerated compositing), which has been shipped last autumn.

WebRender is neither "shipped" nor "not shipped", it's rolling out to increasing audiences based on Mozilla Corp's confidence concerning stability of WebRender on certain platforms and hardware configurations.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where

I had missed the "with approved hardware" bit regarding Win10 :-)

Still, it does run in the wild on all major OSes.

Mozilla has also shot itself in the foot by alienating Firefox's core userbase (power users) with terrible attempts to copy Chrome in a (failed) attempt to cater to idiots.

They ended up trading off powerful extensions for what? A terrible, slower copy of Chrome with Pocket and a share button built into the browser. Seriously.

YMMV but I've found the new Firefox Quantum faster and its extensions easier to write. While the UI customizability has dropped a bit it's more secure with the line of death keeping out deceptive UIs

They lost the power users because they lost focus on their core product which is a web browser. If they want to keep power users then make a useful non hostile browser that puts the user back in FULL control. Under no circumstances should a website EVER manipulate windows, open windows, prevent me from closing a window, or play audio or video without my consent. Instead we get a poor chrome copy.

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