Hacker News Reader

Comment by throaway46546 | Hacker News Reader

I swear google outright punishes you for using Firefox with any of their services. Major annoyance for me right now is paste is broken on their terminal emulator when connecting to a Compute Engine VM instance over SSH.

View on HN

Oh, they won't do it blatantly, but every thing will be broken in small, barely noticeable ways - just one feature here that uses a chrome-only non standard API, just one invisible div here that destroys performance on Firefox but not on Chrome - that add up to be annoying. I clearly remember when I had to use Google Sheets heavily for work, a bunch of small yet grating bugs pushed me over the edge into using Chrome just for it. These are widely documented issues, and every time they draw scrutiny someone at Google will say "oh no it's just a bug, we'll fix it asap", and then they'll break something else. Again, and again, and again. To the point where one of the most popular extensions FF mobile just changes your user agent to Chrome's to get a flat out better search experience.

And it works, because now even large companies like Slack just don't care enough about Firefox to support major features on it.

This is beautiful. It is just likeS with all the hacks in Windows that made their software utterly reliant on each other being still standing. Then when the paradigm shift came, none of their technology (nor culture) was able to advance fast enough and we are here today.

It made Microsoft utterly wealthy and able to survive for another decade until they were able to transition to services, so not everything is rosy. But, they are not the only option anymore.

With another paradigm shift, Google won't be either.

I do not use the YouTube app on my iPhone, I only browse YouTube in a private window through Safari. And I notice little “inconveniences”. For example, I can’t drag the selector text over more than one word in the search bar like I can everywhere else. The videos will always default to the lowest quality setting, and only offer 720 P as the highest (even when logged in). When you auto play the next video in a playlist, the playlist loads that video, but the scroll location is all the way at the very top again. Google is really good at powdering lots of little inconveniences all over for you when you try to break away from them.

I tried changing the users in our gsuite organization in safari a few years ago. Pretty much a core feature. And it was so broken on safari that I couldn‘t change the users.

I don‘t think it was malicious, but still incredibly bad considering gsuite/chrome connection.

Admittedly Safari is like IE of old though, always behind on standards and broken. Apple wants you on native apps.

This is a narrative (very heavily supported by google btw) that really needs to die.

Safari is decidedly neither behind nor as broken as the narrative suggests.

Safari ships about as many WebAPIs as Firefox does, and no one blames Firefox to be "behind on standards". More, Firefox is increasingly siding with Safari when deciding not to implement certain Chrome-only "standards".

Also see this nice take over at Quirksmode (and follow the links): https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...

Safari's slow release cadence (typically tied to OS version upgrades) does leave it more broken and for longer than Firefox, Chrome, Opera and other browsers that are updated more frequently and not tied to the OS.

just recently i ran into incompatibilities with Safari < 14 needing a shim due to still having the old-spec MediaQueryList api:

https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot/issues/538#issuecomment-87...

> browsers that are updated more frequently and not tied to the OS.

This is true. Apple's inane insistence that everything has to be updated only once a year is truly baffling.

These past years Safari gets two releases per year, the big one with the release of MacOS in fall and a .1 spring release, adapting web technologies and sometimes extra releases tied to other Apple events and Apple proprietary APIs

I'm somewhat sceptical about evergreen browser, but that's mostly because I hate having the user interface changed under me without any action on my part. I would have hated to get the Safari 15 Beta just by opening my browser in the morning. A better update strategy seems to me to keep the big UI changes for a yearly update; but update the web engine somewhat more often, bi-monthly or so.

> A better update strategy seems to me to keep the big UI changes for a yearly update; but update the web engine somewhat more often, bi-monthly or so.

I can't emphasize strongly enough how much I agree with this.

>always behind on standards

That's awful!

Why can't we as a society add code to web browsers faster?

ADDED. I use sarcasm very sparingly, but in this case, I can't think of another way to make my point that is not a lot longer.

Google is so good at ad domination they have free space in your head. Safari has a different development process which considers privacy, power consumption, and other user-centric ideas instead of just “how do we beat everyone else down in order to have better ad dominion over the internet”. You talk of standards, but in the time of WHATWG there really aren’t any, just ideas that vendors may or may not implement. If something is in Chrome but both Safari and Firefox have rejected it, do you really consider that a standard?

I think what you write is true, as I experienced it myself seemingly being that way. And then you have that smug colleague, who uses Chrome "because it is so much faster" and wondering why you still use Firefox or alternatives.

No matter whether we ascribe it to evil or the sheer incompetence of Google engineers (the job which so many proud themselves for as in: "I worked at Google!" lol), it remains Google's fault and not the fault of things they subtlely try to push it to.

Yep. Running into issues all the time in YouTube, Gmail, gdrive. Lasts for months at a time. In my case almost all related to blocking third party cookies and such, not Firefox per se. Just makes me use Google services less.

Let me push this again: Chrome, sans Google. My main browser is Firefox, but this will do in the few cases I "need" Chrome.

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

+1, and build from source if you can. I do on Gentoo, but then again, that's the point of Gentoo...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com