Hacker News Reader

Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

I find Firefox to be a superior browser and I use it Firefox on all my devices. But I would have used it even if it wasn't better, because I have lived through IE6 era and I know what browser monoculture results in. We don't need another browser engine monopoly.

View on HN

It seems strange to compare an open source engine to the IE era. IE sucked because it stagnated technically, the engine isn't the issue with Chrome, it's the business incentives of Google that are at odds with some of the things users want in the browser as a product or service.

If the majority of the chromium engineers are Google employees, this seems like a distinction without a difference.

the difference is that with open source software there is always the implicit threat to just fork the thing or discard what you don't want as say, Brave does. The Linux kernel is largely developed and sponsored by big tech and that has never offended anyone precisely for that reason. The optionality afforded by the fact that anyone can walk away limits what a bad actor can do, that's one of the biggest selling points of open source software.

Why wouldn't chrome stagnate technically when there is no competition? Developing it isn't exactly cheap, and manager with looming quarterly reportsb is very likely to make a sensible decision and defund the project, leaving a few developers to fix some critical bugs. No?

There are a lot of companies and a lot of managers interested in keeping Chromium/Blink+V8 developed (Google, Microsoft, any big name using Node/Electron, other Chromium based browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, and Opera) so it's pretty hard for the Chromium project to just get defunded and stagnate outright like happened with closed source single developer IE. Google is by far the most active of the group but they are also the ones paying Safari, a browser with <20% usage share, ~$15,000,000,000/year for just the Google search deal so they understand the value of keeping their browser good enough to stay the most popular of the group instead of just dropping it. I'm sure the extra browsing analytics don't hurt either.

While I agree it'd be better if we lived in a world there were 5 separate major browser engines all neck and neck using 5 separate huge sources of funding I also agree the Chromium based browser monoculture doesn't feel or function like the IE monopoly did. If anything I've almost wondered if e.g. Mozilla's resources would be better spent being another Chromium based build that insures development of functionality Google refuses to maintain (like proper blocking APIs) instead of trying to compete 1:1 on every line of code.

When I tried it a few years ago on iphone, it would constantly crash and I’d lose all my tabs. I wanted sync between mobile and desktop so needed to switch to Chrome. Any idea if it has gotten better?

Firefox sync works well. I have an Android so can't comment on the iphone but Firefox works well on my MacBook.

It hasn't crashed for me in a very long time. IOS now (reluctantly) lets you set it as the default browser, although you'll need to hunt around the settings.

iPhone Firefox isn't really Firefox, it's still using Apple's Webkit engine (as does Chrome on iPhone).

Crashes multiple times per day for me, but does not lose tabs. Love it on PC, so the sync makes me tolerate the inconvenience on my phone anyways.

Chrome is still faster on some sites, so I still have it installed and pull it out when I have a specific need. For example: Watching long videos in unfocused windows.

Why dont you use more than one ? I usedequally firefox and chrome, because I lived through IE6 and actually know what monoculture does :p

To drive up FF stats on various websites so their admins will better notice that humanity is still blessed with two browser engines.

Also, Firefox syncs tabs and logins really nicely. Much better experience than I had with Chrome, that one was very unreliable.

even right now we are suffering because of the chrome dominance. the webextension manifest version 3 dropped a lot of features that coincidentally benefit google by making it harder for extensions that block ads. I don't think it's been fully ratified yet but i think it's pretty close to being the standard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com