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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the Web has turned into ChromeOS, with the help of many folks that used to bash IE.

I can't believe that we fell for this crap again.

That's one of the side effects of aging engineers out of the industry so quickly. We've lost so many of the engineers who just lived through a crippling browser monoculture not much more than ten years ago.

And you see this all over the place, like microservices (The Network is the Computer, SOA, WebServices), WebAssembly (TIMI, P-Code, JVM, MSIL, PNaCL,...).

Lots of stuff that keeps happening because newer folks just don't have any clue of what came before, or why that fence is in the middle of the field.

It's perfectly fine to bash both Chrome and IE.

Internet Explorer references are overall just stale. Most uses of the catchphrase "X is the new IE" are basically shorthand for "I personally don't like browser X".

The only time I use Chrome is for Chrome Remote Desktop. Otherwise, Safari on macOS and iOS seems to do what I need it to do for at least 8 years.

There’s still safari at 34% usage. :badpokerface:

Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone.

Until people find they can’t get to lunch without having to charge their phones.

Crazy thing is that I know a few Linux users that would love to have safari on our Linux machines for syncing.

Firefox on iOS is a horrible experience. My desktop I have switched to Vivaldi so I can easily sync tabs between desktop and phone. I don’t love Vivaldi but the overall experience is superior to Firefox on both.

Would prefer safari on my Linux desktop and use it on my phone

I'd rather have proper Firefox on iOS than Safari on Linux.

And MacOS.

And I hope Apple doesn't manipulate the "power usage" data that always claims Safari is the lowest-power best-battery-saver browser on their platform.

I run Safari on MacOS for only that reason, that it allegedly gives me an extra hour or so out of my laptop vs. Chrome or Firefox. Of course, I should actually benchmark myself and find out.

In my experience it depends somewhat on the sites/web apps one uses (some are not well optimized for WebKit), but Safari definitely tends to be easier on the battery. It seems to try harder to get to an idle state and keep CPU usage down where Chrome and Firefox are happy to keep the CPU spun up, perhaps due to a “speed and bells and whistles at all costs” mentality in development (traditionally browsers have been marketed on speed and features rather than efficiency).

What's "only" about it? Smartphones gave everybody convenient internet access and thus increased the customer/user base enormously for everybody who publishes online. It's perfectly natural that the frontrunner in smartphones will have a huge chunk of the browser market.

If iOS allowed other browsers on the device (and I mean allow other browsers to run their own engines and not have to use Safari's engine under the hood - be first class citizens, just like Safari) then I doubt Safari would have such high numbers.

Maybe, maybe not. But there's nothing "only" about creating a massively popular way to browse the web. That Safari chunk will still be an iOS chunk. Device matters much more than browser for making web interfaces.

Fixing weird bugs like not loading cookies for a ~minute whenever the app needs to launch (as opposed to restore from background) would be a win too [1]

I switched to Safari on iPhone because I was always logged out of stuff on first load, super annoying. I miss the syncing, but not that much.

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/11994

> If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone

Chrome and Firefox are already on iOS – if they're allowed to swap out their rendering engine, is this something customers will actually care about?

Hopefully it will force Apple to compete again and improve Safari.

No, that's not going to happen. Chrome replacing IE could happen only because of MSFT's strategical abandonment of their browser for sabotaging the web in favor of the Windows platform. Apple actually is well aware of this mistake and began to invest into Safari when it's clear that they cannot prevent 3rd party rendering engines forever.

I always get downvoted for that, so it seems that Firefox supporters are subjective about their beloved browser, … and it doesn’t matter anymore whether I phrase it properly, since it will be shunned anyway, preventing Mozilla from actually recognizing their culture problem…

But Firefox has ads. It also has a lot of obnoxious browsing-interrupting interceptions saying that they care about our privacy. Which isn’t possibly true, because they also encourage, sometimes in the same page, to create a Mozilla profile… which gives them all required information to track us better - no matter whether they do it, gaining the ability to do it is pretty much a blank card to the NSA.

So thanks NSA and their Mozilla front and their downvoters on HN, have a safe imaginary trip to privacy!

Do you think that Google (part of PRISM, remember?) protects your privacy better by automatically linking your browsing data with your Google profile if you ever have the idea of logging in on a Google website before tweaking the settings?

And as far as I know, Mozilla can't access the key that encrypt Firefox profiles (as long as your profile password is not 123456). Didn't check the source code, but I guess that if they weren't doing that for real, someone would have spotted it already.

I don’t think Google does it better. But switching from Chrome to Firefox makes much less sense if Mozilla still performs advertising. And, least be said, fires a CEO for having made a private political donation one day, so it is not politically agnostic either.

You are correct that Mozilla has implemented profile encryption and it is believable. However, NSA has backdoors at every level, so having an account online isn’t really a good practice.

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