The Dying Web | Hacker News Reader

The Dying Web

endler.dev

64 pointsqsantos45 comments

Author here; pleasantly surprised to see this on HN!

This started off as a rant with a friend a few days ago. We both lamented the sorry state of the web, particularly web browsers. There's a monoculture that we both have trouble understanding. As a result, the tone might be a bit rough around the edges.

To anyone who's using Chrome: I understand. It's a decent browser, and switching to a different one is work. However! If everyone is thinking that way, we'll be stuck with whatever Google decides browsers should look like, tracking and half-baked quasi-standards included.

Take that as a friendly encouragement to go out and give FF another chance. We urgently need more diversity in the browser space. Brave and Vivaldi are good, but they are still a flavors of Chrome. I actually believe, that if you give Firefox an honest attempt, you might be surprised at how refreshing it can feel. They really turned it around in the last few years.

Yes, there are problems. Yes, you'll have to find workarounds. But you are developers. You can figure this out! Writing browser extensions isn't that hard, and a lot of things (including the UI) are very customizable in FF.

Thanks for writing this. As somebody who survived the first browser monoculture, it makes me sick that we're so eager to go back to those days.

I use both FF and Chrome all day long for work and I do not have any gripes with FF.

I do have gripes with Chrome and its lack of customizability.

Good summary of Google's monopoly on the Internet today:

> Now, the world's largest websites are owned by the same company, which also owns the world's most popular browser and search engine. Coincidentally, they are also the world's largest advertising company. And people are wondering why they can't block ads on YouTube anymore.

For some people, Google is their ISP (Google Fiber), mobile internet provider (Google Fi), DNS provider, email provider (GMail), search engine (Google Search), web browser provider (Google Chrome), and entertainment and news provider (YouTube). Google tracks their online activity with Google Analytics and shows them ads with Google Ads. Google provides their phone (Pixel) and their phone's OS (Android) and backs up their files (Google Drive) and photos (Google Photos). When they go to work, perhaps they use Google Docs and Google Meet.

Some products are more popular than others, some are genuinely better than anything else, but still... for millions of people, Google practically _is_ the Internet.

Relatively (to the total population), this is a very small amount of people. Possibly very small even in absolute terms.

I made the switch a few years ago after Firefox improved performance. I've tried to convince some coworkers to change and no one cares to. I think I'm the only one on a team of about 12 developers.

Firefox for Android is amazing as well, with full uBlock Origin support.

And if they use Firefox, it's essentially kept viable by its primary corporate sponsor: Google.

Sadly Google is single-handedly funding the two of the three largest browser engines. Why Googles motive may not align with mine, I don't blame them, I blame Mozilla leadership for not taking action earlier, and for only half-heartedly attempting to build new revenue sources.

More and more I think that Mozilla should have taken the Google money and created a fund, like Wikimedia. Yeah, yeah, I know, spending donations stupidly, using money on unrelated projects, the point is that they have a plan, and funding to keep running Wikipedia long into the future. Had Mozilla focused on Firefox, Thunderbird and MDN, then I can't see that they couldn't have had a substantial thrust setup by now. Perhaps that would also have allowed them to push a bit harder on donations, but they seem to busy pretending to be a Silicon Valley type business.

I'd be incredibly sad if Mozilla / Firefox fails. I still want Opera to return in it's none Chinese form, using it's own rendering engine. Without Presto Opera seems fairly pointless.

They did create a fund though. What you're equating to Mozilla is actually the Mozilla Foundation.

Sorry, didn't realise that fund doesn't exactly translate directly. The Wikimedia Foundation have financial endowment set up, to ensure future funding. My question is why Mozilla doesn't have that? Perhaps they do, but then finding information about it is rather difficult.

This is obviously not ideal, but it's also an example of "don't let perfect be the enemy of good."

If you care about the web, avoiding a browser monoculture is of the utmost importance.

While I agree Chrome's market share is a concern, to be fair to Google, they are behaving much better than MS did with their near monopoly.

Eg initiatives like Baseline https://web.dev/baseline and interop https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024

Chrome's ability to control how people interact with the world is also contributing to the death of the old, independent web. From an email yesterday from the administrator of the Computational Chemistry List (which started in 1991), at https://server.ccl.net/cgi-bin/ccl/message-new?2024+08+08+00... :

> I have to redo the CCL Web Site, since currently all pages that are not "secure" (https) will not be displayed in Chrome and some other browsers. So http is gone and practically replaced by https. The http pages are treated as insecure, and you cannot view them as http://www.ccl.net like before. The whole site needs to be redone (I mean gigabytes of stuff). This will be a painful process and the problems will persist for a while. [...] I hope I will finish this conversion before I die... If not, then, Bye, Bye, CCL.

Without knowing the specifics of what the administrator has in mind, it sounds like something easily solved with a reverse proxy.

Yes, and someone followed up with that suggestion.

But the problem is that someone needs to do it. Jan Labanowski is xkcd's "random person in Nebraska", a computational chemist volunteering unpaid time, on a 30 year old code base. That isn't so easy to step into, computational quantum chemists who are interesting in doing that migration are as rare as hen's teeth, and why would a non-QC systems developer help?

Yes, there are other mailing list hosting options, but the style and character of CCL is atypical enough that it warrants commentary in Wikipedia, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_Chemistry_List . It is unlikely to be transplanted elsewhere.

It is that sort of independent web which gets smothered by Google's near single-handed ability to determine what people are allowed to view with Chrome, in this case in the name of "security".

To be fair, Google isn’t the only voice pushing for TLS being the default. It’s practically dogma in tech circles generally.

I am extremely sympathetic to the "SSL inherently breaks the promise of the web" arguments, and yet this story makes no sense... why is the cost of converting a website to use SSL being measured in gigabytes of content rather than in number of hostnames cross endpoints, and how is (from the web page, not your quote of it) breaking all of the URLs even slightly an acceptable step on the way to a solution?! Just none of their situation makes sense to me...

Because the person who is charge is not a software developer, systems administrator, or anything like your background, so is unable to explain things in your terms.

Firefox has been far too quiet in promoting its advantages (especially to the dev community), which might have helped in regaining market share. Despite my preference for Firefox, I find myself alone on this island in my workplace.

However, the decline of Firefox likely won't be tied directly to its market share. A bigger looming threat could be the repercussions from the Google antitrust case, given that a large portion of Firefox's operating income comes from Google.

I'm a Webkit (Safari) stan as well. I know it has it's own corporate drawbacks. But I think it's important to just not use Chromium regardless.

The ecosystem makes Safari more valuable. Also "Hide My Email" is fantastic.

I use Chrome and Firefox extensively all day, every day on my M1 Mac. Firefox for personal, and Chrome for work because I like to keep things separate.

To me there is no meaningful performance difference.

If you are using "performance" as an excuse for using Chrome, I suggest that you stop doing that and take another look at Firefox or Safari.

However: even if Chrome was 2x faster, it would not be worth handing the web to Google.

I’ve installed uBlock recently on a friends Mac Google Chrome browser and it didn’t work. Had to install one of the others and it worked but started the ad on yt for a few seconds and then skip it. It had to use some trick to block the ad. Awful experience.

uBlock Origin Lite is the one that works now on Chrome after V2 Manifest deprecation. Would not trust any others. Maybe Adguard.

the problem is that Firefox is also dying a new, true foundation focused on a freaking open browser should struggle it out of the current one.

Looks very tough considering how much complicated a modern browser is. There is Ladybird project but it's expected to be in Alpha stage by 2026.

If you can get the cool kids to migrate to a new, simpler, protocol... (or maybe it's too late and this is what we've got - after all, Gemini was a bust).

I have very little faith in people building a lot of new security infrastructure in C++ at this point in history.

I even see this in IT. The many many tabs squished together, even when Edge now supports vertical tabs. Show them vertical tabs, they go "oh okay"

Someone I know uses adblock at home casually Googling to show me something, clicks on page and it start blinking with ads. "Jesus man how do you use that?? Install this" links him UBO on Edge "oh, thanks"

Some people just don't see it. Same way, I don't "see" my dust bunnies at home. I see them, but I don't "see" them. People just get used to filth.

Now, the world's largest websites are owned by the same company, which also owns the world's most popular browser and search engine. Coincidentally, they are also the world's largest advertising company. And people are wondering why they can't block ads on YouTube anymore.

I work at a major bank.

I’m an avid Firefox user at home. Dev tools on Firefox are just better.

At work, Firefox is forbidden and I can’t install it. For « security » reasons. I swear.

The only browser I have the right to use is Chrome.

I've got Chrome and Firefox both open and think the 'dying web' is a bit of an exaggeration - it seems to be doing fine. I tend to use Chrome more because it seems a bit smoother and the translate feature works better. It's developed a weird glitch with twitter/x though that if you scroll using the spacebar the thing keeps on drifting down. Dunno if anyone knows a fix for that one? That drives me to Firefox.

One big reason for this I think is the big investment that Google made into the Chrome development tools, that were simply better than Firefox.

For some reason as well, Firefox tabs just look wrong to me, as if the label is separate from the tab itself. I know it sounds minor, but it somehow messes up my workflow.

I recently tried debugging and profiling on Firefox and I was surprised it's gotten way better; it's just that old impressions are hard to shake off.

>Try Firefox today, please?

Did and done and got the tee-shirt :)

I have always avoided chrome* browsers as much as I can, but I still think Firefox is turning itself into a chrome want-a-be

> There was a time when I tried to educate people on the negative effects of browser monoculture. Okay, my mum didn't get it, but I was more disappointed by my fellow devs.

Two points.

One: dev tools. Chrome's are just so much better than anything I tried in any other browser.

Two: uneven speed with which web standards land in different browsers. True, Chrome lagged behind on CSS subgrid; but generally, it's pretty quick to bring in new standards.

That's it for me.

I haven't used either browser's dev tools much recently so I don't have an opinion on one vs. the other, but...

Respectfully, if Chrome's dev tools are better, I feel like that's a reason to use Chrome's dev tools... not a reason to use Chrome fulltime.

It's quite rare that I have any opinion on what others do but the Chrome situation is an exception. As the article's author notes, having lived through the first browser monoculture, I'm not looking forward to the second.

Reading this from Safari…

I'm typing this comment on Lynx in the Linux framebuffer console.

I think trying to solve the problems of the web is an exercise in futility. The standard (or more accurately, set of standards) is too complicated to independently re-implement. Like C++.

I disagree. The Web is more alive than ever. Browsers converging into a single engine (Chromium) is a good thing. Web compatibility across browsers is solved or at least less of an issue since all share same basic implementation.

There’s never been a better time than today for independent browsers. Chromium does the heavy lifting and you can focus on differentiation with a small team. You can disable or change any Chromium features you don’t like or ship new ones. Notable examples are Brave or Meta Browser. If competing browsers to Chrome are not getting more traction is simply because don’t offer features that are compelling enough for most to offset the switching cost. Market forces at play

I agree with this article wholly, I had and still have all the described experiences and feelings.

As a long time FF user (from v1) I just migrated to Brave for 2 reasons:

- I'm tired of FF sneakily pushing some telemetry / studies / "anonymous ads" whatever even though they already get bilions from Google

- Brave is better at dealing with gdpr popups and ads than FF + ublock

On the other hand, Brave is a joke at managing bookmarks.

I tried Librewolf last year but I had some problems with it (not sure what it was).

Regarding the tab management issue referenced in the post, I really could not use a browser without Tree Style Tab. Paired with Tridactyl, it makes tab management and switching tabs a breeze. I don't know if Chrome or any other browser has anything comparable to this setup and, to be frank, I don't even care. Firefox is one of my favorite pieces of technology ever and I'm not willing to give up on it.

maybe most of the users just don't care abt privacy

They don't care because it's not something they think about. If they knew where their data lived, they'd think differently

this is not a productive discussion. the web is not dying because people choose to use chromium engine.

what ends up happening in these discussions - people become ideologues. for some people - firefox works for them - that's okay. for some people - chrome ends up having less memory leaks e.g on apple silicon.

fortunately safari, firefox exist. and yeah google makes chrome - but microsoft / brave etc have their own flavors.

so choose your own poison.

reading this from chrome

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