Everything Is Chrome (2023)

Firefox-based browsers exist, notable ones for me being: Tor, Mullvad, LibreWolf, Zen.

I'd wager it's due to someone complaining about firefox (its always bills, you notice? The same reason IE6 stuck around for...), without fail, everytime the word "Firefox" is mentioned anywhere.

And then we get anecdotes like "gmail and YouTube are buggy"

Oh, really? That's so weird that a multinational would hamstring a competitor that doesn't feed their shareholders more value.

Chrome is a better codebase.

I wonder how that will work out in practice with regards to Manifest V3? Are Chromium based browsers free to stay with V2?

Overstates?

Chrome removed manifest v2. It's also missing from Chromium, which means that many other browsers now have to decide to maintain that version manually, or remove it. It is being removed from Edge, a big competitor, just because maintaining it is too much work. Removing V2 and adding V3 does a lot of damage to the users, in favor of adding power to Google's Ad services.

So yeah, no, nothing is overstated here.

Just like Electron is Chrome in disguise, but lets keep shipping those.

Chromium is open source, but I believe Google is its biggest contributor.

Don't hold your breath. Chrome's speed and feature-richness comes from large, specialized development teams. You can't aspire to top that on a whim. And then there are such trifles as dev tools to take care of.

Imagine every website had a widget on the side giving an EXAMPLE of how your data will be used. Like "You have been marked with liking chocolate velvet cakes. This data can and will be used against you in the court of the next website you go to"

Browser engine identification is not the same as fingerprinting.

Author here. I'm sorry if you're experiencing some scroll shenanigans, but it isn't related to my website.

The only scroll-related things that would be different on my site are disabling overscroll to prevent that annoying bounce effect which shows unintended areas when reaching the end of a scrollable area and my custom scroll indicator (https://vale.rocks/posts/the-implementation-of-this-site#scr...), which has no impact on scroll behaviour.

no, it means that it contributes to a worsening of the environment that it runs in - the web.

By making the product - the browser - the best that they can (without damaging their core businesses) Google achieves dominance to worsen the web as a whole.

They just removed V2, and thus ublock origin. Chrome is not the product, you are. Chrome is your fodder.

It's a great product to navigate ubiquitous ads

It doesn't matter how "good" Chrome is or will be when it's your only option (if you're not on an Apple device). Like the author states in this essay, I'm not comfortable with a browser that gives a single company complete control over Web standards and the Internet.

I've been using Safari+Firefox for a good decade now. Just out of spite.

I was there when IE6 was the only browser that mattered, I'm doing all I can to prevent that from happening again.

I do use Chrome for webdev, the tooling is massively better than in Safari and FF. But I very rarely use it to open anything past localhost or the internal test servers.

The article really should be "Everything Is Chrome + Safari", the "Firefox on the brink?"[1] article even shows that Safari has ~37% market share (Although the underlying site[2] currently shows me ~34%.)

[1] https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/ [2] https://analytics.usa.gov/

I've noticed that some sites are buggy on Firefox (hello YouTube) but I don't think I've ever had to actually switch to Chrome to do anything. Maybe it helps that I mostly use electrical invoicing, so I don't really need to use a browser to pay my bills.

Some sites block by user agent, you may just need to use an extension to spoof it and the site should work. Some browsers like Vivaldi do that by default. Though, this sucks, but it's better than the alternative.

I notice this only on web apps that should be native android apps (progressive web apps they are called, I believe).

Normal websites work almost always. Those that don't work typically don't support Firefox 's strict data protection mode (whatever that's called).

I REALLY hate that. Companies become so lazy and hire the worst web developers that don't have any clue and no self-respect.

I still keep using Firefox . Ultimately there's an alternative for everything and if a company doesn't want me as a visitor or customer, so be it.

> Usually I can just ignore the bugs or avoid the site, but sometimes it’s something that I have to do (like pay a bill) and so I have no choice but to keep a Chromium install around as well.

It's very odd, because recently I've had more of the opposite, where Edge (Chromium based) doesn't work, but Firefox does: on the sites where I pay my water and gas bills. Not that sites don't break on Firefox either, I've had that too, it's just odd that sometimes the mainstream browser doesn't work (wonder if it's an extension issue).

I think it's our duty to use Firefox as much as possible, and only launch Chromium for the odd task where Firefox fails. This is the only way to fight the browser monopoly. We have to generate as much Firefox activity as possible, so that websites have to take it seriously as a platform and continue to develop against it.

I only launch chrome for google meets and google maps.

Are these bugs in the website or in firefox?

In my twenty years of using Firefox on every computing device I have ever owned, I have NOT ONCE encountered a website that didn't work on Firefox, including purchases and bill paying.

Even our internal only app that is used for internal management stuff only breaks in tiny and unimportant ways (ie a raw data viewer doesn't load), and probably just needs a polyfill.

Does your city only have one restaurant?