Why I’m breaking up with Google Chrome
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
I don't like Google's "our way is the only way" vision for the internet, where Chrome has morphed into an operating-system like amalgamation of resource heavy proprietary features, while simultaneously shutting down flags, features and settings that power users rely on to wrestle back any control at all of our own personal browsing experience.
Chrome was a great step forward and I will remember it fondly, but it really is post-peak on the technology adoption curve. Google is focused only on that giant laggy late adopter side of the curve and simply could not care less about early adopters and bleeding edge users anymore. If you feel like Chrome and Google actively design against our use cases -- you're right, because the laggard phase of adoption is in full swing and we're, once again, pointless nothings and easily ignored voices, drowned out by Google's Master Vision.
Oh well, Firefox has really solidified into a nice product these past few years, even if they are following Google down the stupid proprietary forced-bundled of useless features (here's looking at you, "Hello", which I ironically am not allowed to say "Goodbye" to).
https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=1&qpaf=&qpc...
I'm really not sure how mozilla will survive without that.
I remember when they launched with V8 and that pressed other actors to improve their own browsers. now this is also happening with new render engines such as Servo.
Regarding NPAPI, I think it never atracted a bigger audience because the building tools (circa 2011) were difficult to use.
Abandoning a 20 year old technology is really the final nail in the coffin for you?
And I don't see how it is insecure by itself; that depends on the plugins themselves, and on the websites we allow to launch them.
Old and insecure was the issue raised by the grandparent. (And I suspect the implied part with old is "has newer alternatives which do not share its security problems".)
> And I don't see how it is insecure by itself; that depends on the plugins themselves
That the security depends on the plugins themselves is exactly what is insecure about it compared to more effectively sandboxed alternatives.
Abandoning a useful technology with zero alternatives, telling the world to "simply get over using those previous functions and adjust to a new reality where you cannot do what you used to do" is the nail in the coffin for me.
This is not a case of a legacy technology being dropped for which there are modern superior alternatives.
This is a case where a core idea in web functionality has been rethought, and the powers that be have decided that we should not use web browsers in this way at all, and we will not be able to do so moving forward.
And if we are given the ability back, it'll be a proprietary, non-standard, vendor hack solution that, in 20 years, will occupy the same space as NPAPI.
On the contrary, that's actually exactly the reason that all browser vendors are phasing out NPAPI (or, in MS's case with Spartan succeeding IE, ActiveX) plug-in technology: it is legacy technology for which there are modern superior alternatives.
Firefox is also favoring a phase-out of NPAPI usage, for largely the same reasons, though they are dragging it out longer.
NPAPI (and the IE alternative, ActiveX) are done; the only difference between the major browser vendors is the details of the phase-out.
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2014/02/28/update-on-plugi...
Guess it'll be time to say Auto Updates -> Off.
Until the websites and services I use migrate to a different solution, if at all possible, I just will open myself up to vulnerabilities and security risks and stop updating at all.
I wonder how many users will do the same?
Maybe the browser companies will get lucky and the companies and services relying on this technology will simply fail since there is no alternative, and they won't have to deal with users holding out, since what they hold out for has been destroyed.
Any public websites or services you can reference? I legitimately can't think of a single website or service I use that will be impacted. Or are you talking more about like ancient internal systems written as a java applet?
> companies and services relying on [NPAPI] this technology will simply fail since there is no alternative
Any company that bet their business on NPAPI deserves to fail. The signals where clear since 2012 that this was coming, and was explicitly and directly stated since 2013. They had a lot of time to transition off.
A full decade ago I was helping companies transition off NPAPI because it was "legacy", "slow" and "buggy". I couldn't fathom a company being silly enough to develop a modern product using it.
Most of the "major" things dependent on NPAPI have fairly clear migration paths. Java Applet -> Java Web Start. Silverlight is entirely dead (despite MS supporting it out till 2021) and there are tons of migration paths off of it.
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=chrome%2C%20firefox%...
We can clearly see that each browser's "slow" search mimics similarly the browser's popularity. If they could provide a "browser's slow" / "browser" graph that would be a much more useful graph.
Note to Chrome engineers... stability is a must-have feature, not a nice-to-have. Being a good battery citizen is a must-have. Performance is a must-have.
I'd really like to switch to Firefox, but there's a few things I just can't seem to get used to every time I try to.
Most of my annoyances with FF were fixed by moving to a fork (Pale Moon).
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453303#c...
For all my complaints with Chrome, there's not an alternative that's attractive enough to entice me to switch (yet).
I believe I remember reading that the chrome team had tons of automated tests that get run on every change list measuring compatibility, performance, memory usage, battery usage(?) etc. So either these tests are broken and they don't know there's a problem or they are ignoring the problem (to work on other features) or there is no actual problem and ours in our heads.
(IMHO Chrome's developer/debugging tools are more pleasant to use, but Firefox is getting there...)
nowadays the native console works great! you should give it a try
Vanilla Safari with zero extensions has been completely satisfactory for me for quite some time.
I have Chrome installed, but nowadays I only use it for a kind of "Flash Browser", where I only use it when there's a flash-requiring that I'm convinced is worth my time (most flash-requiring sites definitely aren't.) Occasionally I'll use Chrome's developer tools, which I find to be more robust than Safari's too.
Safari is by far the faster browser in my experience, it scrolls faster, it uses less battery, it has nicer OS integration on OSX (swipe-to-go-back feels much more natural in Safari, for instance), and it just seems simpler than Chrome (the UI gets out of your way better, IMO.)
And Google Trends shows increasing amount of 'Chrome slow' searches because it mostly depends on browser market share, which is still rising for Chrome.
Chrome seems to handle huge, complex DOMs and piles of JS just fine, but throw a few animated GIFs at it, and CPU usage rapidly spikes, fans spin up, if it's a laptop, it'll get noticeably hotter and the battery life remaining will drop fast. On OS X, Safari can render lots of animated GIFs like it's nothing. I have no idea how they let such an old and widely used piece of web tech get and stay so bad for so long. WTF Chrome?
The dev tools are much better than Chrome's, and it uses a fraction of the memory and tends to be much more stable. I have an HP Elite book with 8GB of RAM with an Intel i5 processor. If I leave Chrome open long enough, it will bring my system to its knees.
Deleting my Chrome data (I mean deleting .config/google-chrome, not just deleting the profile through the browser settings) and purging then reinstalling Chrome fixed everything, even with the same extensions and settings restored and all the same tabs open. Data syncing meant this process was very quick.
Everything is working great on my linux desktop now, and my Toshiba Chromebook 2 gets 8-9 hours on a charge and has never had any problems. Maybe the OSX version is particularly poor?
Maybe some problems are plugin-related? I set 'Let me choose when to run plugin content', rather than having plugins automatically run.
Not likely if the main complaint is power usage. The browser engine is likely to be the main driver there, and switching skins won't help, especially for an engine as tightly coupled to its shell as Blink is.
Generally I use Safari because it renders text better than Chrome (Yosemite) on external displays, but for developer tools still use Chrome.
I use a few of Google's services; for browsers I mainly use Firefox and sometimes Chrome. I've never noticed a big difference between the two browsers when it came to performance, on Google's properties or otherwise.
But on desktop chrome, what really drove me away was how bad it got using on Ubuntu running in a virtual box. I'm unable to drag to do anything in chrome any more, making it very inconvenient to use. I've been forced to switch to Firefox, and chrome still isn't fixed even though I've seen this issue reported online many times.
(As in: most people switch to DuckDuckGo not to be tracked at all times. And if a browser wants you to sign in, that implies quite some volume of data being collected.)
I would have liked to talk about the actual article here, but instead I'm talking about this horrible advertising technique and that should be OK with anyone who supports Internet advertising because that seems to be what you want. Let's start off talking about something else and then maybe we'll get to the article you came here for.
As far as UX goes, this is about as bad as you get to force people to view an ad.
I'm a developer and it took me a few seconds to realize what was happening. I'm fairly certain most users would go to the page, see the ad and think, "Where's the article I just clicked on?" not see it and then leave right away.
edit: just visited this from desktop – wow. That's bonkers.
I'll give you credit for getting around my adblocker though, although that just pissed me off more.
Q: Isn’t this just an interstitital?
A: No. We don’t like interstitials either. They sit between you and the content and require another click and new pageload before you can proceed to the article. The Canvas ad surrounds the article and the article loads at the same time. All it takes to move the article back in view is to hover over the article. It’s a much more intuitive and smooth process.
I pity their developers for putting up with that sort of delusional rhetoric.
And your 'c' key isn't intuitive either. Who sees a fullscreen ad and thinks 'Oh, I'll just press the C key, that'll get rid of it, right?'.
Getting in the way of content is the reason people use ad blockers. Your audience is aware of them and with intrusive and distracting things like this, usage is going to increase.
A 'sexy' interstitial is still an interstitial. At least others like Forbes have clear instructions.
I instinctively tried to scroll down past the ad, then noticed the article was bobbing on the right. I left without reading it. I shouldn't have to do a special action just to get to your content. Scrolling is intuitive, moving the mouse to the right side of the screen and waiting for an animation to move the content into view is not intuitive or user-friendly. I'm sure your advertisers love this though. I'd never heard of your site before today, you just lost a potential new reader because of this style of advertising.
With that said, realizing what's going on, moving my mouse, and waiting for the animation takes significantly more time, and cognitive load, than clicking through an interstitial.
Props for replying - communicating in the face of adversity isn't fun I know, so thank you for that!
I'll try to put my thoughts together in an email for you, but just incase I don't get around to it here's a seat-of-my-pants synopsis before I get into work.
Make the back-to-article functionality discoverable, tell your uses they need to hover over the article / press c / whatever to close the ad, tell people the content is over ----> there.
Techie audiences like here are more likely to not have their hands on a mouse, If I have to take my hands off the keyboard to click on the ad it's annoying also.
Think of you power users, I open a bunch of tabs then flick through them a bit later - This meant I missed the transition where it goes off to one side. I thought your website was a pop-under type exploit - not so hot! use the windows focus & blur events to activate your ad
Seeing the article for a second, then watching it fuck-off to never-never land is really annoying, It's like someone switching the TV off just after kick-off in a game of football.
I wonder if people responsible for sites like this even think about how they may hurt their own site by pushing things too far?
Oh, but if you know the contents of the article, the irony is absolutely delicious. The main complaint there is Chrome's excessive power usage. Which is hard to argue with, to be honest. But that obnoxious ad was increasing my laptop's power usage from 11W to 17W (and the using 50% of a mobile i7). People living in glass houses, etc.
At the very least adblockers will catch up.
thenextweb.com * 3p block
thenextweb.com tnwcdn.com * noop