Comment by 3vidence
1 year ago
(Googler opinions are my own, don't work on chrome)
Chrome has just been a better product for the last 10 to 15 years.
Every other company has just failed to make a good browser because they lack the incentives to do so (have gone back and forth as a Firefox user).
The only competitive browsers are those already built on chrome or safari.
I'm not personally a big fan of Safari but it's bigger issue is that it is only available on one platform whereas the web is naturally cross platform.
Almost by definition Safari can't be the "winning" browser.
This feels like ruling that the iPhone is a monopoly in the US and that Apple needs to divest from phones.
Edit: to those replying I 100% don't agree with all the decisions chrome make, very importantly ad block.
But just survey the actual browser market in the last 10 years to understand Chrome's dominance
Your employer is constantly adding non-standard shit to their browser so instead of making competitive browsers others have to either burn cycles on demolishing that bs, or catch up with you. You want an example? That command and commandFor bs from a couple of days ago.
I am most reminded of all of those, "Whoopsies! Youtube is broken on Firefox again. Guess we will look into that in the next sprint."
Easy to gain market share when one of the tent pole internet services is experiencing regular breakages.
I’m confused, as a firefox daily driver, why is firefox not a good browser? Or are we discounting it because it is funded by Google?
I'm with you. Every time one of these arguments come up, people talk about how Chrome is superior. I've used Firefox daily for minimum five years as a daily driver, and it's been atleast 3 years since I've had to install Chrome because some website specified that it NEEDED a Chromium based browser for something specific, I believe it was a Firmware Upgrade over USB - through the browser. I split my time between Windows and Linux equally, and Firefox is the daily driver on both.
Can someone in this thread who have swapped between Firefox/Chrome explain the problems they run into ultimately driving them back to Chrome?
I've seen increasing numbers of site breakages in the past 6mos. Airline websites that won't let you book, car rental websites that won't even load, the persistent PayPal bug that requires you to enter a security code. 2fa checks everywhere. I keep a chromium installed to deal with these, but when there's a decent alternative (i.e. not brave) I'll probably drop FF as a daily driver.
because it can be used to effectively block Google ads and tracking
Worse security posture (it took decades to even catch up with Chrome w.r.t. sandboxing).
Doesn't want to implement useful standards which I use in my own applications (filesystem API, WebSerial, WebUSB...).
It kills my battery on my Mac about as bad as Chrome.
I am sure folks at Microsoft were saying the same of IE 5 and 6, as I was around when it took over.
I would love for something to trounce chrome the way it did IE, and even FF (which was so slow chrome felt lightning fast by comparison).
I'm not optimistic that it'll happen, but I'd still like to see it.
It starts by not shipping Electron garbage, and write browser agnostic Webapps.
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If I remember my history Microsoft was never actually forced to stop integrating IE in their product.
The only reason it stopped being the #1 browser is that Chrome came out and was better...
Even though people had to go out of their way to download on all computers
Only because the whole thing was shut down when administration changed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C...
Nowadays if it wasn't for Safari, thanks to Chrome and Electron garbage, the Web is effectively ChromeOS.
For all its warts, I think old IE is still a better option than Chrome because at the time of its dominance, Microsoft wasn't an ad company interested in collecting every little bit of data about you, nor did it own the dominant search engine. IE was just a browser.
This doesn't get talked about enough.
Microsoft back then was just a software company, they didn't care about your real life. Unfortunately, companies today are a different story.
> But just survey the actual browser market in the last 10 years to understand Chrome's dominance
I feel like most people here wouldn't understand that to inherently indicate superior quality. I'd argue that the absolute dominance of Chrome is mostly evidence of the monopoly power that Google yields. It got on top via search, becomes the gateway to the web for people, leverages that to sell advertisement and also convince tons of people to use the browser. It's been all leverage.
I'd also disagree on it even being a better browser. Firefox has issues, but on actual usability and feeling like a user agent, it's head and shoulders above Chrome. It is more flexible, more customizable, and I find that it runs significantly better on every website that isn't owned by Google. If Chrome was a better browser, they wouldn't have had to sabotage Firefox on their sites for years (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357).
It's Google that can't compete, if they have to use back-channels and leverage their other powers to maintain dominance. They aren't competing with the product alone.