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Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

(www.magiclasso.co)
281 points bentocorp | 32 comments | 17 Nov 24 22:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.854s | source | bottom
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fellowniusmonk ◴[18 Nov 24 19:10 UTC] No.42175790[source]▶
No not even close by every single possible measure.

I was there, I suffered through it, Google would have to make TONS of hostile moves for that fact to change.

I have no interest in the arguments of a closed source subscription service that wants me to switch to the bundled browser of the wealthiest company on earth's most popular consumer OS, lecturing me about using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser that I freely installed.

The most important one from an anti-trust perspective, every device I've ever had Chrome on I've had to seek out and install/make default Chrome, that includes my mobile devices which used the manufactures browser by default.

If I want to use chromium I can, Safari has been VERY late in implementing certain industry spec standards (SSE's, web sockets, IndexedDB API, animations, relative color syntax, container queries, a bunch of <video> stuff, flexbox, the list goes on and on.)

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1. lxgr ◴[18 Nov 24 19:17 UTC] No.42175858[source]▶
> using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser that I freely installed.

99% of the time I use Chrome it's because some site does not support Firefox (and that often includes Google sites/apps). (The 1% are for APIs that Firefox, consciously or out of resource constraints, does not support.)

In what sense am I "freely installing" Chrome in this situation?

Just today I had a family member reach out to me, unable to use government e-signing on their phone after I'd switched their default browser to Firefox (they were getting tons of ads in mobile Chrome, which does not support plugins and accordingly also no ad blockers). Turns out they support only IE/Edge, Safari, and of course Chrome...

> every device I've ever had Chrome on I've had to seek out and install/make default Chrome

My Pixel came with Chrome preinstalled, as far as I remember. (I don't recall if there was a browser selection screen.)

Sure, that's a Google phone, but then again Windows is a Microsoft operating system.

> the arguments of a closed source subscription service that wants me to switch to the bundled browser of the wealthiest company on earth's most popular consumer OS

Oh, I'd also not advise anyone to switch to Safari. Apple absolutely would pull exactly the same or worse as Google if they could, I have no illusions about that.

I can't wait for the day they're finally forced to actually allow alternative browser engines on iOS and switch to Firefox everywhere.

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2. pphysch ◴[18 Nov 24 19:45 UTC] No.42176147[source]▶
The onus is on the app developer to make sure their app runs on a variety of platforms. It's not Chrome's fault for third party developers being lazy and not supporting Firefox.
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3. lxgr ◴[18 Nov 24 20:09 UTC] No.42176356[source]▶
>It's not Chrome's fault for third party developers being lazy and not supporting Firefox.

What if it's Google themselves? From my original post:

> [...] and that often includes Google sites/apps

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4. nightski ◴[18 Nov 24 20:17 UTC] No.42176450[source]▶
I don't understand this because I have used Firefox exclusively since it first came out and never run into broken sites. What exactly are these exotic sites you are visiting that break in Firefox? You mentioned an elusive government website but I have used many (IRS, SSA, Edu, etc...)
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5. rty32 ◴[18 Nov 24 20:37 UTC] No.42176697[source]▶
That's a very arrogant attitude.

I'll give you one example: I sometimes can't open OpenAI API documentation due to some stupid Cloudflare captcha checks. No, on Firefox, however many times I click that checkbox, I can't go through the verification, just to read some static content. Not even if I disable adblock and tracking protection.

I don't even see a checkbox at all on Chrome or Edge.

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6. fellowniusmonk ◴[18 Nov 24 20:39 UTC] No.42176710{3}[source]▶
[Citation Needed]

What google site or service requires Chrome?

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7. poincaredisk ◴[18 Nov 24 20:39 UTC] No.42176714[source]▶
This is also my experience. But to be fair I have a heavily modified privacy-centric Firefox, and I disabled some features in the config, and I disable js and large images and of course tracking/ads by default, and I delete most cookies on browser close, and I run Wayland on Linux so... any breakage is probably on me.
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8. ◴[18 Nov 24 20:39 UTC] No.42176715[source]▶
9. spoaceman7777 ◴[18 Nov 24 20:39 UTC] No.42176718{3}[source]▶
Are you objecting to single sign on or something? Or some browser extension that is only published for Chrome? What are you talking about?
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10. nasmorn ◴[18 Nov 24 20:50 UTC] No.42176854{4}[source]▶
Meet is as shitty on Safari as Google feels they can get away with
11. graemep ◴[18 Nov 24 20:57 UTC] No.42176932{3}[source]▶
I almost always find that when sites do not work with Firefox (also Wayland on Linux) it works with Firefox (on the same machine) without the same plugins and settings.

Enabling JS is not enough, so I think its liked to privacy plugins, or running inside a container.

12. lxgr ◴[18 Nov 24 21:06 UTC] No.42177036{4}[source]▶
"AI overview" (which I happen to find really useful) was only available on Chrome and Safari for at least a few months.

Sure, it's a lab experiment or whatever, but these are just words, and the effect is that I have to use a different browser to be able to use them, for absolutely no technical reason. (The LLM is running on Google's servers and provides plaintext. I think Firefox could handle that.)

Just visit this on Firefox if you want to see for yourself, including a big "install Chrome" call to action: https://labs.google.com/search/install

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13. lxgr ◴[18 Nov 24 21:07 UTC] No.42177051{4}[source]▶
Some Google sites explicitly say "install Chrome to use this", e.g. this one: https://labs.google.com/search/install
14. lxgr ◴[18 Nov 24 21:10 UTC] No.42177080[source]▶
Elusive to you, essential to people living in my country. (You can't do your taxes without it.)

And look no further than Google themselves: https://labs.google.com/search/install

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15. lxgr ◴[18 Nov 24 21:12 UTC] No.42177103{3}[source]▶
Cloudflare captchas are an excellent point.

Sure, technically nobody is excluded: Just solve the captcha! Fraud heuristics are only reasonable, right?

But it's all fun only as long as your situation occurs within the 90th or 95th percentile of all data labeled "good customer". Good luck if you're out side of that...

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16. jasode ◴[18 Nov 24 21:15 UTC] No.42177132[source]▶
>What exactly are these exotic sites you are visiting that break in Firefox?

In my case, an example of a non-exotic site is Youtube streaming 4k 60fps videos. I tried with latest Firefox a few months ago and it was still stuttering and glitchy. But Chrome plays smoothly with no issues. I previously mentioned that 4k playback has been a long-standing issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28783904

On one hand, my computer is fairly old ... but then again, Chrome works fine on that same old hardware.

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17. baq ◴[18 Nov 24 21:51 UTC] No.42177494{3}[source]▶
the cynic would say if you can't be tracked, you can't be monetized. unfortunately, being successfully un-de-anonymizable means you can't be distinguished from a bot.
18. thayne ◴[18 Nov 24 22:06 UTC] No.42177642{4}[source]▶
I don't know of anything that is completely broken, but some functionality requiers chrome:

On Google Docs, paste as markdown, copy and paste from menus, paste without formatting, etc. only works on chrome. This functionality could be done with standard APIs, but instead google uses a hidden, pre-installed extension to implement it.

Offline mode doesn't work on firefox for either gmail or google docs.

Google doodles don't show up on Firefox Mobile, unless you spoof a chrome user agent.

Youtube has repeatedly had serious performance problems on Firefox.

19. vetinari ◴[18 Nov 24 22:35 UTC] No.42177843{3}[source]▶
Never seen this; however, youtube prefers pushing VP9 over H.264. Maybe your computer cannot use hardware decode for VP9 and can for H.264? (Since you mentioned, it is an older one). Maybe the h264ify extension would help.

What firefox cannot do and chrome can is HDR playback.

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20. olig15 ◴[18 Nov 24 22:40 UTC] No.42177889[source]▶
I see this argument a lot. I use Firefox on my Mac, iPhone and my Windows work PC. I can’t remember the last time there was a website that was broken because of Firefox.

Do you happen to have any examples? I’m curious to see how broken/what the issues are.

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21. bityard ◴[18 Nov 24 23:09 UTC] No.42178173[source]▶
Not who you are replying to, but before I switched to Vivaldi (a Chromium fork), I saw lots.

Among them: Logging into some of my financial accounts doesn't work on Firefox. Enterprise software and gear like VMware and management UIs of various devices on the network. (They foolishly hard-coded their devices to reject any UserAgent strings that weren't Chrome, IE, or Edge.) Sites that use some kind of poorly-implemented tracking/fingerprinting to make sure you're a human. (I would routinely get stuck in infinite CAPCHA loops even on normal sites.) For a while, Slack video/audio calls did not work on Firefox because Slack chose to use codecs that FF didn't support. Video calls on FF are still hit-and-miss on various platforms, ran into it on Facebook just the other day.

These are all just off the top of my head, of course. There are plenty more that I've forgotten.

22. jasode ◴[18 Nov 24 23:36 UTC] No.42178452{4}[source]▶
> however, youtube prefers pushing VP9 over H.264. Maybe your computer cannot use hardware decode for VP9 and can for H.264?

No, even if I download the 4k 60fps file using yt-dlp with forced h264 codec settings locally to my harddrive, Firefox still can't play the mp4 file smoothly.

So it's not really a streaming issue or h264 vs VP9 codec issue. The Firefox core engine doesn't seem optimized to playback 4k and 8k high-frame-rate videos with low cpu utilization. Even VLC for 4k and 8k isn't as smooth as Chrome. I don't know what the Chrome team did but they really optimized that code path to play back hi-res videos.

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23. zamadatix ◴[18 Nov 24 23:56 UTC] No.42178607[source]▶
I don't use Firefox currently but I did for a couple years recently. For a while Teams was blocked and/or broken in Firefox due to calling features Firefox didn't have at the time.

A few sites would silently break, e.g. restaurant online order pages, but work in Chrome. Never really looked into why, it was just annoying and intermittent (might work one month but not the next).

YouTube occasionally had some issues. For a while it was on an old version of Polymer that used Shadow DOM V0 (experimental) instead of V1.

A good list is here https://webcompat.com/issues?page=1&per_page=100&state=open&... keep in mind some of these are "is extremely slow in Firefox". Sometimes that's just that Firefox didn't have the same set of optimizations (not necessarily even fewer optimizations, just not ones built against) and other times that's deeper seated like the Shaw DOM V0 example where the fallback for the page was to use some older.

24. aidenn0 ◴[19 Nov 24 00:15 UTC] No.42178760[source]▶
I use chromium for office365, including teams. Lots of little annoying bugs with firefox (which I use for every single other website on the web).
25. nerdix ◴[19 Nov 24 00:19 UTC] No.42178807[source]▶
The likely reason why they don't support Firefox is because it has less than 5% marketshare. It isn't a Chrome only site. You said that they support Chrome, IE, Edge (if they support IE then I'd assume that they might also support pre-Chromium Edge), and Safari.

That is just the nature of using a niche platform. I primarily use Linux on the desktop. I have to keep a Windows install around for the times that I need to do something that can't be done on Linux. Resources are limited and so high marketshare platforms are prioritized. That's just how it is.

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26. nerdix ◴[19 Nov 24 00:29 UTC] No.42178878{4}[source]▶
But thats not Chrome's fault.

I mostly use Chrome on Linux (fully Google distributed, closed source Chrome...so not Chromium) and I see those cloudflare captchas at a much higher rate than I do when using Windows or macOS.

27. throwaway2037 ◴[19 Nov 24 03:20 UTC] No.42179816[source]▶

    > I have to keep a Windows install around for the times that I need to do something that can't be done on Linux.
Can you share some examples?
28. Kiro ◴[19 Nov 24 05:47 UTC] No.42180389{5}[source]▶
Doesn't really support your statement then.
29. knappe ◴[19 Nov 24 06:38 UTC] No.42180591{4}[source]▶
YouTube is routinely broken for Firefox, especially when navigating around in places like shorts. I actually find this to be a feature because it prevents me from continuing to mindlessly consume. But it is broken.
30. iforgotpassword ◴[19 Nov 24 07:26 UTC] No.42180830{5}[source]▶
Interesting, I recently had the opposite experience. Wanted to enable hw decode on an older Intel system and only got it to work on Firefox. Tried several different instructions from the web on how to force chrome to ignore any blacklists for drivers or anything, but still no luck.

Oh and a while ago I noticed (on a more modern system) that enabling hw decode makes chrome ignore the aspect ratio of the video and displays it like the pixels are square. Again Firefox handled it fine.

(Linux, h264 in both cases)

31. nightski ◴[19 Nov 24 07:55 UTC] No.42180943{3}[source]▶
Maybe that explains it, I don't use Google search at all. I do use gmail/youtube however.
32. tjpnz ◴[19 Nov 24 10:59 UTC] No.42182124{4}[source]▶
There are less options for screen sharing on Google Meet.