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Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

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281 points bentocorp | 9 comments | 17 Nov 24 22:05 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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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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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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1. 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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2. fellowniusmonk ◴[18 Nov 24 20:39 UTC] No.42176710[source]▶
[Citation Needed]

What google site or service requires Chrome?

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3. spoaceman7777 ◴[18 Nov 24 20:39 UTC] No.42176718[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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4. nasmorn ◴[18 Nov 24 20:50 UTC] No.42176854[source]▶
Meet is as shitty on Safari as Google feels they can get away with
5. lxgr ◴[18 Nov 24 21:06 UTC] No.42177036[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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6. lxgr ◴[18 Nov 24 21:07 UTC] No.42177051[source]▶
Some Google sites explicitly say "install Chrome to use this", e.g. this one: https://labs.google.com/search/install
7. thayne ◴[18 Nov 24 22:06 UTC] No.42177642[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.

8. Kiro ◴[19 Nov 24 05:47 UTC] No.42180389{3}[source]▶
Doesn't really support your statement then.
9. tjpnz ◴[19 Nov 24 10:59 UTC] No.42182124[source]▶
There are less options for screen sharing on Google Meet.