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Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

(www.magiclasso.co)
281 points bentocorp | 39 comments | 17 Nov 24 22:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.431s | 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. pjmlp ◴[18 Nov 24 20:56 UTC] No.42176917[source]▶
It definitely is, I was also there, just like everyone was doing IE only sites, not only plenty of people do the same with ChromeOS vision of the Web, they ship Chrome alongside Electron crap.

Safari is the last man standing before a ChromeOS world.

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2. onion2k ◴[18 Nov 24 21:24 UTC] No.42177223[source]▶
Safari is the last man standing before a ChromeOS world.

Except it isn't. Maybe I'm being slightly obtuse here, but the world is not "Chrome Vs Safari". It's "Chrome Vs Safari Vs native apps". If Safari dies we'll be in a world of "Chrome Vs native apps", and that is what Apple wants. Browsers represent a way to deliver software to users that's outside of Apple's revenue mechanisms.

Apple have every incentive to keep Safari being good-not-great at running web apps, so users prefer the native version (even though most of the time that'll be Electron.)

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3. bloppe ◴[18 Nov 24 21:44 UTC] No.42177436[source]▶
Am I the only one left happily using Firefox? You know, the only "major" browser that doesn't seem to have these conflicts of interest?
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4. gray_-_wolf ◴[18 Nov 24 21:45 UTC] No.42177448{3}[source]▶
Also happy Firefox user here. Do not worry, there are dozens of us. Dozens!
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5. ajross ◴[18 Nov 24 22:00 UTC] No.42177586[source]▶
Notably this desire -- to own a platform by making "native" code for your proprietary OS the "preferred" way to interact with the world -- was exactly the logic behind MS's "embrace and extend" nonsense in the 90's. It still feels weird to me that people don't react the same way when Apple does it.
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6. dudhejffj ◴[18 Nov 24 22:13 UTC] No.42177692{3}[source]▶
I use Firefox Mobile but have long abandoned the desktop offering. The only thing I feel like I get from the desktop version lately is a spiritual victory whereas the mobile browser actually has tangible features I prefer like add-ons and the search bar at the bottom.
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7. carlosjobim ◴[18 Nov 24 23:30 UTC] No.42178396[source]▶
Native apps have always been better than browser/cloud based solutions. The only people who prefer the cloud are lazy developers, tech companies who want to sell software as a subscription, and corporate IT who finds it easier than dealing with native software on the computers.

The end user is always served better by native apps.

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8. mr_sturd ◴[18 Nov 24 23:48 UTC] No.42178552{4}[source]▶
It's always nice to meet a fellow neverChrome.
9. xcf_seetan ◴[19 Nov 24 00:04 UTC] No.42178672{3}[source]▶
Another happy Firefox user. On desktop and mobile. I always have used Netscape/Firefox.
10. nerdix ◴[19 Nov 24 00:06 UTC] No.42178700{3}[source]▶
They don't. Apple gets away with stuff today that would have made Bill Gates blush in 1998.

Imagine if Microsoft was able to just ban any competing browser from running on Windows. We wouldn't be here debating if Chrome is the new IE. IE would be the same old IE (and the web would be a lot worse off today).

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11. fenomas ◴[19 Nov 24 00:22 UTC] No.42178828[source]▶
Considering Safari is mainly used on a platform where it's mandatory, I'm not sure "standing" is the term.

Last man being propped up Weekend-at-Bernie's style?

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12. lmm ◴[19 Nov 24 00:26 UTC] No.42178852{3}[source]▶
The Firefox that gets the vast majority of its revenue from Google, that Firefox?

I think the only full-featured browser with a prosocial funding model is Konqueror, where what little money there is mostly comes from EU grants. Not coincidental that its code quality was so much better that everyone else based on its rendering engine.

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13. tapland ◴[19 Nov 24 00:32 UTC] No.42178898{4}[source]▶
On iOS it’s still safari backend though?
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14. eMPee584 ◴[19 Nov 24 01:15 UTC] No.42179175{4}[source]▶
and until recently, the only browser that allows to split the view into independent sub-windows..
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15. EasyMark ◴[19 Nov 24 01:18 UTC] No.42179191[source]▶
It’s not really mandatory, you can use other browsers on both iOS and macOS
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16. firen777 ◴[19 Nov 24 01:23 UTC] No.42179226{3}[source]▶
Being the only Android browser (that I know of) that support extensions, namely UBlock Origin, means that Firefox is the only logical choice for me.

Chrome's Manifest v3 forcing UBO into becoming UBO Lite only strengthen my original decision.

Hopefully this move by google would push more people toward Firefox. Although considering the amount of people who happily surf the web with zero adblockers (including every single of my IT colleagues), I'm not holding my breathe.

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17. fenomas ◴[19 Nov 24 01:35 UTC] No.42179294{3}[source]▶
Safari is mandatory to have on iOS - it's preinstalled and can't be removed. It's also propped up in the sense of being built on apis and OS features that other browsers aren't allowed to use.

I mean, imagine if DOJ forced Apple to divest Safari and treat it the same as other browsers. What would happen? Parsimonious answer: the same thing that happened everywhere else.

18. gregable ◴[19 Nov 24 02:01 UTC] No.42179428{3}[source]▶
Except you can't. Every browser on iOS uses Safari's rendering engine. Chrome/Firefox on iOS are effectively reskinned Safari. This is an apple requirement. The rendering engine being the important part here when talking about standards and such.
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19. cschep ◴[19 Nov 24 02:15 UTC] No.42179490{3}[source]▶
Mostly I agree with you but sharing URL’s to resources is vastly better on the web. So is distributing updates.
20. j16sdiz ◴[19 Nov 24 02:29 UTC] No.42179563{4}[source]▶
Konqueror is underfunded and can't catch up with the standards
21. dcow ◴[19 Nov 24 02:44 UTC] No.42179636{5}[source]▶
Yes.
22. WD-42 ◴[19 Nov 24 02:48 UTC] No.42179653{4}[source]▶
The only browser that seems to be able to get around this is Orion. No idea how they are doing it.
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23. dcow ◴[19 Nov 24 02:48 UTC] No.42179655{4}[source]▶
Every time this discussion happens a non-trivial number of people reveal they’ve fallen into this trap of believing other browsers are allowed on iOS. Feels like a consumer protection issue, at some level.
24. dcow ◴[19 Nov 24 02:49 UTC] No.42179656{5}[source]▶
Orion is WebKit. Safari’s rendering engine is WebKit.
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25. throwaway2037 ◴[19 Nov 24 02:51 UTC] No.42179667{4}[source]▶

    > Apple gets away with stuff today that would have made Bill Gates blush in 1998.
Can you provide some examples?
26. fenomas ◴[19 Nov 24 03:12 UTC] No.42179776{4}[source]▶
> effectively reskinned Safari

It's worse than that, even - IIRC the renderer that other browsers have to use is slower and more limited than the one Safari uses.

So other browsers are effectively reskinned hobbled Safari.

27. travisgriggs ◴[19 Nov 24 05:01 UTC] No.42180213{6}[source]▶
I tried Orion (m1 MBP) recently. From about 3wks ago til a few days ago. I liked the UI. But there were a lot of pages that didn’t work correctly. I persevered for a while. But gave up a few days ago and went back to Brave.
28. dangus ◴[19 Nov 24 05:23 UTC] No.42180304[source]▶
How many Regular Joe people are using progressive web apps in the first place? I think Android users also prefer apps over websites and PWAs anyway. I would guess that if I took a poll of all my real life not-technology friends that zero of them use a PWA, know what it is, or even have one installed by accident.

I think that this idea that Apple is making Safari deliberately shitty to stop PWAs from taking over may have been true at some point, but I think by now that battle has been lost and Apple doesn't have to defend that moat anymore. There's just a plain reality of installing native apps being a better user experience regardless of platform, even though it is more locked down and has its own significant list of disadvantages.

More recently, I have difficulty seeing what's so bad about Safari in this regard. It lets you add web apps to your home screen and works with notifications since iOS 16. Safari has features like picture-in-picture that the native YouTube app doesn't have. It also has extensions. Maybe there are some PWA features that I don't know about here that I'm missing?

Maybe this is my dumbest opinion: say what you want about Electron, every Electron app I've used has been a better experience installed as a native app than used inside a browser. Not much better, but better enough that I didn't want to keep using them in the browser (regardless of choice of browser). Slack comes to mind. I greatly dislike using Slack in a browser, and it's hard to point my finger on exactly why that is.

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29. extraduder_ire ◴[19 Nov 24 05:29 UTC] No.42180324{4}[source]▶
Kiwi browser (chromium fork) on android supports extensions from the chrome store. Not that it'll help for much longer.
30. pjmlp ◴[19 Nov 24 07:18 UTC] No.42180785[source]▶
Chrome won't die when it already owns 80% of the browser market.

And if it is bluntness that you want, native apps should wipe both of them, lets get back to the days of Internet protocols and leave browsers for documents, nothing else.

31. shubhamkrm ◴[19 Nov 24 07:22 UTC] No.42180804{3}[source]▶
> How many Regular Joe people are using progressive web apps in the first place?

I know several of them, because Google doesn’t let e-commerce apps in my country sell cigarettes and other products containing tobacco. The android version of these apps guide users into installing their PWA version if they wish to order such products.

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32. pjmlp ◴[19 Nov 24 07:24 UTC] No.42180816[source]▶
It is, without iOS and related Safari, anyone doing Web can update their CV as ChromeOS Developer.
33. WD-42 ◴[19 Nov 24 15:07 UTC] No.42184208{6}[source]▶
I know it’s WebKit. But they are somehow allowing extensions, which none of the other iOS browsers has managed afaik.
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34. dangus ◴[19 Nov 24 16:21 UTC] No.42185153{4}[source]▶
Of course e-commerce doesn’t really need app-like features at all and works fine on the plain web.
35. jetofff ◴[19 Nov 24 21:20 UTC] No.42188204{5}[source]▶
wait how'd you do this
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36. lmm ◴[20 Nov 24 00:23 UTC] No.42189563{6}[source]▶
It's in the right click menu, or there's a key command for it.
37. dcow ◴[20 Nov 24 02:50 UTC] No.42190419{7}[source]▶
Likely just emulating/providing the javascript interfaces needed for FF and Chrome extensions to run.
38. freediver ◴[20 Nov 24 15:11 UTC] No.42194554{5}[source]▶
When there is will, there is way!
39. zero_bias ◴[21 Nov 24 04:35 UTC] No.42201162{4}[source]▶
Konqueror no longer uses its unique KHTML engine and has switched to working on top of WebKit/Safari, making it just a wrapper, similar to Brave. It’s a pity that the last truly independent player in the browser engine market is gone, but such are the realities.