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Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

(www.magiclasso.co)
281 points bentocorp | 4 comments | 17 Nov 24 22:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.627s | source
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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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1. 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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2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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).