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Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

(www.magiclasso.co)
281 points bentocorp | 3 comments | 17 Nov 24 22:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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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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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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1. dangus ◴[19 Nov 24 05:23 UTC] No.42180304{3}[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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2. shubhamkrm ◴[19 Nov 24 07:22 UTC] No.42180804[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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3. dangus ◴[19 Nov 24 16:21 UTC] No.42185153[source]▶
Of course e-commerce doesn’t really need app-like features at all and works fine on the plain web.