Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

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.)

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.

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.

What firefox cannot do and chrome can is HDR playback.

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.