State of web browsers in 2018

Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by organsnyder on Thursday December 06, 2018 @11:26AM (#18619388)

During the IE-6 dark ages of the early 2000s, Mozilla's browser (the Mozilla suite, then standalone Firebird, finally renamed to Firefox) was positioned in a similar way: it was the niche browser for people who cared about an open web. It stayed that way for quite a few years, slowly gaining traction by implementing features—tabbed browsing, popup blocking—not found in the dominant IE browser.

I could see a similar approach working again. Mozilla could focus on user-centric features, while Chrome has to also serve the needs of Google's business interests.

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Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by laumars on Thursday December 06, 2018 @12:25PM (#18620057)

> the Mozilla suite, then standalone Firebird, finally renamed to Firefox

I believe it was originally called Phoenix. Though you're right it was then called Firebird and renamed again to Firefox afterwards.

I think each time was due to trademark disputes?

Going to your point though, I hope you're right but I'm a bit more sceptical. Chromium, being open source, means anyone who doesn't like the stagnation of Chrome would just fork Blink and create their own modern browser while still enforcing the Chrome mono-culture.

I'd love to see Gecko take off in the same way kHTML, webkit and blink have done. In fact I'm surprised it hasn't. I don't suppose anyone more familiarity with the code base of these rendering engines are able to offer possible reasons why?

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Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by newscracker on Saturday December 08, 2018 @11:28PM (#18639294)

> I'd love to see Gecko take off in the same way kHTML, webkit and blink have done. In fact I'm surprised it hasn't. I don't suppose anyone more familiarity with the code base of these rendering engines are able to offer possible reasons why?

Not familiar with the code base of the engines, but one factor that distinguishes Gecko vs. the other engines is that Mozilla killed the ability to embed Gecko in other applications in 2011. Read about the detailed reasoning in this mailing list thread. [1] This effectively tied Gecko solely to Firefox, and has made using it with other applications or browser chrome (lowercase, not Chrome the browser) impossible (AFAIK). So it cannot take off like the other engines unless Mozilla puts in work to allow that to happen.

[1]: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embedd...

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Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by Izkata on Thursday December 06, 2018 @02:47PM (#18621408)

And they already have (at least) one they could use as a starting point: Containers

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Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by skykooler on Thursday December 06, 2018 @03:42PM (#18622006)

Which is an excellent feature. Another one is WebVR.

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Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by SamWhited on Friday December 07, 2018 @10:38AM (#18628519)

I love containers, and I'm sure webvr is great, but I can't see the majority of people caring at all about either one. Their existing niche of privacy aware people who don't like Chrome and are tech people who like to play with trendy new technology will be happy about both of those, but random people off the street probably won't.

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Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by Izkata on Friday December 07, 2018 @01:45PM (#18630320)

Then don't talk about it from a privacy angle; I use containers so I can be logged in to my home and work accounts at the same time.

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Re:State of web browsers in 2018 by kiriakasis on Sunday December 09, 2018 @06:24AM (#18640361)

For most uses they are a long-lived incognito session.

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