[1] https://news.softpedia.com/news/Lead-Firebug-Developer-Joins...
Chrome’s extensions were isolated, easy to develop and had a permissions system in place.
To this day Firefox is still lagging behind in its isolation. For example Chrome can disable extensions in Incognito, but Firefox does not.
Also if you’re not paying attention, Chrome won and it’s nearly a monopoly. This means browser extensions get developed for Chrome first. Having similar APIs helps with migration.
I view the change as a good thing because I can finally develop my own extensions without headaches.
That is being worked on though:
> The first batch of changes to not run extensions in private browsing mode by default landed, this is still behind a preference.
https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2019/01/31/these-weeks-in-f...
Solution: change profile to launch another browser instance without extensions.
Go to "about:profiles" in the address bar, or configure shortcuts in your OS to launch browser with different profiles: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Mul...
Up until recently†, I'm not aware of a situation where a popular Firefox extension was unable to work in Chrome due to Google restrictions.
†I'm purposefully excluding the whole adblock thing, as that's super recent and thus not relevant here.
I actually still think the API design was a good idea and am glad for the added security. Still, the API change took down some popular extensions for sure.
Now there is no more middle click to submit on forms and I used that at my old job to speed up a bunch of tedious tasks.
It is, and it boils down to the usual security vs. utility tradeoff - beyond some point, more secure means less useful. Kernel access is a stretch, but then again, I could make my computing experience much more pleasant if I had a deeper ability to control and inspect the browser from external software running on my computer.
Especially in Private/Incognito Mode I only want extensions for blocking ads/trackers + 1Password and that’s it.
Also being able to see what the extension does is really valuable to me, because allowing an extension to read the data on all websites you visit is really suspicious for a majority of extensions.
Mozilla has had a good review process in place and truth be told Chrome's Web Store has suffered from spyware and malicious extensions more than Firefox. But that's only because it is more popular and Google is known for really screwed / non-existent human support (e.g. extensions being reported as being malware with no immediate action).
That's fair, but this dynamic drags down usefulness of the whole platform. Browsers could offer extended permissions allowing extensions arbitrary control over the browsing experience, but they can't trust extension authors not to get greedy about privileges, and can't trust regular users to be smart about it. It's what happened with Android: applications requested every possible permission, users learned to just accept it.
> Also being able to see what the extension does is really valuable to me, because allowing an extension to read the data on all websites you visit is really suspicious for a majority of extensions.
That's true, and I wish there was an easy way to transparently run a I/O trace on an extension, and to have super-fine-grained user-level control over its permissions. I use a bunch of extensions that modify the contents of sites; I wish I could manually restrict them to a whitelist - and sometimes blacklist. Like, e.g. I don't need Cloud2Butt to work on my banking site.
Not me. If the new extension system didn't present a loss of important (to me) functionality, then I'd think it was a good thing.
But the loss of functionality happened, and that change is what makes the new Firefox unsuitable for me, so I stopped using it (and I never used Chrome).
This is probably very subjective, but I can absolutely not relate to that.
I certainly see where GP is coming from, Microsoft do have an awesome legacy in dev tooling that lives on to this day with products like VSCode, but browser tooling might be the glaring exception to this - perhaps since Microsoft never really was or became an 'internet' company.
I think that's a debatable assertion.
... years later ...
- A year ago I often used Firefox for its great Canvas debugger. They broke it. I've since forgotten about Firefox.
... 2019 ...
- Microsoft is trying to drive people away from IE, hoping for Edge adoption. I don't care for Firefox. Opera is almost Chrome with extensions. Edge sounds like it wants to be Chrome. Chrome won on most battlefronts. I don't like that fact, because of the "free from corporate greed" reasons mentioned, but it's going to be hard to change the status quo.
Lolno, they gave up and are ditching Edge to use Chrome because Electron. https://9to5google.com/2018/12/03/microsoft-chrome-based-bro...
There's plenty of room to improve on privacy. Non technical people don't care too much about privacy issues yet, but they will.
I keep trying to change to Firefox, but bring dragged back to Chrome.
I mostly work on stupidly big Single Page Apps, which may be part of the issue.
Obviously the v8 stuff also made a massive difference too.
Less RAM = More CPU or more disk space (and much slower)
Less CPU = more disk or RAM
Less disk = more network, RAM and/or CPU
Along the lines of a custom memory manager, that never releases memory back to the OS. If you open tons of tabs, closing them wouldn't release the memory back. Which is a decent guess - it used the memory once, it will probably need it again.
By making javascript so much faster, it allowed web designers to do things that only Chrome could do.
This was how I remember it as well. Not only that but the timing was very fortunate for Chrome because at the time Firefox had some very bad memory leaks which in my opinion really helped with Chrome adoption since people who use Firefox were more likely to be willing to switch browsers having already switched from another browser.
Breaking ad-blocking is sending me back to Firefox.
Chromes super fast start up speed and clean UI is what caused me to switch when it first came out.
I try to live after the maxim: freedom before convenience (at least in parts of my life).
See: Chrome and Android
But by that measure safari is open source because WebKit is open source.
There's a lot more closed source code in Safari than there's in Chrome. But sure: Why not give them credit for open-sourcing WebKit? Safari is closer to open-source than IE.
The added funtionality that the browser "needs", once added, is in practice overwhelmingly directed at commercial purposes, primarily advertising-supported businesses.
In theory it could be used for anything.
Correct me if wrong, but Netscape was originally intended to be a browser for commercial enterprise where companies would pay licensing fees.
And Firefox, whatever its purpose was (perhaps an alternative to another corporate browser from Microsoft), ended up being the precursor to Chrome, a browser written by an ad sales company, as the original Chrome developers were originally Firefox developers.
Following the ideal that the web is this wonderful open platform accessible to anyone, I would like to see more browsers, with reduced functionalty (and perhaps increased safety/privacy and freedom from ads), written not by companies nor organizations that try to compete feature-for-feature with those corporations. These simpler browsers could target the non-commercial web, e.g. the web as a free information source. A web where an individual page need not be a conglomeration of random third parties vying for user attention.
Methinks it should be more troubling to the HN crowd that "browsers" are not amongst the class of programs that can be easily written, edited and compiled by anyone. They could be, but the popular definition of "browser" needs to change, moving away from "all the features of Company's browser" or "all the features Working Group is discussing with input from Companies" and more toward what a given user (cf. company, advertiser), including non-commercial users, actually needs for a given task.
There will always be corporate-sponsored web browsers with corporate-friendly, advertising-friendly features. But we need non-corporate browsers too. They may be enough to accomplish the user's non-commercial tasks but not well-suited for web advertising, e.g. optional auto-loading third party resources.
It took slightly longer to launch than IE, but since it had tabs, I didn't care, because I wasn't opening a new instances constantly.
Not doing the same in Firefox was a conscious design decision by the Firefox team, which didn't want to hoard the memory when Firefox wasn't in use.
(I suppose it makes sense I'd agree with someone else with a Perl-inspired handle :-)
>Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason
It was probably both. I know I was definitely sick of sites (mostly Flash) crashing the browser and throwing my entire session in the bin. I was probably already using some Gecko-based "light" browser instead of Firefox, but V8 did make a difference when using the emerging web app style sites like Gmail.
I'm pretty sure there's a copy of MooTools in the Chromium repository.
Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled with.
There seems to be a bloat cycle with many products, browsers being one of them. They start off lean, gain features over time, and then they are or feel so heavy that a lean new competitor can feel like a fresh breeze.
Remember when Firefox was the fresh breeze, compared to the Netscape suite? I remember Chrome being perceived the same way when it came out.