I see contributor sites being linked all over the place - social media, news aggregators, even Apple news. I wish there was more awareness that these articles are written by some regular person with no qualifications as a journalist and that there is no standard for accuracy.
I’ve been asked to be a contributor before. I don’t know what the criteria is. I got a cold call about it one day. I’ve been a panelist at a couple local events, got a mention in a niche news outlet and was nominated for an award once. My guess is that’s why I was targeted as a lead. The pitch was mostly about having a bigger platform for my personal brand if I remember correctly.
What credibility is that? My impression is that they have lost quite a lot of what they once had for exactly this reason.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect?wpr...
It seems like the ideal solution of using the OS's native web toolkit hasn't been successful so far. So the next best offering (aside from building on Qt), is to have an Electron competitor too.
I don't think that there's a desktop offering at the moment. There used to be quite a few (XULRunner, Prism, etc.) but they all died from lack of love.
Mozilla deprecated it not that long ago in favor of HTML but stalwarts have clung to it and complained.
I use to maintain a couple Add-ons and developed some simple UIs for it. I was never impressed by it and it was easy enough to use so I had no objections either.
Then there's GeckoView, which they explicitly decided not to make available as a WebView drop-in to be available systemwide on Android. In this case, at least they seem to have a reason, though it seems to me that having an alternative to Google's WebView would be valuable enough to continue.
FWIW, I've been running Linux as my primary desktop through 4 companies and 20+ years thus far. I'm not at a loss for applications, native or hosted, that I use in my day to day work.
I'm actually quite happy that I no longer need to worry about installing Microsoft office (current day job uses this suite). Online works great, and when offline, libreoffice 6+ allows me to continue to work with the same docs.
Prior to this, Google docs worked perfectly fine for $dayjob-1, and worked perfectly well across Linux, Mac, Android, so I didn't have any significant issues with it.
Really, Linux is a fine desktop. Seems to be about 2x more common accessing my blog than Mac, and about 1/2 that of windows. I can't imagine all of those are server users. Must be some polished and usable desktop apps in the mix to be able to see that.
Linux has no such source of ample high quality apps that don’t cost hundreds of dollars in fees like in windows (office 365 and adobe, I’m looking at you)
I'm also running a fair few Electron apps on my Mac at the moment.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Is there a public statement from Microsoft that they are following Google on this? I don't know what Microsoft is going to do, but nothing stops them from keeping the API fully working. And if Firefox was based on Chromium too, nothing would stop Mozilla from keeping the API working either. Although I expect some forks to follow Google on this, namely other ad-tech companies with web browsers, like Yandex.
The other day I got one that made the case that both private schools and homeschooling should be illegal.
I don't follow. How does a built in extension to save pages to a cloud account equate with the systematic and pervasive abuses of privacy that are Google's business model?
>Gab
I was not aware of this platform. Here are some lovely snippets from Wikipedia:
>Gab stated that conservative, libertarian, nationalist and populist internet users were its target markets.
What a lovely "free speech" platform. Can't imagine why it was "censored", where by censored we actually mean: we will not distribute this on our website, though you are still free to install it on your machine if you want. Come on... Porn is also legal, and also not available on the Firefox website, and also freely available for you to get elsewhere.
I've been checking the tickets associated with the issue (mainly [this one](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042) ) and there doesn't seem to be any significant advance, nor it seems the people in charge are aware of how prevalent and deal breaking this bug is :(
A long shot but you may be able to save us countless hours of effort. Over at the OpenJ9 project we're trying to get z/OS testing for our JDK and one of the dependencies is the XML::Parse perl library which depends on libexpat. In [1] you mentioned you worked on porting this to work with EBCDIC. Did you ever succeed? If so are your changes available in open source anywhere?
In my experience the bug is usually overlooked because people won't notice that they only have performance issues when the browser is open - for most people, the browser is always running nowadays.
But firefox has shown no indication of gaining marketshare. I'd reckon that a large amount of firefox's current marketshare are people who had pre-Quantum extentions that were critical to their workflow, and who are now using an outdated browser version. One big vulnerability or generally adopted new feature would probably knock a third off even the 5-10% share they currently have.
Firefox's share is so small that the other two-thirds is probably evenly split between google-haters, a constant turnover of people just trying it out for a month or two before going back to Chrome, and people who use Chrome for most of their browsing and switch to Firefox for porn because they are afraid google is watching them.
When firefox was at 40% of the market and shrinking, they somehow decided that their problem was that they didn't look like a cheap knockoff, drop-in replacement for their competitor. They succeeded in making themselves totally disposable.
IMO, their only hope is and has always been to strip their browser down to a virtually featureless embeddable UI component, implement the rest of the current features as a core curated package of plugins against an API that all developers have equal access to, adopt all community-developed plugins that reach a certain usage level, and add a rating system for plugins that communicates the level of mozilla's involvement, e.g. gold for in-house, green for having employees intimately involved with the code, yellow for periodically reviewed by mozilla, red for never reviewed by mozilla, and flashing red for never reviewed by mozilla, has had complaints, and has not responded or been contacted by mozilla.
Other vendors will end up putting together different core suites, and will offer their own ratings, ultimately spawning 5-10 major concurrent firefox versions and swamping chrome out of existence. Through being able to lay off much of the reviewing work to outside vendors, firefox developers can concentrate all of their efforts on streamlining the core, educational outreach about the internet and the web, and lawsuits against the monopolists for adding anti-features to their sites targeted to ruin the user experience on specific browsers.
Instead, firefox has settled into being the token opposition party in a dictatorship that just exists to make sure that there's another name on the ballot come election time, and the dictator only gets 96% of the vote instead of 100%.
Hopefully Google leaves a workaround to enable ad-blocking. Otherwise, I will switch, it will be a bit of hassle, but I'll drop them none the less. No ads & lower power usage would be nice though.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300077/microsoft-edge-ch...
Why are multiple rendering and JS engines critical for the browser ecosystem? Everyone would be much better off if we standardized on one.
Looking a bit further (into possible future business needs of Alphabet) you might see that chrome will refuse to serve anything not based on Googles AMP standard and globally remove anything that hurts their partnership with the Chinese government.
This is the single standard JS engine we are looking forward to.
Ad blocking isn't part of the rendering or JS engine.
>Looking a bit further (into possible future business needs of Alphabet) you might see that chrome will refuse to serve anything not based on Googles AMP standard and globally remove anything that hurts their partnership with the Chinese government.
>This is the single standard JS engine we are looking forward to.
This is just unsubstantiated fear mongering and mostly flat out wrong. If worst came to worst and Google rammed something like that into Chromium everyone else could just fork it and remove the offending parts. A Google Chromium and a Non-google Chromium fork is still way better than what we have now today with four distinct engines in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE.
If we believe Google it is in a very performance sensitive part of the APIs, I would say that makes it a prime target for future optimizations just to hard wire the performant behavior directly into the engine.
> This is just unsubstantiated fear mongering and mostly flat out wrong.
Of course we can always count on a profit driven company to do the right thing and there was never a project Dragonfly at Google, just as there was never a Tiananmen Square massacre. Trust in Alphabets morality absolutely, trust that when they are doing something obviously wrong that they are doing it for the right reasons.
> Google rammed something like that into Chromium everyone else could just fork it
Maintaining a fork is going to be quite difficult when upstream wants you dead, already ships black box modules for some features and represents the de facto standard for 99% of the world.
When Microsoft was in a monopoly position, they ignored the standards and pushed ActiveX plugins. Chrome this year wanted to push other browsers to adopt obsolete U2F specifications because they used them in Google products. If there's a single implementation, and the gatekeepers are majority from one company, standards and interoperability become irrelevant.
That's a good thing. What's the point of maintaining four separate software projects who's ideal purpose is to literally do the exact same thing. It's much better to settle on one open source project. If we think Google is the boogeyman then settling on a Chromium fork is still light years better than what we have now.
The common ground is the standard not the browser implementation. The web has been working well and is still working well with multiple implementations.
EDIT: I have been informed that it's not cross-platform since 2012. My bad.
Chrome is slower and Firefox on mobile is a joke.
Why is that so unbelievable? I use Firefox every day and haven't even considered that this might be a problem. I don't have difficulty hitting the [-] on HN, but if I did, I would simply zoom in until it becomes large enough.
Chrome still had a slightly better UI the last time I tried it but the gap wasn't remotely wide enough to give up ublock origin.
Adverts are even more annoying on phones than they are on desktop so been able to run ublock origin directly on device is a major win.
A couple issues with Safari I've seen since it's slower to adopt web standards:
- buggier websites from devs who don't have iPhones. Since there are some quirky inconsistencies with how webkit handles css vs other browser rendering engines it's easy not to catch those quirks if you don't have an iPhone to check them with. And once users point them out, it's a pain to fix without a physical device.
- a smaller web feature set than chrome/Firefox. For instance, Safari doesn't allow localstorage while in incognito. I think it supports serviceworkers and webrtc now but it took years to get them.
Isn't that good for privacy? Localstorage can store unique IDs and other data about the client's past behavior, it's much more dangerous than cookies.
Websites can detect the absence of localstorage and change their behavior, e.g. notify the user that information will be lost after the session ends.
It does allow (at least in the version I'm using), but doesn't persist the data between sessions. Which is the whole point of Icognito mode.
When I was working more frontend (~1,5 years ago) no browser would cause more work and trouble for us than Safari on iOS (we didn't have to support IE9 and lower).
Also I understand that Safari might've created some pain for you as a frontend developer, but frankly I don't care. I'm an end user and I only care about how fast and secure the browser is. And Safari wins there, it's not terrible by any measure for the end user.
I realize that this is subjective, but Firefox Focus has been my preferred mobile browser, regardless of if I have Safari available, (iPad), or not, (Android). In fact having desktop addons on Android has been great.
Development wise it's not so much about our pain as about certain known bugs that went unfixed for up to 2+ years, similar goes for a range of CVEs (re:being secure).
Here's an example that broke many many sites that use OAuth2 Auth Code Flow for login (including the main UI portal my company provides clients): https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194906
There's also been issues with the handling of 3rd party cookies that create issues for login systems, js stdlib functions being incorrectly implemented, etc.
Chrome generally implements everything new and shiny, no matter how underspecified it is, and with blatant disregard to whether or not it breaks the web.
Software has these everywhere. iOS and Android homescreens are carousels. Netflix 'rails' are carousels. CSS Snap Points is a way to create native snapping scrolling views, which Safari and IE supports, but Chrome does not.
It supports the same crippled ad blocking that this article complains about. It is also years behind the competitors in standards support, and the standards it claims to support are implemented buggily. Finally, it crashes more often than its competitors, but I suppose making a browser unusable is one way to save battery.
(But yes, if I do Frontend development, I use Chrome)
With Microsoft switching to Chromium, Firefox is now the only viable (cross platform) alternative. FF gaining back a solid amount of market share is critical for the browser ecosystem in the future.
(Personally I switched back to FF after the first Quantum release, which brought performance back on par with Chrome. On mobile, the ad blocker is even more essential to get somewhat acceptable load times...)