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Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead by rubber_duck on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @01:32PM (#23631090)
>Android / Chrome are amazing

Chrome has been deteriorating in performance and power usage - on OSX at least, I recently switched back to Firefox because it was that bad (Safari is a step too far as I want to work on non-Apple platforms). Firefox has slipped from the mainstream and it's very obvious - so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF) - the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.

And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation. Implementation is ridiculously inconsistent across OS versions and HW vendors - I was trying to create a WiFi management API for some industrial application that would connect to controller specific networks - Android has 2 layers of terrible and depricated API with documentation that was misleading at best, a new API that only worked on 10+ without backcompat, and the actual implementation was inconsistent across four Android devices we tested. We gave up on the project as the Matrix of features missing and hacks needed for every platform we could find was just not practical to maintain.

Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead by eitland on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @02:30PM (#23631947)
> the situation with Chrome seems to be similar to IE.

I've been preaching this for a while:

- Chrome is dominant line IE was.

- Chrome - like IE - doesn't care about the standards because they know developers will adapt to them.

- Chrome - like IE - is starting to fail.

Unfortunately, meanwhile Mozilla has been busy tearing apart a number of the things that made Firefox shine, especially the extension API. They've also been busy trying to destroy the massive trust many of us had in them by doing stupid things like injecting a silly ad extension and lying (IIRC) about the Pocket thing (nothing against Pocket, they just shouldn't have lied about it, many of us are looking for ways to fund FF development.)

Edit: I still use and recommend Firefox. For me it is still the best browser out there in more than one way, I just feel it could have been so much better.

Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead by rorykoehler on Thursday June 25, 2020 @04:34AM (#23638279)
Have you tried Brave?
Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead by Gollapalli on Thursday June 25, 2020 @11:30PM (#23648393)
Brave is basically just Chrome with an adblocker, just like edge is chrome with a reskin. Obviously that's a bit of an exaggeration, but they are all chromium at heart.
Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead by rorykoehler on Friday June 26, 2020 @12:59AM (#23648847)
It's a pretty big distinction don't you think. FWIW I also use FireFox...
Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead by ohgodplsno on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @05:04PM (#23633858)
> And the small exposure I had with Android SDK I was shocked at the API design quality, poor documentation.

Ho ho ho. You haven't even touched the worst that Android has to offer.

- The bluetooth stack. My god the bluetooth stack. A mix of absolutely awful APIs trying to disguise state machines, APIs trying to simplify GATT (but awfully failing at it), the Android lifecycle making you tear your hair out when you want any kind of long lived connection.

- Camera. Thankfully, CameraX from the AndroidX team makes it much easier. But a few years back? I'll just let Google's very own Camera2BasicFragment speak for itself. https://github.com/googlearchive/android-Camera2Basic/blob/m... . 1100 lines of basicness.

- Well, speaking of lifecycle, here's the Fragment lolcycle: http://boloorian.free.fr/_Media/complete_android_fragment_l_...

- The java.io.File API is basically gone. The reasons themselves are "good". The replacement, SAF is a horrible, slow, inconvenient API that breaks pretty much every file manager.

- Looking at the bug tracker is a whole other level of sadness. What's that, You'd need your testing library to ba able to instantiate a Fragment in an arbitrary Activity ? radio silence since 2019

Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead by cpeterso on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @02:16PM (#23631745)
> many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF (I have to hack CSS because token auth popup from my bank is broken, a game related website has half of the scrolling on the page broken, in general so many sites have broken scrolling on FF)

You can report sites that are broken in Firefox at https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla engineers will debug the broken site and try to contact the site's developers. Firefox also ships some site-specific workarounds (such as spoofing Chrome's User-Agent string or tweaking some CSS). You can see the current list of site workarounds in Firefox's about:compat page.

Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead by gspr on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @02:32PM (#23631969)
> so many sites I use on a daily basis have almost unusable bugs on FF

I find this really interesting, and would like to hear more. I've been a Firefox ESR user for almost a decade, and apart from some breakage on some videoconferencing sites, and sometimes having to disable uBlock Origin, I've not faced an unusable site. And this is on ESR!

Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead by neop1x on Thursday June 25, 2020 @05:23AM (#23638606)
I also use FF on daily basis and I don't remember having such problems. Some webapps like Skype were blocking FF user-agent on purpose (changing User-Agent made it work). Maybe I use different sites than the one complaining but it may also be worth checking addons and considering starting FF in Safe Mode (which disables addons temporarily). Sometimes addons can mess up sites in unexpected ways.
Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead by orange3xchicken on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @01:59PM (#23631495)
Chrome has recently (within the last year) been repeatedly making me frustrated with its pdf issues. It feels like 40% of the time I open a pdf in chrome, I instead get an error message like "the plugin has crashed" or some bs. The only solution is to restart the browser entirely. Switched back to FF for this reason.
Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead by scarface74 on Thursday June 25, 2020 @06:21PM (#23646430)
Android feels just as janky as Windows did for years. Everything about the ecosystem shows a lack of leadership. Microsoft did better with dealing with its OEMs in 1995 with WinHEC than Google does today.
Re:Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead by barrkel on Thursday June 25, 2020 @05:56AM (#23638809)
I have to say, as a FF user who's never gotten on board the Chrome train other than as a target for dev work (because it doesn't have tree-style tabs), I do not see the problems you're reporting.