> + Google Chrome in 2008 : 10x quality-of-life since misbehaving websites crashing don't bring down all the other tabs in my browsing session like Firefox/Opera.

Adding to this: just browser tabs themselves were a 10x improvement for me. I had actually forgotten what the world was like before tabs - a whole lot of unsortable windows, and a lot of clicks of the back button.

It was a godsend to be able to open new links in a tab, and to be able to see those tabs organised neatly in front of you.

This was the entrypoint to Firefox for millions of people.

Unlike today, back then Firefox had a clearly expressive value proposition: Use this! It has tabs! It will change how you browse the web!

Now the only value proposition is some wishy-washy privacy stuff that is much harder to sell people on, even if it's in their best interest.

I believe opera had tabs for a while before Firefox. It was one of the main reasons I think I used opera for a good long while.

You are correct - Opera had tabs way before Firefox, and Opera had a full mail client as well without feeling bloated or slow.

The free version of Opera also had ads at the time: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c6/Opera_6...

I strongly believe that if Opera had had a cool name, it would have been a real contender. People don't like operas, they're boring and stodgy.

Opera was a paid option. It was doomed from the start.

I paid for Opera (twice) because it was clearly the superior product. People spend money on a better machine, so why not on a clearly better browser? (At that time).

And although browsers are no longer distinctly better than each other, I still donate to Mozilla.

Because you can’t buy a free machine. But you can download a free browser.

IIRC the rendering engine wasn’t that great either at that time.

Opera Presto was the fastest browser (and js engine) in the world at its prime.

Opera was the best

Still remember the mouse gestures to zip around the pages.

What a fun time.

You don't need to feel deprived.

https://github.com/marklieberman/foxygestures

https://otter-browser.org/ (Tools → Preferences… → Advanced → Mouse → [X] Enable mouse gestures)

I was thinking more what the result looked like.

Website often broke in Opera due to being written for "IE" standard.

Not really, I was an Opera user when Firefox 0.8 came out... Switched pretty much permanently, Opera also had mouse gestures which I was actively using and still use with a Firefox extension...

Opera had no real tabs at that time. It was still MDI with a button-bar for fast access. Was'nt the browser doing this at the time, and it was'nt as good as Mozillas Tab-addon, which later was built into first firefox-versions.

Opera added true tabs some versions later, while still hanging someway on the MDI-tradition.

To me, the value proposition is still tabs. I have hundreds open at a time. Once or twice a month I will cleanup hundreds of windows and tabs. I've created habits to open up most everything in new tabs and new "projects" in new windows.

I think I do this as a self-remedy for my ADHD, I am likely to allow an interruption to disrupt me but I do need to close the loop on whatever I was working on before an interruption. A window or set of open tabs is enough of a reminder to help me close the loop.

I've long opened everything in a new tab, but would you believe I just realised I need to consciously make the effort to open new "projects" in new windows 2 hours before reading this post? I think the difficulty is working out when that line of a tangent has been crossed.

Tree-style tabs [0] in Firefox help to keep a train of "research" together.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I use a vertical tab extension, and with that I regularly get to > 1k tabs.

Different strokes for different folks but what on earth do you people do on 1000 or even 100 tabs? I have a handful of sites I regularly go to and maybe 50 that I visit more than occasionally. They’re all bookmarked. When I’m done browsing I close the window. What state are you preserving keeping everything open in a tab?

For instance, i go to frontpage of HN and open in new tabs the stories and comments that interest me. Its not uncommon for 15 stories with 15 comments sections (thats 30 tabs already),

Then I sometimes, open links from comments, or Wikipedia etc.

Today i have more than 50 tabs open just starting from HN.

Some stories when i read I close, but sometimes when I think i need to reread or save for later.

After the week i usually have around 150+ tabs that i have left for later, I do the triage and I either save to my notes (like interesting, os dev articles, or rust or postgre optimization tips ...) or close.

And thats just for HN.

Often it will be documentation + stack overflow results. It can be handy to just leave that stuff open, because then you can find it easily. I do purge all tabs every now and again, but when there's no downside to leaving them open, they can build up for a month or so.

What are those 50 sites you visit? I have like 4 which I visit on a daily basis (reddit/4chan/hckrnews/youtube)

Phoenix/Firebird was sold first through its incredible speed, compared to IE, plus popup blocking. The tabs were a nice bonus but the other two were the features that got all of us pushing the browser on every friend and relative who'd let us, even if they'd never use/understand tabbed browsing (some don't, to this day).

Extensions were the other 10x thing with Firefox. Even now browsing the web without them is torture.

> Now the only value proposition is some wishy-washy privacy stuff that is much harder to sell people on, even if it's in their best interest.

They'll still use Chrome or Edge/IE, but will use NordVPN or ExpressVPN after seeing their favorite YouTuber claim that the VPN protects their data and gives them privacy...

...while still not using an ad blocker, which makes the VPN almost entirely worthless from a privacy perspective. At most, it blocks your ISP from seeing what you're doing.

> At most, it blocks your ISP from seeing what you're doing.

In fairness, that is a nontrivial privacy win for a decent number of people.

That's not totally fair. They also hide your IP from sites you access. So if somebody sent me a link to an IP logger and I clicked it, they would not know what city or state I actually live in, for example.

True. You're definitely right there.

Which is just another reason why it is so awfully frustrating flr me that they won't fix their extension apis:

I fully believe the extensions were really a huge part of Firefox' moat.

In that case, Opera Browser in 2001 was the first tabbed browser I used. Long before Chrome.

I still miss some features in Opera like mouse gestures. No, plugins and add-ons can't reproduce the responsiveness of a native implementation, they all fall short.

Good to see someone else remembering the mouse gestures. It was what hooked me, together with being a fast browser at the time.

On a sidenote, I stopped using Opera when they included a torrent-client in their webbrowser. The amount of bloat was staggering.

I remember using Avant browser to have tabs back in the day before I discovered FF. I think it was just an IE wrapper

Wasn't Avant a reference browser to check standards compliance? I recall toying with it. Then switched to a Firefox plugin which used an HTML linter.

I was a teen so I'm not sure what it was. It just had the magic of tabs. Haha

I was thinking of Amaya. Avant is unrelated.

And Maxthon!

Virtual machines have been a huge win, and still are.

Spending 2-5 days setting up a development environment, then archiving a copy of the whole VM made some of the crappier setups usable. Back before rented software (including the OS) that meant one person could grind through the whole OS/tools/IDE/libraries stack and get something we could all use. I've broken software protection to make this work, because it's just such a huge productivity win.

Being able to have a whole test matrix worth of systems virtualised also helps. One place we interacted with MS-Office, so the matrix was Win95/98/Me/XP/2000 (etc), then three versions of Office {cries}. It would have been just unreasonable as a small company for us to have and maintain 2-3 copies of that matrix as physical machines.

I remember when I switched to Linux around 2004. Compared to Windows XP, setting up anything became minutes instead of days. Because everything was just so much simpler to automatr and so much faster in general.

Freezing and archiving the VMs used to build a particular release is also a pretty nice trick.

It comes in very handy for those rare times when a major customer that (for some reason) insists on sticking with an ancient, obsolete version of your software desperately needs a critical fix.

> Freezing and archiving the VMs used to build a particular release is also a pretty nice trick.

An essential trick if you have long-lasting products. I've been able to (and asked to!) make fixes in ~2015 to code that was written in Turbo Pascal 6. With firmware for embedded devices it's more necessary and often also harder, because often the hardware to flash the firmware doesn't work with new computers. Or you end up with a chain of USB-Serial adapter to serial-to-weird adapter to "programmer board" to actual device... but I knew that when I carefully packed everything into an antistatic bag 10 years ago :)

> using Google for search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search.

Aaahhh. The year Google launched, a friend and I were sitting next to each other, at our PCs. Both of us were techie types and into innovative stuff, although working in a software services bigco at the time.

I casually said to him: "I came across this new search engine a few days ago while browsing for interesting stuff. They say they are fast(er than others)."

Gave him the URL. He typed it in, ran a search, saw the results and the time, like 0.0x seconds or so. And muttered "That's fast".

It was Google.

I still distinctly remember the moment of shock with the minimalism of their homepage at the time; compared to AltaVista jam-packed with ads and other stuff to the brim, seeing just the logo and the editbox on a plain white page made me startle and pause with some "Whaaat's going on???" and "This can't be true" feelings.

It was so light weight that when they did user tests, the user didn’t start typing. They just waited there waiting for the rest to load. So they added the copyright notice in the footer. According to Marissa Mayer

Copyright never has to be declared, and I think in many ways Google is responsible for websites having copyright in footers not realising it’s not a legal requirement.

Ha ha, yes. So streamlined.

Heck, GMaps is slow and clunky for me, but it's still 10x better than anything else I've ever used. I'm pretty sure it'll be the last GOOG service I manage to get myself off. Is there even a single OSM-based alternative that offers competitive POI search?

For me, Google Maps got slow some 5 years back.

Sadly, OpenStreetMap is weakest in POI coverage.

In typical area Google has simply much better data - and that is before interface optimised for selling ads about POIs and therefore displaying POIs quite well.

I map a lot in OSM, and POIs in my city are still light years behind Gmaps. And even with StreetComplete (an Android app that I recommend) that made adding and resurveying opening hours data easier, this info is often missing/outdated :/

Using google search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the search results were than in 2021

To their defense, SEO was not as developed. The average website was not a scam like today.

The SEO was there, just optimizing for different things from what Google cared about. Remember pages of keywords with the same color as the background?

I remember developing in the early 90s and there was no open source coding tools. It was miserable. One had to write everything from scratch or buy expensive libraries.

> I remember developing in the early 90s and there was no open source coding tools.

There were open source coding tools in the early 90s (a lot of the GNU tools, including Emacs and GCC, were first released in the mid-to-late 1980s.)

I know what you're saying but the discoverability of such tools, especially on DOS, was poor. Everyone I knew was buying compilers or, ahem, downloading them from other than authorized sources. It was unreal when I was able to buy a RedHat CD-ROM for a few bucks (from Tucows?) and get access to a full tool suite. You couldn't get huge software packages over 56K modems from BBSes.

I did not have access to a unix machine, the internet or the GNU toolchain in the early 90s. I was coding on macs and DOS PCs using Borland compilers and Think C on the Mac.

And Matt's Script Archive was mid-90s.

Let me introduce you to comp.sources.unix: https://www.krsaborio.net/unix-source-code/research/1987/081...

I do that, because I use a not popular enough programming language.

Google Maps was amazing. Back when I showed it to my dad for the first time, he expected it to be a live satellite view of his house.

I'm working on a startup trying to make that happen now. There's an immense amount of "free energy" in the form of 120k+ flights around the world every day with that # expected to increase in the future with air taxis, delivery drones, etc. Idea is to hitch a ride on these platforms and crowdsource (cloudsource?) as much aerial image data as possible to create a map that updates every few minutes. Planet Labs and Maxar are great and satellites aren't going anywhere, but we see a pretty big unfilled opportunity in the remote sensing market.

Apologies for the shameless plug--we're on IG @notasatellite if you're interested in seeing some examples :^)

Interesting concept, but my gut says it could lead to some malicious use cases.

You're spot on, and that's something I think about daily. Satellite-based incumbents have an average revisit rate (assuming good weather) of roughly 2x/day, so hundreds or thousands of passes/day poses serious privacy and operational risk. We rely on guidance from EthicalGEO and other consumer privacy orgs when drafting standards, but the path to the type of hyper-revisit we're envisioning will need to be tread very cautiously.

How might this work? Could you give example of privacy heuristics you are considering?

Also curious. For example, if I run a shop and I normally have N cars parked out front, but anyone can see with 5 minute accuracy that I always have at least N-2 cars, they could easily figure out when nobody's watching the shop (or house).

Edit: also, nobody can ever sunbathe in peace again.

I would expect that most planes fly on specific "routes", leaving a lot of area uncovered. Do you have any solution for this problem?

You're absolutely right, there are huge swaths of airspace that rarely see traffic. Imaging satellites have an inherent advantage when it comes to total coverage but proportionally, a small % of all images captured in an orbital period are of interest at that point in time. We look at our approach as an opposite, complementary offering that optimizes for revisit in well-established and predictable routes around population centers (and whatever else lies in between takeoff and landing).

Most airports are zoned industrial and located within or on the edge of cities and towns, so we can provide more frequent updates of areas that are of greater value to customers monitoring supply chains, construction/site development, estimating traffic flows, etc. High-revisit is equally important at cruising altitude over much of the country where demand for agricultural/environmental monitoring, crop yield data, etc. is of similar interest.

All this to say coverage is a known limitation, but based on those reasons I think (hope) we'll become the yin to satellite imagery's yang.

Why is privacy intromission so trendy and tempting? I understand this in hard-to-reach areas or for wildlife preservation, but you're effectively adding a real-time aerial Big Brother on everyone's head.

Is technology too widespread? Do we need moral courses, in addition to tech ones?

I understand where you're coming from, but it's much more nuanced than plainly-stated "privacy intromission". For all the good that has come from tools like Google Maps, there's an opportunity to extend that good. For all the nefarious uses, it's an opportunity to pioneer techniques to mitigate those externalities in a way Google and other map data providers have not or will not.

The world is constantly changing and we need better, faster, and cheaper methods of measuring those changes. We can respect (and actively lobby for) privacy while obtaining these results at the same time. Morality and technology should not run parallel to one another, they should both be woven into the products we use every day.

My grandmother had the same expectation.

I cannot imagine a period of time where the STL didn't exist, which perhaps outs me as a younger dev

There was arguably a worse period than non-existence, which was when it existed but didn't work very well.

I know of the STL but don't know a damn thing about how to use it. They didn't teach STL at all in my university, even in the C/C++ classes.

We had to write our own Scanner class in our Java classes because the version of Java we were using didn't have that functionality yet. It came out in the middle of the course.

Many video games still don't use the STL due to performance concerns.

They rather use the proper C counterpart, the CTL, written by a game dev. Nobody should ever use set and unordered_map, and many despise string. btree and the various open hashtables are 10x better than the STL parts, (fuck pointer and iter stability), string only recently got improved via string_view.

> + MS Window Media Player's ability to cleanly accelerate playback to 2x,3x,4x of audiobooks and tutorial videos for slow speakers. MS Windows 7 had this long before Youtube's player had a 2x playback option.

I'm pretty certain there were third-party players that could do increased playback speed with unchanged pitch before Windows 7.

Funny how Google went from user's hero to zero.

Only on HN.

Otherwise it's the #1 browser by usage by far, which is saying a lot considering it doesn't come preinstalled on Windows or on Macs, so all those users are making a deliberate choice to switch.

So still the hero outside of HN.

Google is gas-lighting people into using Chrome…

Ever used for example YouTube with an alternative browser?

It's buggy, it's slow (and that's on purpose; Google puts regularly quite some engineering effort into using web features that don't work well in the last independent competing browser). But those Google pages have a big banner saying it will work better in Chrome, and asking the users to "try".

That strategy works very efficiently as Google controls the sites most average people use the whole time.

That's one of the reasons why Google's monopolies need to be broken by regulation. Actually they're over-due for a break-up.

> [Youtube is] buggy, it's slow (and that's on purpose; Google puts regularly quite some engineering effort into using web features that don't work well in the last independent competing browser).

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/disable-polymer-you...

Yes, it's a work-around, not a long-term solution and does not help with the underlying problem. Spread the word and enjoy it while it lasts.

That's not what gaslighting means.

I don't mind using Youtube on Firefox over here, and I don't find it slow.

With adblocker I have nothing to complain about.

I actually understand what the grandparent is talking about with respect to the "hero" to "zero" comment they made, though I might not say that it has fallen all the way to zero.

The reason I understand their comment is because there was a period of time when Google was so cool that people wore Google t-shirts without having ever been affiliated with Google. You could find random college students wearing a Google t-shirt like they would a band t-shirt.

I wish I could hear you but there's this echo ....

It's because most of HN user queries are very niche.

No, it's because since the search is more and more based on user tracking data run through some "AI" the results become garbage for people that don't use the same five sites on the net the whole time, and prevent Google's tracking as much as possible additionally.

That last point is something i hadn’t fully considered but is absolutely valid here. I have watched so much content at 2x speed that I would never have cared about in the slightest at 1x. The human brain is strange like that.