Chrome is far from perfect but they implement things fast and have great dev tools. If anything, I feel like Safari is the new IE. You have to have a Mac to test it, it's slow to adopt new features (sometimes aggravatingly slow), and it breaks in weird ways that Chrome and Firefox don't. I can't speak to the dev tools in Safari but I'd love to hear from someone how those compare to Chrome.
Google is playing the exact same game now with things like manifest v3 and federated cohorts, etc. They're winning the game so far. They may keep winning forever, or they may not. We can only wait and see.
Nobody wanted ActiveX on the web except Microsoft.
Nobody wants Manifest v3 except Google.
Same with Safari and you can use VMs for both of them.
You can run a hackintosh in a VM but it's not a trivial matter for someone who doesn't know anything about macOS, or hackintosh's, or configuring hardware emulation. I also had it break on me regularly in ways that took lots of time and ducking. I finally decided that if Apple didn't want me to support macOS/Safari, then I wouldn't.
Chrome does not have that problem. I fully appreciate the monopoly/privacy concerns, but Chrome being the market leading browser is 100x better from a development perspective then when you had to worry about IE6.
But yes, support Firefox. I've been using it for a decade, there have been ups and downs, but at the moment there's nothing I would change with it.
I have to have chrome installed, like everyone else, for that one form that only works in chrome (or, I use it as the browser without any ad-blocking for when I need that..), but besides that I use it for everything work wise. The argument about the devtools isn't true anymore.
Safari used WebKit, and Chrome initially did as well. In 2013 Chrome forked WebKit to make Blink: https://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for...
AFAIK they push new web standards all the time, and even if they didn't, they have the vast majority of the market share so the boat's sailed on Firefox imo.
I opened a private tab in Firefox and Microsoft Edge (which is for all intents and purposes the same as chrome) on a 2020 iMac. (I uninstalled Chrome and installed Microsoft Edge when I found that their css styling of the chromium dev tools was easier to read)
I wanted to test a commonly visited heavy website. I settled on reddit.com due to it's famous weight.
Before loading the website, I opened both browser's dev-tools, switched to their network tabs and disabled both of their caches.
These were my results:
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Firefox (with uBlock Origin):
- DOMContentLoaded: 2.84s
- load: 4.19s
- Network requests: 291
-----------------------------
Microsoft Edge:
- DomContentLoaded: 3.99s
- Load: 5.79s
- Network requests: 318
-----------------------------
I double checked the network tabs and noticed that Firefox received 291 network requests while Microsoft Edge received 318 requests. Thinking that uBlock Origin may have blocked some ads and trackers making the site load faster, I disabled uBlock Origin on firefox and reran the test (again with the caches disabled).
-----------------------------
Firefox (without uBlock Origin):
- DomContentLoaded: 3.02s
- load: 5.14s
- Network requests: 305
-----------------------------
By my (admittedly small) testing, it appears that Firefox is faster than Microsoft Edge (which is just a restyled chrome).
Also, this really highlights just how great uBlock Origin is on Firefox and how painful it is for Google to push Manifestv3 on their browser (and by extension, other browsers) since it neuters uBlock Origin.
I do use Firefox, but Mozilla really goes out of their way to betray their core audience more and more with addons like Pocket being integrated into the browser along with advertisements in the new tab window.
In either case it always feels like no matter what browser I'm using there are huge tradeoffs in one sense or another, which I never felt when I originally started using Firefox early on or early Chrome.
WebKit does build on Windows, and it's possible to use bare WebKit: https://schepp.dev/posts/running-webkit-on-windows/
But there is for every other OS.
Macs can use Safari, obviously.
On Linux, KDE users (or other Qt based desktops) can use Falkon, and GNOME users (or other GTK based desktops) can use GNOME Web.
Webkit browsers in linux feel a bit half baked as well, though, when you compare it against Firefox and Chromium.
They're just browsers. They don't have built-in web services, they don't dial home, they don't sync your history and bookmarks with some unknown service. Frankly, this is a positive.
I miss cosmetic filters from µBO and should implement something like Privacy Redirect, but vertical tabs work more easily (they don’t require hacking around user.css to disable horizontal ones, though there are no tree-style ones), there’s a simple Stylus alternative, userscript support, JS whitelisting/toggling with a modifier-free binding, and of course native vi/Pentadactyl-like bindings which make extension-provided ones feel viscerally painful (they’re not eviscerated whenever a page is in the process of loading or unloadable, and searching stays incremental).
They also removed many useful features and hide useful settings... (one example being the RSS feed finding feature .... luckily there's an addon that you can install that does a pretty good job, it is called Awesome RSS)
It's already the case, Firefox lost a long time ago
Settings->Home->"Homepage and new windows"->Blank Page
Die a hero, live long enough, yadda yadda
Unfortunately, it helped kill the hated IE6/7 dragon only to take it's place. If you value the free internet and open standards, use Firefox. It is not important how's good chrome is or how beautiful it is (it actually isn't, early design was way better), because, after the demise of Opera, Firefox is the last alternative browser engine we have. We don't want one company decide the standards, it'll end badly.