fchristant

hi, author here.

"This blog post was tough to read! Seems to have capped out at a 6th grade level."

I'm not a native speaker, and this is the best I can do. I was expecting less than 6th grade, so thanks!

"Re: the topic, the author shows clear bias toward Firefox"

Yes, the article literally says I am biased towards Firefox success. You didn't discover a secret plot or anything.

"It might be better to just acknowledge this: the best browser wins on each platform."

No, the one shipped to user's home screens wins. Even crappy ones.

"20/20 means PERFECT vision. Above that is ‘abnormally good’."

If it would mean perfect, there would not be a level above it. I do agree the statement isn't as clever as I planned it to be.

hi, author here, and thanks.

I have a straightforward answer. Build incredible PWAs that users will miss out on on iOS, because it has partial support at best. You'd still serve 80% of the market.

I'll admit its a theoretical answer, as most commercial organization would not risk losing out on iOS users. They're not the biggest group of users, yet some of the most valuable groups of users, commercially speaking.

hi, author checking in.

Just doubling down on my statement. I've seen hundreds of discussions and flame wars on browser performance, RAM usage, the ability to keep open 200 tabs.

I mean it when I say that I cannot reproduce any of these differences. Perhaps I could if I would actively measure things, but in terms of just experiencing the speed of all major browsers, I really do not see a meaningful difference.

It could be device related, but I'm on a 6 year old PC (a pretty sizable one though), not having any issues on my mediocre work laptop either.

Doesn't mean it doesn't matter in absolute terms, I'm just saying I don't see it. The more important point though is non-technologist do not tend to pick browsers in such rational ways.

hi, I'm the author. Agree with your point when you read it like that, so I'll clarify what I meant.

"Compatible with the web" in the context of this article means compatible with the web that is primarily built to work on Chromium/Webkit. Because at this point of time, the web is Chromium.

You're right that Edge is compatible with web standards, albeit that they are lagging a bit behind in implementing newer standards. By that logic, IE11 is also compatible with web standards.

hi, author of the article checking in.

Thanks for commenting in the open from Mozilla's perspective, even if its just one voice, it's much appreciated.

I agree that Firefox will remain an attraction to the group of people caring about openness, standards, and their privacy. My deepest concern is on how small that group is going to be. Will it settle at the current ~10%, or will it be as low as 5%, which I consider very dangerous grounds to be in.

As for Google's abuse of market power, I strongly believe it has already happened, in plain view. There's no doubt in my mind that dominance in one market has been used to capture another market. We don't have to wait for that "mistake", it has already happened.

These abuses are already under investigation, but I'm afraid it won't change the outcome. They'll pay some fine in a few years, but none of the browsers will be uninstalled.

It won't matter much, but added an update to the top of the article suggesting people to install Firefox.

We have to differentiate between prefetching from search and prefetching from the actual page being opened.

Google CAN preload arbitrary websites. They fully load your website, JS included, when they index it. As for the security problem when on google.com, they could still preload the HTML, CSS, webfonts, do all the DNS/HTTPS overhead, all of which would be safe to do, save those first few seconds, and create a level playing field.

hi, I'm the author of the article. I have no idea how to stop it. Bad press doesn't seem to matter, as this has been around for years.

One longshot I could think of is reporting it to the EU as anti-competitive behavior. In the case of exclusive AMP preloading on a dominant market (search), it's not that far fetched.

You're missing the entire point. It is fine to have a framework like AMP that puts up technical constraints leading to a performance-friendly web page.

The problem is the cache and specifically the preloading of it. This gives AMP an unfair advantage of multiple seconds over anything else.