Posts by Kreaninw

Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?

Re: Please, Firefox, just go away already!

Whether it's HTML tag or CSS prefix, it's no different. Since the reason we have web standards is to make sure the same code would render completely the same way in all the browsers. Therefore by using the vendor-specific tag or prefix would destroy that purpose regardless. And that is also why the vendors moved to the user-controlled flags for experimental features instead of using the CSS prefixes as it's harmful to smaller browsers who were forced to add other browsers' prefixes in order to load popular websites correctly.

My point still stands that the trend to use the vendor-specific implementation was an ongoing issue just until recently that this has begun to change. This is not limited IE6 era. I don't know the reason why you would pick up a matter that's not a core of the issue, as the issue is not the differences between HTML tags or CSS prefixes but the vendor-specific implementation which other browsers cannot interpret the code correctly since it does not belong to the web standards.

Also, when Netscape was finally killed off, MS lost all interest in developing and improving its browser offering because there was nobody left to compete with it. However, the point is not about how MS would diligently develop their proprietary web technologies, right? It's the matter of which the web was controlled by proprietary technologies. Did Firefox change that? Nope. It was Chrome that put IE to rest at around 2015 when MS began Edge development, then moved Edge to Chromium in 2020. Firefox was a non-factor here.

And also, while it's true that Chromium is not Chrome, hence the name. But the technology regarding web standards is not built exclusively into Chrome either, all of that goes straight to Chromium's repository which Chrome is based on. And the standards that Chromium implemented have been used by many browser vendors. Therefore by saying that the comparison between Chrome and IE is based on how their enormous market share was damaging to the open internet, would be invalid, since the open standards are built into Chromium which is open source, not Chrome. On the other hand, IE had none of that openness and it would benefit nobody other than MS if IE is the one who leads the web.

Regarding the compression between Chromium and Linux kernel. It seems you still don't get my point that I said that the two are not different. Since the Chromium or Linux kernel is open source and that no one owns it. It just doesn't matter who is backing it, it also doesn't matter that who dominated the changes in the kernel or whatsoever. In the end, everyone can just grab the code, use it, modify it, or do whatever they want with it. I believe that as a computer science student, you should have known this better than anyone else. And while the Linux market among distros is healthy, but if you're looking at the big picture of the market, especially the server market where 100% of the world’s top 500 supercomputers run on Linux (as of 2021) or 96.3% of the world’s top 1 million servers run on Linux. Where is FreeBSD doing again? ZDNet even questioned that can the Internet exist without Linux. Is this the healthy market for you, based on your bashing on Google for the popularity of Chromium? For me, I'm fine if there's only a single render engine for all web browsers as long as that engine is open source, as I am fine if there is no FreeBSD or whatsoever as long as Linux is open source.

Re: Please, Firefox, just go away already!

Regarding which browser caused MS to pulled the plug on IE, I am not sure you understand the difference between the time when MS "speeding up" their IE development and when it actually "discontinued" IE.

Of cause, as I said, Firefox had started the rebel against IE. It's only natural that MS would speed up their game in response to that. However, never once Firefox actually ended the game. The leading browser was always been IE, a proprietary browser with proprietary technologies underneath. Therefore it's not correct to say that we'd probably all still be using Internet Explorer 6 if Firefox didn't upstart the issue (see the original post of PassiveSmoking). Firefox, in all of its time in the market, never bring an end to IE, thus the era of the open web standards only happened after Chrome arrived. To say otherwise is pretty far off from the fact.

My point still stands, It's not Firefox but Chrome that caused MS to discontinued IE. The latest version of IE is IE11 which came out in 2013 Q4. At that time, IE had around 26% of the market share, Chrome had 46% and Firefox was at 21%. Then in 2015, MS began the development of Edge under codename Project Spartan. That indicated the end of its IE brand as well as the "sign" of the demise of proprietary web standards. However, it became clear only in 2020 when MS announced that Edge will move to Chromium, thus pulled the plug in the proprietary web technologies development. At that time, Chrome has around 70% of the market share by the way. Firefox was a non-factor as it only had around 10% of the market share and declining. MS didn't even bother to move to Firefox's engine due to obvious reasons.

Please get your fact straight. Thanks.

Of cause, since Google is the maintainer of the project, most of the developers work at Google. And if you're not OK with the builds that run in Google's data centers, you can just grab the code and build it at your home instead.

Nonetheless, those don't change the fact that Google doesn't own Chromium since you or anyone can use Chromium in any way you want without having to ask Google for permission.

It's funny how people associate Chrome, which is based on Chromium, with IE, yet they don't apply the same logic to Linux. Does Linux kernel consider to be a monoculture to you?

Considering that there's only one main Linux kernel, it took all 100% of the market in this space. Well, you might say that it has little space on the desktop market. However, on the server, as of 2021, 100% of the world’s top 500 supercomputers run on Linux! And also 96.3% of the world’s top 1 million servers run on Linux. ZDNet even questioned that can the Internet exist without Linux? Is that a monoculture?

On desktop, If you're not using Windows or Mac, the only viable OS that you would end up to would be Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and etc. All of them are using the Linux kernel. Moreover, it has been known that big tech companies are the ones who contributed the most, even Google is one of them. But people never complain about it, why?

Because the kernel is open source and that no one owns it. It just doesn't matter who is backing it, it also doesn't matter that it's monoculture or whatsoever. Everyone can just grab the code, use it, modify it, or do whatever they want with it. That's why!

Therefore the most illogical thing that someone could've done is to put Chrome and IE into the same category despite the fact that they're completely different. No one owns Chromium, even Google. Many companies are contributing to Chromium. This is a complete scenario we faced in the IE6 era where MS owns IE and was also the sole contributor.

To this point, I would say that it just makes someone look cool if they're bashing on Google. It's not for reasoning anymore, seeing how rarely I actually got a valid argument when it comes to how bad Google really is.

Re: Please, Firefox, just go away already!

I already told you in detail in my previous comment regarding why I think your understanding of that event is not accurate. Then I also provided you with the fact.

Why don't you tell me in detail what part of my comment shows that I fail to read your comment or fail to comprehend what you wrote so our conversation would also benefit the others?

Re: Please, Firefox, just go away already!

Yes, Firefox pretty much started the rebel against IE. However, the one who closed the curtain was Chrome.

Firefox has never been considered a browser of choice at any time by the market. It's always just another viable web browser around. If you actually look at the market share history, you would find that before Chrome came to the surface, never once was Firefox able to surpass IE's market share.

And to be more precise on the browsers' specific tag, or I would call it the vendor prefix, is not something limited to IE6 in the old era as this was implemented in every browser until recently (even Firefox invented their -moz- tag if you didn't know).

I think your history information is pretty far off. And as a result, you believe that MS took all resources away from browser development because of the pressure from Firefox, not Chrome.

What surprised me is that people usually think Chrome and IE are the same despite the fact that IE is a close source proprietary software while Chromium, which Chrome is based on, is open source that's free to use and you can modify its code without any license restriction. Therefore whether Chrome is proprietary does not relevant as the technologies behind Chrome are open source. To say that Chromium can't be trusted just because Google is backing it is no different than saying Linux kernel can't be trusted because for a long time Red Hat, a commercial company, is the one who contributed to the kernel the most. And recently it's Huawei and Intel who contributed the most to Linux kernel 5.10 development. Do those companies own Linux?

Until you can dissociate IE and Chrome apart, it's impossible to have a productive conversation.

Whether Chrome is open source doesn't relevant in this regard since the technologies that are leading the open web standards are built into Chromium (which Chrome is based on), not exclusively to Chrome. Therefore it's not accurate and groundless to say that we're seeing IE6 yet again in this era.

Re: Please, Firefox, just go away already!

I did make a claim but I didn't produce any figure. If you did search "browser RAM usage 2021" as I have suggested, you would find many results from ssiddique/Developer Resources, Tom's guide, Digicruncher, PCWorld, and etc. that are providing their test in "real numbers". I believe that those sites are even more reputable than a random guy on the internet like me.

Therefore I had already proved my claim, yet I still don't see any from the others who claimed otherwise.

Re: Please, Firefox, just go away already!

If you're not OK with that, then what is preventing you from testing it with Chromium?

Re: Please, Firefox, just go away already!

If you don't believe any of those, why don't you test it yourself to prove your claim?

Considering both the browsers are free to use, you don't even have to listen to any claim with a pinch of salt. Instead of talking bad about everything you don't agree on, prove it yourself and show it to others so others would benefit from your info.

Except for the fact that IE is a close source proprietary software while Chromium, which Chrome based on, is an open source software that's free to use or even alter the code and release in a new flavor (e.g. Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, etc). Therefore even Google has no control over those flavors released by other vendors. Moreover, Microsoft already contributed a lot of their effort back to the Chromium project.

Nope, there's no cycle here due to the obvious reason.

Re: Please, Firefox, just go away already!

You might need to update your info regarding the browser that eats RAM the most. To put it simply, currently, it's Firefox for quite some time now, even before when Chrome 89 came out which reduced its RAM usage by a whopping 20%. Also, Chrome 91 further reduced its RAM usage.

However, Edge actually uses RAM the least compared to both Chrome and Firefox.

You can type "browser RAM usage 2021" in your search engine to fact-check your info.

Re: Please, Firefox, just go away already!

Everything you just said about Firefox, none of that Chrome can't do. All of the things that Firefox can do, Chrome does it better most of the time.

If you're OK with Firefox's inferior performance when compared to other browsers, that's fine. No one will force you to change. However, the public standard can be different than yours. We always seek better technology. And better technology will open a new possibility in development. Otherwise, when AMD built 64-bit processors, why did Intel follow even though 32-bit was enough for most cases at that time?

Regarding Safari, it's not a cross-platform browser. It's out of reach if you're not on Mac or iOS. Therefore it's not only a matter of choosing a browser, but also choosing an OS. Anyway, its performance is really good indeed.

Re: Stats

I don't see any point in this since the majority of Chrome on desktop doesn't come from Chrome OS either. It's on Windows which Edge is installed by default that Chrome is the most popular browser. In fact, Firefox is more accessible on Android (from the official Play Store) compared to Chrome on Windows (only available to install manually on Chrome's website).

Firefox's market share has nothing to do with the availability of Chrome and Safari on the mobile OS. It's because of the users that choose not to use Firefox.

Do we have to exclude some of Firefox's market share on desktop since Firefox is installed on all Linux distros by default?

Please, Firefox, just go away already!

The existent of Firefox doesn't help the web standards at all, as shown in its worse standards compliance which can be seen at HTML5 Test for years. Any sane person wouldn't believe that the browser that doesn't follow the standards itself will actually advocate the standards.

Moreover, the performance which has been its issue for so many years is still in place. It's not even close to the competitors. While Chrome/Chromium-based browsers enjoy the newly updated V8 JavaScript compiler, which is 23% faster and saves over 17 years of CPU time daily, Firefox 89 is making a headline with UI redesign (for the better or worse) instead of fixing the very major issue it has been facing for so many years.

Firefox's selling point regarding privacy seems dated to me also. Currently, Chromium is as open and pure if not more. Brave's business model is also more transparent than Firefox. Firefox, on the other hand, is not following the standards all that good, performance-wise is subpar, and most of the money they get to run the project came directly from ads company. What's their mission again?

This article is very well made. Thanks.

The kids are all right... for Google: Web giant talks up 40 new Chromebook models, school-focused ChromeOS

Re: Planned obsolescence yet again

For a laptop, at that time, it will be obsolete whether it's Chromebook or Windows unless you transform it into a Linux laptop. Therefore 8 years support won't be an issue (I'm not saying it's a good thing to have this limitation).

Trying to install Windows 10 on an average laptop that came out 8 years ago and you will know why it's not a problem to have 8 years support.

Fedora's Chromium maintainer suggests switching to Firefox as Google yanks features in favour of Chrome

I am sorry if it seems that I was awfully committed to pointing out the fact. Anyway, I am OK if people have different opinions than mine. I have never said that it's wrong. However, I considered it to be a false/unprovable claim since they could've shown the result in number to get their bias away. Well, I will address your point also as follows:

1. I have never said that Chrome is perfect. What I said was "Firefox should at least support the open standard(HTML5) that everyone agreed to implement. This should be on par(if not better) with Chrome/Chromium". However, I am surprised that there are people who advocate Firefox for what they think it is, yet they do not care about how Firefox should be the leader/representative to support the open standard than anyone else. And this is my point all along. Firefox should not fall short when compared to any proprietary browser in this regard whether it's the feature that sounds annoying to you, it's completely not relevant. However, what's relevant seems to be Firefox's market share(which you said it's not). Well, when comparing around nearly 70% of Chromium-based market share, Firefox has only around 3%, it's by no surprise that many websites could've blocked/not support Firefox. Anyway, I think it's not fair to accuse Firefox on this point even though their worse performance in maintaining the project and their marketing effort defiantly were to be blamed. Nevertheless, it's still relevant as far as user experiences go. I personally have no problem with Firefox's market share, but rather their much inferior technical-wise.

2. I am not sure which way you're counting the result. In most cases, Chrome/Chromium would be twice as fast or Firefox would be at around half (50%) performance when compared to Chrome/Chromium. Benchmarks will likely vary depending on a machine basis. To clarify my previous statement, I didn't actually mean that Chrome/Chromium is 10x faster than Firefox. I bought up an example when someone told anything based on their experiences without providing any number which can be used to support their claim. It seems you misunderstand this point. And another point worth mentioning is that, if you're sure that you could have found any benchmark suggesting that Firefox is faster than Chrome/Chromium, please share. I didn't find any in existence. In fact, Firefox is far slower than Chrome on my machine on its own developed benchmark, the Kraken JavaScript Benchmark, by about 30%, not just by small margin differences. Or at MotionMark where Chrome is 4x faster than Firefox on my machine... If you want to say this is not by much, then that's fine. But according to my definition, Firefox is much inferior to any Chromium-based browser in this regard. And together with its incomplete features as explained in my previous post also, that's why I think Brave is much more suitable as a vanilla Chromium's alternative than Firefox.

3. It's your preference to choose to sacrifice a small amount(in your opinion, unprovable claim) of performance. However, I am saying in place of the fact as can be proven. I do not have any problem with other people's choices.

And don't forget that Firefox survived because of Google's profit margins(nearly all of Mozilla's revenues came from Google). Therefore by using Firefox, you're supporting Google in a way since Google paid Firefox because they think they could get benefit out of it.

I am not sure about these 3 sources you provided, as it barely counters my arguments regarding HTML5 features support or the performance in which they could've provided us in real number instead of some personal thought. Moreover, they're quite old and outdated comparison that belonged to the last year. I have no idea why would anyone believe these when they can just simply test the result themself on a lot of available benchmark sites.

Well, I know that people downvoted me because they didn't agree with me. However, I expected more feedback, constructive feedback like you do, even though it may be inaccurate/unviable like the one you had provided.

By saying something without any number, I can also say that based on my experiences, Chrome/Chromium is 10x faster than Firefox since that's what I felt regardless of any viable benchmarks. It's the same when someone told you that Firefox is faster than Chrome. It's nothing more than a false/unprovable claim.

IMHO, Firefox should at least support the open standard(HTML5) that everyone agreed to implement. This should be on par(if not better) with Chrome/Chromium since it's their mission to ensure that the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. However, they fail. They're not the #1 browser to support HTML5. Yet, someone said people aren't that interested in HTML5...

Back to the point of my first post, I will make it clear that suggesting a much inferior web browser to the users is not a good idea. Considering that web browser is the most used application in the world, I can see that most users (technical and non-technical) will notice a downgrade experience.

Aside from a performance degraded which leads to experiencing half of the speed they get within Chromium-based browsers, they will have to face many issues that are usually not occurred otherwise. For instance, many websites may render incorrectly due to incomplete HTML5 features available in Firefox (significantly lower market share aside). And for anyone/enterprise who uses PDF, unfortunately, Firefox won't let you work with PDF form flawlessly because it doesn't run scripts in PDF file, thus making it impossible for the user to clear their PDF form. Both of these cases affect many people in general.

I don't know, IMO I don't see Firefox is up to the task. Each to their own, if someone's happily using a much inferior browser, that's fine. But I just don't think it's a good experience for a non-bias user.

Why don't you benchmark them yourself then? It's pretty easy. You can test HTML5 features on HTML5test, and the browser performance on BaseMark as I already pointed out.

Well, a lot of reviews already pointed out that Firefox is nowhere near Chrome/Chromium's performance, as shown even on the Linux channel on YouTube, The Linux Experiment. Recently, Gamefromscratch reviewed OperaGX, the gaming browser from Opera, where the guy benchmarked every browser. You can check it out. It's pure fact, no fanboy.

I am interested that there're so many downvotes. Is it because I stated the fact???

Well, they're suggesting a browser that performs worse that Chromium on ever aspects(HTML5 supported features, performance as can be seen on any benchmark site, especially on BaseMark where it scores only half of any Chrom/Chromium built) as an alternative???

Why not suggesting a Chromium built browser, Brave for example. It would be a lot better as an alternative than Firefox.