It's Chromium based, but I am curious how their vision of the internet is. One of the reasons I keep falling back to Vivaldi is that at the very least they are trying at doing something for power...
It's Chromium based, but I am curious how their vision of the internet is. One of the reasons I keep falling back to Vivaldi is that at the very least they are trying at doing something for power users instead of doing what has always been done (obviously comes from their OG Opera days) - and that their built-in mail and calendar applications are the best on any platform. I signed up for the Arc beta the second they sent it.
Tangentially related, I have mixed feelings on chromium - on one side it's "owned" by Google, not good. But, with more and more companies and services like Arc, Vivaldi, Microsoft, Kiwi, and Brave (fuck that homophobe Brendan Eich though) they make the power that Google individually has, a little bit smaller. Chromium is a bit like Linux in that way, a ubiquitous open* standard. I am happy that Firefox continues doing their thing with Gecko (Gecko is performatively better imo), but they didn't do themselves any service by practically making it impossible to embed.
Edit: I use Firefox and Vivaldi on about equal time, and will often use Firefox at long lengths (primarily because their font rendering is just so much better) and that I support their mission. They are necessary, I have faith in their engineers, but not in their product managers, or the board.
I think your take is a little optimistic about Chrome. I don't think these companies are making Google's control of the internet any smaller, in fact, I think the opposite. All of these companies...
I think your take is a little optimistic about Chrome. I don't think these companies are making Google's control of the internet any smaller, in fact, I think the opposite. All of these companies are building a product that ultimately relies on the core project and the APIs it provides, and so differentiate themselves only a little.
They all rely on the Chrome webstore, which means Google still controls access to all but sideloaded extensions. And as they also control the manifest, they also control what kind of extension are / are not allowed. Worst of all, they control which web standards are incorporated and which are broken, ignored or get bypassed for something bespoke to Chrome.
All of this, and then non-tech people (most people) fall for this illusion of choice, as they see so many options. I think this dilutes the pool and hurts true competitors like Firefox. Anecdotally, most people I've discussed browsers with in real life see basically two categories: Chrome and not Chrome, of which nearly all the non-Chrome categories is made up of chromium derivatives (Firefox and Safari being the only others they know about).
I love Firefox, and for the most part like Mozilla. But I like them mostly for being the only real competitor, and it's a damn shame. The problem is that making browsers is one of the most technically challenging (and mostly non-lucrative if you're not controlling the web or harvesting data) projects you can undertake, so there's little incentive for anyone to build their own engine. Much easier to just build on others. And as chromium is the best supported engine, it's the obvious choice.
Only so much. As long as they aren't contributing to the Blink and V8 projects, they have no real power to temper Google's stranglehold over web standards, they only contribute to it. As far as I...
hey make the power that Google individually has, a little bit smaller.
Only so much. As long as they aren't contributing to the Blink and V8 projects, they have no real power to temper Google's stranglehold over web standards, they only contribute to it. As far as I know, none of these Chromium derivatives are doing that, and if they were, making any changes that Google does not agree with would put them in a tough spot of needing to maintain their own fork.
I believe they're maintaining their own fork since they've made statements in the past about not going along with manifest V3. They're recent video about using ChatGPT as a search replacement also...
I believe they're maintaining their own fork since they've made statements in the past about not going along with manifest V3. They're recent video about using ChatGPT as a search replacement also mentioned the phrase "a post-Google internet"
Maintaining support for manifest v2 is an order of magnitude less complex than maintaining any kind of major changes to the rendering or javascript engines as you are essentially just adding new...
Maintaining support for manifest v2 is an order of magnitude less complex than maintaining any kind of major changes to the rendering or javascript engines as you are essentially just adding new extension APIs that lives alongside those provided by Google.
Web standards are incredibly complicated, especially CSS. Once you make breaking changes with how Google does any of these things, you take on the full responsibility for maintaining compatibility with the constantly evolving body of web standards. This is a very expensive proposition in the year of our Waluigi 2023. It is why Mozilla, Apple, and Google are the only major organizations left maintaining modern standards-compliant browser engines.
Well yeah, but I don't see people making privacy-oriented arguments against Google pushing CSS web standards. Maybe I'm just naive, but I don't really care which company is leading the way on...
Well yeah, but I don't see people making privacy-oriented arguments against Google pushing CSS web standards. Maybe I'm just naive, but I don't really care which company is leading the way on those kinds of technical things until it starts explicitly encroaching on my privacy, data, or ability to remain anonymous (to a certain extent) (if I want to be). Though I understand that the objection is on the size of their influence, not simply that they're the leader. But as far as I can tell, it seems like the tech community in general is pretty good at calling out their BS or nefarious plans early and often
The problem isn't privacy, the problem is Blink/V8 becoming the new Internet Explorer. Everybody building against one browser engine with it's special enhancements hurts the web ecosystem as a...
The problem isn't privacy, the problem is Blink/V8 becoming the new Internet Explorer. Everybody building against one browser engine with it's special enhancements hurts the web ecosystem as a whole.
Google having a stranglehold over web standards does still hurt privacy, even if you don't realize it. It means they can prevent the adoption of web standards or technologies designed to limit things like cross-domain tracking. They can basically say "we won't build these into Chromium, that would hurt our business model". Some of these features may be easy for downstream Blink/V8 projects to implement themselves, others not so much.
The way I see it, making Chromium open source and easy to build third party browsers around, Google has found a way to have their cake (a monopoly) and eat it (squirm out of antitrust litigation). They get to dictate web standards going forward like a monopoly, but when the feds come calling they can point to Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, and all these other Chromium reskins and pretend they don't have that kind of market power.
Spoken like someone who hasn't lived that life. We had it. It was called IE6. It was the pinnacle of browsers when it was released. Then once total market domination was achieved, it stagnated....
Spoken like someone who hasn't lived that life.
We had it. It was called IE6. It was the pinnacle of browsers when it was released. Then once total market domination was achieved, it stagnated. Everybody only tested against it, making using anything else even harder. Because it was so utterly dominant, it made crafting attacks against it that much easier.
The only reason Firefox got the foothold it did is because Microsoft was that bad at maintainence. And even then it took years.
Chrome is now even more dominant than IE was. And that is a big, scary problem...and anyone who remembers Netscape Navigator would likely agree.
To an extent it only works as long as there are alternatives. That Firefox still exists even though it's barely a contender at this point might give Google some cause for concern that people could...
But as far as I can tell, it seems like the tech community in general is pretty good at calling out their BS or nefarious plans early and often
To an extent it only works as long as there are alternatives. That Firefox still exists even though it's barely a contender at this point might give Google some cause for concern that people could go elsewhere, but the more people flock to Chrome or Chromium based browsers, presumably the worse off Firefox will be until the point where it may not even be barely a contender anymore. At that point, I don't know how effective calling out Google will be. There won't be any threat to Google other than judges, lawyers and juries. Can't say that I have a lot of faith in that system overall given the current landscape of things, even if there's been some minor wins here or there.
Honestly, I think I prefer it that way. The browser is the browser. And I would like at least 1 viable option that won't immediately say "yes please" to killing ad-blockers.
I am happy that Firefox continues doing their thing with Gecko (Gecko is performatively better imo), but they didn't do themselves any service by practically making it impossible to embed.
Honestly, I think I prefer it that way. The browser is the browser. And I would like at least 1 viable option that won't immediately say "yes please" to killing ad-blockers.
Problem is, with only one Gecko browser and a handful of barely differentiated forks, we’re effectively stuck with Mozilla’s decisions. If forks diverge too much they become impossible to maintain...
Problem is, with only one Gecko browser and a handful of barely differentiated forks, we’re effectively stuck with Mozilla’s decisions. If forks diverge too much they become impossible to maintain and keep secure, which puts an upper bounds on how different forks can be.
I still miss Camino on macOS, which by far was my favorite Gecko-based browser.
It’s a nitpick, but the web engine that Apple maintains (WebKit) is entirely divorced from Blink/Chromium and has been for over a decade at this point, with the split having occurred over...
It’s a nitpick, but the web engine that Apple maintains (WebKit) is entirely divorced from Blink/Chromium and has been for over a decade at this point, with the split having occurred over unreconcilable differences in opinion between Apple’s and Google’s teams in the late 2000s. WebKit and Blink are now substantially different beasts and nothing Google can do will impact WebKit’s development.
So as things stand, there’s three distinct web engines. Unfortunately, Gecko’s usage is in single-digit percentages (~3%). WebKit only has as much foothold as it does at ~20% because of Safari on iOS, where users can’t be pushed to install some Chrome-variant. I fear that if iOS is opened to alternative browsers, both Google and web devs wanting to only test against a single engine will drive Safari usage down to levels similar to those of Firefox, extinguishing the last significant holdout against Chrome.
As a developer, the most interesting about Arc on Windows for me is the work that The Browser Company is doing to support it, which is building out a toolchain for Swift development on Windows as...
As a developer, the most interesting about Arc on Windows for me is the work that The Browser Company is doing to support it, which is building out a toolchain for Swift development on Windows as well as idiomatic Swift bindings for Windows App SDK, allowing for development of “modern” Windows apps with Swift rather than C#, which is necessary because on macOS Arc’s UI is written in Swift.
I really enjoy writing Swift apps on Apple platforms and it’d be great to be able to use it to port my projects to Windows. I’ve tried writing WinUI/Windows App SDK apps in the past but the idiosyncrasies of C# and MS-isms of the frameworks make for enough friction that such projects don’t last long.
As someone who has previously basically only ever written amateurish server-side code, or CLI scripts, excluding one (1) Java GUI tutorial for the fun of it eons ago: Would “Swift on Windows”-apps...
As someone who has previously basically only ever written amateurish server-side code, or CLI scripts, excluding one (1) Java GUI tutorial for the fun of it eons ago:
Would “Swift on Windows”-apps come with the typical $Apple-OS look and feel? Or only if they used UIKit/{I forget the other framework’s name}? Is that one even portable or what Arc is using here*, or is it pure Swift?
So many questions if I start to think about it. I really know nothing about making Desktop applications, lol.
*Edit: re-reading your comment, you already answered that (I think). Whoops.
Their goal is to have it use WinUI but with the same bindings as Swift UI. So one code-defined UI would (for the most part) work on both macOS and Windows and feel native to users on both. I’m...
Their goal is to have it use WinUI but with the same bindings as Swift UI. So one code-defined UI would (for the most part) work on both macOS and Windows and feel native to users on both. I’m sure there will have to be some flagging between the two but overall it sounds like a great value prop.
Ah, I see. Yeah, a proper “cross platform” UI tooling that’s not just the web-view packaged in more or less efficient ways would be great to have. Wasn’t there some Swift-on-Linux already, too?...
Ah, I see. Yeah, a proper “cross platform” UI tooling that’s not just the web-view packaged in more or less efficient ways would be great to have. Wasn’t there some Swift-on-Linux already, too? Mostly server side probably…
I've been looking into Arc Browser and they sent me an email saying they're starting their beta program for Windows. Wondering if it's worth signing up for. I personally use Firefox and always...
I've been looking into Arc Browser and they sent me an email saying they're starting their beta program for Windows. Wondering if it's worth signing up for. I personally use Firefox and always have for the last 10+ years.
It's built on Blink/V8 so if your reason for using Firefox is to not contribute to Google's domination of the browser market then Arc is not really for you.
It's built on Blink/V8 so if your reason for using Firefox is to not contribute to Google's domination of the browser market then Arc is not really for you.
It's a Chromium browser. What it adds is fluff around that, not a new core. Honestly, the best reason not to use Chrome isn't even Google's tracking (that's just the symptom), it's avoiding the...
It's a Chromium browser. What it adds is fluff around that, not a new core.
Honestly, the best reason not to use Chrome isn't even Google's tracking (that's just the symptom), it's avoiding the total dominance of the Chromium standard. We already have websites showing a sad smiley face when you enter them with a non-Chromium browser, it's Internet Explorer all over again, just worse because Google is actually competent.
So I stick with Firefox for mostly that reason. Maybe a website loads 0.23 seconds slower but at least I'm not handing decisions about global internet standards to Google.
I’m sticking to Firefox on Windows/Linux too, but other browsers can be tempting. Firefox feels much less polished, with things like panes of newly opened windows flashing white for a split second...
I’m sticking to Firefox on Windows/Linux too, but other browsers can be tempting. Firefox feels much less polished, with things like panes of newly opened windows flashing white for a split second even with dark mode enabled, which isn’t actually that big of a deal but acts as one of several papercuts that get grating over time.
I really wish Mozilla would spend at least a year’s worth of development effort on fit and finish exclusively. Firefox needs it.
Honestly, I can bitch a lot about details as you described but I’m still very happy with Firefox. I can’t think of a concrete scenario where I felt held back or genuinely annoyed by something in...
Honestly, I can bitch a lot about details as you described but I’m still very happy with Firefox. I can’t think of a concrete scenario where I felt held back or genuinely annoyed by something in Firefox. They actually are insanely good with polish for a project not run by a billion dollar monopoly and they actually got much better with raw performance. 99% of cases when a website takes long to load, I’m mad at the 30MB of JavaScript that makes it load in 3 seconds in Chrome, not the Chrome-exclusive optimizations that makes it load 3.5 seconds in Firefox.
Feeling very similar about google.com and DuckDuckGo btw.
While I can see the value in this, I also think Firefox lacks in features in some ways and arguably it's just as important if not more than fit and finish. For example, Firefox does not support...
I really wish Mozilla would spend at least a year’s worth of development effort on fit and finish exclusively. Firefox needs it.
While I can see the value in this, I also think Firefox lacks in features in some ways and arguably it's just as important if not more than fit and finish.
For example, Firefox does not support installing a website as an app. I think that's true on both desktop and mobile. On both, the shortcut created is just that, a shortcut that takes you into the full browser with no separation of the service from the browser. Sometimes this isn't a huge deal, and other times it does matter.
I use Messages for Web to read/send messages on my PC that were sent to my Android phone. I go to the website, "install" it as an app, and really it's just using Chrome but in a seamless way where the Chrome browser isn't really part of the interface. It's also automatically treated as a separate window so even if I were using Chrome (which I avoid using, I use Firefox as my daily driver), it wouldn't require extra work on my part to keep the interfaces separate. On mobile, using shortcuts to go into the main browser is less than ideal as well, for similar reasons sometimes but also some different reasons.
This is true with other sites not just Message for Web.
Then there's also the profile support in Firefox, which is pretty bad. There's the fact that it doesn't do chromecast casting, which perhaps they have no control over and that's likely a situation created by Google but it would be a pretty significant missing feature for someone switching off Chrome if that was a feature they were previously using. There's been several other notable features that I don't remember off the top of my head that even the add-on store doesn't fully solve. The profiles thing was one of them, where there's some solid add-ons but they have some quirks, and I couldn't find any actual way to implement casting.
To me, these types of features missing are probably causing a worse experience in trying to get users to switch than some of the "fit and finish" things you mentioned.
Desktop Firefox actually used to have an implementation of PWA installation, though it had to be enabled with a flag. It was removed I want to say a couple of years ago for reasons unknown to me....
Desktop Firefox actually used to have an implementation of PWA installation, though it had to be enabled with a flag. It was removed I want to say a couple of years ago for reasons unknown to me.
I agree that those features are important, but retaining existing users is also important and I’d say that fixing papercuts helps with that as much as bigger features do. Regardless, it’s clear that work needs to be done in areas that Mozilla doesn’t care to focus on.
Pretty sure it does on Android. I've had one installed for quite some time on the beta version and just tried Messages for Web (with the non beta) which also seems to work. Maybe it didn't when...
Firefox does not support installing a website as an app
Pretty sure it does on Android. I've had one installed for quite some time on the beta version and just tried Messages for Web (with the non beta) which also seems to work. Maybe it didn't when you last tried it?
these types of features missing are probably causing a worse experience in trying to get users to switch
For me that's the missing add-on support of Chrome on Android. While on desktop I prefer to use Chrome, on Android it's a no-brainer to use Firefox instead due to the unusability of the web without adblockers and especially cookie request blockers.
You're right, it does seem to support installing PWA on Android. I must have tried a non-PWA site when I messed with it before. This difference changes a bit in the desktop world. Chrome you can...
Pretty sure it does on Android. I've had one installed for quite some time on the beta version and just tried Messages for Web (with the non beta) which also seems to work. Maybe it didn't when you last tried it?
You're right, it does seem to support installing PWA on Android. I must have tried a non-PWA site when I messed with it before. This difference changes a bit in the desktop world. Chrome you can install PWA sites and Edge takes it even further and lets you install any site even non-PWA ones, which obviously the experience isn't the same as a PWA site but it removes most of the browser UI and logically separates the window from the browser, effectively letting it act like a standalone desktop application in most regards. The best Firefox does in this situation is let you create a shortcut which still just takes you to the full browser. There might be some trickery one could do with adding launch commands to the shortcut and isolating profiles or such, but that's overly complicated.
Edit: I actually just realized what site I tried this on that caused me to have that impression of Firefox for Android, and the functionality still appears to be the same.
kbin.social, which is one of the reddit alternative sites that was gaining traction, if I go to that url in Firefox, it has "Add to Home Screen" as an option, which then creates an app icon, but when I open that "app", it merely takes me to the browser. If I do the exact same process in Chrome on Android, it opens up kbin.social as an app with no browser UI.
I don't know if that site is considered a PWA or not, or why some seem to work in Firefox for Android and others don't.
That site can be installed on my device for some reason lol. But I get what you mean. Tildes for example can be only be added as a shortcut to the home screen but from what I understand that's...
That site can be installed on my device for some reason lol. But I get what you mean. Tildes for example can be only be added as a shortcut to the home screen but from what I understand that's because the site itself doesn't support the standard. Firefox is also listed as having only partial support for PWAs on the Wiki, maybe because it works inconsistently.
Huh that's odd it works for you and not for me. I keep my Firefox updated to whatever is the latest in the Play Store, so presumably there must be some other elements possibly within the Android...
Huh that's odd it works for you and not for me. I keep my Firefox updated to whatever is the latest in the Play Store, so presumably there must be some other elements possibly within the Android OS version or such that come into play. It does explain in the wiki some of the technical elements to be considered PWA and apparently it's not all that straightforward to support all elements in all cases, so that would explain Firefox's partial support. Also highlights the feature disparity between Chrome and Firefox and honestly there's not even good ways to tell where some of the fault lies because there's only really 3 browser foundations. Apple goes their own way a lot so Safari often ends up not really being a fair way to compare either Chrome or Firefox to, and at that point when Firefox doesn't do something Chrome does, is it because Google controls so much that it can make things difficult for Firefox to incorporate, or is it because Mozilla is making bad choices?
The more I think about how far behind Firefox actually is when you start to examine the various features, the more grim the future looks.
It does not, or rather it should not. Have you reinstalled it recently? Or perhaps have a bunch of addons that may trigger this?
Firefox feels much less polished, with things like panes of newly opened windows flashing white for a split second even with dark mode enabled, which isn’t actually that big of a deal but acts as one of several papercuts that get grating over time.
It does not, or rather it should not. Have you reinstalled it recently? Or perhaps have a bunch of addons that may trigger this?
My add on load out is pretty lightweight, just uBlock Origin and a vertical tab extension (same happens regardless of which vertical tab extension). Happens across multiple platforms.
My add on load out is pretty lightweight, just uBlock Origin and a vertical tab extension (same happens regardless of which vertical tab extension). Happens across multiple platforms.
Odd, I don't have the same issue on any of the platforms I'm using and I've been an ardent (Dark Mode) FF user for a while now. I couldn't tell you why you're having this issue, but know that it...
Odd, I don't have the same issue on any of the platforms I'm using and I've been an ardent (Dark Mode) FF user for a while now. I couldn't tell you why you're having this issue, but know that it isn't normal behaviour.
Cool to see Arc break out of the Apple shell. I follow them on Twitter and it's cool seeing the small team slowly build out Arc and bring in new features. I personally don't really care for the...
Cool to see Arc break out of the Apple shell. I follow them on Twitter and it's cool seeing the small team slowly build out Arc and bring in new features. I personally don't really care for the Max AI or "Boosts" or "Zaps" but I still find Arc rather refreshing. I used Arc for a bit in the past but just couldn't get used to their concepts of tabs and the UI.
Firefox has been my main choice of browser for a while now, primarily because of the fact that it's not Chrome. While it works okay, it's definitely not as smooth as my experiences with Chrome. Really hope Mozilla sees what Chrome and Arc are doing and make Firefox just a little bit nicer.
It's Chromium based, but I am curious how their vision of the internet is. One of the reasons I keep falling back to Vivaldi is that at the very least they are trying at doing something for power users instead of doing what has always been done (obviously comes from their OG Opera days) - and that their built-in mail and calendar applications are the best on any platform. I signed up for the Arc beta the second they sent it.
Tangentially related, I have mixed feelings on chromium - on one side it's "owned" by Google, not good. But, with more and more companies and services like Arc, Vivaldi, Microsoft, Kiwi, and Brave (fuck that homophobe Brendan Eich though) they make the power that Google individually has, a little bit smaller. Chromium is a bit like Linux in that way, a ubiquitous open* standard. I am happy that Firefox continues doing their thing with Gecko (Gecko is performatively better imo), but they didn't do themselves any service by practically making it impossible to embed.
Edit: I use Firefox and Vivaldi on about equal time, and will often use Firefox at long lengths (primarily because their font rendering is just so much better) and that I support their mission. They are necessary, I have faith in their engineers, but not in their product managers, or the board.
I think your take is a little optimistic about Chrome. I don't think these companies are making Google's control of the internet any smaller, in fact, I think the opposite. All of these companies are building a product that ultimately relies on the core project and the APIs it provides, and so differentiate themselves only a little.
They all rely on the Chrome webstore, which means Google still controls access to all but sideloaded extensions. And as they also control the manifest, they also control what kind of extension are / are not allowed. Worst of all, they control which web standards are incorporated and which are broken, ignored or get bypassed for something bespoke to Chrome.
All of this, and then non-tech people (most people) fall for this illusion of choice, as they see so many options. I think this dilutes the pool and hurts true competitors like Firefox. Anecdotally, most people I've discussed browsers with in real life see basically two categories: Chrome and not Chrome, of which nearly all the non-Chrome categories is made up of chromium derivatives (Firefox and Safari being the only others they know about).
I love Firefox, and for the most part like Mozilla. But I like them mostly for being the only real competitor, and it's a damn shame. The problem is that making browsers is one of the most technically challenging (and mostly non-lucrative if you're not controlling the web or harvesting data) projects you can undertake, so there's little incentive for anyone to build their own engine. Much easier to just build on others. And as chromium is the best supported engine, it's the obvious choice.
Only so much. As long as they aren't contributing to the Blink and V8 projects, they have no real power to temper Google's stranglehold over web standards, they only contribute to it. As far as I know, none of these Chromium derivatives are doing that, and if they were, making any changes that Google does not agree with would put them in a tough spot of needing to maintain their own fork.
I believe they're maintaining their own fork since they've made statements in the past about not going along with manifest V3. They're recent video about using ChatGPT as a search replacement also mentioned the phrase "a post-Google internet"
Maintaining support for manifest v2 is an order of magnitude less complex than maintaining any kind of major changes to the rendering or javascript engines as you are essentially just adding new extension APIs that lives alongside those provided by Google.
Web standards are incredibly complicated, especially CSS. Once you make breaking changes with how Google does any of these things, you take on the full responsibility for maintaining compatibility with the constantly evolving body of web standards. This is a very expensive proposition in the year of our Waluigi 2023. It is why Mozilla, Apple, and Google are the only major organizations left maintaining modern standards-compliant browser engines.
Well yeah, but I don't see people making privacy-oriented arguments against Google pushing CSS web standards. Maybe I'm just naive, but I don't really care which company is leading the way on those kinds of technical things until it starts explicitly encroaching on my privacy, data, or ability to remain anonymous (to a certain extent) (if I want to be). Though I understand that the objection is on the size of their influence, not simply that they're the leader. But as far as I can tell, it seems like the tech community in general is pretty good at calling out their BS or nefarious plans early and often
The problem isn't privacy, the problem is Blink/V8 becoming the new Internet Explorer. Everybody building against one browser engine with it's special enhancements hurts the web ecosystem as a whole.
Google having a stranglehold over web standards does still hurt privacy, even if you don't realize it. It means they can prevent the adoption of web standards or technologies designed to limit things like cross-domain tracking. They can basically say "we won't build these into Chromium, that would hurt our business model". Some of these features may be easy for downstream Blink/V8 projects to implement themselves, others not so much.
The way I see it, making Chromium open source and easy to build third party browsers around, Google has found a way to have their cake (a monopoly) and eat it (squirm out of antitrust litigation). They get to dictate web standards going forward like a monopoly, but when the feds come calling they can point to Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, and all these other Chromium reskins and pretend they don't have that kind of market power.
Spoken like someone who hasn't lived that life.
We had it. It was called IE6. It was the pinnacle of browsers when it was released. Then once total market domination was achieved, it stagnated. Everybody only tested against it, making using anything else even harder. Because it was so utterly dominant, it made crafting attacks against it that much easier.
The only reason Firefox got the foothold it did is because Microsoft was that bad at maintainence. And even then it took years.
Chrome is now even more dominant than IE was. And that is a big, scary problem...and anyone who remembers Netscape Navigator would likely agree.
To an extent it only works as long as there are alternatives. That Firefox still exists even though it's barely a contender at this point might give Google some cause for concern that people could go elsewhere, but the more people flock to Chrome or Chromium based browsers, presumably the worse off Firefox will be until the point where it may not even be barely a contender anymore. At that point, I don't know how effective calling out Google will be. There won't be any threat to Google other than judges, lawyers and juries. Can't say that I have a lot of faith in that system overall given the current landscape of things, even if there's been some minor wins here or there.
Honestly, I think I prefer it that way. The browser is the browser. And I would like at least 1 viable option that won't immediately say "yes please" to killing ad-blockers.
Problem is, with only one Gecko browser and a handful of barely differentiated forks, we’re effectively stuck with Mozilla’s decisions. If forks diverge too much they become impossible to maintain and keep secure, which puts an upper bounds on how different forks can be.
I still miss Camino on macOS, which by far was my favorite Gecko-based browser.
It’s a nitpick, but the web engine that Apple maintains (WebKit) is entirely divorced from Blink/Chromium and has been for over a decade at this point, with the split having occurred over unreconcilable differences in opinion between Apple’s and Google’s teams in the late 2000s. WebKit and Blink are now substantially different beasts and nothing Google can do will impact WebKit’s development.
So as things stand, there’s three distinct web engines. Unfortunately, Gecko’s usage is in single-digit percentages (~3%). WebKit only has as much foothold as it does at ~20% because of Safari on iOS, where users can’t be pushed to install some Chrome-variant. I fear that if iOS is opened to alternative browsers, both Google and web devs wanting to only test against a single engine will drive Safari usage down to levels similar to those of Firefox, extinguishing the last significant holdout against Chrome.
It's just another Chrome-clone, isn't it? I looked at the MacOS videos of it, and I don't get what is special about this?
As a developer, the most interesting about Arc on Windows for me is the work that The Browser Company is doing to support it, which is building out a toolchain for Swift development on Windows as well as idiomatic Swift bindings for Windows App SDK, allowing for development of “modern” Windows apps with Swift rather than C#, which is necessary because on macOS Arc’s UI is written in Swift.
I really enjoy writing Swift apps on Apple platforms and it’d be great to be able to use it to port my projects to Windows. I’ve tried writing WinUI/Windows App SDK apps in the past but the idiosyncrasies of C# and MS-isms of the frameworks make for enough friction that such projects don’t last long.
As someone who has a weird fascination with working with Swift cross-platform, this is amazing news.
As someone who has previously basically only ever written amateurish server-side code, or CLI scripts, excluding one (1) Java GUI tutorial for the fun of it eons ago:
Would “Swift on Windows”-apps come with the typical $Apple-OS look and feel? Or only if they used UIKit/{I forget the other framework’s name}? Is that one even portable
or what Arc is using here*, or is it pure Swift?So many questions if I start to think about it. I really know nothing about making Desktop applications, lol.
*Edit: re-reading your comment, you already answered that (I think). Whoops.
Their goal is to have it use WinUI but with the same bindings as Swift UI. So one code-defined UI would (for the most part) work on both macOS and Windows and feel native to users on both. I’m sure there will have to be some flagging between the two but overall it sounds like a great value prop.
Ah, I see. Yeah, a proper “cross platform” UI tooling that’s not just the web-view packaged in more or less efficient ways would be great to have. Wasn’t there some Swift-on-Linux already, too? Mostly server side probably…
I've been looking into Arc Browser and they sent me an email saying they're starting their beta program for Windows. Wondering if it's worth signing up for. I personally use Firefox and always have for the last 10+ years.
It's built on Blink/V8 so if your reason for using Firefox is to not contribute to Google's domination of the browser market then Arc is not really for you.
It's a Chromium browser. What it adds is fluff around that, not a new core.
Honestly, the best reason not to use Chrome isn't even Google's tracking (that's just the symptom), it's avoiding the total dominance of the Chromium standard. We already have websites showing a sad smiley face when you enter them with a non-Chromium browser, it's Internet Explorer all over again, just worse because Google is actually competent.
So I stick with Firefox for mostly that reason. Maybe a website loads 0.23 seconds slower but at least I'm not handing decisions about global internet standards to Google.
I’m sticking to Firefox on Windows/Linux too, but other browsers can be tempting. Firefox feels much less polished, with things like panes of newly opened windows flashing white for a split second even with dark mode enabled, which isn’t actually that big of a deal but acts as one of several papercuts that get grating over time.
I really wish Mozilla would spend at least a year’s worth of development effort on fit and finish exclusively. Firefox needs it.
Honestly, I can bitch a lot about details as you described but I’m still very happy with Firefox. I can’t think of a concrete scenario where I felt held back or genuinely annoyed by something in Firefox. They actually are insanely good with polish for a project not run by a billion dollar monopoly and they actually got much better with raw performance. 99% of cases when a website takes long to load, I’m mad at the 30MB of JavaScript that makes it load in 3 seconds in Chrome, not the Chrome-exclusive optimizations that makes it load 3.5 seconds in Firefox.
Feeling very similar about google.com and DuckDuckGo btw.
While I can see the value in this, I also think Firefox lacks in features in some ways and arguably it's just as important if not more than fit and finish.
For example, Firefox does not support installing a website as an app. I think that's true on both desktop and mobile. On both, the shortcut created is just that, a shortcut that takes you into the full browser with no separation of the service from the browser. Sometimes this isn't a huge deal, and other times it does matter.
I use Messages for Web to read/send messages on my PC that were sent to my Android phone. I go to the website, "install" it as an app, and really it's just using Chrome but in a seamless way where the Chrome browser isn't really part of the interface. It's also automatically treated as a separate window so even if I were using Chrome (which I avoid using, I use Firefox as my daily driver), it wouldn't require extra work on my part to keep the interfaces separate. On mobile, using shortcuts to go into the main browser is less than ideal as well, for similar reasons sometimes but also some different reasons.
This is true with other sites not just Message for Web.
Then there's also the profile support in Firefox, which is pretty bad. There's the fact that it doesn't do chromecast casting, which perhaps they have no control over and that's likely a situation created by Google but it would be a pretty significant missing feature for someone switching off Chrome if that was a feature they were previously using. There's been several other notable features that I don't remember off the top of my head that even the add-on store doesn't fully solve. The profiles thing was one of them, where there's some solid add-ons but they have some quirks, and I couldn't find any actual way to implement casting.
To me, these types of features missing are probably causing a worse experience in trying to get users to switch than some of the "fit and finish" things you mentioned.
Desktop Firefox actually used to have an implementation of PWA installation, though it had to be enabled with a flag. It was removed I want to say a couple of years ago for reasons unknown to me.
I agree that those features are important, but retaining existing users is also important and I’d say that fixing papercuts helps with that as much as bigger features do. Regardless, it’s clear that work needs to be done in areas that Mozilla doesn’t care to focus on.
Pretty sure it does on Android. I've had one installed for quite some time on the beta version and just tried Messages for Web (with the non beta) which also seems to work. Maybe it didn't when you last tried it?
For me that's the missing add-on support of Chrome on Android. While on desktop I prefer to use Chrome, on Android it's a no-brainer to use Firefox instead due to the unusability of the web without adblockers and especially cookie request blockers.
You're right, it does seem to support installing PWA on Android. I must have tried a non-PWA site when I messed with it before. This difference changes a bit in the desktop world. Chrome you can install PWA sites and Edge takes it even further and lets you install any site even non-PWA ones, which obviously the experience isn't the same as a PWA site but it removes most of the browser UI and logically separates the window from the browser, effectively letting it act like a standalone desktop application in most regards. The best Firefox does in this situation is let you create a shortcut which still just takes you to the full browser. There might be some trickery one could do with adding launch commands to the shortcut and isolating profiles or such, but that's overly complicated.
Edit: I actually just realized what site I tried this on that caused me to have that impression of Firefox for Android, and the functionality still appears to be the same.
kbin.social, which is one of the reddit alternative sites that was gaining traction, if I go to that url in Firefox, it has "Add to Home Screen" as an option, which then creates an app icon, but when I open that "app", it merely takes me to the browser. If I do the exact same process in Chrome on Android, it opens up kbin.social as an app with no browser UI.
I don't know if that site is considered a PWA or not, or why some seem to work in Firefox for Android and others don't.
That site can be installed on my device for some reason lol. But I get what you mean. Tildes for example can be only be added as a shortcut to the home screen but from what I understand that's because the site itself doesn't support the standard. Firefox is also listed as having only partial support for PWAs on the Wiki, maybe because it works inconsistently.
Huh that's odd it works for you and not for me. I keep my Firefox updated to whatever is the latest in the Play Store, so presumably there must be some other elements possibly within the Android OS version or such that come into play. It does explain in the wiki some of the technical elements to be considered PWA and apparently it's not all that straightforward to support all elements in all cases, so that would explain Firefox's partial support. Also highlights the feature disparity between Chrome and Firefox and honestly there's not even good ways to tell where some of the fault lies because there's only really 3 browser foundations. Apple goes their own way a lot so Safari often ends up not really being a fair way to compare either Chrome or Firefox to, and at that point when Firefox doesn't do something Chrome does, is it because Google controls so much that it can make things difficult for Firefox to incorporate, or is it because Mozilla is making bad choices?
The more I think about how far behind Firefox actually is when you start to examine the various features, the more grim the future looks.
It does not, or rather it should not. Have you reinstalled it recently? Or perhaps have a bunch of addons that may trigger this?
My add on load out is pretty lightweight, just uBlock Origin and a vertical tab extension (same happens regardless of which vertical tab extension). Happens across multiple platforms.
Odd, I don't have the same issue on any of the platforms I'm using and I've been an ardent (Dark Mode) FF user for a while now. I couldn't tell you why you're having this issue, but know that it isn't normal behaviour.
Cool to see Arc break out of the Apple shell. I follow them on Twitter and it's cool seeing the small team slowly build out Arc and bring in new features. I personally don't really care for the Max AI or "Boosts" or "Zaps" but I still find Arc rather refreshing. I used Arc for a bit in the past but just couldn't get used to their concepts of tabs and the UI.
Firefox has been my main choice of browser for a while now, primarily because of the fact that it's not Chrome. While it works okay, it's definitely not as smooth as my experiences with Chrome. Really hope Mozilla sees what Chrome and Arc are doing and make Firefox just a little bit nicer.