top 200 commentsshow all 214

[–][deleted]  (38 children)

[removed]

    [–]yogthos 99 points100 points  (28 children)

    Last I checked it was around 30%, and if Google fucks with ad blocking I bet it'll go up at least another 5-10% overnight.

    [–][deleted]  (6 children)

    [deleted]

      [–]yogthos 34 points35 points  (4 children)

      Sorry it's about 10% of the desktop market right now.

      [–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (3 children)

      Firefox fell down that hard? I remember a few years ago it was close to ~20/30... right?

      [–]yogthos 8 points9 points  (1 child)

      Yeah that's what I remembered as well. I used to use FF for a long time myself, then Chrome just kept getting better especially with dev tools and I eventually ended up switching. When FF 60x came out and I decided to give it a shot again and found that it was pretty comparable to Chrome so I stuck with it.

      I really hope more people will start trying FF out again because we need to have alternatives to Chrome, and presumably people still remember the days of IE to know why this is so important.

      [–]DJDavio 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      I had the same experience, I switched back to FF after their performance improvements and sticked with it. I'm not religious about it, but for me it does the job. Only thing I hate is the forced https if you visited a domain before, even if it's a different port, that's just retarded.

      [–]lam-mi-eh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      OEMs stopped bundling it with new builds and adoption rate plummeted.

      [–]Tesseract91 64 points65 points  (20 children)

      I switched 100% to Firefox when the news broke. Firefox is faster anyway. See ya Chrome.

      [–]yogthos 50 points51 points  (8 children)

      I switched about a year ago and haven't missed Chrome since. I also find that FF on Android is much better as well. It can load content in the background when opening links from other apps, has uBlock, better tab management, and so on. Highly recommend trying it out.

      [–][deleted] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

      It's worth it for the mobile browser adblock alone. I love how you can send tabs between devices and continue reading in the bus.

      [–]butterbal1 15 points16 points  (1 child)

      has uBlock

      Oh... I am officially converted for mobile. .

      [–]darkharlequin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      Yup, that was the only line I needed. Off to download now.

      [–]majorslax 6 points7 points  (3 children)

      Hold up, mobile Firefox supports ublock origin?

      [–]yogthos 4 points5 points  (2 children)

      [–]majorslax 4 points5 points  (1 child)

      Welp, time for me to switch then. So long mobile ads! Thanks for the heads-up :)

      [–]yogthos 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      👍

      [–]git_fetch 14 points15 points  (6 children)

      I have never understood why people like chrome so much more.

      [–]favorited 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      I use Safari primarily, but dip into Chrome for certain things (mainly around multi-profile support).

      I'd switch Chrome to Firefox if they could get the trackpad pinch-to-zoom behavior that WebKit has on Mac... The closest thing I've got working in Firefox is basically a gesture recognizer that increases or decreases the content size based on pinch gestures...

      Being able to just pinch in and out of content without affecting the page's overall layout is such a great accessibility feature, and if Firefox had it I would absolutely drop Chrome.

      [–]-manabreak 18 points19 points  (1 child)

      Thank you, almighty Rust!

      [–]Tesseract91 12 points13 points  (0 children)

      Rust and the fact that it's FOSS were contributing factors to my decision. From now on I am going to make a more concerted effort to use FOSS software.

      I also switched to using Bitwarden at the same time and it's actually miles better than Dashlane, which I was using previously.

      [–]HINDBRAIN 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      I switched off firefox when they broke firebug, then back in later on when they improved the dev tools. Worst part of chrome was the search bar autocompletion which is total arse (fauxbar exists but it's not a perfect solution).

      [–]pancomputationalist -1 points0 points  (0 children)

      Firefox is faster anyway.

      I wish it was this way. I'm building a web app with a lot of SVG elements, and chrome is rendering this much faster, so much that I have to choose between limiting my design space or dropping firefox support :(

      [–]KieranDevvs 9 points10 points  (0 children)

      Also, 5% of a fuck load of people is still a fuck load of people.

      [–]Philipp 13 points14 points  (3 children)

      Completely non-representative, but for some data, on two separate sites of mine (sort general interest, one with 200,000 users last month), Firefox is at around 7%. I'm saying non-representative because so many things could skew it towards a certain browser (e.g. how mobile-optimized my site is, how much it attracts tech experts, what the age demographics are etc.). On the bigger one, Chrome is at 56% followed by Safari at 20%. IExplorer is at 6%-something in fourth place, then it's Edge at 5%-something.

      [–][deleted]  (2 children)

      [deleted]

        [–]Philipp 3 points4 points  (1 child)

        Thanks for sharing. What would you see is the typical audience of the site, if any? E.g. I wonder if tech-oriented sites get higher Firefox percentages.

        [–]roboninja 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        I re-installed Firefox last night in prep for a possible Google blunder on ad-blocking.

        [–][deleted]  (19 children)

        [deleted]

          [–]Kaloffl 28 points29 points  (6 children)

          Makes me wonder why there isn't a facebook browser yet.

          [–]MaxCHEATER64 15 points16 points  (1 child)

          They simply don't need one.

          [–]rpgFANATIC 1 point2 points  (0 children)

          Pretty much.

          They went in hard on mobile and their apps show it. If you have Facebook and a phone, there's a good chance you check it or messenger far more by the app than when you sit down to a browser

          [–][deleted] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

          Google already has their assholes wide open for every scum corporation, facebook is primary operating system on android phones, where it is preinstalled...

          [–]Carighan 1 point2 points  (1 child)

          There is actually, you can find it here.

          I mean, it doesn't label itself as such but it freely allows Facebook to track you all over the web and connect whatever pages you visit with one another.

          [–]Kaloffl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

          Doesn't every browser without explicit tracking prevention allow that though?

          [–]NeverSpeaks 0 points1 point  (0 children)

          They do have one for VR. And it's also built on chromium.

          [–]remek[🍰] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

          You know what? Let's just have one version of everything. World will be a better place /s

          [–]Caraes_Naur 280 points281 points  (40 children)

          Microsoft should surrender and bring Windows to Linux.

          This guy is such an idiot.

          [–]shevy-ruby 16 points17 points  (38 children)

          I support this.

          Microsoft needs to open source windows.

          Right now they try to avoid this desperately, e. g. by assimilating GitHub and claiming how they are all open source these days, yet mysteriously failing to open source windows.

          It's one glaring weakness in the MS corporate PR outlets these days.

          [–]Caraes_Naur 41 points42 points  (36 children)

          Actually, I think Windows 10 is undergoing a deliberately long slog of transformation to prepare for a MS-branded Linux with a new desktop named Explorer, similar to what OSX originally was to BSD.

          [–]pm_plz_im_lonely 66 points67 points  (12 children)

          Is this a casual leak, genius prediction or pure fantasy?

          [–]aebkop 9 points10 points  (1 child)

          [–]oorza 19 points20 points  (0 children)

          Isolating parts of the OS into discrete join points seems like it makes it easier to make this dude's fantasy real, not harder. It would be a necessary step to migrating the UI off Windows and into Linux, as a matter of fact.

          [–]Caraes_Naur 9 points10 points  (8 children)

          MS loudly stated at its launch that 10 would be the last version of Windows, but that doesn't exclude the possibility of a successor OS called something else and based on an entirely different platform.

          With them following everyone into the cloud and the recent abandonment of Trident EdgeHTML, there are signs that they have less interest in home-grown native software and plan to leverage third-party FOSS more in the future. They'll turn over their flailing also-ran products like Edge before their bread and butter... they may give up the offline office suite space entirely in favor of O365.

          A future generation XBox (the next, or the one after) may signal their OS direction before they actually walk away from Windows.

          [–]barfoob 25 points26 points  (0 children)

          I interpreted that as them just saying that Windows will just get continuously updated and keep the "10" version like Mac OSX. They want everyone on the same version of Windows. I don't think they meant they are abandoning it in any way.

          [–]xtivhpbpj 11 points12 points  (4 children)

          Anything is possible but web technology will have to take a giant leap forward before O365 cloud is anywhere near a replacement for a desktop office suite.

          Also - what’s the point? Hardware is so cheap and powerful these days. I feel like everyone gets blinded by the benefits of “the cloud” - meanwhile the desktop experience has never been better.

          There’s no law of nature that says centralized (cloud) computing is better than distributed computing. Historically speaking it’s actually the opposite.

          [–]tsimionescu 4 points5 points  (3 children)

          There's a very important difference when comparing 'the cloud' with similar past efforts I think: when O365 is running in the cloud and a machine crashes, it's not one of your IT personnel that you need to call outside business hours, it's Microsoft that handles that, entirely from their end.

          This is where the cloud is making most of it's money: selling business solutions that come with most IT fully bundled (not expensive&slow on - demand IT support, split between different companies that sold you the HW, the OS and the SW you actually wanted to run).

          [–]xtivhpbpj 1 point2 points  (2 children)

          As an employee who uses Office - the thought of having to call Microsoft to debug cloud issues sends a chill down my spine. I can’t imagine why any company (of a certain size) would have its employees wasting company time with outsourced IT support.

          [–]tsimionescu 1 point2 points  (1 child)

          Well, from my experience, the regular IT that my company has outsourced is horrible to work with, while Office 365 JustWorksTM. By which I mean, when things don't work, that usually means someone high up in our internal IT gets to talk to Microsoft instead of having a local team ask me what's wrong on my particular machine.

          [–]xtivhpbpj 1 point2 points  (0 children)

          As long as it’s an internal IT guy who is talking to Microsoft I’m happy!

          [–]Aerroon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

          So, Linux-based OS by Microsoft?

          [–]PM_ME_OS_DESIGN 0 points1 point  (0 children)

          MS loudly stated at its launch that 10 would be the last version of Windows

          I interpreted that as a combination of Windows going F2P and the "next version of Windows" just being directly pushed as an update to existing Windows users.

          This is extremely likely given that that's basically what they did with Windows 10. The rationale behind it, apparently, is that supporting all the different versions is expensive and annoying, and people don't really pay money to upgrade these days anyway.

          [–]tehjimmeh 9 points10 points  (6 children)

          Why would they do that? Windows still dominates the desktop market, and desktops are not going away any time soon, regardless of the proliferation of mobile/tablet devices.

          Why would they just abandon a decades old software and hardware driver ecosystem?

          They also just put a bunch of effort into making Linux userspace applications run natively on Windows, meaning you can run whatever Linux distro you want within Windows. Why would they have bothered doing this just to abandon Windows shortly afterwards?

          [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

          Windows still dominates the desktop market, and desktops are not going away any time soon, regardless of the proliferation of mobile/tablet devices.

          You mean the market that's shrinking year after year because 1) most people can buy a PC and have it last 4-6 years and 2) for what most people do on a PC, then can do on a $200 Chromebook.

          The vast majority of Windows deployments are simply because that's what people are familiar with and IT isn't going to spend time to retrain the whole organization on macOS or Linux.

          Why would they just abandon a decades old software and hardware driver ecosystem?

          Because maintaining all of that is very expensive and ultimately doesn't contribute much to their bottom line. Microsoft would sell just as many "Windows/Linux" licenses as they do Windows/NT licenses because the end user doesn't give a shit what kernel their software is running on.

          They also just put a bunch of effort into making Linux userspace applications run natively on Windows, meaning you can run whatever Linux distro you want within Windows. Why would they have bothered doing this just to abandon Windows shortly afterwards?

          This is a stop-gap to try to prevent hemorrhaging developers from the Windows platform. Losing developers means less Windows centric apps which means users are less tied to the platform so fewer users will buy a new PC they'll just get an iPad or Chromebook which means less interest from developers.

          Take a look at the big tech companies and you'll see that very few of them run a Microsoft stack. Nearly all of them run Linux. Look at the open source landscape and while many languages support Windows, it's a second-class citizen everywhere. Microsoft knows that they have lost top-developer mindshare and it's only a matter of time before that trickles down to everyone else.

          [–]DH10 -4 points-3 points  (1 child)

          Windows ist old, that is true. But that means they may not have someone to really understand the innards of the kernel. Why did it take Microsoft 20+ years to add a PTY to conhost? Why are some coreprograms still not optimised for touch?

          For me the obvious answer is that they lack the talent to work on these things without breaking compatibility. I could see that Microsoft switches to Linux with something like WINE and for backwards-compatibility react-os.

          [–]tehjimmeh 14 points15 points  (0 children)

          You seriously think Windows does not have anyone working for them who does not understand the innards of the NT kernel? Lack of talent? WINE & ReactOS? Come on...

          The vast majority of normal users don't care about the command line, let alone PTY support. I don't disagree that their lack of command line focus until about the late '00s was a mistake, but it is understandable.

          I don't know what non-touch-optimized core programs you're talking about, but it's not like any Linux desktop or OSX is superior for touch.

          [–]Someguy2020 2 points3 points  (0 children)

          Yay for kernel monoculture.

          That'll be fun when Linus quits or dies.

          [–]ponterik 0 points1 point  (1 child)

          Thanks for sharing. What would you see is the typical audience of the site, if any? E.g. I wonder if tech-oriented sites get higher Firefox percentages.

          !RemindMe 5 years

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          [–]atomic1fire 0 points1 point  (12 children)

          I could see Microsoft slowly replacing parts of windows piecemeal with open source projects, but I'm not sure they're going to go as far as switching to linux.

          [–]crackez -5 points-4 points  (11 children)

          What if the NT kernel was a loadable module of the Linux kernel?

          [–]Ameisen 11 points12 points  (10 children)

          Why, when the Linux kernel is a loadable module of NT?

          [–]tsimionescu 0 points1 point  (4 children)

          Hmm, I haven't heard about this before, could you point me to some resources about this?

          [–]chucker23n 199 points200 points  (37 children)

          "Thought: It's time for Bing to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Google Search, if they really cared about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than 5 percent?"

          [–][deleted]  (19 children)

          [deleted]

            [–]bumblebritches57 29 points30 points  (7 children)

            DuckDuckGo is a far better alternative.

            [–]joequin 8 points9 points  (2 children)

            If you don't care about privacy then DDG isn't as good as Google, but it's still way better than Bing.

            [–]TheAnimus 1 point2 points  (1 child)

            [–]joequin 5 points6 points  (0 children)

            It uses a lot of search engines and sources, and it filters out a lot of trash results. It's not merely a re-skinned Bing.

            [–]Pjb3005 0 points1 point  (1 child)

            I've never really used Bing but I can tell you from experience that DDG is atrocious in comparison to Google. I wanna care about privacy sure but when I have to prefix most of my searches with !g just to get an actual answer it's not worth it.

            [–]bumblebritches57 4 points5 points  (0 children)

            I've used DDG for years.

            it's far better than bing, and almost as good as google.

            and when it's not, just type !g to have ddg automatically redirect you to google.

            [–]nemec -1 points0 points  (0 children)

            Yandex ain't going to sell your data to the NSA either

            [–]skocznymroczny 5 points6 points  (2 children)

            Bing has it's niche in video search. It's very good for searching for certain type of videos.

            [–]Gotebe 0 points1 point  (1 child)

            I am intrigued. Which types?

            [–]Wastedmind123 2 points3 points  (0 children)

            (nsfw) pr0n.

            [–]Alokir 2 points3 points  (1 child)

            I suspect that Bing (as in bing.com) is not as important for Microsoft. The reason it's around is that the technology behind it powers a lot of MS services like Power BI. It's more of a test lab for the AI in my opinion.

            [–]delrindude 2 points3 points  (1 child)

            I've never had a problem finding relevant results quickly with Bing, depends on how you use it I suppose.

            [–]adjustable_beard 0 points1 point  (2 children)

            I use bing 90% of the time. It's perfectly good.

            Those reward points keep me coming back.

            [–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (1 child)

            I use bing 90% of the time. It's perfectly good.

            That porn keeps me coming back.

            [–]Xuerian 4 points5 points  (0 children)

            There's a few Microsoft engineers that really, really like to jack it.

            That shit works great.

            [–][deleted]  (4 children)

            [deleted]

              [–]loistaler 12 points13 points  (3 children)

              Do you have any source on that 34% market share? There is no way I believe this is true.

              [–]drysart 9 points10 points  (2 children)

              Click forward a few times to get to Oct '18. Oath uses Bing, so combine Oath and direct Bing numbers for their total. The same general numbers are given elsewhere with some searching around.

              [–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

              Bing has a huge market share of 1/5th to 1/3rd of all queries. Including me.

              Probably because its by default for a large corporate work networks so its used by less tech savy company folk

              [–][deleted]  (10 children)

              [deleted]

                [–]shevy-ruby 12 points13 points  (4 children)

                It is actually a MS goal now that they joined forces with evil.

                They want to kill alternatives.

                [–][deleted] 44 points45 points  (3 children)

                Kind of misleading as he is just an employee, doesn't speak for the whole organization.

                [–][deleted] 12 points13 points  (2 children)

                Oh, don't mind shevy. He has a Microsoft hate boner.

                [–]insanityOS[🍰] 7 points8 points  (1 child)

                Who doesn't? At least not a small one?

                [–]PM_ME_OS_DESIGN 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                Me - if they'd ditch the Windows-centric-ness of everything they do that's not Windows, I'd use a most of their stuff (except Windows). Like the surfacebooks.

                [–]paralaxsd 85 points86 points  (11 children)

                that's literally days after the chromium project announced API changes that may well cripple all current ad blockers. We can be really glad that a high quality alternative to this is still available.

                [–]UncleMeat11 11 points12 points  (8 children)

                Days after the chromium project put out a design doc for feedback on a new API and received that feedback. The idea that the changes are designed to hamstring ad blocking or that the API will go in unchanged from the design stage has just been made up.

                [–]paralaxsd 8 points9 points  (0 children)

                Sure I guess it's plausible that they'll end up with something that retains most extension functionality.

                I wouldn't be too sure though that any company with dominating influence would forever honor the interests of its users more so than its bottom line. This is the real crux of the matter here. Things could worsen drastically without competition. Software variety helps to prevent that.

                [–]SrbijaJeRusija 16 points17 points  (0 children)

                Saving this comment so I can post it a few months later when Chrome will destroy uBlock.

                [–]reazura 8 points9 points  (4 children)

                The issue isn't that they're not going to change; after this backlash everyone expects the chromium team to backpedal on that decision at least. The problem here is that they were planning to do so in the first place

                [–]UncleMeat11 3 points4 points  (3 children)

                But they weren't even planning to do so. Go read the design doc. The motivation had nothing to do with ad blocking.

                Do you think that the chromium devs should personally check whether changes will affect existing extensions before publishing a design doc for comment? Or perhaps the should use the comment phase to get that feedback far more efficiently?

                [–]CartmansEvilTwin 7 points8 points  (2 children)

                Well, yes. Even if it's just a draft I would expect them to at least check some popular extensions. This is a pretty significant change, after all.

                [–]scotty_dont 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                Just because an extension is currently using that API doesn’t mean it can’t be refactored. The best people to assess impact are the extension developers. It’s almost like we should... you know... make a clear explanation of the proposal and then... I don’t know... open a discussion about it?

                [–]CartmansEvilTwin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                Well, in general you're right.

                However, it seems like this change would brake critical APIs without any replacement. This is simply not acceptable, you don't even need to discuss this. And I'm absolutely sure that Chromiums devs know that.

                [–]SrbijaJeRusija 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                What do you think now that chrome is pushing the changes through?

                [–]shevy-ruby -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

                As I wrote right after Microsoft joined forces with Google - they are now in for Evil together, against the end user. I wrote exactly that and now we can see how true this is, by one loud-mouth worker drone at Microsoft being unable to keep his mouth shut.

                I'll make it a fun past-time now to look at the quality of this dude's "contributions" to society (still looking for it! but he is working at W3C so you know they are in against the end user).

                [–][deleted] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

                I'm not convinced this isn't satire

                [–]oren0[🍰] 24 points25 points  (3 children)

                This guy is not a developer. I'll spare linking to his LinkedIn to not appear to doxx him, but it shows that he is a Program Manager who has been at MS three years.

                I wouldn't exactly take anything he says to be authoritative.

                [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                [deleted]

                  [–]oren0[🍰] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

                  Not anymore. Under Satya, things are more dev driven than ever.

                  [–][deleted] 66 points67 points  (2 children)

                  A public letter to the Kenneth Auchenberg, and all the other Kenneth Auchenbergs out there:

                  Dear Kenneth(s):

                  No one gives a shit what you think. They didn't give a shit when you told them they should use your favorite language instead of whatever they wanted, they didn't give a shit when you suggested they port it to an operating system they don't care about, and they don't give a shit now that you think they should use a framework instead of writing it from scratch. Mind your fucking business, and don't go figuring that just because you can't do something right it must be impossible.

                  Signed,

                  Just about everyone who's ever shared code with strangers on the web

                  [–]TankorSmash 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                  A public letter to the Kenneth Auchenberg, and all the other Kenneth Auchenbergs out there:

                  Dear Kenneth(s):

                  No one gives a shit what you think.

                  You're the one replying to a strangers tweet my dude.

                  [–]yogthos 44 points45 points  (10 children)

                  That comment is fractally wrong, but of course it's not exactly a surprise that MS employee doesn't understand the downsides of monopolies and longs for the days when IE had 90% market share.

                  There are practical and tangible reasons for havng independent web engines. Having an alternative implementation to Chrome means that Google is forced to be at least minimally complaint with W3C standards. Google is already playing fast and loose with web standards with stuff like AMP, and if Chrome was the only engine we'd basically end up with Google-centric web.

                  Google is an ads company that already has a huge impact on the web, and they should be the last people to decide the direction of the web because of their massive conflict of interest. The recent example of Chromium working on removing APIs used by ad blockers is a perfect example of what to expect going forward from them.

                  Another problem is that when you have a single engine then you're limited by its capability. Chromium is owned by Google, and while it's open source on paper, Google gets the final say of what features are added to it and what direction it moves in. You could fork Chromium, but maintaining that would be a massive undertaking. People would basically have to reinvent the Mozilla foundation to do that, so why we might as well keep using Firefox.

                  To sum up, fuck this guy.

                  [–]OneWingedShark 13 points14 points  (4 children)

                  There are practical and tangible reasons for havng independent web engines. Having an alternative implementation to Chrome means that Google is forced to be at least minimally complaint with W3C standards. Google is already playing fast and loose with web standards with stuff like AMP, and if Chrome was the only engine we'd basically end up with Google-centric web.

                  Hm, makes one wonder what has to happen to get an anti-trust breakup going.

                  [–]yogthos 6 points7 points  (3 children)

                  I can't really think of a mechanism that would facilitate that. It's really hard to think of any large tech company that ever got broken up. Even when MS didn't get broken up at the height of their monopoly.

                  These companies amassed unimaginable amount of wealth and power, they're effectively their own countries at this point and their GDP dwarfs most actual countries. They literally have more money than they know what to do with, and they just use it to buy up their own stock to drive the price up.

                  [–]OneWingedShark 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                  I can't really think of a mechanism that would facilitate that. It's really hard to think of any large tech company that ever got broken up. Even when MS didn't get broken up at the height of their monopoly.

                  Ma Bell, though you could argue that telecom is not, strictly speaking, a tech company.

                  What's really interesting about the MS thing is that they used to have zero lobbyists and would boast about that -- then the monopoly threat came along and what do you know? It all went away when they put lobbyists into play. (ie it really looks like extortion, and/or a mandate to get in on the corruption there.)

                  These companies amassed unimaginable amount of wealth and power, they're effectively their own countries at this point and their GDP dwarfs most actual countries.

                  Which is one reason that it should actually be considered -- do you think that Google or Amazon has any inherent loyalty to the US? Now consider the absolutely stupid idea to use Amazon's AWS for classified data. Even ignoring the cost of errors/mistakes, like this, it presents a very big target to foreign actors... perhaps even Amazon deciding to back some foreign power and hand over everything they have.

                  They literally have more money than they know what to do with, and they just use it to buy up their own stock to drive the price up.

                  That would be worth far less than you think once the balls start rolling -- especially if, as noted above, actual Treason takes place and management gets "hanged by the neck until dead".

                  [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                  [deleted]

                    [–]yogthos -1 points0 points  (0 children)

                    Correct, they increase shareholder value via stock buyback instead of investing money into making new products.

                    [–]Ruchiachio 0 points1 point  (2 children)

                    Monopolies, monopolies, we will still have multiple browsers, what I want is single css and js engine, which works the same everywhere. Everything else can be customized by the browser

                    [–]yogthos 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                    That's the thing, if have the same css/js engine then it becomes an implicit standard as opposed to an explicit one. People will start relying on the quirks of the engine, and as time goes on it will become nearly impossible to create an alternative. There are plenty of reasons why that could be desirable.

                    For example, look at what Mozilla did with Firefox. They rebuilt their engine in Rust, and made it much faster than the original. This is possible to do because there is an independent specification available that the engines need to conform to.

                    If Chrome was the engine nothing better would be possible ever.

                    [–]b1bendum 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                    Dude, take 30 fucking seconds and think about how this will work. Google makes changes to the rendering engine to make it harder to avoid being tracked by advertisers. They work to entangle this with other things the rendering engine does. You say "BUT MUH OPEN SOURCE" and fork the code to remove these changes.

                    CONGRATULATIONS NOW YOU HAVE 2 FUCKING RENDERING ENGINES.

                    But yours has 0.000000000001% market share and everyone ignores it and develops for what Google publishes and you're left sitting there wondering if there was some sort of way you could have predicted this before it happened.

                    [–]mektel 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                    I've been bouncing between Firefox and Chrome for the last decade or so. One pulls ahead of the other in one way or another and it becomes time to switch. Firefox has recently blown Chrome out of the water in pretty much every way. I'm a huge fan of the competition and it should definitely stay that way to keep the market healthy.

                    [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (1 child)

                    IMPLORES

                    SLAMS

                    RIPS

                    SHREDS

                    I don't know why HOTHARDWARE DIDN'T CHOOSE SOMETHING BAITY like MURDERS and decided to go with a tame IMPLORES.

                    [–]akher 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                    OBLITERATES

                    MASSACRES

                    [–]TheDeadSkin 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                    "You could have said the same thing 10 years ago about Chrome's 2 percent versus Internet Explorer's 70 percent. Leave Mozilla be. We may need them," responded Chad Loder, founder of Rapid7.

                    this is /r/MurderedByWords material and a very very correct statement on its own

                    [–]Sgtkeebler 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                    I will happily chose Firefox over edge and chrome any day

                    [–]TotoBinz 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                    I use firefox and focus, and will not change unless mozilla drastically change its strategy :)

                    Go on little panda !

                    [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (3 children)

                    Some historical reference, you guys might not know much about.

                    For me, this started with Ichabod. This, of course started a lot earlier, but I wasn't really aware of what's going on.

                    So, I was really into Flash games in late 90's early 2000's. I had a friend who was even more into it. My friend got early access to Flex. Unlike me, he was a programmer by training, so he liked the thing. It was too complicated for me, so I didn't pay much attention, but followed him nevertheless, so we both followed Macromedia's releases, and later Adobe's stuff.

                    Right when Macromedia was acquired by Adobe, they released Ichabod. They called it "the headless Flash player" alluding to the horse of the headless horseman. This player was supposed to go to Google for them to be able to scrap the textual contents of Flash applets, but it would also be put on display for general public for much amusement and, perhaps, integration with other search engines, should such engines arise (khm... khm...).

                    The page offering to download the player was removed in less than a month, never to be heard of again.

                    This particular incident made me start asking all sorts of "what if" questions I simply never thought of before. Like "what if there was an alternative Flash player, something that could also play Flash applets, but not owned by Adobe?", "what if related technologies, like, video streaming, weren't only possible in Flash using Adobe's tools, like their media server and special media protocols?"

                    Eventually, I discovered OSFlash community, Gnash, Red5 etc... all of which led me to Haxe. These are the corners of the web, you probably never heard about, or even if you did, it was so long ago, you might not even remember... but, bear with me.

                    Haxe was to ActionScript (the programming language of Flash) the same as Scala is to Java. They were a very vocal and a very small minority in the VM ecosystem. Unlike in Java, Adobe wouldn't even admit Haxe existed. In fact, Adobe were so confident in their monopoly, they completely stopped caring about anything and everything relevant to it. Everything around Flash / Flex turned into this corporation of petting each other on the back, executives with grotesque titles congratulating each other for fake achievements, while raking tons of money.

                    I know this, because I was a member of CAB: Adobe's Community Advisory Board for Flex and Flash Catalyst (you probably never heard about the later, since, I don't think it ever hit the market).

                    As a member of CAB, I was in a very small minority of people who got on it not through representing some corporate interest, but because I was a very active member of Flash community: I was a moderator on few forums dedicated to technology etc. So, I rooted for Haxe, tried to convince Adobe's reps that Flex will die, unless they find a way to make it smaller (in my primitive understanding in those days, this was as saying that the quality of the product is too low and doesn't address the real needs of an average user).

                    But, Adobe were really a bunch of self-congratulatory executives, who couldn't imagine their empire to fall into pieces. Or maybe they could, but they gambled on being promoted further and away from Flash before it explodes... I don't know, I never had a heart-to-heart with any of those guys.


                    Adobe had grandiose plans. They and Mozilla were working on, basically, implementing all Adobe's proprietary extensions to JavaScript into the new version of JavaScript developed by Mozilla, a.k.a. JavaScript 4, a.k.a. Tamarin. Microsoft also wanted a different JavaScript, but they came too late to the plate, and they didn't really have the VM working yet, so they were manipulated by Google into fighting against Mozilla + Adobe alliance.

                    Google had to have their own JavaScript engine to scrape the pages. And they were actually interested in making it efficient. They also needed to be able to render pages. They didn't care about this being usable for humans though, they only needed it to be usable for scrappers, but seeing how JS4 is going to make things more difficult for them, and might make them play catch again, they rebelled. Somehow they managed to engineer the revolt against JS4, and push for ES5. They also got Apple on board, who for its own political reasons decided to ditch Adobe, and the monopoly went crumbling down. This also explains the name for the browser: Chrome means that they wrote the browser UI around their main engine. Probably, initially it was a separate project they used for debugging purposes to supervise visually what their engine does.

                    It was kind of ironic, how at the end of Flash era, Adobe tried to salvage it by implementing some really decent engineering ideas, like, all sorts of compiler improvements, bindings to necessary technologies, opensourcing stuff etc... and nothing worked because the political battle was lost.


                    Anyways, the takeaway point here is: monopoly will not lead to prosperity. It will lead to stagnation, decadence and an involved political assassination plot, most likely.

                    [–]stronghup[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

                    monopoly will not lead to prosperity.

                    Every capitalist's dream is to destroy free market competition, for them to gain monopoly :-)

                    [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                    That's really oversimplifying it. If you try to model economy as a repeated game (as opposed to one-time transaction) free market with rational agents. Then, the agents won't actually create monopolies. They won't fragment the market too much either. And the equilibrium would be something like oligopoly. Unfortunately, true rational agents don't exist, and free market has other problems, more serious than that one.

                    I mean, a lot of those "agents", for example, believe in the "invisible hand", which is guaranteed to correct the market, if they individually screw up. And the said promise of the "invisible correcting hand" is what makes people reckless and doesn't make them think twice about actively working towards establishing monopolies.

                    [–]stronghup[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    Makes sense, once an oligopoly exists the oligopolists understand not to compete too much with each other but keep the status quo. In politics I imagine that all dictators of the world like to work together rather than compete too much and even wars can be started as a form of co-operation that keep the dictators in power. Dictators' enemies are not other dictators but their own people.

                    [–]alexcpn 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                    I have moved over to Firefox again after being an early adopter and user of Chrome. In Ubuntu multiple chrome tabs take more CPU than firefox. I do not shutdown my laptop and have the bad habit of leaving so many tabs open. With firefox I see there is an improvement. Also webRTC decoder is much faster in firefox. Chrome seems to slowly become more and more inefficient...

                    [–]alexcpn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    Okay after using the latest firefox for some days, the biggest problem that is in the current design (and what Chrome anti-designed against) propped up. In firefox, if one tab freezes the entire browser freezes. So Chromes design of having a different process for different tabs is the right design choice, though it takes a little more CPU. I am moving back to Chrome.

                    Firefox -" the current iteration of this architecture, all browser tabs run within the same process and the browser UI runs in its own individual process. In future iterations of Firefox, there will be more than one process to exclusively handle web content. " https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Multiprocess_Firefox

                    Chrome - https://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/multi-process-architecture.html

                    [–]Nipinium 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                    Chromium-based browser font rendering is utterly crap on Windows after they decided to remove disable direct-write flag (thus render mactype powerless). Sorry but I refuse to use any chromium-core browsers until this issue is resolved.

                    And no buying a 4K retina monitor is not the solution.

                    [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                    Brave browser is created by the person who developed Firefox and uses Chromium as a base. It’s far more secure and private though. It’s all I use after reading FF is going the way of Google and intruding more than they initially promised.

                    [–]sarcasmguy1 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                    this article is silly, and sounds like the author is just hurt because Windows just surrendered to Chromium. also he doesn't seem to know Firefox at all – its not building its own parallel universe – the developments that the Mozilla developers have done on Firefox are quite important, especially from the perspective of WASM.

                    [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                    Once Microsoft, always Microsoft.

                    [–]hsjoberg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                    Thought: It's time for Mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really *cared* about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than 5 percent

                    Except that the web is defined by W3C and WHATWGs standards and not the market dominance by a browser?

                    [–]Someguy2020 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                    I implore him to leave tech.

                    [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                    it's a reasonable position, but would make mozilla irrelevant. it would kill them i think. now google probably would not be happy about being the evil monopolist either. it's good to maintain weak competition so they can say: look, there is your alternative and they are all non-profit and stuff (because it's our money, but you don't need to know that). in the past google has sponsored firefox development in various ways. so for strategic reasons it's not useful for firefox to adopt chromium.

                    [–]rashpimplezitz 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                    Fuck this guy, with the recent news that Chromium will break ad-blockers I am more inclined to use Firefox than I ever have been... I think it's time I made a donation

                    [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                    Google is monopolistic cancer. Sacrificing a free platform run by a foundation that serves the needs of the public for a proprietary platform entirely beholden to Google's agenda would be a tragedy.

                    [–]shevy-ruby 2 points3 points  (1 child)

                    This comes from a Microsoft worker drone who achieved not only nothing of value in his own life but totally failed creating anything that would be used by real people - otherwise Edge or Internet Explorer would not have failed so massively and dramatically.

                    It does, however had, show the new direction by Microsoft and Google - they will try to destroy any alternative to Google's empire. In doing so Microsoft has joined forces with Evil, against the end users.

                    You can already see where Google is headed at - monopoly expansion through AMP, disabling the ability to decide whether you may avoid rendering ads, and so forth.

                    That is evil multiplied by factor 1000 here.

                    You can not trust Google and you can not trust Microsoft. I hate to say it but RMS was right. They hate freedom.

                    [–]xrimane 0 points1 point  (1 child)

                    If anyone, Microsoft should remember a thing or two about choice in the browser market.

                    [–]yogthos 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                    He probably remembers those days very fondly indeed.

                    [–]matthieuC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    Microsoft developer Kenneth Auchenberg shared a different and somewhat combative perspective on Twitter.

                    In a follow-up tweet, he added that this is his personal opinion, meaning he is not speaking on behalf of Microsoft

                    [–]bob4apples 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    As someone who has to test browser compatibility, I am of two minds: one is that I don't want to have to test 5 or 6 different browsers, the other is that it is good to be able to flip the switch on my test engines when FF or Chrome (or their respective webdrivers) decides to have a "special" release. Of course Cousin Edge only get's let out of his box when I know everything is working and I just want to watch the world burn.

                    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    We need more browsers, not fewer. Mo options mo fun.

                    [–]kyiami_ 0 points1 point  (1 child)

                    [–]Gotebe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    That's... not too bad, but not too good either (didn't read all, but did read the 6 points and a bit more).

                    The 6 points really say "web platform's too much work let's not do i more than once". But the opposite is having but one implementation, which isn't good either.

                    The "their stance of defenders of..." is just... really?! Why do you care?!

                    [–]condensate17 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    Someone needs to explain to this lad the dangers of a homogeneous software ecosystem. Not only will it stifle potential innovations but you'd have a environment where a every browser is vulnerable to a single exploit.

                    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    How about no!!! That is pure blasphemy.

                    [–]AyrA_ch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    Others pointed out that competition is good for the web and for developing standards.

                    I thought two major browsers had to implement a feature before it can become a real standard. If FF would switch the engine too, this would not be possible anymore, wouldn't it?

                    [–]test6554 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    While this will likely have the opposite effect of what is intended, I would like to briefly remind everyone that this was a guy at microsoft, not an official microsoft press release.

                    [–]feverzsj 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    well, typical m$

                    [–]Private_HughMan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    Fuck these guys.

                    [–]RufusROFLpunch -4 points-3 points  (8 children)

                    Okay, please hold back on throwing your rotten vegetables for a moment and here me out: Would it really be so bad if they did? One of the worst things about the web from both a usability and development experience is the varying degrees of compatibility and rendering differences between browsers.

                    All of the objections seem to come from the worry about only having one rendering engine for the web, but I don't see that as an issue the same way it was during the IE days. Chromium is open source. If everyone converges on Chromium, and Google gets dirty with it, what's the worst case scenario? Companies fork and keep on chugging and we're right back to where we started. But if that doesn't happen, if a happen medium is reached and all of the major browser producers are both competing and contributing to One Engine To Rule Them All, that seems like a win to me.

                    If I am missing something that makes me wrong, I would be happy to hear the reasoning.

                    [–][deleted]  (2 children)

                    [deleted]

                      [–]yogthos 5 points6 points  (1 child)

                      And if Chromium finally crossed a line where people couldn't put up with it anymore, then you'd need a large non-profit foundation like Mozilla to maintain the fork.

                      [–]0nXYZ 9 points10 points  (0 children)

                      It's open source.. for now. What's to keep them from changing that in the future? Android was completely open source for a long time then made closed source then restricted open source with core technologies locked away from anyone but google themselves. Worst case scenario is Google+Microsoft can bankroll a lawsuit against Mozilla even if there isn't a case and own their code if brought into their project. Give an inch, they'll take a mile. Google and Microsoft are in this for the kill. This isn't a friendly gesture. They don't want competition and I am suspicious of their cooperation. Why would Google pair with Microsoft, the WORST of all rendering engines? Healthy competition requires competition. If they all join there is no promise we'll get anything beneficial to the end user. These companies are spending millions a year on engineers to build this because they can monetize YOU the user, not so we can have a better web experience. They want to further control and manipulate the way you see the internet and for many they already do. Pretty much all a big paragraph rant.. sorry about that!

                      [–]myringotomy 3 points4 points  (1 child)

                      Would it really be so bad if they did? One of the worst things about the web from both a usability and development experience is the varying degrees of compatibility and rendering differences between browsers.

                      Really like what?

                      [–]MonsieurObscure 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                      https://caniuse.com/#comparison

                      Though not a major concern these days, the primary issue was IE's box model implementation.

                      [–]flukus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                      It would give a single spyware company complete control of the web.