Author here; pleasantly surprised to see this on HN!
This started off as a rant with a friend a few days ago. We both lamented the sorry state of the web, particularly web browsers. There's a monoculture that we both have trouble understanding.
As a result, the tone might be a bit rough around the edges.
To anyone who's using Chrome: I understand. It's a decent browser, and switching to a different one is work. However! If everyone is thinking that way, we'll be stuck with whatever Google decides browsers should look like, tracking and half-baked quasi-standards included.
Take that as a friendly encouragement to go out and give FF another chance. We urgently need more diversity in the browser space. Brave and Vivaldi are good, but they are still a flavors of Chrome. I actually believe, that if you give Firefox an honest attempt, you might be surprised at how refreshing it can feel. They really turned it around in the last few years.
Yes, there are problems. Yes, you'll have to find workarounds. But you are developers. You can figure this out! Writing browser extensions isn't that hard, and a lot of things (including the UI) are very customizable in FF.
Good summary of Google's monopoly on the Internet today:
> Now, the world's largest websites are owned by the same company, which also owns the world's most popular browser and search engine. Coincidentally, they are also the world's largest advertising company. And people are wondering why they can't block ads on YouTube anymore.
For some people, Google is their ISP (Google Fiber), mobile internet provider (Google Fi), DNS provider, email provider (GMail), search engine (Google Search), web browser provider (Google Chrome), and entertainment and news provider (YouTube). Google tracks their online activity with Google Analytics and shows them ads with Google Ads. Google provides their phone (Pixel) and their phone's OS (Android) and backs up their files (Google Drive) and photos (Google Photos). When they go to work, perhaps they use Google Docs and Google Meet.
Some products are more popular than others, some are genuinely better than anything else, but still... for millions of people, Google practically _is_ the Internet.
I made the switch a few years ago after Firefox improved performance. I've tried to convince some coworkers to change and no one cares to. I think I'm the only one on a team of about 12 developers.
Firefox for Android is amazing as well, with full uBlock Origin support.
Sadly Google is single-handedly funding the two of the three largest browser engines. Why Googles motive may not align with mine, I don't blame them, I blame Mozilla leadership for not taking action earlier, and for only half-heartedly attempting to build new revenue sources.
More and more I think that Mozilla should have taken the Google money and created a fund, like Wikimedia. Yeah, yeah, I know, spending donations stupidly, using money on unrelated projects, the point is that they have a plan, and funding to keep running Wikipedia long into the future. Had Mozilla focused on Firefox, Thunderbird and MDN, then I can't see that they couldn't have had a substantial thrust setup by now. Perhaps that would also have allowed them to push a bit harder on donations, but they seem to busy pretending to be a Silicon Valley type business.
I'd be incredibly sad if Mozilla / Firefox fails. I still want Opera to return in it's none Chinese form, using it's own rendering engine. Without Presto Opera seems fairly pointless.
Chrome's ability to control how people interact with the world is also contributing to the death of the old, independent web. From an email yesterday from the administrator of the Computational Chemistry List (which started in 1991), at https://server.ccl.net/cgi-bin/ccl/message-new?2024+08+08+00... :
> I have to redo the CCL Web Site, since currently all pages that are not "secure" (https) will not be displayed in Chrome and some other browsers. So http is gone and practically replaced by https. The http pages are treated as insecure, and you cannot view them as http://www.ccl.net like before. The whole site needs to be redone (I mean gigabytes of stuff). This will be a painful process and the problems will persist for a while. [...] I hope I will finish this conversion before I die... If not, then, Bye, Bye, CCL.
I am extremely sympathetic to the "SSL inherently breaks the promise of the web" arguments, and yet this story makes no sense... why is the cost of converting a website to use SSL being measured in gigabytes of content rather than in number of hostnames cross endpoints, and how is (from the web page, not your quote of it) breaking all of the URLs even slightly an acceptable step on the way to a solution?! Just none of their situation makes sense to me...
Because the person who is charge is not a software developer, systems administrator, or anything like your background, so is unable to explain things in your terms.
Yes, and someone followed up with that suggestion.
But the problem is that someone needs to do it. Jan Labanowski is xkcd's "random person in Nebraska", a computational chemist volunteering unpaid time, on a 30 year old code base. That isn't so easy to step into, computational quantum chemists who are interesting in doing that migration are as rare as hen's teeth, and why would a non-QC systems developer help?
Yes, there are other mailing list hosting options, but the style and character of CCL is atypical enough that it warrants commentary in Wikipedia, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_Chemistry_List . It is unlikely to be transplanted elsewhere.
It is that sort of independent web which gets smothered by Google's near single-handed ability to determine what people are allowed to view with Chrome, in this case in the name of "security".
Firefox has been far too quiet in promoting its advantages (especially to the dev community), which might have helped in regaining market share. Despite my preference for Firefox, I find myself alone on this island in my workplace.
However, the decline of Firefox likely won't be tied directly to its market share. A bigger looming threat could be the repercussions from the Google antitrust case, given that a large portion of Firefox's operating income comes from Google.
Readit News
This started off as a rant with a friend a few days ago. We both lamented the sorry state of the web, particularly web browsers. There's a monoculture that we both have trouble understanding. As a result, the tone might be a bit rough around the edges.
To anyone who's using Chrome: I understand. It's a decent browser, and switching to a different one is work. However! If everyone is thinking that way, we'll be stuck with whatever Google decides browsers should look like, tracking and half-baked quasi-standards included.
Take that as a friendly encouragement to go out and give FF another chance. We urgently need more diversity in the browser space. Brave and Vivaldi are good, but they are still a flavors of Chrome. I actually believe, that if you give Firefox an honest attempt, you might be surprised at how refreshing it can feel. They really turned it around in the last few years.
Yes, there are problems. Yes, you'll have to find workarounds. But you are developers. You can figure this out! Writing browser extensions isn't that hard, and a lot of things (including the UI) are very customizable in FF.
I use both FF and Chrome all day long for work and I do not have any gripes with FF.
I do have gripes with Chrome and its lack of customizability.
> Now, the world's largest websites are owned by the same company, which also owns the world's most popular browser and search engine. Coincidentally, they are also the world's largest advertising company. And people are wondering why they can't block ads on YouTube anymore.
For some people, Google is their ISP (Google Fiber), mobile internet provider (Google Fi), DNS provider, email provider (GMail), search engine (Google Search), web browser provider (Google Chrome), and entertainment and news provider (YouTube). Google tracks their online activity with Google Analytics and shows them ads with Google Ads. Google provides their phone (Pixel) and their phone's OS (Android) and backs up their files (Google Drive) and photos (Google Photos). When they go to work, perhaps they use Google Docs and Google Meet.
Some products are more popular than others, some are genuinely better than anything else, but still... for millions of people, Google practically _is_ the Internet.
Firefox for Android is amazing as well, with full uBlock Origin support.
If you care about the web, avoiding a browser monoculture is of the utmost importance.
More and more I think that Mozilla should have taken the Google money and created a fund, like Wikimedia. Yeah, yeah, I know, spending donations stupidly, using money on unrelated projects, the point is that they have a plan, and funding to keep running Wikipedia long into the future. Had Mozilla focused on Firefox, Thunderbird and MDN, then I can't see that they couldn't have had a substantial thrust setup by now. Perhaps that would also have allowed them to push a bit harder on donations, but they seem to busy pretending to be a Silicon Valley type business.
I'd be incredibly sad if Mozilla / Firefox fails. I still want Opera to return in it's none Chinese form, using it's own rendering engine. Without Presto Opera seems fairly pointless.
Eg initiatives like Baseline https://web.dev/baseline and interop https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024
> I have to redo the CCL Web Site, since currently all pages that are not "secure" (https) will not be displayed in Chrome and some other browsers. So http is gone and practically replaced by https. The http pages are treated as insecure, and you cannot view them as http://www.ccl.net like before. The whole site needs to be redone (I mean gigabytes of stuff). This will be a painful process and the problems will persist for a while. [...] I hope I will finish this conversion before I die... If not, then, Bye, Bye, CCL.
But the problem is that someone needs to do it. Jan Labanowski is xkcd's "random person in Nebraska", a computational chemist volunteering unpaid time, on a 30 year old code base. That isn't so easy to step into, computational quantum chemists who are interesting in doing that migration are as rare as hen's teeth, and why would a non-QC systems developer help?
Yes, there are other mailing list hosting options, but the style and character of CCL is atypical enough that it warrants commentary in Wikipedia, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_Chemistry_List . It is unlikely to be transplanted elsewhere.
It is that sort of independent web which gets smothered by Google's near single-handed ability to determine what people are allowed to view with Chrome, in this case in the name of "security".
However, the decline of Firefox likely won't be tied directly to its market share. A bigger looming threat could be the repercussions from the Google antitrust case, given that a large portion of Firefox's operating income comes from Google.