>That doesn’t seem like a good situation to me. So I don’t want Firefox to die even though it’s not my daily browser.
...so make it your daily browser?
Seriously, there's no reason at all to still be using Chrome. There was a dip in the mid/late 2010s where FF was a joke in comparison, but they're more or less identical in performance at this point.
I don’t use Chrome. I use Safari. It is and has always been my choice since it was released.
But I still think it’s better if Firefox exists.
——
My experience has been kind of odd compared to most. I switched to the Mac before Chrome or Safari came out. When Safari arrived it was vastly faster than anything else at the time. So it became my browser.
People on Windows or Linux couldn’t use Safari (I tried the Windows version, let’s not talk about that, ouch). So when Chrome came out, and they left IE/FF, they got the same giant performance jump that I liked so much but associated it with a different product. I’m sure I would’ve done the same thing if I was still on Windows.
Firefox eventually got way better, becoming what it is today. But almost everyone had already moved to Chrome.
I’m left with this sort of weird view of the world. When I did try Chrome it wasn’t noticeably faster than Safari because it was using the same rendering engine at the time, but it had a really different UI design that I didn’t like.
So a huge amount of people really love Chrome because of their experiences, and I hate it for the same reason. All because of the order I ended up using browsers in.
>Firefox and Safari are the only two things keeping Chrome from total dominance.
Safari yes, but truthfully nobody gives a damn about Firefox at this point.
>A lot of people don’t like Safari because it’s from Apple, the priorities they choose, or the fact that is not fully open source like Firefox is.
"A lot" meaning a minority of a minority of people. Lest we forget, iOS is superior to Android in at least the US and Japan, and MacOS continues to gain market share at the cost of Windows.
I agree. FF is a distant third. But it’s the only credible third I know of. Brave, Edge, and friends are just Chromium so they’re the same rendering engine as Chrome.
On the Safari topic I was going by the general sentiment I see on HN. The general public couldn’t care less what is or is not open source.
Over the years I’ve noticed a weird (to me) contingent here on HN who appeared to think the best thing for the Internet would be for Safari to be killed so everyone would be forced to use Chrome.
Apple could release it for other platforms (let’s not talk about the original Windows release). Or others could build a browser on the engine.
You’re right most people couldn’t switch tomorrow. Right now Firefox is the only credible non-Chromium browser I’m aware of for Windows/Linux.
Honestly that comment was mostly there to try to forestall the people I expected would come out of the woodwork with vehement Apple hate. And if someone did in one of the replies below my comment.
Chrome and Edge use the Blink rendering engine (except on iOS). Safari uses WebKit. Firefox uses Gecko.
(Edge used to use its own engine, EdgeHTML, but switched to Blink and EdgeHTML is no longer developed. EdgeHTML was derived from the Trident/MSHTML engine, which is also no longer developed.)
Blink and WebKit can both trace their history to khtml, but that was a very long time ago.
Chrome used to use WebKit (before Edge existed). Blink was forked from WebKit and they diverged about 10 years ago. They are now considered distinct rendering engines with different behaviours.
So the big three rendering engines today are: Blink, WebKit and Gecko.
All browsers in wide use today use one of those three.
On iOS, all browsers use WebKit due to OS policy restrictions. Chrome and Firefox use WebKit on iOS. This works, and different browsers continue to have their own respective featureson top.
It is widely thought that if Apple loses the power to limit the rendering engine on iOS due to changes in law, so many web devs will drop testing with WebKit browsers that they will pressure users to install Chrome on iOS instead: "Best viewed in Chrome. Some site features may not work using other browsers...". The same way many web devs already dropped testing on Firefox/Gecko. Those site features may become critical, such as abitiy to sign in or view some kinds of data. Apps will ship with parts of Chrome/Blink directly in the app, saving users the decision.
This is what people mean when they say Apple's rendering engine policy on iOS may be all that's preventing most of the web shifting to Chrome/Blink-only dominance, that you won't be able to avoid if you need essential services online.
I thought EdgeHTML was a clean sheet. I know they had a way to continue to run the old Trident engine under the hood for compatibility, but I didn’t think EdgeHTML was based on it.
Excellent description of the situation. I both think people should get to choose their own browser on iOS, and don’t want them to get to choose their own browser for the reason you stated.
Oh people are still working on it? I know FF wasn’t working on it anymore but I had thought development was basically stopped completely. It’s good to hear it’s still moving forward.
I think they're counting Webkit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome) as two separate engines. Given that it's been 10 years since Blink forked from Webkit, I think that's fair.
I was. Things have shifted enough (it’s been 10 years? Wow!) I think it’s fair to consider them separate. They also use completely different JS backends.
Nothing is stopping alternate rendering engines from being created, but if the alternates are not better and not worth integrating with a browser the resources might be better spent being invested in the most popular one that way it improves the web for the most people.
> but if the alternates are not better and not worth integrating with a browser
This is the problem. There is a MASSIVE sunk cost to get a modern browser off the ground compared to a static target.
Even if you could do it, Chrome is going to keep moving forward. And they have enough power to change things in incompatible ways that everyone will follow because they have the vast majority of the market.
Microsoft made a new modern browser engine. They gave it up because it was too hard to compete with Chrome.
When Apple is forced to let people replace Safari, I fear we’re going to get into an IE6 situation.
It doesn’t matter how good Chrome is, IE6 was great too. But when the company lets it stagnate for years because there’s no reason to invest, or decides to use it to push their advertising business to new heights, we are all screwed until a new competitor comes around.
Firefox only exists because it was built from the Netscape code base. And ‘a modern browser’ was a WAY easier target 20 years ago. What if no group/company can muster enough effort to dethrone a stagnate Chrome?
The web is in trouble. Even tagging along in 3rd place, Firefox is a good browser that could step up in such a situation. But only if development continues. If Firefox dies next year and Chrome stagnates five years from now we’ll be screwed.
Firefox was not the only competition back then. Opera was also around with its own engine, and it was very popular in Europe. But, yeah, this is when HTML and associated standards were a lot simpler.
>There is a MASSIVE sunk cost to get a modern browser off the ground compared to a static target.
You can incrementally improve the browser. Blink was not created from scratch.
>But when the company lets it stagnate for years because there’s no reason to invest
There are 2 big differences. The first is that what the web is and how platforms work is better understood. Google continues to invest in Chrome despite their dominance. The second is that chromium is open source. This means that if Google stops investing heavily in Chrome then others can still contribute and improve the browser.
>or decides to use it to push their advertising business to new heights, we are all screwed until a new competitor comes around.
If Google does something bad enough to make users stop using the browser that hurts them. Even taking that to be the case making a Chromium fork without that stuff would be possible given the demand for an alternative. You do not need a whole new browser engine just so you can make a policy change.
>What if no group/company can muster enough effort to dethrone a stagnate Chrome?
They can build off of Chromium instead. There is no need to start from some basic browser and put in a ton of resources to modernize it.
>If Firefox dies next year and Chrome stagnates five years from now we’ll be screwed.
If Chrome stagnates then competitor browsers will surpass them.
I was there, I was an IE user and proponent. It was a great browser. I think it was considered one of the best when it was released in 2001.
IE 7 came out in… 2006. So IE 6 just sat there for 5 years. And it’s not like ever upgraded to 7 immediately. Lots of corporate PCs kept 6 for many years longer.
That’s why it has the reputation it does. By 2006 IE 6 was horribly behind FF by every measure. Tons of security bugs had been found. By 2010 it was a total joke but developers were still having to make the modern web work on it, somehow.
If it had been replaced in 2003 or 2004 and MS never paused development no one would remember IE 6 as a dumpster fire.
But once you get a total stranglehold on the market, you can do stuff like that.
You are right in that it was way ahead of its competitors (mainly Netscape) when it launched. It had more features, much better performance, and it looked great in comparison.
But it also had an insanely huge amount of bugs, half-broken features and “I’ll just do it my way” stuff. This was also true already at launch.
Sure, if Microsoft had replaced it in 2003 or 2004, nobody would have such “fond” memories of it even today. But the bad reputation does not come only from the fact that it was not updated for a long time; it also comes from its many problems and issues.
Quite true. That’s one of the reasons that having to continue to support it for so long was so horrible. If it behaved nicely even if it had been stagnant it would’ve been quite as bad.
I guess I’m sort of assuming that if they kept new releases coming those bugs would’ve been fixed anyway in time. Which is certainly not a safe assumption.
I felt so bad for them. They worked hard and made a really good engine. They got out the door, started to see usage, and were then told by management one day “never mind we don’t care”.
None of the forks are required to accept every change Google makes or make their browsers a perfect clone. Edge, Brave, and Opera are all in control of their own destinies in making the best product they can.
A lot of people don’t like Safari because it’s from Apple, the priorities they choose, or the fact that is not fully open source like Firefox is.
There are basically three rendering engines right now. One dominates massively and one looks not long for the world.
That doesn’t seem like a good situation to me. So I don’t want Firefox to die even though it’s not my daily browser.