Over the last few months I have had ~30,0000 visits to my website, almost entirely from HN, and I was disheartened to find that 52% of visitors were using Chrome[1].
Given the pro-open-web and anti-FAANG sentiments that's shared on HN I had expected slightly different results.
Worth remembering is that the commenters on the site are the minority. There are a lot or lurkers on HN (possibly orders of magnitude more lurkers than commenters), so "the pro-open-web and anti-FAANG sentiments that's shared on HN" may be a vocal minority.
The people commenting probably varies a lot depending on the topic, too. There are certain topics where you know what the comments are going to be like.
There's no reason to believe that lurkers have substantially different behavior than commenters. More likely is that those who use firefox are more passionate and informed about browser issues.
Commenters are extreme outliers. Only a tiny single-digit percentage of forum readers online ever comment. HN is also a highly regarded, particularly alienating site with a strict tone expected from commenters. I'd imagine the ratio of lurkers to commenters is 100:1.
No it isn't you are incorrect. I now present my essay on why you are incorrect. Now we argue for hours on semantic differences and then call it a draw. And then dang shows up and gets mad that the comments aren't following the rules shown on that really, really ugly and vague faq guidelines page.
Wow this comment is getting downvoted a lot. I think I wasn't clear with what I meant. What I meant is that there's no reason to believe that lurkers have big difference in which browser they use.
Commenters by definition have substantially different behavior than lurkers: they comment.
Furthermore, people tend to be louder about things they perceive as threats, such as corporations dominating the internet. Those who comment about those threats are likely to be the same ones taking active steps to mitigate them.
I'm using Safari by default simply because Chrome is a CPU hog on my machine and I can notice my PC heating up considerably faster when running it.
I considered Firefox and tried to switch for a month before but the recent reorg + the stuff about their top officer pay makes it seem like it's a cushy position some people entrenched themselves in and the org is completely lost - the browser experience was inferior and I don't have sympathy towards them so why bother.
Chrome has plenty of forks so I try to run those on other platforms.
Yeah I’m amazed how many Mac users use Chrome when it’s such a resource hog. Safari has better privacy and battery life as well. Maybe people use Chrome syncing or something and that’s why I don’t understand but it seems like they went out of their way to get a worse experience.
Chrome has such a myriad variety of extensions that using Safari is simply not feasible.
1. uBlock Origin - the content-based blockers on Safari are not nearly as good
2. Zotero connector - for my academic work
3. Session Buddy - for saving sessions
4. Proxy switcher - for selectively using my uni proxy for academic resources
Do you really want to allow a myriad of extensions access to your web browser data? I can understand if you have a couple you like but personally I find extensions only make Chrome slower and I don’t trust most of them because of the deep access you need to grant. I’d just as rather turn my proxy on for a minute at the OS level and not have a permanent extension running in every single Chrome tab.
I could see using Chrome on a desktop Mac maybe, but yeah it obliterates the battery on my MBPs so badly that it's impractical to use unless I'm alright with being tethered to the wall.
It's kind of exasperating how low of a priority efficiency is with both Chrome and Firefox.
I was trying to switch my wife to use safari on chrome (because battery usage), but her argument is that "safari does not display favicons near here bookmarks" and it's big no-go for her. Makes you think about reasons of regular users when choosing browsers.
That's so interesting. I'm very computer literate, and a huge reason I couldn't stand Safari is because it didn't show it didn't show favicons in the tab bar. I typically have dozens of tabs open, and really need some way to tell them apart quickly -- such as favicons showing up. (I did find a hack to do it, but didn't love it.)
You might ask her to try again. Safari 14 actually shows favicons, and that is such a welcome relief.
It goes back and forth. As of a couple years ago, Safari sandboxed the network process which Chrome did not do. Chrome also sends a significant amount of personal data and usage data to Google and potentially other parties which significantly harms the supposed security. Having an always on data feed of the users actions (to enhance your advertising business) is not good security practice.
A ton of sites work better with Chrome than Safari because engineers often don’t put in the 20 min it would take to fix minor issues with Safari and build only for Chrome on the Mac.
It happens occasionally but “a ton” is probably overstating it. Any major website that doesn’t work on Safari for Mac and iOS is going to get bug reports pretty quickly unless it’s a Google product and they just don’t care
According to the article, its privacy is worse. Also, its implementation of ITP leaks more information when it is enabled (the default) than when it is disabled.
Your linked article is some Google researchers reporting some bugs in Safari which were mostly patched a year ago. It seems like they disagreed about whether some were patched initially.
That doesn’t mean Chrome is more secure. They literally install user tracking and tie you to your Google account so they can advertise to you and better sell things. There is nothing secure about a browser built to monetize your data and send it to the cloud for analysis and machine learning. Meanwhile they have their share of bugs as well. What do you think about this one which is more recent?
A vulnerability in Google’s Chromium-based browsers would allow attackers to bypass the Content Security Policy (CSP) on websites, in order to steal data and execute rogue code.
The bug (CVE-2020-6519) is found in Chrome, Opera and Edge, on Windows, Mac and Android – potentially affecting billions of web users
That Chromium bug has been fixed for monts. The Safari bugs in my article still haven't been fixed, causing users to leak more information in the default Safari setup than users who have disabled ITP and much more than users of other browsers, who have working tracking protection. As Justin Schuh pointed out, the changes that Apple made to Safari did nothing to address the issues discovered in the paper.
It’s one bug. Sure if it’s still open (the article was from January) then that’s not good but Chrome has thousands of open bugs as well and likely some that would give me pause. The fact that Google is the one giving Apple a hard time might indicate a bit of an agenda since it’s their competitor..
Google literally sends your browsing habits from pages visited to mouse movements to their servers where they link it with your other Google info like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Maps GPS tracking via your phone. Google products “leak” all the users data back to the mothership as a feature. And Chrome users tend to use a lot of random extensions which means the data usually leaks to a lot of unknown third parties as well (see DataSpii for one example which effected millions of Chrome and Firefox users)
So yes let’s expect higher standards from all browser developers. But realistically Apple likely fixed the bug or has a very good reason why it’s difficult to entirely patch yet. Google has had many extended data leaks as well but they actually build tools to gather your data up in the first place which makes it that much riskier should it get stolen or misused by Google or Google employees.
It's a security bug that leaks information about the user. It reduces privacy for the user to any website they visit. Chrome and Firefox fix these security bugs immediately upon learning about them. Safari does not because it had hyped ITP and is more interested in security theater, which makes for great marketing, than actual security.
I don't know why you are trying to redirect the conversation to services that can be accessed from any browser. The topic of discussion is which browsers are more secure and offer better privacy.
“Chrome won't clear your Google and YouTube data — even if you tell it to
Browser retains site data in defiance of privacy settings”
Every week there is a new scandal with Chrome privacy and usually it’s Google to blame and not a bug. I’m sure they’ll tell us this was another honest mistake that tracked billions of people for ten years but NEXT time they’ll put our privacy first. Meanwhile we all know our data has been the goal since day one and Google Chrome is the Trojan Horse to get the tracking onto our computer
You realize that the article you linked to is about the exact same thing as TFA, right? Then you must also realize because I've already told you that Safari doesn't even give you the option to clear data on exit right? That makes it strictly worse for your privacy.
> Chrome has plenty of forks so I try to run those on other platforms.
Safari’s Webkit engine has plenty of browsers using it — in fact IIRC Chromium began as a fork of at least part of it — eg. GNOME Web/Epiphany, Luakit, Surf, et. al.
The only thing that annoys me about Safari is that there's no way to disable or configure alternate search engines for the omnibar. Sending mistyped intranet urls directly to Google (or DuckDuckGo) search is a huge privacy hole.
Lots of us do. Firefox is my browser on all my devices. I do use Chrome when visiting Google Docs which I assume is deliberately sabotaged on Firefox though.
Might just be that Google doesn't test on Firefox and also maybe are "to smart for their own good" coming up with out of the box solutions that can be more likely to fail to begin with. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I kinda read myself as saying "they probably just don't give a sh!+."
It's not deliberate; it's lack of investment. Docs is complicated enough that the small deviations in browser implementation add up---to make something as complex as Docs not work in Firefox, all you have to do is be willing to publish without hating new features on FF end-to-end tests.
I have a different experience with that: on a current MBP, Google office suite software (docs, slides, agenda, mail etc) regularly uses 100% cpu in safari for no apparent reason, and clearly also has some memory leaks were single tabs bloat to 2-3 gig memory... Have to kill the the threads manually. I would say it’s fairly unoptimized / pushes you to chrome
I second the experience of the other commenters. Keep it open long enough and it sucks up all the resources in non-chrome browsers. I also include Google Slides in my experience btw. It is more severe with Slides than docs.
I work in tech, and people are very surprised to hear that I use IE. When they ask, I tell them it's because I do not like where "modern" browsers (and software in general, but that's another can of worms...) are going. IE11 is the latest browser to have things like user stylesheets and per-zone security configuration by default. It's a small rebellion, but nonetheless an act of opposition to the increasing corporate monopolisation and bloat of the web.
One can be anti-Google and still use Google products. The browser is an exceedingly important piece of software. For some people, the cost of switching to something other than Chrome is too great. Maybe Firefox doesn't work well. Maybe they hate Safari. Maybe their favorite extensions aren't available. Whatever the reason, the cost of switching is greater than the price they put on their anti-Google stance. And that's okay.
Personally, I switched from Chrome to Firefox a long time ago. But I still use plenty of other Google products. I'm overall anti-Google, but I'm not a religious about it. I disconnect from Google where I can, and support products that match my views when I can.
If anything, I'm surprised the percentage of non-Chrome users your site encountered was as high was it was. Makes me kind of hopeful.
Firefox can be kind of annoying to use on HN, at least if you post often.
I use Firefox for most of my personal browsing other than Fastmail's webmail interface, and most of my general work browsing.
I use Chrome for a lot of testing and development at work and for dealing with PayPal. These things all get separate profiles, and Chrome handles multiple profiles better than Firefox. Yes, I know about Firefox containers, but I need separate bookmarks and history. Containers just deal with cookies and maybe cache.
I've been tempted to switch to Chrome for at least HN and Reddit because I tire of dealing with Firefox's spell checking. It regularly tells me things are spelled wrong that are not (such as "webmail" in this comment). It's not just that it is terrible that irks me--it is that it is inexplicably terrible.
What I mean by inexplicably terrible is that they are using Hunspell. That's the same open source spelling engine that is used by Chrome, and LibreOffice, and MacOS. Those all have great spell checking. I thus infer that Firefox's problem is not an engine problem. It's a dictionary problem. So why don't they they grab the ones LibreOffice uses?
Here are some words that came up in comments of mine either here or on Reddit that Firefox incorrectly told me were spelled wrong. Each one interrupted my writing flow as I had to stop and go look it up elsewhere to make sure that I had it right.
There's an issue in the Bugzilla for reporting misspelled words. I've reported all of those there so they should eventually be fixed. I'm not sure how long that takes.
Here's a bunch I indirectly reported earlier, that are now fixed:
Given the pro-open-web and anti-FAANG sentiments that's shared on HN I had expected slightly different results.
[1]: https://simpleanalytics.com/vishnu.tech?start=2019-10-18&end...