The Dying Web | Matthias Endler
The Dying Web | Matthias Endler
I look left and right, and I'm the only one who still uses Firefox.
yes, the web itself is dying with the centralisation of services on top of the blazing dumpster fire that is the current browser ecosystem. So many aspects of the first generation internet have been lost, even the basic concept of it being a massively distributed, hyperlinked collection of pages is just FAANG serving occasional content to break up the adverts. All wrapped up in their own delivery apps that can punish non-compliance with obscurity.
I think the author understates how much better Chrome was than everything else from the time it launched to the time Firefox went multiprocess. It was about a five year period.
Now I think most people just see no reason to switch. Better adblocking might motivate a few.
Yep. I actually switched to chrome back then specifically because it was faster than Firefox (which I had been using), and each tab was its own process so if one bogged down, timed out, or crashed I could just close it without losing everything. And then they made it a bloated mess and I went back to Firefox when they got their act together and opening the browser didn't tank ram usage. There was a point where people switched to chrome because there were benefits. And now the whole browser infrastructure is just kind of garbage because Google investors need more money.
And then they made it a bloated mess and I went back to Firefox when they got their act together and opening the browser didn't tank ram usage
I don't think it was being turned into a bloated mess, as much as that it always was pretty slow, until Google started investing a lot in JS performance with the release of Chrome, and showed how fast it could be.
(Well, and as a result, websites started becoming more demanding, which did make browsers that didn't keep up slow down more.)
I honestly don't know too terribly many people who don't use Firefox (at least in my personal life).
You just don’t know non technically oriented people on corporate America. People are rawdogging Edge without Adblock, at the behest of their own IT departments. It’s appalling and insane.
I mean I bet many people I know use edge as its the default in windows but like my wife and I and most tech people I know use firefox.
This is too simplistic, isn't it? At work maybe we have no choice. My AdBlock is still working on YT. So I don't need to bail on Chrome yet. (I did, but I didn't need to.)
What happens as the ad blockers get worse, as Google disables more and more functionality? This will be the fun time. It's not hard to switch browsers, after all. And people know this. So of course they don't worry about it.
It's not hard to switch browsers, after all. And people know this. So of course they don't worry about it.
I think the author is lamenting this attitude: it's not hard to switch browsers, as long as those alternatives exist and remain viable. That gets less and less likely as fewer and fewer people use the alternatives.