Designer News - <AUTHOR> https://news.layervault.com/ <comment><USER2> I like the idea of an "HN for designers." That said, I don't think it will work.

We built something similar around 2008 and maintained it for a couple of years. Ultimately, we chose to shut it down, due to the difficulty in getting good discussion, and the amount of "pseudo-spam" from folks who would flood us with links to crap and designer link-bait.

My suggestion is to ignore the design feedback you're getting here. It's not that it isn't perhaps accurate; it's just not your biggest concern.

In my opinion, the real key with these communities is the discussion. HN is ugly, but the content is good. Additionally, the active nature of the community is huge. Part of that has to do with it having first-move advantage; the other may be the associated "carrot" of pg looking at contributor involvement, come application time.

My hunch is that the biggest part of why HN is so active relates to startup- folk being more concerned with the data/insight than presentation. I could be entirely incorrect on this point, but my feeling is that the majority of designers simply aren't geared the same way. They're more interested in seeing eye-candy than reading, thinking, and discussing.

This is a generalization, and there are certainly designers who are geared quite differently. (Personally, I find sites like dribbble really boring, but am on HN within 5 minutes of waking.)

The challenge here, for you will be in getting a sufficient mass of _good_ contributors/commenters (i.e. Thoughtful, meaningful dialogue). I think it's will be hard to make this happen. I do hope you'll prove me wrong, though, as the design community could use something like this.

<comment><USER3> _HN is ugly_

What? No way - this is absolutely a case of function instead of pomp and circumstance. One of the huge reasons, I believe, that HN was really kicked off well was because when Digg went stupid and redesigned their site (which looks like OP's design to a degree) people wanted more hacker/programmer style stories in a denser, less ad-drive way. HN was perfectly placed and lots of folks came over (lots of the better users, that is). These people hated the design of digg (a.k.a. "scroll scroll scroll") and needed a more information dense yet content and comment rich environment. This place thrived as did reddit - both sites who offer very dense information pages (reddit has styles/options to make it less dense though).

So yes, design is a huge factor IMO. Startup folks, articles, good comments - all of that works together with the design. You can't say that HN works despite being "ugly".

<comment><USER2> Actually, I can say that (and I did).

And when I say it's ugly, I'm not really talking about style. Instead, I'm referring to how I have to pinch and zoom when reading posts on my smartphone, and the awfully long line lengths, and the small type.

I get that such points probably aren't important to pg (or the community at large) and I can appreciate that. If it works, why muck with it? Still, I don't think it's a stretch to say that the design of this site probably wasn't ever treated as a key concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The gratuitously large amount of whitespace in comments pages is a little off- putting. The very, very light gray meta-info text on white bg is hard to read in the comments container; as is the kind-of-blue text on light blue bg. The icons are _not_ descriptive enough as stand-alones to exist without text indication of what they do, or something similar.

So basically, this is just walking into the 'flat' fad without any careful thought. I'm just in disbelief. I'm primarily a back-end coder but I've designed better sites than this.

Edit: I realize I'm being a little bit mean, and I don't like being mean... but I think it's perhaps warranted this time given the name of the site.

<comment><USER5> <http://contrastrebellion.com/>

<comment><USER6> I like how HN is actually one of the low-contrast examples and the comment you're replying to is complaining about contrast.

<comment><USER5> Here's a good example of what they mean:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711>

This is hard to read. I'd guess PG may have decided to keep it this way so users don't post too many (long) messages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For something aimed at designers, it's disappointing that the design is lacking. The font color is too light. I have young eyes and I found myself straining a little to read. This is especially poor since the number of points is in this light color. Points are what people look for and yet they don't pop out at you.

Another issue is the menu at the top; I didn't know the clock meant new until I clicked it. Adding a hover (at the very least) would make it more friendly to new users.

The key is to not go overboard with minimalism. At the end of the day, certain details that people look for in order to familiarize themselves with something cannot be eliminated for the sake of aesthetic.

<comment><USER8> The design is optimized for Retina Displays – the typo is perfectly readable and the contrast is great; on 2x devices.

Less so on 1x though, agreed.

[https://s3-eu- west-1.amazonaws.com/d013/Screen+Shot+2013-01-...](https://s3-eu- west-1.amazonaws.com/d013/Screen+Shot+2013-01-21+at+17.03.56.png)

<comment><USER7> Then you are optimizing for a minority of your audience and alienating the majority, all for a shade of gray. Readability should never be compromised.

edit: And before this is perceived as me being hostile rather than my intention of helpful (though it seems it already has), let me say that this is the kind of site I have been looking for. And thus I want to use it and want it to succeed. But certain design decisions can imply things to users that may not be intended. Content that is difficult to read, especially content which calls for interaction, does the opposite of what its intended for. And that makes users feel as if they're not wanted.

<comment><USER9> I think here's where the difference would apply. Designers almost all of them use high resolution displays. And maybe Designer News is aimed at those designers, who're at the cutting edge.

<comment><USER10> That in itself seems like bad design, doesn't it? :)

<comment><USER9> Well, its just designing for a target audience. It isn't universal design if that's what you mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great initiative but I do have some feedback. The first thing I notice is that the top menu is unusable. I have no idea what the links do, I only can guess when seeing the icons. The smiley icon is the most confusing.

The second thing are the icons besides the posts. I guess the goal is to help users categorize posts, with the current number of categories it helps. But when all posts match a category you will could have, in theory, 20 categories. This won't help categorize, this will only help confuse people.

The third thing is the text. The lack of dots between the timestamp, username and count of points completely confuses me. When I read the entire line, I will think that Benjamin F. added 3 points 28 minutes ago to the link above. When in fact there are a total of 3 points added to the link above, the post submitter is Benjamin F. and the link was submitted 28 minutes ago. Placing two simple dots helps users not get confused.

I notice a lot of designers want to design something visually attractive but completely don't think about UX/UI. This is a perfect example.

<comment><USER12> Also, the tooltips on the timestamps make no sense. I'm not a fan of the "x hours ago" style of relative timestamp, and much prefer to just know the actual date and time an item was posted. Some sites, such as reddit, give you an absolute timestamp in a tooltip when you hover over a relative one, e.g. hovering over "2 hours ago" on a reddit comment produces a tooltip that says "Mon Jan 21 12:15:37 2013 UTC".

But hovering over "about 2 hours ago" on a Designer News post produces a tooltip that says "20 minutes ago". What's going on here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reading some comments on Designer News [1], I can already see some HN-DN clash.

[1] [https://news.layervault.com/stories/608-designer-news-on- hac...](https://news.layervault.com/stories/608-designer-news-on-hacker-news)

 _It's amazing how many UI/UX experts you can find on Hacker News._

Not everyone who makes a comment is an expert but even then they can have an opinion and they have all the right to express it. Whether you are a hacker or designer you should be professional enough to be grateful that people are even making an effort to express their true opinion. BTW, there are many real UI/UX experts here and I guess there must be some great hackers on Designer News. Can't both peacefully co-exist without making nasty remarks on each other?

 _Ha ha some of the comments are funny. - "I have no idea what the links do, I only can guess when seeing the icons. The smiley icon is the most confusing."

so CLICK THEM if you're not sure. Sheesh where's people sense of adventure and discovery these days. And c'mon you don't know what a plus sign might mean?_

It is amazing how one can find it funny when someone points a major flaw in design that results in terrible user experience. Beautiful icons are of no use if they don't convey clear message to the user. Such designs are similar to a beautiful girl who is mad. When will we learn to accept our mistakes?

The discussion in that thread left me with a sour taste. Forget about the design of site, now I have serious doubts about the quality of the actual community there.

<comment><USER14> At the risk of overgeneralizing, many in the HN community are clearly defensive about their lack of design skills. Almost every time a nice-looking link comes up, the reaction is predictable: you'll find lots of comments finding fault with the design.

In a lot of cases, those comments are accurate. Design is hard, and designers don't get it right 100% of the time. What's strange about these comments is that they only come up when the author of the link is a designer -- no one makes comments about design problems on developers' blogs.

So it seems like there's an attitude of wanting to take down designers a few notches, which is a bit unprofessional and immature, IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's worth it to note that Designer News began as a side project, which may explain the less-than-perfect design details. I guess you could argue that a side project intended for designers should still meet basic accessibility guidelines, but the point certainly apologizes for some of the weaknesses of the framework.

I am very excited about the future of Designer News. As the community grows and matures, I hope it will conjure more discussion-oriented posts and less of the generic links that have made up the bulk of the content. But there is really no place for designers to discuss thought-provoking articles and trends or ask for feedback/criticism. I find Hacker News to be somewhat intimidating as a venue for design discussion, or unable to provide the perspective I am seeking feedback on. Other sides such as Dribbble or Forrest tend to be poor venues for constructive conversation - perhaps because it is the same place where people are displaying their work that might go under fire during the conversation, and many of us don't like to shit where we eat, as it were.

It's a strong concept, even if it needs a few more weekends of polish before it's truly fit for prime time.

<comment><USER16> After reading Designer News for the past week I've noticed most threads have zero (or single-sentence) comments nevermind in-depth discussions.

No offense, but it's essentially a dead-forum and to make it invite-only shows the bigger picture is out of their grasp. I hope they open registrations and shape itself to be something...anything.

<comment><USER17> Designer News is invite-only and will remain so forever.

While it's still in its early stages, we want to future proof things quite a bit. Currently, we can map our users onto a directed graph which will help immensely with spam, dead accounts and so forth. (If you're a spammer, everyone you've invited gets their account nuked along with the person that invited you.)

Also, one of our users put together a sweet visualization of this in action, which you can see here:

<http://ejfox.github.com/DesignerNewsMembers/>

<comment><USER18> Pretty sure things like this: <https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/293495292265893888> entirely taint any intellectual reasoning behind invites.

<comment><USER17> Paul's a friend and I trust his ability to dole out invites. That's why we gave him some.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks more like Reddit than Hacker News:

        Kevin T. about 7 hours ago
        We have to go deeper.

            Marian M. about 6 hours ago
            That's what she said.

        Tyler H. about 7 hours ago
            YO DAWG - http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/33729543.jpg

[https://news.layervault.com/stories/608-designer-news-on- hac...](https://news.layervault.com/stories/608-designer-news-on-hacker-news)

...

 _"We're keeping things small and invite-only to ensure quality."_

<https://news.layervault.com/signup>

Heh. Was Hacker News ever invite-only?

<comment><USER18> I think the reason why Hacker News works is because the demographic are not _all the same_ \- there are all kinds of people that are active on the site, rather than simply "friends of x" and "friends of friends of x" which often leads to inane comments like the examples you listed.

I don't think one can engineer this collision of demographics, I doubt the design nor even content allows you to control it once the wheels are in motion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Put me in the "Wow - that's too much white space" category. I'm on a 1680x1050 monitor and I have to scroll once to get to the bottom of 20 articles. And let's face it: they are presented as _sentences_. That means that, for me to read 20 sentences, I have to scroll. Again: I have to scroll just so that I can read 20 sentences yet I'm on a 1680x1050 desktop device.

I just don't understand this sort of design. It's the kind of thing that looks good on paper but, once you try to use it, it becomes obvious that you aren't presenting people with enough information per click. So I kind of understand someone giving me a comp for a design like this, but I don't understand someone putting this out "live" and then not recognizing the inherent and obvious problems that this amount of white space cause.

Also, put in the "I despise hate icon-only navigation, especially when I'm on a new site" group. The icons also don't make any sense to me. WTH is a smiley face for? No alt title or helpful hint when I mouse over - I have to view the URL to see what it is. Unusable. Unfriendly. And the plus sign is also a login? Whoa...

Sorry - I could not ever use a site like that.

</comment><comment><USER20> > We're keeping things small and invite-only to ensure quality.

If you're going to be a gated community then don't post it on HN.

(also, I seriously doubt this ensures "quality".)

<comment><USER17> We didn't post it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A lot of the points outlined by commenters here have already been brought up by the Designer News community in this Feature Request thread: [https://news.layervault.com/stories/126-feature-requests- let...](https://news.layervault.com/stories/126-feature-requests-lets-talk- about-designer-news). If you're already a member, that's where you can add feedback.

</comment><comment><USER22> I am using a Samsung monitor that kinds fails at contrast.

Also I have a design degree.

Summing the two I can conclude: Your color scheme is veeeery bad, and strange considering the site is called designer news.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice concept, I liked the circle "categories" (CSS, Show, etc)

But one things that really bothers me, especially in a design oriented site, when using image only cues, at least add a title / alt for a tooltip: (1) for accessibility and screen readers (2) for users who don't get the hint of the clock/newspaper/plus icons as the equivalent newest/news/submit concepts from HN.

Good potential, nice MVP overall

</comment><comment><USER24> I find this site to be designed rather poorly, especially for a project you'd expect good design of.

\- I find the icons in the bar on the top to be rather *ambiguous. I don't immediately know what purpose they serve, save for the + icon. Some text (just text?) would be useful here.

\- The text underneath the link titles is very hard to read. I have to squint. The colour is too close to the white background it's on.

\- I have no idea what the tomato and the T circle are supposed to indicate.

\- Nested comments aren't easily scrolled over, because the indentation is quite small.

I'm not a designer at all, these are just some things that I notice as a user. Aesthetically I find the site to be quite pretty.

Edit: I like the concept a lot!

<comment><USER25> 1\. "Unambiguous" is good-- you probably mean they _are_ ambiguous.

3\. It's an Apple, not a tomato. I'm guessing articles having to do with Apple have that "badge". The "T" is indicating a typography related story, whereas the "Show" badge is a "Show DN" post.

I was not involved in the site, the badge thing is just observation.

<comment><USER26> Given that one badge is Show, my natural inclination was to think that T is tell. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It would be nice to link to the actual article rather than the Designer News link in RSS.

</comment><comment><USER28> For a website called Designer News that header bar is pretty fucking incoherent.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have absolutely no idea what the icons at the top of the page mean. Why is that good?

</comment><comment><USER30> Looks neat! What is this written on? Are you making the source available?

<comment><USER31> Search for lamernews for the same thing but opensource and redis based (written by antirez)

<comment><USER30> Thanks for your reply. But Lamernews does not seem to have search. I also found lobste.rs to be good. It is also based on rails and seems like a good choice if someone wants to set up a hackernews style board. Guess I'll try coding up something similar in Django for this month..or does something already exist?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I like the idea. not very impressed by the design though ..

</comment><comment><USER33> I like the design of your site very much (I am a web designer), most of the people who complain about design here - are just programmer - don't ever let a programmer to tell you how a proper design should look like...

<comment><USER13> I find some serious issues with the design, not in terms of aesthetics, but in terms of usability. I am a programmer, a web designer, a marketeer and a business guy.

 _don't ever let a programmer to tell you how a proper design should look like..._

Don't ever let anyone tell you to ignore genuine feedback from anyone especially when he can be a potential user of your site. Focus on what the feedback is and if it is good for your project and not on the "profession" of the person who gave you feedback. Also, I have all the reasons to believe the person who you are giving this advice, who created this site, is also a programmer.

<comment><USER33> Looking at your personal website: <http://www.anujkumar.com> \- it's very hard to tell that you have any relation to web design.</comment></comment></comment>


We Need Chrome No More - <AUTHOR> https://redalemeden.com/blog/2019/we-need-chrome-no-more <comment><USER3> I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today.

Luckily, Firefox, arguably among the most "free from corporate greed" of the browsers, has now finally caught up to Chrome on stability and speed (in my experience), and is rapidly adding privacy and content blocking features and defaults that Chrome lacks. If it were still behind Chrome technically, as it was in 2008, it probably wouldn't matter that Mozilla is more trustworthy than Google.

<comment><USER4> > Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and > could crash without taking down the entire browser.

Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled with.

There seems to be a bloat cycle with many products, browsers being one of them. They start off lean, gain features over time, and then they are or feel so heavy that a lean new competitor can feel like a fresh breeze.

Remember when Firefox was the fresh breeze, compared to the Netscape suite? I remember Chrome being perceived the same way when it came out.

<comment><USER5> I'm surprised there aren't more people on here who moved to chome for the dev tools. That is what moved me over there. Firebug was great in it's day but at some point Chrome's dev tools just became too much better to make staying on Firefox possible.

<comment><USER6> I'm not a professional web developer, but in the experience I've had building a couple of JS heavy sites, I've actually found the Edge developer tools to be the best. If there's one thing microsoft knows how to do well, it's build developer tools.

<comment><USER7> > If there's one thing microsoft knows how to do well, it's build developer > tools.

This is probably very subjective, but I can absolutely not relate to that.

<comment><USER8> Me neither. It may or may not be true in Edge, I've never tried, but it absolutely wasn't true in _any_ IE so I wouldn't naturally expect it to be true in Edge.

I certainly see where GP is coming from, Microsoft _do_ have an awesome legacy in dev tooling that lives on to this day with products like VSCode, but browser tooling might be the glaring exception to this - perhaps since Microsoft never really was or became an 'internet' company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Other browsers need to catch up to Chrome with their development tools. I'd be happy to use Safari or Firefox for development, but...

\- I can't disable CORS in Firefox (yes, sometimes you have to disable CORS rather than modify the Allow-Origin header response, for example if you need to test against a production backend) (and, no, CORS Everywhere is not a sufficient solution).

\- I can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome.

\- Safari does not allow self-signed certs over WSS (and there's no way to override it).

\- Safari does not respect System-wide APC Config for Proxies.

There's a handful of other issues. Both Safari and Firefox do do things well, and often better than Chrome. For example, Firefox tends to actually handle standards correctly, whereas Chrome tries to be overly forgiving. And Safari's Develop and Debug menus are easily the best and quickest way to disable CORS or JavaScript, and examine service workers.

Unfortunately, some of the above issues are blockers.

I can test with Firefox on staging or in production, but not being able to test up front during development really impacts compatibility testing.

If another browser was as good or better for development, I'd be happy to use it.

<comment><USER10> >\- I can't inspect WebSocket frames in anything except Chrome.

For what it's worth, WebSockets show up as type 'Other' in the inspector, and the frames are listed under 'Preview'.

Edit: Safari.

<comment><USER11> It just says "WebSocket Connection Established", and then a list of "Binary Frame". Is there a way to inspect their contents? Just seeing that frames are being sent doesn't seem very useful for debugging.

<comment><USER12> I just tested Safari 12.0.3 on macOS 10.14.3 with [https://websocket.org/echo.html](https://websocket.org/echo.html) and it works for me. In the inspector it has a Sockets folder with the socket, and when I select it, it shows the textual content of each frame.

Edit: This is of course textual frames. I don't know where to find a site that demonstrates binary frames. I do notice that if I right-click the textual frame it has "Log Frame Text" as an option; maybe with a binary frame you can ask it to log the binary frame contents?

Edit 2: Ok I found a binary websocket test and unfortunately there is no option to log the binary info. That sucks. I recommend filing a bug report at bugreport.apple.com requesting better tooling around this. It's also worth checking the Safari Technical Preview to see if they've already added any better tooling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem with these articles is that the recommendation always ends up just preaching to the choir: people who already switched away from Chrome nod in appreciation, but people who haven't switched literally get nothing out of these posts to convince them to switch to what is basically the same application made by a different company, with completely different conventions on where everything is, without any concrete perceived benefits (security and tracking are invisible problems, you don't sell someone on switching by saying they won't have them anymore, no matter how important you think that is). And to boot, the switch would almost certainly make things worse because add-ons people relied on won't work and now you've burdened them with having to find new and unfamiliar alternatives to what they were comfortable with.

Chrome's main problem isn't that it's overstayed its welcome and is strangling the web (whatever you want that to mean), it's that it's so pervasive that people have become accustomed to it to such a degree that you're now faced with needing to convince people to give up what they're accustomed to. And that's a _much_ harder sell. Using chrome needs to literally be a grating or even damaging experience before someone will voluntarily switch to a different browser.

<comment><USER14> I gave Firefox a solid test last year (about 3 months of dedicated use at work + home) and I ended up coming back to Chrome. There are some really great things about Firefox. It has gotten so much better and faster than it was, but Chrome still struggles less with troublesome websites, and seems to load all pages faster overall.

I'm keeping my eye on Firefox, but Chrome still gets my business for now.

<comment><USER15> Same here - made a switch and switched back quickly after.

1\. Compatibility - random sites would just break...I reckon 15% of the time

2\. Battery life - FF destroyed my battery life. To the tune of 8 hours on Chrome vs like 2 on FF.

<comment><USER16> Did you have add-ons in Firefox? I almost never have sites break—certainly not anywhere near 15% of the time. And at least 95% of the time I've had issues in the past, it has turned out to be an add-on causing problems, rather than the browser itself. (Ad blockers would be the first thing to check in the case of random breakages.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find posts like this kind of interesting. Chrome gained prominence because it had great performance improvements over the competition -- IE and Firefox. IE in particular was dog slow at all times, and Chrome ran everything at least as well and almost always better. Firefox didn't have process isolation when Chrome came onto the scene, and that kind of knocked it for security and stability.

It's not as if people switched just because it had Google branding. Everyone switched because it was quantifiably better. From benchmarks to design, Chrome was a winner, and has enjoyed its success.

Now, Chrome is doing things that could be seen as "IE-like." Manifest v3 -- even with relaxed changes towards ad blocking -- will not necessarily enable uBlock Origin to continue exactly as it does today. The forced user system is another move in the direction of anti-consumer behavior.

I've tried to switch back to the competition. I'm using Firefox right now. Pages render faster and compact mode is great. But Handoff myseteriously doesn't work on my Mac when it does with Chrome (added in Firefox 65). I had to enable U2F support with an about:config flag. I had to turn off the spell checker to fight mysterious input latency in average textboxes.

I'm reluctantly staying because I ultimately like what I see, but there's an undeniable truth somewhere in here. It's really hard for Firefox to match Chrome simply based on resources. Google can drop millions of dollars on a browser -- and few other companies can afford to do that. Certainly not Mozilla.

<comment><USER18> >It's not as if people switched just because it had Google branding. Everyone switched because it was quantifiably better.

The knowledgeable minority, maybe. _Most_ people switched because Google pushed it like a piece of adware. Bundling it with other software installers, prompting you to use it whenever you use Google search or other products, and bundling it with an OS.

<comment><USER19> If that was the deciding factor we'd still be using IE.

<comment><USER20> No we wouldn't.

Microsoft was legally prevented from doing that, remember?

Why Google has been allowed to get away with it I have no idea.

<comment><USER21> > Microsoft was legally prevented from doing that, remember?

> Why Google has been allowed to get away with it I have no idea.

Wasn't Microsoft only legally prevented from doing that due agreements made when they settled their antitrust case?

There needs to be another anti-trust case against Google, especially for the cases where it's used its monopoly in search to push its other products like Chrome, since that shouldn't even be controversial under current antitrust interpretations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In retrospect the practical shifting of web-standards-setting from an at least possibly neutral standards body representing multiple interests (W3C) to a a body wholly controlled by browser-vendors (WHATWG)... may have been good for speed of "innovation" for a time, but was in the long-term not good for the "Web as an open platform."

> Making matters worse, the blame often lands on other vendors for "holding > back the Web". The Web is Google's turf as it stands now; you either do as > they do, or you are called out for being a laggard.

Indeed, I think it's the structural politics of WHATWG that make that hard to counter. WHATWG was almost founded on the principles of "not being a laggard" and "doing what we [browser vendors] do". When there were several browser- vendors with roughly equal market power they could counter-balance each other, and had an interest in compatibility with each other, but when there's an elephant in the room...

That is, the W3C folks that were accused of "holding back the web" while trying to keep standards-setting from going to WHATWG... were probably right.

You can disagree, but 10-15 years on, I think we're overdue a larger discussion and retrospective evaluation of the consequences of the WHATWG "coup". I haven't seen much discussion of this, many developers today may not even be aware of the history.

</comment><comment><USER23> Other than AMP, I can't really think of a case that I would characterize as "Google abusing its position" w.r.t. Open Web. It was Chrome that led the push for PWAs, which I think is both great for the Open Web and consumers... The author complains about other vendors being "called laggards", which - let's be honest - we're really talking about how long Apple/Safari dragged their feet on Service Workers... and they _should_ be called out for that because it was an incredibly cynical thing to do to protect their walled App garden from the Open Web.

<comment><USER24> It's laughable that the author suggests Apple as a viable alternative. Apple, the last company pushing license encumbered formats into web standards. Apple, the perennial laggard on standards support in general.

<comment><USER25> Probably because Apple take privacy seriously, which is a direct threat to Google's bottom line.

<comment><USER26> That's their PR position, but I don't see them taking privacy particularly seriously in reality. They tolerated predatory behavior from darling apps like Facebook for ages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> c-smile The post is missing one simple point: the complexity of browser's engine.

The complexity of current web client stack is comparable with the average OS. Any modern browser has all components of Android OS for example - <USER2> file systems, threads, VM, virtual native code execution, independent windowing and graphics stack, message routing, etc.

That's like situation with Windows and WINE. Yes, you may run some win progs on Wine but original Windows will always be better for them.

So we will have just one browser. That's the reality, want we that or not.

Until either one of these:

1\. The spec of Web Client will be reduced to bare minimum. With unified extensions mechanism, think about <applet> but more flexible - based on universal bytecode VM free from licensing issues.

2\. Or users will pay for the browser application, instead of having it for free - giving up their private data instead of money. So browser vendors will be able and motivated to provide better, privacy first browsers.

<comment><USER27> IMHO we got here because we chose the design-by-committee philosophy of organizations like the W3C over more of a waterfall approach built from first principles.

I would like to see a core HTML/CSS/Javascript spec that is a union of features proven to be available and work consistently across all browsers. The spec should incorporate ideas that are obvious in hindsight, such as the DOM diffing optimizations in frameworks like React, or running each tab in its own process.

I think that it should also take a broad perspective approach on things like padding and margin. For example, use simpler abstractions from layout engines like Qt or the layout-as-a-matrix-solver math behind iOS's Auto Layout constraints.

Find the commonalities to give us a high-level abstraction over all the div/span/table concepts of the web, then show a mapping from the abstraction to the quirks of how a div flows, for example. Maybe we could allow one transpiler to go from the solvable/predictable rules to the quirks of say HTML5.

The steps in this process could be relatively tiny and easy to test. It should render the DOM at > 60 fps on a Pentium 100 or equivalent, since games used to do that before they even had OpenGL.

I don't see any step of this process that is intractable. Once we had that, it should be relatively straightforward to build an open source browser as a base spec implementation. This is the sort of thing I fantasized about working on before I got so burned out.

<comment><USER28> I think we got here because of Martian Headsets:

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian- headsets/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here's hoping. The proliferation of browser standards has made this appear a more daunting task as time has gone by. There was a point where if you built a good DOM, javascript engine, and a layout engine and had a reasonable ability to fetch resources, you could bootstrap a browser. That's how Konquerer got there.

But now, I think we're past that point -- if your browser can't do native video conferencing and opengl and music apis and SVG animations and canvas support it might as well be a steaming turd.

I'd love to see someone try; to build a browser with third-party cookies excluded by design rather than policy (so that all off-domain fetches come from a blank "incognito" context), to build a React-style shadow DOM as the primary DOM and have the W3C DOM implemented as a polyfill, with client certificates integrated more naturally, completely killing the notion of allowing windows to open programmatically (I mean, how can pop-ups still be a problem? Any sane site is now using on-page popups if they need the UX), and some sort of model for integrating new web APIs and content handlers.

But combining all of that with a smooth and well-polished UI that works on multiple platforms is rapidly becoming something that only a large software corporation can pull off, and even there, mostly pull off badly. For now, I think Chrome is here to stay.

<comment><USER30> I have a better idea: build a new browser for a new web that is designed with decades of hindsight and isn't as bogged down in all the stupid legacy crap that the current web is.

Then port Chromium to it as a portal to the legacy web.

<comment><USER31> The most popular browsers in China take a similar approach: they're hybrids of Chromium and Microsoft's Trident engine for legacy pages that require NPAPI plugins. Many ecommerce and banking websites in China require proprietary NPAPI plugins so these hybrid browsers seamlessly switch to Trident for those websites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Within two years, Chrome accounted for 15% of all Web traffic on desktop—for > comparison, it took Firefox 6 years to get there. Google managed to deliver > a fast, thoughtfully designed browser that was an instant hit among users > and Web developers alike.

It took 2 years for IE to get 20% [1], and I wouldn't describe IE 1-3 as "fast and thoughtfully designed". I think the lesson here is simply that big tech companies with an established channel for reaching users can boost market share faster than open-source non-profit projects.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#/media/File:...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#/media/File:Internet- explorer-usage-data.svg)

<comment><USER32> Immediately after Chrome released Google was having it bundled with every freeware program under the sun and bribed every major PC vendor to start including it as the default browser in new consumer Windows PCs being sold.

Mozilla never had the raw revenue to just dump millions into forcing Chrome onto everyones desktop like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It left a sour taste in my mouth that Microsoft joined Chrome instead of investing in FireFox and helping them advance their multi-process architecture quicker.

<comment><USER34> Is having a Chromium "kernel" such a bad thing? We don't complain there isn't sufficient competition for the Linux "kernel"

More eyes and hands on a single open source code base is better use of resources and leads to a better output.

<comment><USER35> I think the issue is that Google still has full control over the source. Maybe we just need to pull an io.js on chromium, though Microsoft would need to be on board.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > An ecosystem that doesn't seem concerned with performance, user experience, > privacy, or pushing computing forward.

What? Chrome was more performant that any browser at the time it was released and it's still pretty good. It also became the gold standard for browser UX so much so that all other browsers copied a lot of it. Chrome also brought with it multi-process tabs and the V8 Javascript engine, how is that not "pushing computing forward"?

</comment><comment><USER37> This is such a fairytale retelling of history. Firefox was well on the way to crushing IE. It was the whole reason Microsoft re-kick started IE development again. Firefox was the dominant browser in 2008.

Safari was the browser pushing ahead on performance and being lightweight except in JavaScript. So Google took WebKit and added their own JS engine to it so that Gmail and their office suite could compete with Microsoft's offerings.

It worked and all browsers started an arms race for JS performance.

<comment><USER28> Firefox was never the dominant browser. Neither was it on its way to crushing IE. You my friend are recalling a fairytale.

<comment><USER38> Indeed: [http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market- share#monthly-20090...](http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market- share#monthly-200901-201902)

<comment><USER39> From that source, it looks like the story depends on the region though (for desktop). In order of decreasing use of firefox:

* Europe: Firefox overtook IE in 2011 with ~40%

* Africa: Firefox overtook IE in 2012 with ~40%. It looks like Firefox had the best chance of "crushing it" here.

* South America: Firefox overtook IE in 2015 with 12%. Peak was 32% in 2010

* Asia: Firefox overtook IE in 2016 with ~12%. Peak was 28% in 2011

* Oceana: Firefox overtook IE in 2017 with 12%. Peak was 32% in 2010

* North America: Firefox peaked at 30% in 2009 and was half as common as IE until 2015-2016. It still hasn't overtaken IE

<comment><USER38> Yeah but in most cases that happened during the rise of Chrome which could suggest that Firefox didn't really overtake IE, but IE lost users to Chrome and Firefox happened to lose less users.

Another point to reinforce this argument is that in many of those regions Firefox peaked around 2010 and started losing users too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'd be thrilled to use another browser if they worked.

In my case, the feature that is missing from every other browser is MIDI access. I can plug a digital piano into my computer, and Chrome can talk to it. This is a standard, but the other browsers talk about it but never do anything, it's been "coming any day now" in Firefox since 2015, when I first conceived of the project ( [https://pianop.ly/](https://pianop.ly/), a web app for playing piano along with original music videos from YouTube, karaoke style). It sucks that I have to tell people to use Chrome or it won't work. (although technically they can use Brave, Opera or other Blink based browsers)

Regardless of that one feature, I'm curious why there aren't better alternatives based on Blink that allow you to get the Blink engine without all these things we hate about Google's decisions (related to the being an ad company, for one thing). I understand that we'd still have a monoculture, but I don't see that as nearly the problem it was when browsers worked so differently, for basic layout and such.

</comment><comment><USER41> > Ten years ago, we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free from corporate > greed

How? It never stops puzzling me why anyone thoght Chrome would be any different. Somehow less corporate.

<comment><USER42> > How? It never stops puzzling me why anyone thoght Chrome would be any > different.

It _is_ different! Microsoft never released even a single line of IE. Chromium on the other hand is completely open source, and we have that to thank for all the fun things that came of it from VSCode, to Brave browser, to Puppeteer. Things are WAY better now than in the dark IE days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> If anyone's to blame it's mozilla's criminal laziness. There I said it. We were stuck with firefox 3 for 3 years (early 2008-2011), on a time where chrome was getting a +1 version every month or 2 months.

I remember Mozilla "evangelist" employees hard at work, tweeting "version doesn't matter, it's the changelog that matters, chrome team could have changed two background colors and did +1 to the version counter".

Great battle move. Then, Firefox 4 got released and everyone hated the new interface. Even ex-mozilla cofounder JWZ complained that it feels beta even though it's a fully mature product out for a decade now and that's unacceptable. Also, No mp4 support. Oh yeah. They added it in Firefox 20 finally (then no webm support. They finally added it in January 2019. Good job)

In the meantime, Mozilla engineering kept fooling around with projects that went nowhere. Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that? THE JAVASCRIPT PHONE! FLASH TO JS CONVERTER, where is that now? That JS only Video Codec ORBX.js? that Eich said "I saw the future today" 10 years ago, and it's still not out yet. PDF JS (in it's first release made opening large PDF files on Firefox impossible) etc etc. Many good things came of from it too, like asmjs (ancestor of wasm), but in general there seemed a direction of everywhere, neither arriving here nor there.

Mozilla then switched the default search engine of Firefox to Yahoo! At a time when Yahoo was in the spotlight for rapidly dying and looking for a pity- acquisition!! It also came bundled with great bugs that kept resetting the default search engine back to yahoo - [https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/questions/1206101](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1206101)

To give praise where praise is worth, Mozilla did realize their mistakes got back from their 9 year vacation (2009-2018) and Firefox today is finally very stable and relatively fast compared to Edge and Safari.

I know I am sounding trollish and bitter, but the truth is that I am just sad at how Firefox fell. What happened? Did people get lazy as their savings grew? Where key individuals poached away by Google and Apple? Did they burn out? Something surely must have happened...

<comment><USER44> Addressing your entire post would require further research on my part so I hope you'll excuse that I only address what I can recall off the top of my head.

> Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that?

That's just the code name for Firefox for Android. Ime it's fairly pleasant to use since flick scrolling was improved, and browser plugins on mobile are the selling feature.

> FLASH TO JS CONVERTER

Definitely sad to see Shumway die, but I think in retrospect it will be clear it was a forward thinking decision. WASM will obviate a lot of the effort for what has clearly become a historical feature.

> Mozilla did realize their mistakes got back from their 9 year vacation > (2009-2018)

The origin of modern Firefox could be dated back to the origin of Servo in 2012 since it layed all the groundwork. I think this is the clear turning point in Mozilla's refocus, maybe push it back to 2015 when Firefox OS was dropped.

<comment><USER43> Thanks for commenting. My comment was meant to to be slightly exagerated but since your response is grounded, I 'll rephrase mine too :)

The evangelist tweets (I won't dig them because it's not cool) are 100% real, but keep in mind they were meant to be humorous and not official stance.

Firefox 3 got released in 2008, but firefox 3.5 (arguably the best browser at the time) was released a year later. Mozilla released many firefox updates in the meantime I believe they did so even after firefox 4 was released (no forced update from 3.5 to 4).

Firefox 4 was delayed to my understanding due to the whole html5 hype and trying to support as many of the new standards as possible (this info is from twitter so it might be wrong).

Lots of projects in limbo, not much different than google pushing NaCl, Dart, webkit prefixes. It looks bad only when paired with the general low activity. There were some chat logs leaked of mozilla people talking about adding webkit prefix support to firefox. Some where getting very angry over this. Today firefox supports the webkit prefixes :p must have been a multi-year argument.

Lack of mp4 support was due to MPEG LA owning the rights to h264. Mozilla didn't wanna pay the patent owners, in the end cisco created openh264 and mozilla used that, in 2014 nonetheless. Webm was not added because it wasn't a web standard. In my opinion both h264 and webm events got dealt in poor judgement but whatever.

The Yahoo change was due to an expensive multi-year contract between Mozilla and Yahoo. Money before users. I remember people defending it by saying that yahoo search is powered by Bing, not by yahoo themselves.

In general mozilla used to be this awesomely perceived company... no not company, foundation! They organized things like place giant firefox stickers in your city and gain online fame, and sending a cake to the IE team with every major release they did. Spearheaded the whole open web movement. It was Richard Stallman with Charisma 10! And then.. kinda suddenly stopped and became more like the Apache Foundation. Cool and all but slow and old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and > bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it's ready to ship.

That's me. Sorry, but I just can't be bothered to support every browser's quirks. I check Firefox every once in a while, but really, I don't mind losing a few users if it means significantly less maintenance and testing for me.

It's like complaining that developers are increasingly shunning other OSes - if it works on Windows, it's ready to ship. Yet people do this all the time for video games and most Linux users understand that making a game that runs equally well on Windows _and_ Linux _and_ Mac is no simple task.

<comment><USER45> Developing against Chrome is exactly "support every browser's quirks" instead of developing against the actual standards (usually Firefox has the truest implementation of which).

<comment><USER46> But as a web developer I don't necessarily care about standards. I want the page to work for as many users as possible. For the longest time this meant to support IE's way of doing things, now it means to support Chrome (unless you target Enterprise users).

Even if you develop for Chrome, Firefox and Edge you'll just end up building workarounds for all 3, not adhering strictly to the standard.

<comment><USER47> Sorry to break this to you, but as a web developer you should only care about standards, otherwise you have no standards.

The standards are a single source of truth for your production, if you build solely to a single browsers quirks (in this case Chrome) then those quirks can change at any time.

<comment><USER19> My standard is the browser ~95% of my users use. It's the only meaningful one.

I still fix FF bugs when they come in (it seems to be a bigger offender than IE recently) but developing for Chrome first is the only approach which makes business sense.

<comment><USER48> 95%? I haven't seen less than 20% mobile Safari on any site I've worked on in the last few years, and that's not even including Edge / IE / Firefox and desktop Safari.

<comment><USER49> only true in american markets

<comment><USER48> I was actually talking about UK and Sweden (haven't been to the US in 15 years).

<comment><USER49> what's the difference? these countries are basically american markets, everything west of belarus is kinda a software monoculture

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> There is an important difference between Google and Microsoft. Google is using their market dominance to push their opinions on the open standards bodies; Microsoft used their market dominance to ignore standards bodies completely.

<comment><USER51> Googles browser offers functionality to Googles websites that it does not offer to any other website.

When you log into an Google owned site, it interacts with the browser so that you are 'logged into your browser' with that Google account.

That is not pushing standards into a direction. That is blatant exploitation of ther market position.

<comment><USER52> You're already logged into sites you're already logged into.

I'm not exactly sure how advantageous you think this is.

<comment><USER53> Yeah, all that really happens is that it shows your profile picture, and autofills passwords, when it detects the google login cookie. Nothing that other browsers couldn't implement themselves.

<comment><USER54> For what sites would other browsers do this? Would those browsers be paid by those sites?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I don't particularly like the manifesto style of this post. The author attempts a hard sell by first admitting that the world needed Chrome and then after it succeeded he suggests throwing it to the depths after the wish came true.

> Chrome is effectively everywhere you look. And that's bad news.

Why? It's the dream you wanted 10 years ago, but it comes with Google now. Ooops for you if you dislike Google, but the vast majority of people doesn't care. Use Safari, Firefox or anything, but calling out ditching Chrome is for the greater good is ridiculous.

H mentions 60% as a dominant position which is not how I would describe it in my dictionary.

<comment><USER56> Realistically, would we have cared if IE was everywhere if it wasn't garbage in supporting web standards?

I'm not arguing for a lack of competition. It's just that someone needs to be on top of the heap. Might as well be a company that's invested in having their pages load fast rather than an OS maker with no incentive to improve their browser.

I wish Google would go back to funding Mozilla like they used to. At one point they were 90% of Mozilla's revenue.

<comment><USER55> > Realistically, would we have cared if IE was everywhere if it wasn't garbage > in supporting web standards?

No, I would have been perfectly happy if IE was a developer friendly, standards compliant browser, but they created a huge opportunity by ignoring this. I remember when I was super excited for a little floating JavaScript debug tool that you had to include in HTML and you could inspect variables without alerting them. I was amazed by it :)

> I wish Google would go back to funding Mozilla like they used to.

I think that's still the case:

[https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal- gives-m...](https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives- mozilla-more-money-to-push-privacy/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> As others have said here, I think the article mischaracterizes why stakeholders were enthusiastic about Chrome back in the day. It was a technically compelling browser which joined Firefox in pushing web standards in a way that Microsoft (and Apple) wouldn't.

I think the dominance of Webkit is concerning, but I don't think we can reuse the justifications of ten years ago to say why. Chrome continues to be technically strong (though perhaps not as much) and continues to push web standards (though perhaps too many supporting Google). The situation just isn't as bad today as it was. There is a lot less friction in the everyday experience of developers and users who want to use cutting-edge web standards.

Monoculture is bad, but it's hard to get people excited about challenging it when the monocultural product isn't awful.

</comment><comment><USER58> Chrome (from the consumer POV) wasn't about freeing us from "corporate greed". It was about:

\- Isolating tabs

\- Seamless upgrades (seriously, why does Firefox STILL ask on startup if I'd like to wait and install an update?)

\- Syncing between devices

\- Performance (which at the time was largely terrible)

Most of this still holds true, at least for me, so I see myself using Chrome for years to come.

</comment><comment><USER59> > If it works as intended on Chrome, it's ready to ship

A great step Firefox could take in this space is improving the transparency and performance auditing of its own engine. Debugging rendering performance issues between browsers is still an absolute nightmare. If Firefox can provide a better developer experience than Chrome, it might increase the likelihood that web developers would use FF as their first-choice development platform for simplicity and utility of tools. If it doesn't, it may still decrease the odds that when faced with a nasty performance bug, developers will throw up their hands and say "Chrome does it right; I guess FF still just sucks for performance in this corner case."

FF has been making impressive strides in this space, but their toolchain still feels clunky and slow relative to Chrome Developer Tools.

<comment><USER60> I'm pretty sure this is a commentary on the laziness of devs/why browser dominance is bad for standards, when taken in context:

> The dominance of Chrome has a major detrimental effect on the Web as an open > platform: developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their > testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it's > ready to ship.

When you're following decently established standards (not bleeding edge), it's usually Chrome that breaks now, not Firefox or Safari. Chrome truly is the new IE.

<comment><USER59> I haven't personally encountered this phenomenon. Can you give an example of an established standard that breaks on Chrome but FF / Safari handle?

<comment><USER60> Indeed I can, although one anecdote does not data make. The latest was using SVG sprites as background in CSS I think. Maybe I can throw up a demo during my lunch break, but honestly it isn't that exciting. It just doesn't work correctly in Chrome, the sprite is cropped/has a weird rendering artifact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Weird flex suggesting Vivaldi, given that it's proprietary and there are other open source Chromium forks.

<comment><USER62> Could you recommend some? From a quick search all I could find were things like Opera, Torch, Epic etc, which do not seem to be open source.

I must I am quite happy with Vivaldi at the moment, but a true open source browser would make me even happier.

I did try to use Firefox Developer Edition for a while, but despite being a step in the right direction, I must say I prefer the chromium developer tools.

<comment><USER61> I'm using the Brave developer channel on one of my machines. It's working well. Like Chromium, but without the creepier Google parts that had still managed to get their way in. I also like their theme a little better. Dark, and a little more compact.

<comment><USER63> I've been doing the same. I noticed that their public release is now also chromium based, so I was going to switch over to that. Unfortunately, there's currently no way to port browsing history, etc from Brave dev, only from prior versions of Brave, or other browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Man, I can remember when Google was still an up-and-coming, underdog-ish and exciting tech company, where working was cool and people and "do not evil" was enshrined.

I was really happy and excited whenever Google announced something new, because it was always so diverse, new, clever and somehow helped the world.

Now things have taken a complete 180 degree turn. Google has become an ad company, and any innovation serves only to squeeze a little bit more data out of users. "Don't be evil" got deleted, and Google indeed seems to actively embrace "be evil". They are not even arguing with it anymore - anything that serves to close down the web, force tracking, breaches of privacy and so on...

What changed in google? Any insiders? Just greed? Did important people leave?

</comment><comment><USER65> I try to switch to Firefox (or even Safari) every few months or so.

Firefox was close this time, but there were still a few things that forced me to switch back:

\- On Chrome I can type 'thisisunsafe' (previously 'danger' and 'badidea') to skip security warnings, sometimes I have to do this at work when testing things with invalid certs. On FF there's a class of these issues (HSTS I think?) that doesn't let you bypass the warning so it's unusable.

\- FF still crashes more regularly (like when plugging or unplugging an external monitor.

Thankfully the other two main issues are no longer a problem:

\- FF is now fast enough to be comparable

\- The third party extensions I required (switchy omega) now exist for FF.

<comment><USER26> Yeah that HSTS issue is ridiculous, although to be fair the spec requires browsers to give users "no recourse" to bypass the error. I'm also still annoyed by [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85601](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85601)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> > Ten years ago, we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free from corporate > greed

Firefox already did this. We needed Chrome because Firefox lagged behind in performance and was a memory hog.

<comment><USER67> Oh right, that's why I switched to Chrome. At the time Firefox had that horrid memory leak that would consume gigs of RAM if you left a tab open long enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Where we are now, it's not hard to look at Chrome in a negative light, for all the reasons the article states. However, I still remember where I was when I first saw the Chrome "speed test" ad, and thought "wow, this is what a browser should be! [https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/film/google_chrome_speed...](https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/film/google_chrome_speed_tests)

</comment><comment><USER69> Hypothetically speaking, suppose we didn't care about privacy at all. In that case, what are the disadvantages of a single browser engine taking over the market?

I suspect one disadvantage is that it's harder to innovate. Specifically, your new browser engine has no hope of sticking if all websites are heavily customized to Blink, rather than to open standards. It may seem that it's not a problem if Blink is open sourced. However, writing a new engine that works _exactly_ like some legacy engine is nearly impossible, even if that legacy engine is open sourced. OTOH, writing a new engine to the specifications of well-designed standards is much more realistic, since presumably those standards are (a) clearly spelled out, (b) written with the idea that they can be implemented without a million lines of legacy code.

Of course, this assumes that the community _can_ create high quality and efficient standards. It's not obvious, given how difficult it's been to achieve in the past, when there was more competition between browsers.

Does it sound about right? Any other disadvantages I haven't thought of?

<comment><USER70> The vendor will make decisions that are not in your interest, but in theirs. have you have tried to install an ad-blocker in chrome mobile? they just work in firefox mobile, and in both desktop browsers, but not in chrome mobile. (unless you do some very weird things with rooting your phone, using VPN providers, etc)

Without using an ad-blocker, if I use chrome mobile on my older phone (original Pixel), any time I browse a web site, the whole phone appears to lock up for a few seconds, it starts getting warm, and then a whole page ad appears over the web-site, and half the time clicking the X in the corner loads up the ad in a new tab...

<comment><USER69> Ah yeah good point, ads isn't only a concern for privacy reasons but also for performance/annoyance reasons.

I personally expect that, for purely selfish business reasons, Chrome will eventually kill all ads that are especially annoying or cause performance issues. But you're right, situations where vendor and user interests are at odds may always come up.

<comment><USER71> > I personally expect that, for purely selfish business reasons, Chrome will > eventually kill all ads that are especially annoying or cause performance > issues.

What I expect is that Chrome will be designed to block all non-Google ads alone, so that Google doesn't get affected. Google/Chrome then becomes the gatekeeper for what constitutes a decent ad for users. That would then arm twist publishers to switch to Google AdSense because that would be the only one providing revenues (or more revenues). Advertisers would then see their CPM/CPC costs increase, and they wouldn't have many other choices. That would increase prices for consumers. I recall seeing stats recently that Google (still) is the largest in online advertising, with Facebook being second.

We've seen this kind of behavior before with Adblock Plus and the "acceptable ads" scheme.

There's almost nothing to gain for the users. It will always drift (and only faster, with a monopoly) to satisfy the interests of the company.

<comment><USER69> > What I expect is that Chrome will be designed to block all non-Google ads > alone, so that Google doesn't get affected.

I assume you meant:

> What I expect is that Chrome will be designed to leave Google ads alone, so > that Google doesn't get affected.

I agree with your analysis, but I'm surprised with your conclusion. I think if there's a monopoly that decides which ads are decent, it will cause the overall level of the ads to be higher, which is better for users - at no extra cost to them.

My rationale (and I'm very interested in the opposite opinion, if you're willing to explain it) is this. A monopoly has too much to lose from frustrated or unhappy users. If too many people become too angry, they'll eventually cause a major damage to the ad industry through political action, greater popularity of ad blockers, people avoiding websites with too many ads, or people becoming desensitized to ads (leading to a dramatic reduction in ad value). A small company won't really care if its ads damage the industry -- it's not there for a long run, it just needs to push its products and long- term effects are something it worries about. A (near-)monopoly that controls 20-30% or more of the market worth $100B's a year is going to be really, really careful about even the slightest damage to the industry.

As to your other point, CPM/CPC costs are not dictated by Google. It's a marketplace with supply provided by publishers, and demand created by advertisers. Google influences the prices by choosing the auction rules and by saying which ads are acceptable, but any large shift in prices can only happen from a change in supply/demand. So I'm not sure why you think a monopoly would cause a rise in CPC. If anything, a monopoly would make the marketplace more efficient, taking out intermediaries who take a big cut, and lead to lower prices (as for example happened with Amazon in online retail).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> It's bizarre to see the number of comments on this thread adamantly insisting that Chrome became and stayed popular because of an ad campaign. I was a high school student when Chrome was released. I saw an ad for it, downloaded it, and found that it was much faster and much cleaner-looking that Firefox, so I stayed with it.

</comment><comment><USER73> Whenever Firefox comes out with a new version I try to use it for a week and realize it just doesn't perform as well as Chrome. Theres always one or two sites like twitch where it just LAGS to death whereas in Chrome its smooth as butter. At this point I just go back to it. Sigh...

<comment><USER20> Are you using mostly Google pages or services? That might explain why Firefox runs worse.

Anecdotally, of the three browsers I have on my dev machine Chrome is the biggest resource hog.

<comment><USER74> Resource hog != lag.

The reason Chrome doesn't lag is probably due to the fact that it uses so much RAM. I personally use Safari because of the OS integration but for some sites I do have to fire up Chrome just for performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Google still pushes Chrome very aggressively. Gmail shows a popover advertising Chrome when I log in. It also puts Chrome ads in security alerts about new logins (!!).

[https://imgur.com/a/eAOCL3J](https://imgur.com/a/eAOCL3J)

</comment><comment><USER76> Chrome is just a better browser. Also, Google already has all my information, so who better to trust with my browsing history?

Firefox has >10% market share, it's not like anybody can ignore 10% of users. So this article to me sounds like pure content marketing for Firefox.

<comment><USER77> Article recommends Vivaldi and Safari too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Let me know when Firefox stops being an insane resource hog and I will switch.

<comment><USER79> Now you'll receive dozens of responses of people saying that Firefox is much faster and leaner than Chrome for them. But that's not the case for me or anybody I know. Chrome continues being faster for me.

<comment><USER80> It performs okay (except for a few versions a while back when the helper processes would periodically lock up in kernel mode and it would take a reboot to fix), but 980MB of memory to have one tab open to Hacker News is definitely not lean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Firefox and Safari broke IE's dominance of the web. Chrome came along much later.

Safari killed flash in favor of HTML 5.

How quickly everyone likes to forget.

</comment><comment><USER82> Do we know why Google grew dissatisfied with Apple and forked Webkit?

<comment><USER83> Do we know why Google grew dissatisfied with sites serving their own content and developed AMP?

<comment><USER52> Because sites serving their own content were generally slower, and slower load times means fewer ad clicks.

Google making the web faster is a mutually beneficial arrangement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Look, some misguided individuals seem to hate Chromium because they think it doesn't respect their privacy or out of abject hatred for Google. But a lot are not actually looking from an engineering point of view. Browser's are the 1# security risk on any computer system due their complexity and access to the outside world. Chromium was the first (and mabye only) web browser that was designed from the ground up with privsep in mind. Firefox on the other hand did not have privsep for a long time, it was only implemented later after the fact. Not only that, Chromium now supports unveil, and new security innovation that blocks the browser's access to all files folders on the system except for what specified in settings.

</comment><comment><USER85> As a user (non-developer), I never trusted Chrome and never installed it onto my computer. Half of that was laziness, but the other half was understanding that Chrome is driven by ad-revenue and so privacy options would be severely sub-optimal, at least compared to Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER86> yeah....Apple, thats the solution to ending corporate ownership of the web. :smacks head:

</comment><comment><USER87> I almost regret invariably suggesting chrome in every conversation back when IE was leading, such is hindsight.

Perhaps instead of telling people what to use we should be telling them how to use, or more accurately how to change. Once people are invested in a platform or service it's hard to get them to change their mindset, especially over issues taken for granted like privacy.

There's a lot more attention to social media on the same issue of privacy, this would be the ideal time to bring chrome into this discussion to work on the 'detachment', self-imposed roadblocks, logging out, deleting apps, disabling notifications.

</comment><comment> amiga-workbench I'm afraid we are all way too far down the slippery slope here, you've piled so much garbage into web standards its no longer possible for any new players to enter the game without an unreal amount of financial backing.

</comment><comment><USER88> Should someone dare the major task of writing a new web browser, please, make it fully XML aware, so, as to be able to use it as just another component in an XML pipeline, for rendering.

A setting to convert all HTML to XHTML. This would allow easy XPath queries while browsing, then XPath 3.1 support, XSLT 3.0 support, XML Catalogs and XQuery in the browser would be cool as well. I am aware, that this is _lots_ of work, but it would be nice to have something, that keeps the document centric web alive, and does not play to the rumor web, that we have become.

</comment><comment><USER89> > _" developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and > bug-fixing routines..."_

Not me. I use Chrome to briefly test my builds, then close it and get the hell out of there.

I don't know why developers didn't or don't see the conflict of interest with a Google branded browser. I was unsettled by this from the moment they released the browser. Google uses manipulative design patterns as much as any of the big guns. Chrome is not immune to those efforts to manipulate user behavior for business agenda reasons at every tick.

</comment><comment><USER90> If the desired effect is to make people consider not using Chrome, painting Chrome's origins in such rose-tinted light is unlikely to achieve that.

Google engaged in exclusionary "embrace-extend-extinguish"-esque tactics from a very early stage in Chrome's life, and on web properties that predated Chrome's public launch in their development. Painting Chrome as "break[ing] the Web free from corporate greed" is a pretty disparaging insult to those who genuinely have worked for years to try and do that.

</comment><comment><USER91> FWIW, something like 80% to 90% of Mozilla's income comes from Google. The non-naive interpretation is that Mozilla/Firefox is a _figleaf_ over Google's hegemony.

</comment><comment><USER92> I did not find the author's points very compelling wrt the "we need chrome no more" link-baity title. Clearly, many users -- mostly devs -- do need Chrome.

But more importantly I think that articles such as this deflect from the real abuse-of-power that Google wields and that's in advertising. Google can and has shut down whole businesses by withholding access to its ad platforms. I'm not sure that Google has ever hurt anybody by denying access to Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER93> "We Need Chrome No more" appeared on HN five months ago, and there was a comment that confirmed there is interest in an alternative search engine written by djb.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053163)

It was obviously a joke as no one serious about text-only browsing would suggest lynx over the alternatives (w3m, links, links2, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER94> Am I the only one on the planet that never had stability nor speed problems with Firefox?

(e.g. on Linux when I start Firefox it displays all tabs, but it refreshes/loads only the "last"/current tab - other tabs are refreshed/loaded only if I switch to them. On the other hand when I start Chrome, all tabs are refreshed/downloaded immediately, and all of them start running their code whatever it is)

</comment><comment><USER95> Edge: Hi I'm Edge, I'm better than IE. User: I dismiss you on the fact that your icons look identical. Edge: But wait Im diff.......

</comment><comment><USER96> > They are even noticeably ahead in areas such as performance, battery usage, > privacy, and security.

Privacy - maybe.

Security? I doubt it. Google does a lot for Chrome to stay safe.

Performance adn battery usage? Safari works only on once OS it is build for, so there is really no contest, Firefox on the other hand is still a great way to stresstest your CPU. At least on macOS.

Firefox user for many years.

</comment><comment><USER97> I would love to switch from Chrome to FF on my daily driver but I rely on the multi-profile thing that has no analog in FF. My work windows are separate from my personal ones, and I have different work windows for each company. Of course each is themed differently too, so I know at a glance which I'm in.

<comment><USER98> Firefox multi account containers.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/kb/containers](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers)

<comment><USER97> I did investigate that, but it does not really work for my workflow. I literally want a window locked to a container, and all tabs in that window in exactly one, that container, and with each one with a different set of plugins, etc.

The plugin thing is really important so I can have some windows testing sites with different ad blockers and such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> The only reason I use Chrome is because I have a chromecast and they only allow Chrome to native cast

</comment><comment><USER100> It isn't about developer tools anymore than it is about privacy or the open- web. Sadly, just like with IE6, Chrome is the default pre-installed browser in most used handheld OS. Plus, it is in-your-face-advertised on the front page of world's most popular website, in case you don't happen to have it installed on a Mac or a PC.

There's very little individuals can do to reverse the trend, short of websites and OEMs coming together to start reversing Chrome's stranglehold in an unified campaign (which doesn't seem likely).

The fall of IE6 was due to innovation from Mozilla and Google putting it's weight behind Firefox... What could Safari/Firefox do now? Get all or several of Microsoft/Facebook/Amazon/Apple on-board? Investment from these companies is the only way I see out, frankly, if history is any indicator (OpenStreetMap vs GMaps).

That said, tech needs to keep improving and so Firefox Quantum was a great first step in the right direction, imo.

</comment><comment><USER101> As someone that loves clean UI and blink's speed, is Chromium a trustworthy alternative ?

</comment><comment><USER102> I'll write an unpopular opinion:

1\. Developer's time is not a commodity. The time you spend testing in alternative browsers is time you can spend in tasks that will make life less painful to the people who work with you such as writing tests, documentation, or new code.

2\. A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not exist. The business should be the one who dictates which browsers should be supported, and it should be a rational decision based on data such as reviewing your own analytics. Nobody has infinite resources.

3\. Using a website is a privilege, not a right. The same way you are free to choose your favorite browser, a website owner is free to choose which users to serve, the same way we can say "Are you still using IE8 in 2019? tough luck buddy, the site is broken", we can also say "Sorry dude, I didn't care enough to support Firefox because X feature was broken".

4\. When you as a user decide to choose Firefox because "my ideological reasons", you are also choosing to deal with the negative aspects such as broken websites, broken extensions, lack of features, loss of mindshare, etc., etc., if you don't like dealing with them the alternative is pretty simple: Use Chrome, that's what the end users do anyway.

The reason Chrome has gained lots of mindshare is because we all love convenience, and there are less-painful alternatives to push the "we don't like Google" agenda such as forking Chromium. The "we don't track you" is a huge competitive advantage against Google, why should you give up everything that Chromium does right? The resources that Mozilla spends maintaining Gecko could be used more intelligently to build for example a security team to alleviate the concern of having a huge common attack area.

Wasn't "test once, run everywhere" the holy grail? Or now we like O(N) instead of O(1)?

<comment><USER103> > A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not > exist

I think the only scenario where that's acceptable is experimental/nightly features that haven't yet made their way to the majority of browsers.

> Using a website is a privilege

Some would dispute that. My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical branches. Is it considered a privilege to access my funds via website?

<comment><USER102> > My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical branches. Is it considered a > privilege to access my funds via website?

Glad you made this question. I'm a customer from BBVA and years ago, when Opera recently launched its Chromium-based fork I got a nag: You're using an unsupported browser

I was infuriated: "How the f*ck are you targeting the new Opera?!?!?!?! I mean, even the user agent looks like Chrome, to display this nag you had to explicitly target the new Opera WTF?!?!?!"

Now I ask you the following question: Can you access your bank account with Lynx? Curl? Where do you draw the line between which browsers to support?

Where do you draw the line between telling a user "Use Chrome" or having the user to complain at your call center because the website broke specifically in Brave browser? (pretty unlikely but not unrealistic scenario)

Years ago many banks and government agencies even required you to install Java to access their service. So yeah, it is a privilege to access your funds in a non-supported mean, if you complain at their call center they'll probably tell you "just use Chrome", or "install the Android app", or a similar alternative. If a bank thinks it is a competitive advantage to let you access in Mosaic, then it will push their development team to support even Mosaic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> No mention in this thread so I'm just going to throw this out there, qutebrowser is an excellent choice in 2019: [https://www.qutebrowser.org](https://www.qutebrowser.org)

</comment><comment><USER105> There certainly is a danger of monopolization with chrome garnering an overwhelming majority of user share. However, I'm yet to see the negative in testing with chrome and shipping (assuming you're only using W3C APIs), as most of the time, chrome is fully compliant with W3C, and other browsers simply aren't. Apple is the worst, most guilty of the others, that purposefully cripples iOS Safari to goad users and developers towards the app store. Microsoft probably intended to be fully W3C compliant with Edge, but for whatever reason, they always lagged. And with Mozilla/Firefox, it's always an obtuse, unreasonable argument when they don't comply, they claim it to be in the best interest of the open web, but it is usually a philosophical, more than technical opposition.

</comment><comment><USER106> I agree with the author's sentiment but Chrome/chromium is just so much better than the alternatives. I've tried to switch to Firefox many times and always came back.

They seem to be doing something right.

</comment><comment><USER107> Chrome is the new IE all over again. Remember that it was IE that saved us from Netscape's slow performance and advancements of new web technologies.

Jump ahead 20 years, low an behold Google Earth - Chrome only!

</comment><comment><USER108> Chrome has some great extensions now: Great Suspender is one of the best. Before Chrome killed my computer with too many tabs, now it's fine! Chrome is the best product of Google to me.

</comment><comment><USER109> Out of curiosity, what Google Apps work better in Chrome? I use plenty of Google services entirely in Firefox and have never had problems. I only fire up chrome when using Chromecast.

</comment><comment><USER110> Never liked Chrome, but I liked Google as an idea once upon a time.

</comment><comment><USER111> Yet Another Post Against Chrome. Yes it's bad and it spies on us but it's also damn good for web development and so far I've found no decent replacement :)

</comment><comment><USER112> > we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free Maybe true for the author. But > most people use Chrome to browse the web.

</comment><comment><USER113> When I upgraded to FF 60.0.2 the energy use on my Mac went off a cliff. Maybe you should try re-creating your FF profile?

</comment><comment><USER114> Harvey Dent put it best- "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain"

</comment><comment><USER115> Profiles are the only thing stopping me moving to Firefox right now. They're so easy to use on Chrome.

<comment><USER116> Container tabs don't require new windows for that cookie/account separation.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/kb/containers](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> Firefox Dev tools Network tab still does not allow to resize columns. It's why I hate to use them...

</comment><comment><USER118> OP - the footnotes seem to be reversed.

</comment><comment><USER119> I'm an avid Firefox user, but I just can't ignore the fact that it's way less performant. Consequently, I use it for my personal life, but when it comes to all the web apps I need for work, I have to go with Chrome, or my computer slows to a crawl. I keep fairly extreme numbers of tabs open, but Chrome is significantly better at coping.

<comment><USER120> In what way is it less performant? The start up is faster on Firefox on both PCs that I use. When there are a ton of tabs, both browsers eat on all RAM, but I wouldn't say that Firefox drags the system down anymore than Chrome.

I am on Windows 10.

<comment><USER119> I'm on Mac OS. It bogs down all the time. I have very little in the way of add-ons. Don't know why I've been downvoted, because this is just my experience. I've been and remain a user since Firefox 2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> Chrome is nothing more to me than a launchpad for (google) ads and a vehicle for surveillance.

</comment><comment><USER122> I find the opposite - many websites still don't seem to test properly on chrome.

</comment><comment><USER117> Firefox Devtools Network tab still does not allow to resize columns in 2019...

</comment><comment><USER123> Just use Opera or Brave right?

Aren't those browsers just chromium reskinned and customized

</comment><comment><USER124> Clicking the RSS or JSON link goes no where and then breaks the back button.

</comment><comment><USER125> One thing that people seem to forget is the extreme amount of marketing and push that happened. If you used any Google product (even today) it's basically annoyance not to use Chrome, because of all the "popups" and messages you see on screen to switch to Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER126> I have one bigger complaint: It blows my mind that web browsers take GBs of ram to run. I mean, c'mon, it's 2019 how can we not address that? It's probably the biggest concern I hear from everyone that uses Chrome and knows how to read their task/app manager

<comment><USER127> Leaving aside everything else, how is that even relevant? Even cheap laptops have 8gigs of ram these days, most have 16. Considering the browser is becoming the de-facto single application used at all for most people, what else would they need their ram for?

<comment><USER126> If you use machines in schools usually you end up having older laptops or netbooks. That's why matters IMHO. Definitely not for the person who is a dev and has fully decked out macbooks or thinkpads...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER128> Firefox mobile on android is shit

Cant even render wikipedia properly

I hope mozilla staff reading this

</comment><comment><USER129> Really? No one going to mention brave.com. It's chromium based.

</comment><comment><USER130> We never needed Chrome. Firefox has been around since 2002.

</comment><comment><USER131> Back to firefox, few years later, back to chrome.

</comment><comment><USER132> One of the reasons I stay with Chrome is because of the superb dev tools, which are even better than in the Firefox Developer Edition

</comment><comment><USER133> Chrome is poised to comletely monopolize the browser share market.

You can't fault them either for doing this, this is just what pubic companies do, maximize returns for shareholders and monopolies are the hen that lays golden eggs.

This article will not be seen beyond HN. The fact is the vast majority of Chrome users don't care that other browser exists, and don't want it as long as it is convenient for them (to keep using a familiar platform thats worked well).

Anyways, this is just my two cents. I just don't see myself using Firefox anymore, it's no longer deserving of my attention because I am not concerned about Google's goals, we get a lot of shit for free from Google, and we gave up our privacy. Whether this is beneficial or not is up for debate.

</comment><comment><USER134> Vivaldi and Firefox user, here. Nothing more to say, just wanted to lend my support.

What do you all use?

</comment><comment><USER135> No one is in this stinking bordel questions the underlying assumption that the web is an 'open standard' or that 'competition is good' or that somehow the democratization of browser implementations and 'standards-making' is a net win for humanity?

The web is an edifice of pressed shit-board that hasn't been designed so much as piled up. It isn't an open forum of freely-exchanged ideas and social goods so much as a tool in the arsenal of liberal capitalism to more completely atomize and subjugate the individual by forming his proper sense of obligation to have himself devoured by the fetischism of merchandise.

Pluck out thy phone and cast it from thee.

</comment><comment><USER114> Harvey Dent said it best "You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain"

</comment><comment><USER136> Extensions. I am now locked into Chrome because several services I use require Chrome extensions that aren't available elsewhere. The idea that Chrome can be unseated, or isn't needed, is unrealistic for the many users who rely on Chrome-exclusive extensions.

<comment><USER137> Firefox implements chrome's webextensions api, so it should be possible to run those extensions. Try chrome store foxified [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/)

<comment><USER138> Firefox's webextensions api is a totally different thing from chrome's ones. Some of its api are either missing or work differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER139> > Both Chrome and Chromium run Blink under the hood, the rendering engine that > started as a WebKit fork in 2013 when Google grew dissatisfied with the > Apple-led project

Wait, is this accurate? I remember back when Chrome was released, people were talking about how it used parts of both WebKit and Gecko, and the exact specs of which rendering was used changed based on the website.

I remember not liking Chrome the moment it came out. Google had poured money into Firefox for years and then suddenly came out with (an initially) closed source competitor. Sure it's open source now, but it didn't start that way, and was a slap in the face to the Mozilla project.

<comment><USER140> > Wait, is this accurate? I remember back when Chrome was released, people > were talking about how it used parts of both WebKit and Gecko, and the exact > specs of which rendering was used changed based on the website.

You are misremembering. Chrome never used Gecko.

> I remember not liking Chrome the moment it came out. Google had poured money > into Firefox for years and then suddenly came out with (an initially) closed > source competitor. Sure it's open source now, but it didn't start that way

This is completely false. Chromium and its associated source code were released to the public at the same time as Chrome. See e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#2008](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_\(web_browser\)#2008)

</comment></comment><comment><USER141> More like we need Google no more.

You always find the smartest bunch in these threads. Proof: not a single downvoted comment so far.

But with all your smarts why aren't you building search engines? Is it because you think that with superior tech we can't beat Google? I think it will come down to precisely that. Don't you see how easy it would be for someone who specializes in search to beat an opponent who specializes in ads?

Edit: I should clarify. What I meant was, start specializing in search, or we're all dead. Dead meat. By the hands of the Android.

<comment><USER142> I'm using DuckDuckGo and don't miss Google for search. It's mostly a solved problem for me at this point. Google Maps is harder to replace but there are workable though generally not as good alternatives. YouTube is the hardest Google property to escape for me.

<comment><USER138> I found that DuckDuckGo is still not competent enough for non-English users. The quality of its result in non-English language still worse than Google's ones.

<comment><USER142> I can believe that. English is my first language though and I find it works well for me with English searches.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Dark Hacker News – A Dark-Themed Hacker News App - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dark-hacker-news/id1459946382?mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone! I'm Murph, the creator of Dark Hacker News. Dark Hacker News is a simple Dark-Themed Hacker News client for browsing Hacker News stories and comments. It's my first published iOS app!

If Dark Hacker is well received on iOS and hits 100+ upvotes on ProductHunt, I will launch on Android as well! Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback. Thanks y'all and I hope you enjoy the app!

Check it out on ProductHunt -> [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dark-hacker- news](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dark-hacker-news)

<comment><USER2> Nice design, but

> ..hits 50+ positive reviews, I will launch on Android

I as a non-iOS user don't have a way to signal to you that I'd like you to ship on Android, despite liking your app.

<comment><USER3> Is this an app that android users would want but iphone users don't? If not then iphone reviews are a good proxy for opinion.</comment></comment></comment>


NSFW? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/chris-messina/nsfw-af26990a9bbf <comment><USER2> This entire post is a humblebrag about how the author gets laid L M A O

<comment><USER3> Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

<comment><USER2> What is unsubstantive about this comment? It contains substance dude.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Show a webpage's metadata in a popup when you hover over its link? - <AUTHOR> Hey folks I'm trying to validate an idea for a browser extension which shows a popup when you hover over a link. This popup shows metadata of that webpage including comment count, followers, following, etc and other metrics.
I've been working on this for a few months and I enjoy using it. It has saved a lot of my time browsing large lists of links(Eg: https://github.com/nuxt-community/awesome-nuxt)
Would you be interested in using something like this? Here's a small preview: https://linkpreviews.io <comment><USER2> Sure. It would be cool if it read the URL's JSON-LD / OpenGraph structured data then displayed a thumbnail image. Maybe show a summary of outgoing links and incoming links for SEO analysis.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it does exactly that right now. It doesn't show anything SEO related although with enough demand I can make that work too.

Checkout this preview here: [https://linkpreview.io](https://linkpreview.io)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Edit: Here's a preview gif: [https://linkpreviews.io](https://linkpreviews.io)</comment>


Colab Pro - <AUTHOR> https://colab.research.google.com/signup <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22274938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22274938), which was posted earlier.

(The intention is to share the karma a bit. I hope you don't mind. Eventually we want to build software support for that.)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's fine. I'm curious why the dupe checker didn't hit it though.

<comment><USER2> Once 8 hours have gone by, it will let reposts through unless the previous submission got a lot of points and/or comments.</comment></comment></comment>