RE: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115737483111161917

I'll elaborate. I believe we're in an AI bubble. AI companies are pushing the overton window on AI discourse. They want the most extreme anti-AI sentiment to be "Sure, it's an overhyped technology right now but there will be reasonable applications down the road". I want to see pushback on this. It doesn't matter if I can disable some AI feature in the settings. The fact that Mozilla is jumping on this bandwagon is deeply disappointing to me.

@Gargron i guess i don't see how contributing to google's browser monopoly is an improvement

@Gargron mozilla's new ceo is an idiot addicted to buzzwords. alas. google, with blink, has the sway to bake LLMs into some web API and make it impossible for **anyone** to make a browser without "AI" deeply built in. and they have a massive financial incentive to do so since they've invested a jillion dollars into training their own models

@Gargron there's reasonable application now. I learned something in my 23andme and Genomind DNA reports via LLM (pro models only; the others aren't very good in my testing), that no healthcare professional ever told me and I have worked with dozens. Remember: I absolutely HATE all software by default. And to my shock, I didn't hate this... but I really really wanted to.

@Gargron that said 100% there is a bubble and a gold rush mentality. But this, unlike cryptocurrency, which is grifters and crime and gambling to the bone, does have real practical uses. If you want to hate something, hate cryptocurrency. It's so much more dangerous.

@codinghorror @Gargron i was regularly reassured that cryptocurrency was very useful in african countries where banking was unreliable or inaccessible

@eevee @Gargron I don't disagree with any of that, but how does supporting Firefox, the second browser also funded by Google, help with this? Vivaldi arguably has more practical distance from Google's control (not saying they have a *lot*, but they have some), since they have independent funding and could hypothetically fork. Is the idea that the engine technology itself is the issue, then everyone should be using … Epiphany, I guess?

@eevee @Gargron I don't know if that is actually the case in practice, but who knows, maybe the current regime will make all banking in the US unreliable or inaccessible..

@glyph surely there's a bit of a distinction between "google individually employs most of the chrome team" and "google pays mozilla for a service"

vivaldi isn't even a rounding error. they have no weight to throw around and certainly not enough manpower to actually hard-fork and maintain a browser engine

@eevee Is there? I can’t think of any way in which Firefox has meaningfully acted as a check on Google’s power as a result or any way that it would negatively impact Google if everyone stopped using Chrome and started using Firefox. Chromium is already open source and that seems like the most realistic counterpressure on their own behavior

@eevee like the only thing I can even think of where the actual browser engine tech was at issue is EME, where firefox folded immediately, and I can’t blame them for doing so because they have no power

@eevee this is not asked rhetorically as a dunk, I am not an ignoramus in this area but I am not *super* closely following the ins and outs of frontend tech debates. to the extent that I have it seems like there’s a lot of smoke without much fire (I remember digging through the relatively recent privacy-preserving telemetry stuff and not being able to figure out why anyone cared) but if I have missed something I would love to correct my view

@eevee I guess I should say something about why I think *my* position is worth talking about at all here:

Among the possibilities, two outcomes seem likely to me:

1. Mozilla's "AI strategy" ends up pissing off their entire user base so much that a large plurality leave for other alternate browsers, finally cementing their irrelevance permanently.

2. It works OK and they continue to limp along at … oh. hm. At this point in the toot I looked up where Firefox's marketshare actually is right now

@eevee Sorry, I guess it is not actually worth talking about, I didn't realize that they'd fallen below measurement-error thresholds in every major browser survey in 2022. I was thinking that if the AI failure were the proximate cause of their final doom that might serve as a more useful lesson for the industry than whatever hypothetical bulwark they were supposedly providing against chrome, but I didn't know the doom already happened 😬

@glyph well that's, uh, not an encouraging takeaway

i don't know what happened honestly. i mean a big part of it is that chrome and safari come default on phones and a lot of web traffic is to phones. but somehow chrome just became the default on computers as well despite not actually being preinstalled on any

firefox is a good browser — a better browser! — but they don't have ads on the front page of google dot fucking com every day i suppose

@eevee Mozilla management just kinda lost the plot. It's an OK browser, but it's mostly coasting on a few very marginal features and falling behind on everything else. It won a pretty large marketshare on the strength of being a substantially better browser, the other browsers massively improved in terms of performance and reliability, and now it just isn't a good enough browser to be worth the switching friction

@eevee Chrome is pre installed on Windows computers as Microsoft Edge, which is more or less the same browser

I think Chrome also took the enterprise managed deployment market more seriously than Firefox did, and rolled out quality of life features for IT mass rollouts earlier, so it got shipped on corporate work computers

@eevee @glyph I think they lost a ton of market share in the early to mid 2010s due to performance issues at a time when Google still had a TON of goodwill and Chrome felt snappy and fast, and a lot of SV-based early adopters who are culturally influential if not big in numbers switched and told their friends to as well. Quantum in 2017 fixed perf at the cost of limiting the plugin ecosystem, which pissed off power users without getting a lot of people back.

@yildo i mean specifically chrome. edge is tracked separately in browser stats

@glyph what i find most frustrating is that firefox mostly makes headlines when its own users are really mad at it, usually for doing something chrome is already way past doing, so the impression is just always negative. i love firefox and i am desperate for them to give me an excuse to foist it on people. instead i get "wow firefox is bad because it's doing AI" and meanwhile i opened chromium today for the first time in a while and there's an "ai mode" button IN THE ADDRESS BAR

@eevee as someone who loves Firefox I can see how that would be pretty annoying and seem extremely unfair. at the same time, I don't think even most remaining Firefox users love it? They're accepting worse rendering performance, worse graphics performance, fewer APIs and so on so they *won't* get an "AI mode" button. And then Mozilla's corporate strategy is "don't fix the other stuff, but DO put in the AI button" and given what the remaining user population is like, their reaction is predictable

@glyph fwiw i don't even accept this framing — chrome has always been equally or more jank for me, crashes more, eats more ram while doing less, and has fewer frontend features and a rigid ui. firefox implements plenty of things before chrome, but they don't exist until they're in chrome so nobody notices, and what's missing is insane stuff like webusb that google obviously just wants for chromebooks. firefox is a better browser

@glyph christ it took google well over a decade to make the tab bar scroll instead of just turning tabs into points and making them unreachable. like no one on the team ever had more than two websites open at a time. made it feel like a toy

@eevee this is of course just armchair quarterbacking from me, I will never have to be responsible for a decision like this, but think they could have reversed the decline at any point by simply deciding to stop doing tons of irrelevant nonsense and instead work on making a really good web browser. one can justify their poor competitive performance by saying "but google has so much money to spend on chrome" but they just *have* that money, they don't really spend that much more than firefox has

@glyph see they ARE making a really good web browser. the engine people seem to be good at what they do and care about doing it well. but (a) that's not very compelling when chrome is like, good enough, and (b) management keeps making boneheaded frontend decisions

@eevee I am trying as much as I can to go off of objective metrics like https://www.browserating.com . Synthetic benchmarks can obviously be kind of silly and gamed, but my recollection is that when Firefox was tearing up the synthetics they were also ascending in marketshare. And most "what browser renders xyz the fastest" seem to consistently put Firefox at the bottom below Chrome and Safari (and Edge, which obviously fares quite similarly to Chrome)

@eevee I certainly don't want to be denigrating the people doing the actual work, it's nothing short of a miracle that they remain competitive within striking distance of the efforts several trillion-dollar corporations, but the people making the resourcing decisions are choking off their ability to make substantive progress

@eevee @glyph off the top of my head: go to the gdc site and try to seek a video, it'll crash the video player on Firefox. No webgpu on Linux, no webusb (which yes, I actually use), missing html/css features like anchors, the dev tools are broadly worse, background updates reliably cause issues (most recently the browser was leaking), Firefox android UI is busted often, it gets stuck in uninteractable states until you force restart it a few times, reliably if you try to use "add to home screen".

@glyph i have no idea what these numbers mean

looking at https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/cold-page-load/overview?numDays=60 and the differences (where chrome is also measured) go both ways and are generally miniscule. the worst comparison seems to be amazon and trying it myself i see very nearly identical behavior

very funny that bing apparently loads faster in firefox though

@eevee I'm definitely skirting outside the edges of my expertise here, I'm not a browser perf expert, but if you zoom in on more individual perceptual stuff like MotionMark https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAlerts=1&highlightChangelogData=0&highlightCommonAlerts=0&replicates=0&series=mozilla-central,5281605,1,13&series=autoland,5258100,1,13&timerange=31536000 and Speedometer https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?series=mozilla-central,5279645,1,13&timerange=5184000&series=autoland,5257392,1,13 you see a really clear, consistent edge for Chrome, which squares with my experience on all platforms.

@dotstdy @glyph like the video right under the navy bar with the number of attendees/sessions/etc? i'm also on linux and can seek that fine, forwards and backwards??

anchors are in 147 in two weeks

chrome won't play webgpu for me either; allegedly it only supports intel and only as of the last few months. as a bonus it does this truly outstanding keming

@eevee @glyph plus the long list of things which are broken in FF but it's probably not their fault, like all the internal websites at work. In Firefox' favor: better DOM performance in some situations at least (useful if you want to load the single-page vulkan docs), manifest v2, not made by google. That's my personal rubric, and it's a pretty tough sell.

@dotstdy @eevee my one other personal data point is that out of my 5 Linux desktop development VMs, I've manually installed Chrome on 2 of them because Firefox would crash or hang so often even in the casual use-cased of "download a few things to bootstrap a workable desktop app dev setup" I was struggling to get work done. granted these are both versions of Ubuntu so I had assumed that this was somehow Snap's fault, but, it's not saying anything _good_ about Firefox

@glyph @eevee Ah snap and flatpak, the gift that keeps on giving. But yeah, I mentioned the update thing because I have a suspicion that's where the majority of my issues were coming from. Any time it updates in the background it just borks itself completely. You *really* gotta restart when it updates. Which kinda makes total sense, but probably could be handled with more grace.

@dotstdy @glyph there was something about this in release notes a few versions ago? but i only do full-system updates so i'm condemned to a reboot afterwards

@eevee @dotstdy IME "auto-updates work now without crashing or weird behavior" is the "removed Herobrine" of firefox changelog notes. condemning yourself to a reboot is absolutely the right call

@eevee @dotstdy even if you were to convince us that the browser were objectively superior (and, hey, progress I guess, you got me to install it again to do a webgpu comparison) I don't think there's much point to that debate; it works well on your computer, doesn't work on ours, not clear whose is more representative. but the fact remains that users have abandoned it in droves; is the *only* reason that happened, that Google has a little prompt on the homepage telling you to try Chrome?

@eevee @dotstdy like Chrome still isn't the default, users are manually opting out of Edge by huge margins and electing to install Chrome on new machines, not that many people use Chromebooks that it would influence the numbers like this. and in the days when Firefox was coming up, *lots* of sites still required IE, and people would grumble and use IE for those, while using FF for everything else, so "a lot of sites require chrome" doesn't seem a complete explanation either

@glyph @dotstdy i genuinely have no idea what happened. but given the enormous grassrootsy push it took to get firefox significant market share, and then chrome jumping from 0% to 25% in under three years despite having a pitch mainly consisting of "it's a bit faster i guess", i don't have any other real explanation beyond observing that google is/was a dominant search engine and virtually everyone looks at their website(s) every day

@eevee @dotstdy the big thing that drove me to chrome was the improved security and isolation, which translated into big improvements in day-to-day reliability. IIRC firefox didn't really catch up on tab isolation and sandboxing until 2016 or so. I didn't care that much about the perf difference itself at the time, but the fact that one haywire tab would bring down the entire app in firefox and just hang a tab which would get gracefully killed in chrome was huge

@eevee @dotstdy okay I guess it like *really* landed in 2017 probably but it started rolling out in 2016 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/firefox-48-ships-bringing-rust-mainstream-and-multiprocess-for-some/

@glyph @dotstdy yeah that was annoying. i can't gauge how much it might've factored in globally since Most People™ seem to have like, three tabs open at a time

mozilla was between a rock and a hard place there i think, since electrolysis could not avoid breaking virtually every extension, and that ecosystem was a big thing people liked firefox for. chrome and ie8 had nothing to break

@eevee @glyph people aren't saying this because they think firefox is worse than chrome, they're saying it because they expect firefox developers are somewhat responsive to it and google is a big blank featureless metal wall

@rakslice @glyph fair enough but it sure doesn't make for good Optics™

@glyph @dotstdy fwiw i don't expect anything complex to enjoy being updated while running, especially if it does some fancy-pants dynamic multiprocessing thing. i'd be surprised if chrome consistently fares well, but i've never tried that either. and i sure wouldn't want to update, like, KDE without a reboot

@glyph @dotstdy does ubuntu just update snaps in the background without even asking, is that what's happening here

@eevee @dotstdy all I've got are anecdotes but:

1. IME most people just open tabs until their browser is out of RAM, my own impression is that you're underestimating the neurotypicals' willingness to do EXTREMELY slow UI workflows, constantly (i.e. picking through dozens of tab nubbins one at a time until they find the one they were using)
2. because of this, "do NOT delete my 3 hours of work on my mortgage application because I stopped to watch a cat video" was priority 1 for a lot of people

@eevee @dotstdy there are a lot of bugs here, but, yes, but also no, I think what's happening is that it's specifically firefox sometimes going haywire itself, trying to auto-update on its own *inside* the snap somehow, rather than letting the snap do it. but it's impossible to tell because neither snap nor firefox has any kind of reasonable diagnostic logging tool that I've ever seen, and I've only ever experienced this bug while trying to do something else relatively urgent

@eevee @dotstdy I actually think that the big, game-over feature for chrome was not like "tab sandboxing" in general, although that did help, but rather, *specifically*, this: https://blog.chromium.org/2010/12/rolling-out-sandbox-for-adobe-flash.html

@glyph @dotstdy firefox 4 had out-of-process plugins as well, three months later

@glyph @eevee On that front, I've stuck with Firefox for years, and one thing I do that seems to be atypical these days is take a scorched earth approach to attention management and fully restart at least the browser (and usually the entire machine) most days. I may end with a couple of dozen tabs open across a couple of windows, but then I reset it back to nothing. But yeah, aside from "only works with non-standard APIs" sites, it's fine in practice. Just lost flailing about for a revenue model

@ancoghlan @glyph i currently have 1637 tabs open, though the vast majority are unloaded

@ancoghlan @glyph this is not feasible in chrome.

@eevee it's fair to say chrome replaced IE, rather than firefox

but if i remember correctly, one of the big things was "one tab = one process" so one errant tab wouldn't take out your whole browser

plus pushing for stronger sandboxing of plugins, then throw in the faster release cycle for html5 features

honestly though the moment i opened chrome on a work laptop and saw it had installed a plugin automatically i was like "yeah this is enterprise software now"

@glyph @dotstdy maybe it has something to do with that monkey paw i was holding when i said "i wish KHTML were more feasible to use"

@eevee @ancoghlan … why not? I just got myself throttled by google after opening 1000 tabs with a script in chrome so I don't want to open any more, but it seems perfectly serviceable

@eevee @ancoghlan @glyph chrome also supports tab unloading, though? Can't say I've ever run into a difference here, even.

@eevee @glyph No, the gdc vault videos. All the presentations from prior years. They're broken under FF on my windows PC at work, and my Linux machines at home, as soon as you seek twice. I'm not saying "here's a list of the things which caused people to leave" it's just "here's a decent list of issues I get annoyed by regularly and have to switch to chrome to work around". When I used chrome I didn't really have any such list because it more or less just worked.

@eevee @ancoghlan I also find this kind of a weird metric by which to evaluate a browser, and I don't understand why it's interesting; even if chrome were totally incapable of doing this, why do you want to organize your bookmarks as "open tabs", rather than in, like, bookmark folders and stuff?

@glyph @ancoghlan they aren't bookmarks, though. they're a todo list. and anything that goes into a bookmark folder vanishes forever because i don't see it

it's not really about the number of open tabs though, it's that firefox has https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ and chrome does not (and cannot, because chrome's ui has no sidebar to put it in, so the best you can do is a clunky overlay)

@eevee @ancoghlan ah. this starts to get into my religious beliefs about the nature of todo lists (in brief, “I used to do this, it’s bad, Firefox is leading you into Sin by making this volume of tabs so easy”) but to keep it browser-focused: I think this affordance is one reason Vivaldi is blowing up so much? people do love their vertical tabs and you’re right that extensions can’t quite do it in chrome, but alternate Blink browsers do manage it