>>25116 I don't necessarily object to them advertising their own product on their own website, but how, precisely, does it 'work better with Chrome'? Sounds like bullshit.
When I try to set Epic Privacy Browser as my default, Windows 10 just tells me an "app" was up to something and resets the default to it's own Windows Edge. Which is fucking abysmal, I might add.
Google have built Chrome to support the features that they think are important. Firefox is pretty close, but Edge and Safari lag behind and IE is utterly obsolete.
To give some practical examples:
The Fido U2F standard allows you to use a physical security key in addition to your password. Google have enabled U2F across all their services, but Chrome is currently the only browser with native U2F support.
WebRTC is a peer-to-peer service that allows for secure video chat and filesharing. Safari and IE don't have WebRTC support, so users of those browsers get a worse experience from services like Google Hangouts.
Browsers are a lot more complicated than most people realise. Chrome is about 10 million lines of code. Web developers constantly struggle with old browsers that have poor feature support and incomplete or non-compliant standards implementations.
A browser monoculture is a very bad idea, as we all learned in the bad old days of IE6. With that said, Google have studiously followed open standards while still pushing the boundaries of web technology.
>>25128 How does Chromium compare to the Google version these days in terms of features? I was led to believe it was the version to go for if you want the browser without all the Google mcgubbins attached, but my information may be quite a bit out of date...
There's very little difference between the two. Chrome is built on top of Chromium, adding a few proprietary bits. That's likely to be the case indefinitely, because the vast majority of the Chrome source code is part of the open source Chromium project. They are both equally up-to-date, but some Linux distributions include the older Stable version of Chromium.
The main practical differences are that Chrome has a fully sandboxed version of Flash built in, a few proprietary media codecs and better auto-update features. Chrome has slightly better support for some Google products, because it includes Google API keys.
IMO Chromium is a slightly poorer browser. Chrome autoupdates in the background using very small diff files, but updating Chromium requires downloading the entire binary. The non-sandboxed flash plugin in Chromium is less stable, doesn't perform as well and is a possible security risk. Chromium is still a perfectly reasonable choice if you're paranoid about Google's data collection.
>>25123 I kind of assumed people had stopped but I'm also just really crap at spotting them and don't always open up thumbnails. Will keep more of an eye out for the sneaky one.
> WebRTC is a peer-to-peer service that allows for secure video chat and filesharing.
Browser feature creep is getting beyond a joke. This isn't something I want in what should essentially be a stateless client for a stateless protocol. Someone should pass a law or something forcing people to have alternative sites written in HTML 4.0 with noscript. </rant>
>>25129 > I was led to believe it was the version to go for if you want the browser without all the Google mcgubbins attached
Personally I was unable to make it (Chromium) cease talking to google no matter how much I tinkered with its settings, chrome:flags and commandline options.
Google are quite transparent about when and why Chrome(ium) phones home. Autocomplete, DNS pre-fetching and the Safe Browsing service are the main culprits. If you're really paranoid, there's a forked version of Chromium in the Arch repos that has all Google services stripped out.
It doesn't have pop-up ads appear during Google searches. Google's research data shows that this greatly reduces customer satisfaction with web service, so you won't receive pop ups advertising Chrome during your Google searches if you use Chrome.
>>25132 I agree. Browsing with no script on I find an increasing number bof what should be simple websites are an unreadable mess or just a list of no script notifications pages long.
I tried using noscript a few years ago, after a malicious bit of injected code got picked up by my antivirus. It basically made large parts of the web unusable, anything more complicated than an imageboard certainly. It's probably useful if you absolutely need to visit dodgy sites where you'd rather be safe and block everything, but the default 'block everything unless I say not to' was too much of a ballache back then, and I very much doubt that websites have become less reliant on js, flash etc. in the years since.
> Why modern OS come bundled with the bloat of a GUI I just can't fathom.
The irony here is that you're so uneducated on the subject at hand that you fail to realize that the majority actually don't; both modern *nixes and modern Windows (viz: server core) are both available to install and fully operate without a GUI via the command line. The only one I'm not sure of is OS X, which may force you to install the GUI but is certainly fully operable without one.
The problem with modern websites is not only that they force the "bloat" of superfluous runtime content upon you, it's also that they're almost entirely inoperable without said runtime content. It is both a failure of design and of the imagination.
>>25147 >You are an idiot. Even programs that fail should fail as gracefully as possible.
Hm yes, let's optimise functionality for people who purposefully strip away functionality, that's a useful way to spend resources.
Browser features != [ program / website ] functionality.
This is what happens when you let people whose primary experience with development comes from tinkering with the children's toys that are web applications think that they're allowed actual opinions about computers.
>>25151 You're part of a tiny market segment that cost-benefit analysis shows is worth ignoring. No amount of autistic appeals to theoretical methods of accommodating you changes that.
I cut my teeth writing C64 assembler. I don't do web development any more, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for a sophisticated web app to assume that Javascript will be turned on. Javascript simply allows for a much better experience for 99.99% of users.
Google can parse Javascript, so there's no longer a compelling SEO reason to render everything on the server. Screenreaders don't care how the page gets rendered, so there isn't a compelling accessibility case.
Intelligent use of client-side rendering can drastically improve responsiveness, at a cost of shoving slightly more stuff over the wire. Even this isn't a big problem in a lot of cases - a very large proportion of users of most sites will have a warm cache. By intelligently using CDN distribution, you can take advantage of stuff that users are likely to have cached before they've ever visited your site.
90% of websites are shit, but that's just Sturgeon's law in action. The idea that we'd be better off if the internet was purely progressively-enhanced HTML is bogus. You try providing a service like Basecamp or Trello or Facebook in plain server-side rendered HTML. It might be possible, but you'll be providing a worse experience to most users for reasons of petty ideology.
Honestly my HTML 4.0 comment was almost entirely tongue in cheek, even though well-behaving noscript versions of websites are extremely easy to make - even if they simply show a page saying "Please enable javascript on the following [sub]domains".
My main gripe is with the current "let's do absolutely everything in the browser" mentality which is very much in vogue at the moment. You only have to spend thirty minutes trying to use a Chromebook for anything productive to realise where that particular good-intention-paved path to hell is going to land us.
