skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't blaming Linux for not supporting them - I am saying that encouraging a switch away from an OS when there is no replacement for applications I use daily is not a feasible recommendation. "Just switch to Linux" doesn't work when you can't do what you can currently do, that is all.

And I say this having used Linux from 2.0.n (RedHat 5.2 - no, not RHEL, proper RedHat when KDE1 and GNOME1 were new and LinuxConf was still a tool that existed) branch for years and years until ~4 years ago when I got tired of reinstalling Fedora every other release. I'm not here just to bash Linux for fun - I was stating the issue.
Chrome does the same. This is mainly the VM's 800x600 and Unity.
Jeopardy, Chess, Go, ...Poker?
The also bundled Chrome with Flash, Adobe Reader, Java and such. I cannot remember exactly which, and it depends on geographic location.
Better can mean more than just "faster" or "more responsive". This post argues that Firefox is better in that it does not lock you in in the long term.

Since it is not as visible as responsiveness, it is useful to have these discussions so people can decide what really is the "best" browser to them with full knowledge.
that's a fair point, I more wish to counter the idea that Firefox was a better or even equal product at the time. Chrome was a clearly superior product to Firefox.
I tried Chrome when it first came out, but I always find myself going back to Firefox. I use Chrome only for the development tools or if I have to do anything that will only rely on Chrome, and if I do use Chrome it's on my laptop which has Chromium. I rather not have my whole browser linked to my entire email account.
This is how I feel also. I want to use Firefox but Chrome just works better. Mostly things actually sync properly with Chrome. Tabs, settings, extensions, etc. I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix days but switched to Chrome exactly a year ago as Firefox just wasn't meeting all my needs. Want me to switch back? Then fix things like sync and transparent restore of the user profile on a new install, etc.
Also we should push for usage of https://duckduckgo.com.
Google never made me do anything with profiles. It just worked.
Ideas for Promoting to Market Your Next Church Retreat
Firefox is just as responsive as Chrome (or even better). Default configs is what ruins the experience, Mozilla is way too conservative with their defaults.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks
There's an official SSH extensions from Google.
I've been using firefox exclusively for the last 5 years, and have been extremely happy with it. Sadly, I think my time with it is about to come to an end. With e10s, extensions that have been crucial to my daily needs, namely vimperator and pentadactyl, won't be compatible any more. I know this isn't entirely firefox's fault, as no one is willing to invest the significant amount of effort required to port them. However, from what I hear, WebExtenstions also simply doesn't offer the API to make these extensions possible.

I don't know what I'm going to be using, but I'm very interested in qutebrowser. The dev is active and has shown interest in adding support for WebExtensions to the browser.
Most people like opinionated UI design because it makes things easier and intuitive e.g. iPhone.
Chrome is just as bad for me. I've installed extensions that suspends tabs I'm not using on both browsers and the experience is significantly better. Since I'm not seeing Chrome being clearly better than Firefox in my day to day, I use Firefox simply because of idealistic reasons.
Daily Firefox user here. Switched back from Chrome a couple years ago and haven't looked back.

Just seeing the comments here exasperates me...

So for those who don't know, the Internet is heavily biased towards Chrome. Simple pages that should render no differently in FF than Chrome are often broken. This "Chrome is great, screw everything else" attitude is exactly how we ended up with IE and stagnation in standards/development in the late 90s/early 2000s. The biggest feature of IE was faster rendering and better performance versus Netscape.

It's seriously an issue that developers/engineers are only targeting Chrome and I think a large part of that is also due to V8 powering Node.js. I'm not trying to bash Node here... Developers are so hooked in its (chrome) ecosystem they don't even realize the bias. I'm beyond excited to see things like Chakra being able to replace V8 in node because I think it will be a huge boon to making a more free and open web.

Anymore I've started to protest by refusing to use sites that are flagrantly broken in FF. I block em in /etc/host and call it a day. What happened to standards? Why can't I use a browser you don't like?

Also FF for those that haven't used it in a while:

•) it uses less ram than chrome especially with a lot of tabs open

•) is quite performant and getting better

•) has vastly improved its Dev tools... the folks responsible for them are very receptive to ideas and happy to hear them.

•) multi-process Firefox is MUCH more responsive than its single process alternative but must be enabled currently (I think). Also make sure your extensions are compatible with it.

•) personally, I think, the developer edition Firefox I think is much more attractive than Chrome

I really hope the web doesn't just work in one browser and that things start to improve. Reading comments here gives me little assurance that will happen :(

Edit 1: formatting and note about folks making the FF Dev tools.

Edit 2: clarity in final paragraph and added sad face.
More info on multiprocess firefox: Electrolysis
http://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/22/multi-process-firefox/
My company uses Firefox LTS and all internal applications we develop must work with it.

I use Chrome as my development browser, mostly because of some plugins that help me with development. From time to time I run into inconsistencies between them (latest was that Firefox closes desktop notifications after 4 seconds and you can't change this duration). Googling for this kind of issues takes me usually to the Firefox issues tracker where I find a bug that's open since 4-5 years and hundreds of comments. Most of the time I find a weird workaround that someone else recommended in the comments and I go with it, because bug reports like this are never fixed. I have the same experience with other big open source projects, like Gnome. It looks to me like the maintainers take every feature recommendation as an insult and claim that you are "using it wrong".

So I get demotivated and give up arguing for positive changes as I know that every comment I post on an issue tracker will be received with a lot of negativity. I argue where I can make a change,in my company/to my supervisor to switch to Chrome. And that's the reason Chrome is winning, it's just a better product. I see this "we need to go to Firefox" posts all the time, but it's just getting worse and worse (in case of market share). It can only work if we sit down and make it a superior product. And this can only happen if the maintainers start being more welcome to suggestions and new developers. I love Firefox and want to see it take market share back.
Fake News: Doubling-Down on Lying for a  Much Bigger Lie
MS did pretty much the same with IE and Windows... Someone made something better, people went for it.
Does it run Doom? :-)
Wow! your ideal equilibrium is really scary. It leaves no room for a lot of the existing browsers and features two that I do not want to use ever and one that I use reluctantly because it lives on google advertisement money. So your ideal open web is 66% google and 33% microsoft which seems pretty closed up for something open.
Antitrust regulation + governments that apply it.

Google's already been denied strategies before
The flaw with this notion, is that neither Firefox nor Opera beat IE.

Chrome did.

Most of the people who argue things like this seem to agree that Firefox and Opera were superior browsers to IE. If that was the case, why hadn't they eaten IE's market share long before Chrome was ever produced?

Could it be that Chrome being widely advertised on the most visited site on the internet helped?
Also Firefox for Android has ad blocking.
The killer feature for me is that Google Docs only works offline in Chrome. Before they congratulate themselves, they have not won a friend by eco-system lock-in. It may not show in their metrics but discontent makes me open to alternatives.
I'm perfectly aware that they didn't want to. But if Mozilla can be bullied into implementing it anyway, then how does using Firefox stop Google from doing whatever they want?
You could have one site set as a panel and resize.
I actually use firefox at home, but for watching twitch streams I have to open chrome because firefox just fucking crawls if I've got a stream in another tab.

No idea why. Chrome seems to cope fine so I just use it for that. Since I want my stream in a separate window on my other screen anyway it works out pretty well.
The curious case of the issue and pull request template
Economy class with emirates is quite cheap. I've flown with them several times from Europe to Asia on account of it being the cheapest ticket available. They offer free drinks and staff is very friendly. It is quite a detour though.
I would love to use Firefox on Android, but scrolling is just so much worse than with Chrome, even on flagships.
I don't use Signal for that exact reason. The value in having the unified chat client on my desktop and phone outweight the potential privacy issues, so I'm using Telegram.
Definitely, the bias is familiarity, as it usually is. I started my webdev days when Firebug was big, so FF was my main browser. Then Chrome came, and besides being a nice browser, its dev tools had the same familiarity of Firebug's. IIRC, FF's default tools, for some time, were different than Firebug's and I think I just liked not having to fight with the FF defaults over time (as I moved between machines frequently).

As for my class, yes, I'm not enthusiastic about shelling from the browser no matter how many people like it. But the main mitigation is that the class work we do is based off of my AWS setup: I spin up the EC2 instances and I manage/distribute the keys. None of the assignments require using their own personal info. And another reason for teaching them how to use browser profiles (something I've never seen students have set up) is so that they if they want to build something with Twitter's API, i can strongly advise for them to make a fake account and operate it in a different profile, to prevent accidental Twitter snafus (among other problems).

Why Chrome shell over PuTTY? I remember struggling with things like copy and paste, to the point where I think it is easier to use the mouse...but I push students pretty hard on using the mouse as little as possible. Chrome Shell feels as close to the OSX Terminal with the exception of key handling and the inability to access or transfer files from your own system.
note: vivaldi is also a google chrome clone.
There is some discussion on porting Pentadactyl/Vimperator and on alternatives that support Electrolysis here: https://github.com/5digits/dactyl/issues/99
We can still donate. They ask every year, this year I did donate even if I use Safari right now.
In my experience from yesterday in the latest firefox: firebug still works and firefox devtools are lacking from the start and I go back to firebug after 2 minutes trying to edit live code.

I still miss the old opera dev features that offered way better and advanced features years ago.
Of course they "won" (or their "win" achieved its current magnitude) because of adverts. It's naive to say otherwise. The technical innovations put them ahead of the curve for a brief period of time. Firefox reacted quite quickly (and was accused of blindly copying Chrome for it), and today there really is little to differentiate the two browsers in terms of performance. That's been the case for a while now. The difference is in google leveraging both its own platform as well as buying billboards and TV ad space for Chrome. That's unprecedented. If you don't think that's having an effect you're essentially saying the people who decided to finance that ad push are idiots.

Despite that, Firefox still leads in market share in Germany (though with current trends that will change this year).
Yes. But according to wiki.mozilla.org on WebExtensions [0]:

We strive for compatibility to make developers lives easier and are participating in a W3C community group to work on a standard.

Although Chrome is by no means obligated to, it would be nice to see a company such as Google—that claims to support openness on the Internet—adopt this more open standard. (That is, "browser.storage.local" instead of "chrome.storage.local").

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ#Are_they_compatib...
So much this. It just seems like everyone repeats the "Chrome is better and Firefox is slow" mantra without spending a couple of days trying Firefox.

It's a browser owned by an advertising company. An advertising company that knows a lot about you, and constantly strives to learn more by whatever nefarious means they can think of. I can't see how anyone is okay with that.
Will you lie on your deathbed recalling all the times you spend reading forced memes and thinking, "… for teh win!!1"?

That blog is informal in style but not in content; it's a professional blog by a Mozilla employee. I don't feel like it respects its audiences' time, which is sadly the norm for software-related technical writing. Whings won't get better by saying nothing, and asking people to improve is never a waste of time (if done nicely).

Related: Normalization of deviance in software: how broken practices become standard[0]

[0]: http://danluu.com/wat/
I totally agree: Developers should show more backbone in situations like these.

The "too costly" mantra really is ridiculous, exactly. Maybe we also need to make sure the people trusted with hiring other people learn that their job is not risk assessment or risk management, but finding great talent.
+1. Moreover, I find Google/Chrome behaving like MS of late 90s when they used to force IE down Windows users. For instance, to use Chromecast to stream youtube videos from my laptop, I am required to necessarily use a buggy, bloated Chrome that takes ages to boot up. There's no plugin made available for Firefox which is exasperating.
Self-Destructing Cookies [0], for the security conscious.

It has near parity with Chrome's extension APIs now, so what works on one usually works on the other, but Firefox lets people dive deeper to build things like the above.

You can use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, NoScript and any of the others.

All for nearly Chrome performance, but probably less than half of the memory use of Chrome, and Firefox is getting faster.

As for the average user... That story won't fly.

It never has, and never will.

Chrome is not as damn good as it was when it first launched, and launched from the company that has nearly ubiquitous control over web searches.

Bigger issues to Firefox adoption from the public are things like, "This site only runs on Google Chrome. Download from here." Big name sites have been known to do this, like Netflix (on Linux, at least).

Or how Edge re-adds itself to the user's taskbar with nearly every Windows update.

Those things are what impacts day to day users, and that determines what they use to browse the web.

That being said, Chrome's more aggressive blocking of sites with poor SSL, and more aggressive blocking of Flash, might just push users to another browser... Which will probably be Edge. Because it's on their taskbar.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...
Already a fulltime Engineer myself, I guess what I am looking at can be more phrased as applied machine learning, to solve production related problems. This is somewhat different than a regular engineering role though.
Fully accepted. Firefox got comfortable in its position when IE was 'defeated', same as IE before. They had "won", so no reason to innovate anymore. Maybe Chrome was a much needed "kick in the ass". I checked Firefox again a few days ago and it seems to be faster than I remember it, which gives me at least hope that they haven't given up yet.
Well there was that browser ballot they had to show in Europe to Windows users as a result of a antitrust case.
Can you cite some of those pages? I have been using Firefox forever and haven't had any rendering issues in the past years. I imagine it must be some fancy niche node+webgl websites...
Stats give FF at 45% market share, before Chrome got heavily advertised and took over.

Chrome didn't beat IE. Firefox fought an all-out war and was not going anywhere either. What beat IE is an antitrust lawsuit actually.
I switched from Mozilla to Opera when the former dropped the 'suite' approach to focus on Firefox. I was happy with Opera until Tetzchner left, and then switched to Chrome when Opera moved onto Blink. Now I keep both Chrome and Firefox open all the time so I can cmd-tab between views.

All it would take for me to prefer one browser over another would be for one of them to figure out rss, email, and irc. That would put them on par with browsers from a decade ago.

Maybe Slack could add a web browser?

Of course I wouldn't give up consistent rendering, performance, and modern dev tools to get an integrated rss reader.
It's already the fastest algorithm available. Not sure why anyone would need to salvage his ideas; anyone needing state-of-art graph isomorphism algorithm will implement it.
Also don't throw stuff away. I had injured my knee and has surgery to correct it. I bought a walker until I got better. When my father got sick he borrowed my walker instead of buying a new one.

If you look in thrift stores you can find canes and walkers as well sometimes.

It is just like OTC aspirin, bring in your own bottle to save money as if a nurse gives it to you, you are charged $50 a pill. Buy one for $1 at a Dollar Store and use that.
For me it was; I guess I was a relatively early adopter, and Chrome was just so much faster and less bloated than the competition at the time. Clean UI (and it's still clean, they're keeping that promise), superior performance, frequent updates, superior built-in developer tools, etc.

IDK if that caused it to grow to become the biggest browser, but it sold it for me.
The "Motorola lapdock" was an attempt at doing this, but it seems not to have taken off.
I'd note that Firefox now implements restrictive code signing practices with regard to extensions; in this regard, Firefox Developer Edition, which makes this a setting, might be a better choice than normally-branded Firefox builds.
Firefox also offers amazing stability on FreeBSD when compared to Chromium. That alone is what converted me.
French Connected Condom Paris
I do have one and I enjoy my daily commutes on it :)

But, given the negligible effect it's had on my health, I want to refine my original comment to make it clear that I don't imply causation between cycling and burning calories. Clearly, I need to make additional changes.
Im confused.
Isnt that the definition of a Smartphone? :P
The only thing standing in the way of me returning to Firefox is them having a comparable rendering process sandbox to Chromium. It's coming, but it's hard to say how long it'll be before it's as good as Chromium.

More info: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox
An Animation Illustrating This Winter's Alarming Global Sea Ice Decrease
Probably better to block ads on your cellphone via hostfiles or a custom nameserver that blocks ads. Try turning your phone on and sniffing its packets with tcpdump on a notebook (use Wireshark to decrypt if WPA). You'll be surprised by the amount of servers from ad companies that are contacted before you even unlock your screen, if you let apps start at boot.
Chrome has definitely taken IE's place in pushing their own "standards" specially thanks to Android and ChromeOS.
There are broken because like IE Firefox don't support all standard. Chrome has been every time pushing news technology, ban or isolate adobe flash for the best for the users.

Firefox take decision for me and I don't like it.
He lives in a fairly traffic-dense urban locality. He did spend a large amount (~10-15 years) of his life living in the hills when he was in the civil services.
Yup. Some distros (e.g. Gentoo) already ship Developer Edition by default.
Agreed, this is a fantastic description of one of the true legends of CS. I had the great fortune of having Laci as my algorithms professor. Many great researchers are lousy lecturers, Laci is anything but. He's a captivating lecturer. Listening to him it feel like your brain is moving twice as fast as normal. That's how clearly and quickly he explains concepts.
I'm seriously baffled by a big red UK based telecommunications company, which prompts me to use their e-billing features, yet can't make their local website work with Firefox for years now.
long live xircon!

all said, duck yeah, irssi remains one of my fav pieces of software. watching the rise of slack and so forth has been quite amusing to me, as a longtime irc chick. my barometer for new chat networks being good or not is "can i somehow use it in irssi?"

awaiting a good and proper discord-irc bridge to make up for all the funtimes tryin to make twitch/ustream/hitbox chat work via irc.
> What if a smart table could keep track of its owners and use, almost like an odometer

sigh How much am I going to have to pay in the future to not have hackable surveillance embedded in my furniture? It's bad enough when it's creeping into televisions and lightbulbs.
> The browser browses the internet.

You mean 'the World Wide Web' [1] since 'the Internet' includes other protocols than HTTP(S) such as SMTP, POP3, and IMAP.

Nowadays, Node is everywhere. Slack, using JavaScript, is replacing IRC. One of the best e-mail clients is Nylas N1 which uses JavaScript under the hood. Hyper is a terminal using JavaScript. Discord is becoming the defacto standard for VoIP gaming, and uses JavaScript under the hood. In a way, the WWW -via JavaScript- is invading the space of the traditional protocols.

You may find that bloat, but all of the above applications provide an excellent user experience. The UIs work very well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
Which bad parts?
Nope, it's theoretically amazing interesting, but anyone who really wants to solve graph isomorphism would use Brendan McKay's Nauty, or one of the up-to-date implementations (Saucy, Bliss, Hungry, Ferret).

Personal interest: I wrote Ferret, my PhD student wrote Hungry.
On Android I find that Chrome and Brave tend to work better and be more comfortable to use.
Once every 6 months, I make an honest attempt to switch to Firefox. I want to use it. However, at least on macOS, I don't buy the argument that it's faster/uses less RAM. I usually have a TON of tabs open[1], and Firefox is horrible at pulling that weight. It's just a slower browser, and I can't tolerate that.

[1] http://imgur.com/a/mt2OE
Use Wireshark, Chromium still talks to Google even if you disable all configs it allows you to disable. Firefox is the only one you can configure to not talk to it's servers (Mozilla's).
I've never seen stats placing Firefox much above 30%, where are you getting 45% from?
1 Css Property That Will RUIN Your Scroll Performance
Why America is Self-Segregating
Angular 4 Beta Version Out
Ask HN: What is the best language to write a REST back end in?
I am currently running Java on a tomcat as backend rest service. Which language would be good to migrate to. Good performance, future proof and I can find other people to maintain as well.
ChromeOS, while not that much successful outside USA, it appears to be a thing there.

So if you have a browser based OS, which happens to be loved by the USA school system, which browser do you think many US devs will care mostly about?