Firefox is ahead in some ways, too burneded by BS like a plugin ecosystem (focus on browsing damnit) and non-native UI skins, on the other.
Plugin systems are key to a good browsing experience; Chrome includes almost entirely the same feature set, so your argument is void; and, overall, there's no evidence that Firefox is particularly burdened by anything.
IE is catching up but limping.
IE caught up already, and I don't see any evidence that it's "limping"
Webkit is not updating that fast anymore.
Well, there are fewer contributors now. But it's kind of hard to draw any conclusions about how fast it's updating given how little time has passed since Blink forked.
Anybody holding their breaths for full ES6 support?
Yep, we're making good progress, and Firefox 29/Chrome 33 are doing better than ever. Still work to be done, but the ES6 spec isn't even finished yet, so that's to be expected.
In other words, chill out. Everything's looking pretty good, there are loads of excellent browsers available, and they're mostly getting better. It's not perfect, but what platform is?
> IE is catching up but limping.
IE caught up already, and I don't see any evidence that it's limping.
I actually kind of agree, and I'm surprising myself in saying that. Just from a consumers perspective, I found at least one place where IE offers something that I directly wanted to do that couldn't be done on any other browser.
I wanted to watch a HD Netflix on my laptop, but the Silverlight client had no hardware acceleration so it played terribly. Turns out, there is a hardware accelerated HTML5 version of Netflix that's only usable using IE since only IE has the necessary DRM.
I was quite surprised. Ignoring the potential ethical quagmire here, I thought it was interesting that there was something where IE gave me a better experience.
I wanted to watch a HD Netflix on my laptop, but the Silverlight client had no hardware acceleration so it played terribly. Turns out, there is a hardware accelerated HTML5 version of Netflix that's only usable using IE since only IE has the necessary DRM.
I was quite surprised. Ignoring the potential ethical quagmire here
Let's not. DRM on the open web is bad.
DRM on the open web is an open specification for how to close the open web.
If Netflix had decided to use a standard mechanism to deliver video, instead of relying on closed, proprietary DRM-plugins, everyone would be able to provide this good user-experience.
Not saying MSIE hasn't improved, but enabling DRM on the web is not in any way improving anything.
It's bad. All bad. Bad for the present, bad for the future. It needs to die.
Not quite - it's used on (some) Chromebooks, as in the HTML5 version of Netflix only runs on locked down hardware from Google partners. Unlock the hardware so you can run your own software on the Chromebook and the media decryption module refuses to decrypt anything.
The various content providers seem to have used the advent of HTML5 to insist on stricter DRM requirements, ones that can only be met through control over the entire hardware and software stack. I presume Microsoft's version uses the long-standing GPU support for hardware decryption and acceleration of DRMed video instead of whatever ChromeOS does. Apparently unlike the Google version it's possible for other browsers to freely support HTML5 EME that's compatible with Microsoft's DRM, but naturally only on Windows: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/dn46673...
>"competing engines would be good for the web"?
They will.
Citation needed. Because, to support my argument, we just saw a "competing engine" starting to divert from the others. And not only in this case -- just the other day the Google team announced they'd drop CSS Regions too.
Would it be as easy for Google to do so, if they were still sharing Webkit code with all the other Webkit partners?
>IE caught up already, and I don't see any evidence that it's "limping
Well, we still have to support IE10 (some also IE9). Everytime, every version gives something new, but holds something back that the latest other browser engines already have. E.g IE9 and WebGL.
>Webkit is not updating that fast anymore.
Well, there are fewer contributors now. But it's kind of hard to draw any conclusions about how fast it's updating given how little time has passed since Blink forked.
Nope, also before. Google had published commit stats in the time of the fork, and Apple had considerably slowed down commits for couple of years or so before that.
This is misdirection. The allegation is that Google is using it's market power to subvert the standards process and subvert the open web it once championed now that it is powerful enough to do so.
Bringing Ad Block into the core would violate the wink, wink, nudge, nudge arrangement between Mozilla and their default search provider Google. If Mozilla did this, the value of being a default search provider in Firefox would fall to around zero, and Mozilla would close up shop as 90% of their revenues disappeared.
Bringing Ad Block into the core also sounds like a violation of the browser abstraction to me. A browser is supposed to show me what I give it. Specifying and implementing policies about what content is "good" or "bad" and should be treated specially seems logically separate to me.
You realise that such features can come with a on/off setting right?
Plus there's no such a "browser abstraction". A browser is just supposed to be useful for surfing the web, and if blocking ads is part of that, then so be it.
Nobody talks about a "mailer abstraction" ("a mailer is supposed to show me what is coming into my account"), when mailers have built-in spam email filters.
Not to mention that similar things already exist in browsers. Browsers eg. stop you going into "bad" content ("fishing", "malware" etc sites). They stop your visit, show you a warning page, and ask if you're sure you want to continue. Technically those are just other pages, they are content too (and sometimes they even have been labelled wrongly).
Interesting, and concisely put. Now I'm wondering whether FF users are obliged to use google (the same way we get obliged to turn off adblock on sites we don't wish to hurt).
I'm pretty sure at least Bing has a revenue sharing program with Mozilla for search results from the search bar (they did as of Firefox 4[1], at least). Google just won the auction to be the default. Not sure about the other default search engines, though.
The type of users who value extensions heavily are the type that evangelize browsers, and the type whose friends and relatives ask them what browsers to use.
Remember when Blink was announced, how some people said "competing engines would be good for the web"?
And how the Blink team/Google paid lip service to improving the web going forward, better standards compliance, etc.
Firefox is ahead in some ways, too burneded by BS like a plugin ecosystem (focus on browsing damnit) and non-native UI skins, on the other.
IE is catching up but limping.
Webkit is not updating that fast anymore.
Opera, nobody but 10 people ever cared about. Besides, they're just Blink now.
Anybody holding their breaths for full ES6 support?