I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched. It was amazing. It was such a relief to move away from IE and all the arcane levels of details I had to remember back then to artisnaly get IE to behave like a moderately modern (for then) browser.
Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking. Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution.
Now these days the only thing keeping me tied to chrome is finger muscle memory. The death of manifest v2 is the 2nd to last nail.
Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.
The problem is I use safari on iOS. Generally not a bad browser. Equivalent and superior to Chrome is certain aspects. I don't really need to run Chrome on my phone. Safari is good enough. However... for a local build only I use maybe it's possible.
At that time, Mozilla refused to implement some new CSS standards as they deemed it impossible in their engine. Chrome came along and a year down the road Firefox had got the features for some reason without much trouble. Revisionism is failing to accept that Chrome ate Firefox' lunch within months, for extremely good reasons.
You are talking about a completely different set of events happening years after the events I'm discussing. Both of us are correct, because that's two different topics.
> a fast, modern and extremely nice to use browser already
That's some revisionist lies. Slow, crashy, a memory pig with a big leak problem, stuck on a single process architecture. It was none of fast or modern. Whether it was extremely nice to use is debatable, but lots of people rapidly voted by switching.
It very regularly crashed and took down the entire process.
It's fine to lament the Chrome monoculture, but we misdiagnosis it if we don't remember the seeds were sown via Mozilla's incompetence. They made it crystal clear they couldn't and wouldn't do better, and the next 5 or more years made that inarguable.
My high school blocked websites with a proxy set in IE. To bypass this we would install Firefox on a flash drive and run Firefox from it. When Chrome came out everybody switched instantly because it worked so much better for our use case. Maybe a regularly installed Firefox could have been competitive, but my first use of Chrome was a night and day difference compared with Firefox.
As I remember it, Chrome was way faster than Firefox, but I was in high school and probably stupid. Firefox wouldn't catch up to Chrome until Quantum, which was amazing when it first dropped, but now Firefox is slow again.
No, Chrome was way faster than Firefox. You were not wrong. It grew right alongside HTML5, and Chrome put a lot of effort into V8. Firefox was definitely better than IE or Safari, but Chrome could do everything that Firefox did without the memory usage that Firefox had. It's funny how memory usage is now abysmal on Chrome, too.
Currently I am feeling this too but only for one site, GitHub. Which is where is spend most time during the day...
Quite sad, I don't know if it's GitHub's fault or not but Firefox needs to figure out what's going wrong here soon or people like me may be literally forced to Chromium.
I've tried Chrome too on that wave of hype, including on some pretty slow machines. Like the Eee PC, and for a few months, not few hours btw. It wasn't perceptibly faster than Firefox, at it had its own slowdowns, just a bit differently. For example as I remember, Chrome often rendered a page visibly faster than FF, but it was actually unusable and frozen static "image" of sorts for a few brief moments, and only then it become active. FF had a slower time rendering, but at all times it was not frozen statically, just some elements were loading. Things like that. In the end, I returned to FF not because Google had some bad rep back then, but purely because Firefox was better and more pleasant to use. I'm still baffled how that "FF - slow!" campaign worked out eventually.
Yes, they were both much of a muchness when taken as a whole, though some people definitely did find that one or the other was notably faster for their typical workloads.
But Chrome won the vast bulk of its market share not because it was technically better in every way, but because they spent much more on marketing at the exact time IE entered terminal decline.
There has never been a tag: elements that in DTD days (HTML 2–4) had EMPTY content model, and which these days are called void elements, cannot have an end tag. If you write , it’s a parse error, though in practice all implementations you care about will ignore it.
Back when Phoenix launched it was not a reliable alternative to IE or Opera, it was more like a sign of protest. You’d use it to tell the world that you didn’t care if most of the internet didn’t work for you, as longs as you where “sticking it to the man”.
I remember developing web pages with the purpose of ensuring they would work in both, so Phoenix was my main driver, but whenever anything was “done” the real work started of also getting it to work in IE, it was always a monumental effort. Sites with buttons for “go here for pheonix/go here for ie” where common. My friends who worked in the windows ecosystem mostly saw Phoenix as some “crazy hipster trend” and didn’t have a care as to if anything they made worked in it or not.
There was half a decade between the Mozilla Browser stopped being called Phoenix and the launch of Chrome. Firefox usage peaked at some 30% of desktops the year after Chrome was released.
It's not like Firefox wasn't a "viable" browser at the time. It was quite mainstream.
Moving from IE to Firefox was a much more memorable experience than going from Firefox to Chrome. But yeah, first Chrome was fast. I’m quite sure any of the today’s browsers would be fast if running in the pre-react world though.
> You’d use it to tell the world that you didn’t care if most of the internet didn’t work for you, as longs as you where “sticking it to the man”.
This is eerily similar to how I feel about using Firefox today. Not that I am sticking it to the man - I just want there to be diversity in the market and not have every viable option be a way for a megacorp to have presence on my computers.
>but whenever anything was “done” the real work started of also getting it to work in IE
due to IE not being a standards compliant browser.
As others noted, Firefox was around for a long time before Chrome and was not called Phoenix all that time, so it sort of seems like you looked at a piece of technology a month after launch, didn't like it, and refused to took at it again for 10 years? I mean that right there is at the level of moral complaints, not just performance or rendering.
I’m still using Firefox, I was adding the perspective from back in the start of “why didn’t you just move over from IE” like everyone would just move because an alternative existed.
Most didn’t and i get it. I am not the norm. I also ran gentoo back then which is not an option for most computer users.
Also being “technically most standard compliant” doesn’t mean anything to the average user who’s just angry that their browser isn’t showing their MySpace page correctly.
Calm down. Not every bit of real perspective on software short of “Firefox is perfect” is an existential criticism of it existing.
I've been using Firefox since I think basically its 0.1 release as Phoenix in 2022 and it already worked great at the time, no need to keep IE around (which I couldn't after switching to Linux in 2003). In fact, for years it was my "always works" fallback because I was using Konqueror otherwise. Firefox had two name changes in quick succession - Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox, but it was already over in 2004 so it's weird to keep calling it Phoenix for the more important time after that. In response to the name changes, there was a funny extension to randomize the name so you got "Firechameleon" and "Hypnodinosaur": https://github.com/miraleung/firesomething-2/blame/master/de...
Phoenix launched right at the peak of IE’s market dominance and that name lasted about a year, so if you are remembering it that way, it was very early. By 2005, Firefox had ~10% global market share; by the time of the first Chrome release in 2008, Firefox had ~25% global market share[0]. So the OP had plenty of time to switch away from IE before Chrome showed up.
In any case, nobody got to quit dealing with the misery of IE6 until some YouTube engineers did a little caper[1] that gave everyone else an excuse that their big brain business bosses would finally listen to.
you know we already had firefox back then? anyone with half a brain only used IE for the institutional website with ActiveX that wouldn't work otherwise
> I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched. It was amazing
Mi was a web dev then too, forced to develop for ie6.
At the time I remember asking why is google making a browser? How do they make money, and in the long term will their browser work for my best interests, or theirs?
Yeah, this is one area where I look forward to Rewrite in Go and Rewrite in Rust keep doubling down, unfortunely Rewrite in Java or Rewrite in C# are grandpa technologies and not fashionable.
I went back to Firefox on desktop and phones when it was clear Chrome was going the way of IE in terms of being too large a market share for it's own good or the good of users and developers. These days its much better than when Chrome first came out, but I also toy with librewolf or other even more user oriented alternate browsers.
> Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking
I think you're misremembering or you didn't try Safari at the time. The first version of Chrome was not very different from Safari which it was just a shell of anyway.
The first Chrome did use a fork of WebCore, the HTML part of WebKit, as its rendering engine, but added its own V8 JavaScript engine. The speed of JavaScript was the main differentiator. And _that_ was very different from Safari, and every other existing browser ... The quote is correct.
V8 kept getting even faster, including adding faster RegExps, which pushed the other browsers to speed up their JS too. Firefox is now using that RegExp implementation too, even if they're not using V8.
WebKit was itself a fork of the KHTML browser engine. And just like WebKit diverged from KHTML, Chrome diverged from WebKit.
My memory as a Mac user switching to Chrome when it came out was that the performance was basically the same as Safari. I'm sure V8 was faster than JavaScriptCore, but the web wasn't nearly as JavaScript-heavy as it is today so it wasn't something you noticed in normal use. Maybe if you were a heavy gmail-in-the-browser user.
The main reason I stuck with Chrome was the tab isolation. WebKit was super crashy back then, with Safari crashing several times a day just browsing the web. In Chrome only one tab would crash instead of the whole browser. This was one of the original selling points in addition to performance.
I switched back to Safari when I got my first Retina MacBook Pro, since Chrome had terrible performance in HiDPI for the first two years of retina Macs.
> "Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place."
You wouldn't be worried about vulnerabilities that the vibe coded browser could produce? I use plenty of LLM generated code, but a browser wouldn't be something I'd try on the Web.
So long as you don't distribute it and it doesn't become popular, don't underestimate security through obscurity. Malicious actors won't know about this homebrew browser's (presumably many) hypothetical flaws.
Only if you're limited to knowing exactly how the actual cryptography works. If you understand exactly how the key derivation works, and know how that is seeded, then you can very much get inside.
It would be nice benchmark for models. Something like generate web browser from web standards in rust, c, and a language of your choice. An automatic judge would score the results by amount of found vulnerabilities and functionality. We could also see if generating code by LLM in rust makes it safer or if language doesn't matter anymore. And you know that it will work eventually, because AI labs need models capable to write new fully working models themselves to reach AGI or whatever you call it.
> Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.
Passing opinion, but I hope this isn't indicating a lean in direction to 90's era Apple now that Tim retired. Too many overpriced skews and non-core products that diluted the brand and led to their market shrinking.
Back a few years ago with gpt3.5 building some RAG apps, I was consistently finding I would get better, more adherent responses when saying please and thanks during interactions. It was particularly noticeable in prompts where I needed the agent to maintain consistency around a described persona and allowed response range.
I don't think there's anything going on inside other than predictions. That being said, being nice never hurts.
If I'm mean to some people and nice to others, that just means I'm an a-hole. I don't wanna be that. Being kind all around helps me be a better person in the world. And in some cases with the robots, it helps as well.
I've got kinda the opposite take - saying please and thank you helps anthropomorphize the models and is compatible with the idea that there are common behaviours that we should be applying to models and people - when I'm strongly of the opinion that we shouldn't use our experience with models at all when guiding our interactions with people.
Being polite to a model isn't like saying please and thank you to my dog when he does his business, it's like saying please and thank you to my furnace when it turns on and off.
> Being polite to a model isn't like saying please and thank you to my dog when he does his business, it's like saying please and thank you to my furnace when it turns on and off.
True, but if saying “please” has a measurable functional effect then this is an important characteristic of the system. I also observed that saying please and thank you produced notably different responses. For me, there’s no real danger of anthropomorphism—I recognize that it’s a machine. But I also want it to do what I ask, so in my mind it’s really no different than having to use semicolons in Java but not in Python.
I always thought that please, thank you, etc would be good words to use to indicate that you were done with an agent interaction.
Siri, text my dad … send it. Thank you.
And then it could stop trying to listen. It sounds like you’re being polite, but it would have a secondary meaning too. Kind of like using the stop word to end an LLM’s output token list.
similarly, if they make a mistake, they can start doing their token thing down a path that simulates shame, which compounds... the effects of training data
The entire site looks like it was generated with Claude.
The site hijacks scrolling.
I scanned through paragraph after paragraph of overbloated and repetitive descriptions of what and how RAG works compared to how "modern agents" need to access documents.
What I never saw at any point was whatever this "alternative to RAG" was supposed to be.
Honestly the entire body of copy feels like it was llm generated.
Location: San Francisco
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: TypeScript/JS, React, node.js, Redis, Postgres, pgvector, LLM agents, Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), ci/cd pipelines, other tech
Résumé/CV: on request
Email: charles@geuis.com
I don't understand why people continue to use em-dashes. As far I know, the comment system on HN doesn't offer them. And iOS and android don't make them a default. They aren't something normally used by humans because - is a keyboard option that's easier to use.
The usage of them immediately makes your commentary suspect. Either you aren't using the standard web interface to make a comment, you're using and odd 3rd party client, or its LLM generated.
I just typed dash twice into iPhone. Hardly a “non-standard” web interface. Also, I’d like to think my comment was higher quality than anything an LLM could generate! At least, yet.
I've been using compose keys on desktop operating systems and the default keyboard on Android to write em-dashes for 10 years. I also use LLMs every workday, but I have never once used one to write, review, or edit prose because my voice is important to me.
I don't give a shit if my Hacker News comments sometimes look "suspect" to some people. The way I use language is deeply personal and I'm not going to let the clankers or reactionaries against them take it away from me.
Hear, hear! An em-dash is a great stylistic device for structuring sentences. It saddens me that the use of it now has become some sort of scarlet letter. I’m hoping the co-opting can be reversed.
Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking. Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution.
Now these days the only thing keeping me tied to chrome is finger muscle memory. The death of manifest v2 is the 2nd to last nail.
Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.
The problem is I use safari on iOS. Generally not a bad browser. Equivalent and superior to Chrome is certain aspects. I don't really need to run Chrome on my phone. Safari is good enough. However... for a local build only I use maybe it's possible.
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