Chrome Browser Turns 10 (theverge.com) 154
Google first released its Chrome browser 10 years ago today. Marketed as a "fresh take on the browser," Chrome debuted with a web comic from Google to mark the company's first web browser. From a report: It was originally launched as a Windows-only beta app before making its way to Linux and macOS more than a year later in 2009. Chrome debuted at a time when developers and internet users were growing frustrated with Internet Explorer, and Firefox had been steadily building momentum. Google used components from Apple's WebKit rendering engine and Mozilla's Firefox to help bring Chrome to life, and it made all of Chrome's source code available openly as its Chromium project. Chrome focused on web standards and respected HTML5, and it even passed both the Acid1 and Acid2 tests at the time of its release. This was a significant step as Microsoft was struggling to adhere to open web standards with its Internet Explorer browser.
Another significant part of Chrome's first release was the idea of "sandboxing" individual browser tabs so that if one crashed it wouldn't affect the others. This helped improve the speed and stability of Chrome in general, alongside Google's V8 JavaScript engine that the company constantly tweaked to try and push the web forwards. After a decade of Chrome, this browser now dominates as the primary way most people browse the web. Chrome has secured more than 60 percent of browser market share on desktop, and Google's Chrome engineers continue to improve it with new features and push the latest web standards. To mark the milestone, Google said it would make a surprise announcement on Tuesday -- some improvements coming to Chrome.
Another significant part of Chrome's first release was the idea of "sandboxing" individual browser tabs so that if one crashed it wouldn't affect the others. This helped improve the speed and stability of Chrome in general, alongside Google's V8 JavaScript engine that the company constantly tweaked to try and push the web forwards. After a decade of Chrome, this browser now dominates as the primary way most people browse the web. Chrome has secured more than 60 percent of browser market share on desktop, and Google's Chrome engineers continue to improve it with new features and push the latest web standards. To mark the milestone, Google said it would make a surprise announcement on Tuesday -- some improvements coming to Chrome.
The best improvement won't make it. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Video blocking test suite (Score:5, Informative)
I tried chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy in Chromium Version 68.0.3440.75 (Developer Build) built on Debian 9.5, running on Debian 9.5 (64-bit). It didn't block most of the test cases in my video blocking test suite [pineight.com]. I guess that's because blocking all video playback is very much easier said than done.
- Block the <video> element, and sites will fall back to the less efficient <img> tag with GIF.
- Block <video> and GIF, and sites will fall back to using JavaScript to rotate JPEG or PNG images into a container.
- Block <video>, GIF, and script, and sites will fall back to using CSS sprites with stepped animations [teamtreehouse.com] to rotate frames of a JPEG or PNG filmstrip into a container.
Download cap; canvas reading (Score:3)
First, a video that is downloaded but not played would still count against the monthly download quota that your ISP imposes on you, especially a satellite or cellular ISP. Second, playing a filmstrip through a canvas (as demonstrated in canvid [github.io]) lets the video delivery script read the pixels in the canvas [stackoverflow.com] and relay back to the website that the video was decoded. Thus a video that was downloaded and played invisibly still uses CPU time and battery energy for decoding.
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GIFs are still better because they don't have sound.
Nor does a video played through a <video autoplay muted> element. And a video played through a <video autoplay muted> element costs less on average against your monthly Internet cap than an equivalent GIF.
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"Video GIFs" are one of the worst thing anyone has ever created for the Web.
If you think loading a video and not playing it wastes bandwidth, animated GIFs are ten times worst. 50MB+ GIFs should not even exist in the first place.
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In my experience, it's not 2:1 but 10:1 in favor of video. Compare a 200 kB video [pineight.com] to a 2 MB GIF [pineight.com] at the same size and frame rate.
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And I thought graceful degradation was dead!
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Flashblock. Look it up as mine is enabled by default
Junkware (Score:1)
Safari also doesn't spit out bogus threat dialogs on HTTP sites.
Google's Chrome is junkware. Gmail is doing the same shit. Idiots.
Protecting users from ISPs like Comcast (Score:3)
What does Safari do instead to protect users from ISPs that insert deceptive or otherwise malicious scripts or other content into HTML pages delivered through cleartext HTTP? <cough>Xfinity by Comcast</cough>
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DNS is not secure so DV over DNS can't be secure.
Your attack model appears to involve misissuance based on a man-in-the-middle attack on the server's DNS at issuance time. A DV CA uses two countermeasures: verifying that that it receives the same result over multiple routes through the Internet (route diversity), and publishing logs of all certificates that it issues (Certificate Transparency). How would an attacker sustain an attack past these countermeasures?
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I can haz adblock? I can haz extension? I can haz personal choose? Yaong?! Nyan?! Meow?!
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Blocking all auto-playing videos is NOT ENOUGH.
If it loads any video that we did not ask for, it's wasting bandwidth.
Say Nice Things about Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have much to add, but I will say that Chrome provides very nice developer tools for building and debugging client-side web applications. It is almost as if the people behind it had a vision or something.
Sort of related: I went to a movie yesterday (Crazy Rich Asians) and saw an ad before the movie pushing Chromebook. If you want to see floorboss-level trolling of Microsoft go see that. Oh, and the movie was pretty good too.
Re:Say Nice Things about Chrome (Score:5, Interesting)
Chrome really upped the game for security in browsers. It also stated a performance arms race that gave us huge gains.
Google also did a lot to kill flash. Not just the plugin, but by moving the web away from flashy animated sites (pun intended) and back towards information and useful content by ranking such sites higher.
Even if you don't use it, it's been an overall force for good that benefits everyone.
Re: Say Nice Things about Chrome (Score:1)
It started dick measuring for performance and in doing so made the https insecure by disabling ocsp revocation checking. Also it actually decreased performance. Presto based opera back then could manage 120 tabs with a little less than 800 memory usage. Chrome managed perhaps 12 at the time. Today, it manages one for that same amount of memory...
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Google also did a lot to kill flash.
Devil's advocate: killing someone else's product does not imply making your own better or competitive. HTML5, in general, has had this problem for a LONG time, especially when compared to Flash.
I know it's popular to hate on Flash, but I'm not thrilled when huge conglomerates insist on making choices for me, most notably what technologies I can't use for my own good. I personally think it'll be a sad day when Flash is completely dead, if only for what it means symbolically.
This is the factual inaccuracy in the summary... (Score:5, Insightful)
Chrome focused on web standards and respected HTML5, and it even passed both the Acid1 and Acid2 tests at the time of its release. This was a significant step as Microsoft was struggling to adhere to open web standards with its Internet Explorer browser.
I must assert: Microsoft did not even try to adhere to web standards at the time.
For a company of Microsoft's stature with thousands of [capable & competent] programmers, this would be cake walk. They chose not to try.
Re:This is the factual inaccuracy in the summary.. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem was while Firefox did starting to adhering to standards it had it's issues. Phoenix was fast before being renamed to Firefox 1.0. It still had some Netscape bugs here and there but was much improved. Firefox 3.0 was slow and was known to freeze with lots of plugins. Firefox 3.5 was even slower even if it did adhere to even more standards.
IE by default was quicker if you ran MS specific HTML and MS CSS and cheated by loading when the OS loaded so it appeared to load faster. People stuck with it as it just worked and it was there.
Chrome was much better. Webkit also was a much better architecture than Gecko which is why Google left Gecko and switched to webkit for Chrome OS and Chrome browser in development. Apple already used webkit for Safari and their iphone. The architecture was multithreaded and easy to embed and light. It was perfect and much needed in the age of Vista where Pcs barely had enough ram to run it.
Chrome surprised Firefox quickly too. IE 9 was the first non sucky IE browser and MS was forced to follow webstandards all thinks to Chrome's marketshare and users demanding their websites work on their iPhones.
Chrome was a better browser. I could argue Firefox was marginally better depending on which are you looked at. Most users do not know what web compliancy is. All they know is Firefox was slow, and their worksites looked funny which is why it never took more than 15% marketshare.
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Chrome surprised Firefox quickly too
I can assure you that Mozilla was not at all surprised by Chrome. If anything, many of those working the codebase at the time were worried because there wasn't any solid direction devs were being pushed in to compete with Chrome. But everyone saw the writing on the wall with Chrome coming out which is exactly what prompted the 3.0 to 3.5 jump and began the era of "toss literally everything at it" that eventually ended with Firefox 24.
users demanding their websites work on their iPhones
I don't think this could be underscored enough. People wanting the site
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IE 9 was the first non sucky IE browser and MS was forced to follow webstandards all thinks to Chrome's marketshare (...) All they know is Firefox was slow, and their worksites looked funny which is why it never took more than 15% marketshare.
What a load of bullshit history revisionism being modded up by moderators sucking Google's cock. Firefox peaked at well over 30% [statcounter.com], people were leaving IE in droves taking it from 95%+ to the low 60s before Chrome even existed. Mozilla and Firefox did all the hard work of getting sites to work in something other than IE6 and the decline continued even though Microsoft much improved standards compliance in IE7 and IE8. Yes, Chrome was good but it came long after writing MS specific HTML/CSS was dead.
which is why Google left Gecko
That never
Unfortunately, it's Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
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You're amusing: when was Google ever trustworthy?
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Google recently crippled chromium pretty badly. For example, h.264 playback is really hard to get in now that "just copy relevant decoders into correct directory" option is no longer available.
Re: Unfortunately, it's Google. (Score:4, Interesting)
We're talking about chromium, and the fact that it in fact does not use system hardware or software decoders. And with semi-recent changes google made to chomium code, you can no longer just drop in the decoders into appropriate folder to make it work.
Re:Unfortunately, it's Google. (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox, the browser that secretly installed an advertising plugin running native, unreviewed code on your computer? The browser that integrated Pocket?
Mozilla are worse, if anything.
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I wouldn't say that what they're doing is worse, but I can't stand their ad campaigns championing their respect for privacy.
Google doesn't try to hide the fact they collect data. Mozilla has been caught borderline lying (and semi-backtracking) on too many occasions.
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Unfortunately, it's controlled by Google, an organization that can no longer be trusted.
Trusted with what? Trust is not absolute. What specifically do you not trust Google with?
Struggling to what? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only thing that I find annoying (Score:3)
Web Server for Chrome (Score:2)
Have you tried loading your local files into the 200 OK! Web Server for Chrome [google.com]?
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But why? Seems a bit daft to fire up a server when the file:// uri would do nicely and does the same thing with the same level of security.
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I believe that Chrome's treatment of each path in the file system as a separate origin is intended to prevent files downloaded from one origin from being able to see and exfiltrate other files that your user account can read.
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How do you test HTTP header configuration with file:// ?
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You don't. Why would you want to? We're talking about displaying a local, static file, not running a server-backed web-based application. If you need a web server, run a web server.
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Then you accept inability to test differences between Firefox behavior and Chrome behavior locally.
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So if someone tricks a user into opening an HTML file they've downloaded, the scripts in that file should have access to every file on your filesystem?
You can't test anything to do with security if you're using file:// as the origin. You can't test cookies, you can't test http headers, you can't test cross-origin restrictions.
Are you really unable to run a local web server? Is it beyond your technical skill level? If so, please reconsider your choice on doing web development.
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Of course I can run a local web server. But it's not only that. SVG injection (not sure if you have heard of this) is not possible with Chrome in local HTML files. So if we give a customer a file that displays a bunch of CSS styleable SVGs, we have to put all the SVG code inline into the HTML, making it huge. In Firefox we could just keep those SVGs in separate files, just as you would expect it to work. Or of course, I cou
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Here's one example, the first google result I got when I searched "firefox exploit access local files"
https://blog.mozilla.org/secur... [mozilla.org]
Would this have been an exploit if Firefox had locked down local file access?
Here's another one, reported to the tor project, which was using Firefox
https://hackerone.com/reports/... [hackerone.com]
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with Chrome is its CORS policy for local files. Each time I test websites locally I have to switch to Firefox, because Chrome would not allow request to the local file system from a local HTML page .
By definition, you can't test a website without running a server, since without a server you don't have a website. You just have a pile of HTML.
You also can't expect file:// URIs to behave like http:/// [http] URIs, because the browser may behave differently in those contexts even if it does allow you to load them.
TL;DR: You're doing it wrong
Thanks KDE/Steve Jobs & Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Webkit was a much needed improvement. Also IE 6 websites still dominated many many years after 2000 in 2007/2008 when the first iPhone came out.
Webkit was better and designed to be abstract and multi-platform unlike gecko which was why Chrome switched from gecko to webkit while it was still in alpha. Without Chrome and mobile app support IE 6 would still be here. I was one of those Firefox rebels but it was a geek thing 10 years ago. If I recall it had just 10 to 15% of the market and I had to keep IE around for some websites.
Grandma would see this site not render in Firefox and blame the browser and go back to IE which made webdevelopers scream in frustration.
Though webkit and it's blink cousin are default in all devices and platforms I think it's a good thing we the web returned to where it should be and is now an open standard. Thanks Google, Apple, and the Konqueror project for making this possible.
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KHTML was chosen as the basis for WebKit due to being lightweight (140k LoC). After Apple seized control the number of lines of code quickly grew to 14 million (!) This was expected to be better than if Microsoft got control of the project (NaN LoC estimate).
And after 8 Years (Score:2, Insightful)
I went back to Firefox. I don't trust Google and their ad ecosystem.
Firefox has its problems, but it doesn't have a multi-billiondollar neoliberal fascist enterprise backing it.
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I went back to Firefox. I don't trust Google and their ad ecosystem.
Firefox has its problems, but it doesn't have a multi-billiondollar neoliberal fascist enterprise backing it.
LOL....LOL....LOL
Apparently you don't understand where Mozilla gets all their money.
Almost 100% of Mozilla's revenue (currently about $350 Million a year) comes from . . . . . . . GOOGLE!
And Mozilla is just as "neoliberal fascist" as Google. (Forced their CEO to resign because he gave some money to a political campaign they don't like).
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Chrome doesn't have ads and Google respects Do Not Track, which you can enable in Chrome.
Firefox secretly installed an advertising plugin for a TV show without permission.
Your trust is misplaced. Also, "neoliberal fascist enterprise" makes you sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist.
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Google respects Do Not Track, which you can enable in Chrome.
Yeah, sure they do. And Santa and the Tooth Fairy are real! Remember how it came out recently that Google is still tracking you when you tell it not to in Maps? Yeah. I trust Google about as far as I can throw their HQ.
Apple's WebKit ? (Score:5, Insightful)
WebKit came from the KDE browser. And because it was LGPL code Apple and Google were forced to keep it Open Source.
Would be nice if these details would at least get some attention on a site like /..
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Apparently I wasn't clear on this: My point isn't that they are one, but that the LGPL forced Apple to keep Webkit Open Source.
Woohoo 10 years (Score:2)
of unabated browsing history stealing and massive privacy invasion. Yeah Google!
And for its 10th birthday it enforces account (Score:1)
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Amazing (Score:1)
Amazing how a piece of software made by a company that has as its goal to gather as much knowledge about you and the rest of the world has become so popular in such a short time.
Yay for Mozilla. At least they don't gather your data.
Chrome is the new IE (Score:3, Interesting)
Dumbed down anti-user interface. Arrogant background processes that spawn countless instances and take over your computer. Drive-by unwanted trojan installs as Google greases the palms of every freeware dev to sneak a Chrome install into their app installer. But worst of all now are the "Only works in Chrome" websites:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/... [theverge.com]
Microsoft got raked over the coals for doing all the same shit that Google is now getting a pass for. What the fuck?
All you so-called geeks who champion Chrome are either just out of highschool or you are hypocrites with very short memories.
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Not the same.
IE was the Chrome of 1998. It was faster. It had more features. It was being rapidly developed. It was multiplatform. It was from a cool .com era company which enterprises loved no one got fired for picking Microsoft back then.
IE lost. It had bugs that accumulated and were never fixed. IE 6.5 was rumored to have even tabs and a download manager. It was canned so the focus could return to desktop apps. BIG MISTAKE. IE had major security issues that were never patched. It never caught up again an
amazing how quick (Score:3, Insightful)
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There's noting bloated about Chrome. It is merely keeping up with the web standards of the day. The web standards which have effectively redefined "displaying some visual content" to "become a second OS within your OS" are what have become bloated.
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There's noting bloated about Chrome.
Tell that to my RAM usage monitor. I finally had enough headaches with Chrome’s memory usage that I gave Firefox a fair shot for several weeks (I gave up due to a thousand small lacks of attention to detail), and now am giving Safari a fair shot for a few weeks. At this point, I plan to stay with Safari. Though it isn’t as full-featured, the current version feels snappier, uses less memory, and does enough of the stuff that I care about to have won me over from Chrome.
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Tell that to my RAM usage monitor.
Hey Anubis's RAM usage monitor, I have some information to share with you. Web standards have grown large and complex and the size of Chrome's memory footprint has nothing to do with it. All applications that meet modern web standards and capabilities as set out in the current HTML and JS standards have the same memory footprint. Lighter browsers can also be given a different name: Browsers that are missing functionality that is part of the standard or simply offload functionality elsewhere. So next time y
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That actually got a chuckle from me, so, yes, I am. Thanks for the unexpected response!
And or ten years (Score:2)
"Microsoft was struggling to adhere to open..." (Score:2)
Was? We still schedule as much time to fix changes under 11 and Edge as we do to write the feature in the first place. Yes, they've greatly improved since MSIE 6, which we still have to support with several of our apps, but they're still not good.
It was so much better than the competition, at the (Score:2)
It was so much better than the competition, at the time.
I'm largely back to FF now. As FF seems to be regaining at least part of its sanity.
Finally! (Score:2)
Now it's old enough to drive a bike on the street.
Why do we care how old browsers are (Score:1)
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How does APK work with DNS over HTTPS https://blog.nightly.mozilla.o... [mozilla.org] ?
Once this is enabled by default, it will bypass the operating system's DNS resolution, bypassing APK Host files.