[Mistletoe]

If I had to guess, Google will only change Chrome in ways that make it more money. Browsers could do all kinds of awesome things but Google isn’t going to do any of it if it interferes with sending people to ads. It would be kind of nice if the majority browser wasn’t owned by the people selling you ads.

[greenyoda]

I agree, but nobody is forced to use Chrome. If Firefox (which I use) were to implement some really useful features that Chrome didn't have, maybe more people would start using it.

Chrome may be the default browser on Android, but Firefox is as easy to install as any other app in the Play Store.

[Ayesh]

As browsers have reached the feature plateau, I still like the pace Firefox is innovating.

I'm using Firefox heta, and every time I jump a major version number, I get a bit excited to see what's new. Unlike Chrome (which I uninstalled on both my desktop and mobile devices), I know that none of the new features are mal-intended. Sure, Firefox messed up in the past (like Pocket integration), but they Firefox has been innovating for the past few years at a pleasant pace.

Recently, they added in-browser offline translation, enhanced cookie blocking,automatic cookie banner rejection, etc. In FF 120 (current beta), the only new feature I noticed was that they enabled "Copy Clean Link" context menu (which copies a link without tracking URL queries), and it's better than a browser run by an ad company sneaking in WEI or speaking at Ad Block Developer conference to say "Manifest v3 isn't that bad".

[zx8080]

Maintaining Chromium takes at least around $1B annually. This involves playing around with all that shiny new standards to pass the unneeded stuff together with needed one to make sure a browser engineering does not need less than that sum. Why? Because if it's cheaper then anyome could make browser. And allow it ignore ads.

DRM (or hardware attestation) is the key to the market now.

It's actually very clever: once banks start blocking non-DRM browsers, that's a game over for all opensource and competing projects. The browser (and therefore the internet for most of the population) will then be controlled by the largest ads corporation in the history.

Sad, but this kind of an entrenching seem to go very quick and very well in the mobile land (see second part of the comment [0]).

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38124214

[skybrian]

I don’t see why you can’t use one browser for banking and another for other things? On mobile, some people even use apps that only interact with one bank. Or an app just for YouTube.

(I don’t use separate browsers, but I gave Facebook its own Chrome profile.)

A new browser would need to do one everyday thing really well to get part-time use. The question is what that is.

[AlotOfReading]

Financial service requirements have a habit of spreading into other websites. Imagine e.g. PayPal blocks their payment widget from working on other browsers. Suddenly shopping might be impossible with that browser. In fact, the current state is that PayPal will always require 2fa if you use Firefox, so this isn't particularly far fetched.

[zx8080]

> I don’t see why you can’t use one browser for banking and another for other things?

Because those banks have recently replaced SMS OTP with mobile app push confirmation dialog. But the bank's app does not want to work when there's any app installed on a smartphone not specifically whitelisted in a bank.

Everyone hates SMS OTP them here at HN, but here's an alternative.