[phantomathkg]

Chrome basically is abusing its market position, 69.65% globally, and becomes the new IE. Implementing its own HTML/JS standard.

The sad truth is, some companies will look at Statcounter[0] and say because Firefox does not reach 5% global population and decided not supporting it, actively or passively.

[0]: https://gs.statcounter.com/

[zdragnar]

This is literally how the standards are meant to work, at least on the JS side. The tc39 process requires at least two live implementations to exist before a spec can move to finished.

In this case, there's also people from Mozilla onboard, so there's no guarantee that it'll remain chrome only or that chrome will keep it if the spec doesn't go anywhere.

In fact, much of the web as we know it evolved this way. We have IE to thank for AJAX, after all.

[shimman]

Standards are democratic controls for democratic institutions, not "organizations" that are entirely captured by corporate interests. Absolutely despise how private entities have ruined software engineering by pursuing things that favor themselves rather than people in general.

[oaiey]

That is not how standards work. Some for sure, but the majority are established by groups of companies / a guild establishing rules. The law pressures them often into it (e.g. the EU did not say USB-C port, they said: one standard, you industry figure it out).

There are surely exceptions (maybe the IEEE; which are professionals union).

[shimman]

No, this is how good standards bodies works. It require collaboration across nations, sorry but this is like small d democracy stuff here. What isn't good are corporate interests rat fucking engineering practices to pursue greater profits.

[oaiey]

I agree all about company creed and also in many cases the standard is the lowest common denominator of their implementations. I am also a fan of putting national sovereignity over profit, but that does not change that in most cases only companies have the interest, the need and the insights to standardize stuff.

[sheept]

Another reason why this is problematic is that their proposed standards follow Google's priorities for its own products, particularly Google Meet.[0][1]

[0]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/element-captu...

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/document-pict...

[austin-cheney]

Another example is QUIC. What is the benefit of QUIC? On one hand Google boasts it greatly increases page load speed, which is contextually arguable. On the other hand, Google’s design priorities were to introduce UDP to the browser because UDP supports multicast, which lowers CPU utilization in data centers.

[wahern]

They claimed and showed QUIC slightly-to-moderately reduced latency, particularly for mobile. This benefits Google by loading pages with third-party content, i.e. ads, faster.

But QUIC significantly increases CPU utilization on servers, at least the widely used userland stacks do. Unless/until Google deploys QUIC in the kernel (or puts the whole network stack in userland, a la DPDK), this won't change.

The multicast claim is kinda bizarre. I can see how QUIC could help eliminate UDP client barriers, but those barriers pale in comparison to multicast. Multicast routing just doesn't exist on the Internet; it's only supported within some independent, typically small networks. Most ISPs don't support it. Wherever you could manage to distribute content with multicast, you'd necessarily also be resolving the collateral routing problems which QUIC support resolves, whereas even ubiquitous QUIC doesn't materially improve the multicast situation.

[austin-cheney]

You can invent your own conclusions all you want. Google’s evidence and motivations are what I stated. Their words, not mine.

[wahern]

I couldn't find any evidence Google pushed QUIC with the aspiration of utilizing IP multicast.

In 2022 an RFC for adding multicast support to QUIC was published, but backed by Akamai, not Google. And of course the RFC has the caveat that it would only be useful over multicast networks, e.g. edge servers colocated at an ISP. It seems this effort has picked up some steam over 2025 and 2026.

But I didn't look too hard. Can you share sources?

[austin-cheney]

Here is a Google Chrome discussion about it from 2018: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/proto-quic/c/pAQz...

Here is a quick overview (undated) from Google about it: https://peering.google.com/#/learn-more/quic

The phrase in that last one is: "multiplexing without head of line blocking". If you search for that phrase you will get a bunch of results. The browser is an extremely limited interface with regards to transmission, so the solution in the browser is always open more sockets. However, on the server, the advantages are huge.

You have to understand that multicast is OSI layers 2, 3, and 4. Its layer 2 because it uses a NIC as a local identifier for management apart from other multicast sockets available, UDP and TCP are layer 4 protocols, and it also takes on some layer 3 capabilities for congestion management. This is where the CPU advantage comes in, because you are offloading some of the traffic processing elsewhere in the stack and to network devices, like switches/routers.

Yes, Google has said that part of the motivation was reducing CPU load but I cannot remember where I saw that.

[chrisweekly]

IIRC, QUIC was also the precursor to HTTP/3. I don't like Google's motivations for wanting a faster web, but many of the things they've encouraged and/or provided have made things faster and more efficient. I'm not a google apologist, there's so much wrong and so much harm done... just saying it's maybe worth separating the tech from the motives.

[doodlesdev]

HTTP/3 uses QUIC as the transport layer, which in turn relies on UDP. QUIC replaces TCP while allowing a reduction of handshake exchanges in HTTP/3 first requests. Finally, even though UDP supports multicast, I believe QUIC doesn't. GP saying Google has developed it to use multicast thus is nonsense. Furthermore, QUIC takes much more CPU than TCP right now, due to running in userland.

In my opinion, QUIC and HTTP/3 are technical marvels, but are perhaps way too complicated and don't really serve the interest of most internet users.

There will be a point in the development of web browsers and associated technologies where we should just stop a bit to get things stable instead of churning protocol version after protocol version after new API. Will it ever stop?

Eventually, it all becomes so complicated no company can manage it all. Honestly, we might already be past this point, with Chromium at almost 40mi LOC, more than the Linux kernel itself, including all its drivers. When will the madness stop? Do we really need such complicated software to see Instagram posts, comment on a few Hacker News threads and mess around with Google Sheets?

The biggest reason I worry so much about this is that in the web, adding new features, APIs and protocols is easy. Removing and deprecating is basically impossible.

[pie_flavor]

It's not very complicated to import the QUIC library, or to import the HTTP library with HTTP/3 supported. For the library authors, QUIC isn't more complicated to implement than TCP. Doomsaying about the complexity of Google Sheets is completely unrelated to whether QUIC is good tech and superior to TCP, which it is; the only remaining complaint is that it's too new to have been part of the kernel yet, and if that makes technology somehow illegitimate then I guess we're just stuck with the mistakes of the 90s forever, why ever invent anything new at all.

[austin-cheney]

That is also entirely incorrect. There are many challenges to implementing an original QUIC library. The Node.js project is developing and evaluating for this right now and the effort is extensive.

[austin-cheney]

> Finally, even though UDP supports multicast, I believe QUIC doesn't.

Don’t confuse the browser for the server. QUIC is UDP but UDP is not QUIC. Unlocking UDP for the browser allows capabilities on the remote end that aren’t available to the browser.

[gorgoiler]

Interesting to see that on Desktop, Firefox (5.8%) just overtook Safari (5.0%) for third place. It doesn’t feel statistically significant but it’s a bit of data at least.

(I’m a big Firefox fan and idealist.)

[gfody]

This has been happening for a while now, basically anywhere there’s room for a potential compatibility issue there will be one. As if any time some observable behavior is an implementation choice the Chrome team policy is “not what Firefox does”. The result is that if you develop on Chrome and don’t test on Firefox your stuff is very likely broken on Firefox.

[Klonoar]

IE was bad because Microsoft let it stagnate, not because they were creating new things.

Stop getting history twisted.

[danaris]

It was both.

If you wanted to do dynamic stuff in IE, you had to use ActiveX. Which was IE-only. So many sites only used ActiveX, because IE was the 900lb gorilla, so why support anything else?

[reaperducer]

Chrome basically is abusing its market position, 69.65% globally, and becomes the new IE. Implementing its own HTML/JS standard.

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

We went to this rodeo a generation ago. Nothing was learned.

[vaylian]

TIL that Firefox has less than 5% market share. When and why did people stop using Firefox?

--

Submitted from Firefox

[jampekka]

The use started to decline when Google started the extreme marketing campaign of Chrome around 2010 or so. All Google services had huge banners and included all sorts of dark patterns to get people to install it.

TBF, Chrome probably also had some better features and performance over FF, but I don't think most people think much about their browser quality.

[selectnull]

> When and why did people stop using Firefox?

Approximately at the time when majority of the Mozilla resources started going into non-browser projects. And pretty much for the same reason.

[tweetle_beetle]

So when would that be exactly? Firefox was first released in 2004 and Mozilla Corporation was founded in 2005.

According to https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#yearly-2014-... the high point for adoption was 2010 and it has been falling since then. (However, they only have data from 2010 onwards, so the high point could have been even earlier.) This coincidentally [sic] aligns to the launch of Chrome with a massive marketing push in 2008, promising speed, ease of use and security.

I find it hard to believe that there are enough people who closely follow the drama around the internal financial management and politics of Mozilla Corporation that they can be measured in the tens of percentage points of total internet market share.