zlacker

As a Firefox user who is very upset with Apple for (clearly intentionally) lacking support for PWA features, I am still happy that Safari exists as a counter-weight to Chrome. Any contribution counts.

>>kristi+(OP)
As a Firefox user on Linux I'm about to switch honestly. The browser is in a terrible state on Linux in terms of performance.

There is video playback on without fan noise (Chromium) or a very audible fan noise on Firefox (Notebook & Steam Deck + Fedora/Pop/Arch/Ubuntu) => More use of power resulting in less time for me.

Switching to Linux resulting in me ditching my forever browser Firefox is something I would not have guessed.

>>ThatMe+P1
You might want to check out that it's using hardware acceleration properly, and that's it's configured correctly to use wayland if you're on wayland.

Personally, I bounce between macOS, Windows and Linux (mostly Linux, with Wayland), between Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari (mostly Firefox), and also between laptops/desktops and Firefox on Linux is consistently the fastest one with the least amount of crashes for me. Also the combination that lets me get the most battery life out of my laptop.

>>capabl+N5
>"You might want to check out that it's using hardware acceleration properly, and that's it's configured correctly to use wayland if you're on wayland."

Maybe it should be browser's task to do it. As a user I just do not want to waste my time on things like that unless they're vital. In this case I'll just use different browser.

>>ThatMe+P1
To add to that, Firefox sandboxing on Linux is awful.

https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...

>>FpUser+f7
> Maybe it should be browser's task to do it.

Unfortunately you don't really get that luxury if you use Linux.

>>capabl+N5
> Firefox on Linux ... the combination that lets me get the most battery life out of my laptop.

If you've managed to get battery life from Linux and Firefox even remotely near default fresh install of MacOS and Safari, you should write that up and post the link to it on HN.

>>ThatMe+P1
While based on chrome without the privacy issues, I'd highly recommend Vivaldi browser (the company is also a worker co-op). They removed a lot of proprietary stuff too from the source.

>>ThatMe+P1
That's weird, I use Mac (x86) and Linux (x86 Debian) and Firefox works great on Linux but is unusable on Mac (at least it was two or so years ago when I last tried).

I have an nvidia card and non free drivers if that matters

>>Terret+Ad
My laptop only uses Windows and Linux, only Apple hardware I have is desktop. But makes sense that Safari gets best battery time on Apple laptops, friends with Apple laptops says the same.

>>FpUser+f7
Running Linux on a desktop pretty much guarantees that you have an endless parade of small problems to fix.

I really wish this weren't true, but the user experience has barely improved in the past 15-20 years. The specific problems may be different, but it's still the same struggle.

>>FpUser+f7
Takes time to migrate to a completely new display manager :) For now it's opt-in, in the future it'll obviously be default if you're on Wayland.

If you don't like bleeding edge, warts or sometimes unpolished experiences, might be better to go with Windows or macOS, no one would blame you.

>>kristi+(OP)
Nobody is arguing Safari shouldn't exist. They're arguing that Apple shouldn't get to force monopolize it on iOS even more aggressively than Microsoft was doing with IE 20 years ago.

>>ThatMe+P1
Please try to resist. I bought an external battery, it's less convenient but if that's the cost of privacy then so be it. Supporting Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird is critical, some sites are now chrome-only, this is a nightmare. The battle for a free phone is already lost it seems as banks mandate google or iphone apps for 2FA and we don't have functional linux-only phones with browsing/email/mapping/sms/calls/photos that work reliably yet. I'm truly concerned we might loose the ability to use a linux desktop too: MS-Windows was required for many things in the past, these things are now possible on Linux, I'd hate to see Chrome become the next Windows.

>>kllrno+Ku
Microsoft was hardly even aggressive about leveraging their OS monopoly to promote their Internet Explorer browser. All they did was switch from selling it as a separate product to giving it away for free in order to crush Netscape. And Microsoft made IE the default handler for web links. But they never did anything to prevent users from installing third-party browsers on Windows.

>>capabl+1o
I think it'd be worth reading how you got your Linux machine to behave itself though. Any time I've tried to run Linux on a laptop (even a supposedly well-supported Dell laptop) it's been a buggy mess.

Then again, Windows was even worse. It was constantly waking itself up in a cramped bag, where it would try to forcibly install updates, overheat, drain the entire battery, then shut down and need to charge for 30 minutes just to light up at all. At which point it would boot into the recovery menu since it botched an update and needed to try again.

>>capabl+Qo
I use both Windows and Linux. Linux runs on server and workstation class hardware dedicated for deployment mostly so the last thing I care about is what / how browsers run on those.

>>Firmwa+yC
So why not just run Linux in a VM? According to your description, the hardware isn't working correctly natively when running the OS on bare metal, and that's always been the reason people say against using a VM. They want the native performance, but in your case, native sux.

>>ThatMe+P1
Are you running a distro provided build or one downloaded from mozilla?

>>sbaidd+rn
Firefox has improved a lot on mac in the last two years. It's still less battery efficient than Chrome, but not by too much anymore. I've just switch for it's better tab management features (tab groups).

>>FpUser+f7
That's completely fair. The reason that everyone is half-in on Wayland is likely because it's not yet default on Ubuntu. That, and Gnome window decorations.

>>nradov+sB
... and that was enough to completely destroy competition, and get a near monopoly for many years. Clearly amoral move enough that they got slapped with quite a big anti-competition fine from EU for this.

>>nradov+sB
I guess we'd have to argue what "aggressive" means here, but what you describe as "all they did" can and has been found to be monopoly behavior and against the law in the US. This is known as bundling and there are a bunch of prior cases which confirm it can be considered a violation of antitrust law. The bundling concept was the basis of the antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the late 90s.

That said, Apple is doing something worse with Safari, in that not only are they bundling the browser, they are using their tight control over the operating system to prevent other browsers from being installed in the first place. It's slighly murkier than the MS antitrust case because the counter-argument is "but they do allow other browsers! You can see Chrome/Firefox/Brave/etc in the App Store!" and then you have to get into a technical discussion of the difference between a browser application and a browser engine.

Sigh.

>>kristi+(OP)
Do you mean "upset with Mozilla"? The PWA Wikipedia article claims that Safari has better PWA support than Firefox.

>>ThatMe+P1
Firefox notoriously has bad performance on Linux compared to Chromium. Chromium does a pretty good job at implementing new hardware acceleration features while Firefox just got around to it like a year ago and it is still no where as performant. There is noticeable delays for me on Firefox when doing things like resizing windows in a tiling window manager as well.

>>runjak+RQ
Per [1], PWAs on webkit lacks push notifications, full-screen display, hardware acceleration, web bluetooth as major headline features needed, which Firefox on mobile appears to generally support per a 5-second glance (I didn't see web bluetooth, but the rest I did) [2].

That wikipedia page has a support table saying IOS supports PWAs as YES and Firefox as NO is odd considering Apple requires Mozilla to ship a crippled form of safari on IOS, if Firefox could ship their own true application, I suspect they would have better PWA support as a differentiator with Safari.

[1] https://thenewstack.io/owa-takes-on-apples-browser-ban-for-p...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

>>angora+aM
Describing what Microsoft did as "bundling" seems a little silly in retrospect. I mean of course a desktop OS should come with a browser. If they had just added IE as a standard feature of Windows from the start without ever selling it as a separate product then they would have had a stronger legal case. It would be absurd for antitrust regulators to prohibit software vendors from enhancing their products just for the sake of protecting competitors' revenue.

>>angora+aM
It's not bundling because a web browser is a part of a operating system. For the same reason it's not bundling if their operating system contains a scheduler or network drivers

>>nradov+sB
It was more than that. Microsoft was giving IE special APIs that it wasn't letting others have, and was also deeply integrating IE into the broader OS (eg, embedding it into the file explorer)

Which is also what Apple is doing but then going even further and just outright banning other browser engines.

>>Snitch+5T
If I’ve read correctly [1], Safari on macOS 13 (released after the mentioned article) supports the standardized Web Push APIs.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...

>>charci+B61
> a web browser is a part of a operating system

This was not at all the case in the 90s during the period of MS antitrust action.

> For the same reason it's not bundling if their operating system contains a scheduler or network drivers

There is a robust market (even today) for web browsers, and the makers of browsers make millions of dollars in revenue from their products. Therefore, I disagree, and I believe the bundling concept could still apply today to browsers. Network drivers and schedulers are not at all the same, because there isn't much of an independent market for them.

>>nradov+m51
> I mean of course a desktop OS should come with a browser.

This was not that obvious in the 1990s.

> It would be absurd for antitrust regulators to prohibit software vendors from enhancing their products just for the sake of protecting competitors' revenue.

This is absolutely a situation where a bundling case could apply, if a large incumbent uses their monopoly power in one product area to enter another and unfairly compete. IANAL but I don't believe whether or not the product was available separately or not would factor much into such a case.

>>kristi+(OP)
> Apple for (clearly intentionally) lacking support for PWA features

It's in Google's interest to replace native iOS apps with web apps.

It's in Apple's interest to replace web apps with native iOS apps.

Native apps also tend to be more power efficient and to present a platform-native look and feel.

I don't see any incentive for Apple to support PWAs (or Google's vision for web apps) ever.

>>FpUser+uD
So you don't run browsers on Linux, I don't see what you have a problem with then? The particular issue you're complaining about doesn't seem to affect you at all.

>>Snitch+5T
> web bluetooth as major headline features needed

"web bluetooth" and many other hardware APIs are Chrome-only non-standards that OWA pretends are standards and core features for PWAs.

>>kllrno+U71
Eh, we could still write a browser that interfaced with those special APIs, albeit in a hidden fashion.

And even without them, we could write a browser and distribute to people so they could install it.

That cannot be said about iOS.

>>capabl+UA2
Where did you see me complaining about the issue? I just stated my opinion that it should be in general task of the software to figure out the environment it is running under and adjust accordingly.