I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure, some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source. Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch, they do need to find some way to distinguish themselves apart from Chrome, which again leads to these misc features being thrown out there.
The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's viewed as an essential feature.
> Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.
Ah, how the young forget... Mozilla became popular precisely due to their willingness to challenge the market leader at the time [1], namely, Internet Explorer. Going against the market leader should be in their DNA. The fight is not lost just because there's a market leader. If anything, Mozilla is currently losing the battle because the leadership doesn't believe they can do it again.
I'm fine with Mozilla diversifying their income, but I'm not fine with Mozilla sacrificing their browser (the part we desperately need the most) in the name of a "Digital Rights Foundation" that, at this rate, will lose their seat at the negotiating table.
They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device. Eventually they MS lost an anti trust case against it and it opened up the market, which is before that graph begins.
Well 30 years later we are back where we started.
Chrome is where it is because it is preloaded on most phones on the planet (the other ecosystem has a different preloaded browser). The other thing is that it was advertised on the most visited page on the internet for 20 years.
Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
Exactly, this is just about the most lucid explanation of the market share graph I've seen on HN. It's baffling to me that the rise of Chrome, distributed via Google, on phones and on Chromebooks, somehow doesn't enter people's explanations of market share change when talking about Mozilla. It probably the biggest single driver of market share change by an order of magnitude.
> They were losing because MS bundled IE with every device.
They weren't losing, they had 10x the market share they have now. MS lost an antitrust case, they weren't forced to do anything even after they lost, and big tech learned (correctly) that there was not ever going to be any serious antitrust enforcement on platforms.
Chrome came out with a heavily marketed browser that some people liked (but was far more marketed than loved.) Firefox then intentionally destroyed its own browser to make it a wonky clone of Chrome, even down to trivial cosmetic features and version numbering. Firefox's strength was its extensions ecosystem, so it took special relish in destroying that, and joy in painting the users that were bothered by this as stochastic terrorists. They claimed that the perpetual complainers just didn't understand the "normal users" of the market while Firefox shrunk from 30% of it to 2.5% of it. Meanwhile, they took to forcing bizarre, unhideable features that should have been extensions, and doing bizarre marketing experiments.
> Most internet users don't even use desktop/laptops, they use mobile devices and likely have no idea there is any other option than chrome.
Firefox gets all of its margin from Google, and is 2.5% of the market. There isn't really another option, no matter what Mehta says. Firefox gets more than all of its margin from Google - Google cash allows it to blow money on goofy money-losing projects that look good on resumes. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has 100x what it needs to run in the bank, entirely from donations, still keeps dishonestly begging, and still keeps collecting.
But Firefox claims that's impossible. It has to be fully dependent on Google because reasons, and those reasons are that it chooses its direction based on Google's desires.
edit: the craziest part of this common argument about Google bundling is that Google doesn't have anything like the monopoly that Microsoft had, Microsoft bound its browser to everything it could figure out how to, and Microsoft was still losing a huge section of the market to Firefox. The idea that Google is some special impossible challenge when Microsoft owned every computer is insane. It's impossible to beat Google when they pay your salary.
It's worth noting that Chrome was just legitimately a good product in a space where the competition wasn't blowing any minds. The people that switched over saw how much better a browser can be and spread the word.
Allowing the user to pull tabs into its own windows and merge them back was magic back then, as was including search and url in a minimalistic bar, when other browsers had 3-row bars at times. Such a simple and elegant product.
For a couple years Chrome was noticeably faster than IE/FF which is what caused tech oriented people to switch.
FF and even IE closed the gap for a little bit but once Chromes dominance took old I imagine the fact that no one tests things on FF any more has probably caused it to slip performance wise.
It wasn’t challenging the market leader that made them successful. It’s because Firefox was precisely a better browser at the time, and their marketing/activism around open web standards was great. There were lots of “challenging” going back then.
But simply challenging isn’t enough. People like to tell this tale where just being an underdog gets you some benefit. But it doesn’t. Firefox was way leaner, opened faster, had extensions, so on.
There is no possible way to compete against a competent trillion dollar organization that knows how to build a good browser, and exploits its global monopoly position in search to advertise their browser.
It doesn't matter if Firefox became better. There is simply not enough differentiation potential in the core browser product to win by being better. Its all marketing.
I just wish Mozilla sold some stickers/themes as proxy donations and became largely independent.
> Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader.
s/Chrome/Internet Explorer/g
Nobody has won until the match is over, and history has a very long tail.
I see the point, but them following the leader on this does not seem like a recipe for success. They aren't going to be as good at AI as OpenAI's browser, and their users are going to be less bought into it. I would have hoped they'd have learned their lesson from things like FirefoxOS but I guess not...
> The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program.
You under estimated the work to develop a web browser. Vivaldi are 60 people.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program. They couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working.
That's a good example. I'm probably significantly underestimating the amount of people needed. $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.
> $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.
$250,000 is conservative for the total cost to employ a software engineer in the US. And their expenses are not limited to software engineer salaries of course.
A fair question would be what Google or Apple spend to produce their web browsers. The answers are secrets. $1 billion is a common Chrome development cost estimate in my experience.
Good question. Looking at their expenses, though, it seems to be just a plethora of piddly donations. $1M here and there, and it adds up. That does fit with the lack of focus narrative.
I've seen a few posters ask already, so I figured I'd answer what the PS2 analog button's function was.
The button switches between two modes of the analog joysticks, either to behave with their normal functionality, or to simply be a digital input (so just round all movement to either up/down/left/right). For PS2 games, you typically wouldn't want to do this. Instead, the functionality exists because the PS2 was backwards compatible with PS1 titles. The original PS1 controller didn't have analog sticks at all, just the D-Pad for navigation. After a few years (and the success of Nintendo's N64 analog controller) Sony released a revised version of the controller that included two joysticks, which their controllers still mimic to this day. However, those PS1 games released prior to the analog controller wouldn't always behave correctly if you tried to use an analog input scheme, so Sony added a mode to allow the Joysticks to function the same as the D-Pad, in case players preferred it.
Other fun fact, the analog controller was not the same as their more famous Dualshock controller. There was a short-lived PS1 Dual Analog controller which just added the joysticks. It only lasted a few months before Sony replaced it with one that supported rumble functionality (also after being inspired by the N64), this was the Dualshock.
I had a PS2 slim years ago and was annoyed that it wouldn’t let me use a “dual analog” controller I had kicking around to play PS2 games, eg for second player. Seemed like an unnecessarily hostile move to force an upgrade there when all the functionality other than rumble was clearly present.
But of course it’s the same now on PS5. I still have my PS4 pads and use them to round out 4p couch coop for broforce, overcooked, moving out, etc, but actual PS5 games will only work with PS5 pads.
The DualShock/DualAnalog were not quite the same as the DualShock 2, the face buttons on the DualShock 2 were advertised as being pressure sensitive. Some games were capable of using this.
Funnily enough, this caused issues with PS2 games ported to Xbox subsequently. Metal Gear Solid 2 made heavy use of the pressure sensitive buttons for weapon aiming vs shooting. I recall the Xbox didn't have pressure sensitive buttons, so had to do something different to achieve this (I'd need someone else to fill in the gaps here, I never owned an Xbox!)
Original Xbox had the pressure-sensitive buttons, but 360 did not, which specifically caused issues for MGS 2 and 3 in the HD Collection. Twin Snakes on the Gamecube suffered similarly, requiring awkward combinations of Y and A to lower your pistol or raise your automatic weapon without firing.
THAT'S WHY. As an avid Metal Gear enthusiast during the release of MGS2, I remember having nearly-impossible time finding MGS2 Substance for PS2 when I wanted to do my first real replay way back in the day. I imagine it was the more popular version since it had working pressure buttons, presumably.
The original Xbox actually did have pressure sensitive face buttons. Off the top of my head, the only game I know that used them is Vexx (which strangely didn't use them on the PS2...)
The PS3 had those too, but they were dropped for the PS4 and PS5. I did read that it caused a few headaches for the classics ported forward.
Speaking of oddball controller features, I was a bit surprised the PS5 retained the little trackpad, given how little use it seemed to get on the PS4— even in obvious situations like Assassins Creed where you're moving an on-screen cursor around a map, but only with the thumbstick.
So IIUC the PS4 gamepad can be used but only for PS4 games? That is ridiculous.
Meanwhile I'm rocking an original release day Xbox One controller on a Series X.
That said while I can understand them dropping X360 witeless due to protocol changes I'm still bitter that the X360 wired accessories were simply denied on the Xone, notably the whole Rock Band stuff as well as steering wheels.
>>So IIUC the PS4 gamepad can be used but only for PS4 games? That is ridiculous.
It's because PS5 games can use the adaptive triggers functionality that is impossible to emulate on the PS4 controller. For example in Ratchet and Clank short pull on the trigger fires the gun, there is artifical resistance past that point, but if you pull past it it will fire the secondary weapon mode. On a PS4 controller you'd just fire the secondary mode all the time because there would be no way to find the threshold on a trigger without this functionality.
Of course games could be designed around this and support both - but Sony avoided placing such a requirement on devs so all PS5 games are presumed to be using a PS5 controller when going through cert.
> On a PS4 controller you'd just fire the secondary mode all the time because there would be no way to find the threshold on a trigger without this functionality.
Just don't mash the trigger all the way? You don't have the haptic feedback of such a trigger wall but claiming it's "impossible" is a bit extreme. A nice threshold mapping could arrange for that e.g 0-10% dead zone, 10%-80% main mode, 90%-100% secondary mode, _ factor in rate of press to avoid misfiring main mode. Which is probably the logic that it implements already, except with probably a bit more leeway thanks to the haptic feedback.
"Impossible" would be playing a typical† dual stick game with a gamepad that has none (e.g original PS1 gamepad)
† like a FPS that uses the now classic stick layout for quick yet precise movement + orientation
Honest question as I'm curious and don't have access to a PS5: what about PS5-only games that happen to exist on other platforms that don't have such features? Can they be played with a PS4 controller?
Oh and to be clear: it's not a Xbox vs PS thing, I find them both equally guilty of excessive e-wasting / platform locking, just in different ways.
Ehhh let me put it in a different way - it's not impossible, of course. But it's about the fact that if someone is using a PS4 controller and they don't know about this, then they are going to have a bad time. And no dev wants their players to have a bad time, and neither does the platform holder. So they would rather just say no, you as a dev don't have to worry about this - every player will use a PS5 controller, done.
>>what about PS5-only games that happen to exist on other platforms that don't have such features? Can they be played with a PS4 controller?
Sure, Ratchet and Clank has a PC version now which can be played with any controller, including a PS4 or xbox controller. Obviously for this version it was remapped to make sense when using such controllers.
Again, it's not about actual literal impossibility - it's Sony's choice to say "look we want to promote features of the PS5, so code your gameplay features to make use of the adaptive triggers and we guarantee that every player will have a ps5 controller. You don't need to code your game to support older pads" - so devs don't. They obviously do on platforms like PC where the player might be using anything.
What was remapped for PC? I don't have a PS5 so PC is how I played R&C:RA and I don't recall there being any difference in how the trigger pulls were interpreted between having adaptive triggers enabled or disabled.
I literally had to boot up the game to check - long press on the trigger fires the secondary mode. So basically if you press and hold the trigger it will do the primary fire then the secondary fire.
> Honest question as I'm curious and don't have access to a PS5: what about PS5-only games that happen to exist on other platforms that don't have such features? Can they be played with a PS4 controller?
Games that use PS5-exclusive features when played on PS5 obviously don't use those features when not run on a PS5, if it's been ported.
While your idea sounds neat in practice, with those thresholds and such, I'm not sure how practical it is in real-life. Lots of controllers eventually start reporting somewhat inaccurate values, sometimes rather large variance, so whatever you end up using as the actual values, they tend to not be perfect for everyone, so then the game will appear really buggy, almost broken.
I'm guessing they're favoring "works 100% for everyone who can run it" rather than "Kind of works for most people, broken for the rest".
It's totally reasonable to expect the native pad for single player games; my contention is more around couch multiplayer scenarios. When each pad costs as much as a day 1 game, it's a big investment to have four of them— so most players have just one or two.
As it turns out, there aren't all that many couch multiplayer games that are PS5-only, and a lot of what's there is two player only (Diablo 3/4, BG3, Hot Wheels, Borderlands, etc). So maybe the whole argument is moot, but the long and short of it is that any game which I think I might want to play with more than two people I buy on Switch instead, since I'm always going to have lots of those pads.
I don’t get why backward compatibility is even expected, other than a nice-to-have. Historically, gamepads weren’t portable between generations of systems.
I’ve got a Logitech steering wheel that I can’t use on 64-bit Windows because of the way the driver was implemented.
Because we all know that under the covers it's just Bluetooth and USB, and they don't have a good reason. Especially in Xbox world, where while the hardware on an Xbox Series X is more powerful than an Xbox One, the software is largely the same.
Strange analog stick fact: According to YouTuber Wulff Den, the first ever game that used an analog stick for third-person camera rotation was only Super Mario Sunshine in 2002. A GameCube game that came out more than two years after the release of the PS2, and several years after the N64 and the PS1 Dual Analog controller.
I guess some ideas seem only obvious in hindsight.
I scoffed when I first read this, but the more I think about it, the more that might be correct.
Mario 64 had third-person camera movement, but it was with the N64's C-buttons, and had fixed angles, not free movement. Since it didn't have a second joystick, that rules out the N64 (some games did allow you to use a second controller as a second analog stick, but I don't think any third person games did so).
Likewise, the Dreamcast didn't have a second stick, so it's ruled out too. That basically leaves us with the PS1 or an early PS2/Gamecube game. Apparently Quake II on PS1 did allow for the second stick to aim, but that's not third person. The closest I can find is Ico on PS2, which allowed for analog stick camera movement, but I think only in the horizontal direction. Mario Sunshine might well be the first for full camera angle movement, which honestly really surprises me.
Just piling on to say that there was also Alien: Resurrection on PS1 that used the modern dual-stick movement/aiming setup. It was one of the first FPSes to do so, at least as the default control scheme. Reviewers at the time mostly hated it and called it awkward, probably because they were comparing non-aim-assisted console FPS controls to PC FPSes of the era, which is kind of fair tbh. The game's difficulty was also probably too high for the time, especially given the brand-new control style.
Yeah but the comment you are replying to, and the one before that, talk about third-person games, not first-person games.
Regarding Alien Resurrection: Turok (another FPS game which came out a few years earlier) also had modern FPS controls as default, though movement was done with the d-pad, as the N64 didn't have two sticks.
I don't think that's true, I remember playing both Jak and Daxter and Ico in either 2000 or 2001 and I think both of those had camera control with the right-hand analog stick.
However, I'm not sure whether it was only used for horizontal rotation or full arbitrary rotation (arbitrary combinations of horizontal and vertical) as in Super Mario Sunshine. But it might very well be the first game to have that, not Mario Sunshine.
I just looked at a few videos and it seems that the analog stick does indeed move the camera, though apparently only horizontally, not "freely" with arbitrary rotations. I'm not sure though.
Now you made me unsure, so skimmed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrsWUmiayLM for a bit, which seems to me to confirm it's just horizontal camera movement. But there seems to be a zoom in/out functionality, which would move the camera in/out+vertically, but that's different than rotating around the character freely. The camera also does a ton of vertical movements by itself too, as Mario jumps/falls.
Yeah, I think you are actually right. I must have misremembered it. This source also suggests Mario Sunshine didn't have a "free" rotating camera but a combination of horizontal rotation and zoom: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Sunshine/Controls
Of course the question is whether there might have been an earlier game which had it. Regarding Ico, apparently it also allows only horizontal rotation (camera "panning" is horizontal movement): https://strategywiki.org/wiki/ICO/Controls
I've read some early reviews of a licensed alien shooter where they complain about how confusing the control scheme is - left stick for movement and right for aim.
Yeah, that's another point: the modern first-person controls you describe were once thought to be counterintuitive compared to the old Wolfenstein style controls.
A similar point holds for third-person games: Before Super Mario 64, all third-person games had Wolfenstein style tank controls where left/right rotates the character in place and up/down makes it move forward/backward. E.g. Tomb Raider or Mega Man Legends. The idea to make character movement relative to the camera viewpoint wasn't obvious.
(Though the Tomb Raider developers tried to work around this to a degree by fixing the camera behind the character, which prevented to most counterintuitive control issues Mega Man Legends had, but also meant free camera rotation was impossible.)
That's really strange because that setup was effectively the default for N64 games. Stick under your left thumb for movement and the C buttons under your right thumb for camera control
It's not strange because it's not really true. The default controls both of GoldenEye and Perfect Dark used the stick for moving forward/backward and turning left/right. Turok did use the c buttons for walking and the stick for looking though.
Forgive me sounding like Claude, but you’re absolutely right! I’ve played platformers from that era recently but it’s been a long time since I touched the shooters. I was mixing them up in my recollection. The shooters had a weird mix and for some reason even though Goldeneye had a bunch of control scheme options, none of them let you put all movement on one input and all camera control on the other.
I'm pretty sure both GoldenEye and Perfect Dark had (non default) control options where movements were on the d-pad and camera on the analog stick. For GoldenEye see "Solitaire" and "Goodnight" here: https://goldeneye.fandom.com/wiki/Control_style
I think the problem I had with the left-half controller layout is that it still used A and B but they were hard to press. Same problem with holding 2 controllers in the center. The N64 controller definitely was not the greatest design for shooters. (And now that I've tried to use one more recently, not a great design in general for larger hands... mine don't really fit the center grip)
But the linked page indicates you could use the right half rather than the left half of the controller. So the c-buttons (rather than the left d-pad) for walking and the stick for looking/turning. Turok style. The "Solitaire" preset even has the Z trigger for firing.
Which sounds pretty good. Of course having an actual stick for walking would have been even better, but buttons aren't that bad, considering that PC games still use them for walking to this day.
I'm actually wondering why PC games never converged on a "left joy-con" style controller with a stick and buttons, for one hand, while the other hand holds the mouse. I guess the ordinary keyboard is good enough so there wasn't much pressure to replace it.
> I'm actually wondering why PC games never converged on a "left joy-con" style controller with a stick and buttons, for one hand, while the other hand holds the mouse. I guess the ordinary keyboard is good enough so there wasn't much pressure to replace it.
Really does seem to be a matter of the keyboard being good enough and knowing that most everyone has one connected to their PC. I've just come to accept that I need to prioritize what matters most for a given game. So, selecting between KB+M or controller on a case-by-case basis. I think the only game recently that annoyed me for not fitting one or the other very well was Cyberpunk 2077 because the cars were very touchy and would have been better with analog input.
Omg, I remember exactly that intermediate joystick. It was lighter than the dualshock, so when you held a dualshock it felt cool, especially when it started rumbling!
I really like the concave analog sticks on that controller. The convex DualShock ones get slippery as hell once the controller is a few years old.
The analog face buttons of the DualShock 2 are cool in concept but always made me press too hard out of fear of not getting up to full speed or whatever in games that used face buttons for acceleration (mostly Burnout 3 and Revenge for me) https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/List_of_console...
I love the adaptive triggers. I have all the consoles and a gaming PC and will buy games on PS5 because of them. I think it adds an interesting tactile element that also improves playability.
I love them as a feature, I think they're really cool, but I find some games like Horizon (with the Bow)... I'm failing to think of others at the moment as I haven't played in a while... cause ache after a relatively short gaming session.
Maybe I just need to look into reducing the "resistance" of them in the settings.
The buttons on the front of a playstation controller (d-pad, cross/circle/triangle/square) were pressure sensitive on the ps2/ps2.
256 levels on the ps2, 1024 on the ps3. Few games used this outside of racing games, and they were removed from the ps4 controller. It's most commonly noticed when configuring a ps3 controller on a PC.
Regardless of what's even in the document, the core issue is the administration effectively attempting to punish universities who do not agree to whatever standards they dictate. Not because anything actually against any enacted state or federal law, or even standards set out for every university, but based on policies the executive can arbitrarily decide for a handful of schools. That's why you're seeing such push back.
As for the document itself, it's a bit of a mixed bag, with a lot of subtle gatchas to make it sound enticing on the surface, but more sinister the closer you look. I honestly like some of the proposed tuition changes, but there's some language regarding enrollment that I find problematic. However, since the whole thing is being given to them with the threat of a knife hanging over their head, you're going to see a lot of universities be opposed to this.
Does it? The entire Compact document is contradictory. "We don't want diversity initiatives unless they benefit the white American and conservative thought."
"We want only the best and brightest to be let in, unless they are foreign or female."
I looked for your quote "We don't want diversity initiatives unless they benefit the white American and conservative thought." but couldn't find it anywhere.
The document was carefully written to look innocuous and reasonable (unlike most Trump communications). However, a close reading indicates that it's a clever trap that gives the government a great deal more power and oversight. Combined with the known ideology of Trump's supporters, it's not hard to see that the document was not intended to be a simple, good-faith attempt at undoing some of modern academia's excesses.
I agree with many of the principles in the document, but I'm good at reading between the lines and determining the true intent of the authors.
There's a few different versions of this same idea, I think zoxide is the third one I've used. Years ago, I started using z.lua, then switched to a fish shell plugin implementation of z, finally to zoxide. I don't think there's any real difference between them, aside from their implementation language and the ease of installation.
Finally made an account on hackernews for this after years of reading. I just checked my Unraid server, I'm running five docker containers from Hotio - Prowlarr, Sonarr, Radarr, Overseerr, and Tautulli.
If I remember correctly, I originally chose Hotio's configs due to there being a few extra settings missing from the standard images in the Unraid store. This was all to avoid learning anything about docker at the time, but since then I've gained a few skills so I'd say it's time for me to set up the containers myself.
Thanks for posting this, I really only read HN so I would have missed this if it were anywhere else.
The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's viewed as an essential feature.