Reading this breaks my heart. I have been a Firefox user for almost a decade now and I have good and bad memories with it. Since Quantum release my experience with FF has been nothing but exceptional. On a general day I have around ~15 pinned tabs and more than 50 other tabs open and FF handles it like a breeze. The memory usage is good given the fact that my workload is heavy. On a dual-core machine, I am able to restart FF under ~3 seconds.
I have read comments in this thread suggesting that FF's performance is not that snappy but I cannot seem to notice any difference. Maybe my dev senses are not that strong ... maybe the benchmarks do show a difference but I have never felt FF to be any less performant than Chrome.
I am tired of listening to people screaming their lungs out about privacy when their actions don't reflect their opinions.
> “I am tired of listening to people screaming their lungs out about privacy when their actions don't reflect their opinions.”
Those screaming for privacy, like myself, are in fact a small minority.
Also regardless of the topic, double standards are rampant in this community.
You’ll often see people screaming against Google but still using @gmail.com because paying for a domain and the price of one coffee per month is too expensive. Or people claiming that they need ad-blockers for privacy, but then screaming against paywalls.
I have run a Zimbra server for several years now, it's a full size enterprise grade email server.
I can run it on a $10 droplet from Digital Ocean. $10 is kinda high just for my email, but the bonus is I host _all_ my family's mail. Wife, kids even mom and dad!
It's been nice not being concerned about email privacy. Zimbra is a great piece of software. I think more people should look into it.
I don't trust myself enough to run my own mail server; did you set up your own backups? What's the uptime / SLA (not that gmail has any but still)? Do you need to set up and manage security yourself?
i'm not the parent poster, but did host my mail own for a while.
99.99+ uptime for mail is generally not as important, as undelivered emails get resend if it wasn't up at the time of delivery.
it might still be a problem, because its technically possible to disable that feature, but its generally done everywhere.
the bigger problem is, iirc, that the biggest mail provider (gmail) pushes unknown mail servers to spam... so you'll probably be forced to use a relay.
thats still not a big problem, because you generally get one from you domain registrar
there are also fully functional mail implementations that you can use right away with minimal configuration such as MailInABox [0]
...still, i've switched to fastmail ~2 yrs ago and won't be going back to self hosted anytime soon, though i do own several servers i could use for that...
I am not running a mail server on DO, but I do have several other services on their VMs, and they will do automated backups for you for a few USD per month.
I'm not that bothered about the type of privacy Chrome invades. If someone put a camera in my bedroom I'm bothered but if Google knows I'm thinking of fixing my washing machine and tries to advertise to me it doesn't bother me.
But say that and you get down voted etc by the "people screaming their lungs out about privacy" crowd. So us types kind of keep quiet.
The problem with GMail is, it's too convenient to use, and relatively secure because of 2FA support.
Also, people (including me) think that some newsletters, some bills and receipts are not very personal, so people don't care.
I have two main addresses, one is from a local provider and my all financial e-mails and other stuff is coming to that e-mail address, however they don't encrypt anything.
I also just got a free Proton mail, and will upgrade the account when I'm a little better off. Paid e-mail addresses are not meaningless, but they're harder to justify in most people's eyes.
BTW, I never store anything which makes me uncomfortable, anywhere incl. my brain. That's a much better way of living. Not that privacy conscious people is hiding something, but that's my policy.
> Paid e-mail addresses are not meaningless, but they're harder to justify in most people's eyes.
It's not just paid email addresses. It's paid anything. My father constantly pesters me to tell him where he can get free movies, music, software and so on. He wanted to know where he could make unlimited online backups for free and I told him that stuff costs money. Somehow people have gotten it in their heads that if it's on the internet it's free and they shouldn't have to pay for anything.
> Somehow people have gotten it in their heads that if it's on the internet it's free
The VC funding model of investing for growth has helped to create this perception. The sad consequence is that this has made it difficult to run companies that don’t scale to sizes that interest VC investments.
The thing is that a lot of things ARE free - or, there is a free option available. Piracy is a great example, because it is (was?) free, convenient, and you have pretty much an unlimited selection. Streaming services like Netflix and digital game delivery like Steam have made it easier and more trustworthy than piracy.
Actually, for me piracy was more about availability and unfair pricing. Especially for music.
After I started my job and the prices came down with the help of online music sales and streaming, I bought a lot of CDs and digitally distributed music. Most of them were albums that I already have, because I wanted to support the artists which brought that feelings into my life.
Same is also valid for software, movies, or anything. If I can justify price of a software, I buy it. Otherwise, I use something FOSS instead.
You're right that streaming services have made things easier and more trustworthy. Some people are just cheap and don't want to pay when someone else can pay. I just tell him that he shouldn't pirate things because he doesn't know how to stay safe when doing so. After all, this is the man who has trouble finding porn on the internet.
G Suite from Google is still Gmail, but with a better terms of use and usage of your own domain and thus no lock-in. For people that like Gmail it’s a much better alternative.
My point was that people aren’t willing to vote with their wallet, but being a loud mouth doesn’t cost anything.
And that’s how we end up with monopolies.
On the topic at hand I still remember the people crying against Firefox’s Pocket integration. Well, as Chrome crushes its competition, while becoming more invasive everyday, I hope they are happy with the outcome.
I think there's a confusion, by GMail, I've pointed to the free offering, not the GSuite, sorry for being not clear.
> My point was that people aren’t willing to vote with their wallet, but being a loud mouth doesn’t cost anything.
Because I think that the same people believe that their e-mail is not that private, so they don't feel the need for voting with their wallets, however they are loudmouths because they're bothered by the breaches or privacy invasions they read/hear. They feel they are either exempt from this or not affected as much, so they're not alarmed.
I’ve been planning on ditching gmail for a while, but I can’t find a domain name for my perineal email (either taken or don’t love) that I want to use for the next 10+ years!!!
> BTW, I never store anything which makes me uncomfortable, anywhere incl. my brain. That's a much better way of living. Not that privacy conscious people is hiding something, but that's my policy.
That is a better way of living, but it’s a harder choice for a lot of people.
With recent political trends towards the far right, it could become a harder choice for even more.
> With recent political trends towards the far right, it could become a harder choice for even more.
Yes, you're right. The climate worldwide is not the kindest recently. BTW, with uncomfortable I didn't mean opinions or ideas, but anything which will embrass you or put you in a hard situation if revealed.
As a corollary, this means living an honest life and telling what you think. Generally violence doesn't born from ideas themselves, but the way these ideas are told. So talking politely and without attacking the other side results in a reasonable discourse in most cases. Disagreement is in the nature of communication, and if can be managed well, it's very beneficial to both parties.
It's lucky for you that you don't love anyone your society says you shouldn't, that you never love them in a way your society says you shouldn't, and that you are never forced into a decision your society doesn't approve of.
To be fair it does take much more than $20 worth of effort to migrate all your stuff from gmail.
How much more I don't know since I've yet to do it, even though I've been paying for another email service for more than a year.
Man, I pay $50/year for my Fastmail account. I use a custom domain, so total cost is a bit higher, probably something like $60-$70/year, not sure. Moving from gmail to fastmail, given their integrated migration process, was a complete breeze. I still have gmail forwarding set up to my new email address, but I haven't logged into the account for well over two years at this point.
This reminds me to actually check how many emails I received over the past year that came via gmail. Off the top of my head I can only recall a single one, at least from a person I know and wanted to receive email from. I swiftly replied with my new address of course.
I'm going to stop forwarding now, and set up an auto-reply to give people a new address. Not my personal one, but an alias I'll set up in a minute, so that I can shut that down eventually too. Probably useless paranoia, but it floats my boat.
I don't regret the move one bit, and the whole process of setting up my account and moving all ten or so years worth of email from gmail to Fastmail was over and done within a week. Fastmail does what it says on the tin – it's very fast. It also pretty much never fails. In the past two or so years that I've had my account I have only experienced downtime once, for a few minutes. I made myself some coffee and then service was back again.
I am not affiliated with Fastmail in any way, shape or form – just a very happy customer.
It's not the same thing. First of all lawful companies don't do anything that isn't in the terms of service, that being the legal contract that describes your relationship with the company. Otherwise you can sue them. I'm in the EU and in my country there are state agencies that protect the consumer and handle the suing. Filling a complaint for me is easy and I've had great results in the past.
This is why even an upgrade to GSuite is better, being governed by a different ToC.
Google's standard ToC says that their service:
1. may use tracking pixels, web beacons, browser fingerprinting, and/or device fingerprinting on users
2. may collect your device fingerprint
3. can use your content for all their existing and future services
4. can share your personal information with other parties
5. may stop providing services to you at any time, for any reason
6. keeps the rights on your content when you stop using it
And as we've seen, Google indeed does all of the above.
The second problem is one of lock-in. If you're using an email address that's not on your own domain, you're locked into Gmail and the cost of switching is higher, as can be seen by the people complaining about it. But that's a situation of making your bed and then sleeping in it.
And in the case of Chrome, we are already in a situation in which Google can crush its competition and impose whatever standard they want. It's the new IExplorer and the fact that it has an open source core doesn't matter that much when speaking of Google's lock-in on the market, because the Google-free forks are completely irrelevant.
> First of all lawful companies don't do anything that isn't in the terms of service, that being the legal contract that describes your relationship with the company
I'm gonna stop you right there, because a ToC can only enforce certain provisions and companies can change their ToC anytime they want, as per their ToC. It also does not explicitly prohibit them from doing anything not on the ToC, just as it wouldn't prohibit a user from doing something not covered by the ToC. I guarantee you that Fastmail has this clause.[0]
> second problem is one of lock-in. If you're using an email address that's not on your own domain, you're locked into Gmail
That's irrelevant and a false equivalency. You can use Gmail with your own domain.
> in the case of Chrome, we are already in a situation in which Google can crush its competition and impose whatever standard they want.
Again, completely irrelevant to the question that I asked.
>> "companies can change their ToC anytime they want"
It may be possible in the US, but especially if it's not in the interest of the consumer and if there is a service fee involved, then you need to be notified about such changes in the EU and an online publication won't do. Service providers in my country send me SMS messages and postmail with pickup confirmation required. If they don't have proof that I received that notification, then the new contract does not apply, by law.
Also these contracts can't be applied retroactively. So your point is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
>> "It also does not explicitly prohibit them from doing anything not on the ToC"
Indeed, but the law does. Especially in the EU companies cannot use personally identifiable information without explicit consent. And now with the GDPR, they can't track or profile users without explicit consent either.
We'll see what will happen in the following years, but guess what, Google and Facebook are still doing the same shit, without asking for consent, because they consider that a sign-up is enough, since you've read and agreed to their terms and conditions ;-)
>> "You can use Gmail with your own domain."
I already said in my previous message, along with other messages here, that "even an upgrade to GSuite is better, being governed by a different ToC" and I don't like repeating myself.
Please make an effort to read, or we're going to simply talk past each other.
>> "Again, completely irrelevant to the question that I asked."
You mean the one where you asked about jumping from a frying pan and into the fire? I assumed it wasn't a question related to cooking.
> I'm gonna stop you right there, because a ToC can only enforce certain provisions and companies can change their ToC anytime they want, as per their ToC.
At which point they tell you that they have changed their ToCs
> It also does not explicitly prohibit them from doing anything not on the ToC, just as it wouldn't prohibit a user from doing something not covered by the ToC.
Which is why you check the ToCs to ensure that main classes of poor behaviour that you want to avoid are included in there.
It doesn't scale, at all. Not when I am interacting with upwards of a hundred microservices.
And after a malicious ToC change, the company can immediately act on the policy, meaning if you're even a few minutes late to the party, or if it takes more than a few minutes to completely scrub your data from the website (it does) then your data is now subject to the new ToC.
So the ToC offers no legal protection from data abuse. It's just a nice thought.
Sure, but that's a different discussion altogether. The post I replied to was implying the effort is greater and more complex than most think, and I'm saying it probably isn't – at least not for the common cases. Privacy is a very real concern, but a different conversation.
Since I'm paying them they answer to me. They don't get income from sources other than people paying for email. If they sniff my email they don't have anything to gain from the effort, so they are much less likely to.
I finally did it this year! All the scandals (dragonfly, drone programme, auto sign-in in chrome, grabbing data through auto translate, etc.) were just too much.
Getting away from the convinient variant, for which I paid with my user data, to privacy oriented choices felt empowering.
I went with Posteo for email and calendar (EUR12/pa), went from mostly FF to all-in FFk (donated to Mozilla), from Google search to DDG and Qwant.
It's somewhat more effort. But it is worth it imv.
I am still on Android though. But I installed netguard, which reigns in Android somewhat. The only thing I struggle to find: A good alternative to the Google maps app (open street maps is decent for desktop).
There is no alternative (that I was able to find) for the "browsing what's nearby" feature of maps. It allows you to pull up the app and just look around from where you are to find stores, restaurants, museums and whatnot. You can check opening times, reviews, see pictures, all from inside maps.
But, if you are looking for a GPS navigator alternative, there are plenty, and some are much better than maps, IMO. I personally use Sygic on Android, in the free version, and I've found it more accurate than maps in many occasions. It doesn't have the live updates on traffic like maps, but it will take you from point A to point B with a few metres accuracy. While maps sometimes just gets you to the other side of a building, and leaves it to you to figure out that the actual entrance is on the other side, and to reach it you have to drive around half a block, be careful with access restrictions, and go through a traffic light. Sygic just always gets me to the correct place, on the correct side of the buildings, and even signals parking areas nearby.
On my phone I try to use OsmAnd on iOS, based on Open Street Map, see: https://osmand.net/ — my experience with this is mixed, where I live (in Bucharest Romania) it definitely has more info than GMaps on points of interest, however it's not as reliable for car navigation or public transit, so it's not as reliable for getting directions.
If you keep using Google Maps (I still do), at least disable the location tracking in your Google Account.
HERE maps has a fairly good reputation (formerly Nokia HERE, now owned by a bunch of German car companies)
Locus/Locus Pro are good for looking at maps, it's nice having half the continent available offline. Depends a bit if OpenStreetMap works well in your area or not, and not much in the way of routing/POI as far as I know.
For public transport, there's transportr and Öffi and probably a bunch of specific ones for different regions - again, coverage depends on where you are.
The smart choice would've been to not use Gmail in the first place. The fact that Google doesn't have your best interest in mind is nothing new. The fact that Gmail invades your privacy by reading your emails to show you ads has been in there from day 1.
I'm saying this, because you started with "to be fair...". As if this was a good explanation for the double-standard your parent poster mentioned. You can still fix it, even though it now takes more time than never having used Gmail at all. Complaining about "the effort" just reinforces the double-standard.
Use something like Fastmail. No hassle with setting up your own domain or email server (although you can use a custom domain) and they offer a tool to migrate your email from any IMAP server (and probably from Gmail as well).
> Complaining about "the effort" just reinforces the double-standard.
Another point of view is that this is just the reality. Loads of people are on gmail, and migrating isn't always simple. Pretending it is doesn't make it so, and pointing out that one never should have done it in the first place is a moot point.
As someone with a domain at home and a working email server, I'm still stuck with Gmail as I don't have time to make sure my setup is resilient enough to base my daily emails on...
> As someone with a domain at home and a working email server
Maintaining your own email server is crazy and not feasible unless you're passionate about email servers.
It's also a false dichotomy. Nobody with any experience and common sense suggests that you should install your own email server. Use FastMail, use Protonmail, use Office 365, heck, use Google's G Suite.
Most such services have import tools that work and the option to work with forwarded emails and external SMTP servers, so migration can be smooth.
Seeing software developers complaining about migration costs makes absolutely no sense.
Just yesterday I migrated a GSuite account to FastMail. I just changed the DNS records and imported the email via FastMail's import tool, which was automatic. And with a @gmail.com address you can just work with forwarding until everybody knows of your new address.
I migrated email addresses several times, including from my old @gmail.com address which now no longer exists. It wasn't a tragedy.
> Maintaining your own email server is crazy and not feasible unless you're passionate about email servers.
Sorry but I think this is FUD and it potentially discouraged people from taking steps to be part of the solution and not the problem.
I’ve run my own mail server for years on a $5/mo Linode VPS, and am not passionate about email servers. It was a little difficult to set up but no more difficult than a lot of weekend projects the smart people on this site undertake. It should not be scary. You can also make the switch gradually by first setting up your MX and forwarding to gmail if you want to take it slow. There’s no reason anyone with a moderate amount of Linux skills and patience can’t host their own Email.
The toughest problem I had was for a brief time, Comcast rejected mail sent from my host, but the reject log was sufficient to diagnose the problem. I just needed a fresh IPv6 address.
It's easy to say the smart choice was to avoid it, but I think that's quite a naive comment.
Hindsight is 20/20 and the email landscape is different now than it was then. At the time I got my gmail (back when invites were still a thing) most options available to me were either ISP email or free web email, and gmail was one of the best. Not to mention, I was a lot younger and probably not in a position where paying for email made sense, and certainly not running my own.
For those of us that started many many years ago with gmail and kept it out of an inertia of convenience, now it is difficult to get everything switched off of it.
The difficult part isn't moving emails over. The difficult part is all the accounts and websites online I've signed up on with gmail that I need to switch the email address on. That's going to be a nightmare.
You can keep your Gmail account forever and transition to a new email in a slow pace. By auto forwarding your Gmail to your new account, or if your new email can act like POP or IMAP client to access your old Gmail, this process is painless.
I had a Gmail in the month it was launched and I switched to my own domain (ironically, still in GSuite) in a process that took a few years. Whenever I login into a site with my old email, I would update it to the new one. My current email still connect to my old Gmail over POP3, but it’s mostly empty.
It doesn't take that much more. Office 365's base plan is something like 35£/year, plus around 10£/year for a domain. They offer IMAP import so migrating from Gmail is seamless.
After cloning the repository and installing the listed dependencies (some Perl packages available in your Brew / Ubuntu repository already), you can do:
I've used imapsync in the past to migrate thousands of mail accounts from and old decrepit IMAP environment (with some weird edge cases) to a shiny new IMAP based mail platform.
It's a hugely flexible and versatile tool and it's quite zippy as well, can highly recommend.
Effort, not money. As a Firefox/gmail user who routinely shits on Google, it's mostly the lock-in of any email address that keeps me coming back. I've actually opened a few paid accounts, but effort to switch is real. I gave up partly through switching over the dozens (100s?) of services that send me emails. I would never get to the point where all of my acquaintances and relatives actually use the new address.
This is precisely what I have done and it's worked great. All services I use (and care about) I've changed to use service specific aliases now and it works fantastically well. Effort wise I'd say I spent probably a couple of days migrating some ten odd years of email from gmail, setting up domains etc. All in all, the migration itself was done within a week. Only maintenance I do on this setup now is send receipts to my accountant, and update credit card details when needed.
> Also regardless of the topic, double standards are rampant in this community.
Most of us speak out against against Google because we like most of Google and want to continue to use their services, just not to thrilled about some things and want them to shape up, not have them cease to exist completely. It's the difference between being reasoned or extreme.
My FastMail account costs $50 / year or $130 / 3 years, thus with a monthly cost starting at 3.6 USD. That's less than the price of a Starbucks Grande Latte.
Google's G Suite, which is still better than free web mail since you no longer have the lock-in, plus a better privacy policy, is $5 per month, which is almost the price of a Starbucks Venti Latte. And this is actually an expensive offering in the business.
So no, it's not an expensive coffee, especially since we are talking about a highly skilled and highly paid demographic.
Also I'm from Romania where we have a lower cost of living and lower wages to go with it, so seeing my Silicon Valley brethren complaining about the price of paying for non-free email on your own domain is really awkward, given the importance of email.
I get it, I hate subscriptions for software too. But not when that service is essential for your profession, your security or your privacy and email is all of the above.
> That's less than the price of a Starbucks Grande Latte.
A cup of coffee is a pretty lousy indication of cost. For some people going into a Starbucks for a $5/€4,40/£3,92 gluten-free-unicorn-sprinkles-ariana-grande-latte may be part of a daily routine, but for others, coffee means using a coffee-maker to brew your own cup for a few cents, or just getting a cup to go at a some kiosk.
My point is that many of us drink such beverages every couple of days at least and in order to pay for your email address basically implies the same effort as buying a Starbucks Grande Latte.
And your email address is your online identity and has plenty of information in it that shouldn't leak, including your entire online purchasing history at least.
I am against paying for crap via subscriptions, I hate the subscriptions trend myself, but email in my opinion is fundamental to who we are and what we do online.
I think that's a pedantic detail that actually ignores the point being made. I've seen the "cheaper the the cost of a coffee per month!" type of phrasing used to commonly refer to Starbucks/etc
I almost never buy coffee out anywhere like Starbucks, but it was easy for me to understand in the context of his post
You can run your own email server via Vultr or DO for $5/month or less. You have to do some work to maintain it so there's the cost of time invested, so maybe two coffees/month. You can also opt for Fastmail or ProtonMail, or similar privacy-respecting email services, and again you're getting it for less than $5/month. I use Fastmail for my main email account and I love it.
I use Tiger Technologies (https://tigertech.net) for hosting mine and my wife's personal sites and email, they are all I need for basic Wordpress/email hosting and they have a superb support team. If I decide I want to get my hands dirty with running a server, I use Vultr.
Also the much better deal is the business edition, at $10 per month, which also gives you unlimited GDrive storage. Couple that with something like ArqBackup, Rclone, etc and it gets to be very cost effective, being cheaper than a Dropbox subscription.
Also the Terms of Service for G Suite is meant for businesses and thus much better.
Just be careful when buying apps and books from Google Play. If you don't want to be locked-in, don't purchase anything that can't be migrated.
Agreed. I'm on nightly and it has been stable - even with WR turned on. I've been pushing my family and friends to use FF - but a lot of them are Chrome loyalists. Still - one must persist.
I'd rather not have a world where only chrome and chrome clones exist - and I certainly don't appreciate that Chrome wants me to log in every time I use the browser (and getting more and more insistent at that lately from what I hear)
Firefox Quantum also nags constantly about logging in and syncing devices, not that I'm against it, it's great when you have multiple devices and don't want to install the same plugins, sync bookmarks, etc.
That's well and good but I'm replying to the comment above me which stated:
> I certainly don't appreciate that Chrome wants me to log in every time I use the browser (and getting more and more insistent at that lately from what I hear)
Did you have to disable the requests? Or are you really saying that on a virgin installation, Firefox never tried to get you to login and sync? Are you on Apple/Linux? I was able to disable most of the reminders to sync on both Android and Windows but I eventually gave in, in order to sync all my plugins and bookmarks.
> I am loving Quantum, and I don't understand why Firefox continues to slide.
Apparently a lot of Firefox installs are on older systems (think Windows XP/Vista era) from before Chrome took over the world. There's a reason Firefox was the last major browser to drop XP support (they only did so when 52 ESR left support a few months ago!). As those systems get phased out they generally get replaced with systems that come with Chrome preinstalled and that's "good enough" for most people buying them (unlike Internet Explorer back in the day) so they don't seek out alternatives.
They broke extension support. Half of the extensions disappeared (didn't migrate to Quantum). The other half works only partially. One year after Quantum i still have a blank new tab because a custom html file in new tab would require an extension AND a web server.
Sure, it is harder now for non-technical users to shoot themselves in the foot. On the other hand, Mozilla took away control from users. After Quantum I lost all hope.
There might be a problem with your session history files getting locked and therefore Firefox doesn't update them. Could you take a look here and let me know what you find:
Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either
"3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Troubleshooting Information
(menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter
In the first table on the page, click the "Show Folder" button.
In your profile folder, scroll down and double-click into the sessionstore-backups folder. You may see numerous files here. Of particular importance:
recovery.js: the windows and tabs in your currently live Firefox session -- if you check the modified date/time, is this fresh or is it from the time frame that keeps coming back?
recovery.bak: a backup copy of recovery.js
previous.js: the windows and tabs in your last Firefox session
upgrade.js-build_id: the windows and tabs in the Firefox session that was live at the time of your last update
Do you see any numbered files, such as recovery-1.js? Firefox may create those when it is unable to store your current session history in recovery.js. Unfortunately, at the next startup, those files are not used automatically.
I agree this was rough but things need to be taken into context with this in my opinion.
Given their small "market share", it would seem right to remove a major burden to rapid development (the old extension format, XPI) in favor of open standards (web workers).
It's more maintainable, more in-line with current standards. I am only speaking as a fly-on-the-wall here. Although I am a senior "full stack" developer, I am pretty far removed from any of the day-to-day here.
By wiping the slate clean in terms of extensions, hopefully this will be a small paint-point, quickly forgotten, and things move forward from here.
Re-reading this prior to submit, it seems like I've inserted too many items straight out of the BS generator but I'm ok with it.
"it would seem right to remove a major burden to rapid development (the old extension format, XPI) in favor of open standards (web workers)."
Perhaps. But it sure would have been better if the new extension system were as capable as the old before axing the extensions. The loss in functionality, for me, is unacceptable. At the heart of it, this is what made me give up entirely on post-57 Firefox.
It's hard to compete with a product that is being spread like crap ware bundled with other freeware or pushed through Android or the main search engine on the internet.
From my experience this is the ways most of the people I know came in contact with Chrome. Even those where I've installed FF end up with Chrome. When I ask them why they switched, they don't know. They don't even know where it came from...this is what you get from clicking "Next" without reading...
In fairness - much as I like desktop Firefox, Android Firefox has never felt as slick as Android Chrome. I'd love to switch, but it's got to be good enough.
I switched back to Chrome on Android, and will stay there until FF Mobile and LastPass start playing together nicely. I'm not sure which party is responsible, but it's a dealbreaker in general for me.
I use Firefox on Android and it's good enough. I don't even notice it's different. Additionally it's amusing to me to see just how far we have come where simply having a functional browser on a handheld device isn't enough.
(Reading this thread and writing this comment from Firefox on my phone)
I think FF Focus is absolutely brilliant an mobile and for everything else (except Facebook) I use firefox with ublock origin. It performs very well and I can nicely sync my passwords and tabs to my other devices.
True, but not very nice to use. For example, if you change the tab, all other pages get unloaded and will reload if you change back to them. Very good for loosing where on the page you where.
It is not a big issue really as FFF (as I understand it) is not meant to be used for tabbing a lot and it prevents the usual tab accumulation.
Firefox has noticeable delays and scrolling performance issues on OSX. I have a top of the line macbook from last year, with i7, 16GB RAM, etc. But even on that it's sluggish and stuttery. I've tried all sorts of performance tweaks, beta/nightly builds - nothing really makes it as snappy as Chrome or Safari. So, unfortunately, I have to go back to those.
I Ihave around 50 tabs in FF, but active only maybe 15-20. On Mac OS I see a standard problem when I connect external monitor after wakeup, FF starts to "eat" memory like crazy, until I either kill it, or it's crashed. I need to restart FF every 2 days to get my memory back. Here is screenshot from App monitor: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rh133wnhk1wgbe2/Screen%20Shot%2020...
Sometimes, after 2 days of work each worker consumes ~7Gb of RAM (on machine with 16GB of RAM)...
P.S. mostly opened documents in google doc, gmail, calendar, JIRA/Confluence...
There is a well-known bug[1] with non-standard resolutions. Try changing the resolution and see if it makes any difference. If not, please file a new bug :). Otherwise you can see if you can help fixing the issue. Unfortunately, it requires some re-engineering of core graphics processing and they are working on it, but it'll likely take a few more months to fix completely.
My problem with the new FireFox is simply that I don't like it. I like it better than Chrome, but I was never a Chrome user (I've been using Firefox since the very beginning). I'm better off using a fork that still allows for enough customization that I can make it behave the way that suits me best. Since I can use forks in a way that is no less (or marginally less) secure, they are my best option.
I have tried using Firefox several times this year, but on a Macbook with only 8gb of RAM the RAM usage was far too big compared to Chrome. It made the rest of my computer sluggish. And Firefox itself was slower than Chrome, one of the examples for me is Youtube. Yes Youtube is Google, but I use it often enough that it was too slow for me to stick with firefox.
I get your point but I often wonder if by stuffing everything through a networked document renderer hasn't caused a lot of those performance issues.
Rendering a page is expensive enough, but you have a generation of programmers who only know javascript (and for good reason, the web is an incredible software deployment system). But when everything is a web-app, then the renderer that does the parsing and execution needs to be optimised so hard that the code might as well be proprietary.
That's how I feel about chrome. Parsing and rendering websites today is /hard/ and we're not helping things by pushing more and more and more into our browsers. Of course it will become a monopoly.
well to be fair sometimes my firefox makes really really strange things.
sometimes our internal sites won't work, because firefox resolves a IPv6 address (that is also in our network but for another domain.) when the thing has no IPv6 address.
i.e. git.example.com has the IPv6 and sometimes sentry.example.com resolves the ipv6 of git besides not having any IPv6 AAAA entry at all. I could not find out why that is happing, since it's only happening in FF.
besides that, I also think the developer tools got better, but are still not on par with Google Chrome.
(At the moment I primarly use Firefox, besides when the bug occurs than I open these services in Safari or Chrome)
It's actually turned into a benefit for me that the developer tools suck. I also use FF for browsing and then Chrome for debugging. Which is nice when a coworker is watching me debug over my shoulder because autocomplete never reveals the incredibly basic shit I google on a day to day basis.
> I have read comments in this thread suggesting that FF's performance is not that snappy but I cannot seem to notice any difference.
I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago but I had a terrible experience using Hangouts with a customer for two hours. The Firefox degraded until a point of no return and that sucks when you are talking with a customer. I initially blamed the network but there was no signal of network issues.
> I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox but I had a terrible experience using Hangouts
So, you're saying Google's anti-competitive tactic of degrading and not supporting other browsers worked on you. Did you know there's a name for that tactic? Embrace Extend Extinguish.
Did you consider using another, more neutral video conference system?
I use FF for normal browsing and Chrome for Google based stuff that requires an account, like Gmail, YouTube, Docs, etc. Besides not having ANY performance issues with FF I think it is good practice to separate most of your accounts from normal surfing.
Just today I ran into a weird bug in Google Drive's document editor where selecting 'paste without formatting' from the context menu resulted in a pop-up saying 'These actions are unavailable via the Edit menu, but you can still use: Ctrl+C Ctrl+V Ctrl+X'.
This is not a weird bug. It’s Google tailoring their products for their own browser and ignoring the others (Safari has the same “issue”). It’s their prerogative to do so, but I think they’re risking getting hit by antitrust for these kinds of antics in the future.
I ran into the same issue and had the same thoughts. The ironic part is Hangouts might be extinguishing Firefox, but it's also extinguishing itself. Google doesn't maintain it, it's running on autopilot and will likely be shutdown in 2019.
When using a Google property (particularly a niche/slated for death property), expect it to work better in Google's own browser.
I'm not sure which is likely to be lower ranked at Google - Edge compatibility for all those end users for whom changing browsers is too difficult or Firefox where compatibility is probably easy but the users can probably figure out the message of "works better with OEM branded components (or browsers)!"
I actually tried switching. I found Firefox to be still slower than Chrome. At least on Google sites it may not be their fault but knowing where to put the blame doesn't help me on my end. Marketing doesn't seem like the likely fix.
Are you on Mac? If yes, it's not a feeling, it's a real problem Mozilla is trying to address but have yet to crack. Firefox is an order of magnitude more performant on windows and linux.
Hasn't Firefox been around for longer than Chrome...? It's a bit off-putting when they can't seem to solve popular platform issues.
I've been on Chrome for a long time, tried to switch to FF when Quantum came out and couldn't hear myself think over the sound of my laptop winding up.
Yes it is. Given that their team is top notch and their intent has been great so far, I will go with "it's a freaking hard problem and google could afford spending millions of dollars to solve it" kind of explanation.
Another reason could be that Google
optimizes both sides of the Chrome/Google webapp interaction but doesn't care very much about optimizing for any other browser than Chrome.
Once you realize that not being evil isn't a priority at Google anymore this explanation actually makes some sense.
I've never had any issues on my Mac. Then again, I'm using an MBA 2012 sans Retina. If you are using displays with "non-standard" resolution (including Retina), even external ones, then you can refer to my other post[1] for background.
This isn't because of that. Although even if it was, my entire point was that at the end of the day if Firefox is slower, even if it's Google playing dirty, that's going to make users like me not want to use it over Chrome.
For personal email I'm on FastMail, but my work email is still Gmail (not my choice). I found Gmail to behave like shit in Firefox.
Then I tried it in Chrome and found that Gmail behaves like shit in Chrome too.
The solution however was to drop Gmail's web interface. Switched to a desktop client. If you're on MacOS I think MailMate is the best.
Couldn't be happier. And this advice is independent of your browser choice.
PS: the fact that Google's online properties are optimized for Chrome should make you realize that Chrome is the new IExplorer and it's our fault for allowing it to happen ;-)
I'd support it if it felt like a first-class citizen on macOS. It's ironic that everyone decries Electron for not being native, then says you should use Firefox when it violates so much about the platform that it's not even funny.
A bug about overflow scrolling (the default bouncing when you scroll over in macOS) has been open for years. It doesn't fit in.
Does Apple provide a correct specification for implementing overflow scrolling on custom window controls? Or is a default behavior that only Apple-blessed graphic components have? Failing to follow the Apple guidelines would be bad for Firefox. If the issue is not having a spec, we'd be talking about Apple actively sabotaging apps like Firefox.
I'm a Firefox user on macOS and I don't remember issues with scrolling. I don't use a trackpad, maybe that's the issue?
My main machines (both personal and work) runs macOS and I find Firefox to fit in fine. Certaintly does what I expect 99.9% of the time. Scrolling for instance seems to work as expected (and on par with Safari which I occassionally use). Can you share more examples?
On Linux with KDE that web-extension change killed the kwallet integration too. But you are right when you are saying that it degrades the user experience of MacOS users :-(
I'm not sure what Mozilla's deal is these days, to be honest, but Firefox really just doesn't feel like it fits in on Mac. It's frustrating, because I want to support it... but I just end up back in Safari because it feels far more smooth and integrated.
I got into using macOS later on but after 10 years of Firefox I had no issue with it on the Mac. I guess I possibly did not even notice the bugs mentioned. Ironically I couldnt use Chrome after beta cause I was too used to how Firefox works.
I was originally using chrome for pretty much everything, but I started getting annoyed with the performance hiccups and I wasn't switching over to Safari because of the failure of the extension ecosystem ($99 to publish an extension?). Firefox being the best choice out there has been positive to the point where I don't have Chrome installed on anything other than my phone.
I really would like to say that I find it ridiculous that mac users consistently bash Firefox due to feeling it doesn't belong while they use Google Chrome.
How is Google Chrome more AppleOS then Firefox? Granted I can't stand AppleOS and find the UI to be totally frustrating still in 2018 and how old it feels. How is Firefox any different then Google Chrome?
The reason was Mozilla killed embedding. Making everything an XULRunner app was supposed to be the future solution, but precluded native apps like Camino and K-Meleon from doing their thing, and while Mozilla had "reasons" I thought and continue to think it was incredibly shortsighted. Look at all the Chromium and WebKit shells. You just can't do that with Gecko on desktop (this may be changing on Android, though).
Pinch to zoom is also non-existent so Firefox becomes useless for a many adults/elderly with poor eye-sight or even just many other users who like to browse and zoom on text/pictures etc.
It's so frustrating that this feature is not available in Firefox when you are promoting it. The absence of this feature in my small survey is the main reason people quit using Firefox.
I'm honestly a bit confused. This is the second comment I've seen regarding the lack of this feature. It's not one I ever use purposefully, so maybe I just don't understand what's missing. But, with Firefox on my Samsung Galaxy, I can zoom in and out of text and photos by pinching, with no issues at all. Was it a long time ago when you last tried it perhaps?
Latest version on MacOS
It's one of the primary gestures of MacOS, and is in heavy use with casual users. It's f.x the primary method of reading material on websites that my parents use.
I think they mean desktop Firefox on a touchscreen laptop, rather than mobile Firefox. Personally, I can't imagine trying to pinch-zoom on a desktop, but maybe I'm just old.
They're talking about a gesture that's specific to the Macbook trackpad; namely, the implementation you see in Safari, which is not the typical browser 'zoom' function that increases the size of elements and reflows the page, but rather zooms in to show you a subset of the DOM canvas as rendered, like mobile browsers do. It is definitely a handy feature but to characterize it as a missing 'standard' functionality I don't think is fair. No desktop browser had this functionality until Safari ported it over from the mobile version a few releases back as I recall, though Chrome has since copied it.
On Microsoft Surface in tablet mode I often want to pinch zoom. It works but it's limited to the discrete zoom levels that you see with Ctrl+ and Ctrl- so you don't get the smooth zoom you get on Chrome. I still prefer FF for a variety of other reasons so to me it's just a nitpick.
I would love to use Firefox more for dev, but until it has a first class way to disable CORS, I can't. "CORS Everywhere" is not sufficient (it alters responses, but does not actually disable CORS, which doesn't cover all needs).
Chrome I can at least disable CORS via the command line, and Safari does it best by putting it in a Developer menu that I can easily toggle.
Firefox's dev tools also seem to still be behind — I haven't seen a good way to inspect WebSocket frames, for instance.
I would really prefer to use Firefox due to Mozzila's stances on privacy, especially in contrast to Google; however, I have to use the tool that lets me actually get work done.
I love using Firefox as my daily driver, and I can always pop open chrome if I really have to. What kind of life do you lead where your browser needs to have CORS constantly disabled?
This can be helpful in development scenarios. I’m supporting a team that uses localstack to support local development against some AWS services. Unfortunately, the CORS settings for localstack break the development environment. With Chrome allowing them to disable from the command-line, I can provide a shortcut to launch with degraded security, no plugins, no user settings, etc. My only wish is that Chrome would make it more obvious that it’s running with these protections disabled.
At the very least, CORS should be disabled for localhost. I build interfaces using create-react-app, which launches a dev server on localhost:3000 (useful for things like live reload), making requests on a go api on localhost:5000. On production, both are on :80 and the backend serves frontend production files. This is annoying to alter the application code just to handle dev environment (although, this already happen in many other places, so it's not critical).
Not sure if it might have this but have you tried using Firefox Developer Edition? I would suggest if disabling CORS is missing to request it for Firefox Developer Edition. Its Firefox bleeding edge with some developer focused plugins out of the box.
The web server is configuring CORS policy properly, but the browser is making client-side calls to localstack. As far as I can tell, localstack has hardcoded a CORS policy that is a mismatch for the requests being sent.
The cleanest solution is to extend the dev pipeline with a proxy for localstack. It won't take me long to knock that out, but it's not something I can prioritize at the moment.
Because having code that behaves differently on development and production is never a solution, it's a workaround. Having bugs that can't be reproduced locally is the worst thing that can happen to a developer. So yeah, you can _just_ put environment settings if you have no other possible way, but you should really avoid it if there is any other one (like using chrome with CORS disabled, here).
Mentioned this in another response. In this case, that requires the addition of another component. The app itself is serving a valid CORS policy. The stub we're using to support S3 development offline (LocalStack) ignores the configuration it's passed.
I agree with you that fixing the headers (via a proxy in this case) is the right solution. I'm just not able to prioritize right now.
Beyond that, there are always going to be occasions where developers, security analysts, and testers need to bypass default security enforcement. I'd like to see every browser provide a way to make these adjustments for a one-off session (e.g., via a command-line switch). It's an efficient solution that I can offer when I come across a nasty hack living permanently in a developer's web configuration.
By that same argument, using Chrome with CORS disabled is just as bad, if not worse. If you only test in Chrome with CORS disabled, how do you know that CORS works at all?
Not really. In lots of relatively large companies there is a good relationship between infrastructure, development and security teams and they will work to find a solution that works for everybody.
It's 2 lines of code with most modern web frameworks with junior level knowledge required. Actually, any people with decent dev skills (any people that receives money for code should...) add a conf switch for that since the begining of the project.
>My only wish is that Chrome would make it more obvious that it’s running with these protections disabled.
I know this is beginning to become off-topic, but why? Presumably, if you're using a flag that has to be run from the command-line, you're either doing it on purpose or using hardware you don't own (and a keylogger is a much greater risk than anything else at that point)
I can't speak for OP, but for me the problem is that I likely already have normal Chrome windows open when I start a "special" Chrome instance with a private profile and other settings. So now when I see a Chrome window I would like to be sure whether it's my normal user profile or the special profile.
In practice, it's not a problem for me, because the presence or absence of my usual row of extension icons and profile photo is enough of a clue.
But I could see where someone who doesn't normally sign into Chrome, or who doesn't have very many extensions in their normal Chrome profile, could have trouble distinguishing it from their a profile. The windows will tend to look pretty similar.
Exactly. If I need to run a browser in a special configuration, I want to take every precaution to avoid using it for anything but the intended purpose. Since I disable my profile and extensions, I get similar cues.
The problem I see is that not everyone takes the same precautions. And plenty of developers accumulate these sort of tweaks and hacks in their daily driver without realizing or remembering that they've crippled their own security posture.
From a UX perspective, my preference is to make it clear when normal security mechanisms are disabled.
Most folks set up a little proxy--or configure CORS if the other end of the pipe is owned or cooperative--rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater due to inability to disable an important security measure.
For testing a client side app in development locally against a remote API, disabling cors is really handy.
I have localhost.com in my hosts file and a local web server to run around it, but it's still really frustrating not being able to turn it off entirely.
I develop browser based video games that talk to a central API that I control.
I mostly have the setup you describe, and most development happens against a CORS-free staging server. But it's often necessary to build a local prod version that is identical to the live version for debugging or analysis, that plays against real players and reads/writes to the same data store.
It's an edge case, and in the past when I've done web development simply turning off CORS on staging has trivially solved any issues. But it does feel a bit like the developers of the browsers have chosen not to include the feature in a "we're smarter than you, trust us, you don't want this" kind of way. For the most part, they're probably right.
This is one of my gotchas (and I prefer to do so from the commandline). I also need a good extension manager and a session/tab manager. The extension manager makes it easy to disable extensions that are only used occasionally. The session manage makes it easier for me to keep tab count down.
I have found a few session manager options on Firefox but most suffer from permission bloat and poor UI.
Last I checked, there was nothing to make it easier to manage add-ons.
I use Firefox for development, but I use safari (privately) and edge (professionally) for browsing, and see no real advantages to using either Firefox or Chrome for that.
I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.
> I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.
This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox after the google login controversy, and have been happy with the transition too.
The only only thing that really annoys me is that when you snap a tab out of a window into a new window, the gesture is similar with snapping a tab into the favorite bar, and I end up with lots of "New Tab" or other unwanted favorites.
Also a small personal annoyance. I got into the habit of always launching the browser by clicking the shift key on the windows task bar icon, so that I always get a new window, irrespective of whether some session is already running or not. But in firefox, when no session is running, launching with the shift key pressed results in the "safe mode" prompt. I wish there was a way to disable that.
If you haven't used Chrome, no wonder you haven't noticed Firefox sucking. But a side-to-side speed and responsiveness comparison of Chrome and Firefox is unfair even today.
I have used Chrome and Firefox side-by-side, consistently since Chrome's original release. I have used Netscape and Internet Explorer since before both existed. I have performance gaming rigs of all generations, and I develop software. I have multiple generations of Apple machines as well. I run Windows and Linux.
Firefox doesn't suck, and matches Chrome. But there's no accounting for user behavior. I have seen user behavior that is mind-blowingly stupid, and subcultures of user activity and tendencies trace well with product loyalty trends.
Some user subcultures are retardedly dependent on browser extensions, never clear their cache, retain cookies for the lifetime of their laptop battery, and seemingly need hundreds of tabs open. And none of this shit makes sense to me.
These are likely the same people who carry around phones on the brink of overheating while locked, and in their pocket, because they have to have a thousand apps installed, in order to feel like they're getting the $1,000 phone they paid for, I guess. Their emails are constantly peppered with "sent from [app|device|service]" signatures, and they claim microphone permissions are why ads target them.
Honestly, if you've been blaming the browser, it's more likely that you're the one being your own worst enemy.
All the users I forced to use Firefox, decided that Chrome was faster, and they were more than 100s of them.
( And as a user I knew that too. I just wanted to support Firefox. )
So saying Firefox Doesn't suck may be partially right. As we will have to define "suck" first. But saying it is as fast as Chrome during Firefox 4 and early Chrome era is just the same as saying earth is flat.
So...what are you trying to say here?
That if you don't feel comfortable with a browser, you are the issue?
That if you have different use-cases and behavior, you are the issue?
Each browser has different look and feel and is unique in its own way, even if some differences are tiny.
And, yeah, if Mozzila likes dropping numbers, nothing has to change.
Chrome handles PDF and printing (with the preview) better than Firefox in my opinion. I probably like Chrome a bit more for dev work as well but as a user they're pretty similar with the exception of the PDFs that I mentioned.
"Chrome handles..." can be said for a lot of things really.
Just this last month I've had Firefox crash tabs daily that Chrome handled perfectly fine, I've seen it crash the entire browser when Chrome did just fine. Underlying both those issues was a janky Windows install that was partially broken. But still, Chrome carried on like a trooper.
I've even just switched back to Linux and immediately saw Firefox stumble over scrolling frame rates. That was caused by using an Nvidia graphics card and the proprietary drivers on Kubuntu which was a bit janky again to say the least. But Chrome carried on through again with no problem.
Just today I've switch to an AMD graphics card and the opensource drivers on Fedora and only now is Firefox seemingly playing nice.
It's a great browser (though Dev Tools don't seem as good to me) and I love the containers but it does seem it needs a bit more of a particular environment to operate just right whereas Chrome 'just works' more of the time. That is possibly why lots of people say 'fine for me' (it is for me now, yey!) but others say "it's broken" or 'slow' or whatever.
When I notice a difference in responsiveness between Chrome and Firefox, it's usually due to the webpage being Chrome-optimized. I don't know why: maybe it was developed and tested under Chrome, maybe it uses features that work better on Chrome because they were developed and pushed by Google, or maybe the differences between the rendering engines favor Chrome.
Google's own websites are some of the major culprits. The funny thing is that similar webs don't have this issue, and I don't notice any slowdowns that push me to do side-by-side tests.
I've noticed worse performance of firefox on macos compared to windows, to the point where firefox is unusable on many websites on a 2 core macbook pro. Even fucking facebook is slow on firefox, even with recent improvements.
I use Firefox daily, alongside Chrome for a very long time. Firefox manages system resources much better, works way more stable, and behaves the way I want, without any exceptions.
Chrome feels like an untamed animal which does stuff without telling you, and I don't like it.
This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.
To this day, my browsing experience is still worse with Firefox than it was before 57, because so many useful little add-ons have never been replaced or have been replaced only with inferior versions. In some of those cases, that useful functionality can't be provided in the new environment, because the APIs to support it aren't there. I was unpleasantly reminded of this just a few days ago, when the same problem infected the latest Thunderbird update.
More seriously, I am running into increasing numbers of sites that simply don't work properly with Firefox. Sometimes this is because of the privacy/blocker extensions I use, but often the problem persists even if I disable those. Whether it's due to bad web developers doing Chrome-only things or bugs in recent versions of Firefox, the unfortunate result is still the same from the user's point of view.
This I can relate with, but I would like to note that Firefox seems to be continually expanding its APIs and regaining functionality that was lost. In particular, [Tridactyl](https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl) (which tries to reimplement Pentadactyl, a kitchen-sink extension API consumer) works rather well. There are still some pain points, like the keyboard shortcut API which still hasn't been merged, but I am hopeful they eventually will be.
I too experience privacy extensions breaking websites frequently, since I'm a heavy user of those, but so far I have never encountered a case of a website that was truly broken under Firefox. It was always one of my settings and worked under a clean profile.
They rushed it and I find it hard to not see it as a giant "screw you".
They didnt release the specifications early enough for people to rewrite their addons and at the end of ESR52 there where still multiple bugs open which prevented people from porting their addons. We didnt even get a normal 1 year ESR support frame for gods sake. All that ignoring the fact that there was no warning for the end users that all their security addons were disabled after the automatic update.
I am still furious about the absolute arrogance and carelessness Mozilla showed here.
I was very pissed at them for exactly this reason and I still am to some degree. I would love to find an acceptable alternative that goes back to the roots, so to speak. For instance, I've been looking at qutebrowser, but it's still too limited (and might remain so for some time).
But Chrome as an alternative? That's not even on the table. Firefox is definitely the lesser of two evils.
This. Ever since the plugin fiasco, it’s really hard for me to see Firefox as anything other than a worse Chrome. Extensibility was Firefox’s main selling point; and they pissed that away.
I'm just amazed that you can't even manually remap keyboard commands. Seriously Mozilla? $500 million/year in funding and you can't support that customization?
Thanks for the heads-up! I locally maintained Pentadactyl for my own browser until Mozilla banned unsigned addons (which ticked me off enough to write a Hiter parody[1]). That extension was also what got me into vim.
I'm still upset that they broke custom keyboard shortcuts for ... two years now? All the replacements will only remap keys after a tab's JS has loaded. I used to be able to just zoom through the tabs with shift-j and shift-k, but now it will randomly stop on pages that need to reload, which breaks the whole experience.
I've had Super NES games that offered key customizations, and had much less memory and money to work with. That's really disappointing.
For several years, Firefox was punishingly slow and had awful tab control compared to Chrome. It may not have 'sucked', in the sense that I still vastly preferred it to IE or even Safari, but switching was an immediate and dramatic improvement.
There have been major speedups since, and container tabs help fix the other issue. At this point, I still find Firefox worse than Chrome in a large number of ways, but they're small and often preference-based - but lots of people seem to agree that were a lot of users lost (or not gained) during a stretch where Firefox was pretty much objectively behind.
I use FF too, and I notice it sucking periodically, often after a big update - as things will - there have been periods of a month maybe two times in the last 10 years where I had to switch to another browser because it sucked too bad.
Sadly this is my story also. I use Vivaldi as my main browser now, which is Chromium based. Firefox does work awesome and is normally what I program my scripts through headlessly but in personal use FF just gets bad periodically.
I used Chrome since its early alpha versions on Linux, and I have to disagree. Even in its first days Chrome was a far superior browser speed, responsiveness and security wise. Firefo caught on some of these nowadays, but not nearly e ough for me to switch back.
When you log out, Firefox will block it and warn you that you are about to close number of tabs. When you select "OK", your tabs are gone.
But Chrome will quietly exit, and when you start it next time, will offer to restore the tabs that were open last time. Chrome approach wins, hands down.
That's a setting in both browsers. Default is "Start with Startpage or empty page" in both browsers as well. You can always select "Restore last session" in both browsers.
Defaults really matter. Probably 1% of users would ever think to look for a way to change that behavior.
I think Firefox for a long time tried to optimize for those users who do want to tweak their software, and doing that can even be a way to make superior software (instead of aiming for the lowest common denominator), but it is certainly not the right approach to maximizing _web browser market share._
I didn't use Firefox for many years (because I thought it sucked; slow, bad defaults, always apologizing in this anoying way for having crashed the last time I used it) but I now use it every day again (though not as my default browser; I tend to keep all the major ones open) and I'm glad to see Mozilla recently seems to have changed their priorities and focused on usability and performance. I hope it's not too late.
When I last installed Chrome in a fresh installation of Windows (so no saved settings from previous installations), it defaulted to an empty startpage. Might just have been me, mind.
The problem is that if Firefox is getting this default wrong, what else are they getting wrong? And it should realize user state is sacred, I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!
I'm very happy that when I close my browser it kills all my tabs. If I really want something back I just view it from the history.
> I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!
I'm pretty sure no one expects nor wants this. You're definitely in a minority here. The problem you describe isn't very technical, it's simply that you want something else than most people else and you don't want to take the time to configure your browser to how you want it to behave.
Lots of people actually expect that. It's how phone apps work. There's no concept of "closing an app" in the iOS and Android guidelines. You just get the app out of the way.
I think the lack of improvements in desktop UX in the last 10 years is making every desktop OS to slowly adopt mobile UX conventions. Some of those new conventions are a step back.
But this isn't wrong, it's just your entirely subjective personal preference being different to someone else's.
Personally, I don't like it when browsers implicitly keep tracking things when I close the application and then fire up some half-baked version of the same stuff when I come back later. If I want to remember where I am, I can easily bookmark some or all of my tabs.
Firefox has had a particular problem in recent versions where it seems to think it crashed on the previous shutdown, even though there was no user-visible evidence of this, and then tries to restore the previous session even when it otherwise wouldn't. That's not helpful if your previous session involved shopping for surprise Christmas presents for the SO who is now standing behind you as you open the browser again several hours later for some entirely unrelated purpose, in a totally hypothetical example.
Isn't this google applications will track what you do all the time, and even after you close the application and restart it knows who you are and what you did?
> but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.
The last part is true, it did suck for a while. But I can't say "no fault but their own". Even if they rocked, they would have taken a big hit: chrome was advertised for a long time, and at no cost, using solicitating prompts directly on the most consultated and trusted web page in the world.
The advantage of Firefox / Chrome in general is that if you develop habits / shortcuts you can use them in any OS. Safari only works on macOS and edge on Windows.
Both their plugin ecosystems are significantly less robust as well e.g if you want to use any popular tools e.g shodan, google data saver, edit this cookie, etc
I think it's more like a new generation of people started using Mac OS on which I heard Firefox suck. So being already in a walled garden environment they did not care about entering Google's.
Firefox was always good on other OS. And you got noscript there with full access to block everything Chrome does not want you to block.
FWIW, I use Firefox on High Sierra and I don't think it sucks at all.
About noscript:
Recently I was playing with it, in an attempt to curate which site is allowed to make connections to which domain but I discovered that I cannot do it on a per domain basis and every whitelisted entry was applied everywhere. Apparently that was something that could be configured at noscript's ABE panel which doesn't exist in the latest versions.
If you want per domain rules I would suggest trying umatrix instead.
What I like in chrome is search shortcuts, example I start typing "thes" then press TAB, then I'm brought directly to https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hello (possibly with little configuration).
I don't think Firefox has similar things, last time I checked we have to use bookmarks or something
In Firefox you can add a bookmark and set a keyword for that bookmark. If the URL of the bookmark contains "%s", it'll get replaced by everything you type in the URL bar after the keyword. For example I have a bookmark for Wikipedia with the keyword "wp". So when I type "wp Y Combinator" I end up on the Wikipedia page about Y Combinator.
I really enjoy this feature and even catch myself regularly trying to use it on other computers, which obviously don't have such keywords defined.
Yeah, but the indicator that you’re using such a bookmark when typing “wp Foo” in the address bar is really poor. When you use the OpenSearch search engine integration you can also set a keyword but it’s highlighted properly. Downside is that you need to enable the separate search bar to get the option to add a site’s OpenSearch provider when visiting it because the small looking glass gets a tiny plus you need to click.
I recently switched from chrome to Firefox but the search engine situation is something I’m not really happy about.
> Downside is that you need to enable the separate search bar to get the option to add a site’s OpenSearch provider when visiting it because the small looking glass gets a tiny plus you need to click.
Nope, you can just right-click the site's own search bar, which is how I've been doing it forever.
I think that adds it as a bookmark which is not the same thing as an OpenSearch provider because it doesn’t give you the blue highlight when searching with it.
Actually this is exactly what lorenzhs said, and it is my experience too. I know this because I spent half an hour trying to get a “blue search” for BBFC.
Yup that’s what I meant. The right click -> add as search engine creates a bookmark which doesn’t get the blue highlight when using it. That distinction just doesn’t make sense to me.
Didn't know about this either. Awesome and helps alleviate a pain point... but a) how the hell would any normal user know to do this? And b) how long until it is yet another undocumented feature dropped by Firefox?
You could just set duckduckgo as your default search provider. Then you can use their bangs[1] to quickly search on specific sites. "!thes test" will find synonyms for you.
I switched to DDG for the privacy, and a general desire to ensure that competitors to Google survive. But I've found I use the "bang" commands all the time.
Firefox/Chrome: You can right-click any search field on any web you visit and add it as a search engine, with the keyword of your choosing. I've been using "w foo" to directly search on English Wikipedia. It's half the characters! :)
The advantage of Duck's bangs is that you don't have to install or configure anything beyond searching with DuckDuckGo. I've managed to guess the correct bang-abbreviation plenty of times (Urban Dictionary? ud, OpenStreetMap? osm, Hacker News? Guess!).
As others have mentioned and I believe you were referring to, Firefox does let you create bookmarks with keywords to accomplish the same thing.
Funnily enough, I've often seen Firefox users unaware that they can do the same with custom search keywords in Chrome, so the problem runs both ways.
As someone who uses these features in both Firefox and Chrome, I do think it would be nice if Firefox copied how Chrome automatically adds these search actions, and perhaps a bit of the UI polish too (like how Chrome's omnibox will recognize you're performing a keyword search and adapt accordingly). It doesn't make much of a difference for existing power users, but it could help new users discover and use the feature.
If you think using Chrome is selling your soul to the devil I wonder what you think about me who is fully integrated in the Google ecosystem with Google Home and everything.
To add to the comments that show you how to configure something similar yourself, Firefox recently started including search shortcuts by default. This means you can now type `@google <query>` in a recent Firefox installation to search Google. More info here: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/10/17/searching...
It's still not as smooth and doesn't support as many OpenSearch providers as Chrome's, but might already help a bit.
As someone who switched from Chrome to Firefox not that long ago this is the only feature I miss. Searching e.g. YouTube involves typing the query and then using the mouse to click the YouTube icon in the address bar dropdown. It's not nearly as effortless.
Yeah this is the worst in firefox. I'm desperately trying to stick to firefox out of principle, but Chrome is just sooo much more comfy beacuse of like 3 features.
Firefox actually has 2 domain specific search-shortcut features, but both take time to set up and then is not intuitive at all. Chrome just blows it out of the water.
Also wtf - if I type "hello" and press enter in the search bar in FF, it puts a "www." in front and ".com" at the end.. like holy hell, if I knew the domain I'll write .com myself, it really is no problem. I even went ahead and googled for 15 minutes and disabled this in some deep settings somewhere, but it still does it when I press enter too fast... damnit, it frustrates me every single day.
I hope they see this and fix this very-frustratingly-obvious anti-UX behaviour..
Typing a word or words that don't look like a url or file has so far as I can recall always searched the default search engine for the word or query. This so far as I can recall has always been the case. Can you replicate this in a fresh profile to ensure this isn't just something you have set?
I run into the same thing somewhat frequently. it's the only real issue that I have with firefox. it's definitely not related to the profile, and it only seems to happen with fast enough input+enter.
it's really jarring to be sent to a random domain when looking up something in a hurry.
Firefox sucking wasn't their own fault? I would say it was. I would also say that their continued bloating of firefox and ancilliary projects/services shows that they still haven't return to their original mission.
I like firefox, and use it a lot at work as generally my main browser with DDG as the , but I end up going back to chrome quite a bit
Things that bug me
- For some reason often when I have quite a few tabs, open link in new tab stops working, the tab appears then disappears instantly, oddly if I use Vimium to open the tab in a new link it works. Mostly I use Vimium so this is not too much of a problem
- Copy pasting of formatted html is worse than Chrome.
- Confluence runs like a pig on Firefox for some reason, completely unusable on some pages, not strictly a FF problem, but is problematic.
- Just something about the aesthetics that is somehow "off"
On the positive
- I like the developer tools
- "Column select" out of the box just works
- scrolling tab bar instead of teeny tiny tabs where you can't see anything is good
- I feel better that I'm hopefully leaking less data, not that I can really verify that, but I generally believe I should be better protected than if I was using chrome
Overall, while there is cool things about FF, I feel I'm using it not because its the better browser, but some vauge idea I'm helping browser diversity.
This. And their dark theme is way better than any Chrome extension. The big deal is that Chrom(ium) has taken over the rapidly growing desktop webapp market with ElectronJS, and AFAIK there is no Electron competitor that uses the modern, Quantum FF stack.
Financially, Mozilla is currently entirely dependent on a search contract with Google, their mortal enemy.
They obviously see that this relationship is extremely risky, especially as Firefox becomes less popular and thus their userbase less valuable to Google. As such, they're trying to diversify their revenue stream.
Do you have any better solutions? Browsers are absurdly expensive to develop, by the way.
Firefox is improving by leaps and bounds every day.
But the market is not a meritocracy, as much as some people like to pretend it is. Success in the market is much more to do with things like marketing, momentum, inertia, and general opinions. All of these things are favoring Chrome right now, and Mozilla is not in a position to turn this around.
And you may not have noticed, but being popular doesn't actually give you money when your product is free and features no ads or tracking. All you are saying is that "google should give mozilla more money". How do you suggest they diversify their revenue stream?
I disagree. IMHO Chrome is a better browser than Firefox. A few examples from the top of my head why Firefox is worse than Chrome (on Linux):
1. Hardware acceleration is still disabled by default on Linux
2. Pocket
3. Unwanted notifications about wanting to update / being updated / having updated
3. Ugly spacing left and right of the adress bar
4. Takes longer to start
5. No integration with GNOME keychain.
6. Ctrl+Q quits the browser.
7. Laggy UI
> How do you suggest they diversify their revenue stream?
I would suggest that they don't need to diversify their revenue stream. As long as they are a major player, Google (or any other search engine) will continue to fund them.
Sure, you can also fix a lot of other annoyances. But those add up until the point where someone just installs Chrome in the first place where the defaults are sane.
I agree more option other chrome is a positive. Started to use duck duck go browser on mobile and so far so good.
Firefox has always been a resource hog and crash prone for me on just about any system. Although I use it primarily for some of its features and prefer it over chrome.
It's been a really long time I experienced any crash from Firefox. Last time I had instabilities, it was due to my profile. Deleting it solved the issues.
DevTools are lacking and they broke a ton of add ons with the API update (with no simple way to side load.) I can't use it. I tried again about five months ago and, one two machines, pages would stutter as I scrolled. Not worth my time to mess around with.
Would love to know your favorite add-ons that are broken and not available in AMO for FF57+ some of the contributors during their free time working on to bring extensions. can you share link or about the addon ( https://github.com/firefox-addons/ideas )
Session managers no longer work reliably since the apis for reading and writing tab and window state are not exposed. This is the biggest one for me. Also vertical tabs addons have been fighting an uphill battle.
More devs should support and use it, lest we be beholden to Chrome for the rest of time.
Why support what already broke your work once without an actual transition plan? They didn't have a full replacement ready to go when they got rid of XUL, and seemed that they didn't really care.
At the end of August of 2018 they stopped supporting 52 ESR which is the last extended support release that supports the old addons.
During the 3 years between a and b mozilla worked to provide support for flexible interesting addons which is why all the notable interesting addons I'm aware of have new versions.
I'm sure that the will to port every useful addon in existence just isn't there but it seems challenging for firefox to move forward without ditching the old addons.
Did you realize the new addon system was released over 3 years ago? It kind of seems as if perhaps as a user you were only peripherally aware of matters and derived an erroneous interpretation of events.
Anyone who ignores prior treatment of folks is foolish.
Why would a web developer support one browser over others? They keep everyone honest by sticking to the middle road and not having a badge like "Works Best In FireFox".
Well, it would help if they would resolve the serious quality issues. I wrote a webpage the other day, fully standards compliant (at least as I read it), and Firefox got it completely wrong (one of the bugs, three days old and not triaged[0]) in a way Ed.
I still have open bugs in Firefox from 2012. Firefox is riddled with layout and scripting bugs. I don't understand how they can afford all of this experimental development and "outreach" stuff, when the core product is basically just accumulating bugs which they will never address. Their tracker is full of untriaged bugs from as far back as a decade.
It is virtually never required. Even Chrome's interpretation of undefined behaviours is convenient (i.e. margin: auto on elements with only a max-height; this doesn't work in EdgeHTML or Gecko)
I switched last week to Firefox after trying to go back to it over and over again, maybe once a year, for 5+ years. I absolutely love the Container system it has. I was fumbling around between Chrome profiles for GCP and back to my personal for gdrive/docs/etc. It just got cumbersome. I didn't really understand what the Containers were until I installed the extension and started to split up domains by Work and Personal containers. It's fantastic. Now I have a ton of work-only domains that as soon as I go to them it opens them automatically in my "Work" container. If I pop over to reddit or hn it automatically uses a "Personal" container. The UX could be better, I'd like to dump a list of sites in and bulk select their containers but you can't do that AFAIK. I'd also like to open a URL and just hit a checkbox that says "Always open this in Work/Personal" instead I need to open a Personal container and then "always open in this container."
Haven't really paid attention to resource usage vs chrome. I don't immediately feel like it's incredibly lower, if lower at all, but that's just taking a cursory glance that having a decent amount of static tabs and a video player running (not 1080p) is using 2gb of ram. I feel like chrome would be right there, maybe higher, like 3gb.
It's got some quirks that bug me. On Windows (I use OSX mostly) it seems to have issues with dragging links out but nothing to get me running away from it.
OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH! I was unaware of this. Been keeping chrome and chromium to use on specific cases for work accounts (email, banking, social media, etc). And now I can just consolidate everything with firefox, love it!! I can finally get rid of google's browsers :D
Don't really know what to say because I use 3 flavors of chrome + incognito mode to make sure my sessions are well separated.
I didn't know about this. Guess I have to give it a try now.
Quantum I think was too incremental and conservative, trying to integrate Servo into Gecko. They’ve ended up making a desktop browser which is as good as Chrome, but not good enough to demand attention. Mobile, where parallelism should be most beneficial, has lagged behind, and parallel layout, which is where the real prize is, has disappeared over the horizon. Servo has been relegated to WebVR experiments which are speculative at best, at a point when VR is only available to a truly tiny percentage of the population, and should it be successful will probably be dictated by market share anyway. Do Quantum by all means, but follow five other paths to make Servo a success. Servo was designed to be embeddable, why for instance not attempt competition for Electron. Even if it only implemented a subset of the spec it could be a big success. This is Mozilla’s lifeblood, and it just seems attention is elsewhere.
If you've been following #servo lately, you'll see that we're starting a reboot of parallel layout right now (which I'm leading, more or less).
It just so happens that I'm also juggling a million other things simultaneously. For example, I'm working on power usage improvements on macOS that should help address some of the complaints upthread. Also there's the entirely new GPU font and SVG renderer (which is a novel technique). Also there's making sure WebRender ships. Etc.
Is any of this work coming to Mobile? I agree with the GP that this is where Firefox has the biggest opening, but it seems like there's very little investment in Firefox on Android.
I know it's probably really early to ask this, but do you have a rough estimate of when the power usage improvements will happen? Battery life is the main thing stopping me from using Firefox more, so I'm really looking forward to this being fixed.
I had a ~power related issue using Quantum. It "killed" my cpu (temp rising by 10s of degrees so fast I didn't have time to throttle before kernel thermal shutdown). I guess it's so parallel and so gpu intensive that my whole system goes into fever.
What? Your system doesn't handle running at max CPU and GPU usahe even for what I presume is seconds before thermal shutdown? That seems like an extremely serious issue with your system.
Clean your heatsink out, and also consider replacing the heatsink paste: that CPU is so old, its entirely possible a cheap thermal pad is no longer usable (commonly used on laptops and stock desktop HSFs).
I'm going to guess your problem is not CPU related, but rather a hardware issue relating to other hardware that Firefox uses (GPU, audio, …) Firefox spends most of its time idling in event loops; it's not a batch job like a compiler.
Note that I'm not blaming ffx, just witnessing something weird and wondering if it's due to using rust parallelism in ways not done through the usual cpp libs.
Very doubtful. The only thing I could think of that might conceivably cause similar symptoms would be AVX2, but none of our shipping Rust code uses that.
Odd then. I wasn't even using a specific webpage, just loading the previous session (~20tabs of average intensiveness). Chromium has the same kind of session and it never causes similar heat spikes. Anyway I'll try to reproduce it even though it's not pleasing to overheat like that.
Servo is nowhere near ready. It's been a few months since I've seen actual results, but I'd be surprised, if it nowadays completed ACID3 (which was state of the art for browsers in 2009).
The thing is that rewriting a browser engine doesn't just happen over night. No bigger browser engine has been written from scratch since the previous millennium. Also, no browser engine implements all currently specified webstandards. So, Mozilla would have to full-pelt develop Gecko to be able to keep up with Blink in webstandards, and then also develop Servo at more than full-pelt to be able to catch up in finite time.
That just doesn't add up, which is why Servo was specifically started as a research project. It might never be completed. They have been able to integrate various components from Servo directly into Gecko, therefore sharing the development work which they didn't really plan with, so that's one tiny reason to still hope for it to ever catch up, but yeah, just don't be too optimistic.
Having said all that, the integration of components from Servo into Gecko isn't done yet. WebRender is still missing, which should bring another good performance boost. It's sort of been overhyped with artificially complicated CSS animations [0], so the real world effect isn't that big, but it's still very much noticeable.
Aside from that, on Android, Mozilla is building a new framework for building Android browsers in general, called "android-components", which also includes a much cleaner integration of Gecko on Android, called "GeckoView".
They've already rebased Firefox Focus onto GeckoView and are actively working on rebasing Firefox for Android (Fennec) onto it, too, which is internally called "Fenix". This should also significantly reduce the lagginess and speed up their development in the long-run.
I guess, what I'm mainly trying to say is that there's definitely still things happening.
We have them. HTML/HTTP work great, but the DOM and JS APIs are out of control, and their surface area has no end in sight.
The web actually works great without JS, and doesn’t require gigs of memory to browse.
Every month there’s some new JS API being proposed or developed for browsers, with no care for its impact on the web. The JS APIs are still growing and only getting more complicated too! service workers is a perfect example of the problem. Offline browsing worked great 20 fucking years ago, but now multithreaded Turing complete programming languages have to be used to view a website offline. It’s absolutely absurd.
> Servo was designed to be embeddable, why for instance not attempt competition for Electron.
It should be noted there have been side projects to back nodejs with spidermonkey [0] and have electron APIs backed with gecko [1].
I agree with you and the thing I want more than anything is a cross platform browser engine embeddable with a supported C API that's not Chromium. Servo was on its way, but work has definitely slowed. But I acknowledge that even though I would build my own browser UI on top of an embeddable gecko engine, it probably won't affect adoption that much to be worth the effort.
I really can't agree more with you. WebVR is not a good investment, when you are not even on par in terms of performance for displaying a web page, the last thing you look into is WebVR. This is one of the main problem at Mozilla, they often get influenced by the trend or they spread funds over many different projects ( that range from VR to Museum Arts, grants for LGBT, harassment prevention, Bioinformatics, etc. those are very noble/interesting causes too but you cannot save the whole world at once ). But I don't know maybe this is good for marketing and it allows them to get even more donation / sponsoring? But I'm really not convinced... I think what can really save Mozilla is WebRender/Servo. The best thing that happened to FF is surely not Pocket (once again, huge investment and most people don't use it) but Quantum and this comes from the Servo project.
As you said, they could also make a killer electron alternative and it would be very fitted to Servo as you can start with a subset of the spec and focus on performance/footprint, but their lastest attempt is from what I know this :
https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell/blob/master/README.... which is almost 1 year old
It's understandable, but don't mix the Mozilla Foundation with Mozilla Corporation. The former wholly owns the latter, but they do rather different flavors of work/outreach and they're not really competing over the same one of resources.
Firefox and Gecko has a lot of tech debt, and it's big. It'd be too risky to just try to throw big chunks of it out and hope that the replacement will be great. Though the momentum seems lost, the WebRender integration is still ongoing. ( https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2018/11/29/webrender-newsle... ) And it's big, it's complex, it's hairy, the web is a mess. So, it's slow and full of terrors. (Shaders, caching, multi-threading, mobile, multi-core, C++ and Rust interfacing, etc.)
I wish Mozilla would stop doing so much non-development stuff. Now that Thunderbird is moving on its own, FFox is their only product and yet they waste a lot of time sending out emails about various petitions and similar. They should definitely support pro-Internet petitions as a company (as does Google and others), but IDK why they are now running essentially a mailing list infrastructure for them.
Do you mean is you disagree with what they do politically and so you are going to sit here and pretend you wish they didn't waste resources on non technical issues. This isn't terribly charitable.
Even though I broadly agree with them politically, I still think companies should be apolitical. All these politics involved in things that aren't inherently political are tiring.
I'd like to use Firefox. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the performance improvements, Safari still feels like a faster, smoother browser.
Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated.
Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search.
I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago, and it wasn't as nice as Safari. For there to be a point to this, I'd need the same browser in both places, with perfect syncing of bookmarks, cookies, tabs, etc., just like Safari.
Lastly, migrating is a pain. There's apparently no way to import my current Safari session (I have probably 60-70 tabs) or history (I keep everything I visit, going back years), which means I'd lose stuff by migrating and would have to migrate tabs over incrementally. Hard to try out a browser in any significant way this way.
> Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search.
I don't use a Mac, so I am not sure if there are other features of the Safari omnibar which are appealing. But the example you provided is especially concerning to me since it suggests that Safari is sending user input in the location bar to some external service for analysis. This is what allows the browser to find and render a snippet of a Wikipedia article that best matches what you've typed in the location bar. If I were using Safari, I would definitely be looking for a way to turn that off. I can't tell you how many times I've (accidentally) pasted something into the location bar that I would never voluntarily send to any third parties.
On Firefox, I have a Wikipedia bookmark that uses the 'w' keyword and uses the URL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s
So I would type "w Richard Feynman" to reach the same destination. Maybe not quite as elegant, but I have another that does a Wikipedia search if I don't feel like typing the whole name of an article.
For whatever it's worth, I find the Firefox omnibar superb for many reasons, one being that it prioritizes my bookmarks and my history higher than directing me to a third-party search engine.
Yes, I use also an extension that lets me type "w richard feynman". I also use DuckDuckGo, which has a lot of these shortcuts. But Safari will still offer the first "best hit", when I'm not sure where to look something up.
As for privacy, I'm already deep in Apple. They take care of my stuff: My entire Safari history (synced with iCloud), backup of my iPhone, my iMessage chat history, and a lot of other things. Given their stance on privacy, I choose to trust them. I've never accidentally pasted anything in the search bar.
The feature which the person was talking about is called search suggestions and, indeed, the searches get routed through the selected search provider. There is a related feature, Safari Suggestions, which seems to use the system's Spotlight search service to provide other suggestions.
For people's information, these can be turned off in Safari preferences -> Search.
Safari's autosuggest of the numeric code from 2FA text messages is outstanding. I don't hear anyone talk about this feature, but I could never live without it. I use 2FA for every website possible and this makes it easy.
Yeah that feature (along with iOS 12 native OS-level password manager integrations) was a major leap forward. I no longer dread enabling 2FA on websites when push/HOTP tokens aren’t supported - at least from a usability perspective. The security of SMS-based 2FA is still poor, though generally better than nothing.
Almost nobody implements the API for password managers. It's either apples password store or bust. I use 1password and frequently have to switch to the app to grab a password. Although, with face ID enabled this is relatively painless.
I’ve never had to use it because I use hardware/software 2FA, but while developing an app recently it worked in a native app. I was stunned and thrilled.
I really want to use Safari, but for me the deal breaker is the fact that Safari doesn't seem to block pop-ups properly.
Yes, they've changed it in the latest version. I have Block and Notify option selected in Privacy tab. But many popups still go through -- sometimes they open in a new tab, sometimes in a new window.
Is there a way to fix that?
Also, is there a Tree Style Tab alternative for Safari?
Agreed, popups are annoying. But Firefox doesn't seem to block them all properly, either. For example, try this [1] site. It's notorious for hijacking its own clicks; about 50% of the time you load that site, the search field will open a popup when you click on it to type. Same goes for real links. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a fix for Safari.
I don't know of a tree-style tab extension for Safari, sorry.
The worst thing about Safari is the “Do you want to receive notifications from this website?” pop-up that appears every time you hit some random notification-supporting website for the first time.
There has got to be a better way to implement notification subscriptions than this annoying pop-up.
You can turn this off. Go to Preferences, then Websites, then Notifications, then at the bottom of the window there's a checkbox: "Allow websites to ask for permission to send push notifications".
Not to mention the inability to integrate with iCloud Keychain. I have over 500 passwords that work across every app on my phone, my computer, and tablet. That’s a big switching cost for me. Add to that the performance/stuttering that I still seem to get even with Quantum’s improvement, and I can’t see myself switching from Safari anytime soon.
While switching will still be a pain, have you considered a 3rd-party password manager?
I'm using Enpass which works with the three major browsers, has apps for iOS and Android, and has desktop apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux. The best part about it, in my opinion, is that their syncing backend lets you choose which cloud provider you want to sync with (they support six or seven different ones), including a generic WebDAV/ownCloud one if you want to host your own.
It's not perfect, but having something cross-platform and cross-browser has a lot of appeal.
I agree about the performance on OS X. I still find myself trying to figure out which tab is pegging the CPU and about:performance is not helpful.
Another nice feature Safari has that I rely on is "show all tabs". Yes there are various "works in progress" trying to replicate the old tab groups / panorama functionality but I find them lacking or incomplete. Mozilla really hasn't done anything to improve the many tabs UX. Even Chrome might get something like tab groups:
What specs are your device? On a mid-2012 non-Retina MBP with a regular HDD, Firefox Quantum made my laptop feel like an entirely new machine. It was significantly faster than Safari, nevermind Chrome.
We all have wants, but I can't blame FF for not pursuing them if the numbers in the link can be believed. Safari has a much smaller adoption rate than even FF, so it could be argued FF are doing more things right. On a link about desktop browser adoption, I don't see the value of complaining about FF issues compared to a lesser adopted browser or comparing to a mobile browser on an OS that doesn't allow real browser competition anyways.
> I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago...
I was in the process of switching to Firefox from Chrome, and a few days after installing Firefox on iOS it interrupted me with a notification advertising Pocket. I immediately uninstalled it and haven't looked back.
I use Pocket, though not with Firefox. It is a very good and useful (and free!) service. I wouldn't disregard a browser just because it comes with built-in integration.
It wasn't about Pocket itself but that Firefox was rudely using notifications to advertise to me. So I went back to Chrome, which has never done anything like that.
Lol, you mean apart from prodding you on every single Google site to "switch to a better browser" or the websites which misleadingly show the "Sign in" button with your name already filled in(!!)
I moved back to Safari exactly because the User Interface is much better and it does not feel like an electron app like firefox (and chrome) does. I love the native look and feel and it’s a pity Safari is the only browser on Mac OS working this way.
on my iMac my issue with Safari is that if I tab away from streaming content or such it reduces the quality so when I switch back to that tab or the browser I have to wait a few seconds for the quality to go back up.
this was very noticeable with twitch where I tend to have more than one stream up. I will pop up mail to reply to something and watch Safari drop the resolution behind mail yet firefox does not do this. I haven't found a solution to it yet
> Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated.
Mozilla have put a tremendous amount of effort into the "ugly on every platform" cross platform tools over the years, from XUL to whatever the current one is. Developing a native UI for each platform would have been less effort and given much better results than continuing with this tried and failed approach.
Their latest attempt at theme support is just laughable and was very obviously not QA'd. In text areas I get the dark background theme from my desktop and the dark text foreground from the website css and it's made firefox unusable for me.
This is on top of things like their recent breakages to extensions so things that used to work (vertical tabs) still don't. And this only broke so they could go multi-threaded and then quickly had to add throttles so random sites couldn't hog every core.
But it seems mozilla are more concerned with re-writing things in rust, tying users into various web services and god knows what other side projects while they continue to avoid improving their core product.
I'd love to see firefox regain market share, we need an open source browser that's not controlled by a spyware company, but on their current trajectory firefox will dissapear into history and mozilla themselves will be the primary cause.
Every single rewrite of a Gecko component in Rust has been accompanied with architectural improvements, most notably Stylo. Nobody is rewriting things just because Rust.
And those architectural improvements broke things that worked for me previously, from my point of view they aren't improvements at all.
I'm a user, we should I care that they are making architectural improvements while they rewrite things in a different language when there are so many obvious issues preventing me from using it?
At this rate they will be rewriting it for no one.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience. But architectural improvements are done to improve performance and stability. I can't think of a single Rust component that shipped without extensive performance measurement to demonstrate improvements in the important metrics that users care about.
> demonstrate improvements in the important metrics that users care about
And yet market share is plummeting, doesn't that indicated that your metrics for what users care about are completely wrong?
It's hardly me alone having this experience, most firefox users had there extensions break for no visible benefit. Anyone with the non-default ubuntu theme has the same issue with text boxes, which indicates a complete lack of QA.
I also have a 15 year long emotional attachment to firefox and a desire to see it succeed, if you can't convince me these changes are for the better then good luck with the rest of the world.
Unfortunately market share is more about being about to efficiently distribute your product than just the quality of said product.
Mozilla is suffering from not having its own platform - they could have done so by keeping FirefoxOS alive and use the growing success of KaiOS today. Looks like they are not ready to come back because... reasons.
Firefox OS was a terrible idea. Gecko is horribly slow as it is, and they put it on low-end, under-powered mobile phones. As it was expected, using it for a few minutes made you want to hang yourself. I know they met with bosses from telecos, I wonder what faces they made when they showed them how the mobile behaved.
I used to have a Flame, the FirefoxOS development phone (which was the higher-end FFxOS device but was still bellow $200), and it was WAY snappier than my current Android phone (which is a $400 one!).
> Unfortunately market share is more about being about to efficiently distribute your product than just the quality of said product.
Firefox has broken out of this before by being a better product. Not being default on any platform is nothing compared to back in the day when IE had >95% market share and sites were made to work with it only.
These days even many linux distros are defaulting to chromium, that's the one place where it could be the "native" browser.
Has it? I've got a vertical tab extension that was made not long after but the tab bar along the top is still there. It broke something that worked great for the better part of a decade.
I didn't see any indication as to their methodology for how they're calculating these stats. It's probably been said a zillion times before, but if it's JavaScript-based you can safely assume that they are incorrect as it's likely there is a large intersection between people browsing with an ad-blocker, private browsing, or with content blocker and those people using Firefox.
Looking at netmarkshet website and web requests it seems this pulls from gator.io for metrics. Looks like 3k-4k websites have this data which lines up with the previous statment.
https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/
It probably almost doesn't matter if they're wrong - if they see this decline in users, true or not, then so will people monitoring users to their websites, and they will be likely to stop testing their sites on Firefox.
Also it's a drop - do you think the number of people turning off JavaScript has gone up since Quantum? Why would that be? It's either that or less Firefox users.
It's not so much that users have turned off all JavaScript but blocked tracking elements. Take a look at Content Blocking (formerly Tracking Protection): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection. It makes it dead simple to enable and disable for an average user and blocks tracking elements like Google Analytics, etc.
In addition to the higher prevalence of privacy (/ad blocking) conscious users on Firefox, Mozilla has also been aggressively making it easier to enable tracker blocking natively, and turning it on by default in certain cases. This has been happening with progressive versions as they're more confident it won't break large numbers of sites. Rollout of those features does actually mean this type of data needs to be interpreted differently depending on methodology.
Probably. Mozilla getting funding would depend on these numbers. And one of the most common addons is user agent switcher. For awhile Netflix allowed Chrome on linux and not Firefox (even though they assured me that wasn't the issue). But I could get around it by doing a user agent switch.
People do this for fingerprinting too. I'm sure there are plenty of people that always have it on and set to Chrome.
Also, Mozilla higher ups might be using these statistics to see how worthwhile the new features and work they have done.
> it's hard to argue that drop isn't related to a drop in the underlying number of users
We would need more data to determine that. What the site here is showing is a decline in the percentage of marketshare, which is a relative measure, not an absolute one. Even if Firefox were seeing a net gain of users, if it's doing so at a slower rate than the market is growing overall, then that would be reflected as a decline in marketshare.
Very interesting link, thanks! Frankly, I'd much rather see that submitted to HN than a site like netmarketshare, who are known for applying opaque weights to their data in an attempt to normalize regions.
Chrome has adblocker too and I's say the number of people using them there is similar or even bigger. On the other side is the number of peiple actually using privacy-related addon very small. Even on Firefox it seems to be something around 5%.
Though, Firefox now has some blocking-mechanisms on it's own. Not sure if they are activated by default, but it would be interessting to see how they influence such usage-collecting scripts.
1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser. This is partly because other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers, and mainly because (as an extension developer) why would you code for browser X when you can get more users on browser Y?
2. Anecdotal evidence, but every time an update of Firefox (and most notably Quantum) is released people laud how fast it is. On my 2015 Macbook running Mac OS Firefox has never been faster. Maybe there are things behind the scenes such as caching playing a role, but web pages load slower, scrolling feels sluggish, videos drop frames and freeze or get out of sync. It isn't an enjoyable experience compared to Chrome or Safari.
> 1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser.
You say this, but on mobile, the only major browser that supports extensions is Firefox. Not Chrome. Not Safari.
I'm a heavy Firefox+addon user, but I just don't use phone browser enough to even bother using addons. (And Firefox for Android is pretty bad otherwise, unfortunately.)
Since I refuse to install apps on my phone for services I use that have websites, I'm a fairly heavy phone browser user.. so being able to adblock, block arbitrary JS (noscript), and kill tracking cookies is wonderful.
> And Firefox for Android is pretty bad otherwise, unfortunately
One problem I have with Firefox on Android is that it doesn't support the Samsung DeX desktop environment, while all the other browsers do (Chrome, Edge, Bing, Samsung Internet). Presumably that means it doesn't run well on ChromeOS laptops either. It's also noticeably slower than the other browsers.
That said, I keep going back to Firefox as my preferred phone browser, I still like it more than the others. And Firefox is definitely my favorite desktop browser, ever since Quantum. It was an enormous speed improvement over Safari on Mac for me when it came out, and I'm enjoying Firefox on my new PC laptop too.
Firefox Focus is my go to browser on Android, and it has ad blocking built in (as well as cookie / history erasure).
That said, have you tried installing Blokada from FDroid? It sets up a local VPN on your phone and routes all network traffic through it, blocking all ads in all apps. It's astonishing how many ads and trackers your phone would otherwise download in a week.
Having a VPN for ad blocking is unfortunately a really bad option, as you should already have a VPN to prevent your "open WiFi" and LTE provider spying on you.
Scrolling feels really off (non-native) to me, at least on Android - e.g. it coasts at a noticeably lower velocity than other apps after a sharp flick.
yeah and yet there it's single add-on for pull down to refresh which barely works and Firefox was constantly crashing on pretty ordinary sites i was visiting until i gave up after few weeks and returned to Brave where i don't need to be afraid to open porn website or pharmacy website without crashing whole browser
using Firefox on desktop though, can't complain much over there, but it's useless on android if it crash even on ordinary sites
> other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers
Note that this is why Firefox underwent the extensionpocalypse last year; the prior extensions model made it impossible not to regularly break the ecosystem. The next bit about "why code for browser X?" is also why they based their new APIs on Chrome's, to make it easy for existing Chrome extensions to support both browsers.
> Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser.
I'd say Firefox's support for extensions is better than Chrome's, even after the change to WebExtensions. The author of NoScript, for example, thinks Firefox has the best environment for add-ons:
I just deleted Chrome, and switched to Brave as my full-time personal browser: faster, more secure, and based on Chromium so full extension support[1].
I still use and support Firefox for development purposes, and am wedded to containers, but apart from that it's Brave all the way (especially on mobile, which has been my default browser for over a year now).
[1] Excluding anything that bakes in Google spyware, and I believe they'll do a bit more curating of extensions from a security perspective.
Even better is that it's optional, so those of us who don't want to see any ads but still want to support sites are in a position to tip / donate / potentially subscribe to sites across the web using a browser-native crypto wallet.
That also means I can financially support sites without handing over any PII data as well.
It's up to them to offer a deal to get subscriber data (marketers gonna market), but the bar is increasingly high as we see hacks like Quora.
I think we're moving to a world where publishers will see that an MVP business model is 'dollars without data', and BAT with ZKP anonymity enables that.
I am an edge-case but my favourite extensions are AdNauseum [1], CookieAutoDelete and NoScript. The first isn't even available on the Chrome store (although you can install it via Dev Mode [2]), and that's before I weight concerns like Google's dragnet. Totally agree with the Network Effect point though, and I hear Chrome's dev tools are quicker than Firefox's in DOM rendering.
With regard to 2, I've not found it to be noticeably slow, nor experienced dropped frames or the other complaints (ran on a 2014 and a 2017), but that's more likely me being unobservant.
My recreational browsing is mostly on an iPad, and the user story there is pretty desperate. I'd prefer to mimic my Desktop setup, but the walled garden doesn't afford me that opportunity. I'm cautiously optimistic that situation will catch up before I move platforms though!
Anyway, thank you for helping me see the other side a little better.
[2] - I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but there's a needless and incessant Chrome (and Chromium) prompt on each startup as follows:
"""
Disable Developer Mode Extensions
Extensions running in developer mode [sic] can harm your computer. If you're not a developer, you should disable these extensions running in developer mode to stay safe
"""
I personally find it inherently hostile, but perhaps I'm just an old man disregarding the use-case of other people!
I used NoScript forever, but recently switched to uMatrix, and it's so much better in that it gives you much more fine-grained control over what to block/allow. I'd recommend giving it a try.
uBlock Origin is a great complement to it, for when I want to block specific page elements.
I use both in parallel and sometimes it's annoying to make a video player work (or captcha). I don't know how a video player can rely on 5000 injected dependencies from 5000 different domains.
> 2. Anecdotal evidence, but every time an update of Firefox (and most notably Quantum) is released people laud how fast it is. On my 2015 Macbook running Mac OS Firefox has never been faster. Maybe there are things behind the scenes such as caching playing a role, but web pages load slower, scrolling feels sluggish, videos drop frames and freeze or get out of sync. It isn't an enjoyable experience compared to Chrome or Safari.
This is my experience too, unfortunately. I keep using Firefox instead of Chrome now to support Mozilla and their positive attitude towards end-user privacy, but compared to when I use Chrome it is an annoying product to use with the endless waiting and lag. Using Linux, so maybe it is just really only optimised for Windows PCs (arguably their largest user base)?
Really? I'm on Linux and I saw immediate changes once Quantum hit. It runs better for me on Ubuntu{16,18} and Arch. I had some glitches at the beginning, but not anymore.
The only glitch I have now is that I can't use send tabs to push a tab to my phone (but the reverse works and it is fine to any other computer). So that's not that big of an issue.
I wish I had your experience. But I switched from Chrome when Quantum came out, and it felt like a big downgrade in performance. And I feel that is still the case these days when comparing Firefox and Chrome. Granted, I hadn't used Firefox prior to the Quantum release for a long time because of the performance so I likely didn't notice the improvement as you did.
I just wish it was better, because while it does get annoying at times, I do want to support Mozilla :-/
There are a few niche plugins I use for specific sites to enhance usability that I definitely don't expect to be ported to Firefox, but even the ones that are take an understandable backseat in terms of developer priority.
For example, for more than 10 years I've been using Chrome extensions that allow you to hover over image links to view them without clicking. There are dozens of these extensions in almost any browser, but they require constant updating to keep up with 1) new image/video hosts and 2) changes to existing image/video hosts.
For me, these extensions are an essential part of the browsing experience of many websites. I've found that the same extensions by the same developers often lag behind 6+ months on Firefox vs. Chrome which makes them really useless when gfycat, streamable, imgur, etc. all stop working.
It's kinda strange how bad mozilla is in doing the obvious good. Building in a direct support for chrome-store should be a priority. Solutions like this addon have such a bad experience..
I built a browser for this: https://cretz.github.io/doogie/. Granted I haven't uploaded the binaries for the current Chromium version (easy to do, just lazy) and I also don't support extensions and there's no macOS support yet. But the sheer productivity increase for me is substantial.
The XUL extension I miss most is Pentadactyl. Tridactyl is a pale imitation, and still immature. Qutebrowser has potential, but still lacks critical extensions like uMatrix and uBlock Origin.
(To clarify: it does have an adblocker, but it's quite basic, only based on a blacklist of hosts. You can also selectively enable JavaScript for individual domains, but not yet based on both webpage and its origin like with uMatrix)
Session Buddy and The Great Suspender. I have ~800 tabs open in Chrome right now on this PC. I haven't used Tree Style Tab, but Chrome's tab-shrinking is actually better for lots of tabs (up to a point) than Firefox's tab-scrolling. I have yet to try tab suspension extensions in Firefox, so there may be a workflow that works for me there (Chrome is not ideal).
My experience is exactly the opposite. Each time I'm past 200 tabs or something (i.e. all the time), Chrome's UI starts occasionally lagging and glitching, and I'm not even talking about memory usage (overall or even just parent process alone) and how it's affecting the operating system. Even with pre-Quantum Firefox I was always pushing limits much, much further.
However I'm avoiding media- and script-heavy websites as much as possible, and block a couple of ad networks solely because of the stress that rich media ads (videos flying all over iframes and whatnot) causes for the hardware I'm running the browser on. (I don't mind ads if they don't take 8 CPU cores to render, but they seem to be disappearing from the internet.)
That's weird. I currently have ~100 tabs open in Firefox (yes, on the same computer as 800 in Chrome), and it's fine. Back in 2008, I had ~800 tabs in Firefox on Linux for a project (with TabMixPlus); it was pretty slow and unstable, but it worked.
Lol, I usually organize tabs by location so pinning them (and minimizing their horizontal footprint) is good enough for me. Further, I personally found that when I had a million tabs open, at least 50% of them were duplicates so I just started using tab deduping extensions to cull them.
Not OP, but I currently have around 80 tabs open spread/organized over 6 different windows (and two different Chrome profiles). And a bunch more "snoozing" with OneTab.
Extensions get to modify the same about:config in FF as the firefox internal settings.
Some extensions dont work after a year of being undeveloped, because the API changes. Is this really a bad thing? Opensource software uses patching as a "heartbeat" to discern whether a project is still developed or not. Hackers find holes over time, and when devs no longer fill them, the project needs to be left for dead.
Why should browser addons be any different?
I guess its a different philosophy - if the devs leave a browser addon for dead, the users should too.
Once every couple of years, the API changes and cleans out dead addons. Im not sure this is often enough.
But the best addons stay. NoScript. Adblock Plus or uBlock Origin. httpsEverywhere. The best Canvas blockers. These stay up to date.
For #2, might be the same issue I posted about on HN a while back, particularly if you have a 13” MBP. I corresponded with Mozilla employees, but I still don’t think it has made much movement toward getting fixed.
I have switched to Firefox on mobile as well. There are some occasional hiccups (rare), but the speedup and battery life you gain from ad-blocking makes it totally worth it.
For those who are evaluating, please install AdBlock before you take a call - and do try it for a few days.
Chrome lost me when it started to force-login me to Chrome when signing into Gmail, thus sharing all my website visits with Google. I switched to FF two months ago and haven't looked back. FF is like Linux: less polished, but works, and you are in control. A fair tradeoff for me.
I switched over summer and the only thing I really miss is the translation built into Chrome. S3.Translator seems to be the recommended alternative, but compared to Chrome it's next to useless. I find it very slow, constantly nagging and often it breaks websites. in Chrome the translation 'just works'.
it's even worse on android, only alternative to Chrome if you need translation it's Edge for android, which it's still using inferior translation, tried it for few minutes and saw completely opposite transmission than was meaning on the page
This is exactly where the lost me too. I'm moving towards using Facebook and Gmail in their own Firefox containers. But the problem is, I foresee a lot of sites that use "Sign in with Google" deliberately crippling their experience for people who don't expose their Google session...
I think signing in with anything other than email is a horrible idea. By doing that, you forever tie yourself (and your data) to Google. I never use those options.
I agree, but I didn't come to this decision until a bit later in my internet life, so I'm slowly unpicking a number of services.
These days if a service doesn't support email auth I just don't bother signing up for it. I control my email address and the domain used for it, I can't see a reason to use my old gmail anymore.
The window and rendering is a bit more jittery. The UI is less slick. I do find static sites render faster in FF. But JS-heavy pages are (somewhat) faster in Chrome.
The UI being less slick seems like a very subjective thing, especially when phrased vaguely and without concrete detail of what's wrong. This is especially surprising to me given how similar the two browsers now look (see a comparison someone posted in a comment elsewhere: http://9ol.es/double-browser.png).
Firefox has actually been more responsive and less jittery for me than Chrome for quite some time, but I've seen various differing experiences in large enough numbers that I suspect this is dependent on many variables. Yet any difference I observe is still minimal. Can it really be that bad?
Being visually nearly indistinguishable from chrome hasn't really worked in its favor. (quick, which is which: http://9ol.es/double-browser.png). Probably north of 95% don't know about or understand licensing differences or differences in rendering engines or core architecture. Interfaces and obvious features with compelling narratives are what matter because that's how the user engages with the product.
Asking users to go out of their way to install and use something that looks and feels identical to what they already have for reasons most people don't know, understand, or deeply care about and do not get surfaced in any meaningful way is not a winning strategy. A case has to be made in the battle of perception and the decreasingly small visual differentiation hasn't helped build it.
Al Ries's laws of marketing and branding and Donald Norman's models of differentiation apply equally to all products regardless of the economic and institutional structure that builds them.
Is that the timeline here? In that case it was Chrome using its market position cleverly and Firefox not responding adequately. I can only speak for linux interfaces btw.
Small "bullshit" interface changes can have dramatic user and marketshare impact. We can all sit around and wish the world didn't work this way but it's not going to change.
Firefox has alternatively had closer-to-curved-rects or boxy tabs for practically its whole lifetime. Chrome went heavy on diagonal-edged tabs early on, and relatively recently they've been undoing that.
they're even mimicking Firefox's scrollable tab-bar since it's such an obvious win over a million super-narrow tabs that you can't possibly identify.
> they're even mimicking Firefox's scrollable tab-bar since it's such an obvious win over a million super-narrow tabs that you can't possibly identify.
The non-scrollable tabs are what I miss most about Chrome. I know I'm not in a majority there, but I wouldn't call it an obvious win.
about:config has `browser.tabs.tabMinWidth` :) just set it to 0.
Though I firmly believe that about:config is in no way a user-viable option (as useful as it can be, for dev purposes), so I don't intend to imply that means "firefox has that too". It doesn't, it just has a workaround.
yea, doesn't really surprise me. most about:config is pretty hit or miss. out of curiosity tho: was that before the UI overhaul (i.e. have you done it since it became HTML+CSS instead of XUL)?
personally I'm loving Tree Style Tab, so I don't really pay attention to the tabbar any more.
It was within a month or so after the official release of Firefox's new theme that it became publicly known that Chrome was working on a new theme, too. So, there was no way they could have adequately responded to that. You just can't rebrand twice within a year.
I'd kinda agree. As described in Zero to One, to convince shift users to adopt, you need a product that is an order of magnitude superior to the incumbent. Incremental changes or parity mostly won't cut it. A browser would have to be radically innovative or better to gain share which is difficult considering the services Google has hooked into it.
Mozilla did this (below) once, about 15 years ago when knocking IE from it's 95+% 2004 marketshare, they need to find a way to do it again:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - R. Buckminster Fuller
It was quite a bit different then. IE was in the "first mover" batch. Chrome is the "last mover". It was easy to knock out the first mover as things had stalled yet there was still lots of innovation to be done. But browsers have since commoditized, and the door for differentiation has closed. Especially as browsers inherently need to match each other through web standards. I don't see a way for 2D browsers to rise up against Chrome. Firefox, after hundreds of millions of dollars over the last several years, hasn't made radical changes.
Personally, I'm chasing VR and AR to be the new wave of the Web, where browsing experience will be heavily differentiated.
Netscape Navigator had substantially beat IE as a first-mover in the market and the mind.
IE wasn't a first-mover, it was bundled with the computer, it won as the most available, just like Starbucks vs. Coffee Bean - later comers can be assumed as more readily available then their perceived equivalencies. Firefox broke through by shattering the consumer's perception of equivalence.
The door for differentiation in the same way as before has closed, but not for differentiation in other ways that people immediately perceive.
Lacking a prescriptive direction that Mozilla Inc should take to establish this doesn't invalidate the observation, you can describe an illness without knowing the cure.
It's more than just visually indistinguishable; historically a big chunk of the Firefox user base have been (a) power users, and (b) people who listen to power users for computer advice.
Power users ceased being particularly important or influential in the early 2010s. Computers have gotten easier for an average person to use and maintain without needing to be de-wormed every 4 months, all browsers are "good enough" unlike the times if IE6, Google's brand is ridiculously powerful and is further able to push Chrome via Android preinstall.
All of the other browsers have some other vector to push their browser. Safari, Edge and Chrome are all preinstalled on OSs and chrome is advertised on the biggest website in the world.
Even if firefox is slightly better than the rest it doesn't matter. Chrome only exists because IE was so bad people went out of their way not to use it.
Chrome only exists because Google were afraid of lacking control over the stack they use to deliver their content. Firefox was already 'good enough' long before it ever appeared, and Google could easily have dedicated engineering resources if the problem with Firefox was purely technical, much as they do with Linux.
FWIW a lot of Google behavior can be cast as an analogy to a paranoid control freak. Net neutrality is an obvious one, the incredible lack of any demarcating information useful for traffic shaping in QUIC is another. But of course both of these are really about citizen rights and privacy :)
Only if you as "good enough" define "with Javascript even slower than IE." I've personally never used Chrome, because since even the first days it already had more "protected" installation than some malware, and that never made me confident in their intentions (and I've never liked Chrome UI) but Firefox has always had performance problems. As Chrome appeared it had extremely fast JS, and only then others "woke up."
Mozilla was working on a tracing JIT for JS before Google announced V8, although I believe V8 was released before the first version of Firefox with TraceMonkey was.
To be fair, FF shot themselves in the foot. They didn't keep pace with Chrome. I use FF and think it is better NOW, but that wasn't always the case. I think that's where they lost their market share. I'm glad they put the work into Quantum. But it is going to be hard to regain that market share.
The classic problem of being first to market in software, is that your competition can learn from your design and move forward with a fresh code. Firefox is still trying to shed off code from a decade ago.
The history of browsers is littered with legacy code being defeated by new code.
Except Chrome wasn't some brand new project. It was Webkit which was KHTML and dated back to the mid 90s. They just wrote their, uh, chrome layer and js engine a half decade later which were, and still are, reaping tangible benefits.
The problem is that firefox is only getting faster if you happen to have a half dozen 4+Ghz cores to burn. If you run it on low end hardware all these rewrites in rust/etc to improve parallelism seem to actually be slowing it down and apparently increasing its overall resource consumption. Older versions would run up against a gig and a half or so, and start garbage collecting. Now, its not unusual for me to see 5+GB pinned across assorted firefox processes.
I've been meaning to play the high speed video capture game with a couple of versions running on the same hardware to see if my feeling that the GUI is actually getting laggier despite posting better benchmark numbers.
More and more I find myself spinning up falkon, or other browsers because I want to actually be able to play streaming radio in the background with my browser without having it skip if I open amazon.com, or some other JS heavy site. Worse, I'm still running 56 on a couple of my machines because I can't stand how laggy the newer versions are on those machines.
I've been having the exact same issue. I tend to leave a relatively large number of windows/tabs open and Firefox is starting to edge towards unusability on a 4x3.2ghz + 16GB RAM system simply because its performance and memory consumption is interfering with other applications.
Though I really think most major browsers are somehow all simultaneously losing the thread. Websites are fundamentally just formatted text and extremely basic graphics, for the most part. It's not like I have 50 high end webgl demos running. Rendering text and basic graphics is not something that should be consuming anywhere remotely near the resources that have become typical. If javascript is the problem, then that should be dealt with and not simply accepted as the price of doing business. In many ways I feel like the mantra that 'premature optimization is the root of all evil' has gradually turned into 'any form of optimization short of making sure you don't run O(n) in O(n^2) is not a priority.' But like anybody who's worked on a project knows those placeholders that 'you'll get to later' end up being exactly what goes live. And when optimization is disregarded, you get text/graphics rendering struggling to perform on systems millions of times stronger than what sent us to the moon.
>Now, its not unusual for me to see 5+GB pinned across assorted firefox processes.
I've been using Firefox continuously since version 3.1 and it's been bothering me a lot recently. Circa 2011 Firefox was perceived as a memory hog, and MemShrink effort was started to keep it under control, which resulted in the nifty areweslimyet.com website (which was transparent and good PR too).
Now MemShrink seems defunct, areweslimyet is obsoleted with seemingly all the progress undone as of last update in 2017, and the new Perfherder website is inscrutable for an outsider.
In my case, Firefox balloons to gigabytes of RAM with just a few tabs open. If you need more than 8GB of RAM on your system to do basic office work something has gone rather wrong (and RAM prices are historically somewhat high right now).
Pretty much my experience. From time to time I see some article claiming how Firefox is getting faster and more awesome, but when I try it out I never see any improvements on my modest hardware.
How sad... I have switched to Firefox about 8 months ago and have been really enjoying the browser. It's just difficult to compete against the giants of Google and Microsoft. I mean anywhere you go there will be messages like "Try a faster browser- Download Chrome" on any Google site, or the extremely difficult user interface to switch default browser on Windows. I really wish for Firefox to succeed in the long run, just dont know how it could be possible.
Unfortunately this is becoming more and more frequent. We are back to 2000s I.E. only websites... :(
I'm afraid there are only some options:
1) Mozilla aggressively tries to be Chrome compatible.
2) Focus on Developer Tools in order to "motivate" Developers to use Firefox instead to develop their apps.
3) Somehow a miracle comes and they gain market share.
Actually i like the direction of Mozilla is taking now days where they are adding lots of interesting usability to Firefox. Like taking screenshots, share/send menu etc... But it seems this is not enough to get new users :(
It's not really a button, they convert the button to switch to a weird link and clicking the actual button means to keep Edge. Its misleading, and most people thought they switched because the clicked the button but actually that didnt do the switch. But agree it's not necessarily difficult, just misleading.
There's a very interesting pattern in the data if you look back from 2016-05 to 2018-04 (chart has 24 month limit). Each April and October shows an appreciable drop in Firefox market share. This tells me that the Firefox desktop/laptop we are losing are on Linux and decide to switch to another browser when they upgrade their (probably Ubuntu based) disto.
I myself run Firefox on Xubuntu but stick to the LTS releaaes. The biggest impediment from switching from Chrome to Firefox was being familiar with the Dev Tools. One day I just did it and the change wasn't as big a deal as I thought it to be.
We really need to keep Firefox alive, it's our best, free-est option. With Microsoft replacing Edge with a Chrome-based browser this is as important as ever.
> One day I just did it and the change wasn't as big a deal as I thought it to be.
This is so true, if everybody here thinks that should change but worried about this. It takes just a few hours, almos all features have an equivalent if not exactly the same and in the same place.
Except FF's tools are slower and the experience is overall worse. A lot has improved about firefox (including my old main complaint, that the renderer was slow) but saying the dev tools are at all acceptable when you're used to Chrome's is sadly still a stretch.
Which dev features do you find unacceptable? I still do switch back and forth, mostly at work when pairing. The other times I use Chrome and Safari is for web dev on mobile devices.
Beyond that I don't find much difference and there are as many times I find that the Firefox dev tools can do things that I can't in Chrome.
To me Firefox is just blundering with it's marketing. It should be touting it's amazing features and showing how it eats chrome's lunch until chrome has no choice but to implement those features.
They should showcase containers, tree style tabs and other things that chrome can't do and are massive productivity and quality of life changes. Instead they market privacy and performance features and change their brand, which let's be frank barely interest even 9% of the people.
Any time I explain to people who see my browser about tree style tabs or containers, at least 30% switch, usually within days.
Sad news. Firefox is my favorite browser, and I like their Dev tools the best.
All the important stuff done in a browser should not be trusted to one that is closed source. (I know chromium is open source, but almost no one is using it).
A good balance of browsers is important, I've already seen "you must use chrome to view this site."
I wonder how many FF users roll with a user agent that identifies as chrome or some other browser, and how much (if even significantly) it affects surveys like the one in this article.
I wonder that too. I used to have it always on and set to Chrome when Netflix was blocking DRM enabled FF. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people just always have it on, especially considering how popular of an add on it is.
If you don't want it on desktop for some crazy reason, at least replace Chrome with Firefox if you're on Android. uBlock Origin support alone is worth leaving behind any benefit you get with Chrome.
One thing I would mention, though, is that using google services will all downgrade themselves if you use firefox for android. For example, this is the exact same search in chrome: https://i.imgur.com/uK8Tr9I.png and in firefox: https://i.imgur.com/pEBphaQ.png (both using the same android phone). It's even worse if you're trying to use a "near me" search. I don't want to put an image for privacy reasons but major functionality is removed, such as the ability to view the business's hours(!) Also, google maps doesn't seem to work in firefox. And when it does, it's very slow.
However, there's a really easy solution to this! Install a user-agent switcher and have firefox identify as chrome. These problems will all immediately go away.
Honestly, I haven't cared about the speed of Firefox for a long time now. I use it everyday, and I want to keep using it in the future, not because of it's speed, but because of the features and options.
For example: there is a way to completely hide the 'X' from the tabs. I love that. It's weird for some people but I like it that way. Chrome cannot do that. There is a feature request, but it was marked as won't fix for a long time now. Who decided that, I don't know and I don't care.
I want my options like that and many others that Firefox has and Chrome hasn't. And with the danger of being misunderstood here, I would consider switching, if Chrome had a few features/options I want. But the fact that Mozilla people care and spent 10 min to add the option for me or an add-on, makes them stand much higher in my mind.
This isnt good for the users, because Firefox respects the user.
Firefox is build for the users, and all features are made with the idea that the user has control.
Many privacy features are started at Firefox.
Chrome isnt a bad browser, but isnt made for the user, it is made for commercial websites/webapps.
An example is that Firefox has a good tracking protection system.
Firefox didn't respect me when they sent my data to Cliqz, when they installed Pocket without my permission, when they started showing me ads on my home page, when they remotelly installed a Mr. Robot addon without my permission, and so on. The "Mozilla sides with the user" argument needs to die and be buried already. Mozilla is at best sloppy and at worst as evil as Google is.
I use Google Docs and noticed that one apparent dark pattern Google uses with Chrome is that you can print directly to a printer from Google Docs in Chrome whereas with Firefox (and presumably any other non-Google browser) you're forced to download a PDF first. It's confusing enough that my wife, who prints periodically from Google Docs, asked to switch back to Chrome.
I switched to desktop with Quantum and love it. But the huge win for me was switching to Firefox Mobile on my iPhone. It may just be a wrapper for WebKit. But it integrates with Firefox Sync.
The killer feature is "send this tab to your iPhone". Great when you're looking at a recipe / restaurant address / funny picture on your computer and want to have it on your phone.
If I notice something cool whilst at work I can send to my Home desktop, and vice versa. when at home and see something that would be useful at work send it there.
This is pretty disastrous for the world. I don't know how much it effects Mozilla, but it's terrible for people's privacy and a web that is at least a little independent of a small number of giant companies who have a history of being bad actors.
Also, how the heck is Internet Explorer more popular than Firefox? Even Microsoft doesn't want people using it.
What an irony. I've been using firefox for 10+ years and now it is faster, uses less resourses and doesn't crash. As a user, this is the browser I have been waiting for.
Yes, dev tools features could be expanded as well as the plugin franework(vimperator!).But these are non-issues for regular users.
> now it is faster, uses less resourses and doesn't crash
XUL extensions removed, power users are angry and leaving. And the power users were the main driving force for Firefox adoption - mostly not by themselves, but as influencers for people around them.
They switched to browser with the same powerless extensions indeed. Because the difference is no more. An attitude of Mozilla Firefox team is against power users clearly for so long, and that's an only logical outcome.
No it is not. If all the alternatives werent so dismal I would have wiped FF from all my machines when they first switched to quantum and then had no extended support frame for ESR52.
It was a slap in the face of the core user base and they did it carelessly. They did not have the necessary information in place early enough and did not fix bugs that prevented people from porting their addons before the end of the last pre quantum ESR. They more then deserve where they are today
I switched from Firefox to Chrome around 2009. I switched back to Firefox this year with the release of Quantum. Its performance has seemed fine to me even on my late 2012 iMac.
I think the switch back to Firefox was worth it if only for the privacy and to claw back some control from Google.
And yet, it is one of the only usable browser for most users thanks to the Tree Style Tabs extension. I still don't understand how people can browse the web with Chrome :|
With how bug-infested TST is now, this is not a strong reason anymore. Also TST has not many users anyway. Seems it's something around 115k, so majority can live well without it.
Before chrome, FF outcompeted IE & safari on features. FF's features against OS makers moats like making their browser default and unlimited finances.
Once mobile got added to the mix, default, preinstalled browsers had even more advantage.
The feature/quality gap just isn't enough anymore. When FF gained all that market share 10-15 yrs ago, it had tabs years before the competition. It had add-ons before the competition. You could have IE6 or you could have FF with firebug, "tabbed browsing," as blocking, and cool web 2.0 stuff like social bookmarks and whatnot.
It was a massive feature gap. That's no longer the case. Hard times.
Dropping support for legacy extensions absolutely gutted what made Firefox different from every other browser. I'll use Firefox 56 and NoScript until the end of time before I use a browser with tabs above the address bar.
Dropping support for these extensions made it possible to create Firefox Quantum. Also, I'm using Firefox with tabs on the side with Tree Style Tab and a simple userChrome.css hack. No need to stay with an outdated version just for that.
Yeah, I resisted the upgrade to FF Quantum for a while, but ultimately made the move and it's worked out well. The biggest things I needed were a WebExtension version of Tree Style Tabs, plus the restyling options from https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx .
Having the tabs at the top is much better because of Fitts's law [0], essentially making their size infinite in one direction and therefore much easier to reach with a quick flick of the mouse.
Although it is possible to move the tab bar using user CSS [1].
You're also missing out on a much faster browsing experience with the newer versions. In the older version I remember the scrolling lagged when I opened a new tab in the background, that hasn't happened in a while.
Not enough people are using addons to be such significant. It seems more that firefox had a slight growth last year because of quantum, but market grew faster, while some of that growth inflated again.
Usernumbers went something like 250->300->275 Million. Seems they are somewhat stable in numbers.
Just providing my piece of anecdata that me, and everyone in my family, have switched to Firefox Quantum on all our desktop machines, and aren't looking back.
(My wife has never used anything but FF, but she begrudgingly updated, and is now a happy user. I switched from Chrome; I can get way more tabs open on my cheap Asus 2-in-1 with FF.)
Quantum would make my work laptop (Macbook pro, 13 inch touchbar 2017) overheat constantly. It just always had performance issues and I troubleshooted every way I could. I never figured out what exactly was causing it. I tried to switch to Firefox for 2 solid months, but I just couldn't do it :(
You can improve the performance by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in the about:config settings. This will disable the transparency of the window, but it will reduce the overall resource consumption. The reduction is significant, approximately several extra hours of Firefox use, and your lap will thank you.
I came back to Firefox after years on Chrom{e,ium} because of their bad evolution. FF is far for being good IMO but far less obscene than actual Chrome.
Anyway, brace yourself: an era of "proprietary web" is coming, with a worst lock-in than Windows era in the '90s.
netmarketshare collect data from their slim clientele base. A few years they had to modify their data using weighting to get inline with other websites. Other sites have more accurate data which will reflect browser usage more accurately. I recommend using wikimedia's data. It's one of the biggest sites that open up their usage to the public:
I give Firefox a chance every few months, and even after all their work I still feel like it has occasional performance issues and I end up right back in Chrome.
For me Firefox desktop differentiates itself from all other major browsers for their built-in content blocker and support for other privacy-oriented features.
I've been using Firefox for a couple of years now. It is genuinely very good and I encourage people to give it a shot if you haven't. You might have been like me and swapped to Chrome when it got stable and Firefox was in bad shape. Let me tell you, Firefox has made ENORMOUS improvements in every area. It really is worth trying again.
Remember how crucially important it is that we have more than one web browser.
if there was a warning that said “all activity on this browser will be sent to google and sold to advertisers” chrome would still have 60% market share
The internet Moloch has thrown its weight around and now most of us sheep are using its browser to get tracked daily.
I'll hang on to Firefox as long as I can and might move to Chromium (i.e. NOT Chrome) if necessary.
Now as Microsoft has given up and switched to Google's Blink engine, given importance of the web and scary perspectives of it becoming owned by a single corporation Google competitors (as well as its industrial customers - it's never good to rely on a single vendor that can always do just whatever it wants), NGOs and GOs should start funding and promoting Mozilla now IMHO...
It’s unfortunately already been the case. Mozilla’s money comes directly from Google and Google has had the heavy hand over all web standards decisions for years now.
Firefox on Linux appears to adopt the GTK themes (in my case Dark Themes) for web elements (Forms, message poxes, etc) and I have great difficulty removing the customisation. Chrome based browsers do not do that and it's one of the primary reasons I still use Chrome.
I flip flop between Firefox and Chrome often. Lately I am on Firefox because I was trying to isolate a fatal crash I kept having on my brand new Macbook Pro (it would lock up completely, but cursor would still move and audio would still work and then it would inevitably shut itself off)
Since ditching Chrome the issue has not come up again ... but not sure if it's correlation or causation.
There are a few things I do not like about Firefox but the web inspect or is definitely miles ahead of Webkit.
> On a general day I have around ~15 pinned tabs and more than 50 other tabs open and FF handles it like a breeze.
I just commented about this somewhere else but basically no. Something here is wrong.
Firefox fans say it's fast, Marketing materials say fast, even benchmarks say it's fast
...but it just feels slower than the rest to the average joe.
There is something somewhere that isn't translating to speed somewhere. In a previous comment I've highlighted my experience with youtube and amazon as places where Firefox feels slower/clunkier compared to chrome. I really like Firefox, even love Rust but there is a problem somewhere that the firefox devs and hardcore fans just keep denying exists.
Immediately after install, it prompts you to install a chrome extension, it has a big google chrome icon that takes up 1/16th of my screen. It has no mention of how to do the same in firefox.
Naturally, I responded by searching both "polar firefox addon" and "Save to polar firefox addon" on both DuckDuckGo and Google. All return a long list of results that don't include a save to polar addon.
I go to addons.mozilla.org and search "Save to Polar", I don't find your extension.
At this point I would typically have given up and assumed you just don't have a firefox version of the extension... but since you've just told me that there exists a firefox extension and I'm curious I'll keep going.
Your website mentions it nowhere.
The chrome store doesn't let me install it in firefox.
The GitHub readme doesn't mention it.
No GitHub issues mention it.
The subreddit linked from the website has no sidebar. Searching on it finds no mention of firefox.
Checking the other github repos under the same account as the polar repo I see a "Polar Chrome Extension" and not a "Polar Firefox Extension", but maybe those are the same things these days since both support web extensions. Nope, that repo is a placeholder with nothing in it.
Going back to addons.mozilla.org and just searching "polar", filtering for extensions, and scrolling through the results (only 5 thankfully) reveals nothing.
I search "Save to Polar" github' on both duckduckgo and google, hoping to at least find the source of the addon. Neither return any relevant results.
At this point I'm astonished there are any firefox users of that addon... as far as I can tell it doesn't exist for firefox.
Edit:
It occurs to me that maybe you meant looking at other people's addons. So I looked at the most popular addon I know of, ublock origin. Chrome says "10,000,000+", Firefox says "4,794,583"... which is 40%!
Sorry.. didn't see your comment. I never said we had a Polar FF extension.. We don't have one yet but should soon. I think since ours is reasonably small it won't take time to get on FF.
If you're looking to see adoption rate, what you really want to be comparing isn't absolute numbers of Chrome vs Firefox users, but rather the adoption rate of your add-on vs your potential users.
If Chrome has 10,000 potential users of your add-on, Firefox has 100, and you have 98 Chrome users and 2 Firefox users, then the add-on adoption rates are 0.98% for Chrome and 2% for Firefox.
Of course that's just shifting the hard bit, which is figuring out who your potential users are.
You did not say much about your methodology, so just general things that I imagine played into this:
- What is a "user"? Is it someone who downloaded it once? Is it just straight up the number of installs that ever happened? Or is it someone who actively uses the extension on a frequent basis? If you go by the numbers on the Chrome Store and on AMO, they likely have different definitions.
- Firefox recently introduced support for an extension API which is quite similar to the Chrome extension API (for the most part a superset), so lots of Chrome extensions have been ported over from Chrome just as recently and as a result will naturally not yet have as high user numbers.
- Firefox has traditionally had more powerful extensions and still continues to have a more powerful extension API. So, there's going to be extensions that are better, which only exist on Firefox, whereas similar extensions that were ported over from Chrome, therefore exist on both, will largely be ignored.
Analysing this on a non-empirical level:
- Firefox has less users.
- Chrome has somewhat less functionality built-in, which means users will have a higher need for extensions.
- With Firefox's extensions having traditionally been more powerful, the user base should still have many tinkerers.
- Firefox extensions are much more thoroughly vetted and malware is essentially a non-issue. On Chrome, it happens more often and I have seen people removing non-essential extensions for that reason.
- Chrome users are less likely to be privacy-conscious, which somewhat negates the previous point again and means they're more likely to just install an extension without thinking about it too much. On the other hand, Firefox users should be more likely to install privacy-enhancing extensions.
- Firefox for Android supports many extensions as well (though its user base is not the biggest).
There are deprecated extensions that can't be ported to Quantum and were actually useful to many users. And then Quantum is a memory hog, jumping from ESR 52.9 to the current version it needs a couple GB more for my workflow. It's faster and looks nice, but my computers are powerful enough to make that pretty much irrelevant.
For this small speed gain and unless I switch to Waterfox or some other community effort that tries somewhat hopelessly to keep alive what many users want, I have to buy more memory and stop using FireFTP and Session Manager. I just needed Firefox, not a Chrome competitor.
I've never jumped on the whole Chrome hype train, and while Firefox for a while was slower, it didn't bother me that much. A pity many jumped and never returned, even when Firefox caught up.
Now three major milestones I'm personally waiting for (for the Linux version) are Firefox using Webrender (efficiently) with Vulkan on Wayland.
Another one that's still missing is fully functional Servo, that can run in browser.html on some mobile Linux UX like Plasma Mobile.
> I've never jumped on the whole Chrome hype train, and while Firefox for a while was slower,
Firefox has always been slower than Chrome. I was resisting Chrome very hard and long yet at some point Firefox's slowness became intolerable and I was forced to go Chrome.
With the introduction of the Quantum engine Firefox has became reasonably fast again and I switched back but as soon as I've installed all the extensions I want it became extremely slow again so again I have switched back to Chrome (which runs all the extensions I want without a noticeable slow-down).
I will switch to Firefox as soon as it becomes as fast as Chrome is (and I only have 5-8-years-old built-in Intel Graphics in my laptops, not fancy GPUs so GPU-accelerated rendering won't help).
Basically chrome seems to continue to be popular. MS is struggling to get people to use Edge and Firefox is doing way better than Edge and is just barely out-competed by Internet Explorer (what's up with that?). I'm guessing a lot of old devices are stuck on some old version of windows.
But bottom line is it holding up nicely against MS. A lot of people seem to default to installing Chrome/Firefox instead of whatever MS/Apple is pretending is the browser of choice. To the point that these are not even the default choice on their own OS and struggling to remain in second/third position.
So not that bad for Firefox. I'm back to being a full-time Firefox user since about one and a half year. Really liking the post quantum performance and also really enjoy having fine grained control over trackers, ads, and other crap. As other people point out, their mobile browsers on Android are worth using as well. Unless you like being tracked and blasted with ads of course.
Time to make another contribution to Mozilla. I have not been using Firefox on my MacBook or iPad, but I recently bought a Linux laptop and as an experiment I am only using Firefox. Nice experience. I might install Chrome just for accessing Google properties because I like to isolate interactions with Google, but that is in no way in criticism of Firefox.
One thing keeping me from using Firefox full-time is that when using heavier web applications like Google Cloud Console or Stackdriver it always hangs, shows a warning that the webapp is taking too long and asks me if I want to wait or stop it. This happens every time I try to load something. I looked for a way to disable this behavior but with no luck.
I'll never give up on Firefox (been using it since the Phoenix days). Mozilla has the right intents for its users, and Apple probably comes a distant second if you consider both privacy and the open web. I believe we would all lose if we don't evangelize Firefox and improve its numbers, since its marketing budget may not be as big as the others'. More people need to know that Firefox is good (or good enough).
As others have said, I also find Safari on macOS to be faster, smoother, and consuming lesser power. But it just doesn't have the extensibility of Firefox (the extensions that I depend on regularly), and no Container-like system. The only other browser I use occasionally is Brave, having boycotted Chrome permanently a little while ago (with the user profile/cookie fiasco that the team backed out of later on).
P.S.: Of course this comment was written from Firefox. And donating to Firefox (in addition to regular donations to Thunderbird).
I used it since the Phoenix days too. But I stopped at version 37 because they no longer had the right intent for it's users. In fact, they no longer target the same users at all.
Now it's all about making sure DRM protected video plays, making sure Facebook works, and making sure ignorant users doesn't accidentally break their config or install malware. No longer can the user determine what add-ons they can use without switching to a buggy beta build. And lets not forget the removal of all of the customization code and the add-on holocaust right before this. Most new add-ons still have only a fraction of their former functionality. And they'll never get it back because Mozilla isn't about that any more.
Mozilla has abandoned their long time users in an attempt to become Chrome. And it has, just like all the other browsers. And that's why it's losing market share. It's the same crap but without a monopoly position to promote itself like Google or Apple.
I used to install it for my family and friends that needed help in building or setting up their computers. Now I do not because Firefox has the same anti-user policies as Chrome or Safari.
Still has more market share than desktop Safari and is still #2 behind chrome on the desktop. Probably its market share is being eaten by chromeos devices. Ultimately it would be really bad for the internet to have Google effectively own it, regardless of whether they have made mistakes or not firefox as a project is too important to allow to fail.
It's now close to one year that I have completely switched back to Firefox. For performance reasons and also fear. Fear of Google having full control over browser market and pushing forward their own agenda. Their revenue is mostly ad-driven. What if they decide to change technology in such a way that prevent people like me from using add-blockers and privacy-protection measures against their sophisticated tracking techniques? This fear above all other fears, drove me toward alternatives, including Firefox. Not only I use it and promote it, but I help with development, however limited. I report bugs and invest my free time fixing them. That's what I can do as an indie developer.
Web technology in general and DOM to be specific gives us freedom. They took parts of it away with DRM and pushing it into browsers and standardizing it. I don't want to see this happen for the rest of the web that is remaining.
I switched back to Firefox after Quantum (where its speed on my MBP became finally tolerable again, even if still slower than Safari) after a brief intermezzo with Safari (where the extension "eco system" plainly sucks) after being a long time Chrome user.
The problem is, I still have to actually force myself to actually like Firefox. Chrome IS, all-in-all, the better the browser - except that annoying privacy thing which caused me to switch in the first place...
A major source of pain are still the development tools in Firefox. They work flawlessly in Chrome, hardly work at all in Safari after their dev tools rewrite a couple of years ago, and show annoying quirks in Firefox (like the Debugger, which sometimes simply loses a source file, making it impossible to place breakpoints there) and have, in general, a slower UI than Chrome's.
I switched away from Firefox years ago, because it felt very bloated, plus they'd break backwards compatibility pretty often, and every other update meant one or more extensions would stop working. Over time I grew tired of the "eeny, meeny, which one this time" routine.
I use Firefox nearly every day and it's pretty good. If it was the only browser in existence it would be hard to complain. However, when switching between chrome and firefox I'm always much happier when I switch to chrome than I am when I switch to firefox. And it's not because of site rendering or anything like that, it's always a matter of UI, speed, and resource usage. The firefox UI is pretty clean but it has just too many weird clunky edges. For example, there are many situations where chrome just "does the right thing" while firefox does not (and it's more common for chrome to be easily configured to do something different if you want it to), this is especially true with handling tabs and the new tab page. Updates are another example though, chrome's updates are fast and nearly painless, firefox is a lot better than it used to be but updates are slow and it's far too common to launch the browser and for some reason see that it's not updated.
There are also many cases where doing "ordinary things" while browsing will lead to firefox slowing to a crawl or using crazy amounts of resources. Chrome is a notorious memory hog and yet somehow it manages to behave better than firefox in most situations, at least for my browsing habits. I also really like chrome's search integrations, if I want to search wikipedia all I need to do is hit ctrl-t then type "wiki <tab> search string" and boom I'm there. Same thing for youtube, amazon, etc. It's a small thing, but it's the addition of all the small things which make for an overall superior experience.
For reference Mosaic was my first browser and I've always been open to switching over to whatever browser had the best experience. I was using phoenix project builds before they renamed them, I was using Chrome back when it was in beta (speed, process isolation, minimalism, better acid2/3 scores, what wasn't to like?), and I keep checking on other browsers to see if they're worth switching to. The Mozilla org is great and firefox is a solid browser but it needs to up its game if it wants to be seen as a state of the art browser.
I started my web dev company in early 2003. My son, a big gamer, pushed me to not use IE as our primary development browser and to use this new thing called Firefox which I think was version 0.9. To appease him, I would test our web pages in Firefox and started noticing differences with IE. So I started asking questions.
"Why does the HTML standard say things are supposed to work one way, and it does in Firefox, but not in IE?"
I would be laughed off any forum I visited. I would still be laughed off a lot of forums until 2012 or so. With this announcement, you will still find people who think there was nothing wrong with IE and will even think "Edge is great!".
Well, like I used to tell people years ago, if Edge is so great, why is Microsoft dumping it?
Mozilla can do a lot to help users that other browsers don't do, like block ads by default, ship with a bigger collection of fonts and block external fonts by default, make all animations click to play, disable annoying featuring by default, CSS features that are used primarily to break UX or render things too slowly, like "position: fixed", etc. But Mozilla chooses not to do any of that. It chooses advertising corporations and publishers over its own users, just like Google, but tries to offset that with controversial "privacy" PR.
What is the point in having a separate browser engine if you don't leverage any features to make it more attractive to users? You can't beat Google by just chasing it.
Coincidence or not, I got a request from the Microsoft Feedback Hub just yesterday, asking me about my experience with Firefox. I found it very strange, Microsoft asking about a non-Microsoft product. Today I read that MS is replacing Edge with Chromium. Or maybe not?
I begrudgingly left the FF community when it became far, far easier to debug and develop on Chrome. At that time Chrome was competing with Firebug, and it was clear that the Chrome team had far more resources to be able to make continual improvements to the development experience than Firebug made. So I switched for development, and for practical reasons all other usage followed.
I wonder if my story is similar to others. From what I've seen Firefox now looks as though it has much better tools in-built and so I could consider the switch back, but I'd love some input on that.
Also, things I develop obviously have to work on Chrome, so that's another impediment to me switching over entirely, which is a shame.
Personal reasons why I'm using Chrome right now instead of Firefox: Chrome is faster, or feel faster, why I don't know, but it seems to perform better on low end gear. It starts fast and most pages don't seem to "block" while loading. Second, I despise Firefox dev tools, period. I hate the console input being stuck in on a single line, this isn't how most CLI UI work, so why does it make sense for Firefox to do that? it doesn't.
Obviously since Google started pulling that "logged in Gmail == logged in Chrome" stupid stunt, I want to move away from Chrome, but Firefox will seldom be my first choice as an alternative.
Have you made any attempts to try out the new Firefox Developer Edition? They've done some revamping recently of the Dev tools (to the point that, yes, multi line is supported in the console)
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the reason I don’t switch to Firefox is their lack of AppleScript support, and I’m certain several other automators share that feeling. Without AppleScript support, Firefox is unusable as the day-to-day browser for many of us.
And that’s just one of its problems on macOS. Every time there’s a Firefox thread on HN, I see people complaining about performance or lackluster support for a macOS feature, such as Keychain.
Firefox isn’t losing because people don’t care about privacy; it’s losing because it sucks so much in certain areas, many of us who want to use it just can’t bear to.
I've been using firefox on my personal computers and phone as my main browser for ~18 months. Honestly at this point I prefer it to chrome. On mobile the ability to use native extensions like ublock origin is amazing.
I use Firefox as my main browser (but I'm a Linux user, so I'm already away from mainstream). (edit: tree-style-tabs is the killer feature/extension, and I can never go back)
I do still pop open chrome for the devtools when I'm working on web stuff. I wish I didn't have to, but there's one thing that FF doesnt have that I need at work: goto line in the sources browser.
Lots of our files at work are several thousand lines (I know...), and its a huge missing feature to me.
I might see if I can code it up myself and submit a patch, but that's not exactly trivial.
I use both. I mostly use Chrome for Google apps and for video streaming. I use Firefox as my main browser. I've been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. One thing I've noticed is that Firefox's plugins don't work as well anymore. Lastpass on Chrome just works. Lastpass on Firefox is always fighting with me. Downthemall disappeared. Using UBO breaks sites on Firefox much more often than on Chrome. That makes me sad.
One thing I love about firefox is, it has a top bar which shows the title of the webpage in full, when have multiple tabs open, the title in the tab-bar is invisible.
The main thing stopping me from using FF is it's poor profile support.
There is a profile manager but it sucks. You have to launch it directly (can't open from a FF window) and you can only have one profile active at a time.
Compared to Chrome where I can seamlessly have my work and personal profiles active at once, allowing me to do all of my work in a segregated profile while still having access to all my personal stuff like music playing in another window.
I like Firefox but I don't use it as my main browser anymore as it just feels too out of place. I use macOS and it doesn't zoom with pinch to zoom, it doesn't scroll like everything else on the system, etc.
I know these are pretty small things in the grand scheme of things but they make it feel awkward to me. Chrome isn't perfect but it feels a lot more 'at home' on macOS than Firefox does.
I use Firefox as my desktop browser and love it, but I generally use Chrome in Android for mobile browsing; seeing this stat was discouraging, so I just now switched to Firefox for Android.
The [-] collapse buttons for these threads are weirdly a lot more difficult to click (specifically, register a press with your finger) than in Chrome... Anyway, I think committing to FireFox is more important so I can deal with it.
I switched back to Firefox a few months ago and haven't looked back. I've also noticed that people are increasingly distancing themselves from the Google ecosystem. I have even had less technical friends looking at alternatives such as Brave.
Looking at the numbers, Perhaps the non-ie/Safari/Chrome crowd is being fractured by the alternatives available but to me it certainly seems to be growing.
I left Chrome after it started to overload my dual-core cpu (it simply can't properly handle more than 15 tabs), lag, stutter and delete my tabs around version 56. There were also horrible font rendering issues, which were fixed I think by the 68th (unbelievable) release. Firefox Beta is my browser of choice now, both on Windows and Linux based OSs
I still use Firefox on my work computers and personal. The reason simply being that I feel the performance is better than chrome most times. I used Firefox / Mozilla for many years, then went to chrome when it was new and shiny, but I’m back to Firefox as I believe it truly is the better product. They just need to somehow market it better to people.
Firefox keeps getting faster and faster. (Firefox dev tools are however terrible slow, so I use Chromium for the dev tools). I'm afraid that if Chromium get 99+ market share the community will become lazy and it will get slower and slower as new features are bolted on and we will get "designed by committee" issues.
It’s the smallest feature but I’ve never been able to switch to chrome because of it.
The ability to highlight text, right click search and have it open in a new tab in the background.
Chrome insisted on opening in the foreground and I found it really disruptive. They have extensions that change this because but they never worked well for me.
On our business news sites, Firefox is 5% of desktop traffic. Which isn't too crazy; lots of our readers probably can't install their own browsers. The crazy part is Chrome is at 65%. Chrome ate all the marketshare that IE/Edge lost in the enterprise over the past few years.
Some corporations seem to do adopt Chrome as an official workplace browser (next to IE). I am wondering what would it take to lobby them to adopt Firefox. Does anybody have any experience pitching Firefox inside their own company? Is Mozilla doing anything to get into the enterprise?
Is there a way to see the raw numbers? Eyeballing last few months it seems that Chrome grew significantly mostly at the expense of internet explorer, but also other browsers.
This trend could be explained by a large number of new chromium users. Or maybe Google figured out how to push Chrome better.
Still puzzling to me. Chrome with its non-native, childish looks, questionable google integrations; and on the other hand the non-optional vertical tabs for firefox. I've never seen a tech-savy chrome user in the wild. Neither among colleagues, nor among friends.
I switched to FF from Chrome when I got a new computer for work and it has been great. I was a FF user back in the day when it was a massive improvement over IE. Now it feels "fine enough" in terms of feature richness, and it has great performance.
I just switched back to Chrome last night, after about 10 months on Firefox (on Mac). The only reason I switched to Firefox is because Chrome started showing these little blue notification dots on pinned tabs, and these were really distracting. Firefox had them too, but I figured out how to hack them away with CSS.
I found out that these dots disappeared after Chrome redesigned their tabs, so I switched back.
Chrome feels much faster and nicer to use. Firefox would often get really slow and start freezing. The Firefox dev tools were often really slow and unresponsive. If I was working on a big React app the devtools UI would often just disappear and freeze for 10-15 seconds. I think it was known issue related to source maps. My workaround was to close the developer tools before I refreshed the page, and then reopen them. So I'm glad I don't have to do that anymore.
I really missed Chromecast support. If I ever wanted to watch a video on my TV, I would have to pick up my phone and open the YouTube app, or just open Chrome and paste in the URL.
I had to open Chrome every time I had a Google Meet call. Clearbit only provides a Chrome extension and doesn't support Firefox (but that's a problem with Clearbit. They really need to add support for Firefox.)
I liked Firefox's "Multi-Account Containers". It was nice that I could sign into multiple accounts at the same time, and have all the tabs in the same window. Chrome has profiles but they can only open in a new window. (But that works fine.)
One other advantage of Firefox: It kind of lags behind Chrome in some ways, so if your website works in Firefox, it almost always works in Chrome. When I was only developing and testing in Chrome, I would occasionally get an error report from a Firefox user. That never happened while I was using Firefox. Now that I'm back on Chrome, I'll need to be more careful about cross-browser testing.
Is their vision "big standards player" or "niche, boutique" browser? If the former, I guess this is bad. If the latter, as long as they execute well and have a critical mass of users/contributors then they should be ok
I wonder what the numbers would be if FF forks were included. I see Seamonkey in the list, but no Waterfox or Pale Moon, etc. Surely wouldn't be any great number, but is curious the forks are not listed.
I recently switched to FF with DuckDuckGo for privacy purposes. I do find the dev-tools to be noticably less user-friendly than Chromes, however I think it's a small price to pay for the priacy.
That's less than proportion of the population with color blindness, yet I bet more developers test their sites for Firefox compatibility than making them usable by differently-abled people.
Firefox died to me when they rewrote their plugin system and i had to give up on vimperator. Yeah, yeah, quantum is snappy, but so is Chrome. The plugin ecosystem was an actual differentiator.
It still makes my battery on my 3 different MacBooks die 10x as faster than chrome and and safari. Literally the only reason I don’t use it, but it’s apparently not a problem for anyone else.
When you can make Quantum feel like Safari (or at least Chrome) on my Mac, then I'll switch. Right now it drains my battery faster than I can say the word "battery drain".
I've been using Firefox on mobile almost all the time for a year now. Also on Chromebook side I have been trying to use it but it still has its display issues with Chromebook.
A Web browser can put video on the screen and audio on the speakers. So, any such browser should also be able to put video also into a file, say, file type MP4.
I’ve tried to switch to Firefox many times, primarily on Ubuntu 16 and 18. But Firefox crashes about once a day for me. I can’t remember the last time Chrome crashed :-/
I had close to ~220 tabs open in 3 windows open on a windows machine that's not especially powerful and didn't have any performance issues. It wasn't even using that much memory...
Firefox is only browser where multi-row tabs works -- all other browsers are impossible to navigate with more than 8 tabs open. I frequently have 30+ tabs open in Firefox (sometimes as much 100).
That being said, Firefox has a bunch of small performance / hang issues that have nothing to do with the number of tabs but add up over time.
I might have mistaken the cause for my lagging problems but in any case the nagging feeling of Firefox being laggy and not always very responsive is there, and as you said it adds up over time.
I mentioned in another sibling comment of mine that my 2nd gen i7 CPU was very heavily hit by all Spectre and Meltdown mitigation fixes and is noticeably slower now. Still though, Chrome works snappily and Firefox does not. :(
To clarify: my Win10 PC has a 2nd-gen i7 CPU and it has been very heavily hit by the dozens of Spectre and Meltdown fixes. Compared to a year ago, it feels like it's running twice as slow. :(
Many apps are not affected but Firefox definitely is. It starts hiccuping with only several tabs open while Chrome is working just fine.
The PC has 32GB of RAM so it's definitely not memory.
It's nice and responsive on my 4-year-old Win8.1 desktop and my 1-year-old Win10 laptop, with dozens of tabs open. I'd be curious to see the common factor between the people who say it's slow, because it certainly isn't for most (some?) of us.
This sucks :( I'm using firefox now, after 55 it's faster than Chrome for me. I hope they regain market share. We need an option not tied to a massive company.
Dear lazyweb: How can I make my favorite browser - Firefox - use MacOS's native full-screen when clicking "full screen" in a video? Thanks for your reply.
Although there is some vested interest, although indirectly. Decisions are still tied to money, which is why Google has traditionally been the default search engine in Firefox.
> Google has traditionally been the default search engine in Firefox.
There is little if anything wrong in tracking people who don't care about being tracked, those who do can easily switch the search engine to startpage.com, duckduckgo.com, Searx, Seeks or whatever.
Agree. Though default options hold great power, Chrome users could also navigate to DDG. Also hard to advertise themselves as the user champion of privacy going up against Google, and then route everyone to Google, while pocketing their money. I think it's okay to take their money but seems hypocritical.
Also remove the desktop filter and watch Safari jump up to like 20% and FF down to 4.5%. Usage of the Web on mobile is huge, and it's even bleaker for FF there.
I tried Firefox for the last few months as my default browser, I just switched back to chrome.
The amount of lag it caused to the system was beyond bearable.
It's a shame because I really like the features, like containers, unfortunately, it's just not good enough for my heavy use.
A few months back I've started a journey to move to FF.
1. First installed it on my Android phone so I could use uBlock Origin. Then found 2 other amazing extensions, Cookie Autodelete (less tracking, more privacy and no newspaper paywalls) and I Don't Care About Cookies (no more annoying Agree to Cookies popups). I couldn't be happier!
2. Despite some reports about FF issues on MacOS, I went ahead and installed it. Memory usage having many open tabs dropped considerably, maybe 30% to 40% compared to Chrome. Everything works great, speedy and solid.
3. I've installed FF on my home Windows 7 media center. Strange, but that's where FF is noticeably slower than Chrome and seems to have memory swapping issues, where some tabs will be swapped out of memory and take a while to load. The machine has only 4GB RAM though and is not very performant.
4. I've discovered Pocket and I'm really liking it. Although the recommendation engine is a total waste of time, the text extraction is great.
5. I love Firefox Focus, which I use sporadically, and I wish that was the default engine everywhere. I'm not sure if the next generation FF will be based on Servo or Blink. Whatever it may be, I hope it's as snappy as Focus.
Some issues or quirks I had with Firefox:
- Bookmarks with search keywords. Chrome OpenSearch integration was much nicer. I had to define several bookmarks on FF to have at least the searches I use the most.
- YouTube videos in Windows feel sluggish and I had to install a Windows Media extension to be able to see them. Chrome has video support out of the box.
- PDF viewing feels less responsive, but the FF viewer interface is fine.
- Downloading UX is better on Chrome. The FF down arrow on the top bar is very hidden, I tend to forget I was downloading something.
i use chrome because firefox mobile is so slow on my iphone 5s and i like to sync tabs between mobile and desktop, so chrome on mobile means i have to use it on desktop too
"... And because our computers control much of our personal information and daily activities, proprietary software represents an unacceptable danger to a free society."
Mozilla is way better then the others but still not great.
The numbers are so low because people do not care about any privacy whatsoever. I hope the pay the price one day and regret it.
To name just one reason FFX sync is prate and secure by default unless all the others who use your bookmarks to sell them. You by default (you can disable it) share all you bookmarks with Google. Hell yeah hi Google I have torrent sites or whatever PRIVATE stuff bookmarked. Here have it all and store it instill I am dead. And when I find out about it and disable it you already have what I need from my initial sync. Thanks yeah you are so nice to me Google.
I know a few year(s)? ago FFX was still the most user in Germany (where people generally do care more about privacy and things like that). But when I look at the stats now it seems Google has managed to even Brainwash the Germans.
Mozilla is not even very good on the claims they have. They may be working closely with the Tor browser team but I think Firefox should essentially become something like the Tor browser. Their Addons have become a walled garden as the recent cause about that paywall prevention Addon that got kicked of the "store" showed. If I got that right people can not even install it in stable versions of FFX.
Also that "Profile" Generator showed here on HN as well shows they have several deeps flaws in the browsers that need addons for fixing like canvar tracking and stuff I did not even know about. The Tor brower does all this things by default. Why does Firefox do not even have UI to some of those settings and others even need extra addons ...
I could go on. Here I am criticizing Mozilla when I actually thing there are the best browser Vendor ever. They are an non-profit. They have done so many great things for the web and there was only as extreme short tiem where I was about to switch to Chromium because the devtools or Firebox where really really slow and clunky. I am a Forefox user from the very start and I am really disgusted how Google pushed their Browser in their searches to the point that even Linux users who have if they really want to install Chromium. They should just use FFX. But what are they doing? They install Chrome. Google has even brianwashed Linux users into thinking they need Chrome. Chrome is 99% chromium with 1% proprietary Google crap on top of it. If really baffles me how stupid people are.
I lost could on how many Linux tutorials and "First things to do after installing ..." I read that had Chrome in there. Just yesterday I read a top answer on AskUbuntu about how to enabled unattended installs for PPAs and Chrome was yet again there in the example. Chromimum is right there in the sources you Idiots. Why would you infest your almost entirely open source OS with this Google crap?
Firefox is a good browser and Quantum made is faster and less resource hungry. Mozilla works on this new Browser engine with Samsung that speeds things up by a lot. Many parts are already in FFX today but I think the main parallel GPU rendering stuff is not yet. Not up to speed with that. Anyway Chrome may be "faster" in benchmarks or "feel faster" but believe me this few milliseconds are really really not worth it.
Mozilla also (until now) allows Adnauseam that clicks every ads it finds, based on uBlock origin. Chrome forbids this Addon lol but you inlike in FFX just can sideload it. I love that concept and its the Adblocker I use. It may help them with tracking me but I just love the fact that I might cause them pay per click losses.
Mozilla is not as good and as anti advertising as I would like them to. I mean Google payed 40% of their income at a time how independent can they be? They redirect search tos the this evil data snake for money to this day. I heared their CEO talk about how she likes some ads but she does not like the tracking lol. So she wants ads that do not relate to her so why not just no ads at all?
Oh the other hand where would they be without Google money? I am wondering if they would be able to make it crowd funded with Wikipedia style "annoy beg to donate ads" across half the screen.
More around 90% of the income. I think they would sustain better at a smaller capacity Wikipedia-style, but not 1000+ people multinationally. The ROI doesn't seem to be there versus the growth.
I can read you because I went to my settings and turned on "showdead". But you are shadowbanned, so you don't know you're banned. It sucks and it's really mean; it's a big thing I don't like about this website.
I used Safari as my primary browser for about a year, mainly because it was easier on the battery. I gave up on it because:
1. I kept running into Safari-only issues on websites. The most memorable one was on the American Express website. I couldn't switch between cards because the selection widget was broken on Safari.
2. The marketplace for Safari extensions is anemic, a problem which is only going to get worse[1] as legacy extensions are about to be totally deprecated[2]. Firefox did the same thing, but at least they moved to the WebExtension API. Safari App Extensions are very limited in what they can do.
3. Safari's developer tools were not as good as Chrome's or Firefox's.
The most common complaints I've seen have been that it doesn't support their extensions or they need their web sessions to sync to their Android/Windows/Linux device.
I don't want to attack a strawman here, but your comment makes it seem like you think that programmers simply write code that they're told to write, providing no input on the project at all. This isn't true at all: just because you're not a product manager doesn't mean that you don't have a chance to influence the final product; in the extreme case that you're told to essentially "shut up and code", you can exercise your control by walking away from the project if you don't like where it's going.
I have read comments in this thread suggesting that FF's performance is not that snappy but I cannot seem to notice any difference. Maybe my dev senses are not that strong ... maybe the benchmarks do show a difference but I have never felt FF to be any less performant than Chrome.
I am tired of listening to people screaming their lungs out about privacy when their actions don't reflect their opinions.