Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
robert.ocallahan.org
robert.ocallahan.org
Firefox did well when their only real competitor (MS) was actively trying to make their own browser bad in order to preserve the relevance of the desktop OS and their dominance in that area.
Now that they have a competitor (Google) which is actively trying to make their own browser good in order to increase the relevance of online services and their dominance in that area, Firefox hasn't fared so well.
I don't necessarily disagree with the author of this post, but it doesn't seem like moral high ground alone is going to make Firefox any more successful than the other things we "should."
What I wonder about is what larger systemic or structural shifts would have to occur for Firefox and the other "shoulds" of the world to have a chance.
I don't think vegetarianism will ever be the norm, but there are enough vegetarians to create a market for vegetarian food. This creates options for people who don't want to eat meat for ethical reasons, increasing their freedom to live life the way they want without it being prohibitively inconvenient. A similar argument can be made for desktop Linux or using Firefox.
For Firefox to gain market share, either the perceived "cost" of using Chrome has to skyrocket or Firefox has to be superior for a common use case. Ethical arguments attempt to do the former, but imho nothing short of google charging for chrome will increase the cost.
Mozilla needs a killer web app that people want to use. Something like gmail that attracts millions of people, with features added to Firefox (new APIs or whatever) to make the app much more effective.
Chrome for Android does not.
I'd consider that a killer feature.
That is just a question of habit and education. If you are used to veggie food, the meat is not appealing to you. Tastes are things we build, not stuff we are born with.
Vegetarianism will not become a norm, if it does, because of one factor only. For such a strong cultural habit, you need several factors. It may happen under a combination of the following:
- meat production is costing too much ressources (land, water, energy, etc) compared to the food it produce - meat production does manage to feed the growing propulation; - mass meat production will revealed to be more and more unhealthy, either by nature, because of the artificial products we use for it, or because of the pollution it causes; - it's effect on global warming will trigger a similar reaction as the one we had about CFC.
I doubt it though. I see more and more people consumming less meat around me, I'm a vegetarian myself, but I can't see a shift happening any time soon.
BTW, morality is a very weak factor. It never stopped people to drink and do something stupid, it never stopped people from bying iphones built by children, and it never made them choose a proper president.
The election system in the US prevents that from ever happening.
It wouldn't hurt either if we nerds, pros, superusers etc etc stopped spreading FUD like "Chrome is way better".
Humans are also very good at self deception. Even if you sort of know your beef is butchered, it carries little meaning since you never have to see it happen.
Same goes for Google stealing your data or Apple making pretty phones with slave labor.
Basically pretty much everybody needs to be smacked hard with a stick now and then and told what kind of picture they are really painting.
I never understood this argument vis-a-vis butchering, since it implies pastoral farmers are particularly immoral people, unlike "regular" people who would stop their behaviour if only they'd see the results. Is that really your view?
In my opinion, the opposite is true: growing up ignorant of how it works is the only reason why they may be shocked when they find out. If it was a common sight, people would be OK with it just like most people growing up in farms are.
I think you're right - it's not that ignorance is required, just that the moment of discovery is a bit shocking.
What's old is new again.
That's not really true, about them being appealing. There's several Italian pasta dishes that are quite tasty which I frequently make for myself because they're super-cheap: spaghetti, penne, etc. Pasta plus a tomato-based sauce is totally vegetarian AFAIK, and what kind of weirdo doesn't like spaghetti? (Of course, a lot of people eat it with meat sauce or meatballs, but that's not necessary for the dish.)
There's also macaroni & cheese; lots of people like that.
Of course, the problem with these dishes is that 1) personally I don't want to eat spaghetti or pasta every single night, and I'm probably not alone there, and 2)you don't get much protein this way.
The problem with vegetarianism is that there just aren't a lot of good plant-based protein sources that are actually appealing, and you need this for a balanced diet. Meat is a simple and easy way to get lots of high-quality protein into your diet.
I believe vegetarianism is going to die out in the next century, as artificially-grown meats are developed and commercialized. If you can eat filet-minion-quality beef cheaply and without having to kill a cow to get it, why bother being a vegetarian?
>Mozilla needs a killer web app that people want to use. Something like gmail that attracts millions of people, with features added to Firefox (new APIs or whatever) to make the app much more effective.
The problem with this idea is that it breaks the whole idea of the web, which rests on open standards. Web browsers aren't supposed to be walled gardens that are incompatible with each other, they're all supposed to show web content the same way. We should not be going back to the bad old days of site X needing browser A to work.
The main thing that differentiates browsers is features and extensions. Edge, for instance, is a mostly unusable browser because it doesn't support all the ad-blocking extensions that Chrome and Firefox do. Performance is also a big feature, and Firefox has been lagging there for some time by sticking to having a single process.
Personally I think that Firefox would be fine if they'd stop wasting time and effort on bullshit features like Pocket and work on making it the fastest, most memory-efficient browser possible, which also best supports uBlock Origin and other advanced features. It'd probably also be a good idea if they could support Netflix viewing out-of-the-box the way Chrome does. If they got all that right and working really well, and touted themselves as being "spyware-free", they'd have sufficient marketshare to be relevant and hold their position, which is all they really need to do. They don't need to be #1, they just need to be large and influential enough to keep the others in line and prevent fragmentation of the web like we had in the IE6 days. If 40% of the market wants to be suckers and use Edge and look at copious ads, let them; they don't matter as long as they're not a clear majority.
1. There are no special chemicals or compounds (protein, iron, etc) in meat that can not be found elsewhere.
2. The protein myth is strong in the US, but it is hard to find almost any food that lacks it. Have you ever known someone who was protein deficient, anywhere? It is estimated that 6% of the US is veg and 40% of India is vegetarian. And these people are typically healthier then the rest, not deficient.
3. Speaking of India. You think vegetarian food cant be made to taste good, or is too bland? They have had it mastered for thousands of years. The point is not that Indian food is good, but that vegetarian food is not necessarily bad. Just because you had one bad veggie burger, does not mean there is not great veggie food out there that would appease most of the world.
4. And speaking of taste, taste is not a static condition. Yes, there are some things we have evolved to like, but your taste buds themselves are malleable - not fixed as most people will tell you if you go on a diet for a couple weeks.
I never said there were. The problem is that they are not easily found elsewhere, in an appealing form, in sufficient density, like they are in meats. If you really love lentils or some crap like that, more power to you. The rest of us think a lot of that stuff is nasty.
>2. The protein myth is strong in the US, but it is hard to find almost any food that lacks it. Have you ever known someone who was protein deficient, anywhere? It is estimated that 6% of the US is veg and 40% of India is vegetarian. And these people are typically healthier then the rest, not deficient.
Wrong. Look at the average height of people from India. Now look at the height of children of Indian parents who immigrate to the US. Compare it to their own families back in India, to eliminate the effects of socioeconomic differences between groups/castes there. There's a huge height difference, and it's because of the readily-available protein in the diet. The kids end up growing much taller than the parents even, and much taller than their cousins back home. I've seen it myself up close. It's not genetics, it's diet: childhood nutrition has a huge effect on height.
So no, it's not a "myth", and yes, lots of people are protein-deficient, it's just not as readily-apparent as people who are visibly malnourished as in truly impoverished places where they're literally starving to death.
And as for American vegetarians, they fall into at least one of two groups (there's a big overlap): 1) people who are already adults, and probably aren't extremely physically active/athletic, so they don't have the high protein needs that growing children do and can take advantage of, and 2) people who are basically religious about their vegetarianism, so they're extremely well educated about what foods contain what, and go to a LOT of trouble to make a balanced diet out of it (whereas the rest of us just throw a little meat into our diet and avoid excess and otherwise don't have to spend a lot of effort or attention on our diets).
>3. Speaking of India. You think vegetarian food cant be made to taste good, or is too bland? They have had it mastered for thousands of years.
Yeah, if you like Indian food. People who didn't grow up with it frequently don't. At least it's not nearly as bad as some southeast Asian foods, like Indonesian, but it's pretty much inedible to western people unless they tone down the spices.
>Just because you had one bad veggie burger, does not mean there is not great veggie food out there that would appease most of the world.
No one's made a good veggie burger, and that's because it's impossible. If they could do it, they would do it, because there'd be a lot of money in such an invention. They all taste like cardboard. The only way you're going to make something taste like real beef is to either use real beef, or chemically or biologically replicate the beef somehow. You're not going to achieve that by growing some readily-available plants and mixing them up somehow; that's like thinking you're going to build a Ferrari out of typical bicycle parts.
>4. And speaking of taste, taste is not a static condition. Yes, there are some things we have evolved to like, but your taste buds themselves are malleable - not fixed as most people will tell you if you go on a diet for a couple weeks.
Basically you're advocating somehow either forcing or convincing entire societies of people to suddenly change their taste preferences. That's not likely to happen. And don't forget, here in many western nations (esp. the US and UK probably), we are exposed to the cuisines of other nations a lot (though sometimes they're heavily modified to sell to Americans--Chinese food is infamous for this). It's not like Americans have never tasted Indian food; we have. There's lots of Indian restaurants here, plus various other exotic cuisines (middles eastern, Ethiopian, etc.). It hasn't caused Americans to all suddenly switch.
I am not mandating that Indian food replace everything else. I am saying there is plenty of good cuisine out there that does not include flesh. Like you said we are brought up eating meat in the US. This is nothing more then a cultural tradition, not a requirement. While vegetarianism is not necessarily free or easy for everyone, it is very accessible. It is lazy to continually blindly support an industry based on violence (or argue for it in your case).
You like its "easily packed density", but somehow hundreds of millions of vegetarians manage to survive. Hm.
And, like you said there are more people eating less meat which is an indication of this cultural change. Speaking of impossible vegetarian burgers, what you say cannot exist already does. In fact it is even called Impossible. I have tasted one. To me they are disgusting. But that is because they actually taste like flesh. These were designed for meat eaters, not vegetarians. Of the people I tried it with, only the meat eaters had any appreciation for it. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/21/482322571/sil...
I won't eat white pasta (or white rice/bread) in general.
Type 2 Diabetics?
I see what you did there.
There have been countless practices which were once the convenient norm but are now seen as archaic or barbaric, at least in some parts of the world;
Slavery, serfdom, monarchies, dowry, arranged marriage, virgin sacrifices, involuntary circumcision, blood feuds, war crimes, excessive pollution... I'm sure the transition period in each of those cases was anything but convenient, and in some places it's still nigh impossible to convince people to stop these practices.
I think it's not so much "swaying" the public at large but continuing to provide sufficient education to them, and the technology to ease the transition, then at some point the transition just happens on its own. Of course the inverse is also possible and people sometimes revert to old and worse practices.
To be clear, we are comparing all this to using chrome and having browser homogeny?
I'm a theological non-cognitivist, coming from a Muslim family. Putting involuntary at the front does not make circumcisions which had the consent of an underage kid OK. I'm very sensitive about this, and while I love my parents, I still feel violated because of their decision.
Just wanted to share. No offense or anything taken from your comment of course.
Funny how this conversation sided into vegetarianism. Because I am one who sides with the moral issues - as a vegan, Firefox, Linux user. I represent the ones mentioned here who will go the extra mile, which is typically the harder route to do what is right, not what is easiest.
However, I dont think this route is for everyone. And I think legitimate competition between browser features is key. I do use both browsers, but only when necessary with Chrome (Chromecast and Netflix, some Google products like Photos). However I think there is not a concrete answer which browser is a better user experience. And these things change over time. Yes, when Chrome came out it was a great fast experience (mostly because there were no addons and there was no cruft in the beginning), but Firefox overtook it in the benchmarks several times since. Its been back and forth.
These reputations are strong, but dangerous. I'm a developer and still come up against the "Java is slow" argument. I'm no fan of Java, but I find it to be anything but slow these days. Yes, back in the early applet days it had a bad name and decades later it cant shake that reputation. This is technology! Things change fast. Dont get stuck in the fud.
1: on a desktop. I also regularly use FF/chrome/edge on a laptop, where FF's slowness+ power usage is possibly slightly noticeable (not very), and I also use multiple browsers on mobile, where FF clearly is behind (though it's not clear how much of that is due to FF+chrome, and how much is due to websites simply only ever testing on mobile chrome and possibly iOS - not that it does the end-user any good)
The difference between the browsers is overstated. If it weren't for vendor lock-in effects, you could use FF today and barely notice the difference.
The developer tools are slow, lacking in features and can reproducibly be crashed. FF is relying on broken extensions for things that should be core functionality. The "Awesome bar" is so mediocre, I wonder how it got its name.
I've been using FF for about 10 years and tried to stick with it, but there are so many quantifiable things that it's worse at that I recently switched to Chromium and it did make my life and work faster and easier.
If your statement was true, I'd still be using Firefox.
Process sandboxing is not a user-visible feature; it's (1) a largely hypothetical security feature (hypothetical in the sense that it's not empirically obvious that complete sandboxing is better than alternatives), (2) a means to discourage locking and make the browser snappier.
Note that by now, firefox does use process sandboxing, and indeed has used process sandboxing for the most critical bits (plugins-i.e. flash) for years. Benchmarks do not back up your claim that Firefox is a lot slower than chromium; nor is that my experience. For a long time, scrolling was smoother on firefox than on chrome - I often read long webpages in auto-scroll, and chrome was janky on some pages firefox was not - and the reverse was true too (although to this day, when it works, it never works as well on chrome as it does on FF, for some reason).
The FF developer tools have at times lacked some features, but there have also been features they've had before chrome, e.g. the rendered font display. I can't right now think of a devtools feature in chrome that I'm missing in FF. I certainly debug in both all the time.
For a very long time, font rendering on windows was better, and hi-dpi worked while it didn't on chrome.
Chrome's a good browser, and it's still snappier today. But the difference is really splitting hairs at this point. There are much larger differences in day-to-day usability that people put up with all the time. I don't buy that chrome's undeniable strengths are sufficient to be noticeable unless you're actively looking for them; and chrome also has bugs and issues other browsers don't; it's not a pure win.
My phone, however... Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin is the best mobile browsing experience I've ever had.
On desktop it's google having (almost) monopoly on search and abusing it market its other products.
On mobile, it's Google abusing its power over the platform to make OEMs use Chrome in the same way MS pushes OEMs to ship Windows and Secure Boot and various other shit.
Firefox could be perfect (and it isn't, because what do you know, developing good software takes insane amount of money) and it wouldn't help.
These days, that's no longer the case. I know that I certainly did not switch from Firefox because of Google's marketing efforts or underhanded tactics.
But what if you're right? In a world where, I agree, it takes an insane amount of money to develop good software, where Google has more of that money than Firefox does, and where Google has really effective market leverage, do the "shoulds" have a chance? Is the future we want even a possibility?
I don't personally think that it is, which is why I wonder what larger changes we would need to see for that to become true.
What follows here are my observations on what are the advantages/disadvantages of the two browsers:
The biggest advantage to Chrome that I can think of is it has its own implementation of Flash in it, rather than using the Flash plugin. This allows Chrome to not have another container process, unlike in Firefox which does spawn a container process for Flash, which uses a ton more CPU cycles for the inter-process communication. This makes some sites crawl because of all the junk that is added to them, probably for advertisement networks.
Other than that, Firefox seems to give you more freedom with what extensions can be installed on it and allows a larger variety of addons that is available at the main addons site, third party sites can be used, although that is going to get more difficult in the future. But it is better than Chrome with from what I understand is going to disallow extensions from anywhere other than the Chrome store. An example of what will not be on the Chrome store is 'Cleaner for Facebook', which I remember because the story was so recent. Here is the story 'How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension featuring 24k+ users' at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12442048 .
Nowadays: inertia and familiarity. Firefox is sometimes faster and sometimes slower, but there's not enough of a difference to tip my hand, and I already have Chrome configured the way I want (including extensions, multiple sessions, and the keyboard accelerators and widget positions that have burned themselves into my brain). And the cross-platform sync works great; I don't know if Firefox's is better or worse, but it would take more than 0 time to set it up, so I don't care yet.
It's also completely integrated with Chromecast, which I use and enjoy.
I'm not GP, but I switched because Chrome had better dev tools. For a while, I was using Firefox for browsing and Chrome for dev, but I ended up using just Chrome. It also didn't help that Firefox dropped its 1st party browser sync (Weave) and Chrome had bookmark & history syncing natively
No, it didn't. It was renamed to Sync and incorporated into Firefox itself. It works great, it's end-to-end encrypted and it supports nifty features like Send Tab To Device[1] (unlike in Chrome, where you have to either bookmark or keep the tab open on the origin device and then trawl for it on the destination).
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/send-tab-to-d...
However, Sync has a dissappointing property: Despite the (simplified) claims on the most readable user facing pages about it, it will not sync your open tabs across devices. It will only sync your last 100 (?) active open tabs on each device.
I will happily admit to being an outlier with >100 tabs per device, and I'm very grateful to Mozilla for this free service they're providing me. I also understand that any such service may need an upper limit.
However, had there been any mention of this fact anywhere other than the bugzilla issues I found while trying to figure out why Sync was (in my perception) not working properly, I wouldn't have tried it. I'd love it if they were just accurate about this in their feature description.
MS did the same thing, although back then they used ActiveX extensions or certain proprietary IE implementations that simplified the transition from old fat-client development to web-development.
Now that this is gone, focussing on debugging and open-sourcing is a better choice for a web-browser to win dominance. Chrome did just that: Opensourcing the core - attacking one of Mozilla's core promises - and adding proprietary google eco-sytem add-ons on top of that.
So imho what made you change to Chrome is similar to what made everyone of us developers back then adopt IE (i.e. simplifying development). And when Chrome started gaining traction, the google-lead team started implementing proprietary APIs that we now struggle with when we consider an open non-proprietary web.
I use firefox everyday, for dev and regular, and I'm happy to be a user. But I also see a lot of sites that just start breaking because they have been implemented with Chrome in mind. For where I am standing, I try to encourage our team to develop for FF first, test in Chrome and then EDGE/IE, that way it's most likely that anyone can access the site without breakage. And yes, this also means that sometimes it takes some overhead, but I'm willing to take that for the sake of an open web ;-)
The problem is stability especially for development, a rogue JS script can still kill a browser, chrome loses a page, Firefox loses its mind.
For the rogue JS, that is indeed a problem. From a development perspective though, I even think this is a good thing: stuff that bricks your browser needs to be optimized first. the moment we'd allow a more easy grip in terms of development, a lot of slow stuff will find its way into the codebase.
So it seems people have switched because of:
* Process Isolation
* Dev Tools
* Bookmark and History Syncing
* Chromecast
Also some people have mentioned performance, but this is unclear.
But the success parameters were very different. At the time, gaining a 5% to 10% market share for non-MS browsers on the desktop was considered raging success. Firefox never gained a majority market share, they likely never even reached 25%.
Nowadays, "success" requires 30% of a much larger market including gazillions of mobile devices, fighting not 1 incumbent but 3 on a multitude of different hardware and software platforms, in a scenario (web standards) evolving faster than ever before. The posts have moved quite dramatically.
> what larger changes we would need to see for that to become true.
Mozilla could flip the bird at Javascript and implement something that the hordes of desktop-orphan developers might adopt enthusiastically. More, I think Mozilla should partner with Microsoft, which is the only way to break the Apple-Google "axis of webkit".
Try watching random FB video, Twitch streams, etc. on a Linux FF and you'll get greeted with a nice "please download Adobe Flash" or some such nonsense.
With Chrome it just works, it bundles Flash, I don't have to care which version it is, how to get it for my system, etc.
I would like to use FF because the theme makes it match my Gnome theme (silly but it would make me switch browsers) but it just breaks on multimedia.
You have something that works out of the box, and something that doesn't.
Doesn't matter why it's your fault, you are using it wrong, it's your operating system, you aren't holding it properly these are the excuses of poorly designed products.
Adobe offers such technology under a nonfree license.
Open source browser Firefox can't include flash because of the license.
Purely open source distros also cant include this.
Oems can and should ensure end users don't have to worry about this.
Distros less concerned about purity may choose to set this up for their users.
Not only is this not mozillas problem it's a wholly imaginary one. The set of people who CAN install their OS but are incapable of installing an additional package is very nearly the empty set or at least it will be when said user doesn't learn to install software on their shiny new OS.
If that's too hard tell the people that work on the package manager gui and tell them how they ought to do better. The answer however isn't making it easier to go to the vendors website and download an exe.
The ficticious grandma that people want to cater to will experience Linux when it comes preinstalled on the pc she bought at Walmart and if flash doesn't work out of the box tell dell.
There is no sandboxing (in the works for how many years now?), their pdfjs is not as fast as the chrome native plugin, they force me to use the insecure and terribe flash plugin that crashes every time, one frozen tab still freezes the entire browser.
No I don't want to use Chrom{e,ium}. I wasn't tricked into choosing google. I just want something that works.
You mean Adobe's terrible plugin. It's a totally black box. Mozilla has nothing to do with the plugin development.
Although occasionally a Docs tab in Chrome will go crazy and gobble up RAM and max the CPU.
iOS not allowing competitors also stuck a knife in their back.
Dark patterns like prechecked bloatware install boxes aren't going anywhere under him.
Is this conspiracy or fact?
Conspiracy mixed with facts is... At the end of the nineties, Netscape was pushing to make the browser the platform, instead of the desktop. MS was quite worried about that, they had a monopoly on the desktop and used that to create a monopoly with their browser, so Netscape had no chance to do what they wanted. MS succeeded, as in delayed the process, it took maybe 15 years, after the death of Netscape and the rise of Google, to have Google and others make a platform out of the browser. Having the web stagnate and locked in to a browser like IE6 was for MS a desirable situation.
More ontopic... IE6 was slightly better than Netscape 4, so almost everyone switched to IE6. Just as now Chrome is only slightly better than Firefox to a lot of people (not to me though). And a lot of people are switching to Chrome. If you trust Google (an advertising company) to not play the same tricks as MS did, then good luck with your Google Chrome :). Once Google has a lock on the browser market, who knows what will happen. Another lock-in, and more years of stagnation. Yes, more conspiracy :).
Google has market incentive to improve on the browser's capabilities that Microsoft did not.
http://theunshut.com/2016/09/26/firefox-chrome-and-the-perce...
When I switched to Chrome I did because it felt better. The decision would be tougher today because Firefox, Chrome and Opera (Edge has to mature) are great options and not that different in performance and features. Change is tougher now because the perceived value isn't really there in most cases.
That attitude is a recipe for shrinking market share. FF is competing against extremely well funded, extremely aggressive and competent competitors. You don't get to stop listening to the market in an environment like this. It will run you out.
Google is winning because it's bundling its browser just like Microsoft used to and is aggressively advertising it on all of its web properties, which might have a reach of close to 100% of the web-using population. Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people doing ridiculous things as keeping tens of tabs open and not restarting it for days - learn to use bookmarks!
Silly Mozilla thought they were fighting hand in hand with Google for web standards when Google was fighing for ad money all along.
Firefox’s reputation is because of its history: when Chrome was new it did perform really well and Firefox did have serious performance issues. Chrome has been marvellous for Firefox. The sad thing about it is that these past several years Firefox has been better than Chrome in those departments than Chrome, but people aren’t aware of it.
Firefox is much much better than Chrome. Only chrome can put it's foot in the door and sneak in anywhere due to Google peddling it on all its webapps as the best browser for optimal performance for google apps. Just the search and gmail page is enough to convert the unsuspecting population to think Chrome is better than Firefox.
How many of the common masses are actually aware that Firefox exists? How many of them would actually try out both browsers on their systems and evaluate and decide which is best?
There are still people who are swayed by endorsements by huge corporations as signals of quality. In their eyes, Google, which is their window/gateway to the internet, saying Chrome is good would just seal the deal.
Once I got to 1200. It started to feel a bit sluggish during the usage and I had to restart it daily. Restarting took about 3-4 minutes, but it was fine for some time after restart. Eventually got tired of it and reseted the whole session.
On the other hand, Chromium becomes almost unusable with around 50 tabs. I cannot imagine having more than 200 tabs open in it, both from UI and CPU/RAM perspective.
Typically it takes about three seconds for Firefox to open on a fresh boot, whereas Chromium takes nearly 20 seconds. This is with the same extensions installed on both browsers, so that's not the issue. Having about five tabs open in either browser, with Firefox switching tabs is nearly instant, whereas in Chromium it takes several seconds to redraw the canvas for the newly selected tab.
Then there's multimedia performance. Firefox can play videos (both webm and Youtube HTML5) without stuttering at 480p and lower resolution, while Chromium chokes on even 360p content in either format.
For these reasons, even though Chrome/Chromium is my normal daily browser in Windows, I happily use Firefox on Linux and other OSes as it just performs better for me.
On my other machine with Catalyst it isn't much better either, it is worse with the open source AMD driver.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chad-Ver...
I'm 'll try not to argue the details too much here, but at least I'll outline how I experience it:
Firefox's start time may not be instant, but its quick enough and more importantly is consistent no matter how many windows and tabs I have. Starting Firefox does not impair the overall performance of my machine.
Chrome presents an initial window pretty quickly, but its not done loading, and from there on it's slow until everything is loaded, and its startup gets progressively slower the more tabs and windows you have. And due to Chrome's multi-process implementation, this can lock up your machine because Chrome uses it 100% across all cores. That's bad IMO.
The closest analogy I can think of is how Windows 95 booted and seemed to be "ready" back in the days, but then you had tons of background-processing slowing the machine down for another minute or so before things stabilised and the machine was actually ready. That's how I perceive Chrome's "quick" loading, and I find it genuinely annoying.
Personally I much prefer the predictability of Firefox here.
That aside: How often do you honestly restart web-browsers? Not questioning your answer or anything, I just find it a weird problem to have, so I'm genuinely curious :)
Personally I only restart browsers when I reboot my machine. So for me, the metric that matters is time from reboot to having ready to use browser session. If that takes 20 seconds, or 25, I really don't care.
That's 5 seconds once a month which I definitely wont worry over. How's your usage pattern since you think this is a big thing?
I game a lot so I use to close down Firefox since it drains so much memeory and CPU. So I restart my browser a bit too often to not suffer from it. This has basically led me to start Edge more and more since it is the quickest of the three and drains the least performance of my computer.
I honestly care about start time and if it's not going to improve I will leave firefox for chrome sooner or later (even if I do not wish to). But that is honestly not either the only issue Firefox has, it is laggy in rendering web stuff that actually surprises me. Agar.io for example, is laggy for me in Firefox but not in Chrome or Edge.
Do you mean it has the reputation from people doing this 5 or 10 years ago and it's stuck? Or is this still a problem for Firefox?
However, Firefox will not magically better itself; developers - paid and volunteer - will need to fix issues as they are discovered, and that means that if you run into performance problems, you should file a good bug.
I use both Chrome and Firefox on my Windows 7 box, simultaneously for various reasons.
The Chrome (vanilla install except for uBlock Origin) performance is... not great for me, at least once I get more than 10-15 tabs open, mostly when switching and/or opening tabs. A lot of it seems to be swap-thrashing.
Firefox performance on the other hand is OK to great, even tho it being my main browser with usually 50+ tabs open (with tons of overlap with those Chrome tabs) and rather add-on laden. I am using Nightly since forever, with e10s off at the moment because of one or two add-ons that would fail otherwise; tho I also have Firefox Stable installed and when I use that it behaves the same.
Sure, webgl and/or js benchmarks might be a little behind on Firefox (tho not by a large margin). So that nifty html5/webgl 3D ego shooter might perform a little worse, but that is nothing I personally really care about. Firefox excels for me for regular browsing performance, and that is what I want.
Chrome on OSX always performed abysmal for some reason, so I am using Firefox (Nightly) exclusively on a recent MacBook Pro, which runs fine (sans the occasional memory swap/uncompress stutter when switching back to really old tab that got paged out).
I cannot comment much about startup performance as I usually have long-running sessions in the order of days or weeks, but it seems OK for both browsers.
I use Firefox mostly because I have a terrible habit of clicking any link that looks remotely interesting with the intent to come back to it for later reading. Granted, it rarely works quite like that, but Chrome became a bear after 150-200 tabs (and often started capping my RAM). For all its faults, Firefox (again, in my use case) still manages to stay around ~2GiB unless I do something stupid or watch a bunch of YouTube videos (under Linux). Chrome does well, but the UI became unusable since you couldn't scroll through opened tabs without having specialized addons and such. I'm not sure if this is still the case, and even if it's changed, I don't think I'd go back. The RAM usage was too much, but I fully understand Chrome was probably never designed with my browsing habits in mind. Whereas I've seen claims that allege a handful of Firefox developers are tabholics. I'd believe it.
Somewhat off-topic: One thing I really like about Firefox is the profile manager. I've started creating separate profiles for general browsing, documentation, and videos sometimes with extensions tailored for each. It was a slight pain to change my habits around to accommodate that, but I've noticed if one instance hangs, it's not much of a problem. With multiprocesses on the horizon, maybe this will cause me to change my browsing habits again, but I think I like the profile isolation for enough reasons unrelated to performance to continue as is. Perhaps this is abusing it somewhat, but it works for me. If you keep a relatively clean profile with few tabs open, Firefox stays pretty snappy.
Not because Chrome is a better browser. All these sheep ( like me ) which get hoodwinked into using Chrome by Google's marketing blitzkrieg. Silly us. But wait,
> Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people doing ridiculous things as keeping tens of tabs open and not restarting it for days - learn to use bookmarks!
What a bunch of dummies, amirite ? Firefox is obviously the best browser. If you find that it is not 'Teh Awesome', you are using it wrongly and there must be something wrong with you.
PS: I am trying to use Yandex browser. So far, so good.
From my perspective there is something wrong with people using and supporting google: they gave up on their privacy and dignity.
If one has principles and cares for something they will fight for it. If not they give up and make sarcastic comments, so that they can at least feel better about themselves.
Don't make the mistake to think that I'm trying to convince you of something, use whatever browser you want.
Saying: I prefer Chrome for reasons x, y and z is fine with me.
Perhaps a nod to how much google wants to own your experience is how the chrome browser doesn't use your desktop's windowing decorators, instead spludging down its own horror. I prefer my own horror, thankyouverymuch!
Why not? What are the factors that convinced you to stay with Chrome? (genuine questions)
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_proce...
The setting defaults to 1, but will be moving to 2, and then 5 eventually. I'm testing Firefox Developer Edition 51.0a2 (2016-09-26) with this set at 4 right now. I only ever have ~10 tabs open, uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger addon, and my machine is fast and has lots of RAM.
Honestly, Im not sure what will help future and privacy considering your information is the number 1 comodity. But Im getting the impression that escape is impossible and we all should get used to being less "anti coorperation" and more "pro happiness"
I don't know what the best way forward is, but as long as Firefox is a decent browser (and it is) I'm doing my part by simply using it, recommending it to those who would benefit from it, and helping out here and there by submitting bugs and helping people fix their websites. I do know that giving in is not constructive.
I will be using servo once its out though. I am very intrigued by all the work they've put into it.
Reading the comments my suspicion is that what shortcomings it does have affects the hacker news crowd a disproportionate amount more than usual, or affects the academic crowd disproportionately less
Those are the top 2 issues by far, with legacy web app issues as a semi-distant third. This is our fault for using legacy php 3/4 apps that still work, but firefox doesn't produce any issues and is reliable for this purpose.
For me, the last time I attempted to switch from Chrome to Firefox, it drove me nuts after a few days because of one behavior: When you click a web link in another application, it opens it in your non-incognito (or whatever that's called in Firefox) window, even if the incognito window is the one on top. Instead, you have to copy the link from the other app, tab over to Firefox, and manually paste it into the incognito window. This is a flow I use many times a day, and having to do this workaround was really annoying. I found a thread about it on Firefox's issue tracker, but it was closed with a response that basically amounted to the developer telling the user that reported it, "this isn't a valid use case."
I may be able to switch back to Firefox when they implement that feature where each browser tab is essentially an isolated "incognito" context, which is really what I want. The distinction between "incognito" and "not incognito" windows has really just been a proving ground for the idea of concurrent browser sessions isolated from each other, which is a much overall solution to controlling your privacy on the web.
I tried Chrome from time to time and the endless processes eating up an immense sum of RAM (I had to add together first to realize) as well as the missing addons drove me away.
I never considered myself a participant in the ideological browser war and whenever I have to fix a computer somewhere around my friends and family (besides my parents) I left Chrome on their computers. It somehow always is there. Installed through Avast or similar. This annoying and disgusting behavior and the fact that Chrome wasn't anywhere faster or better led me to the conclusion that there is no better browser for me then FF.
I wonder if I'm missing something or am just not the exceptional case where chromes use of memory matters.
Chromium was using about 7.5GB, it was quite noticable. I then reopened the exact same tabs in firefox, made sure they are all loaded to make a fair comparison and it came out to less than 1.5GB RAM usage. I've been a happy firefox user since then and never looked back.
What this means is that you can't get a true picture of the ram usage just by adding as you will in fact be double-counting any read-only pages that are shared using COW.
As I've wrote below: I had one addon (ublock) on Chrome while my FF is so full with addons that I have to look up what they actually do from time to time ;)
- Firefox uses way less RAM
- Chrome is usually faster/smoother, even if not by much. For very odd or intensive sites. And for things like dragging a tab into another window and how long it takes until inspect element loaded.
- Firefox has Tree Style Tab, Chrome doesn't and will never have. This alone makes FF the only usable browser for me
- I find the non-optional non-native and childish look of chrome silly
- Some google sites like the play store and youtube just work better on chrome
For me, I use FF because of the memory, the styling and Tree Style Tabs. And I hope they keep on fighting. I understand the chrome users though.
But my observations are quite different:
- On my machine, Firefox uses more RAM than Chrome (Canary) for the same workloads and is slower
- Chrome is way faster. As a web application developer I notice that all the time. Chrome renders faster and the JavaScript engine also processes faster. Firefox likes to crash when reloading a page that uses WebSockets.
- I don't know your platform, but on OS X the default UI of Firefox is awful. That's the primary reason why I use the Developer Edition.
On my 8GB RAM machines, Chromium performs faster when there are up to 10 tabs open, but otherwise Firefox easily beats it.
Chrome is faster and renders better than Firefox is pretty much every way. Safari delivers faithful color reproduction and speed. I spent 10x as much time fixing Firefox rendering issues compared to every other browser, including Microsoft Edge.
Firefox has lost its edge. I do miss tree style tabs, though.
I develop sites in Firefox and then go for compatibility checking in other browsers.
Edge is normally fine.
Chrome is horrible. Atrocious. Abysmal. It implements lots of new features, but they are just so regularly buggy or badly implemented. To select the example I remember the clearest (there have been many more over the years): I went to use flexbox on one site and Firefox agreed with the spec (and what was obvious) on the treatment of some major item sizing issue while Chrome did something altogether different which I really couldn’t think of any justification for and which made flexbox a non-starter in that case. A year or two later they had fixed it in Chrome, but I’ve ever found it like that: Firefox has a slower rate of implementation, but normally implements things well; WebKit/Blink has a faster rate of implementation, but breaks things often (even with a handful of serious bugs in production releases that broke entire websites completely) and has always felt like a toy, rather than a serious, stable browser engine.
Here's just one of the many bugs filed on the topic: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1187209. Firefox can have major (breaking) paint bugs filed and have "Status: NEW" for basically an entire year.
Compared to Chromium, Firefox is a slow, confusing, incompatible security liability with no consistent wins. Even when they do uniquely good things (like the WebGL live shader editor) they are held back by the general inadequacy of the product.
No amount of pleading will change any of this.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Linux and https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...
There's more details than I can easily describe in a HN post, but in general read those links to learn why
> if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself
There's a difference between sandbox separating it from the system (what apparmor/selinux can do) and sandbox of each content and plugin (what browser itself can do, mostly with seccomp). Or in a practical example - why do I care that a website can't write to my home directory, if it still has full access to my bank in another tab.
e10s helps a bit, but it's still in early stages. It wasn't even enabled for everybody until 12th Sept this year. Even now, I believe (please correct me if untrue) that there's only one child for all web content, not one per tab.
(There's not a well-supported way to avoid this, but there are some tools that use Xpra for it.)
We are in full agreement. On X11, the security model is: every application can see/do everything. You should only run an application in X11 when you fully trust it.
http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/18/pwn2own-2016-chrome-edge-a...
I've finally settled on this:
Why are dev tools 1-size-fits-all? What is that? I should be able to say, turn on all the tools, or just give me simple mode.
For a lot of websites I create, I would love to have:
1) Console for errors and debugging output.
2) A way to edit the source of the page I'm looking at, and any connected CSS/JS pages in a regular notepad-like editor to make real-time changes to what I'm looking at (and reload with those changes in place)
That's it. Then I can transfer my changes to my dev files and upload to the FTP server.
Then, when I'm working on some huge bloated website with all kinds of craziness, I can turn on all the tools in an advanced mode.
And the worst privacy story and resource handling.
Extensions that have no even chrome extension:
- tree style tab: nested tabs on the side of the screen
- Imagus: elaborate image preview on mouse-over
- FF Rocker: click right+left for history back and the other way around for forward (there is a chrome extension, but it's no fun)
- grab and drag: I hold right click to scroll as if I was dragging the scroll bar handle (only works for single-core FF :/) (there is a chrome extension, but it's no fun)
- All-in-Sidebar: bookmarks, downloads etc in a sidebar
- tab grenade: store all open tabs in a link list and close them (might have a chrome equivalent)
- Link Alert: hover to see if you are going to an external page or pdf or image (might have a chrome equivalent)
- Vimperator/Pentadactyl: vim style shortcuts for everything, no more clicking. Currently both projects struggle to stay compatible with recent FF versions, can't recommend to switch to it now :/
With that in working I wouldn't need smoothing much anymore and could scroll half pages without confusion.
I'm currently stuck to pentadactyl, would try vimperator again, but don't want to set it up. Would have to see how to port my pocket script and such.
I have switched back to Firefox one year ago, and never looked back.
I can only hope for chrome's devtools to be ported to firefox. (firebug is close but slow).
Vendors in a market are rarely in a position to tell the customers in that market what they should and shouldn't do. We don't want them to be in that position either, even Mozilla. They have to improve their offering.
I for one also think that Chrome's dev tools are better and am 100% in the camp of wanting to see Firefox gain market share.
So, the point is, it's possible there is no real difference and it just comes down to personal preference or what you're used to. At least, that was the commenter's point which you didn't address.
I think the dev tools in Firefox and Chrome are much more distinct from each other than Coke vs Pepsi, though. The last time I used the FF dev tools (which was admittedly over a year ago) they were much slower and their support for changing attributes on HTML tags inline was more limited. I think the Net tab had fewer features too but this is going back a while so my memory is fuzzy.
Even if the only difference is personal preference, what's wrong with Firefox trying to accommodate more users' preferences?
Neither of the comments you replied to said anything about 'Firefox trying to accommodate more users' preferences'. So I don't think they had anything against Firefox accommodating more users preferences. They were just saying what people prefer is different, some people like Chrome's web developer tools more, some people like the web developer tools in Firefox more.
Simply, I just couldn't switch to Chrome for normal browsing. One thing I couldn't do without is the bookmark tagging in FF. I also like the fact that the address bar behaves much more predictably, like when I type something and it shows me links only from my recent history.
Youtube does play better in Chrome, FF uses a lot more CPU and it is a known issue. So now I use Chrome for playing Youtube and FF for everything else! It's a mess.
Hasn't Firebug been mostly replaced, long ago, by Firefox' built-in tools?
Press Ctl+Shift+i, or click Tools > Web Developer.
Also as a user I cannot bear to use Firefox. I recently retried it (can't recall the version, IIRC it's the first version they introduced multiprocessing) and it still underperforms: I experienced (sub second) lag on UI interactions whereas I wouldn't using Chrome.
The winners mentioned are the ones that require the most resources, so I guess they'll keep being that even with Bing, etc
I do use Firefox, sometimes it seems Chrome has more issues, sometimes it's FF, but I'd say they're pretty comparable (though FF has better dev tools builtin and it is easier to configure a proxy, because Chrome depends on a system config, which is not what I want to change usually)
1. The seamlessness of the ecosystem.
2. The low rate at which products are introduced only to be unceremoniously knifed when you least expect it.
3. The fact that I'm the customer not the product.
4. The public stance they've taken on their customers' security & privacy, backed by concrete design decisions.
I still remember switching to Google from Altavista. I'm currently midway through disentangling my online presence from Google.
But I've got enough to do. Apple phones just work.
My point is that while there are a lot of people that buy it for aesthetic reasons only, they do a lot of things right and a lot of tech savvy people use their products as well
(Hence the usage of "the sheep" was a jab at those who consider Apple customers sheep, it was not a critique of the users themselves)
They have a lot of income.
I don't mind them going of on various edgy projects.
But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years. They should really refocus their efforts to concentrate on delivering the best browser again, as it was before Chrome came along.
Can we please stop fueling this myth?
Maybe for some of you Firefox lacks something you actually need.
For others, like me and a bunch of others it is completely the other way, -if I was forced to use any other browser it would annoy me to no end (not tree tabs, etc etc).
So while I think it is totally fine to point out where other does better, telling everyone that Chrome is better isn't even true except for very specific cases.
Edit: clarify need
One of the things I love about Chromium though is the responsive and device modes of the web inspector. Top quality.
Remember FF extensions can be quite a bit more powerful than other extensions.
FF was my main browser, and would be to this date if it provided the best experience.
Chrome is faster, snappier, more fluid. Faster time to render, fastes JS engine.
There's a reason most of the geeks switched to Chrome on their own, before Google began it's aggressive approach of converting everyone to it with ads and bundling.
For any of the reasons you mention we can pull another reason why FF is better.
But unlike others I hope that I don't tell everyone that my taste is better.
I also believe that Firefox should look to exploit Google/Chrome's weaknesses more: Google relies fully on ad income. Firefox relies on sending users to someone's search engine/default page. Why not offer a version that shows the web as most of us see it: ad-free and with less tracking.
Linux and Apache and the others succeeded because they spawned a lot of other businesses that were just cheaper than the offerings from Microsoft or Oracle.
That's a unfair caricature of what really happened. There were competing systems with business-friendlier licenses. Obviously, Linux wouldn't be what it is without corporate contributions. But it also wouldn't be what it is without Linus' management and extreme pragmatism. That combined with the momentum introduced by the distribution ecosystem and advocacy that sprung up in the nineties.
Don't forget that by the time that IBM started pouring money into Linux (Peace, Love, Linux was in 2001 IIRC), Linux already had a large following among the tech crowd, which was stealthily replacing commercial UNIX installations with Linux.
The only reason chromium is "open-source" is that google attracts lots of talent, saying users have a choice between chromium and chrome, when in reality this isn't true.
It’s really unfortunate that developers of many interesting products (or websites!) seem to be forgetting about CPU efficiency. The Atom editor is another example.
But I also believe that this is not going to be the end but instead will make it desirable again to create something new - there will be a new breed of hackers and power users creating new and alternative web based on P2P- and blockchain-technologies, meshed-networks ... I think it's going to be cool :)
(Though I'd be in favor of simply reducing Google's power - but that is simply not going to happen - no matter what browser I use and how many people I convince to use FireFox.)
Otherwise, I've no probs with FF these days. 49 seems solid on BSD, at least.
This is an idea for open source in generally. I know BountySource try to do it.
I think the fact that there is another post about SQLite on the front page right now, attests that it would have been better to just standardise that. But then all those greenfield "spec hackers" wouldn't have had the fun of building cloud castles.
As a web developer and a browser user I'm tired of things not working. And if that means less options in terms of browsers I don't care as long as the browsers that are there give me a solid foundation to work with.
I'd rather have less options with more freedom of choice because all the different options are compatible and interchangeable, than many options but little choice, because their features sets are all disjoint and nothing is compatible.
Interest started to wane when Chrome's JavaScript execution blew it out of the water on release but continues to erode mindshare as the development tools languish.
If you want further evidence, a very prominent Mozilla employee posted on his blog, syndicated on the Mozilla blog feed, an active solicitation for people to donate to a UK initiative to ban gay marriage. What followed was a massive shitstorm [1], including calls that said person be fired from the project. He remains employed to this day. I find it amusing that no one appears to have mentioned this incident during the entire Brendan Eich debacle [2], though.
[1] I'd actually link to a relevant copy of the page on archive.org, but that updates too infrequently to capture pages that change daily. [2] Interestingly, when trying to find the page on archive.org, I did discover that the news of his donation first became public about the same time. Two years before he was appointed CEO.
Every time I try to switch back its fine for 2 weeks and then starts to get slower, like the internal database breaks or something. This is two weeks with 2-3 windows, with 5-20 tabs each, without restarts.
So far Vivaldi has been the best chrome replacement for me.
for regular users i don't give this kind of assine reply, but here on hacker news, i expect everyone used Firefox for a good decade before switching to chrome now, so i expect you did the minimum to the project and have at least abugzilla account to say "me too" on some bug.
Yes, it's open-source and I could in theory pop it out and fix it myself (ha, because I have a spare weekend to burn on setting up a Mozilla dev environment and dependency stack). No, there's no incentive to do so when Chrome simply doesn't have the bug.
Chrome has bugs that languish too, but so far I can't name any that I've tripped over. I'm sure when I do, it'll be incentive to consider switching to Firefox.
btw, try to disable referrer on chrome ;) ... or even set it to only send to the same domain
For referrer in Chromium, I think there's a flag?
https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/public/common/c...
BTW, Rob left in early March:
I really loved and used Pentadactyl, but it's now gone and dead and so is Firefox as far as I'm concerned.
The only thing that I can think of that seems like a risk is the amount of influence that Google has on things like whatever the replacement of CAs will be. But the situation is already so bad, it's hardly going to get worse.
You're not, by any chance, thinking of the Chromium OS are you?
You can contrast Google's "the web as apps" with, say, Apple + Safari's more "web as documents + prettiness" approaches.
With at least 2 major implementations, even if Google doesn't want to do something, if Apple + Moz + MSFT does something, it's still possible to get it into the standard.
You can try getting into the standard without a single implementation but that's probably difficult without a vote of confidence from stakeholders
I used chrome for a long time, and I am now starting to slowly move back to firefox. One complain I now have about FF is it feels a bit sluggish compared to chrome when rendering web pages. The nightly build is however a lot better. (I am using ubuntu btw).
---------edit-----------------
Another thing I wish ff works on is screen real-estate.
Besides that, the more they know about me, the better their products get. I am personally thrilled when I open Google maps and it magically whos where I live, where I work, etc. It just makes my life easier.
I think this might be a cultural thing though, people from some third-world countries (like me) may not take privacy and freedom for granted.
I ended up switching to Vivaldi. Not only does it fix the majority of things I hate about Chrome, but it supports Chrome extensions which are good enough (but not as good as Firefox).
IIRC, Chrome was using the FileSystem API which was supported only in Chrome - hence the partial support for offline functionality in Google docs..Only recently have the specs behind Persistent Storage API and Service workers have matured. I would love to see Google docs to make use of these APIs to make the functionality available across browsers.
Also, PNacl -> Web Assembly which Google has supported.
Of course Android OSes are going to ship with Chrome as a default browser - at least you have the choice of installing a different browser if you want to. Unlike Apple, where all browsers are forced to use the same JS engine provided by Apple.
Google has been pushing web standards for a long time now - instead of platform specific APIs and saying that the internet is going to be only accessible from Chrome is stretching it quite a bit..
Given that this performance disadvantage is not new it is clearly caused by lack of focus and manpower. As a result Firefox usage continues to decline and they cannot compete with fast moving competitors like Chrome or Webkit. Mozilla should discontinue 32 bit, Windows XP+Vista, ESR releases, Flash/GTK2 support, other side projects like the HTML editor. That should free up enough focus/developer time for Mozilla to improve their core product.
Well, unless you're using something like QupZilla or Konqueror, but then this blog post doesn't really apply to you anyways.
What I personally do to make Firefox fit in more into KDE is to use the Developer Edition Theme [0], which has a Light and Dark variant, so looks reasonably not-out-of-place for Breeze and Breeze Dark.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/devedition-th...
There's also this user-style to fix theming issues, which is what I guess you're saying when you refer to a custom color scheme making it look even worse: https://userstyles.org/styles/96657/fix-kde-theming-issues
The LGBT folks won that battle. If you don't switch back, then you've hurt their cause. OkCupid did this - they made a big song and dance about boycotting FireFox, intruding their political message into all their users' lives... and when the LGBT side won, not a peep out of OkCupid to repair the damage they'd done. Some others did similar things - appearing righteous was more important to them than actually being mature. If you don't stop the boycott after you've won, then the problem is with you.
(note: I am actually very pro-gay rights, but the actions of some around the Eich debacle were as deplorable as he was)
So all the lemmings who dropped (or just said they would drop) Firefox while I was CEO were obligated to rush back on board once I left? What about the various right-wingers who #nozilla'ed and otherwise boycotted after I left?
How about using the best browser in the market, built by people of diverse opinions and high ability who come together to do excellent work?
There's a good idea that seems to appeal to many people, of whatever various and diverse beliefs.
Try https://brave.com/.
I think that your position that gave rise to the debacle was indeed deplorable, but at the same time, boycotting Mozilla was the wrong thing to do. I didn't support the boycott, because it was striking at people unrelated to the issue at hand.
Finally, if you're conducting a specific action on the basis of a moral position, then yes, you are morally obligated to reverse yourself when you win. It's the point of taking a moral position in the first place.
Thanks for writing more about your position. I appreciate that you don't endorse collective punishment. However, I still do not agree with your collective judgment of those who may have boycotted Firefox on account of me for not returning after I left. They could have found other reasons not to switch back, having tried another browser. I heard directly from some people who had exactly that experience.
It seems to me we disagree on obligations based on reactions. That's ok, peace. I suggest that cause and effect, action and reaction, are not as simple and Newtonian as you seem to say. Not only might people who left Firefox while I was CEO have found the grass greener -- some might have changed their minds and then become appalled by post-me Mozilla, and not come back on that basis.
As with the grass-is-greener cohort, I know a few folks in this category. One example: https://twitter.com/theHirad/status/547588240895528960. Here is another point of view, but I'm not sure whether a change of mind preceded it: http://jeremiahlee.tumblr.com/post/81652982229/9-quick-thoug....
I think such thoughtfulness over time, rather than hurting "their cause", does it individual/piece-wise credit.
People are not simple machines, ya know! :-)
Also, when is Firefox going to let me style scrollbars?
Still a CPU and power hog on Windows 10.
But still love Tab Tree.
I need simple,stable and fast. I do not really care about features or security at this point.
I'm a front end dev. I run linux. I also run chromium because it is a superior product to Firefox. The market agrees. Wake up. Want to win me back? Make Firefox better.