Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
robert.ocallahan.org
robert.ocallahan.org
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579163 (102 days ago, 484 points)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8185461 (874 days ago, 389 points)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8151180 (882 days ago, 175 points)
Just seeing the comments here exasperates me...
So for those who don't know, the Internet is heavily biased towards Chrome. Simple pages that should render no differently in FF than Chrome are often broken. This "Chrome is great, screw everything else" attitude is exactly how we ended up with IE and stagnation in standards/development in the late 90s/early 2000s. The biggest feature of IE was faster rendering and better performance versus Netscape.
It's seriously an issue that developers/engineers are only targeting Chrome and I think a large part of that is also due to V8 powering Node.js. I'm not trying to bash Node here... Developers are so hooked in its (chrome) ecosystem they don't even realize the bias. I'm beyond excited to see things like Chakra being able to replace V8 in node because I think it will be a huge boon to making a more free and open web.
Anymore I've started to protest by refusing to use sites that are flagrantly broken in FF. I block em in /etc/host and call it a day. What happened to standards? Why can't I use a browser you don't like?
Also FF for those that haven't used it in a while:
•) it uses less ram than chrome especially with a lot of tabs open
•) is quite performant and getting better
•) has vastly improved its Dev tools... the folks responsible for them are very receptive to ideas and happy to hear them.
•) multi-process Firefox is MUCH more responsive than its single process alternative but must be enabled currently (I think). Also make sure your extensions are compatible with it.
•) personally, I think, the developer edition Firefox I think is much more attractive than Chrome
I really hope the web doesn't just work in one browser and that things start to improve. Reading comments here gives me little assurance that will happen :(
Edit 1: formatting and note about folks making the FF Dev tools.
Edit 2: clarity in final paragraph and added sad face.
It's a browser owned by an advertising company. An advertising company that knows a lot about you, and constantly strives to learn more by whatever nefarious means they can think of. I can't see how anyone is okay with that.
The day I can open Firefox and it feels as snappy as Chrome I'll switch back to Firefox.
* Opinion of one blue-collar worker.
Its these little things and in general Video support that I keep my Chrome installed. Most of the times i end up using Chrome at home more than Firefox.
Firefox take decision for me and I don't like it.
Could you give some examples? Let me make it easy for you. Check out [1] and tell me which API you found difficult to manage without.
> ban or isolate adobe flash
Firefox doesn't come bundled with Flash. Chrome does. Does that count as a decision taken on your behalf?
A similar thing can be said about Apple versus other hardware companies. It saddens me that especially people on dev forums don't want to see this.
I love Firefox extensions, I love the bookmark editor, I love the non-big-corp centric coupling. But I can only use it for long periods of time if chrome has a bug (I use canary). Or when they send a memory debugging build which are as sluggish as Firefox.
Every time I run Firefox I'm sad thinking about Firefox 2 with good old basic windows gui.
Also, since Chrome 56, maybe it's just an accounting trick, but memory usage dropped tremendously...
ps: refresh done, still lagging on tab open/close. That said, I use Nightly, and I'm not sure it's not instrumented and thus slower..
Perhaps FF should include a "look-like-chromium" option to win over users (since chromium is open-source, I guess they will not run into copyright issues there).
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome/
There are add-ons which claim to fix that, but they always change other stuff as well. I just want to get rid of the ellipses and make the tabs take up at most 50-60px. The current 100px-wide tabs have roughly 8px of horizontal padding, 16px favicon, another 8px of whitespace, 40px title, 15px ellipses, and then even more whitespace on the right.
As for the CSS-file, you have to create a folder called "chrome" in your profile folder and then in that folder create a file "userChrome.css".
In that file, you have to have the following line at the top of everything else: "@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xu...");"
From that point onwards, I'd just search on userstyles.org. In the advanced search, select "App" from the first dropdown, then it'll show you pretty much only Firefox-styles.
If you found something that suites your taste, you can click the "Show CSS"-link and copy-paste that into userChrome.css. Just make sure that you don't have the @namespace-line twice.
This for example sets the minimal tab-width rather low: https://userstyles.org/styles/53019/firefox-5-minimal-browse...
You can also find userstyles that for example hide the close-button until you hover over the tab or merge the close-button with the favicon.
Does userChrome.css work with e10s? I remember that there were some issues with that in the past.
The gesture, I believe, is under 'Advanced Gestures' and is called `[Popup] List All Tabs`. Honestly I wish this was a standalone add-on because it is bloody amazing and I don't really use anything else from FireGestures.
It gives me a context menu with all of my tabs. No need to move my mouse to some "tab area". Although it appears this functionality is broken in modern versions of FF, as it only lists the active tab instead of all tabs. :(
* Disclaimer: I use Cinnamon Desktop on Ubuntu with the Numix theme. Other themes/Window Managers might be different.
Unfortunately [and call it subjective, if you like] Firefox on Android is slow and gets noticeably slower as you use it. It needs regular 'fettling' by manually wiping its caches –more so than any other Android browser, in my experience.
After getting fed up with Firefox, I gave Opera a try and, for a while, that was my default browser across all devices. It has a brilliant text reflow on Android, which is a real 'killer feature' and, of course, the desktop version supports those 3 or 4 'must-have' plugins.
Unfortunately, Opera seem to be on a kamikaze mission to drive away their few remaining users –and contrive to make each release worse than the one before. The last straw for me was when they started pushing those trashy clickbait type junk articles on the homepage as a "News Feed" and adding spamvertising bookmarks to your 'speed dial' page. Opera on mobile also seemed to suffer the FF style slow-downs, after prolonged use.
So, after a brief trek through a couple more browsers [Vivaldi on desktop, Ghostery on Android], I arrived back [reluctantly, I thought at the time] at Chrome [or Chromium for the desktop version]. And you know what?... it runs great on Android. It doesn't slow down after a couple of weeks of use and have to be given a 'cache enema'. It's the only browser I've used on Android that can be relied on to communicate semi-reliably with LastPass's atrocious mobile version...
[OK. I'll admit. That's LastPass's fault for making their Android app so bad that it only [just about] works with Chrome]
...and, since I've got my Android devices rooted and have AdAway patching my hosts file, I actually find out that, in daily use, the lack of plugins for Chrome on Android isn't such a big deal after all.
I'd like to use Firefox for all the reasons you mentioned but, I've evaluated them all and switched between them all quite recently and have come to the conclusion that, while all browsers are flawed and all have their particular strengths and weaknesses across platforms and in terms of 'philosophy', Chrome/Chromium is currently the best of a bad bunch, for my use case.
I'll be happy to take Firefox for a spin again, if they make any measurable improvements to the browser [I've read that they're working on re-writing it in Rust, which may make it a leaner machine] but frankly, the whole 'Firefox experience' recently has been a complete turn off. Are they still carrying on that lunacy of what seems like a new release every couple of days which appears to do nothing other than annoy me with yet another hefty download?
Disclaimer: what follows only applies to Samsung Androids from 6.0 (Marshmallow) and above. I use Chrome on my Win10 main machine.
What works best for me on Android is Samsung's Internet browser. It supports content blocking (definitely saves my sanity when I browse on my S7 Edge) -- and the lack of bookmarks synced to Google wasn't something that proved to be a problem. In the very rare cases I miss it, I just open my Android Chrome, copy the URL from the bookmarks UI and open it in Samsung's Internet browser.
Plus it's very fast and has a pretty decent Reading Mode support (which also has a switch between a day and night mode and a config for font size; it works really well and helps a lot when I want to read the web while on the bed).
I was never a brand loyalist and I realize the problem with the standards and I dislike every dev team that doesn't take it seriously, please note that. But I still love Samsung and Apple for being one of the few that keep Google's browser monopoly at bay. Microsoft too, although their Edge browser is yet to get more audience.
I went back and tried both the developer edition and the stable release after seeing this post because I want to move away from google as much as possible. But the fact of the matter is that in the hour I was attempting to use firefox I saw the OsX spinning wheel about 20 times. I have never once seen it while using chrome. This killed it for me immediately.
(Notes. I had GPU acceleration turned on, and nearly 6 gigs of free memory.)
Firefox has been super responsive to me, using less memory than the same browsing activity would on Chrome & Firefox-only (afaik) add-ons like Self Destructing Cookies are A+. On Android, Firefox Mobile works just as good or better than Chrome.
From a developer standpoint, Mozilla's recent work on the Web Extensions API (which is an almost complete match with Chrome's) is outstanding.
[pihole](https://pi-hole.net/) is a project aimed only at that niche.
Serving Google with the same kind of antitrust Microsoft got would be highly deserved and beneficial, but unfurtunately google made the political investments that Microsoft lacked.
Which means we get to hear officials say Google is indeed in a situation deserving the antitrust, but it's fine "because their products bring value to customers"...
I'm aware of some of the issues involving Android licensing/bundling of apps but not well informed on other aspects.
So if you have a browser based OS, which happens to be loved by the USA school system, which browser do you think many US devs will care mostly about?
Again just to be clear, these questions are in good faith, I'm not simply trying to be argumentative, I'm hoping to get a better understanding of the issues.
Yes if you think in Global market share, Chromebooks don't matter. I hardly see them on sale here when traveling across Europe.
However any US software company doing web applications for the American school system will probably be biased to focus on Chrome.
Advertising Chrome as "a better browser" in (IIRC) search results, gmail, possibly other places as well counts as abuse of monopoly IMO.
Microsoft was punished for similar tactics back when the default desktop was equally important as top of Google search results and top of Gmail inbox.
Margrethe Vestager is a tough customer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/technology/google-eu-antit...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2016/09/18/apples...
_That's_ why they "won" not because of fucking adverts.
Given that Opera was basically "Chrome without Google marketing" I heavily doubt that. (The first version of Chrome was such a blatant Opera clone, it was just funny)
Chrome did.
Most of the people who argue things like this seem to agree that Firefox and Opera were superior browsers to IE. If that was the case, why hadn't they eaten IE's market share long before Chrome was ever produced?
Could it be that Chrome being widely advertised on the most visited site on the internet helped?
Chrome didn't beat IE. Firefox fought an all-out war and was not going anywhere either. What beat IE is an antitrust lawsuit actually.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
It is true, however, that chrome came at about the right time to capture a large share of its users (as well as a good share of FF users).
You seem to have messed up the timeline, or disregard the importance of being the first alternative to IE spread by word of mouth in the public.
No idea why. Chrome seems to cope fine so I just use it for that. Since I want my stream in a separate window on my other screen anyway it works out pretty well.
Despite that, Firefox still leads in market share in Germany (though with current trends that will change this year).
IDK if that caused it to grow to become the biggest browser, but it sold it for me.
I think we've seen throughout societal history that if you want to affect change you have to do it through the path of least resistance for consumers; this means creating a better browser experience that people use not because they want to revolt, but because they gain utility from doing so.
Even on desktop, I prefer Firefox (although mostly due to higher familiarity with it). Does Chrome really have some killer feature that I'm not seeing? I can't seem to figure out where exactly Firefox lacks.
This is where regulation is supposed to come into play.
Microsoft was not broken down or fined to oblivion, but they did change their behavior a lot when they started hitting regulatory boundaries. Internet Explorer was practically put into maintenance mode for many years when it became clear that Microsoft would not be allowed to own the web like they owned the PC.
We cannot know the outcome of an alternative history where Microsoft was given free hand to leverage the stranglehold on the web a fully enforced Internet Explorer (e.g. enforced like Safari in iOS?) could have developed. For all we know the outcome might even be Microsoft driven phones in every pocket, with everybody else unable to innovate on their own because they would be completely preoccupied with chasing compatibility with an ever-changing "Microsoft Html".
You can't do shit these days without having to deal with Apple's ridiculously selfish and tyrannical business model or Google's all-knowing, ever watchful gaze.
Worse in which regard?
> You can't do shit these days without having to deal with Apple's ridiculously selfish and tyrannical business model
Actually I do shit every day these days without coming into contact with Apple's selfish and tyrannical business model. So do millions of other people. iOS developer is a choice, not a sentence. If you don't like it, don't do it. There are tons of other things to do.
Their respective business models?
> Actually I do shit every day...
OK, but we're on HN and we're talking about building software and/or webpages... So let me rephrase - you can't make software and/or a webpage without having to deal with Apple and Google in some way. You're either going to have to put it in the app store and do some advertising with Google or you're going to have to make that webpage work with crappy Safari or make it AMP compliant or something else in order to get ahead. Of course you don't HAVE to do that stuff, but then you'll just get left behind. Seeya!
I was expecting some details about why these business models are far, far worse.
> So let me rephrase - you can't make software and/or a webpage without having to deal with Apple and Google in some way.
If you exclude extra-vague words "is some way", yes you can. Of corse, you'd come into contact with software made by these companies from time to time, but that software would be just like any other you use, regardless of their business model.
> You're either going to have to put it in the app store
No I don't. I've been gainfully employed as a software developer for more than 2 decades now and never put anything in any app store.
> you're going to have to make that webpage work with crappy Safari
I've not have to deal with browser compat issues for many years now, but if they exist I'm pretty sure that a) there are toolkits to deal with them, and b) that has nothing to do with business model, every browser has its quirks, including Firefox (in fact, last 2 times I had to deal with browser compat issues the Firefox was the problem and it worked fine in Chrome and Safari - of course, nobody cared about IE).
Pretty sure I mentioned those in my initial complaint.
> If you exclude extra-vague words...
OK, is "the only search engine that matters" too vague? How about "the only app store that makes money"?
If you just want to build some software, then fine: you don't have to deal with Apple or Google if you don't want to. If you want to be successful and make money though? You're going to have to deal with one of them whether you like it or not.
At the very least, you need Google to search and you need Google to help people find your product. Good luck getting customers if Google removes your pages from their results.
Similarly, Opera. People will still tell you with absolute confidence that Opera is terrible compared to Chrome. It's been a Chrome-clone since 2013. You'd think people would fact-check their opinions somewhen within almost 4 years, but unfortunately they don't.
Since it is not as visible as responsiveness, it is useful to have these discussions so people can decide what really is the "best" browser to them with full knowledge.
I know this sounds like RMS but with a problem the size of Google, then things gets political.
I'm typing this from Vivaldi, because I'm constantly looking for a replacement that feels fast and I can have the few 4-5 extensions I typically use.
IIRC they are working on expanding this so that tabs are split across multiple processes, without using Chrome's resource-hungry Process Per Tab approach.
For me, Google Chrome has always been a resource killer that's sluggish and consumes almost all system RAM (on 8GB total) with just 10 or 20 tabs. I see Firefox consuming a lot less with a few hundred tabs. While your response states your experience, it also sounds like you're meaning to say that Google Chrome is better solely because of your experience. So I don't see how such a response is helpful, overall.
I don't think I've experienced it, except when I watch HBO (Netflix and C-More works fine, so it's on HBO to get their stuff together in that instance).
I'm not much of a plugin user, but I'll be using Chrome's Secure Shell [0] for the first time ever and will be advising Windows students to use it over PuTTY (at first, anyway). It's kind of a lifesaver for me because PuTTY, from my experience a couple years ago, is a much more stilted experience than OS X Terminal. I see Firefox has FireSSH [1] and will give that a try, but the high user base of Chrome's Secure Shell (600K+) gives me a little assurance about the reliability of the plugin.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...
Yes, Firefox has multiple profiles.
Putting "all your eggs in one basket" in security context is suspicious. For SSH, Putty is a small program compared to the whole Chrome, security-wise much easier to evaluate. I don't know how using Chrome for SSH can be rationalized. Who is behind of that "Secure Shell" plugin ("offered by chrome-secure-shell-publishers")?
As for my class, yes, I'm not enthusiastic about shelling from the browser no matter how many people like it. But the main mitigation is that the class work we do is based off of my AWS setup: I spin up the EC2 instances and I manage/distribute the keys. None of the assignments require using their own personal info. And another reason for teaching them how to use browser profiles (something I've never seen students have set up) is so that they if they want to build something with Twitter's API, i can strongly advise for them to make a fake account and operate it in a different profile, to prevent accidental Twitter snafus (among other problems).
Why Chrome shell over PuTTY? I remember struggling with things like copy and paste, to the point where I think it is easier to use the mouse...but I push students pretty hard on using the mouse as little as possible. Chrome Shell feels as close to the OSX Terminal with the exception of key handling and the inability to access or transfer files from your own system.
All without losing the convenience that you talk about.
- Some keyboard combinations will be intercepted by the browser before going to the plugin (big one was ctrl-w which I used in vim a lot). The fix for this is to run the extension in it's own window; you can do this by right clicking the extension on chrome://apps and selecting "Open as window".
- It doesn't handle mixed width fonts very well and they jumble up the screen a little. This came up for me when using powerline. I couldn't find a fix for this at the time.
Hope that info is useful!
I don't know what I'm going to be using, but I'm very interested in qutebrowser. The dev is active and has shown interest in adding support for WebExtensions to the browser.
It's a pain at first, but I got used to it and now I don't have to care if vimperator/pentadactyl will be ported or not.
Let me preface this by saying I am open to a new browser, especially one that is always in "incognito" and doesn't share sessions between tabs/windows. My favorite is Lynx but that doesn't always work .
Facebook & Messenger for Android is pretty much spyware and they have over 1B downloads each, so that takes spying out of the discussion.
The last time I checked Chrome performed best (even if it is only marginal) on all benchmarks.
I know there are lots of serious reasons not to trust Google aside from user tracking (changing search results for political reasons[1], Eric Schmidt being a little too friendly w State Dept.[2]) but they make damn fine products.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-think-tank-launch...
Because your techie friends tell you to. This moved people off of IE6 to Firefox and this is what initially got people to move to Chrome from Firefox. Google's muscle on its web properties did the rest. Even you admit that Chrome is only marginally better on all benchmarks. For me, it's worth it to help your non-technical friends keep the web a bit more open by making them wait 0.1s (or however much longer) to open Facebook.
... works for me
Browsers and mobile OSes are two places where I think even we as developers have accepted the closed and encumbered ecosystem as the status quo because the alternatives are not user friendly.
Chromium holds almost all of Chrome and is open source. Multiple (!) alternative browsers are based on this.
You could argue against the WebKit monoculture, but that's a different topic. The browser ecosystem has never been this open
The reason you should is mostly constituted from all the things your browser does that you don't know about.
I get that's a hard sell.
Firefox is (currently) measurably much less binary exploit secure than Chrome, but it is the browser with a development community thats trying hard not to sell you out.
It has near parity with Chrome's extension APIs now, so what works on one usually works on the other, but Firefox lets people dive deeper to build things like the above.
You can use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, NoScript and any of the others.
All for nearly Chrome performance, but probably less than half of the memory use of Chrome, and Firefox is getting faster.
As for the average user... That story won't fly.
It never has, and never will.
Chrome is not as damn good as it was when it first launched, and launched from the company that has nearly ubiquitous control over web searches.
Bigger issues to Firefox adoption from the public are things like, "This site only runs on Google Chrome. Download from here." Big name sites have been known to do this, like Netflix (on Linux, at least).
Or how Edge re-adds itself to the user's taskbar with nearly every Windows update.
Those things are what impacts day to day users, and that determines what they use to browse the web.
That being said, Chrome's more aggressive blocking of sites with poor SSL, and more aggressive blocking of Flash, might just push users to another browser... Which will probably be Edge. Because it's on their taskbar.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...
And I'm having a lot of issues with html5 video playback especially on prime video.
I'm hoping that Electrolysis will improve the general performance at least.
The main reason I would not switch to Firefox is because, at least when I last tried it, I did not like their dev tools as much.
Google's already been denied strategies before
And with that vent out of the way, here are some positive ideas:
1. At some point, the giants tend to get too heavy handed for their own good. Try your best to keep alternatives alive until that point.
2. If possible, see if you can make the user on-boarding experience of your favorite OSS software much better. Usually it is easy because the standards around documentation/user on-boarding are generally pretty poor.
3. The reason people usually don't do 2 is that there is no incentive. See if you can figure out a sustainable way to incentivize it. Throwing out a wild idea: Say a StackOverflow like gamification website for people who create OSS documentation and fix OSS issues.
And if you are one of the committers, help users' with their problems when you actually have time to do something about it. FireFox was asleep at the wheel for quite a while not addressing its real defects. Chrome would have been another Safari like browser (i.e. dominant, but only within its ecosystem) if FireFox had actually improved at the rate you would expect from a heavily used software product.
Note that I say Gecko, not Firefox. While I currently use Firefox I keep on switching between it and Seamonkey, what used to be the Mozilla suite. I run nightly builds for both, when one of the misbehaves I switch to the other until I get fed up with whatever bothers me in that build and switch back.
Chromium often is a bit quicker, especially in javascript-heavy sites, but it it a memory hog. It also looks rough around the edges, the user interface is not as configurable (overly large tabs and fonts in the UI are a constant annoyance) and it's normal (Linux) builds are more unstable than Firefox and Seamonkey nightly builds.
Firefox and Seamonkey used to have another advantage over Chromium in that it was possible (and easy) to run your own sync server. Now that the 'old' sync engine has been deprecated for good this advantage is gone due to the lack of a self-hosted 'new' sync engine. This means I have to make-do without a sync engine as don't see why I would give so much of my data to any company.
https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html
Working fine with Firefox on macOS and Android. You can even setup the authentication server, but I didn't see why I'd need that. Having the data on my own server is enough for me.
Does a user-agent switcher addon not help?
I use Chrome as my development browser, mostly because of some plugins that help me with development. From time to time I run into inconsistencies between them (latest was that Firefox closes desktop notifications after 4 seconds and you can't change this duration). Googling for this kind of issues takes me usually to the Firefox issues tracker where I find a bug that's open since 4-5 years and hundreds of comments. Most of the time I find a weird workaround that someone else recommended in the comments and I go with it, because bug reports like this are never fixed. I have the same experience with other big open source projects, like Gnome. It looks to me like the maintainers take every feature recommendation as an insult and claim that you are "using it wrong".
So I get demotivated and give up arguing for positive changes as I know that every comment I post on an issue tracker will be received with a lot of negativity. I argue where I can make a change,in my company/to my supervisor to switch to Chrome. And that's the reason Chrome is winning, it's just a better product. I see this "we need to go to Firefox" posts all the time, but it's just getting worse and worse (in case of market share). It can only work if we sit down and make it a superior product. And this can only happen if the maintainers start being more welcome to suggestions and new developers. I love Firefox and want to see it take market share back.
So, if Mozilla can make FF as fast and "hip" to use as Chrome AND they can make it as free (which in this sense means being bundled in everywhere), then yes, they stand a chance of overtaking Chrome...
Try d3.js for instance, the rendering speed is horribly slow on Firefox.
I won't be switching to Firefox unless its performances get closer to Chrome's.
As a developper I wish I could contribute to make a better Firefox, but I'm pretty sure the technical level is too high for me.
Servo is a stand-alone project, but Mozilla will replace some big parts of Firefox with Servo code: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum - So most contributions to Servo will end up in Firefox eventually.
More info: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox
The author might argue that this is weak resistance because it's just adding fuel to Google's fire. They have co-opted the open source community by building their tools this way. I prefer this to the nearest alternative, which is a company that pushes closed software on the world.
IMO, the best alternative is a fully open ecosystem in which the players are very small relative to the overall size of the markets in which they operate. Such things don't last long on their own. We need to decide to support them as a community or they will be overwhelmed.
The ideal equilibrium for the open web right now would be 33% each for evergreen Chrome (or other Webkit/Blink browsers), Edge, and Firefox.
Bleeding edge prove-of-concepts aside; developing a website or web application that works in all modern browsers has never been so developer-friendly with all the wonderful tools and mature frameworks we have (e.g., Babel), and is trivial with just HTML and CSS. It's a shame to see a class of developers emerge that target Chrome exclusively.
All it would take for me to prefer one browser over another would be for one of them to figure out rss, email, and irc. That would put them on par with browsers from a decade ago.
Maybe Slack could add a web browser?
Of course I wouldn't give up consistent rendering, performance, and modern dev tools to get an integrated rss reader.
Is this article asking me to sacrifice these benefits just to oppose the imminent monopoly? If the only difference between chrome and firefox was the market share then it might make more sense for me to switch. The problem is that I don't want to give up the extra benefits of chrome just to be one additional user for firefox.
There was fear that when chrome overtook firefox that google would not need firefox anymore, and if it falls below use share of relevance google would remove their advertising money and firefox would just disappear as mozilla goes bankrupt. I'm not sure this situation has been fully addressed today but mozilla has been working on it for some time.
I appreciate that Firefox is open source and that I feel a little more comfortable with my privacy using it.
My usage of tabs is pretty intensive, I guess. I use them like temporary bookmarks I have to have a look at, and/or to find things very quickly (thanks to the tab search).
The week before Christmas, before I decided to nuke all my tabs for the holidays, my work computer's Firefox Nightly was handling more than 500 tabs (despite regular cleaning). Just even try to get 100 random page tabs in Chrome, if you can. If you are just able to, I'd say you have a pretty good amount of RAM.
After a few days back to work, and still careful cleaning, I currently hold 61 tabs on this browser on macos, more than 400 on my own linux laptop, more than 50 on my mobile nightly (and a dozen of addons on it at least, where do I get that on Chrome ?).
Oh and well Firefox containers are also pretty awesome, I currently use in this browser 4 browsing context together in just this serie of 30 tabs (I use a panorama-like addon to have it back to manage more tabs)
I generally avoid apps if I can (not only for some obvious reason, but moreover because my current cheap motorola android phone only allows to install new apps if I uninstall other ones, because you know I only have 200MB free, even if this is a small app...) and I stay on the web version of the mobile service, currently the "install my app" on every website (often on every page of it, despite having addons to nuke those banners) is pretty terrible, and it bothers me quite a lot, enough for me to drop visiting/using some service apps
I have a weekly hangouts for my work, and google decides it needs a dedicated plugin for FF, not for Chrome. If I go instead on talky.io for example for the same call, I actually have a better video experience than hangouts on both firefox+plugin (which can be sluggish, hello stupid plugin !) and Chrome.
When I do any search on Google ( rarely happens now, partly because of this, I'm using most of the time duckduckgo ) Google tells me to install Chrome to have a better experience...
When I open Gmail, it tells me in FF that it needs a plugin for running hangouts text discussion ( but behaves ok without it). Did google have no engineer in the last 10 years for needing a plugin for IM ? Seriously ?
When I click on the call button of Slack (the website, not the app, hello Slack, you cost me 10 time less memory for my 5 Slacks if I'm using FF tabs instead of your dedicated Chrome based app !!), it tells me "Please switch to Chrome".
Yes this 2014 post is fcking right, we're back to IE6 stage, but know your true OS (the web) is controlled (not totally, but still a lot) by Google, whereas Microsoft could never make it with MSN ( I mean before MSN was an IM service, at the start it was an alternative web owned by Microsoft), so at some point IE6 was still better than current situation
Oh, BTW, My ZTE open C using latest version of FirefoxOS was fcking awesome (despite its bad screen and its worse camera), came from ok to good to awesome when I decided to updated regularly to the latest version of FirefoxOS. Performance was so great with this bad hardware I was just baffled(even webgl games worked pretty well). Some little stalls apart, really understandable given the hardware, it was almost as good as my 10 time more expensive Samsung with 10 time more memory, lot better cpu and gpu. This little phone became awesome only when Mozilla implemented the Webextensions standard in FFOS : you could easily write OS-wide extensions ( like ad-blocking... yes OS wide adblocking would have been really easy, but in general it was meaning total user control over the phone thanks to third party developers).
When they announced they'll stop working on FirefoxOS (for phones at the time) -- and they had reasons to do it -- I was having at least 40 tabs open to try finding a better phone I could buy with FFOS, or at least on which I could deploy FFOS on it with an actually good hardware ( notably a better camera, better screen and bigger, and some more CPU/ram to see where it could compare to my android with the same kind of hardware ). I never bought that first power user phone I dreamt of, and I really think it would have become my main phone, not a secondary one like my "toy" ZTE open C
>Mozilla Foundation just reported a 28% leap in revenue for 2015, to $421 million, with cash flow more than tripling, to about $80 million.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2016/12/01/mozilla-...
Give it a try: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Migrating_fro... and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools
I still miss the old opera dev features that offered way better and advanced features years ago.
You mean JS code in the debugger? You may want to raise an issue for this in the new debugger which seems much faster developement progress: https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html
Or html in Inspector or CSS in the rule view?
Just checked and firebug is still here and works and will be supported until firefox 52 when firefox moves to become a multiprocess program. The firebug team is working to integrate firebug into firefox.next because it would be too complex to port firebug to a multi process architecture.
I didn't know about this and am not happy about it, I guess this means I switch to firefox esr and pale moon to continue using firebug if the dev tools are not to my taste (as they are now and have been since their introduction)
- I can't block javascript/cookies per page. (I do not want to install a stupid plugin just for that)
- I can't zoom with my fingers (macos here). (basic gesture for trackpad users)
Bye firefox, I will try again in 2018.
Chrome Dec 2016 : 56% mkt share
Switch. Now.
vivaldi[1] is where the innovation happens.
otter[2] is the open source project to recreate the innovating opera.
Then again the alternative to chrome has been iron[3] from the start and more recently epic[4]
[1]: https://vivaldi.com/ [2]: https://otter-browser.org/ [3]: http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php [4]: https://www.epicbrowser.com/
So I don't actually know who took the decisions, but I wouldn't be so sure that it's Mozilla.
When you can't even use the browser it's very hard to keep marketshare.
There were a few years (2010-2014) when Chrome was a clear industry leader: in design, web standards, resource consumption, and championing openness on the Internet. Not anymore, at least for me:
* Firefox has built-in Reader mode and RSS, while Chrome still doesn't.
* Firefox's ES-next compatibility is comparable to Chrome, and Safari Technology Preview is ahead [1].
* Chrome hasn't embraced the WebExtensions specification (I'd love to be wrong on this).
* Killing Chrome Apps [2].
* Chrome displays an ambiguous/dissuasive popup when you attempt to enable Do Not Track [3].
That said, Chrome's Web Inspector is top-notch, and it is the only thing I miss from switching to Firefox.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13325507
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13133135
[2] http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/19/google-will-kill-chrome-ap...
I'm by no means an expert on this, but aren't WebExtensions based on the chrome extension API? Says pretty much that on the developers page[0] of Mozilla as well.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions
We strive for compatibility to make developers lives easier and are participating in a W3C community group to work on a standard.
Although Chrome is by no means obligated to, it would be nice to see a company such as Google—that claims to support openness on the Internet—adopt this more open standard. (That is, "browser.storage.local" instead of "chrome.storage.local").
[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ#Are_they_compatib...
Essentially, for those apps or websites it shouldn't matter if they run in Chrome, Safari, Edge, or Firefox.
I too can't wait for Servo, although the reality is that it's still an experiment and is miles away from being anywhere near feature complete or compatible with the years worth of edge cases coded into Gecko, I wouldn't hold my breath on Firefox being based on Servo in the medium term, however Servo will find a use in quite a few niches where the content is much more controlled, courtesy of it's compatibility with the CEF.
Agreed that it is much more polished, if only because they aggressively remove everything they can from the UI, including features. Definitely provides a visually relaxing look, even if they crammed it full of unnecessary margins and whitespace. Works pretty well on tablets, too.
Chrome is the Apple of browsers and it should burn in a fire wrt how it mandates and imposes specific UI patterns on users. Mozilla, for all their "we're trying to make extensions more chromelike" seems to be holding onto that.
At least firefox allows for some customization, though not as much as the old opera used to offer.
From a pragmatic perspective, the fewer browsers we as developers need to support, the better. There has never been any meaningful standardization between browsers. Even "modern" browsers are all different enough that you need to test and code specific paths for each of them unless you stick to trivial things.
Personally, I want the same thing I wanted back in 1996 when I started this ride: One browser to win, and the others to drop to such a tiny share that we don't need to support them anymore.
Firefox performed a service in convincing Microsoft to update IE6. But that was fifteen years ago. Since then, Chrome has arrived and demonstrated that it is far and away the best. In my opinion, Firefox would serve us best by simply stepping aside. All it does today is force us to code yet another path into everything we build.
The stagnant few years after Netscape screwed up Navigator 6 was actually a little mini golden age for web developers. Essentially one target, with a ton of features that are only now being recreated in modern browsers.
It's just a shame that Microsoft was so hated by everybody. Things like their sane Box Model endured 15 years of people referring to it as a "bug" until finally it got introduced as a CSS option and people were overjoyed to finally be able to specify the width of a DIV and have it end up being that size after borders and padding.
I, for one, am happy to have the option of a browser that doesn't decimate my battery life
Because the less competition, the more stagnant the web will be. Then vendors like Microsoft will shove proprietary tech into their browsers and we'll be back to IE6 + Flash. Is it what you want?
Firefox is the only serious open source browser project out there. Chrome isn't, Google could drop Chromium development any day, it wouldn't be the first time they did something like that.
Of course, I believe Mozilla & Firefox shot themselves in the foot by refusing to implement specs like WebSQL,File System API and a few others, no matter what the reason was. I use these API to deliver complex offline applications, I had no choice but to tell my clients to use Chrome. And yes IndexedDB sucks.
May as well just use Chrome at this point, rather than Chrome Lite.
This may sound great in theory, but I have serious doubts that Mozilla can deliver on that. At least from my perspective, their decisions in the more recent past have been erratic at best. They even happily implemented DRM when everyone else was doing it. At the moment it feels like Firefox is just copying what everyone else is doing, slightly worse.
And even if Chrome "wins", it's still open source, for the most part. If Google abuses their power, then the thing will be forked and their hole user base will be split. I'm pretty sure Google doesn't want that.
If you want to worry about something, worry about Google controlling Android. They already implemented lock-in there, it's a huge pain to fork in any reasonable way (see CynogenMod) and they control > 85% of the market. But sadly, Mozilla failed here quite spectacularly, because they simply didn't have the resources for it.
This is a totally disingenuous interpretation of EME. I think you mean when Google, despite their ~open source bona fides~ with Chromium, collaborated with Microsoft and Netflix to introduce DRM to the browser and used their crushing market dominance to force Mozilla to comply or fall even further behind?
If Firefox had a 90% market share, we wouldn't have this discussion about how we should use Firefox instead of Chrome. But the fact of the matter is that the majority of users doesn't care, and won't change their opinion because of a random blog post.
Now, Mozilla could have decided to make Firefox a privacy focused, truly open browser for those who do care. They could've been the first major browser who blocks privacy invading Ads by default, and that didn't implement DRM like all the others.
But they didn't. And so my point stands.
It was like they forgot why they started Firefox (I used it when it was still called Firebird) in the first place - to have a streamlined focused browser that didn't include Mozilla's other suite (email, Frontpage clone, browser) but in the end has ended up being Mozilla 2.0.
I think (we could actually check Mozilla meetings notes to know for sure) that :
- They saw that mobile web/internet would be where most of the traffic in some years. - They saw most of the mobile internet was webkit prefix specific. - They also saw they would not be able to provide Firefox by default on most phones, and people were unlikely to change the default browser. - They finally saw that internet was moving to use "apps" in walled garden silos platform control by 2 companies (3 if you account for MS) instead of an open specced web.
They started FirefoxOS to provide an alternative option to users when buying a phone that is focussed, streamlined and was fulfilling Mozilla mission in providing a better open web.
FirefoxOS 1.0 was a basic smartphone OS really great for a grandpa moving to a smartphone. I could not tell such a thing for the Samsung Galaxy S3 The latter the versions, the better the features. Last FFOS version before being killed was actually fcking awesome (not perfect yet but it was close to be able to,some more month and that would be it) thanks to the webextensions being implemented OS wide. This puts the (power) user in control, really.
I found this enough appealing ( also after I've done some small web apps and deployed them to my FFOS phone, it was just sooooo simple) to look for a big and hopefully powerful phone (I just had this toy FFOS for less than 50EUR) with the latest FFOS on it, instead of my android phones I had since the G1. But they killed FFOS right when I was searching for this next phone. I was ready to pave the way and really write the apps (and/or webextensions) I was not finding yet to my tastes for a primary phone, it was not that hard, actually really easy for a web developer compared to even any webview based app. I was even OK to write my own keyboard for matching my expectations regarding it( not that the original was really bad, but it was no great either, but for the multiple keyboard switch system). I was eager to try to write the code (and waiting for the API on bluetooth was complete enough ) for conversing with my bluetooth devices ( including my Pebble ), and I was happy any website could actually do it once a simple JS lib published on npm would do the hard part of the job.
But when they saw the market for small priced device was invaded by Android devices because the cheap phones spec became good enough, they knew their inteneded market was never getting grounds, so they stopped it. In fact, once at this point they should have IMO switched and target the middle-high end power user, which would have gave them a new kind of influence, and access to actual hacker needing apps and able to write them.
But this was not that much an option as they wanted to get rid of the way they were financed at 90% by Google, in order not to be locked by it, notably to be able to focus on privacy like they did since (and containers are fcking awesome, thanks guys :), I have my own walled garden for you, web, I the user ! ), and they would likely lack of money to do this switch and the needed deals to achieve that.