Can the new Firefox Quantum regain its web browser market share?
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Plus, it's worth repeating that Firefox sync works without problem across desktop and mobile. The sync [0] and auth [1] servers are open source, and one could choose to use one or both on his premises.
IIRC, browser synchronization was a thing on Firefox well before it landed on chrome.
[0] https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...
[1] https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...
I hope that the mobile browser will get at least the same level of attention as in the past.
I use Firefox Focus as my default browser for all news/app/etc links except for when I specifically need access to existing sessions and don't want to log everything in again.
You’re not required to set one (this is in addition to your google account credentials), but it’s available as an option.
Aye, it was. It was called Mozilla Weave, and it worked with the very early versions of Fennec (the original name of Firefox Mobile).
Also, your data is securely encrypted at Mozilla, and isn't being profiled (if you disable those features in Firefox).
In Firefox 58 (you can run it today on Android by installing Firefox Beta app) you can run PWA (Progressive Web App) which allows you to turn a website into basically an app. Not every website will work though.
FWIW, closing tabs once in a while can also help. Mobiles typically don't have too much RAM.
Other than that, I'm loving the mobile Firefox.
It's just a mitigation, but at least it's an ergonomic improvement.
Yes, but it was bad. Chrome allowed you to sync just by typing your Google account credentials. Firefox relied on sharing a text file between computers. If you lost the file and reset your profile (as was common in old Firefox), you effectively lost all of your synced content. Adding a new computer was difficult and slow. Firefox ultimately failed the "could you explain this to your parents" test, and many users simply gave up trying to get it to work.
I try to stick to Firefox on my desktop and find workarounds for broken addons, but on a mobile it seems easier to switch away.
People went to Firefox because it was head and shoulders better than IE6 for regular use - popup blocking and tabbed browsing were the most obvious examples, but even then (and being advertised on Google's front page), it only for about 35% of the market.
Now let's say it'll be a bit faster than Chrome. Let's say it'll be twice faster than Chrome, with better deep extensions coming back, it won't make a difference. Chrome is too usable.
Sorry but that’s just wishful thinking. In this regard Firefox is less of a target than Chrome/Internet Explorer because it isn’t the dominant monoculture, similar to how Mac OS is less of a target than Windows. That doesn’t mean its safe.
When Gary Kovacs shifted the focus to Firefox OS, the desktop browser lost pretty much any advantage it once had.
Internet Explorer was just bad enough that they lost about 20% (from 90%) to Firefox. Don't expect that to happen with Chrome.
I also endured firefox for the past 2 years, cursing through all the crashes and buggy behavior.
Donated 5$ to the Mozilla foundation after the FF 57 came out.
I may be an outlier, but I always suggest FF to everyone. The world deserves some optimism.
However, here's the info, straight from the source: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
Looks like < 1% of installs in Germany will get this preinstalled. Here's how to remove if you're one of the unlucky ones: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cliqz-recommendations-f...
Finally, Cliqz has a Firefox Test Pilot program (German-only): https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/cliqz
Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit. Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox. Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user’s IP address once the data is collected. Cliqz’s code is available for public review and a description of these techniques can be found here.
And it's opt-out; it's not clear if the users receive an opt-out notification:
Users will receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz recommendations enabled out of the box.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
I read HN, I'm a web dev, I try and keep up to date with this kind of thing and I've never heard of it. How is any non techie supposed to?
A statement in a blog that only a tiny percentage of users will read is not at all transparent.
Do users who receive browsers with Cliqz get a clear, effective opt-out warning? Really, it should be opt-in but that doesn't appear to be the case:
The users will receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz recommendations enabled out of the box.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
Either way would render the experiment useless (self-selection bias). Obviously if something like this should make it into Firefox proper, that would make something like an opt-out warning a hard requirement.
But that is Mozilla's problem, not their users'.
As probably would be the legal position in many places, if news of this got out more widely and regulators started getting involved. It's hard to see how this wouldn't fall foul of even general EU data protection laws today, never mind anything stronger that is specific to Germany.
Sure, I'm just telling you how we arrived at the current situation and why your proposed alternative is a nonstarter for an experiment that tries to figure out if this feature adds user value in the first place.
I still find this a very bad sign about the directions they're willing to explore, but it's important to get the accurate scale of the thing.
I really like the new version. And I am glad to have switched back from Chrome, because I really like what Mozilla is doing - not just with Firefox.
As an aside, one silly thing that tarnished Mozilla's brand for me was the treatment of Brendan Eich. I may not agree with his donation of money but I think impinging on his rights is a far more fundamental immorality than what he was accused of.
It's like Twitter's controversy over blue ticks. If they'd only given them as a result of identity verification, and not used them to indicate Twitter's approval of someone's beliefs, then they wouldn't be where they are now.
Stick to good tech and fighting for relevant causes, e.g. net neutrality, I say.
He has, presumably, gone on to find other work, after resigning, he still has a platform, he can still talk and associate freely.
You can dislike the fact that he resigned, but blaming anyone for his actions but him doesn't make sense.
Yes, this is a key point people forget. No one fired Eich. However, a large chunk of Mozilla's open source contributors (along with a decent chunk of their paid employees) were ready to resign.
Eich may not have had good politics, but he legitimately cared about the organization and was not going to let it implode on his account.
Funny how so-called-libertarians love at will employment until it's used to pressure a bigot to resign.
Citation, please. I'm a Mozilla employee, and was a Mozilla employee at the time. I'm not going to claim everyone was ecstatic about things; there was a lot of soul-searching going on for some people. But I don't recall any "Mozilla employees", in the sense of people working for the Mozilla Corporation, saying they would resign, nor calling for Brendan to do so.
There _were_ a few such calls from interns, and a few employees, at the Mozilla Foundation. People who were not involved in Firefox in any way, did not know Brendan, and were not relevant to the things that Mozilla is actually known for doing.
Of course the press spun the story in such a way as to make it seem like there was mass unhappiness internally... And most people read the press spin, not the actual blog posts actual Mozilla employees were writing at the time.
I'm not saying there was an organized "we, a group, will resing". I'm only repeating what I was told hanging out on the deck during one of the cantinas - that there would have be a lot of turnover if he hadn't left :)
IIRC Eich indirectly acknowledged this when he resigned when he said he didn't want to hurt Mozilla.
I was merely pointing out that it is my understanding that you resigned, that you mentioned care for Mozilla as why you did, and that many people would have resigned if you hadn't. I thought I made that clear when I said "indirectly acknowledged". I guess my understanding was wrong. Sorry for that.
I definitely don't want to take a low road. We never met, but even the people who disagreed with your politics all thought you were a pleasant person and would mention missing you at the various company events. I hope you know that.
It's had that for years, and I'm yet to have a problem with it.
> As an aside, one silly thing that tarnished Mozilla's brand for me was the treatment of Brendan Eich. I may not agree with his donation of money but I think impinging on his rights is a far more fundamental immorality than what he was accused of.
I can't decide if what they did was wrong or not, but I'm not totally comfortable with that issue either... no person or company is perfect though.
Which is sort of my original concern. Mozilla was neither of those things to Brendan Eich, and yet more and more we see employers and influencers behaving as though they are.
If the organisation felt he didn't represent them then it doesn't make sense for him to be CEO. It would have been less of an issue if he were in a more purely technical role.
I want a browser maker who specifically argues for the most foundational and important of needs regarding the internet. I don't want a social justice crusader who values PR above all.
In fact, my leaving had nothing to do with advocacy _per se_. As Erin Kissane wrote at the time, if Mozilla were to become a narrow "progressive" advocacy group, it would fail at its stated mission. Whether it has taken or will take that fall, I won't attempt to evaluate here. But that's the risk Erin cited, and I agree.
Well, and Chrome's maker fired someone for a certain inflammatory manifesto. I don't think that at this point it is realistic to run a tech company of any sort in the US without some amount of displays of political loyalty to the vocal majority of your recruitment and customer base.
It wasn't about his rights as a private person. It was that he gave a non-trivial amount of financial support to a campaign to remove rights from other people, which did not seem consistent with the values of the non-profit that he wanted to publicly represent as CEO.
1) Google makes a really poor decision (e.g. disabling ad blockers, charging $$)
2) Mozilla partners with existing web apps or they build their own web apps with extra value that is only available in Firefox (in the same way that Google sites generally perform better on Chrome than FF)
What evidence do you have of this? As far as I can tell, their strategy has been to 1) imitate Chrome and 2) get faster. I don't know that people wanted them to imitate Chrome and get faster, and I would cite the fact that millions have uninstalled it over that period, and installed Chrome.
It allows me to have a work container logged in to work trello and Gmail, and a personal container logged in to personal trello and Gmail. It also allows me to have a FB container so I can stay logged in there, but do all my browsing in other containers so they don’t know which other sites I’ve been visiting. That’s a feature I didn’t know I wanted until they built it.
I think the bleeding of users from Firefox over time, however, has been because of a Chrome inspired cycle of constant add-on breakages, removals of configuration options, and UI changes towards a Chrome look, with each breakage and change removing a distinction between the two browsers that would keep a user from switching. Additionally as the add-on breakages were happening, Chrome was expanding their library of add-ons, further removing distinction between the two browsers, and in some cases, such as developer tools, gaining the upper hand.
I think it's important to note that this latest firefox move was not only a move to render it incompatable with its own library of add-ons, but to adopt Chrome's library as its own. The multiprocess functionality that it is now touting was a response to Chrome's own multiprocess functionality. The UI is now completely indistinct from Chrome's.
For every add-on that didn't make it over, there's 1000 users for whom that add-on was keeping them from switching to Chrome. All of the UI manipulating add-ons represented ingrained habits that 1000 users really didn't want to change, so they were bound to firefox. At the point of this version change, upgrading firefox or moving to Chrome has exactly the same amount of friction. The only way Firefox can compete with Chrome now that they're indistinguishable is on marketing, and I'm fairly sure that Google is the biggest advertising company in the world.
I suspect that this has been intentional. Firefox is again financially dependent on Google. This was as precipitous a fall as the Elop-headed Nokia.
For the first one they need to stop undermining their own message though (by adding weird extensions people don't want). For the last one, it will take years to complete and some more time for the trend to be noticed.
And Mozilla has(/had?) a deal with Yahoo! to advertise Firefox there.
The bug's 17 years old now.
Tech folks might care about shiny new engine, but they are also more likely to care about their favorite extensions not working anymore. I personally wouldn't be surprised if FF actually lost some share in the long run, but that's just my dissapointment talking.
I know for certain that if something like waterfox keeps old extensions running I will gladly give up Quantum for a better UX.
Full disclaimer: Years spent supporting end users might have negatively affected my view of the "average user".
And even among techies, I think you overestimate how many actually care about much else than "fast" when it comes to a browser. Just look at how many techies run Chrome. It's usually not the most wizardly of techies, but a good number of techies either way.
Longtime FF user but I gotta say the new version is great. MUCH faster than the old version or Chrome.
Great work Mozilla. Feck the begruders!
Technically yes, there is the ESR version available until April, but the vast majority of regular users aren't going to know about that.
By far the vast majority of popular extensions were ported well in advance, NoScript[1] was a notable exception, but even Tree Style Tabs is available now.
[1] I've found uBlock Origin in dynamic mode to be superior to NoScript, anyway.
Had to map my 'music' key to run a script that hides the title bar in gtk3, but works for now.
0: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-the-titl...
Instead of an IE monoculture, we now have a WebKit/Blink one:
Chrome: 54.57%
Safari: 14.59%
Alibaba UC Browser: 7.86%
Opera: 3.89%
Samsung Internet: 3.41%
Android: 1.90%
That's a total of 86.22%. Plus ça change.
So it's not as much of a technical problem, as a marketing one.
May be mandating browser choice for mobile devices could help it, including forcing Apple to remove the ban on competing browsers, which really should have been tackled by anti-trust a long time ago.
With Chrome on OS X I've got pretty used a more or less flawless video experience - kind of forgot what it used to be like.
We may post some daily numbers after the holidays.
wishes Mozilla luck in reversing the downward trend
A couple of hours ago, I've had about 25 tabs opened, about 20 of which were suspended. Just for the heck of it, I've checked the memory usage of Firefox. 500 megabytes.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-suspender...
Will probably try again in another 6-8 months. I have problems with Chrome eating tons of memory, hoping the new FF gets a lot leaner (and robust) as their newer tech gets integrated. Plus, the blog posts on their usage of Rust are really fun to read!
However I think Mozilla have a lot of work to do. Desktop browsing is pretty much legacy at this point so convincing mobile users to use something other than the default browser will be hard.
I work on a site with 8 figure monthly unique visits and the browser stats are startling.
iOS Safari had about 51%, Chrome mobile & desktop about 35%, Samsung browser at 7%. Nothing else has over 2-3%. Edge, for example, is a rounding error.
OS might be hard, as Win and Mac have their own browsers, so my first guess would be Linux or security focused builds of Android. This doesn't sound like enough exposure to make a significant/disruptive change.
I expect Mozilla to be more active in this area though. Yes, performance is important and I switched to FF recently too, but I'm still using Electron powered apps on my MacBook.
What's more plausible is a situation where Chrome for some reason (ekhm... privacy?) loses market share to FF/IE/Safari. Having more competition will make my browser better, regardless of my choice.
Firefox is the default browser in virtually all distros, even Debian.
As for Android, to make a difference it would need to be installed in Gapps-by-default phones, so Google would have to concede. Maybe if the EU hits them with an antitrust lawsuit Microsoft-style, otherwise it's not gonna happen.
Edit: Been at 100% for 10 minutes. Much, much better. If anyone knows how to set default zoom on Firefox it'd be greatly appreciated.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-tree/
I'm wary of switching to Waterfox because it's a single developer project and might be more buggy than it seems from the outside, but I might end up there after all, if equivalent addons don't rise up.
> Even worse, the new Windows 10 S operating system prohibits the installation of any apps which do not come from the Windows Store, so it is impossible to install Firefox on devices running Windows 10 S.
So in that sense, I'd say it's a complete gamechanger on mobile, much more than on desktop.
[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-web-browser/id989804...
[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2017/01/open-sourcing-chrome-on-io...
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/05/22/update-on...
Are you using scaled resolution? Then it's a known issue that is being investigated and will hopefully be fixed soon: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
Just checked the config: layout.css.devPixelsPx, default, string, -1.0
Edit: Checked the screen resolution as well: it is default, but not scaled.
The Android version of Firefox can be installed on Chrome OS though.
You'll find the page transitions are not quite as smooth in Firefox when compared with Chrome or Safari.
As for Android, the new CSS engine (called "Quantum CSS" or "Stylo"), which landed with Firefox 57 on the desktop, should ship on Android with Firefox 59.
There's also "Quantum Render" or "WebRender" upcoming somewhen soonish. I'm guessing Firefox 60 or 61 on the desktop, so maybe again with a small delay then on Android, I don't know.
WebRender should be kind of a big deal. In extreme cases, the difference can look like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0hYIRQRiws
EDIT: Added explanation
The big issue is I often switch between Browsers for work. So I often switch between Chrome, Firefox, and Opera with custom extensions for my workflow.
With the amount of choice, I don't need to stick with a browser that makes my life harder than easier.
Chrome is my main browser now, it was already getting close to majority usage for me.
I'm not saying I will switch to something else (other browsers seem equally unusable to me as FF57 is currently), but I will certainly try all the options to find out if something else isn't at least marginally better than FF57.
I'm one of the dozen people that care about a browser being user configurable and not doing any analytics, telemetry, experiments,... . Mozilla has lately been working exactly against this. I have about 80KB of patch files just to remove all the crap Mozilla managed to stuff into an otherwise perfect browser like: advertisements, telemetry, more data sharing, geolocation using google servers, a social network and proprietary binary blobs for service integration.
When I build a clean version of Firefox then I'm happy too.
With the amount of choice, I don't need to stick with a browser that makes my life harder than easier.
Chrome is my main browser now, it was already getting close to majority usage for me.