Has Chrome fully taken over yet?

Google, however? Their stuff at least works. They never had the luxury to send people through hoops, 3 seconds and people give up on the web. So that’s what makes Google so scary. They’re omnipresent _and_ competent.

My only hope ist that, as they grow, their products get worse which empowers better competitors.

When IE6 was parked and browsers were considered 'done', it was a closed source monolith tightly coupled to the dominant OS. Today Chromium is open source, even if Chrome isn't, and browsers are used on a greater variety of operating systems. Just as it's common for an owner of a new Mac or PC to install Chrome as a first task, there are no technical reasons why something else couldn't be the dominant choice - just familiarity and inertia. Those things change.

The other reason things are slightly different is because of better compliance with Web standards. For a web developer in the late 90's, it was easy to get drawn in to using Microsoft's proprietary tinkering with the DOM (only now are they able to resist the temptation to EEE, probably not through choice or natural instinct). Browsers now put much more emphasis on standards compliance, making web site and app portability common and expected.

But then Firefox got complacent with their performance, giving Chrome an in, and in the meantime IE/Edge got a lot better, so there is less incentive to try something else.

At this point, Firefox doesn't really solve any pain points for most users. Some people like the greater flexibility Firefox has (had?) with extensions, some people care about the anti-tracking work they're doing, but at this point the selling point seems to be an abstract notion of competition/freedom, which most people don't really care about.

Firefox needs a vision of what is missing from the browser that really resonates with people. They seem to be banking on the idea that privacy is that differentiator, and it's smart in the sense that it's not a direction that Google will go with Chrome, but all signs point to people not actually caring that much about privacy.

My personal take is that Firefox should really invest heavily in their Android browser (e.g. improve reliability of the media stack, get e10s, etc), build in an ad blocker, or bundle uBlock in the default install, and market that. Chrome will never ship an ad blocker on Android, and blocking ads is far more of a thing people care about than privacy.

[EDIT]: Maybe all the Rust stuff will pay off and Firefox will have a really good performance/security(battery life?) story. That would be a good path as well.

Also, I feel firefox consumes less battery than chrome on Android. I used to use chrome exclusively, and it would always show up as the largest consumer of battery. After switching to firefox battery life has been much better.

It seems strange to say, but my experience is the opposite. Because my Android Chrome experience was so bad, I went looking everywhere... and FFox was the answer.

Move away from their client based products though: Chrome-> FireFox, Gmail app->any other, Maps->Bing/OpenStreetMap.

(Personally I still use maps, because the others aren't quite quite up to par in my region).

If you check on Bugzilla, there are many bug reports about it.

I disagree with this assessment. What human beings are generally bad at is including the concerns of other people in their calculations. The probability that the information Google, Facebook, etc are gathering on them will ever be used to cause them significant harm is incredibly small. While one can imagine some future holocaust scenario enabled by it, no reasonable person would see that as likely from our current vantage point. The people affected by the way it is currently used, or the ways it is likely to be used in the future, are in a minuscule minority (and any competent authority wishing to abuse this information will no doubt endeavor to keep it that way).

> I'd see this as an argument why stuff like privacy can't be left to individual choice.

Is for your own good comrade!

Standard Firefox for Android has used Gecko from the start. It is gradually being upgraded using the Quantum improvements, but the rate of change seems slow. I thought that the emphasis on multi-threaded processing in Quantum would be particularly useful for mobile, because the single threaded processing capability of mobile (and particularly non-Apple mobile chips) is very limited, but there don't seem to have been massive improvements.

I think it’s a shame they relegated Servo to a research project, integrating Servo into Gecko has been long-winded, and the most important target of porting a parallel/multi-threaded layout engine isn’t even being discussed. Frankly, given their $500m budget, their core mission of browser development, and the massive importance of mobile, they probably should have pursued both Gecko and Servo at the same time. Even if Servo only supported flexbox layouts it could be very useful as a wrapper while wider compability was being pursued. The emphasis now is on WebVR, which seems not very relevant to the mass market.

I run Nightly so I get the improvements quickly, but even with that Firefox is still far behind Chrome.

- Firefox does not have a JIT for 64-bit ARM (AArch64). Didn't benchmark but this does make a difference.

- Running a extension based ad blocker seems to degrade performance and the difference visible on a smartphone SoC. I think Brave has it written in native code and deeply integrated, and it seems to perform without making things super slow.

- While I can't judge on the UI (actually I miss the tab gestures on Firefox), Firefox often glitches like not loading custom tabs, page search getting stuck and some others. This was quite stressful.

- The sync is super glitchy. It can easily be days outdated unless you trigger it manually.

It was a bit tougher a year ago but recent versions are spot on, I've largely forgotten it's not chrome as it just stays out the way.