The Firefox Dilemma
blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk
blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk
2. Firefox have bookmark tags.
3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width)
4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked.
5. Firefox have a built-in reader-mode. I don't use it much on desktop, but on on mobile it's very useful for pages that doesn't reflow.
6. There's an ad-block extension for firefox-mobile.
[1] Could of course be because I'm more used to it and have more history in firefox :)
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...
Chrome allows me to do use the built-in search engine of any website supporting it by pressing tab and then typing my search query. In firefox, it seems what I have to do is type my search query than use my mouse to click on the wikipedia icon (or amazon/etc). This also requires me to setup said search engine in firefox preferences. Ain't there anyway I can get that search experience using only the keyboard?
If you don't mind a network round trip, you can also setup DuckDuckGo as your default search engine and use bang commands [1] to do different kinds of searches on many sites.
Then you can just type 'y rick roll' to make a search.
Alternatively, set your default browser to duckduckgo.org and use it's bangs, no need to manually add shortcuts!
The previous example would then be '!y rick roll'.
Tags, on the other hand, are actually shown in the regular UI without needing to open the full bookmark manager. Much more discoverable, at least.
Not enough time to write one myself these days, but if keywords disappear, I might.
I'm a fan of Firefox Color: https://color.firefox.com - which allows you to express the UI color scheme in a shareable/saveable URL.
There's also Side View: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/side-view - which allows a persistent column to the side regardless of which tab you're in. Useful on widescreens.
[1] By proceeding, you agree to the terms and privacy policies of Test Pilot and the Side View privacy policy.
It can be installed from here: https://testpilot.firefox.com/files/side-view@mozilla.org/la...
(From their GitHub page.[1])
Also note that the Test Pilot page [2] contains a summary of the data they collect. Most notably:
> Side View does not collect any information about sites you visit.
The data is does collect seems related to whether and how you use it - it is an experiment, after all.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Add-ons/Cod...
For instance, I'll queue up a bunch of infant related tabs to email to my wife. If I'm unsure whether the site will stand the test of time, I can send the entire article (with an index) to her in the email as a kind of archive. I've also been sending myself my programming-related tabs when I go down a particularly deep rabbit hole.
Details on the ranking algorithm: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places...
For future notice though, the answer in the first link is wrong; you want "places.history.expiration.current_max_pages", not "places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages". Apparently the max "pages" are automatically calculated by default- mine was around 160k, so my history only went back about 2.5 years. I've set it to the maximum value for a 32 bit integer, which I guess should fix the problem for the next 20 or so years.
Kind of annoying that Firefox's default is to delete things when you told it not to delete things.
Chrome on Windows 10 doesn't appear to differentiate between tapping and mouse clicking on a menu item. The spacing between items remains the same narrow spacing, making it somewhat harder to select the correct item using touch.
For example, I have bookmarked my blog (theandrewbailey.com) in both. Typing "rew" into Firefox suggests my blog. Chrome doesn't, and I need to type it out from the beginning in order for it to get the clue.
is supported on it. It completely changed my browsing experience, and I cannot use any other browser except for quick, temporary browsing (like how one might use Notepad on Windows in a bind).
I'd highly, highly recommend this extension to anyone who has never had the pleasure to use it.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
So it's there, but it's nowhere near as seamless and convenient as it is in Firefox.
3. userChrome.css is poorly documented but a nice option, not sure if Chrome has something similar. I have firefox set so that each tab is just a favicon and an extra pixel on each side. It mostly works well, except at some point the audio icon started appearing (it didn't when I first made the change) and it appears over the next tab, that makes it impossible or nearly impossible to directly select the next tab.
5. Reader mode is exellent if you use a more comprehensive javascript blocker, since many pages work in reader mode that wouldn't otherwise. Hopefully this isn't because it is actually running some javascript in reader mode or otherwise avoiding the usual blocking rules.
I think the reason there is a focus on "firefox is better than crome in some fundamental ways" is that once you get down to individual features they both change frequently and a feature that one person likes might really annoy someone else. The reasons to avoid chrome are not likely to change unless firefox gets as bad as chrome. If you convince someone to switch for some random feature then there is a much better chance they will switch back in a few releases when the random feature breaks in some way. Additionally, it isn't clear that firefox has an opportunity to convince all that many end users.
That being said, anyone who wants to do a feature comparison should go ahead and do it. The article seems to be saying "the real problem here is that other people are writing about the differences they care about".
Very strange that clearing the history doesn't resolve it though..
Also, I found browser.urlbar.autoFill that gets it to not modify what I type but still show suggestions from bookmarks. I think I had tried to disable browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled at some point and enabled it again since it is sometimes helpful to quickly find bookmarked pages. It still searches if the entered text doesn't look like a domain name or url and there seems to be no way to disable that. Still, I appreciate that Firefox is configurable in a lot of ways and that there is a way to get it to mostly do what I want :).
Me too. I've hated that thing since it was first introduced.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...
Chrome ate Firefox's lunch, not IE's. Firefox was the first browser to take a chunk out of IE, in large part because of the stagnation of IE6. People were switching away from IE at a fairly consistent rate. When Chrome came along, the rate remained the same, but people started switching to Chrome instead of Firefox.
This graph shows it clearly (starts a little late to catch Firefox's initial bump but you can see the trend): http://i.imgur.com/7bP2pmj.png
FF had the upper hand against Opera, who were still quite the serious contender. I'm sure someone has done a PhD thesis on this, and if not well worth doing on multi-factor influences on market share for web browsers. Very multi-disciplinary too, covering tech, consumer understanding, embedded incumbents, marketing (a big part in Chrome's boom in my opinion).
Chrome's growth came from IE, yet. But at the time, anyone's growth could have come from IE. Chrome did it better and faster.
* I was still using IE6 in a corporate enviornment in 2013. I have friends that still require IE6 on XP in a company because funding for the system upgrade can't be made. The system's not internet facing, not explicitly. IE6 tried to define the internet, thankfully the internet moved on, and would have moved on. FF was at their tails, Chrome sped that.
FF was not without responsibilities (they got bogged down in backend work on gecko that never really delivered, then got distracted by side bets like FFOS and friends), but without Google's other properties and market share, this would never have happened.
I might have faulty memory, but this is not some minor detail. It is world changing.
For young teenager me, Chrome had a vastly better UX than both IE and Firefox when it debuted.
(now I prefer Firefox though)
I never had Firefox crash on me, so I never saw it as a selling point.
I however saw tabs crash all the fucking time in Chrome, so to me it just seemed like a workaround for bad engineering.
If anything was world changing to me, it was that now we were being told that tabs crashing all the time was normal.
When Chrome came out, it was much faster than Firefox.
IIRC, it was also an evergreen browser from the start and you could install plugins without restarting.
It was in many ways a superior product.
Google did to Firefox what it did to Yahoo, Altavista, Excite etc. When you can sell ‘6 minutes Abs’ who would buy ‘7 minutes Abs’?
Chrome was faster when it came out. I was on Win7 back in the days and I was being down voted. The proof is in the pudding.
It doesn't matter that much anyway - Google didn't make the difference by converting FF users, but by being better than Mozilla at pushing IE users to switch. Which, again, was not a technical issue at all. I would bet that 90% of those users never even tried FF. A lot of them installed Chrome on Windows so they could synchronize settings from their main device, i.e. an Android phone.
At the time I remember this was a huge performance gain on my machine with my workflow (dozens of tabs), since you could easily open up the Chrome Task Manager and see which tab was causing problems. It was also the first browser to make updates invisible, so I installed it on every family member's PC.
Eventually all my computers ran Chrome because Firefox wasn't the best option anywhere any more.
- Mozilla diverting devs towards Firefox OS;
- Mozilla attempting to maintain the old XUL/XPCOM-based add-ons architecture.
Both of these hurt Firefox a lot. Since Firefox 57, though, Firefox is back to being really quick.
On the other hand, most (non-dev) people I know who installed Chrome did it for marketing reasons – oftentimes simply because they had installed an anti-virus or Flash, which came bundled with Chrome – not out of actual merit.
When Chrome came out sometime in Fall '08, I used it, and it was faster than whatever FF version I had installed. So I kept using it.
One is often repeatedly prompted to install Chrome when visiting Google on other browsers[1][2]. Most normal users would just give up and install just to get rid of the pop up.
Microsoft has been doing the same (e.g. trying to trick you into keeping Edge when trying to select another browser as default on Windows 10), but their product wasn't good enough for it to work, it seems.
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/1192441/is-it-possible-to-te... [2] https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/922025
That definitely is using their dominance in search to make people.use their web browser.
However you're right in general Google are using the position to enforce Chrome
There's always duckduckgo, though.
It stopped because IE and Windows were not dominent anymore.
Surprised Google didn't get at least a warning for force feeding his browser.
For me, it's not the bloated browser centric computing experience that's the biggest problem. In my eyes, it's eclipsed by the armies of web developers whose only professional purpose is to work with this technological mishap. If our only document delivery system, i.e. web, wasn't such a mess, the same could be accomplished by a fraction of the current workforce.
Not that I have any insider information but from the complaints I've read about how the committees that handle promotion requests at Google, I'd be surprised if there aren't Google engineers already trying their hand at this.
What I'd like to know is how much does Chrome cost Google? I've read that Mozilla spends just under half a billion dollars a year so I'd expect Google likely spends at least a billion a year on Google Chrome (and associated tasks). Not sure how we'd come up with a number though because I wouldn't know how to put a price tag on things like webp, webm, depot tools, or the Google infrastructure that Google Chrome team gets to use (presumably for free).
I would be surprised if (without counting ads), the Chrome paid devs were not at least 3x the number of Firefox paid devs.
Oh, good point. I didn't think of that. I think the fact that Google promotes Chrome on Google Search and so on is worth more than the ads I see all over the web as well.
Think about what Chrome's dominance means: Chrome can push users and developers around as it wants. There is no long-term viability, and anything is at stake. Chrome already has QUIC support, will soon gain Grid Layout Level 2 support, etc. At the end of this decade, we'll be left with a generation of developers lost in the cloud.
For too long, the situation on the web has been that the inmates run the asylum, including so-called standard bodies financially dependent on Google. As they say, the road to a dystopian future is littered with good intentions.
I'd be very happy with a fixed, lower tier of web standard that is easy to implement against. It should contain enough standards to build attractive, solid (eg) online banking interfaces, blogs and news sites, commenting etc. In other words, a minimum for media consumption, rather than apps.
(Disclosure: I work for Google on AMP ads. I also know how much people here dislike AMP, so this is not entirely serious.)
I'd quite like an RSS+reader view browser. At a guess, RSS+reader view+AMP could cover pretty substantial amounts of existing content.
The hardest part is that amp probably isn't restrictive enough: you can still use a very large subset of HTML and CSS.
I'm not sure what you mean?
2. Reader mode
3. Addons on mobile (pretty much just for blocking unwanted requests to make things way faster on slow connection and to protect my privacy)
4. Facebook container (same for Google would be nice)
5. Taking screenshots
6. Always enable zoom on mobile
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/send-tab-firefox-ios-yo...
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
[4] https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extensio...
[5] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-screenshots
Here you go bud: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
There's a third-party one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
I know that is a bold statement but it is easily verified with numbers using a perf tool. Chrome is faster at executing JavaScript than Firefox, but even still Firefox leaves everybody completely in the dust when executing the DOM API.
DOM access is so incredibly important to how the web works and nobody really talks about. For some unknown reason most developers are deathly afraid of the DOM and will do everything possible to hide from it. It is common in every job I have worked to see mountains of querySelectors and 10mb of supporting framework code so that developers don't have to fear the DOM buggy man. I could sympathize if the DOM were complicated, but it isn't.
I really believe if Firefox goes away and that competition is gone the web will get fundamentally slower. Everybody will see this slowness and yet very few people be able to diagnose why, and that is tragic.
Ie. React's virtual DOM is a phenomenal idea because it greatly reduces actual DOM interaction. Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?
> Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?
The DOM is the standard technology the browsers use to communicate from JavaScript to markup. QuerySelectors are strings, so they have to be parsed into DOM instructions by the browser using a native code engine. Since the DOM is a well defined standard and it is the standard that all browsers use DOM instruction performance can be directly compared between the different browsers.
That really depends on what you're doing.
Reimplementing querySelector in JavaScript (even if you do it on top of JS-only node representations, not on actual nodes) is likely to be slower than the built-in version, for example.
If you're doing a "modify-read-modify-read" cycle, then things are different because the contract is different: the DOM promises that reads will see all modifications, while some of the other systems built around it don't.
> Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?
It really depends on the shape of your workload. There are various cases where React's virtual DOM is pure overhead and just makes things slower.
[Disclaimer: I work on a browser rendering engine, and have done a fair amount of performance work, so I may have my biases about what I see in profiles.]
I look at the sessions of people that use Chrome, and I wonder how they ever manage to get anything done: tab management is uniformly hopeless. Firefox, on the other hand, copes with hundreds of tabs with perfect equanimity. (I currently have 165 tabs spread across three windows—one for personal stuff, one for work stuff, and one for a particular work project; this is a fairly typical number; I might have less than twenty once a year or so, and I’ve had as many as 450 before.)
I use the Tree Style Tab extension for a vertical tab bar with hierarchy. I’ve suggested it to family members once or twice each, and my dad and two of my sisters use vertical tabs (two via Tree Style Tab, one via some other extension) and wouldn’t be without ’em. Most of the rest of the family uses Firefox too, and I believe Firefox is the leading browser used by my coworkers at FastMail by quite a margin.
Firefox’s awesome bar is aptly named. It’s way more useful than Chrome’s.
I am an idealist and not fond of Google, and while that’s a factor, it’s not the primary reason I use Firefox. I use Firefox because I find it simply better. (Same deal with using DuckDuckGo over Google. It’s more usable with keyboard shortcuts and bangs, and finds results every bit as good as Google’s.)
I also use Firefox on my phone; there, it’s more of a mixed bag: it’s markedly slower than Chrome in general, but I can install regular extensions like uBlock Origin and Stylus. There, my dislike of Google is more of a factor.
How do you manage this setup? I'm specifically interested in how you can assign tabs to different windows and have this information persist across restarts.
I do also use container tabs a little with some automatic assignment (automatic assignment to container, that is, not to window, useful as that would be), but I don’t think I actually need them any more; I think that FastMail is now the only thing where I need actively different sessions for personal and work, and it supports multiple logins just fine.
Then sometimes there’s a particular project that I want to focus on, and so I create a new window just for it, and shift it and any other related stuff into another new virtual desktop.
P.S. I just closed 50 tabs because I had finished something and deferred another thing.
For me I am using firefox-esr with noscript, privacy badger, https-everywhere and vimium. I'm extremely happy with my web workflow.
Another thing for me is that firefox seems to be easier to lock up. Twice this week I had issues where firefox locked up. The first was trying to render a dropdown select with several thousand items (blame the prom explorer for that) and the second was rendering some graphs, which while not fast in chromium, certianly did not cause problems.
I shared this link earlier internally on slack because I think it makes a fair point that applies to many David-and-Goliath marketplaces, namely that "not" being Goliath isn't a compelling argument. Having a brand based around F.U.D. is an easy thing to slip into, but really Firefox and other small competitors should focus on beating the competition with features, not fud.
You do have to make some custom css tweaks in userStyles.css as outlined on the extension page so as to hide the default firefox tab bar. But it works a charm. I held out on upgrading to Quantum, right up until this extension was made available.
I respect people choosing products based on ideality, but I personally will just use what suits my demand/preference best.
When I first switched from IE to Firefox 1.5, it's because it has tabs. And I loved it more and more once I figured out how well-built it is and how powerful addons can be.
When Chrome firstly came, it was pretty bad in term of functionality. The extension system is weak (compared to what Firefox can offer at the time), it lack TONS of what I personally consider as "essential features" (font settings for different languages is a big one for me as a non-Latin character user, for example), so I continued to use Firefox.
But Chrome catched up very quickly. Today, the features of two browsers are basically on par in my user case, especially after Firefox switched to WebExt (which I think is the right direction, by the way). I started to use Chrome more and more due to some small details, like better sync experience etc. Again, purely personal choice based on my heavy use of both.
Another thing that pushed me away from Firefox is my personal experience in bug reporting. I'm not a software developer, but I do report bugs semi-frequently. I feel like I was treated better in Chromium project than Firefox's one. I have lots of unhappy experiences there (the one that I still can't get over is that they won't fix a video playback bug that affects all Win7 + nVidia GPU users [1]). I think in Chromium everytime you report a bug with clear repro steps, there will at least an employee (or volunteer? Not sure) that will attempt to repeat your steps and attach a screencat of that in 1-2 days. It feels good.
Except it happens because it emerges from the collective behavior.
Now, one can't fight a all the fights, and I don't think somebody that decides to avoid this one is a bad person. But one should definitly pick up some fights. Choose some things to pay for, decide some things to consume or be part of, not just by the nature of it, but by the consequences of doing so. Although I do think like in the article that it's better to fight _for_ something than _against_ something.
Anyway, if one doesn't makes, on daily basis, regular, endless, conscious choices, one is not taking part of the world but is just passively living in it.
And that's how we fail to build a society.
Anyway, as a fact: it works fine in IE and Chrome (after they fixed it). So at very least, it is fixable on browser's end.
It also works fine in any video player you can think of.
Also, from what I can see, neither Chromium dev nor Firefox dev claim it's an "nVidia bug". Chromium dev just went ahead and fixed it. Firefox dev said they're not going to fix it because (from previous ticket [1]) "We don't intend to add new features such as this code is only used on Windows 7." Which IMHO makes no sense because when this bug firstly appeared, it was 3-4 years ago; and Win 7 is still one of the most used OS and is in the supported OS list of Firefox.
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1161349#c46
Be vocal! Use your influence!
And if you have the means: donate!
When I tell people to use Firefox they just laugh like it's a quirky personality trait that I use the underdog browser instead of the one everyone knows is best.
Definitely true. Asking users to respect certain principles is tantamount to guilting them which doesn't work.
> It’s time we analyse what Firefox does better than Chrome, and sing those praises.
From the perspective of a non-technical user, the differences are not noticeable. Firefox and Chrome have continued to converge (...er...maybe one following the other) to the point that the differences listed are not real differentiators.
Oddly enough, you could argue that telemetry and the constant push for user happiness and adoption is what is hurting FF. FF looks like Chrome. I'm not saying stop listening to your users, but in general it's ok to differentiate yourself in ways that don't appear to be immediately beneficial to adoption. The primary way this can be done is in the UI. We can all recognize that there are still lots of efficiencies to be gained around the current state of internet navigation. Other approaches may not be better, and I understand the maintainability fear of multiple UI paradigms in the same software, but at least it's a way of differentiating yourself.
Not to come of as dismissive, but if this is the first time you picked up this conversation, you simply haven't been paying attention the last half decade.
If we've addressed things properly back then (with web developers using more than the Ad-company's browser), we wouldn't be in the situation where we are now with only 2 real engines remaining, down from 4, and mobile more crippled than ever.
And now it's going to be much, much worse encouraging web developers to actually adhere to the standards for a diverse browser-market.
My addition to the list: Firefox has better kerning support while Chromium team ignores the problem (e.g. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=888374... and https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=912052).
For the context: I'm software developer working in printing.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=639223 is a good example of my experience there: a fancy typography thing that is just completely broken in an uncommon but by no means unreasonable situation, and it just sits for years untouched.
But Firefox is still definitely not perfect: as an example that has sat unfixed for ten years, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479829 is about hyphenation and ligatures not mixing well (you can get half your ff ligature on one line and half on the next). I tend to see the effects of that once or twice a year.
I think market share is the wrong metric to fixate on. FF market share has never been particularly big, that shouldn't be the target and it never really was. The target used to be improving the web and being the most innovative and reliable engine for web standards. This is what Mozilla was good at, before they started thinking like your run-of-the-mill big company ("we need to find the Next Big Thing! Market share! Leverage! Competitive advantage!"...) and wasted years in pointless side-bets.
1) If your market share is too low, sites don't bother testing in your browser. Since most sites are not written based on standards but rather by trying things until they work [1], this means that sites will start breaking in your browser and it will become harder and harder for anyone to actually use it. This is what happened with Opera and Edge.
2) If your market share is too low, you don't get much say in standards discussions.
It's not about having "big" market share. Having 90% market share or whatnot is a not really a goal for Firefox. But it does need "enough" market share that it can actually meaningfully achieve its mission [2]. Producing a browser that no one can actually use in practice and having no impact on the evolution of the web would both be failures in mission terms. 0.01% market share is "not enough". 20% is "enough". Where the line is in between is hard to tell.
[1] Hard to fault web developers for this; the standards are so complex that writing "to the standard", which requires understanding it, is hard. It doesn't help that recent web standards have had a tendency to be over-engineered, partly due to being created by a large company at the behest of other parts of that large company, so having a tendency to be designed to be usable by large companies but not necessarily worrying about anyone else.
Doesn't seem to work, though.
I get the whole "You are the product" thing when using Google services for free, but it still bugs me that anything I bookmark might/will end up in a profile somewhere.
In fact I liked way Firefox Sync did this same way (when it was called Weave) -- actually allowing to use a passphrase. They got rid of passphrase and they are now using username/password pair to handle encryption.
I use Firefox mainly for privacy and containers. Is there a good reason Firefox couldn't provide features based on Chromium/Blink too (like Brave)?
If Firefox adopts Chromium, there becomes effectively no way for Mozilla to shape the futures in manners that are not blessed by Google. For instance, Google doesn't seem to be interested in WebVR/WebAR, so there is no way to bring a Chromium-based browser in this direction until Google says so. The same thing happens with compression formats, for instance.
Also, as Google controls Chromium, a monopoly of Chromium also means that Google can decide to deprecate and/or customize web features without any counter-power. For instance, Google could decide to restrict WebPay to GooglePay, effectively leveraging their monopoly against PayPal and credit cards. There are also a number of manners in which Google could, in theory, make Netflix or Facebook or any competitor less usable or entirely unusable on the web. No Chromium-based browser can do anything against this.
Don't forget that Mozilla is also working on a next-gen rendering engine, Servo, that is expected to kick the ass of both Gecko and Blink on recent platforms, in terms of both performance, battery use and security. Making Chromium the only web browser means abandoning any hope to switch to this new architecture, as everything would need to be bug-for-bug compatible with Chromium, instead of following the standard.
(edit) typos
Chrome simply isn't configurable enough to make it nice to use for me.
I suspect that would be easier than persuading web developers to target more browsers unfortunately.
Like a Shadowdom API v0 (v1 is standartized by W3C) used by Google in Polyfill so Youtube is way slower?
> even if it means making the browser work with Chrome's non-standard implementations of things
How good the compatibility between Internet Exploder's features and FF/Chrome was?
I should probably give Firefox's tools another chance, but last time I checked Chrome's dev tools was alot better.
No, because Google can just copy those features (except for the privacy respecting ones; but almost nobody cares about them)
Sync, awesome bar, tab management, multi-account containers, trustworthiness in the add-ons I install (better reviews by humans) and resource usage especially with many tabs.
Firefox went through a very painful transition with Quantum due to invalidating many old extensions that people liked. However they managed to do the impossible imo, Firefox being better than ever and the ecosystem of add-ons is not in a bad shape either.
I also believe it was the right thing to do, because technically speaking it was inferior to Chrome’s multi-process architecture. The old add-ons system also had a big problem from the user's point of view ... Firefox had no permissions system in place and I like their review-based approach, but it doesn’t scale well.
So now after Quantum, I'm pretty sure Firefox will move on to innovate in its internals way past Chrome or Safari.
As a software developer I'm super psyched about what they are doing with Rust. Having a browser with components built in Rust, a super safe language, doesn't mean much for regular users, but it should translate in a more stable, safer and performant product.
And I don't know how many people appreciate this, but building a better language than C/C++ and then re-building components with it in an old and popular product, without breaking it, is super hard.
- Pinch zoom using the trackpad or the touchscreen is not smooth, it doesnt zoom the whole page just elements. Chrome/Safari/Edge does it well.
- Tab tearing is clunky compared to Chrome.
- The UI for bookmarks/history is awkward. For example it takes 4 clicks to reopen a recently closed tab compared to 2 in Chrome. When I add the history button its still 3 clicks...
Somewhat ironically since many people say Firefox is better at blocking tracking.
When it's hard to whitelist the cookies I need, I might cave and simply allow all third-party cookies.
Would that allow Mozilla to make Firefox more awesome by freeing up dev time that was taken by servo and gecko, and now can be used to make great UI and extensions and features?
If they were to put webkit on Firefox, and after the initial de-googling, they would start working on webkit and contribute there, or somehow merge some servo things in webkit. I guess in the end it would still take a few years until it's complete, but it is an interesting thought to me.
I haven't used chrome for years, so actually don't know. Maybe I'd prefer it but I make a policy of not using google software and services (where the choice still exists).
No-one expects Windows programs to work on macOS or Linux. But with the web that's different.
All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers who pulled out Firefox, and all the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years.
P.S. There is a whisper going around that Google's only reason to keep paying Mozilla so generously is just to keep them down, and quiet — a kind of unwritten non-aggression pact
What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO.
Mozilla's intentions and fears seem to be very reasonable, driving what they do from AV1 to fighting DRM, though they have hit dead ends with Firefox OS (now Kai OS) and other side projects, the organization is still doing work that is in the best interest of the common person, unlike what the tech giants have been doing.
Many things been coming out of their house, but not a usable browser — a raison d'etre stated in their charter.
Wrt having a usable browser, I'm literally using Firefox for Android to talk to you right now. Firefox has been a usable browser for years, seems your salty tho.
Please provide citations for:
- Incompetent directors flying chartered jets and getting $1M USD remuneration for nothing.
- All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers
- All the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years.
Page 7.
Mitchel Baker 1,054,536.
Jim Cook 985,899
And a list of 8 people with six digit salaries, out of whom 4 have their roles not even tangentially related to Mozilla's charter activities. And this is for Mozilla Foundation only. Mozilla corporation (M. F. Technologies) is keeping really below the water in terms of publicity.
> All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers
All popularity Firefox had gained was in time of it being a community project, when Mozilla did nothing but provide a CVS server and a bugzilla. You should've seen how they bled user share the more they turned into a commercial business for the past 17 years.
> All the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years.
First take their revenue from getting generous payouts from Google, then from all others affiliate programs, including the ill famed pocket. $300m is a not a joke sum, very generous, more than they pay to any other affiliate http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almos...
And yet here I am reading this on Firefox. Like, I get that someone might prefer Chrome, but how anyone could call FF unusable is baffling to me. What on Earth would make it unusable in your opinion?
I don't like it either, that's why I give to Mozilla once in a while.
b.) The ads are entirely local and do not track you. They're an attempt to diversify revenue sources away from Google. Chrome doesn't have to do that, since Google tracks you.
I posted a few reasons for this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655028
Also
> If chromium is open source other companies could share the control over code right?
The sole governing body for Chromium is Google. Other companies get exactly as much control as Google decides.
That's the opposite of, say, the Linux Kernel or Rust. It is my understanding that Firefox is also heading in the same direction as these, i.e. towards shared control by all stakeholders.
(Personally I was using Konqueror in that era - even then it felt like a much better browser - and wish the open-source community had rallied behind it. But the US open-source folks never seemed to pay much attention to anything that had been implemented in Europe)
The truth is that working on browser engines is hard and unfashionable work, nobody in opensource really wants to do it. Every desktop environment made its crappy half-baked reimplementation when it looked like deep desktop integration was inevitable and Netscape was a black-box (the IE 4/5 era), then dropped it when Firefox came about - it was good enough, and the integration fashion had passed.
I do agree that KDE was (still is) ridiculously ignored in the US. The licence schism generated a certain tribalism that is now difficult to overcome. Which is funny, considering GPL is now The Devil in the US.
How so? The browser kept working nicely the whole time. Eventually Webkit was offered as a rendering engine option when development overtook mainline KHTML, but that was long after Apple first adopted it.
Well sure, but I saw that more as splitting out the file manager and browser into separate apps, which seems perfectly sensible.
> It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project.
Shrug. It was always a shoestring project in terms of how many developers they had, but the browser kept working well, was my experience.
Google pushed Chrome a lot. We need another antitrust for Google honestly. They are promoting Chrome everywhere they can.
When Chrome arrived, though, the paradigm shifted. Chrome was blazing fast. You double clicked it and it opened instantly. You closed it and it was gone. When you typed somrthing into the bar, it searched it or it went to the url. When you opened a new tab it opened instantly. It was amazing. And everyone knew who Google were - they’d made real search, they’d given us Gmail (upending all of webmail).
Among those who did switch, most switched to Firefox (and a small few switched to Opera). By the time Chrome was released, Firefox's market share was 20-25%, entirely through grassroots evangelism. It felt like a steady race that we were winning. Then Chrome came along with its minimalist interface, hyper-optimised JS engine, extreme attention to latency, and aggressive marketing from the front page of the internet (which was also growing more JS-heavy by the day), which contributed to Chrome not just feeling faster, but amazingly futuristic. Whereas Firefox was "you really shouldn't be using that crufty old IE, try this new hotness - it has tabs!", Chrome was more "OMG you have to try this, it makes your internet twice as fast". It didn't help that Chrome's strength was Firefox's weakness - for all its merits, its XUL-based interface sometimes made it feel a mite sluggish.
Of course it might not really have, but the sleek look, the circular loader instead of a progress bar kind of a loader that Firefox had at that time, faster JS engine – all this combined to give me a wow factor in terms of browsing speed.
Remember, this was at the time when 250kbps of broadband speed was the "normal". And speed was easily a critical factor.
Then in a couple of years Chrome emerged. It was a way simplier than FF, it had no firefox's complex dialogs to customize a lot of things. Chrome helped Firefox to eat the rest of IE market share, and then started to eat into Firefox market share.
It was like this. Funnily that people doesn't remember that, believing instead that it was Chrome who overthrown IE. It was Firefox who changed web to a point when web-developers couldn't ignore non-IE users, and had to check compliance with standards, not just check whether their sites works with IE.