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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Firefox's marketshare is pretty horrible - non-existence on mobile and very small on desktop and shrinking at 10% a year. It is basically at Edge-levels of adoption on desktop:

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...

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Firefox on mobile is actually pretty good and more people should use it.

(At least on Android, on iOS it's just a skin on top of whatever engine apple forces down their throats).

I started using Firefox Android a year ago and now I can't stand chrome and all the Ads!

Ublock origin on Firefox mobile is a godsend.

I find that firefox + ublock is still far slower than brave on android.

It isn't slower for me, and Firefox + uBlock Origin have the benefits of being FOSS (no for-profit making decisions behind the scenes) and having much better control over blocking.

Brave sometimes totally fails to block Outbrain-like junk at the bottom of articles, and that seems like it must be intentional.

Add on dark reader and the mobile experience is dramatically better. It's still a little clunky from a UI/UX standpoint, but still superior experience overall.

I'd describe the mobile UX as less optimized and more straightforward than Chrome. Definitely easier to tweak your privacy settings as well.

I use FF exclusively on my laptop. Having FF on my phone syncs my tabs and history. This is amazingly useful. Use it 3-4 times a week.

If you enjoy FF I recommend signing up for their beta program. New versions come out every couple of weeks and tend to make noticeable random differences or feature enhancements.

Firefox on mobile still hasn't implemented something as basic as enlarged touch targets for buttons in webpages. Pressing the [-] button that is next to each comment of this site using Firefox is a nightmare compared to any other webkit browser.

I wouldn’t say that it’s a problem with the browser, rather the implementation of the site’s design. The browser could of course be helpful and increase the click target size to some minimum value, but it would just make the development complicated due to yet another quirk in how browsers implement the UI, especially in cases where you need a lot of small click targets.

Hmm, are you sure? Because I remember implementing that. Maybe it got disabled for some reason.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247095 for why it's currently disabled, and you can toggle "ui.mouse.radius.enabled" in about:config and see whether the issues that led to this being turned off are actually relevant for your personal usage or not.

Firefox Focus is very fast, not sure if its out for ios. I dont use it as a daily browser, but I do use it often with sites with obnoxious popups, or incognito sites I don't want to give info too.

Even most firefox communities agree FF on Android is hot pile of garbage in terms of performance, power usage, and scrolling. The rewritten FF preview is fixing some of that but it's obviously not GA yet.

It is not true, FF on Android is pretty great. I use it a lot every day. It actually syncs tabs and passwords better than Chrome (and without leaking them to Google without encryption)

> I use it a lot every day. It actually syncs tabs and passwords better than Chrome (and without leaking them to Google without encryption)

Has nothing to do with performance, but I agree - to be clear I use FF but that doesn't mean I have to justify/defend "it's slow" with other reasons I choose to use it.

> It is not true, FF on Android is pretty great.

https://cnet3.cbsistatic.com/img/dzNTI91dH4nch-WEKzTkp_WWza8... https://greenspector.com/assets/img/articles/2018-11-19-navi... (Firefox Focus was on still on the WebKit base when that benchmark was done, not their own engine)

Even posts about how great it is have to contain qualifiers https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/97vqb2/firefox_for... "I know a lot of people complain about Firefox on Android... "es, the scrolling isn't as good as Chrome".

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/c2qovb/how_stable_... top comment " but it can have somewhat poor performance... But yeah, Android Firefox is actually being rewritten for that reason. " and only other comment "Yes you can sync. Performance is still abysmal. "

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bxr3yc/why_is_andr... "I've used Firefox, Firefox Beta, Firefox Focus, and Firefox Nightly. They're all absolutely glacial browsers on Android." top comment is basically what I said "Firefox Preview or fenix is a promising browser . It has modern superfast Ui . Better page loading time and benchmark scores . It is currently under development (that's why it's called preview ) ."

I could go on, these aren't cherry picked they are just going straight through searches and clicking top results. These aren't rare opinions, they score decently high on forums dedicated to discussing FF. The comments on the rewrite are the complete opposite, praising performance and fixing laggy scroll, but it's not done yet. This is a constant source of discussion.

If the current version of FF on Android didn't have issues they wouldn't be rewriting it.

Firefox does not need to do everything better than Chrome to be great. It is a false presumption. It just has to do the job well and browsing easy, which it does. After overcoming initial unfamiliarity, I find it better suited for my regular workflow. And, of course, FF never tried to destroy my eyes like Chrome did: one day the wiseguys in Google decided that everything should be extreme WHITE [1]. First, when they had enabled it, you could reduce whiteness by turning on a hidden flag in preferences, but in the very next update, they removed said flag completely.

I read from my phone very often in the dark environment, and Chrome usage became excruciating even on the minimum screen brightness. So removing that option was a final straw for me, and I switched to FF on both mobile and desktop. And honestly, never looked back, learning to appreciate what I have with FF. I never noticed anything laggy about scrolls, and power usage on Android is about the same as Chrome (likely less, due to everything being NOT SO FREAKING WHITE!).

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B0rbZd_cEpW...

> Firefox does not need to do everything better than Chrome to be great.

Nope, but it doesn't need to be protected from criticism for coming dead last either.

Again, workflow and theming are completely irrelevant to anything I mentioned. "hot pile of garbage __in terms of performance, power usage, and scrolling__." (emphasis added). You're reading "someone said something bad about FF, I've got to say how it's better than Chrome!" instead of what was said. I then provided hard data to validate it's not just my anecdotal experience.

> one day the wiseguys in Google decided that everything should be extreme WHITE [1].

Just to note they have since added native dark mode and the native ability to automatically convert sites you browse to into a dark theme. I'm hoping FF adds the latter natively but in the meantime it's doable via extensions so it's not as big a deal as finishing the Firefox Preview rewrite for Android.

> "hot pile of garbage __in terms of performance, power usage, and scrolling__."

Thing is, it is not. On Chrome I regularly had unresponsive pages that once cleared led to all tabs being closed, and it happened more often when I had more tabs open, the critical number is 10-12. Once you are over that limit, expect "App stopped responding" modal. On Firefox, I currently have 36 open tabs, and it works without any slowdowns.

In Chrome, if start typing something in a webpage, open another page to do some fact-checking, go back to the first page, and see all my typed text gone. On Firefox, I do this all the time, open different apps, and all my tabs and their contents are safe (with the exception of private tabs, sadly).

Power usage is about the same, scrolling is also fast enough for me (I am aware it does render fonts in lo-res while scrolling, but I only learned about this in an online discussion about 'horrible font rendering', never noticing it myself in more than 6 months of usage at the time.

So no, I don't agree with your assessment of Firefox as a "hot pile of garbage". I think it is a great mobile browser, and I think it will get even better. YMMV, of course, but I'm very happy with Firefox and have no plans of going back.

To clarify, when I said"Even most Firefox communities agree FF on Android is hot pile of garbage in terms of performance, power usage, and scrolling." and provided independent quantitative comparisons & community discussions as example I wasn't implying anything about your particular experience with Chrome(???) and reasons you decided to use Firefox. When I claimed the Firefox Preview rewrite is primarily about fixing these above issues I'm not referring to whether or not you personally feel it's related to the performance of the existing version rather things like Firefox blog posts and related discussions around it say it is.

To reiterate: When I mention power/performance I'm referring to the benchmarks showing it's last not whether or not I personally think it feels fast and when I mention the Firefox communities common opinion I'm not referring to your personal experiences or whether or not you personally found Chrome worse in the same regard.

Also I'd like to point out once more something I've already pointed out: At no point have I said or Firefox on Android as a whole is a hot pile of garbage nor have I mentioned anything about Chrome being better/worse/relevant. Please stop saying I have and particularly please stop using cut off quotes to imply I did. It's not what I was talking about and, more importantly, it's not even the opinion I hold.

I dropped chrome on Android a year ago, transitioning to Firefox Mobile. Was kinda uncomfortable for a few weeks, but now I like it more than I ever liked Chrome. I also switched to using DuckDuckGo recently on all my devices, and it's been pretty great!

In short: more people should be using Firefox and DDG.

For non-technical people, this is not surprising, as Google shoves it down your throat when you go to their website(s).

For technical folks, I really don't understand it - I'm not a web developer, so my use case might be different, but I really don't see what exactly people are missing. I've never had issues with browser performance (I use FF on mac, Windows, Linux, and (slow out of the box) development Linux VMs).

People here usually complain about performance, but how does one even objectively measure that? Do people's browsers freeze up? Do websites load noticeably slower?

This is a genuine question - not just a rant.

As a side node, syncing to your own server is a huge feature for me - as far as I'm aware, Chrome can't do that. That + DDG as default search engine is an open alternative to Google's/Chrome's monopoly, which in my opinion should take precedence over pure convenience for the audience of HN.

I can't speak for others, but

>[...] which in my opinion should take precedence over pure convenience for the audience of HN.

is a no from me. Maybe I've done tech too long, but I don't feel obliged to ditch convenience for nerdcred or the feeling of authenticity or whatever your frame is. Several years ago, FF was slower -talking margins of magnitude- for me, both on windows and linux-machines. Maybe it was due to addons and whatnot, but I migrated to Chrome, and, in simple words, had no UX-related reason to switch back ever since. Chrome does what I want it to do, and I cba to switch back to FF unless I'll actually start seeing ads again. And I'm not a webdev either, for that matter.

When you say "orders of magnitude" slower, are you referring to specific measurements you made, or are you just saying that Firefox seemed a lot slower?

> I don't feel obliged to ditch convenience for nerdcred or the feeling of authenticity or whatever your frame is.

That's an awfully dismissive way of putting it given the prevailing topic of this thread: privacy. Firefox isn't perfect in that regard, but I trust Mozilla a hell of a lot more than I trust Google.

Not to mention I don't want Google dictating how the web works through sheer force of market share. It's like nobody remembers the 90s and IE anymore. Do we really want a repeat of that?

Obviously there's a line to be drawn: when "convenience" turns into "browsing is actually a difficult chore because FF has bugs X, Y, Z", then sure, it's of course understandable that you'd ditch FF for an alternative. But I don't think that experience should be common.

Actions speak louder than words, and the actions of Mozilla in the last few years surrounding so-called "experiments" makes Google look like the more trustworthy actor wrt browser components. At least Google never called ads "user-enhancing"

[1] https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504

Yeah I do not exactly understand why FF is not the preferred browser of developers either. :shrug emoji:

Anything but Safari takes an hour or two off my laptop's battery life and harms systemwide performance more than Safari does. Yes, still. I open FF or Chrome for specific purposes then close them as fast as I can. It's bad enough that I have Electron running amok on my system—all the more important that my actual web browser respect power use, memory, and processor cycles.

Maybe give Firefox 70 a try when it comes out next week? They've redone animation rendering on macOS to do it the same way Safari does, which should increase performance and reduce battery consumption.

Last I saw the favorable comparison for the upcoming performance improvements was "now uses as little battery and performs as well as Chrome"... so I'll try it—I mean I do use it pretty often anyway in short bursts—but there's a ways between that and Safari.

[EDIT] to be clear, I'm rooting for them. I've used Firefox since it was Phoenix. And Firebird. Back then I evangelized it, hard. I've not loved it since somewhere in the 2.x range, but I wish I could again. It's just, you know, been a while.

I've switched from Chromium to Firefox on Ubuntu. Performance has been a bit worse with regards to rendering, tab switching etc. The scrolling isn't as smooth in Firefox. Otoh, Firefox stays responsive even if one page runs a lot of scripts; it freezes the tab, not the browser (as Chromium does).

It's not necessarily an issue for me, I won't switch back because of it, and I like Firefox for development, though the Chromium dev tools are still a bit better in some regards, but yeah, lower performance has been noticeable for me.

I don't remember what made me switch on Desktop, but I had switched on android before, simply because the internet was unusable on Chrome with ads.

For me, firefox's touchpad scrolling is much smoother than chromium's on linux.

Also, firefox implements kinetic touchpad scrolling on linux, whereas chromium still does not (this is a huge missing feature IMO)

Unpopular opinion: as a "technical" person, Mozilla and Firefox's behavior over the last few years really should raise red flags in the technical community. The various so-called "experiments" with advertising and other features might have helped with the bottom line, but it erodes confidence at a time where people are more conscious of privacy-related matters. Even the open source advocates should consider that huge parts of Pocket are still closed source

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/31/mozilla-ad-on-firefoxs-ne...

[2] https://www.ghacks.net/2017/10/06/mozilla-to-launch-firefox-...

[3] https://drewdevault.com/2017/12/16/Firefox-is-on-a-slippery-...

[4] https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/

[5] https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75

I've noticed on MacOS (on two MBPs) that Firefox 69 (with ublock origin as only plugin) is noticeably slower to render / lay out sites and maybe download content than Chrome (with ublock origin as only plugin) on same machines. Battery life is noticeably worse as well compared to Chrome.

I've switched though to using Firefox despite the above on MacOS at least.

On Linux however, Firefox seems quite a bit worse than Firefox to the extent that it's approaching "painful" levels to use it - scrolling is very laggy (messed around with hardware accel, drivers, etc), downloading / rendering is noticeably slower, etc. (Same setup of only plugin in each browser on Linux being ublock origin). Even starting it seems much slower (with cold FS caches). This is on several Linux machines, and seems pretty universal in my experience.

At work, we have to use the internet through a VDI terminal (main network is completely segregated from internet), and I've noticed that with this setup, Firefox is even slower than my "native" Linux comparisons. Also, as I can see the network traffic between the VDI and my machine, I've also noticed that a single blank page window in Firefox keeps sending updates (300KB/sec, like it's refreshing constantly in an event loop or something), whilst a blank page window in Chrome has no updates, which seems a bit weird to me, and indicates something's non-optimal in Firefox, as I don't see why a blank page should cause firefox to apparently re-render stuff...

Quite an interesting disparity across markets. In Germany, Firefox's desktop marketshare is above 25%. Poland, 20%. France, 16%, Spain 11%, UK and US 8%.

I picked those examples as a mix of language markets, the two largest non-English speaking EU countries and an East/West EU comparison.

What links Germany and Poland in Firefox adoption on desktop?

they are neighbours, for one thing

Well, yes, but so is Denmark and Firefox desktop marketshare in that country is down to 4.55%.

I suspect Germany and France are much more concerned about privacy

I’d also like to mention that Chrome only overtook FF 2017 (compared to 2014 in the US) here in Germany.

at least to me, that graph shows exactly why we need to start using Firefox and not hand the entire web to Google & Chrome. That's frightening to see. I'm old enough to remember the "optimized for IE" buttons everywhere.

Interesting to see that Safari has risen and is still slowly rising, even with no Windows version anymore.

Unfortunately the majority of users don't know and/or care about the differences between browsers. Firefox to them is just a weird looking Chrome.

There's an entire generation of internet users that _only_ know Chrome. I am a huge Firefox fan and use it myself, but trying to convince others to switch is a futile in my experience. Those who understand or care about the benefits are either already using it or some other Chrome alternative, everyone else doesn't want to be bothered.

At this point I don't know it will take to de-throne Chrome. As much as I want to see Mozilla succeed, I don't know if it will be Firefox. I'm not sure what else they can do to make it enticing to the general populous. I just hope they don't give up and keep pumping out wonderful features.

You know what would be a great comparison? The amount of money in/out of the Mozilla foundation way back in their start when they had an equal 10% market share against IE6 (probably around 2003 or 2004?); along with breakdowns on what they spent it on.

They're kinda in the same boat with Chrome that they were with Microsoft/IE way back in the day, but the composition of the company and user base has changed a lot!

I have really tried to love the new Firefox builds on desktop due to the containers.

The performance is not stellar on OS X and plugin support is tiny by comparison so I find myself drifting back to Chrome.

Firefox 70 is suppose to have a big performance boost on Mac.

Firefox 70 will use Core Animation on Macs for graphics rendering, just like Chrome and Safari. This will vastly improve low energy consumption/battery life, but I haven't heard anything about general UI performance?

Anyway, it's supposed to be out next week [1] :)

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar

I'm on Firefox Nightly, and performance has been noticably better in the past several months.

Previously Firefox was barely usable for anything with animation on OSX. They've been making steady (if slow) progress for the past year or so, now it's subjectively on-par with Chrome and Safari for me.

Does this mean that watching video via firefox on OSX will no longer make my machine heat like crazy?

Firefox performance has been a joke on mac for years with "fixes" supposedly happening every few months but it's still horrible. I'll believe it when I see it.

> The performance is not stellar on OS X and plugin support is tiny by comparison so I find myself drifting back to Chrome.

Are you saying that Firefox has less addons than Safari? Is that even possible with the restrictions on Safari browser (ads blocking)?

I’m assuming that they’re comparing Firefox to Chrome.

Interestingly, that site is completely blocked by default on my browser. I think 3 of the top recommended extensions for Firefox block it (uBlock Origin, uMatrix, and NoScript).

I imagine this impacts their data.

I wonder if statcounter is getting tracking information from Firefox users when Firefox ships with content blocking to protect privacy. I think it's on my by default now.

Makes me wonder if the pro Firefox and Anti Google threads are part of the marketing ...

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