It wasn’t the users that lost interest in Firefox. It was Mozilla that lost interest in Firefox.
Firefox does not have a brand visibility problem , no amount of marketing will convince users if the browser is not significantly better. If the value is marginal convenience trumps.
Firefox did not gain market share orginally because they did better marketing than IE. They became big because they built a better product.
Chrome became because of the same reason too. They did a lot of early innovations with per tab process isolation headless or v8 decoupling and myriad to new features giving performance boost and making it possible for projects like electron to exist.
Firefox got a major usage boost post quantum.
If they could rebuild the full stack on rust there will be a massive usage boost.
Mozilla is in a unique position they don't have revenue targets or shareholders to please. They have users, and a single customer who is also their only competitor.
It is no brainier to say largest chunk of investment should have gone there.
P.S. yes google has a unfair advantage, they implement web standards well before it is accepted then force their version by sheer force the market dominance. This is not new IE did it to netscape . However google also owns a lot of the pages people visit. They will optimize their sites for their browser. This is why youtube will always be faster in chrome than firefox.
And of course Chrome became dominant the same way.
Word of google.com main page > word of mouth :(
Chrome was the same too. Yes Google does have unfair advantage because they own lot of properties people interact with every day, they are a significant player for user mind space, but they are not so large that people spend 50-60% time on google products only .
I often find that the specific things that are thought of as 'meaningless distractions' by different people don't entirely overlap.
For example, I think having a mobile OS not controlled by google or apple would be phenomenally important, so I was entirely in favour of FirefoxOS.
Rust has led to improvements in Firefox that were previously said to be nearly intractable. I'd definitely include that as something valuable, not just for firefox but for the world.
Mozilla Persona seemed like a really good way to solve something that we're still struggling with - to have a universal web identity that belongs to me rather than some surveillance monetiser.
I could see value in emscripten, Firefox sync, Rhino, Shumway, thunderbird.
Now that is already a selection of projects that includes a bunch that were widely considered to be failures and were killed. It's also already probably too much for a company of Mozilla's size.
The projects that we see mozilla doing at the moment, I sort of get - they're trying to pitch the brand as a 'privacy' play, but if they really want to do that plausibly, they're going to need to change their income model.
Three to four years ago was the first time, particular among young people, teenagers say, that I met kids who didn't know what Firefox was. It has lost an extreme amount of awareness.
But even if the users aren't aware of what changed, it will likely affect user behavior.
For the better? Hard to say. Websites that load a little faster are a little more addictive.
It is not just about privacy or blocking ads. It is matter of security . I am trust nytimes , I cannot trust every third party whose code nytimes decided to include. Who in turn has included a bunch that nytimes doesn't even know about. How can I trust a website when they themselves do not know what crapware runs?
> Safari and Chrome both do blur on the GPU Firefox does it in software unless WebRender is turned on. You could try turning on the gfx.webrender.all pref and that should improve things.
See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where
To check if you're using webrender, check about:support. Check the graphics>compositing section.
(Edited to correct first paragraph.)
I have an Intel video card (UHD 630), and Webrender (which I had to forcibly enable) is working very well. Video acceleration, too. Even with a 4K screen.
One thing that really annoys me about Firefox on MacOS is that they disable keyboard focus of links by default. Which is not good for accessibility - it took me days to work out why my accessibility testing demos were failing[2].
[1] - I use this demo for my goto stress test: https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demo/canvas-006.html
[2] - https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/keyboard-focus-of-links-on-m...
Does the average person really need to understand JIT optimisations?
https://www.mobil.com/en/lubricants/for-personal-vehicles/ou...
https://www.amsoil.com/p/signature-series-5w-30-synthetic-mo...
Web developers aren't alone here, of course. It's the same story for systems software as well.
In general, thinking in terms of equilibriums is helpful.
Warp is only a bit faster in some cases, and about 10% slower in typical benchmark code. The speed improvements don't come from optimizations, but from skipping many costly optimizations. The "value" of these skipped optimizations is that some type optimizations are just too costly for them, using also a lot of memory. It's a typical jit trade-off.
Well at least it's an improvement over the browser being referred to as "Internet" before.
Because as far as I know, chrome doesn't come loaded on safari or windows