The only browser that's been losing users for years is Firefox. That already tells Google all they need to know. (It also tells Mozilla what they need to know; pity they are deaf.)
Firefox as a browser, especially dev tools, seems better in every day use than Chrome does. I am really not sure why they keep losing users. I do remember being massive performance issues in the past, but that's really not the case today (at least in my experience)
Because, number one, they keep constantly making radical UI/UX changes that frustrate and alienate their long term users who would rather they keep the "older look" which they got used to and works just fine for them, and number two, most websites are lazy so their devs only optimize for Chrome, even going the extra mile to explicitly state that "For best experience use Chrome" <face_palm>
Edit: changes in tone and corrections after getting off the bus
Cannot overstate this enough. They keep randomly changing their UI constantly, and it's especially frustrating when you have a bunch of custom CSS. I'm a bunch of versions behind & dreading updating because I don't want to spend the hours it'll take to fix my shit for their new version. I honestly hate this browser so much at this point, but everything else (i.e. Chrome) is so much worse that I'm stuck....
1. Automatically install updates (recommended)
2. Check for updates but let you choose to install them
You would think I'd choose option 2, since I don't want updates, but I tried that, and I got a popup several times a day saying INSTALL UPDATE NOW OR LATER—no way to say "No I don't !%$@ want to update!" ... so after putting up with that for a while I changed to option 1 to avoid the neverending update popups. Not at all what I want though. Talk about a dark pattern. "let you choose to install them" indeed! Not "choose whether to install" but "bombard you with update popups until you crack and choose to install".
Personally, I've gone from "customize every last pixel" to just using things the way the designers wanted me to use things. I like having flexibility and configuration toggles, that I use often, but I'm much happier now without trying to customize things for customization's sake.
[1]: https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html
Having an out of date browser is as "dangerous" to you and those around you as driving in a car with flat tires. Declining to upgrade software because of aesthetic changes seems shortsighted to me.
> I don't agree that whether something looks "horrible" is completely subjective.
Let's agree to disagree.
> I've never tried to customize things for customization's sake, if you're implying I do?
I'm not saying you have, I'm saying I have customized things for change's sake, and since I stopped doing that and being overly annoyed and fighting changes "forced" on me, I adapted to most of those changes. I dislike when customization options are taken away. But I also understand that customization comes at the bottom of priorities of developers, and that is likely the right call to make for most applications.
It is a problem that upgrades aren't always an improvement on every axis, but staying on old network connected applications is manifestly not a reasonable solution.
If the browser designers think it's so important for people to update, then perhaps they should stop driving people away with relentless, needless, irritating aesthetic changes! They're the short-sighted ones here.
You might tape over the warning light on your car's dash too, if you knew there was a good chance it would come back from the shop painted a different color and having had a racing spoiler bolted onto the trunk.
For eg. why tf would you put a separate scroll menu on tab right click to close tabs on left or right, it saves literally 1 row. and increases every single tab change to two clicks. UI disaster!!
i hope some group forks firefox and i will happily donate. But, due to current mozilla ceo siphoning money, not gonna donate a penny.
https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ...
> Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) is an official version of Firefox developed for large organizations like universities and businesses that need to set up and maintain Firefox on a large scale. Firefox ESR does not come with the latest features but it has the latest security and stability fixes.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switch-to-firefox-exten...
{
"policies": {
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
from https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ...
EDIT: alternatively, you can install the ESR version for 91, use the userchrome link in the sibling comment, and forget about it for 18 months, wich is what I'm currently doing. And good thing too, apparently 92 broke some UI again, because of course it did.
chrome gained a lot for two reasons, it was a hell of a lot better than firefox and they advertised the crap out of it.
Firefox has caught up significantly since then but doesn't have the advertising
the adblock debate will push a lot of users back to firefox and it feels like the ui is in a much better place than it was
People don't want to do custom CSS, they have to in order to get the workflow back that they had last week. It's annoying and a lot of work. Firefox changes probably cause >3% user attrition every single release.
Not anymore. There are github lists documenting everything you can do with css in firefox these days. And I don't think the answer to your workflow being disturbed is to nuke the entire thing from orbit and built it back up on another platform, that sounds a lot harder than skimming these github pages.
today non of these extensions exist and similar things are a joke by comparison lacking the large userbase and years of refinement.
then i also frequently have no idea where most of the interface buttons have gone.
i still use it but im far from locked into the ecosystem.
Prior to their rewrite of everything in version fifty-whatever, I could just drag-and-drop all this stuff into a single toolbar, but when they decided they knew better than me how I want my browser to look it all got 100x harder to get the layout I want.
In addition to this single-toolbar layout I have some easy stuff like highlighting the background color of "View background image" and "Copy link location" and I think 2-3 other things in the context menu a dark purple so that I misclick less often (this particular change is actually amazing and I highly recommend it!).
And I make the URL dropdown suggestions constrained to the width of the URL bar, not 100%, because I find the context switching of hiding the entire webpage too jarring when they're that wide. And I also hide a bunch of random buttons here and there that I find useless; I'm not sure what they are at this point because they've been hidden for so long...
Oh! And my highlight color (in URL bar, etc) is bright magenta (otherwise my theme is dark mode). Just because I like it. :) I use that in Sublimetext too, though I don't do that in every text editor/IDE.
A decade ago it was very easy to make Firefox look like you wanted, even without extensions (if you weren't opinionated about aesthetics, just position and functionality.) Every UI change since Chrome was released has been a regression, and more obnoxiously, each change has been locked in with user adjustment actively prevented or made prohibitively difficult, even for programmers.
They could at least offer a consistent interface to change the UI. Instead they demand the flexibility to make UI changes without having to maintain an interface, while using that flexibility to claw back more and more flexibility from their users.
People who got marketed to convert, and hence, the product is indeed good based on this metric.
Firefox does seem to lag behind in terms of performance, esp. on mobile. Firefox also has poorer video rendering speed i think - i get more skipped frames than chrome. I tolerate it, but many users don't.
Firefox has some difficulty being deployed in an enterprise environment (aka, an organizationally managed profile, which chrome has). This has led to enterprises adopting chrome as a primary browser (over firefox), and this may lead to familiarity which causes them to also use chrome at home.
There's a myriad of issues with firefox, and it is rooted at the organizational level, rather than the technical level, but these issues bleed down into the technical level.
I do not have this problem in Firefox anymore. I used to but i updates fixed it.
>Firefox has some difficulty being deployed in an enterprise environment (aka, an organizationally managed profile, which chrome has). This has led to enterprises adopting chrome as a primary browser (over firefox), and this may lead to familiarity which causes them to also use chrome at home.
GPO exists for Firefox now and works great, I have implemented it.
But what I actually see for enterprise customers is a move to MS Edge. The Windows account integration, control and the fact that on Windows 10 it has really good performance means there is no need for Chrome or FF unless Edge breaks (have had some issues with antivirus breaking it)
Cannot confirm at all. I do not know any feature in ff dev tools I am missing in chrome, but the other way around lots of it.
Mainly: editing and saving directly in the debugger!
Could also be my ignorance, but I regulary do debugging in FF and it works, but way less efficient.
Meaning I browse with FF, but work with chrome.
Chrome tells you the used font for a single element on a pretty generic level, e.g. "Lato — Local file" or "Lato — Network resource".
Firefox Inspector has a Fonts tab that lets you list all the fonts used on a page. It tells you a more specific font name, e.g. "Lato Regular", the relevant @font-face rule and also the font URL if it's a network resource.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto...
Hum... Firefox does that. I know because every time I mistakenly start saving I ask what is the point of it. But well, looks like it's useful for somebody.
Also, how can I edit code? It is non editable for me.
I believe you can activate it on the main build too, but I don't know how. Anyway, if you are debugging code, I highly recommend the developer version.
1 - That is a different configuration of the same code as the main build, for web developers. It's not for developing Firefox itself.
Chrome's devtools have been superior (faster, more reliable, more featureful) for years near as I can tell (and everyone I work with). I am curious what makes you feel firefox's devtools are better.
compared to chrome, firefox no longer has an edge. Chrome's restrictive addons is what made firefox stronger.
But ever since firefox removed the old XUL style addons, their utility has drastically dropped against chrome. I was very angry at their poor choice, as some really excellent, but unmaintained addons no longer work.
I put up with firefox, just so i can give them some boost (whatever that might amount to), but obviously not that many users would sacrifice their browsing experience for such purposes.
Firefox should be the premier customizable browser, with more addons than chrome. Instead, firefox chose to copy chrome. Thus, it is forever relegated to being second.
But firefox's value add is their addon system - even if it is old, and difficult to use. It enabled some really great addons that weren't possible in the new replacement (as a simple example, the DownThemAll was rewritten using this new api, and it's shadow of their former self).
Firefox should have paid the cost to maintain the old legacy system, and replace it only when the webextensions api is sufficient to replace _all_ functionality (which, of course, won't because webextensions evolved from google trying to kill off addons https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/ ).
But it's been years now and Mozilla's only solution is to switch to nightly.
I'm using Firefox nightly and I have to jump through hoops to get the extensions I want. Far too complicated for most users I'm sure.
And the frustrating thing is that this used to be a problem even with the previous iteration of Firefox on Android, i.e. it seemed somewhat understaffed and had some surprising bugs (e.g. under memory pressure it would suddenly and silently stop remembering your current tabs) and missing functionality (it didn't remember your scroll position if the app was killed, you couldn't reorder tabs in the tab list) that were only fixed after years, and even then quite a few times only through outside contributions.
And now the rewrite means that all of this has been thrown away and judging from the current development speed it'll take once more years until we sort of get back to where we used to be.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/async-panzoom-apz-lands-in...
Also, Firefox 79+ on Android (August 2020) performs significantly better than older versions, despite having lost many features in the rewrite. The current version might meet your expectations.
(The 2017 update did not do it for me)
I test on Chrome, and I personally don’t think switching is that big a deal that some commenters make it out to be. It’s just as fast as Chrome or faster, the UX is similar enough not be stalled for long if you need to switch. It’s really worth a shot!
Also, most non-technical people use the default browser that's installed on the OS whether that's Safari or Edge.
When manifest v3 kicks in and we'll see the true ad horror that's the Internet today without ad blockers, maybe then we'll jump to a more privacy first browser. Until then nothing will happen.