I use FF as my daily driver on all devices. It is a very, very, competitive browser compared to Chrome and it's offshoots. In some area's, or with some plugins, it wins, and in other's it looses. I also really like the that Mozilla is actively involved in activism and thereby does a huge service to our safety/privacy online (refer to the recent DarkMatter story).
I'm sad FF share is declining. I wonder what I can do to counter this trend.
Keep using Firefox! Encourage everyone you know (without being too obnoxious of course) to switch. Help them switch if they’re receptive to the idea. Support them in staying with Firefox if they have extension requirements, workflow concerns, whatever.
The pitch for Firefox should be easy nowadays. Talk about how it’s privacy-focussed while still being competitive with Chrome in performance and ease of use. A lot of people know that Fa$ebook is evil and gobbling up all their data, but they don’t feel like there’s that much they can practically do. Switching to Firefox and using Containers is something anyone can do easily.
Of course there’s probably bigger things that you could do. But thinking locally (if you’re not already) is absolutely required before you then think globally, IMO.
Firefox did some great things to increase speed in the last couple years (Servo!) but their share still seems to be declining or constant which leads me to a scary thought: Chrome and ilk are just too big to fail.
It’s possible Chrome is large enough they could be objectively worse and sites just optimize to Chrome or people just end up not caring about alternatives.
I Wish Mozilla could come up with a some kind of promotion system where all indie developers who have apps, websites, blogs etc. could request our users to use Firefox instead of chrome. For example a "Best Viewed In FF" image or Some kind widget in app.
I use firefox all the time, but the do a terrible job at creating a good browser that I can recommend to people. Biggest problems:
1. Tab handling is horrible compared to chrome. Vertical tab plugins are theoretically better, but are broken by the new extension system. If you install the plugins you still get tabs across the top.
2. Handling of native themes. Mozilla started attempting this and failed miserably with obviously no QA. They will match my themes dark background but not match the lighter colored text, making the inputs black on black.
3. Non-native UI's. They can support a cross platform UI framework but not a cross platform browser?
4. Whatever the hell is going on with that hamburger menu, they seem to change it all the time and I can never find my bookmarks.
The spend so much on experiments, rewriting things in rust, switching UI frameworks and barely used experiments like webasm and webgl but won't invest in making their core browser experience better. They're stuck doing things that are fun for developers to work on.
I wish I could trust Firefox not to be basically the same evil Chrome is if it gets to roughly the same position. It has already betrayed the trust of its userbase twice in recent memory.
I've made multiple attempts recently to switch to Firefox as my primary browser, but I never could stick with it.
1) It's simply not as responsive. They've worked really hard to keep up with Chrome, and I respect that, and the recent overhaul did make a big difference. But Chrome just feels like a piece of physical machinery, where Firefox still feels like a piece of software.
2) The dev tools are just not quite as good. As with general performance, they've always been very close, but there's just something about them that's off. Enough to disrupt my work.
3) Firefox mobile, at least on Android, has weird high-friction scrolling behavior that doesn't match the rest of the OS and feels terrible, and there's no way to turn it off.
I use Firefox for casual browsing on my gaming desktop, but that's about it. I'm rooting for them, but there are just improvements that still need to be made.
On the bright side, Chromium is 99% OSS (as opposed to Android, which is like 70% OSS). I think a fork could become a competitor if Google took the project in a direction that was just really egregiously bad. Let us not forget that Chrome's rendering engine, Blink, was itself a fork of Safari's WebKit.
I would be very upset to see Firefox fade into oblivion. My at home workflow has Firefox baked in: separate containers for G Suite, Twitter, HN, for paid web apps, etc.
I don’t think that Chrome supports anything like Firefox containers, right?
I think Firefox/Mozilla is still a bit on the "too big" side, and they've done some mollycoddling/anti-user-freedom stuff in the past too.
IMHO if you want to "protest" the browser monopoly, use something more like Dillo or NetSurf. They have no JS, so web apps are out of the question, but work well for the document-centric sites.
One thing the article doesn't mention is the effect of Apple's browser engine policy on iOS. Forcing everyone to use WebKit may be anticompetitive, but it's also the main thing keeping the Chrome/Blink monoculture at bay.
I downloaded an extension to spoof my user agent this morning, haven't tried doing much yet, but messages certainly seem to work and that's 99% of what I do anyway.
I don't know why I couldn't have be treated to a "this might not work 100% warning" instead of being completely locked out.
If the government didn't step in microsoft might still have 90% of the browser market. I think its time they came in and forced google to not push chrome in android.
The entire reason why I switched to Firefox in 2003 was because of its superior user interface (tabbed browsing) and performance. Likewise, the reason I switched to Chrome in 2011 was because of performance, syncing, and auto-updating. For me, it was never about privacy, breaking monopolies on rendering engines, or open source. It was always a pragmatic decision based on what browser gave me the best experience.
Do you even listen to yourself before making these statements?
Linux desktop share = 1.3%
Of which 80% of users will use the browser they want to, irrespective of what is currently installed. So 20% of 1.5% = 0.26%
Fortunately firefox is not at a stage where they have to care about 0.26% usage share of worldwide desktop.
And I have rarely seen Linux distro maintainers acting in any bigger-sense-of-good or in technologically better solutions. They have their own favourites.
If firefox wants to succeed- it should ship default with uorigin, kills google and makes firefox snappier. Instant win. If I were making firefox- I'd also ship a power user edition with uMatrix enabled
I still test on Firefox because it has been my main browser since the Netscape days (pre-Firefox), but for most customers Chrome, Safari (on iOS) and IE 11 make the bulk of our RFPs browser acceptance matrix (in Germany).
> Further, users who have tried changing their user-agent—the identification string, sent by browsers, that tells Web servers what version of which browser they are—have reported that much of the app works in both Safari and Firefox, with reports that even voice and video calls work in Firefox. It's not clear that everything works, and WebRTC is arguably persnickety enough that Microsoft would have to explicitly test and perhaps tweak its code to work in Firefox or Safari. But ultimately, none of this appears to be a fundamental tech issue.
Goes to show that companies will cut corners in silly ways whenever possible. Unless MS is called out on this repeatedly, it won't change. The noise needs to be louder on supporting Firefox (and other non-Chrome browsers). Otherwise everybody could lose.
"IE's hegemony presented an enormous challenge for the upstart Firefox browser, which was built to support Web standards rather than Microsoft's particular spin on those standards."
A bit of revisionist history here. Firefox, nee Phoenix, was a branch of Mozilla because its authors felt (correctly) Mozilla was too bloated. I remember 1-2 minute load times when trying to open Mozilla back in the day.
It's a slight simplification. The Mozilla Suite was "built to support Web standards rather than Microsoft's particular spin on these standards". Firefox/Phoenix/Firebird is the second generation Mozilla browser.
You need around 70mb of sheer complexity to render a page fully correct and you need millions of dollars to build a competitor that would lose because level of complexity is increasing daily .By the time you cover what you thought the web was ,the most used browser chrome had already came up with more complexity to add to the web.Web sucks and this helps the monopoly.
I would still like to know what kind of features are unavailable in Firefox to warrant a complete block on the browser. This would also help Firefox developers to implement them or fix the bugs. I mean I always see "Firefox does not implement all the features we need for our cutting edge web app" but I've yet to see anything more specific. Do any of you with more frontend experience care to comment?
A competent session manager. The old "Session Manager" died in the transition to Quantum, and several developers of quasi-replacements, who acknowledge they don't come very close to it, maintain a list of two dozen or more bugs and missing features compared to Chrome they need to do better, like Chrome's Session Buddy.
If I couldn't simply copy my entire configuration as I upgrade versions of Linux I'd be making a painful one time change completely to Chrome and Chromium, which I'd really rather avoid.
The bottom line is that Mozilla let Firefox's market share decline so much that the only two reasons people kept using it were it's not Chrome, and the extension ecosystem. Which is reported to have included a superior debugger, which indirectly made sure a lot of sites implicitly supported Firefox because they were developed using it.
Users don't give the slightest damn that keeping the old XPI ecosystem was hard, and had serious security issues. A huge number of extensions that they depended on have become roadkill on the information superhighway, even if some made the transition with significant changes. Making Firefox into an inferior version of Chrome means for most that the only reason to use it is that it's not Chrome.
I recently switched to brave because I'm tired of having to trust 5-10 extension authors who may or may not sell their extension one day (adblock had to fork to ublock iirc because of something like that). Most of what my extensions do is baked into brave, so its both idiot proof and requires less trust.
If Firefox sold a privacy version of Firefox, I'd buy (edit: ie, with my privacy features/extensions built in)
It just proves they keep breaking Skype updates, nothing new.
Kind of ironic coming from the people who gave us IE/EDGE, the browser with the most incompatibility issues.
One thing they got right, Linux/Firefox people are probably not their target audience so why bother. Especially after year of broken Skype updates in Linux. There are better alternatives now.
I wish the open source world would wrap Blink into a usable browser product that doesn't have all the things we might not like about Chrome (or at least that allows a lot of settings for removing them and customizing it in ways that Google may not want to do with Chrome, because they don't think it is in their corporate interest).
It's a lot easier than building a whole browser from scratch. I salute what Mozilla is doing but I still don't want to use their browser because it just isn't as good, in my opinion. (Firefox also does't support the MIDIAccess API yet, which I need)
Obviously a lot of people agree that Chrome is better. I'm a lot more likely to use Microsoft's Blink browser than I was to use Microsoft's fully proprietary browser, but even better would be a fully open source, community steered "UnGoogled Chrome".
I would prefer not to contribute to Chrome's increasing dominance, but I feel like I don't get much of a choice. I want to choose a browser on its merits. For me that is currently Vivaldi. Where is the Firefox-based Vivaldi equivalent?
Mozilla does not really seem to be addressing the fact that they provide one browser - Firefox - that is competing against an increasing array of Chrome-based browsers, all providing different user experiences. Why has no one built an interesting browser on top of Firefox?
It stands to reason that Chrome cannot be all things to all people. Neither can Firefox. The difference is that alternative browsers are increasingly Chrome-based, with the single exception of Firefox. Unless Mozilla (or someone else) can reverse this trend, I think this battle is lost.
Oh the irony to hear Microsoft complaining about browser monopolies. Somewhat akin to their "embracing Linux" posturing whilst perpetuating their Linux patent racket. Remember this - Microsoft only embraces open standards as a last resort.
I use FF and duckduckgo. I spend a lot of time on the web and i cannot complain about anything... I only use chrome for web development and google for SEO optimization...
[+] [-] cies|7 years ago|reply
I'm sad FF share is declining. I wonder what I can do to counter this trend.
[+] [-] samcday|7 years ago|reply
The pitch for Firefox should be easy nowadays. Talk about how it’s privacy-focussed while still being competitive with Chrome in performance and ease of use. A lot of people know that Fa$ebook is evil and gobbling up all their data, but they don’t feel like there’s that much they can practically do. Switching to Firefox and using Containers is something anyone can do easily.
Of course there’s probably bigger things that you could do. But thinking locally (if you’re not already) is absolutely required before you then think globally, IMO.
[+] [-] adzm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marricks|7 years ago|reply
It’s possible Chrome is large enough they could be objectively worse and sites just optimize to Chrome or people just end up not caring about alternatives.
[+] [-] KorematsuFred|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|7 years ago|reply
1. Tab handling is horrible compared to chrome. Vertical tab plugins are theoretically better, but are broken by the new extension system. If you install the plugins you still get tabs across the top.
2. Handling of native themes. Mozilla started attempting this and failed miserably with obviously no QA. They will match my themes dark background but not match the lighter colored text, making the inputs black on black.
3. Non-native UI's. They can support a cross platform UI framework but not a cross platform browser?
4. Whatever the hell is going on with that hamburger menu, they seem to change it all the time and I can never find my bookmarks.
The spend so much on experiments, rewriting things in rust, switching UI frameworks and barely used experiments like webasm and webgl but won't invest in making their core browser experience better. They're stuck doing things that are fun for developers to work on.
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _bxg1|7 years ago|reply
1) It's simply not as responsive. They've worked really hard to keep up with Chrome, and I respect that, and the recent overhaul did make a big difference. But Chrome just feels like a piece of physical machinery, where Firefox still feels like a piece of software.
2) The dev tools are just not quite as good. As with general performance, they've always been very close, but there's just something about them that's off. Enough to disrupt my work.
3) Firefox mobile, at least on Android, has weird high-friction scrolling behavior that doesn't match the rest of the OS and feels terrible, and there's no way to turn it off.
I use Firefox for casual browsing on my gaming desktop, but that's about it. I'm rooting for them, but there are just improvements that still need to be made.
On the bright side, Chromium is 99% OSS (as opposed to Android, which is like 70% OSS). I think a fork could become a competitor if Google took the project in a direction that was just really egregiously bad. Let us not forget that Chrome's rendering engine, Blink, was itself a fork of Safari's WebKit.
[+] [-] jfk13|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|7 years ago|reply
I don’t think that Chrome supports anything like Firefox containers, right?
[+] [-] userbinator|7 years ago|reply
IMHO if you want to "protest" the browser monopoly, use something more like Dillo or NetSurf. They have no JS, so web apps are out of the question, but work well for the document-centric sites.
[+] [-] panic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrgriffin|7 years ago|reply
I don't know why I couldn't have be treated to a "this might not work 100% warning" instead of being completely locked out.
[+] [-] samfisher83|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anth_anm|7 years ago|reply
Microsoft didn't.
[+] [-] 10-6|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdlyga|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anoncake|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hd4|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asplake|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktjfi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] executivetech|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fxfan|7 years ago|reply
Linux desktop share = 1.3%
Of which 80% of users will use the browser they want to, irrespective of what is currently installed. So 20% of 1.5% = 0.26%
Fortunately firefox is not at a stage where they have to care about 0.26% usage share of worldwide desktop.
And I have rarely seen Linux distro maintainers acting in any bigger-sense-of-good or in technologically better solutions. They have their own favourites.
If firefox wants to succeed- it should ship default with uorigin, kills google and makes firefox snappier. Instant win. If I were making firefox- I'd also ship a power user edition with uMatrix enabled
[+] [-] Semaphor|7 years ago|reply
[0]: http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/germa...
[+] [-] pjmlp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtmt|7 years ago|reply
Goes to show that companies will cut corners in silly ways whenever possible. Unless MS is called out on this repeatedly, it won't change. The noise needs to be louder on supporting Firefox (and other non-Chrome browsers). Otherwise everybody could lose.
[+] [-] rwc|7 years ago|reply
A bit of revisionist history here. Firefox, nee Phoenix, was a branch of Mozilla because its authors felt (correctly) Mozilla was too bloated. I remember 1-2 minute load times when trying to open Mozilla back in the day.
[+] [-] Yoric|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benj111|7 years ago|reply
What you're saying doesn't seem to contradict it?!?
[+] [-] SUr3na|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snaky|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spystath|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfrage|7 years ago|reply
If I couldn't simply copy my entire configuration as I upgrade versions of Linux I'd be making a painful one time change completely to Chrome and Chromium, which I'd really rather avoid.
The bottom line is that Mozilla let Firefox's market share decline so much that the only two reasons people kept using it were it's not Chrome, and the extension ecosystem. Which is reported to have included a superior debugger, which indirectly made sure a lot of sites implicitly supported Firefox because they were developed using it.
Users don't give the slightest damn that keeping the old XPI ecosystem was hard, and had serious security issues. A huge number of extensions that they depended on have become roadkill on the information superhighway, even if some made the transition with significant changes. Making Firefox into an inferior version of Chrome means for most that the only reason to use it is that it's not Chrome.
[+] [-] jammygit|7 years ago|reply
If Firefox sold a privacy version of Firefox, I'd buy (edit: ie, with my privacy features/extensions built in)
[+] [-] guilhas|7 years ago|reply
Kind of ironic coming from the people who gave us IE/EDGE, the browser with the most incompatibility issues.
One thing they got right, Linux/Firefox people are probably not their target audience so why bother. Especially after year of broken Skype updates in Linux. There are better alternatives now.
[+] [-] robbrown451|7 years ago|reply
It's a lot easier than building a whole browser from scratch. I salute what Mozilla is doing but I still don't want to use their browser because it just isn't as good, in my opinion. (Firefox also does't support the MIDIAccess API yet, which I need)
Obviously a lot of people agree that Chrome is better. I'm a lot more likely to use Microsoft's Blink browser than I was to use Microsoft's fully proprietary browser, but even better would be a fully open source, community steered "UnGoogled Chrome".
[+] [-] nr0mx|7 years ago|reply
Mozilla does not really seem to be addressing the fact that they provide one browser - Firefox - that is competing against an increasing array of Chrome-based browsers, all providing different user experiences. Why has no one built an interesting browser on top of Firefox?
It stands to reason that Chrome cannot be all things to all people. Neither can Firefox. The difference is that alternative browsers are increasingly Chrome-based, with the single exception of Firefox. Unless Mozilla (or someone else) can reverse this trend, I think this battle is lost.
[+] [-] cutler|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tracker1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edgarvaldes|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] la_fayette|7 years ago|reply