Firefox marketshare revisited
andreasgal.com
andreasgal.com
I've had to fix this for three family members previously as they were using a free antivirus and couldn't figure out why their browser looked different and didn't have an ad-blocker now.
This happened years and years ago, and it wasn't long after that I decided that I didn't want Flash installed on my computer ever again. :P Sad that Shumway didn't manage to pan out, though.
http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-...
Some providers offer a switching service though.
My three email providers don't (Kolab, Posteo, Autistici) but the few hours I spent changing my email addresses everywhere was worth it.
Gmail really doesn't offer anything you'll miss once you make the switch.
I remember this unfortunately happening on Windows 7/8 upgrades to 10, but I've yet to encounter it on my personal machine in a Win 10 point release, at least as far as I can recall.
[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170517-00/?p=...
https://www.recode.net/2016/4/22/11586336/microsoft-google-a...
Firefox pulling ahead of IE back in the early 2000s was a sign of open source disruption taking on a monopoly:
Chrome is the total opposite; well at least initially. They pumped millions into Mozilla and then took the parts they liked from Gecko and Webkit and created Chrome. Originally closed source, even though we have the open source Chromium today, most people used the official Google branded and integrated version.
I feel like with Microsoft and IE and the anti-trust cases from back in the day, we're see a return to what the author termed web browser 'monoculture.' The author does make a point that at least Chrome isn't stuck in the past.
Chrome, FireFox and Edge all seem to be doing the rolling release thing today, which is vital to us not getting stuck in IE6 land again. (Not sure if Safari does this yet). I've recently started using Vivaldi, but I do miss my dedication to Firefox and all the years of usage, plugins and bug reports.
https://www.google.com/amp/www.winhelponline.com/blog/edge-h...
Bundleware makes it sound like it's just some innocent "bloat", while in reality this effectively hijacks all web traffic of innocent users and sends it to Google.
How is this not criminal?
EDIT: Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11057532
And honestly, your reply was childish and and a bit douche-bag-ish.
There's no need for this here - (I assume) we're all adults, and don't need to resort to playground tactics.
(If you actually are under 16, then I take the above and I'm sorry - welcome to HN!)
Yes, it is less scummy than burying it in an EULA and giving the user basically no notice, but it is still really scummy.
While I don't doubt that Google's advertising of Chrome has drawn away some Firefox users, I also don't think that we can ignore or deny the many controversial changes to Firefox that have likely had an impact, too.
Just off of the top of my head I can think of things like:
* Frequent breakage of extensions when first switching to the more rapid release schedule.
* Frequent and disruptive UI changes that didn't bring users much benefit, such as Australis.
* Removing the ability to easily disable JavaScript.
* Taking many years to get multiprocess support working. (Not that I'm suggesting they should have rushed it, of course.)
* The inclusion of Pocket and Hello.
* Sponsored tiles.
* Users who report experiencing poor performance and high memory usage.
* Disruption caused by requiring signed extensions.
* The removal of support for OSes or OS releases that are moderately older, but still do have active users.
I'm sure there are others that I'm forgetting.
Even if they seem minor, those are the kinds of things that can cause users to switch away from Firefox, or not even start using it in the first place. Losing a small number of users for a variety of minor reasons can add up very quickly, as well. Furthermore, those issues don't really have anything to do with Google or Chrome.
I stopped using firefox because of performance. Nothing more, nothing less.
If I'm remembering this right, I think there was initially an about:config option for disabling the signature checks. But that was eventually removed from the stable releases. The workarounds were to waste my time getting the extensions signed, or to use some special unbranded build, or to use the Nightly or Developer Edition releases. None of those were acceptable to me. Then I learned about the planned WebExtensions changes, and knew it was time to move on.
I'm aware of the security-related reasons that were used to justify such changes. But for me they ended up taking away the main benefits that Firefox offered, namely being easy to extend, and giving me the freedom to use the browser as I see fit.
It seems to me disabling the xpinstall.signatures.required setting has no effect anymore, at least the last time I tried using it, it had no effect.
If somebody gave me a Ferrari for free with the caveat that there's a guy sitting on the passengers seat who keeps track of where I'm going at all times, I guess I'd still keep driving my current car (hint: it's not a Ferrari).
And before the downvote reflex sets in in some of you: I'm not saying that you should be like me. If you like Chrome, great, good for you! It's just that the speed difference to me personally has never been a good enough reason to switch. YMMV.
That could explain why it doesn't support multiprocessing. I disabled it because it doesn't do much. This is a list of its functionality from https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/what-are-the-ubuntu-firefox-...
* Enable searching for missing plugins from Ubuntu software catalog
* Add the following options to the Help menu
Get help on-line
Help translating Firefox
Ubuntu Release Notes
* Set homepage to Ubuntu Start Page
* Display a restart notification after upgrading Firefox
* Add ask.com to the search engines. You can uninstall this if you prefer to use a pristine Firefox install.
That's why I switched back from Chrome after using it for a month few years ago.
Now I would switch because Chrome is the new IE, some developers don't test on Firefox, they say "just use Chrome", no WAY.
I find it uses probably 50% of the memory that Chrome does in my typical use-cases as well (4-5 windows open with around 10-20 tabs in each).
I'm glad to hear that you found a web browser that makes you happy. So have I.
If it took a minute to render, it would matter. If it's a matter of a few seconds, it doesn't.
However, I also know that folks like my parents who do not deeply care about IT and performance in general don't really care too much. They do not spend their day in front of the screen like some of us do, but rather look something up once or twice a day. In the greater scheme of things, the difference in rendering times across different browsers doesn't make a measurable difference in their lives.
This gut-check test isn't particularly useful.
> If somebody gave me a Ferrari for free with the caveat that there's a guy sitting on the passengers seat who keeps track of where I'm going at all times
The price you pay is much higher than you think.
Think twice, you have a choice.
You seem to be implying that Chrome tracks every site that you go to and shares it with Google. Care to cite a source on that?
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068
Of course, this can be turned off, but it is very likely to be turned on if a user has set up an Android device (lots of prompts to do so).
Edit: link
I think majority of people just use Chrome because they either don't know better or because when it came out, it was legitimately a cooler more innovative browser than Firefox at the time.
Only very few people need a few extra codecs that Chrome provides or maybe the bundled Flash plugin.
In short screw you too mozilla.
Ohh, and the Chrome dev tools are just better. So that helps. But if Firefox weren't noticeably slow I'd use it without hesitation.
* Restore the old settings. They copied Chrome's settings-as-a-tab with the UI just being HTML. But in Chrome I can at least search the settings. Why did Mozilla waste their time on copying the HTML-settings without also implemented the most useful feature? It was just a huge regression, because the UI is now non-native, many things aren't resizeable anymore and some other minor bugs where introduced, without any apparent benefit. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325286
* When you start Firefox two times in a row, the dialog "Firefox is already running, please close the running instance" or something like this pops up. Chrome doesn't have this problem, maybe just because its startup time is SO much better. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489981
* On Linux: Integrate the tabs into the titlebar like Chrome does. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513159
* Way too easy to quit the whole browser with Ctrl+Q (Chrome uses Ctrl+Shift+Q) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821
* Encrypt passwords with the keyring (like Chrome does) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 (btw: that's the second most voted bug of the "Toolkit" product according to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=productdashboard.ht... )
* No hardware acceleration on Linux (playing HD YouTube videos lags for me in Firefox out-of-the-box, perfectly fine in Chrome) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523
* Speed and responsiveness of the UI in general are much better in Chrome. (no bug report link, sorry)
Notice how that there's no complain about the look of the main UI, still Mozilla decides to redo it yet again with project Photon ... Did I miss the bug report with lots of votes for that?
And regarding the bug reports (most of them reported years ago): There was a comment on Reddit a while ago where a GNOME (!) developer said something along the lines "We're not Mozilla, we're actually reading and answering our bug reports". That says something.
On Windows, this only happens if the second instance starts with a specific command-line option (the name escapes me at the moment). Otherwise, the existing instance just opens a new window.
> * Way too easy to quit the whole browser with Ctrl+Q (Chrome uses Ctrl+Shift+Q)
Saying that it's nitpicky to include this in your list would be huge understatement, it's straight out ridiculous. I have always found Firefox to be more responsive and less resource heavy than Chrome, so I don't know why you had problems with that.
But yes, you are right when you imply that Firefox seems to have prioritization problems, lots of them imo. However, it is understandable to me, making the UI looking prettier is for marketing, not usability. Most of these things you listed are not addressing a lot of users, on the other hand, having a flashier UI would address and (potentially) attract more users. But their management still needs to improve, and as a company, they should have better direction.
There's a bug report about it with lots of duplicates and 71 votes. I use Ctrl+W to close tabs, so losing work in other tabs is just one key away. For me, it isn't nitpicky.
> having a flashier UI would address and (potentially) attract more users.
You don't know that though. You think it will attract more users.
You'll need some kind of metric to know what people really want. "Gets often repeated in discussions" is one, "which bug reports get voted on" is another.
I definitely think that this should be handled by the OS though.
I think alt-f4 closes the window while ctrl-q closes down Firefox entirely (in my KDE setup at least.)
On Windows ctrl-q doesn't work for me though.
As for why I sometimes use it it is because I can then do a restore session after restarting Firefox and get back everything.
(On Windows I have to find the now hidden menu and select Quit Firefox or something like that.)
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-ctrl-...
Then there are the asian and middle east that do not even use the same alphabet. Though those may use the QWERTY as an underlying layout for compatibility.
This is actually due to shutdown (rather than startup) being too slow. Your profile is still in use from the instance of Firefox taking too long to shut down, so when you start a new instance it hits this error. This should be a little better with multiprocess, because web pages are run in a separate process, and we kill that process more quickly, so shutdown should be faster.
I simply double-clicked the Firefox icon twice quicker than I ever normally would, and the Close Firefox error appears: "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system."
Hit two of those quickly and hello dialog...
> Notice how that there's no complain about the look of the main UI, still Mozilla decides to redo it yet again with project Photon ...
Are you seriously askong that?
Firefox is doing Photon (like they were doing Australis) because they're replacing their entire UI framework with a faster one.
Australis was the move from native GTK2 to XUL, Photon is a move from XUL to HTML5 for UI.
Photon is not a wholesale move away from XUL either.
Firefox is about to shoot itself in the foot again. Soon, all old add-ons will stop working, as Firefox tries to get add-on developers to change to their new WebExtensions API. (Which is almost, but not quite, compatible with Google's add-on format.) Many developers are not bothering, and will drop Firefox.
Tab Center Redux <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re... is a fork of the testpilot extension that is a WebExtension, so it works fine in Firefox Nightly. It's naturally more limited than the original extension, though: it can't hide the top tab-bar, it has to draw its own context-menu, it can't be shown at the same time as any other sidebar, etc.
It's still nicer than the top tab-bar for those of us with a bunch of tabs open, though.
Someone has forked Tree Style Tabs so that it works with latest Pale Moon.
Set your User-Agent to Firefox or IE Edge and Windows OS. You'll soon see "install chrome" pop ups/banners/warnings that take up a portion of the screen all over Google properties.
At that point why not just self-uninstall?
Out of non-Google search engines, Yahoo makes most sense even if they got no money from the deal. Maybe DuckDuckGo but unfortunately it's still not as good.
Regarding extensions, it's better this way because nobody is bothering with current API. Most new extensions are chrome-only.
This is a US only move, in the EU it's still google and mozilla got a truckload of criticism for this.
Late last year, after many years on Chrome, I gave Firefox another serious look and I have switched back. Firefox has improved tremendously and I would prefer to give my support to Mozilla from a philosophical standpoint (the Chrome team does a lot of good work with regards to pushing forward the features of the web and its security but at the end of the day, Chrome is still a strategic piece of Google's business machine and not a philanthropic effort)
While I have my reasons for using Firefox, I don't see a compelling reason for most users already happy with Chrome to switch back. The average web user that I know doesn't really understand where web browsers come from and isn't very interested in learning about it. They just care whether the browser runs better or worse for the tasks that they do. (Except many still hate IE and will not even try Edge because the logo looks similar enough - that's a branding issue that Microsoft has)
What irritates me now are more and more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally throw up a page that blocks access and says go download Chrome). These are sites that are not Google properties so I'm not blaming Google for this bad behavior, but again, I would like to support the diverse browser landscape that has existed to this point. I guess my main complaint to Google is to please stop popping up dialogs about Chrome across all of your properties. The browser I'm using works perfectly fine thank you, and you should be supporting the open web with your products anyway.
http://techdows.com/2016/10/firefox-52-skia-enabled-by-defau...
What does that actually means in practice? I'm guessing the only time you actually get skia is when running in a pretty old hypervisor environment or on a server/BMC without hardware acceleration.
Which IMHO, having your application _LOOK_ different depending on hardware acceleration capabilities is sorta stupid.
Which is one of the reasons I transitioned from liking Web back into loving native development (there are plenty of other reasons though).
Doing discussions with customers about pixel differences across browsers, specially if it is the same browser on different OSes, is anything but fun.
That and the request for features and behaviors only possible in native UIs.
No, they should very much be blamed for it! Proper web design should follow cross-platform standards and implementations. They are part of the problem if they force users to choose one or the other.
To be blunt: says who?
A lot of people and most organisations aren't making websites as a charitable exercise. They're doing it with a goal in mind, such as bringing in money directly or indirectly, or raising awareness of a cause they care about.
Whatever that end goal is, they need to use the web to communicate effectively with their visitors. If those visitors are mostly using one particular browser and they can achieve better progress towards their end goal by optimising for that browser, that is what a lot of them are going to do.
I don't think this is necessarily healthy for the long term future of the World Wide Web, but I also don't think it's reasonable to blame people with a job to do for choosing the most effective tools available to do that job.
As I said before, this might well be bad for the long term future of the World Wide Web as a resource for society, but in this business you have to play the hand you're dealt, and the browser developers hold all the important cards.
Those still work in every browsers I've tried so the major browsers developer have to cut more established functionality: https://justinjackson.ca/words.html http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
No such thing. A job, like an order, is not something that actually exists outside of the actions of people. Both the people giving orders and the ones following them remain responsible. They can pretend to leave the court room by dozing off but they remain in it for those who haven't, and what you seem to see as "putting blame" is simply pointing out what is already present and cannot be removed.
Any example of this?. Because I've never visited such a site.
WhatsApp during the Beta.
Signal's desktop client.
Google Earth.
Google Translate works, but has 3 helpful dialogs telling you to install Chrome.
Google Search on Mobile Firefox is heavily restricted in functionality, and tells to install Chrome.
Under some situations, Google will replace the first 4 search results and replace them with a "your browser is outdated, install Chrome" while also adding a top bar saying the same, and a dialog at the top right.
I use firefox because I want a browser to exist that isn't hellbent on knowing exactly who I am in order to maximize profits.
But my point was simply about directing users' searchs to google search engine, which is enough to expose yourself to google.
Mozilla is not telling google obviously because they don't know who you are. But it's a technicality as they enable and empoyer google to do it by themselves, in exchange for millions of dollars. For a few years over 95% of mozilla revenue in millions of dollars came from google for exposing their user privacy while most users were not aware of this and mozilla boasting being a white knight for privacy.
Then when they finally decided to do something about it, the chose to help yahoo artificially inflate their usage stats to improve the value in the upcoming sale, but only in the US where they had lost the most marketshare, in Europe where firefox was still relevant and where there are alternatives that actually respect user privacy mozilla chose to keep google as the default search engine.
* better search/address bar behaviour (particularly in finding relevant bookmarks. Chrome wants to turn everything into a Google search)
* Integration with Firefox on android (which I need because it supports ad-blocking extensions)
I miss opera where it would also search in page content from cache, not only URL or title.
* Being able to disable unnecessary features and phoning home using about:config is great
* Extensions look and feel more native (this will probably change because Mozilla has decided that cloning Chrome is the way to go)
* Extensions are more capable, still no decent side tabs in Chrome
* They're not an ad agency, so they don't ban extensions they don't like or nag you when you install something unapproved
* Font rendering manages to not look terrible
I'll admit though, Chrome still kills Firefox on UI speed and in many security technology ways. My biggest worry is that Mozilla will fail to achieve Chrome UI speed while ditching the things that make Firefox unique today.
There was a very good non-nested side-tabs extension in Firefox Test Pilot, but it has expired.
Yes, I'm using it ;)
They are keeping the current Extension model.
Long-term plans
Our long-term plans for Pale Moon involve (potentially) moving our browser to the UXP (Unified XUL Platform) that is currently being worked on alongside the browser. This will at its earliest be somewhere in 2018.
Plug-ins
Pale Moon supports NPAPI plug-ins. Unlike Firefox, we will not be deprecating or removing support for these kinds of plug-ins. This means that you will be able to continue using your media, authentication, and other plug-ins in Pale Moon like Flash, Silverlight, bank-authenticators or networking plug-ins for specific purposes.
Extensions used to be more capable, this is about to end. Decent side tabs in chrome is called vivaldi, (actually a decent chrome is vivaldi).
Mozilla effectively bans extensions they don't like since the made signed extensions mandatory.
I disagrre on the speed and performance difference, with 150+ tabs opened at all times firefox works while chrome struggle to deal with 50 tabs. All this on a core i5 16GB RAM SSD laptop. I guess YMMV here.
I miss some of the extensions of Firefox and Vivaldi does have some interesting bugs, however development on Vivaldi seems rapid. Recently they finally combined the web page inspector into the browser (it use to open a separate window).
I've loved Firefox for years and would honestly rather use it, but the performance problems turned me away.
Not true. They sign very liberally and you can even host signed extensions for your own users exclusively without listing them on addons.mozilla.org at all.
For example, FreeIPA used to have an extension, that configured Firefox to your own domain (enrolled an root signing certificate, configured trusted domains for GSSAPI, etc. - all the dangerous things). But because the extension was customized for your own domain, obviously, it could not be signed.
So, it was killed instead. Nowadays, you get a list of steps, you have to do by hand. On every desktop.
Any specific examples of this? A URL, or a couple of them?
When making such an assertion, it would be nice to minimally provide a way for others to see for themselves.
it was available at http://www.allisnotlo.st/ but now features an error message about google dropping python 2.5
firefox was initially named phoenix and it was made as a workaround the performances issue of mozilla suite by removing everything unneeded to run a browser. Except mozilla suite fixed its performance issues way before phoenix was ready for prime time.
Firefox itself used to be an alternative - the main browser was Seamonkey, that included mail client, chat client and kitchen sink, just like the original Netscape did. Firefox started later as a lightweight alternative, just the browser.
No, it wasn't. Were you there when NS4 came out?
Compared NN4 and IE4, NN4 was better. Compared to later IEs, IE were better.
Except for IE5 for Mac. That one was weird, it's CSS implementation was best from all the available browsers. But when you opened Slashdot (or another table heavy site), boy, you quickly switched back to Netscape.
But performance. Firefox very often outperforms Chrome in microbenchmarks and computationally-intensive code in my tests, but in the real world an awful lot of sites really are much more responsive in Chrome.
For me as a user, most recently an update to the FastMail web UI a couple of weeks ago made it lamentably slow in Firefox -- just mousing over the folder tree caused CPU spikes and lag in updating -- and in the end I switched to opening FastMail in a separate Chrome instance while continuing to use Firefox for everything else. I've just switched it back to Firefox as I type this, to see whether anything has improved.
The web app I'm working on as a developer just now also has problems updating as smoothly in Firefox as in Chrome, and I'm not at all sure whether we'll be able to do anything about it.
I can't think of an example at the moment of a site that feels faster in Firefox.
I believe I have come to think of Firefox as a web browser, and Chrome as a platform for web apps. Things written to be web apps are almost always more responsive in Chrome, even though many of their components (number-crunching work) really do run measurably quicker in Firefox.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/emoji-keyboar...
If there are firefox users left to shoot.
I think I jumped to conclusions because the change roughly coincided with a visible update to FastMail (the one that added the little progress spinners to the folder tree).
(My earlier post lost a couple of HN points after I posted that reply, even though it was many hours after the original discussion. I wonder whether people had upvoted it because of potentially useful material about Firefox and FastMail and then unvoted when I admitted that particular bit was bogus. It would be rather encouraging if that were the case)
Later edit: I spoke too soon. After editing an email extensively, the whole UI slows down again.
On the other hand, Firefox Focus on mobile seems to run pretty fast and comes with enough ad blocking to make the web bearable.
If it had either tabs or a way to open multiple processes then I would probably ditch the other mobile browsers.
Full Firefox on Android has a slow startup time if it's been pushed out of memory, which it usually is, because it's big. Firefox Focus is a way of quickly opening links from other apps without paying the cost of opening Firefox, while keeping an acceptable level of ad-blocking and privacy.
You should have both installed, set Focus as your default browser, but liberally use the "Open in Firefox" menu on Focus when you have real browsing to do.
Pocket? Hello? Really?
Firefox memory usage has for years used less memory; basically since its inception. Apparently it's no different now: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/03/whos-winning-the-browser-...
e10s? Come on, give me a break. I bet the vast majority of users have never heard of it, and of the others, most don't know what it's about to any useful degree, and of those that understand this feature, most probably wouldn't know the details of how the various multiprocess implementations actually compare. A vanishingly small proportion of the user base know of this feature, understand it enough, can compare this to other browsers, and then have a strong enough opinion to affect browser choice (and frankly, it's not obvious multiprocess is actually that great of an idea in the first place if you really do know what you're talking about - not one of the browsers actually separates every tab into a separate browser - for a reason!)
As to OS support - firefox still is the last browser to support XP, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. Version 52 was the last one; but that's on an extended support cycle until june 2018, which AFAICT is more than two years later than chrome's last v50. Microsoft hasn't "supported" XP with any reasonable browser... well, not ever (the highest IE version was 9!), and it hasn't supported the OS at all even with security patches for years (with certain notable exceptions).
As to disruptions caused by signed extensions - so that's why the appstore has failed and nobody is using windows anymore? I get it's annoying, but this is a pattern that's recurring all over the industry, and has for many years before FF made this step. If anything, I think it's more plausible FF is being punished because it was too slow to ban unsigned extensions! Because poor experiences based on bad or even malicious extensions do reflect on FF. And for that matter, signing isn't the real issue, it's add-on sandboxing/threading. Chrome got this "more" right, in that it's less likely for an novice extension author to accidentally bring chrome to a grinding halt. But precisely this feature is still causing lots of addon breakage because FF has not yet completely dumped the old, problematic add-on API, presumably because users really hate losing their cherished extensions (and for a reason). I've witnessed several addons that have chrome+FF equivalents where perf issues occured only in FF - which may have been the addon author's "fault" - but that's a really poor excuse.
Poor perf, and the expectation of poor perf sound like more reasonable guesses, but even there I'm not convinced this actually matters as much as you'd hope. Still, that's at least something. But then, the number of people you see working with unworkably slow setups for all kinds of reasons that apparently don't care enough to switch products suggests that even abominable perf isn't necessarily very impactful. Maybe this matters indirectly; in that power users that care influence others in their choices.
Actually IE9 requires Vista, so XP is stuck with IE8.
It is clear that the only reason many changes were made, and features removed, was solely because Chrome did it. And Google has very different motivations and goals than Mozilla. Google wants to make money, and use Chrome as a pillar in their platform. So, by emulating Chrome so closely, not just does it indicate that the developers are making bad decisions, it also means that the browser will not be as good.
EXAMPLE: They proposed removing FTP support from Firefox, and the justification was just a link to an announcement that Chrome was doing it. [1] It makes sense for Chrome to do it from a business perspective, but it does not make sense for Firefox.
Or, better yet, I remember that there was talk of having Chrome switch back to using a native pdf renderer back from the javascript one. This sacrifices portability and arguably security for speed.
Or sometimes there are design decisions in Chrome that are outright hostile to the user, to help Google's partners, such as removing the "save as" option for html5 video. It is only a matter of time until Firefox makes it harder to download video, solely because Chrome is doing it. When Google does this, I at least understand that their sabotaging this functionality is part of their larger strategy. Mozilla doing it is just baffling.
I mean, the original Firebird went in the opposite direction as Internet Explorer 6. If Mozilla had the same culture back then, they would have put all of their resources into making an inferior clone of Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer was a better user experience in a lot of ways, especially for the first few years. But people started moving to Firefox because it was worth it. The security, control, and flexibility was worth it. I specifically remember turning people onto Firefox because they were sick of ads, and there were special add-ons that they wanted.
If Mozilla wants Firefox to work, it needs to do what Chrome wont let you do. It needs to integrate aggressive ad-blocking. Let you have control over the content you view. I think that people would happily use Firefox if it empowered them.
Change it to "open in external application" is one of my first changes after a fresh install.
That bug was filed by the person who wrote most of the FTP implementation in Firefox and was one of the few people who maintained it. The reasons to consider removal were that it was a maintenance burden, extra security attack surface, and not really relevant to users nowadays. The posted link only spoke to that last point: that other widely used browsers were removing it and it wasn't being a problem for their users, apparently.
The first two reasons for removal were not clearly explained in the bug report initially, because they were obvious to both the bug filer and his intended audience: the networking module owners and peers.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174462#c23 for more details.
Would the summary being "consider removing FTP support" more accurately reflect intent? Probably. Did the actual engineers involved know what the bug was about? Yes.
> Or, better yet, I remember that there was talk of having Chrome switch back to using a native pdf renderer back from the javascript one.
I assume you mean Firefox? Speed was part of that discussion, but so were the various features pdf.js lacks but the proposed replacement supports.
> It is only a matter of time until Firefox makes it harder to download video, solely because Chrome is doing it.
If you assume that Mozilla is just aping Google. But if, on the other hand, you just have that as a preconceived notion and try to make all decisions fit that theory no matter what the actual reasons for them are... then you might just guess wrong on this.
I agree with you on the broad point that Firefox needs to do things Chrome can't or won't do. The worry with your "aggressive ad-blocking" suggestion (much as I would like that personally!) is that a likely outcome is a large enough number of sites blocking Firefox altogether that users stop being able to use it at all for normal browsing. If Firefox had a monopoly position in the market it _might_ be able to get away with that sort of move, but it doesn't have that position.
Actually the point was that mozilla should stop removing features that are not in chrome first, if there are any left. The point is firefox should differentiate from chrome instead of being more and more similar because being similar to chrome just remove the appeal firefox had.
> If Firefox had a monopoly position in the market it _might_ be able to get away with that sort of move, but it doesn't have that position.
But when they had the better share of the market they were adamant not to do any adblocking and this may be related to the fact that 98% of their revenue came from advertising through google. Then again how would a website block firefox ? Using user-agent ?
Of course they have, I'm such an individual but I'm responsible for about one to two thousands installations of firefox over the last decade or so. Carefully replacing any sneaky install of bundled chrome each time I faced one, and so on.
It's been 2 or 3 years since I've gradually stopped doing this. I have no reason to keep helping a corp that keeps disappointing and not caring about users, selling an image through marketing (giving power and freedom to users) while doing the opposite in reality (removing power and freedom from users). I've barely made any new firefox installation and stopped replacing sneaky chrome/IE unless expressly asked.
Just with one individual they've lost I'd say about a few hundreds users over 3 years. Although a few hundred users is not even a blip on their radar, I'm not alone in this situation and numbers quickly add up to a significant amount. Though maybe not significant enough for mozilla's devs to care.
The point is, a limited number of individual users played a role (possibly significant) in firefox success, the same people now play a role in its demise. It seems mozilla does not understand this fact despite building a large church of evangelist fanboys.
The other browser that got it and offered a quick menu to disable/enable javascript was opera with the f12 or quick preferences menu, not sure if this option survived opera selling out and becoming a chrome skin.
Pocket was another thing not needed to disable in firefox, it was proprietary and had vulnerabilites when a better opensource alternative existed, mozilla got a lot of flak for this. Then they bought it for millions of $ to leverage the users to get into mobile.
Hello was again another unneeded thing to disable right away (yay more extensions!), it leaked the local IP and added vulnerability.It was such a popular feature that it got removed a few versions later.
Those 3 really infuriated me and a portion of the firefox users community.
I can't tell about the memory usage, I've bought a 16GB RAM laptop a few years ago to free myself from firefox memory issues, I do know that once in a while I have to quit firefox because it's consuming too much memory and cpu while idle.
by the time e10s arrived, there was no "vast majority of users" anymore for firefox. Having not heard of it means mozilla communication sucks. Anyways e10s is disabled in my firefox, I do not remember why.
I'm not sure what you mean by firefox being the last browser to support xp, 6 months ago I tried to install firefox on windows xp and installer denied to install telling me it does not support xp anymore. I think I installed pale moon instead and opera so maybe firefox is not the last one to support xp.
Signed extensions caused an uproar and some people left firefox over this because it's removing freedom from user and giving more power/control to firefox. I had to drop a couple extensions that refused to comply with mozilla demands or were not updated.
And there are other things like this, and when all this happens while bug report dating of years or decades are still waiting to be dealt with or closed as WONTFIX because you do not matter enough, well...
I would have liked Hello (or really, any decent chat application that's not just some vehicle for the dreams of vendor lock-in by a large company) to succeed, but you're right, it flopped.
Firefox 52 was supported on XP service pack 2 (or later). Version 53 was released April 19, 2017. If you couldn't install FF on XP six months ago, you either were using a really really out of date XP (SP2 was released 2004!), or you misremembered, or you were using some beta or otherwise nonstandard FF.
I mean - I don't really disagree with you; heck I share some of the same frustrations. But what the heck is the alternative? Most of what you're mentioning is worse on every other browser.
What remains is perf and extensions; but I feel that those two issues are intertwined. FF extension APIs were, unfortunately, misdesigned. Not through malice or even incompetence, but because this turns out to be tricky. And so it was really easy to bog FF down with benign-looking extensions, and furthermore, it was difficult for FF to modernize with such low encapsulation. They should have bitten the bullet much earlier - instead, the problem kept festering.
When you say FF was a hog on a 16GB laptop, then it's almost certainly down to extensions - those very extensions you're frustrated they're forcibly modernizing. I don't think there's any good solution here.
Thing is there is no need to bog down the UI for people who don't need certain advanced features (of which an adblocker is not), you can be smart about it. Once again look at opera did it. For example mouse gestures were disabled until you first tried to use them and at this point it would spawn a window asking you if you wanted to enable them.
I have no idea what the reasoning for adding hello into a web browser. Opera did it with an IRC client a couple decades ago and it stopped being relevant at some distant point in the past. There are enough chat applications around, no need to push an additional in the browser, especially when on the other hand you remove or do not add features on the pretense that you lack resources.
I do not misremember at all (well it was probably more than 6 months ago as this took place at the end of last year). I remember perfectly being sorry for cleaning up my archives of older version install files for firefox because the oldest I had was version 49 and this version had already dropped windows xp support for this hardware (and IIANM firefox dropped linux support with version 52 or 53). Faced with replacing fully functional CPU/ motherboard/RAM or dropping firefox, guess what was the chosen solution.
Even pale moon that's based on older firefox versions has dropped window xp support[1].
I wish there was alternatives, but AFAIK the only alternative is to rely on older releases. Next time I have such an xp machine between my hands I'll do more research and tests to hopefully find something that will fill the gap.
Windows xp sp2 has been released in 2004 but we still fill containers of such computers to ship to Africa through humanitarian programs. We have a container leaving in september of this year. Most technology oriented people from rich western world tend to overlook that the rest of the world has not the same privileges they have.
I agree that it is not difficult to have poorly coded extensions or misdeisgned API causing a drain on resources, but this a strong design choice by mozilla who consistently refused to add those features to their browser even if incredibly popular (heck they even remove them at times). So even if the extension is the reason for the performance issue, the responsibility still lies with mozilla.
I don't mind modernizing, what I mind is that said modernizing means removing a good 70% of what I had to add to firefox to turn it into a modern browser and make it useful to me. When they tout freedom and user power but remove control and power from my hands while ignoring user feedback or even knowingly messing users because well they're not a high percentage in their skewed metric.
I may badly expressed myself here, I didn't mean that firefox is a hog all the time, but that with my use case of couple hundred tabs open over weeks or months it happens once in a while that I have to close it to clear an unexplained CPU or RAM hogging. On the other hand it is common to have 35-75% CPU usage of one core for just being opened and idle which is something I don't understand. When this happened in opera a simple F12 / disable javascript was enough to stop this nonsense. My take is that it's not as much an issue with the browser than with those stupid js heavy websites, the shortcoming from mozilla is to have removed the ability to disable scripts.
It's probably extensions in most cases, but I have replicated the behaviour with a brand new user profile and a vanilla firefox without any extensions, it actually happens faster and more often without extensions (lack of ublock origin and noscript plays a significant role here I guess).
Anyways I'm disgruntled, frustrated and fed up with this mozilla bs over the years. I sincerely hope they disappear sooner than later or that people in charge are replaced by competent people and that a user centric browser emerges from this mess.
Reasons:
- Firefox got bogged down with just a few tabs open, and caused beachballs (OSX/macOS) systemwide. Chrome was snappier and didn't harm my system's overall responsiveness with several times as many tabs open. This was the main reason.
- Dev tools. Liked Chrome's better.
- Profile handling was, at the time anyway, better.
- IIRC Firefox didn't do per-tab crashing at the time, while Chrome did, which aided overall stability.
Advertising had nothing to do with it. Chrome was just way, way better, especially its (apparent, which is mostly what matters) resource footprint.
Now I'm mostly on Safari, even though it's the worst mainstream browser, just because I gain 1-2hrs of battery life using it over Chrome or Firefox.
They definitely are. To this day I'm baffled I'm not sent to the debugger when clicking a line reference in the console.
But I still use Firefox as main browser. Since the pages I visit and the pages I develop are always in different places it's pretty easy to have one browser for development only.
I've since switched back because Chrome is a terrible memory hog and I can have tons of tabs open on Firefox with no impact on performance (as long as I don't actually load them), and I don't have problems with crashing the way I used to.
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/03/background...
And also - they're aggressively throttling background tabs:
http://blog.strml.net/2017/01/chrome-56-now-aggressively-thr... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471543
I'm on Chrome Canary - and there's been noticeable improvements in memory/responsive wise for a few months now.
I have around 320+ tabs open, spread over 2 Chrome profiles (around 160 per profile).
It's understandable they have to find ways to make money, but those experiments alienated users. Once you've started down that path, there's no returning in a lot of users eyes, mine included.
That's why I switched. It broke most of my extensions every time it upgraded. After the 3rd or 4th time it wasn't worth dealing with anymore. I switched to Chromium and I don't remember it breaking an extension.
But the issue here is that mozilla do not listen to user feedback and just push whatever they feel like pushing with an attitude and some hostility towards unhappy users. or as pointed out in the mozillazine forums: they're " making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum. "
It seems inside mozilla they're convinced that firefox is great and answers users' needs, while users feels that firefox is not that good and getting worse. There's quite a gap between mozilla marketing and the reality, which shows that firefox fails to deliver on its promises.
All that said, it's the least-worst in the browser world, for now. It seems pretty clear that they have some technically brilliant people as well.
Edit: seems that I need to learn how to write lists...
insert an empty line between each bullet point.
First without an empty line:
* bullet point without empty line between each other * bullet point without empty line between each other
then with an empty line inserted in between:
* bullet point with an empty line between each other
* bullet point with an empty line between each other
Firefox become unusable - shut down Firebug replaced by half-assed new DevTools, removed XUL based API, multi-process support that's still not working like Chrome1+/IE8+, still dog slow, can't handle more than a few tabs, Addons-website got useless as most addons aren't working anymore.
Sad, but Chrome is so much better, and Firefox is digging in a bigger rabbit hole with every new release. Would be great if we keep another open source competing browser around. Servo based browser could be a fresh start, but they need to focus now, in a year it can be too late.
Almost everything you list are things that happen around a certain time and we don't see those events manifest in the graph.
The reason of course being that the vast majority of Firefox users are not expert and don't care or know about those advance features.
Maybe if you can link to a user satisfaction report...
Meanwhile Chrome just works. It's even worse on Android, they don't have in FF even pull down to refresh and it's the slowest browser I tried.
I switched to Chrome a lot later than most of my friends, and actively try to switch to Firefox every once in a while, for literally the last 7 or 8 years. There has yet to be a single time where a couple days of usage didn't reveal the browser as far inferior, in ways that affect my day-to-day life materailly (multiprocess support being the biggest, most basic issue for a long time). I spend a LOT of my time in the browser, and I'm a very heavy user (usually about 100 Chrome tabs open total at any given time, with fairly high turnover). The performance and quality penalty I pay when using Firefox just isn't worth it.
I don't disagree with the article's claim that Google's advertising is having a big effect on a drop in FF usage; it's just bizarre for them to act like this is the only possible reason why people are switching.
Privacy is the one problem that Mozilla/Firefox can address, which Google and Microsoft will be fundamentally conflicted about addressing. It is also a growing market; that is the market Firefox should be aiming for!
It seems to me that Mozilla/Firefox folks don't appreciate this at a deep level. They are eroding user trust in the attempt to gather data for engineering better features. Eg. see the recent controversy regarding Firefox's usage of Google Analytics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 .
I made some comments on that thread, on how Mozilla/Firefox could try to win the privacy market. I don't want to repeat those comments, so I'll just link to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14754672
That's really sad but seem to be true. Too many examples out there.
1) Various navigator.* APIs all claim you're on Windows. Some people on non-Windows platforms may have issues with this.
2) Various window-sizing APIs lie about sizing, so pages that use them will end up making windows too small for their content.
3) Geolocation is disabled altogether.
4) The performance API is effectively disabled (claims pretty much everything took 0 time).
5) Media queries on the device pixel ratio lie and claim it's 1, no matter what it actually is.
6) All timing functions are clamped to the nearest 100ms. That means Date.now(), performance.now(), etc. If nothing else, shipping this by default will make all benchmark results _very_ weird.
There's also various other functionality that gets disabled (gamepad API, orientation API, etc, etc). These are generally not used much yet, so might be ok to remove, if people think these should actually not exist as web APIs.
2) So we send (through a Tor-backed PGP/GPG-encrypted message) a message saying "hey dev.dork, your minimuum window size is unrealistic".
3) Yay!
4) Yay!
5) And...? maybe it'd be wise to declare 4:3, but otherwise I see no issue.
6) Well, obviously we should have a button of "This page is requesting private data - Share for this page load? Y/N"
And I really, really don't mind if literally everything called an "API" were to go out the bloody window. Sure, it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but there's too much bathwater and the baby's a squalling jerkface anyhow.
Some sites actually work incorrectly (e.g. keep giving you an .exe to download instead of something you can actually use) if they think you're on Windows when you actually aren't. I'm not saying this is good practice, just that people do it.
> So we send
Normal users don't do that. Remember, we're not talking about a "privacy mode you can enable", but a "privacy mode that is shipped by default out of the box". Obviously for an opt-in mode things are simpler.
> 3) Yay!
Turns out some sites break without geolocation. Again, not saying it's a good idea, but it is what it is.
> 4) Yay!
Just so you understand, the next likely step is Facebook blocking your browser.
> 5) And...? maybe it'd be wise to declare 4:3, but otherwise I see no issue.
Um... I don't think you understand what device pixel ratio is. This is the ratio of CSS to device pixels. Aka "is this a high-dpi screen", aka "which images should actually be used to look nice?
> 6) Well, obviously we should have a button of "This page is requesting private data - Share for this page load? Y/N"
So every page that uses performance.now() (hint: pretty much everything) would have this thing appear? Again, remember that we're talking about a default mode here. Do you really think this is the experience most users are looking for?
I really think you're talking about a quite different situation (opt-in privacy mode) than the one I was responding to...
If sites break because people control their web experience, then one of two things will happen:
1) People who are not security-focused will switch to Chrome, which is what's already happened. So focus on a specific group and push the edge-case agenda with both the browser product and an ongoing marketing budget.
2) People will become aware of what webpages are demanding by default and just how little respect these groups have for their privacy - and have a means to fight back through browser selection.
I'm willing to accept that there will be the need for certain opt-out options because some people are going to actually want to give up private data, for purposes of online shopping, online banking, etc.. I want it default closed down, but again, I accept that most people aren't focused on it.
No, it hasn't. And I think explaining to people exactly why a web page expecting Date.now() to work is somehow demanding something and invading their privacy is a pretty tough job. Like "requires reading academic papers to understand why it could be a problem" tough.
So what you're basically suggesting is that Firefox resign itself to being an extremely niche browser. I don't think that really aligns with Mozilla's goals, for what it's worth.
could address, unfortunately Firefox default settings are no better than Chrome nowadays - what a shame. Every time the Firefox settings dialog gets changed, privacy related settings get less, and default options changed for the worse. One has to dig through the about:config mess, and even there the settings get renamed. It feels like their new devs learned their work at Microsoft, with Win10 as shameful disrespectful highlight of user hostile behavior.
I've also seen other (somewhat badly-designed) websites where using Chrome leads to less issues, probably because its developers are only testing with it and using non-standard or legacy features/plug-ins. Because of those issues, I am forced to recommend family members to try Chrome when things seem broken, to the point that some have now switched to it by default. I really hope this will not become another IE-like situation...
Now the next remark tends to be that Chrome is pretty awful as well with very weird rendering errors happening all too often - for example HTML comments can shift paragraphs up or down (lots of fun with React inserting those everywhere), or toggling a class from JS making things disappear completely.
Safari seems to be a designer-favourite with a very strong focus on things designers need. I don't think I've heard any complaints about Edge either.
Please tell them to report those issues? Either tweets to @bz_moz or email to bzbarsky at mit dot edu or just bug reports in Bugzilla if they're up for it and a cc; I'll make sure things get routed to the right place.
It just seems like your friend is making things for safari only, then is for some reason trying to remake it properly for other browsers once he's done.
> Safari seems to be a designer-favourite with a very strong focus on things designers need.
I have the completely different experience. If anything Safari is the new IE6 here.
It has bizarre JavaScript behaviour mismatches from other browsers because it doesn't conform to the standard and does its own thing instead. However, some of these problems are only present on iOS/macOS because they're related to the underlying libraries used/provided by those operating systems. It also has "edge-case" (I'd call them quite common, actually) rendering issues that haven't been fixed for at least a few years now (their flexbox model is still broken). Sometimes they even don't really treat these as bugs either but instead assume a high ground and claim their way is the best way. Sounds familiar?
Both Chrome and Firefox have some issues where things don't work properly, or deviate from the standard, and these are treated as bugs, and there's much fewer of those.
In my experience Firefox in general has more of these issues than Chrome and it usually requires a bit of added fluff to get it to work as the documentation claims it should work, but they're usually fixed quickly since there's usually already a bug report for them.
Chrome on the other hand has some subtle issues with rendering, and ironically a lot of them seem to be with the table model—which you'd think should be robust given its age, and some of them have not been fixed for ages, simply because people are moving away from the table model and interest in these bugs is dropping.
The table model has technical design issues to begin with, anyway.
For example, Hangout. I can no longer use Hangout using Firefox.
Or I think Gmail Inbox, which also came out only working on Chrome initially.
It's the sum of all these things that look very much like "best viewed with internet explorer" type stuff. I don't ever want to go back to such a world.
Also I can only use my U2F security key for Google when on Chrome. Firefox doesn't support it.
IIRC, there was s public notice by Firefox about the API change more than a year in advance. Google does not have the resources for implementation? Firefox support is just low prio for Google. I think it's a deliberate (non)-action because instead of switching away from Hangout, people rather start using Chrome... So not-browser-compat seems to help Google :-/ (see also my other comment)
Google has had three years to adapt to other browsers' standard WebRTC stacks, but it was apparently not a priority for the company as long as the legacy Hangouts plugins still worked in other browsers. Mozilla announced in 2015 [3] that it would remove NPAPI plugin support in 2017, so Google had plenty of notice that the Hangouts plugin would stop working in Firefox. Google's new "Hangouts Meet" service is supposed to work with standard WebRTC in Firefox and Edge, but Hangouts Meet is still in beta and its system requirements page still only lists Chrome.
[1] https://plus.google.com/103171586947853434456/posts/39TCW3Pc...
[2] https://webrtchacks.com/hangout-analysis-philipp-hancke/
[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plu...
It's certainly unfortunate that Google hasn't updated their software but Firefox didn't need to remove NPAPI. They chose to do that and when they did they broke software for lots of companies, not just Google. That's a trade off and decision that Firefox made and I'm suffering for it. They had their reasons for making that decision but that decision had costs and downsides for me.
Maybe you mean that there isn't a W3C standard and that's true as far as I can tell. I don't think that should be a blocker to Firefox adoption but maybe there is a reason it is.
As someone who has actually looked at implementing it... no, it's not, by the standards of modern web specs. That's part of the problem with it. The other problem is that its creators ignored a whole bunch of best practices for web API design...
Anyway, the FIDO thing (or an approximation of it, which was the best they could do given the quality of the spec) is what Chrome shipped and what they've been trying to backpedal from since.
If you want the gory details as far as Firefox is concerned, see https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mozilla.dev.platf... for the discussion about whether to implement FIDO U2F in Firefox. Note that it's about 6 pages of posts, at least the way google groups shows it to me... The posts from Ryan Sleevi (representing Chrome) are particularly interesting.
I wished that instead of switching to Chrome, people would instead move away from Google Services like Hangout (Skype, WhatsApp, https://meet.jit.si/) or Gmail (posteo, mailbox.org) whenever they see a "This works even better in Chrome" notice…
Overall I think it's a tossup. Google makes sure their stuff works decently in Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox (probably in that order).
Is that different from Hangouts[0]? That's worked and continues to work in Firefox AFAICT.
> looks like the site requires a login now. It used to be available publicly for years and was public until a few days ago
I'm no longer a Mozillian, but stuff like this is really, really weird. I'm referring in general to things being hidden or locked up—Mozilla as an organization operated more openly than anything else I can think of, which is part of what used to make it so beautiful (and successful)—but specifically, I'm talking about sign ins.
I stopped touching stuff on developer.mozilla.org 5+ years ago (or even consulting it, really), but I was reading some docs on the site last week and saw something that was so outright wrong that I felt it had to be fixed. I tried to, and it turns out that you have to use GitHub to sign in. The idea of requiring a social media sign in for a Mozilla web property is one of the most un-Mozilla things possible and really blew me away.
It's easy to see how exposing this site to the world might not be a good idea, especially when it's referenced from a blog post appearing on the hacker news front page and people start drawing all kinds of uninformed conclusions.
I'm not saying I am entitled to mozilla's data, but if that were the reason behind closing data that was once open I would feel a little insulted.
Lack of openness also makes participation more difficult. For example I occasionally see links by mozilla developers posted on IRC (some telemetry, google spreadsheets) that require login, which makes it more difficult to follow what's going on.
Also, (unpaid) Mozilla contributors do get access to this stuff.
yes, the crash stats site shows similar categories
I wonder why it is that i seem to bump into an upsurge of near religious FOSS devs from Europe these days...
Another factor could have been Mozilla's defaulting to Yahoo for search (and the difficulty some people had with changing and keeping the change to another search provider). For quite a few years Yahoo has not been very good at search, and Mozilla's insistence on teaming up with them probably brought Mozilla's name down.
This is sadly almost what I feel.
Then again I'll stick with FF for now since Google has managed to annoy me with their Chrome campaign and since FF is slightly better for my use cases and uses less resources AFAIK.
... the popups requesting your email address or that you turn off your ad blocker, the auto-playing videos (that relocate themselves as you try to scroll away from them!), the javascript hijacked page scrolling, and so on.
So really it doesn't matter which browser you use. Your browser is going to feel slow, and it's going to use a ton of resources.
And then they pivoted to Firefox OS. At a time when WebOS had already failed, Nokia had already failed, and the writing was on the wall for Blackberry and Windows Phone. It was already well known that the market couldn't support another mobile OS, and that was the moment they decided to build one, totally bizarre.
I firmly believe that if Mozilla had gone all-in on Firefox for Android at the time when Android's browser was just atrociously bad, they could have been the hip option there, and had a leg-up on Chrome for Android.
To everyone that says "people don't install 3rd party browsers on mobile", that's 100% wrong. Chrome for Android was a 3rd party browser for several years and was popular.
And then broke it down, step by step. It used to be perfect but over the years gradually got changed/removed features that I loved, with no about:config option to get them back. Things like no menu button[1] (my device has a physical menu button), text reflow when zooming was removed, double tap to zoom to a paragraph now (sometimes?!) selects text instead of zooming, the tab you have open is no longer on the bottom side of the tab menu (it would slide open fast, as soon as your finger touched it and would feel super snappy; now there's some fancy animation)... etc.
It got to the point where I started looking for other browsers, but there just are no good options. Chromium sometimes bugs and uses 100% CPU for hours until I notice, and most other things are closed source. So I'm stuck with a mix of Firefox and Habit browser.
Habit seems to be what Firefox used to be: configure it any way you like (and it does a fantastic job at that). The trouble is that it's closed source and it has an inferior rendering engine, so I don't dare using it for things with a login that are valuable and it doesn't work for some websites.
Edit: by the way, the desktop story is completely different. I could never go without Firefox on non-mobile for various features (besides the privacy matter).
[1] What does that matter: Well, space (now there's two buttons next to the already-small address bar) and usability. I used to be able to hit the tab button without really looking. It was on the side of the screen, I'd just finger along that edge and I'd open my tab menu. Now I need to tap somewhere specific, and if I accidentally hit the menu button, I need to either reach over to the other side of the screen (on a 5.5" phone, that's a stretch for my thumb) or hit the back button (which would require shifting my phone, then touching it, then shifting back, all balancing it in one hand, oftentimes at least). How friggin' difficult is it to make an about:config setting to hide a button?
There seems to be a generation of devs taking over that is less about making sure things work and more about padding their CV with the latest bling tech.
End result is that unless you manage to keep up with their bleeding edge web dev mentality of moving fast and breaking things, the stuff you depend on for whatever you are doing will be mothballed or tossed out in short order.
The vanilla installation of Firefox lacks basic UI components (mouse gestures for example), lacks session management, and the bookmark and history interfaces look like they were made in 1995.
When you click an old entry in History I don't understand why it's so difficult for the selection to stay near the formerly clicked item, instead of it selecting the top most entry forcing you to scroll all the way down again if you want to open another entry that's near the previously clicked entry.
Why can't Bookmarks employ a simple logistic classifier? OK I've stopped using Firefox's bookmark system a long time ago (because its so shitty) but if I were to be still using it I would expect the browser to be smart enough to figure out that if all my bookmarks from a certain site are in a specific bookmark folder that most likely means this new bookmark from that same site should go there and should be offered as the 1st choice.
Now, yes, of course you can add all these features in a slow JavaScript-based addon which will eat your memory and cpu time and allow the Firefox team to blame the addons when something goes wrong with Firefox, but at some point you have to reconsider if this is such a good idea.
Sure very few people use mouse gestures in Firefox and adding them out of the box could be interpreted as bloat, but maybe if more users even knew what mouse gestures were and how useful they are, they would start considering them a fundamental aspect of a browser's interface and not just a fancy knick-knack.
I miss the old Opera so much :(
I try it occasionally and I'm enjoying it. Most tools come out of the box, like Adblock, screenshot, window tiling, and mouse gestures. Not sure if the Adblock is as good as uBlock origin, though. Some new features like an improved history (haven't used thoroughly yet) and tab stacking.
It still is a bit buggy for me on Ubuntu 16.04. Sometimes when playing videos the window flickers.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1299016
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469426[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/12/23/firefox-s...
What I worry about, is the increasing situation of "best viewed in Chrome" and sites starting to break in Firefox. That's going to be very bad.
I'd say that the best thing that could happen for Firefox would be Google banning ad blockers, but in my experience with end users in office environments most users don't realize they even exist. Similarly they could partner with Facebook or some major destination sites, but that would have its own issues and complications.
IE/Edge has Windows.
Chrome has Android and Google services broadly.
Safari has iOS & Mac.
Firefox has... nothing.
Unless Chrome suddenly gets a lot worse, it's pretty clear what's going to happen to Firefox. Even IE/Edge is finding it difficult to hold market share against Chrome on the PC (where Microsoft still has an effective monopoly), Firefox doesn't stand a chance by comparison.
It's perfect for doing web searches that you don't want associated with your device. If you're on your home wifi, you can probably still be tracked, but if you're on cellular I imagine it's pretty anon.
In the first version you were stuck with Yahoo! search (which is surprisingly bad), but now you can use Google.
However, at the time (about a year ago), I didn't think Firefox was as fast as Chrome. So I eventually switched to the Chromium-based Brave (run by Mozilla's former CEO) due to its speed and (Chromium) security architecture (and of course ad-blocking).
I would use Brave on the desktop, too, if not for the awful UI decisions there (on mobile it's more like a Chrome clone). They really need to replace their UI guy, because I feel like he (or she) has been getting it wrong since day one. Too much UI fluff getting in the way and controls being hidden from you.
Chrome for years and years was sold as lightning fast and secure from malware - and it delivered.
That was why I switched back in the day.
Even today, it has a reputation for being lightning fast, and having a fast pace of development.
In my (admittedly mostly/predominantly) technical circle - I don't know many who switched to ads. In fact, those people are the least likely to click on ads.
Most of them switched because Chrome is fast, and lightweight - or for the non-technical people, because their technical friends told them to.
I've seen technical people switch because of performance, and I occasionally use it for certain tasks too for that reason.
But almost every time I see it on a non-techie computer and ask them something like, "ah, you're using Chrome?", they look at me like I'm speaking a different language. So I suppose they were not aware when they installed it.
I have many tabs open, and did notice high memory usage.
I'll reference my comment elsewhere here - tl;dr - they/we aggressively throttle background tasks now:
> Chrome recently introduced some changes to background tabs (to a bit of grumbling from sites that wanted to use background resources/service workers): > https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/03/background.... > And also - they're aggressively throttling background tabs: > http://blog.strml.net/2017/01/chrome-56-now-aggressively-thr.... > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471543 > I'm on Chrome Canary - and there's been noticeable improvements in memory/responsive wise for a few months now. > I have around 320+ tabs open, spread over 2 Chrome profiles (around 160 per profile).
I'd much rather use a Mozilla product than a Google one, but chrome is simply a better browser.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/#night...
If Firefox 54 is still slow for you, I would be interested if multiprocess is enabled (look at about:support). Also, what does about:performance say?
If still slow you might want to do a Refresh: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...
Anyway, still not annoying enough to switch away. It'd take a lot for me to switch away again.
Edit: Ironically, that about:performance page you linked reports everything runs fine, except the about:performance page!
Because it sounds like FUD at this stage, until somebody provides a shred of evidence.
There are people who care more about their private data and others that care less. If you find Chrome trustworthy, go with it. For me a closed source browser is not an option.
That's like saying your school could install cameras in the toilets - so they must have?
Or that your landlord is secretly going through your stuff, because he has keys?
Actually - the Chromium browser project is open source:
It's what Google Chrome is built on - you could just compile that if you wanted. (You lose out on a bunch of integrations - but it sounds like that might be what you want, anyhow).
If he is known for doing such things, yes, I have to expect him doing so.
> Actually - the Chromium browser project is open source.
I know and Chrome is not.
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I see a lot of conjecture and wild paranoia - but not much factual reporting.
I really must be a wild paranoid if I would ever think that a big corp or gov would read the private data that I throw into their cloud.
You think it's paranoid to expect it, I think it's naive to not expect it.
Why is it that anyone that question the decisions regarding a project are instantly tarred as "haters"?
These however there is no really big advantage to using Firefox over chrome, and when the difference is that close marketing and convenience will win. In other words if Firefox would've been on or with internet explorer years ago it would never have gained the market share it did in the first place.
It's not just a marketing issue but a combination of a marketing and engineering issue.
No _user perceived advantage_ but they are important: Privacy, freedom and avoiding the monoculture of a single web engine. The amount of websites that don't quite work well or outright has bugs on firefox is increasing.
The average user does not care but it should care. People like us should inform them since we can.
(Then again, your comment is 6 hours old, maybe it wasn't discussed yet back then.)
Everyone who doesn't care about control is just going to use chrome, edge or IE so going after that market is probably not a good use of resources.
I don't quite get the whole performance thing, chrome eats memory constantly and trashes the machine which is something firefox doesn't do. It's single threaded though so shitty pages will hang it.
If I were to boil it all down, (and I say this with zero snark), I'd say that they have little to no differentiation with Chrome. It looks like Chrome, it will soon be no more powerful than Chrome, it's developed ignoring community input like Chrome, and the kiss of death: it performs worse than Chrome.
With all that in mind, why not just use Chrome like those popups suggest I should, and get a speed boost while I'm at it? (Note: open source politics do not factor into this)
The number one reason is that scroll seems to work differently to every single other app I have installed. It's "sticky" and doesn't feel native. It also takes a noticeable amount of time to render the page when scrolling quickly, which is not something I've ever noticed with Chrome. What gives?
So this is a monopoly problem again.
https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/re...
It's based on Chrome custom tabs, which is a pluggable protocol. Firefox is working on support for it as well [1]. There doesn't seem to be any ongoing work to support per-tab tasks in Firefox for Android itself right now [2].
Supporting being a provider for Custom Tabs has nothing to do with being able to have your tabs show up in Recents. Are you an Android Dev?
Yes, it does. Which part do you not understand?
> Supporting being a provider for Custom Tabs has nothing to do with being able to have your tabs show up in Recents.
No, but if Firefox supported Custom Tabs, you could use it with Chromer.
Prove it, then. What are these "internal differences"?
Let me reiterate: there is literally nothing that relies on a proprietary or private API in the former Chrome merged apps and tabs implementation. Any app can do the same thing using completely public API's.
I've already linked the API's required to do this. I've linked a third party app that provides the exact same functionality. Which part is unclear to you?
Too bad, I really liked Firefox Sync, it was such a superior solution (for privacy, at least).
Basically i am waiting for a Servo-based browser which will hopefully change the UX in favor of Mozilla again.
Oh, and PLEASE Mozilla. Unify that f* search toolbar into the adress bar, already. It's stupid.
edit: but sometimes the separate search bar is useful eg. when searching wikipedia instead of google? maybe it's just not your use case, I know it's not mine, I just append "wiki" to my searches, but we have to consider many different users.
I switched to Vivaldi last month due to webextensions breaking fully functional mouse gestures in the Firegestures addon. They finally forced me away. Thankfully Vivaldi exists!
Firefox is the only browser out there that supports text-only page zooming! And until recently, the only browser that supported these total-conversion extensions like Vimperator.
Before Vivaldi added customizable mouse gestures, my plan was to stick to a Firefox fork that will still support XUL addons, like Pale Moon. That's my suggestion, if the text zoom addon doesn't work and your use-case really needs that.
it cuts off exactly where you would think there's ten times fewer Firefox users
(this quote is from the article, in reference to Google aggressively advertising Chrome)
I'm pretty sure that all the ads mentioned in the article have been around for far longer than 12 months. What else might have happened 12 months ago to influence the decline?
I installed Chrome on the PCs of family members and it was trouble free for them. No need to update Flash separately, no random crashes, the anti-phishing is great, too.
If I could have software and services not totally derail what I was trying to do, that would be greaaaaaat.
"...the “falling off the cliff” is just the snowball effect of bad management and decisions made many years ago. Its to late now to stop the bleeding as-is. The solution is right there, although obvious, its probably to much for Mozilla to undertake at this point."
Because they don't want to send all your keystrokes in the URL to your search provider just so you can get autosuggest. So there is one bar that does autosuggest and a different bar where you can put things that your search provider should not see.
Obviously Chrome doesn't have that problem, since they _want_ your search provider to see all the URLs you visit.
If you personally don't, then you can combine them yourself in Firefox right away: just remove the search bar entirely via the normal UI customization mechanism, and use only the URL bar, which doesn't do search autocomplete.
Based on the diffs there, looks like the 55 feature can at least be turned off by setting the "browser.urlbar.suggest.searches" preference to false... (That preference doesn't affect the search bar.) Also looks like there's preferences UI for this (the "Show search suggestions in location bar results" checkbox).
I think there were talks about not presenting the search box for new profiles, too, but it looks like that hasn't happened yet.
They have. Try typing "test test" in the address bar and hit enter. If you mind the separate field, hit menu -> customize -> drag the field away -> hit done. Then have a beer.
> Why can’t Firefox ditch their slow animations
On mobile? No idea. On desktop? Which ones? Might it be a Windows thing that I don't notice on Debian?
> buttons
Wait what? You mean the, like, five buttons that are left in the interface by default (menu button, new tab button, and some in the toolbar)? I added extra ones myself for things like enabling/disabling flash, user agent switcher, etc. but besides that, I don't think Chromium does any better on that.
> menus
There is one menu... I don't know what you're talking about.
It is slow. the ui sucks. it looks dated. it crashes far too often and eats up loads of mem. Don't blame Google for its ads, the problems are homegrown. Its sad to say this but i guess i will turn my back on it too if things dont change.
Power users are Firefox's best chance at regaining market share, and some of those users are now gone as a result of Mozilla's stupid decisions.
The change in UI to Australis i could deal with, as it could be mitigated with extensions.
But "recently" they changed to GTK3 on *nix, and are now in the process of making extensions less potent.
All this makes it harder to continue using Firefox where it used to be the flagship browser.
Firefox is dropping, but not collapsing. And my opinion as to the primary reason why is the Yahoo default search.
The difference is that in those days, it was the developers of many different web sites doing it. I did it on many sites I worked on. We were sick of working in IE and wanted a browser that followed web standards we could all use.
I don't think Chrome's dominance is a bad thing. Because if Chrome ever breaks the web for developers, we'll just do it all over again (or force Chrome to follow us, as we did with NaCL vs. WebAssembly).
Also can't remember the last time FF crashed on me (and I usually have hundreds of tabs open for weeks/months on end).
Dev tools are a toss up but I tend to use the ones in FF more than Chrome, probably simply out of habit.
Once servo becomes mainline (and assuming it delivers on its promise) I can't see why anyone would choose anything other than FF.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ works for me
Edit: I'm not big on extensions but do have a few installed: session manager, foxyproxy, one tab and fireshot.
I really think this is a big part of the discrepancy in opinions of performance here. In my own experience, Firefox on Linux just has sluggish responsiveness. It doesn't happen everywhere, and sometimes the effect feels cumulative (depending on how long the process has been running). I've also found the occasional website (usually forums) where the text input box is painfully sluggish in Firefox (for no good reason), while its just fine and dandy in Chrome.
Now I've also run Firefox on Windows, where it seems quite snappy and I don't really have any performance complaints.
(Of course there's also the part where "hip web designers" are now treating Chrome like the modern MSIE6, which probably affects "internal" sites more than public-facing ones. But that's a topic for rants elsewhere in this thread.)
I still use it on Windows but had to switch back to Chrome on my MacBook.
If you buy into the Google Suite then you get synched profiles. Firefox has the same but the account is only useful for keeping Firefox in sync whereas Google's also give you access to all their other products, plus oauth to third party services.
Google Chrome exists inside of an ecosystem, which means that is stays simple. On the other hand, Mozilla has a tendency of treating the browser as a goal in itself, which is understandable but creates things like the Pocket extension and other UX complexities.
Android's unremovable Google search doesn't open the default browser but presents the result in a Chrome WebViewer.
That's the exact reason some of us avoid Chrome :)
possibly. however for me, technical problems are why i avoid it in general.
i still use it a bit, as i'm lazy about switching between user accounts with various services and separate browsers makes this easy.
sadly, nearly every day firefox will crash, often when i'm not even using it. it happens so often i don't even get annoyed anymore... it's just normal. my system is a fairly new build and nothing else crashes (or at least, so infrequently i don't recall anything).
I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Firefox, but the reality is that Firefox's engineering is inferior when compared to Chrome or Safari IMO. To deny this is perhaps illustrative of why Mozilla's browser is suffering. It crashes, it leaks, it sputters, it freezes. It's shameful and embarrassing.
Yikes! I hope that was an exaggeration! I'm a long-time Firefox user on desktop and mobile, and I certainly don't want to see it die on the desktop.
I prefer FF both because of the motivations behind the browser, and because on Android it supports extensions, making it much more useful to me.
I do wish they'd release an iOS version that had the ad blocking of Firefox Focus, and the tabs and Sync and such from regular Firefox.
I can't leave Firefox open on even simple pages, without it consuming ~5% or more of the processor with one tab doing nothing. If I open numerous tabs, forget about it, Firefox will eat the processor (brand new machine, i5-7400, new Firefox install). I can leave Chrome running almost perpetually without problems with tons of tabs open. Right now I've got seven tabs open in Firefox, and it's consuming 706mb of ram, for a few stackoverflow pages and HN. I've had that resource abuse problem with Firefox essentially since the beginning, across a lot of varied PC systems.
Over the last year I've gradually stopped using Firefox because I can't stand its horrible performance any longer.
I am using the developer edition instead of stable, though, and there have been a lot of somewhat recent improvements; maybe that accounts for the difference.
I still use it today because usability wise it's just better for me.
I can't for the life of me get used to a separate search box. The "omnibar" is simply fantastic. Coupled with turning off "search suggestions" in the Settings, you have a wiki on hand pretty much. Anything you type will match a personal bookmark, or a personal search. Or title of a page visited earlier. This means I don't need to make bookmark in many cases. I can also manage omnibar to give optimal results by making random, useless searches in a private window, which again, is so easy to use in Google Chrome (Ctrl Shift N). And then if a search match is inconvenient for speed or just not useful anymore, just shift+del to remove it.
Firefox completelty lost me when I looked back and it was like version "52" instead of the version 14 or something I was one, just a year or two later. I was like "what the hell??" "WOW what are all these amazings updates they made?" Only to realize barely anything changed at all.
And lately they just lost me completely as a developer. They wanted to integrate the Firebug extension, arguably the most useful aspect of Firefox for developers. I kept using Firefox for firebug for years, while Chrome was my main browser. But since they integrated it, it just performs worse. It's so damn slow and unusable, meanwhile Google console just gets better and better.
I am not talking about the performance of JavaScript, compliance with standards or developer tools, no, I am talking about Firefox's outdated UI and inconsistent user experience. Chrome is slick and fast while FF often lags, wastes space in the tabs and address bar and confuses me with additional search bar.
It's a shame that Chrome which appears to be on track to become the most popular browser by a considerable margin is proprietary software. And before I get a reply telling me that Chromium exists, I know that - but I also know that it's not Chromium that's popular.
I think it is also a shame for two more reasons: Mozilla wants to make Firefox look like Chrome, probably to replicate features which seem to draw users in, by changing the extensions API to make it less powerful, by supporting standardised DRM in the browser (though this is a different issue) etc. Secondly, we may see a world in which only Webkit matters, and standards no longer rule, similar to the situation with Internet Explorer years ago. This will also put pressure on Mozilla and other "third party" browser authors to support features just because Webkit supports them, or even to break standard features so that they render like they do in Webkit.
I'd probably get shouted at for thinking it would become a "monopoly", but that's exactly what it is, just not in the legal sense.
There was a point about 7 or 8 years ago where Firefox was my favorite browser. It was the scrappy upstart that was better than IE in every single way - and look, plugins!
I had a decent plugin load, including a bunch of stuff not in the store, could skin the UI (anyone remember "Classic Compact"?) to shrink down the more annoying UI elements, use vim key bindings, and a bunch of other stuff I can't even remember anymore. I had to scroll two or three pages to list them all.
Slowly, they started taking that power away from me.
Slowly, the UI started becoming more obnoxious.
Slowly, the performance got worse and worse.
The moment Chrome got a decent ad blocker, I left and never looked back. Firefox is basically turning itself into a Chrome clone, with a side of user hostility and ancient bugs.
And they have only themselves to blame.
That said, given the treatment of how some other bugs are handled, especially one particularly noxious one regarding dupe SSL certs that's been kicking around for nearly a decade now that renders Firefox unusable for technical enterprise users, the fact that it's filed in their tracker doesn't mean much, and their classification of that bug as "(REOPENED bug which will not be worked on by staff, but a patch will be accepted)" tells me that compatibility isn't that much of a priority internally.
Why not let it bake a little longer and then release it? Surely Firefox won't turn into a pumpkin if they fail to push it out the door by November?
Changing the extensions API to decouple it from the browser's internals, allowing long-needed refactoring, a move to multiple processes, sandboxing, etc.
And because the old extensions API must be completely scrapped (and ought to have been scrapped years ago), it makes more sense to replace it with a new thing that's compatible with other browsers rather than a new thing that only works with Firefox.
> Mozilla wants to make Firefox look like Chrome, probably to replicate features which seem to draw users in
This is false IMO
> by changing the extensions API to make it less powerful
This is not about copying Chrome. This is about moving off of an API which was effectively "our entire codebase is your public API, here, have fun", which is horrible for making it easy to evolve the codebase. We had this problem with electrolysis (multiprocess firefox) already, lots of addons broke because of it. Additionally, the base of this API is XUL, which is a technology many want to phase out.
Firefox is using the same base extension API as Chrome. It's a sensible choice -- if you're going to design an extensions API from scratch, why not standardize the base so that many extensions become interoperable. The base manifest format and most of the normal APIs from Chrome are the same, however the new system has many other APIs which chrome doesn't have, and the intent is to continue adding these so that most of the former very powerful extensions are still possible. But I'm already using extensions that won't work in Chrome because Chrome doesn't expose that functionality.
> by supporting standardised DRM in the browser
If Netflix didn't work in the browser Firefox would not have any users left.
Mozilla fought this battle, and lost.
It's frustrating because I really want FF to succeed, but they keep shooting themselves in the foot. If they aren't following with Chrome, they why do so many of their decisions end up mirroring Chrome after Chrome has made their decision?
The general UI and their overall design philosophy
shelling out data to places that I don't approve of (pocket/ga)
rapid releases
toggle-able options
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14805761
> shelling out data to places that I don't approve of (pocket/ga)
Pocket was not shelling out data, Pocket was an addition of an add on by default, one which did nothing unless you tried to use it (and if you did you'd have to sign in to a 3rd party site -- it's all pretty obvious)
Mozilla has a deal with GA that restricts the data collected. https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785#issue...
The data collected is IIRC only aggregate numbers.
Neither of these are "copying Chrome", they're just "things you don't like"
> rapid releases
The web is evolving pretty fast too. This has become necessary over time.
> toggle-able options
no idea what you mean here
I know you had to "turn on" pocket. That doesn't counter my argument.
I also don't care what agreement FF with Chrome. It's still shitty to do, especially if your selling point is privacy. Having a special agreement doesn't make doing shady things with your user's data OK.
But I don't see how they aren't "copying Chrome". One of them is using another product that is made by the same creator as Chrome, the other copying the "here's a feature that nobody wants that sends your data elsewhere" which, AFAIK, they didn't do before Chrome started doing it.
I strongly disagree that rapid releases are necessary. What issue came up that needed to be implemented within one FF release cycle?
toggle-able options were way back when FF used to have different settings in the options page where you could make changes to the UI, functionality, etc. Almost all of those are gone now for a "simplified" set of options.
Kinda does, especially since Google never used pocket?
> they didn't do before Chrome started doing it.
Chrome uses GA for general telemetry IIRC, a feature which Firefox has basically always had. Firefox's telemetry is much more privacy conscious (it collects very basic numbers and nothing personally identifiable). I'm not sure why about:addons decided to use GA instead of Firefox, but this isn't "copying something Google did first".
These are decisions which you may not agree with, but you're reaching when you describe them as "copying Chrome".
> toggle-able options were way back when FF used to have different settings in the options page where you could make changes to the UI, functionality, etc. Almost all of those are gone now for a "simplified" set of options.
about:config still exists. Most options are still there under advanced in settings. The UI is even more configurable, because themes exist and you can drag-drop UI elements to other parts of the browser.
> Kinda does, especially since Google never used pocket?
Pocket also gave way to a new type of add-on that's impossible to remove and installs silently. They do show up in about:support, at least, but only as names [1]. I feel like that whole episode was treated very poorly by Mozilla, with a lot of misinformation [2] and reasonable documentation requests being ignored [3].
[1] what's even "presentation@mozilla.org"?
[2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/2PYq2w8te...
[3] e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1179699
It doesn't exactly "install silently", it's there by default. Just like the code for the bookmarks toolbar is there by default. It uses the addons API, is all.
The Presentation addon IIRC handles some prompts for https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Presentatio...
I'm not sure why it's structured as an addon, but it's basically browser functionality.
The Go Faster initiative seems to have started around June 2015 [2] with Pocket being one of the first users [3] [4].
> The Presentation addon IIRC handles some prompts
Thanks for the information.
[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Go_Faster/When_To_Use_Syste...
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Go_Faster/Meetings
[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694
[4] This first comment in #1215694 has a nice Orwellian tinge: "We're moving pocket to a built-in addon. This will facilitate user choice [...]". We all know how that went.
I don't think they can be
> with Pocket being one of the first users [3] [4].
So were Hello/Loop. I think you've got the cause-effect backwards here. It seems to have started off as a way to add experimental features that needed a different update cycle (before Test Pilot existed). Now that Test Pilot exists all of these addons are basically for core browser functionality (e.g. the dev tools may move to this model at some point). So right now it's just a way of shipping code with a different release cycle, and being used for things that would otherwise be baked into the browser itself.
Anyway, this is super off topic.
> This is not about copying Chrome. This is about moving off of an API which was effectively "our entire codebase is your public API, here, have fun"
But at the same time it also breaks access to non-mozilla things, i.e. external libraries and the operating system (e.v. via js-ctypes). Which means it becomes more difficult to interact with native, which turns the browser more into a non-interoperating silo.
It also prevents valid use-cases such as modifying the UI, download management, implementing novel network protocols (think ipfs) and integrating it with the internal network request APIs.
While the arguments for webextensions are clear to me the no-compromise approach is not. There are no escape hatches that are conceptually comparable to sudo, rust's unsafe blocks, phone unlocking or whatever.
Mozilla was fairly loudly warned by developers that this will hurt specific addons and exclude entire categories of addon features and they went ahead anyway. In other words they did choose to make their addon system less useful. I don't think this can be argued away.
I'm not arguing that away.
I'm saying that it doesn't imply firefox is copying Chrome.
There are tradeoffs here. The team weighed them and made a decision. It was not about copying Chrome.
> It also prevents valid use-cases such as modifying the UI, download management, implementing novel network protocols (think ipfs) and integrating it with the internal network request APIs.
Not necessarily, webextension APIs that provide better scoped hooks to this can be added. Except perhaps the novel network protocols one. But it depends.
That mere possibility does not alter the fact that upon release of FF57 a long-tail set of features will unavailable at that given point, in other words there will be a decline and mozilla might work over time to win back some fraction of that decline.
The net effect compared to today is still a decline in features, which is what will be perceived.
Without escape hatches this system will always be inferior in its versatility. Which is why most runtimes do have escape hatches, they admit that any provided APIs will never be sufficient for all valid uses.
They only function for prototyping things and hoping mozilla will bless them eventually.
The current Firefox marketshare is a predictable outcome of that strategy; by eliminating everything that made Firefox distinct from Chrome, they've made made going with the biggest, most well-funded version of Chrome the most reasonable choice. It has resulted in a Chrome monopoly, but there's really no way to prevent it: even when given a explicit choice between Chrome and mostly-Chrome, people will usually choose Chrome.
edit: After the elimination of the old-style extensions, I've run out of distinct features that justify sticking with Firefox, and am left with pure ideology. An ideology that I don't even think that Mozilla places any importance in anymore, so I might as well be using Chromium.
Firefox is trying to avoid losing marketshare and you're complaining about a big usability win. In what way could causing every video service on the planet to start steering users towards Chrome/Edge/Safari help that?
(Yes, I realize we don't like DRM but normal people are far more concerned about not having to do anything other than click play on Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/etc.)
Learning the answer to that question will also show you why this attitude is completely ineffectual in the fight against DRM.
The firefox people should take care of such details when they deal with the most widely used desktop OS.
Also: connecting a 4k monitor to your Macbook to run Firefox on and things will get hot real fast.
Shame really, I love Firefox but keep coming back to Safari because of the CPU usage.
These two things are probably related :)
But I guess Mozilla is just as corrupt as Google...
don't let it fall
Seriously?
Seriously, everyone who is anyone is streaking headlong into a play for video hosting. If Google has a monopoly here they're managing it extraordinarily badly.
Again: an argument that Google is exploiting a monopoly in video needs to be able to explain why Instagram et. al. were so successful in the face of it.
No, what you're describing is monopoly abuse.
Once more, though: how do you take that frame and then explain the success of Instagram, which launched straight into the face of the unbreakable monopoly you posit?
We never got to see what would have happened to Instagram, had Facebook gone on to compete with it over time with a cloned product (or perhaps some other purchased competitor that might have sprung up to take on Instagram).
One of the most critical powers of a monopoly (with the typical profits that go with such), is its ability to acquire the smaller competition - frequently at high prices - that threatens it. Which is why Facebook was willing to pay such a seemingly immense sum for WhatsApp (a product with essentially zero sales). And it's why they would have happily paid a lot more for Instagram (another product with no sales) if they had demonstrated continued growth.
Again, you're saying that "big" competitors have advantages, which no one sane disagrees with. Nonetheless that's not what antitrust law is about, and whinging about "monopoly" as a synonym for "big" just leads to pointless arguments like this one.
Also, I said that tech markets tend to reach (quickly) a monopoly situations. But even if it's very fast, it does not mean it's instant. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr were all created in the same 10-year time span.
And this has nothing to do with monopoly. That's just a rationalization for their fuckup. I don't even know where to start, let me just list a couple:
1. The "Yahoo.com" by default is the worst: I know users can switch to google, etc. but if a developer like me doesn't even want to go through trouble, why would any ordinary person go through all the trouble when they can just use chrome? And we all know Yahoo doesn't provide customer-centric search results but ad-optimized results to squeeze out revenue.
2. Bad performance: YES IT IS ALL ABOUT ENGINEERING. As someone who keeps a lot of tabs open I can't use firefox because the cpu level reaches the stratosphere if i keep opening tabs and leave them around. The firefox browser performance sucks. Period.
But I think the main reason FF is failing is because the developers are out of touch with the reality, just like in this article where one of the developers complain it's because Google is pushing chrome through monopoly. He's forgetting that before Chrome, it was Firefox who won despite MS pushing IE through monopoly.
If the developers were more self-aware, they wouldn't have let all this happen.