HN Gopher Feed (2017-07-19) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Firefox marketshare revisited
211 points by ronjouch
https://andreasgal.com/2017/07/19/firefox-marketshare-revisited/sited/
___________________________________________________________________
fimdomeio - 4 hours ago
I want to use firefox, I really do. But I can distinguish when it's
running and when it's not by my macbook fan noise. And yes I've
tried all kinds of clean ups. but it just sits there on the
background consuming 40% of a cpu while doing nothing.
bqe - 4 hours ago
For an opposing anecdote, I do not have this problem at all.
Firefox is always snappy and uses less memory than Chrome on my
Macbook.
rrggrr - 5 hours ago
Extensions are tipping in favor of Chrome. Many of the extensions I
use are Chrome only.
bahjoite - 4 hours ago
Not included in these numbers are installs of Trisquel's Abrowser
and The Tor Project's TorBrowser. Both are rebadged Firefox and
neither one is downloaded from or phones home to Mozilla. I don't
suggest that this would make much difference to the numbers.
netule - 3 hours ago
Are Chromium installs counted in the Chrome count as well?
dhekir - 5 hours ago
Some crappy companies such as Eurostar currently experience issues
in their website when using Firefox (e.g. impossibility of using
vouchers in some cases), and when you contact customer support,
they clearly state that "Chrome is recommended" for better results,
and that "there are known issues with Firefox". I initially thought
it was due to some Firefox add-ons, but even with all of them
disabled, things do work better in Chrome.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...
Ygg2 - 5 hours ago
But you seem to point, that it already is an IE-like situation.
wichert - 4 hours ago
I have heard designer friends say that Firefox is the new IE for
them: so many rendering problems that they always need to do
special Firefox-specific workarounds.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.
bzbarsky - 2 hours ago
> I have heard designer friends say that Firefox is the new IE
for themPlease 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.
jasonkostempski - 2 hours ago
To developers and designers "rendering issues" equate to
anything "not the same as my primary browser". Obviously bugs
can be to blame but they could be due to different
interpretations of a vague standard or somebody decided to do
what they felt was right instead of what the standard says.
soperj - 4 hours ago
Safari is the worst for me. Everything works as it should in
Firefox/Chrome, and it's always Safari with the weird issues,
like not doing flex-box properly.
dest - 2 hours ago
experienced problems with Safari and flex-box as well. And
when you don't own a Mac to run Safari on it, it's difficult
to do tests! You have to annoy friends/colleagues with
Macbooks.
rossdavidh - 6 hours ago
While Firefox on mobile is virtually nonexistent, what this post
asserts just doesn't look true to me. He's basically asserting
that Chrome is where Internet Explorer was in the late 90's, but
when I see what browser people are using for presentations, or when
I am pair-programming or otherwise able to see directly what people
are using, I see Firefox commonly. Outside the U.S., I don't have
much visibility, but the StatCounter data
(https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...)
which shows Firefox on the increase in the last year, looks a lot
more like what I am witnessing.
adventured - 5 hours ago
Firefox is being squeezed out of the browser market for the same
reason Opera was. They have no monster platform/s to
leverage.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.
mtgx - 5 hours ago
I was one of those few who used Firefox on mobile because I could
install ublock origin on it, so I preferred it over Chrome
because of that.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.
digi_owl - 5 hours ago
On that note, Opera Mobile have built in Adblocking as well
these days.
BrendanEich - 2 hours ago
Hi, which controls do you want that are hidden from you on
desktop Brave? Thanks.
adrianlmm - 1 hours ago
I'm not that guy, but I'd like to see a dark chrome in Brave,
I dislike bright colors.
BrendanEich - 1 hours ago
Got it, on our todo list.
fencepost - 6 hours ago
Just the fact you're on HN means that you're in a small
percentage of users, and anyone doing pair programming or many
related activities will also fit into a small subset of overall
Firefox users. The vast majority of users will start with IE (now
with Edge) or Safari, and will be exposed to Chrome when they go
to Google for a search or because they have an Android phone and
got directed there.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.
Hnrobert42 - 5 hours ago
I believe they were saying Ff on ios is non-existant. However on
Android it is decent and growing. I exclusively use it on
android. I even have Chrome disabled.
digi_owl - 5 hours ago
Well FF on iOS is basically a wrapper around the iOS browser
that provides bookmark sync with Firefox on desktop.
gnicholas - 4 hours ago
I love Firefox Focus on iOS. It's a stripped-down browser
that has ad-blocking built-in and forgets your history with
every new session.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.
Zardoz84 - 4 hours ago
The samae with Chrome for iOS
digi_owl - 5 hours ago
For me at least Firefox have been burning bridges like crazy.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.
[deleted]
ashitlerferad - 2 hours ago
Since my 10AM EST blog post comment has not been approved . I'll
paste it here:"...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."
dannysu - 5 hours ago
It's not just marketing. It's also Google websites that only work
with Chrome.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.
laken - 3 hours ago
YouTube's new preview on thumbnail hover doesn't work on Firefox
as well.
cpeterso - 2 hours ago
Google Inbox initially did not support Firefox because "Firefox
was too slow" [1]. Inbox hit a performance problem with Firefox's
Array slice() implementation, but Google didn't report the
problem to Mozilla. Chrome's slice() was fast, in part because it
was not handling some corner cases correctly. Once Mozilla
engineers were made aware of the performance problem, they fixed
it in one day [2].[1]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495498[2]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963
NewEntryHN - 2 hours ago
There was a time when web developers went to great length to make
their site compatible with every browser. Now they just make it
work on Chrome.
dschep - 2 hours ago
> For example, Hangout. I can no longer use Hangout using
Firefox.Is that different from Hangouts[0]? That's worked and
continues to work in Firefox AFAICT.[0]
https://hangouts.google.com/
nachtigall - 3 hours ago
Yes, cross-browser support seems to be a low prio for Google
nowadays. And the bad thing is that it does not hurt them but
helps them to succeed.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?
cakeface - 4 hours ago
Yes! It's really frustrating that Hangout / Meet don't work on
Firefox. This isn't just Google's fault I think. Firefox changed
how plugins work and I think that broke Google's Hangout
implementation.Also I can only use my U2F security key for Google
when on Chrome. Firefox doesn't support it.
nachtigall - 3 hours ago
> Firefox changed how plugins work and I think that broke
Google's Hangout implementation.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)
cpeterso - 3 hours ago
Google Hangouts switched from the NPAPI plugin to WebRTC in
Chrome back in 2014 [1], but still used plugins (NPAPI or
ActiveX) for other browsers. Hangouts depends on non-standard
WebRTC functionality in Chrome [2].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/post
s/39TCW3Pc...[2] https://webrtchacks.com/hangout-analysis-
philipp-hancke/[3]
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-
plu...
ams6110 - 3 hours ago
I don't know anyone who use Hangout anymore so that doesn't
bother me. Basic gMail, Docs, Sheets work pretty well in Firefox.
They feel faster in Chrome (actually I use Chromium) but are not
perfect. Right now I'm having a problem where deleting a document
in Drive causes an "Aww, Snap" crash.Overall I think it's a
tossup. Google makes sure their stuff works decently in Chrome,
Edge, Safari, and Firefox (probably in that order).
corford - 4 hours ago
Maybe Firefox is slow on Linux but on Windows I don't notice a
difference between it and Chrome. If anything FF starts faster on
my Win10 box. The UI is just as snappy and I vastly prefer FFs
settings dialogs to the kid gloves one in Chrome.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.?\_(?)_/? works for meEdit: I'm not big on
extensions but do have a few installed: session manager, foxyproxy,
one tab and fireshot.
octorian - 3 hours ago
> Maybe Firefox is slow on Linux but on Windows I don't notice a
difference between it and Chrome.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.)
Aissen - 5 hours ago
I've been a firm Firefox on Android user for years, but I recently
switched to Brave. While Desktop performance is acceptable, Android
cold-launch performance is very bad, and Chromium-based browser
beat it to the punch. And the native (implemented in C++)
adblocking means better performance than uBlock Origin.Too bad, I
really liked Firefox Sync, it was such a superior solution (for
privacy, at least).
digi_owl - 4 hours ago
Yeah i have noticed this cold launch issue myself.
morekozhambu - 5 hours ago
I was a firefox fan until recently. I guess it was firefox 51 or so
and I switched to chromium purely for usability and performance
sake. The page loading and bookmarks management was horrible at
that point. Not sure how it is now.
swiley - 3 hours ago
They argue they're privacy minded and then remove control from the
user.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.
ssivark - 3 hours ago
> Firefox?s decline is not an engineering problem. Its a market
disruption (Desktop to Mobile shift) and monopoly problem. There
are no engineering solutions to these market problems. The only way
to escape this is to pivot to a different market [...]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
Glyptodon - 2 hours ago
Pretty much this drives my Firefox usage... I use it on mobile
because I can still use various adblock/privacy extensions
without trouble. Use it on the desktop, too, because Google being
deeply linked into my browser creeps me out.
[deleted]
tonmoy - 3 hours ago
Forefox installation numbers maybe declining, but how does it
compare with any browser install? Maybe desktop growth has
stagnated, maybe with always updating OS and Firefox itself, people
just don't need to "install" Firefox anymore?
moocowtruck - 5 hours ago
I was expecting a bit more than blaming google... The reason I
stopped using firefox is because it became nothing more than a
'meh' chrome clone and slowly killed its ecosystem.
ue_ - 6 hours ago
I've seen people frequently say that they don't use Firefox because
Chrome is faster, and despite being a Firefox user myself, it's
close to what I've noticed. In Chrome (on GNU/Linux and mobile at
least), pages seem to load instantly. I don't know why that is, but
apparently it's not just me who has noticed this. Meanwhile, the
most frequent complaint about Chrome is RAM usage, and only when
using many tabs. Most people don't use many tabs.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.
sp332 - 6 hours ago
Firefox isn't simply aping Chrome, even visually. The next UI
refresh is going to look more different, not more similar.
https://www.primeinspiration.com/mozilla-firefox-getting-new...
The extensions API is being changed to disengage addons from the
guts of the browser, which will let the team make bigger changes
to CPU- and RAM-hungry areas of the codebase. The new extensions
API has had a huge amount of work put into it to expand it before
the old-API cutoff around November. The point is to make the
browser perform better, not to make it less capable.
Karunamon - 5 hours ago
Whether it's the point or not, making the browser less capable
is exactly what is happening.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.
sp332 - 4 hours ago
Yeah, I have 15 extensions running right now. You can still
get full themes (called "complete themes", not the skins they
call "themes"), and there's even a "compact" category.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/complete-
themes/com... Not having abilities like vimperator is a bug
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1320332 I can't
deny that the new API doesn't have enough power, but that's
temporary. Being Chrome-like and having weak extensions are
not goals. There's even a meta-bug that tracks new proposed
functions that Chrome doesn't have.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215059
Karunamon - 3 hours ago
Thanks for the link to the themes page (I must have
overlooked that and thought they blew up the theme system
outright), and there are a couple of promising ones I'm
looking at now.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?
tetromino_ - 5 hours ago
> changing the extensions API to make it less powerfulChanging
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.
Manishearth - 5 hours ago
[Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, but I'm not involved in Firefox
decision making]> Mozilla wants to make Firefox look like
Chrome, probably to replicate features which seem to draw users
inThis is false IMO> by changing the extensions API to make it
less powerfulThis 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 browserIf
Netflix didn't work in the browser Firefox would not have any
users left.Mozilla fought this battle, and lost.
CaptSpify - 56 minutes ago
Then what is the real story? I have the same impression as OP:
FF seems to spend most of it's time playing "me too" with
Chrome, while blatantly ignoring what the users are
requesting.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?
the8472 - 49 minutes ago
> > 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"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.
pessimizer - 5 hours ago
> 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 powerfulThe 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.
jorvi - 6 hours ago
There's also a far bigger difference: Chrome looks native (with
elements of Material Design mixed in) on every platform.
Meanwhile, Firefox aims to have the same Firefoxy look on every
platform. Users definitely notice this and choose accordingly.
acdha - 5 hours ago
> by supporting standardised DRM in the browserFirefox 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.)
smacktoward - 6 hours ago
Using your dominant position in one sector to push your products
in others is the exact kind of behavior that gets you tagged as a
monopoly in the legal sense of the term.
digi_owl - 5 hours ago
Indeed. The one thing that got a relative of mine to go Chrome
was that the flash games on Facebook performed "better".
HellDunkel - 4 hours ago
I know how much better Chrome is yet i stick with Firefox all
because of the idea of a free web.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.
dep_b - 4 hours ago
I don't use Firefox that much because I'm mostly on macOS, but
every time I use Windows and I open Firefox it seems more snappy
again. I am making sure nobody in my family uses Chrome because
it's a resource hog and effectively helps the same kind of monopoly
we had with Internet Explorer.
mcjiggerlog - 5 hours ago
I really want to like Firefox Android (addons are awesome!) and try
it out every now and then, but every time I just end up
uninstalling and reverting to Chrome.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?
rwmj - 5 hours ago
The most annoying thing is that Firefox's tabs don't integrate
with the normal Android mechanism of switching windows.
tacomonstrous - 4 hours ago
To be fair, neither does Chrome. Not for the past year or so at
least.
glogla - 5 hours ago
That's probably because you can't do it without using special
Google-only API - I don't know of any other Android app that
could do it.So this is a monopoly problem again.
veeti - 5 hours ago
This is not true at all.https://developer.android.com/guide/c
omponents/activities/re...
BoorishBears - 4 hours ago
It's true, Recents showing Task instances isn't the same as
the integrated tabs feature
veeti - 4 hours ago
It is literally the same thing. You can download a third
party browser called Chromer that opens every link as a
separate task and see it for yourself.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].[1]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1208655[2]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1098543
BoorishBears - 4 hours ago
Chrome custom tabs have nothing at all to do with the
Tasks from the activity model. Chromer doesn't do what
the tabs in recent option does.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?
veeti - 3 hours ago
> Chromer doesn't do what the tabs in recent option
does.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.
glogla - 5 hours ago
I use Firefox on Android exclusively - because it has uBlock, and
thanks to my country's carriers, I have very limited mobile data
budget, that I can't afford to spend on ads.
gator-io - 4 hours ago
Here is a view of browser market share with detectable bot traffic
removed.https://truemarketshare.comFirefox is dropping, but not
collapsing. And my opinion as to the primary reason why is the
Yahoo default search.
makecheck - 4 hours ago
I really wish Google's Chrome spam wasn't "working" because I am so
tired of it (and anything like it). This is a variation of the
"Here's what's new in the app that you didn't know you updated!"
dialogs that developers seem to like now.If I could have software
and services not totally derail what I was trying to do, that would
be greaaaaaat.
JohnTHaller - 5 hours ago
One additional cause of new Chrome installs taking over from
Firefox: bundleware. Chrome is foisted upon users as install-by-
default bundleware when users install or update lots of different
apps, especially free antivirus apps on Windows. Just clicking
"Continue" when your free antivirus on Windows updates will cause
Chrome to be installed and set as the default browser. Here's an
image of Avast tricking you into installing Chrome:
http://imgur.com/hNZLbmLI'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.
dtzur - 3 hours ago
As a web developer, I'm actually quite fine with this.
Considering your family members probably fall under the
"potential IE users" category.
JohnTHaller - 2 hours ago
All of them were using an up-to-date copy of Firefox previously
with ad and tracker blocking configured with exceptions for
their financial sites and with Flash configured to
automatically update via Windows service as well.
noja - 1 hours ago
https://unchecky.com/
Jaepa - 3 hours ago
If I remember, wasn't the version installed by Avast a custom
chromium fork until relatively recently? Then there was some
security issue, and google basically stop the AV's to knock it
off? I think Comodo also did something like this too, though
theirs was more of a mess, because Comodo.EDIT: Found it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11057532
JohnTHaller - 3 hours ago
Sometimes. The screenshot I showed was when Avast specifically
offered me Chrome. Not the Comodo Chrome knockoff. Avast
offers up different things at different times depending on who
is paying what. Chrome has been bundleware with a ton of
software.
Fej - 4 hours ago
I'm actually kinda glad that Windows 10 forces the user to be
very explicit when changing the default browser. Yeah, they use
it to push Edge, of course. Better than programs changing it
without the user knowing.
[deleted]
JohnTHaller - 3 hours ago
Exactly. Though I wouldn't be surprised if Chrome finds a way
around it. Chrome adds itself pinned to the taskbar as it
installs even though Microsoft guidelines explicitly forbid it
and it is purposely a little difficult to do.
Fej - 2 hours ago
If they found a way around it, Microsoft would patch it out,
certainly. But I doubt it.
JohnTHaller - 2 hours ago
Chrome was the first app I saw that found the technical way
around to force taskbar pinning. Microsoft, sadly, didn't
patch that out.
digi_owl - 5 hours ago
I recall even the standalone flash installer coming with Chrome
bundled (or at least pushing for it) at one point.
kibwen - 4 hours ago
Indeed, I'll never forget how my first exposure to Chrome came
as a result of updating Flash and finding that it had not only
installed Chrome, but set it as my default browser. That was
the day that I began weaning myself off of Google services
(still don't know if I'll ever make it off of Gmail,
though...).
cpeterso - 3 hours ago
The irony is that Chrome bundles (Pepper) Flash, so a Firefox
user would download the Flash installer, which downloads the
NPAPI Flash plugin, Chrome, and Chrome's Pepper Flash plugin.
The NPAPI Flash plugin would be downloaded but never used
after the Flash installer changed the user's default browser
to Chrome.
Doctor_Fegg - 2 hours ago
Flash is now significantly broken on Firefox under Ubuntu
anyway (Bugzilla #1374559) and it's been classified as a
wontfix (P5), so continuing the irony, downloading Chrome
is probably closer to what the user wanted to do.
kibwen - 57 minutes ago
> closer to what the user wanted to doThis 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.
jventura - 3 hours ago
Does anyone know why they do this? Do they earn some extra money
per each Chrome install or something like that?
JohnTHaller - 3 hours ago
Google is paying the app makers for the bundleware per install.
kibwen - 5 hours ago
In addition to Chrome's bundling deals which override your
default browser settings, major Windows updates now appear to
reset your default browser to Edge every time.
r00fus - 3 hours ago
Isn't that in direct opposition to their EU antitrust
settlement? How does MS get away with this?
majewsky - 3 hours ago
I'm actually wondering more how Google is getting away with
those screenshots from the submission. That's exactly the
same behavior that it was recently fined for wrt product
search.
zokier - 2 hours ago
One reason might be that EU doesn't have many browser
vendors who would put in a official complaint.
gorkonsine - 2 hours ago
Why wouldn't MS complain? If MS can be good for
anything, helping keep Google in check ranks #1 on my
list.
avarun - 1 hours ago
They reached a deal last year to stop complaining to
regulators about each
other:https://www.recode.net/2016/4/22/11586336
/microsoft-google-a...
giobox - 4 hours ago
Does this actually happen? I recently installed the big Windows
10 "Creators update" and my default browser remained exactly
the same (Chrome), or is this something that depends on what
"tier" of Windows 10 you have?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.
Jordrok - 3 hours ago
Oddly enough, Windows 10 Pro seems to leave my default
browser alone most of the time (I do seem to recall it
messing with it once, but I may be wrong), but I've had it
attempt to switch my default media viewers away from VLC and
Irfanview multiple times. Quite annoying.
futurix - 3 hours ago
That is because they still haven't fully adopted "new" file
format association APIs (introduced with Windows 7).
errantblaze - 25 minutes ago
Likely related to the feeling that Windows 10 resets file
associations is that Windows 10 changed the way this data
is stored and restores the default value if the registry
keys are manipulated directly.[1] As a side-note, I don't
think any of the major updates have reset my browser
choice, but I have gotten an irritating pop-up suggesting
that I should try Edge.[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c
om/oldnewthing/20170517-00/?p=...
metajack - 3 hours ago
I know lots of settings get reset when you get new Insider
builds. It annoyed me constantly. Perhaps OP is on those?
richdougherty - 4 hours ago
But that's not fair, Google's already paid for that install! ;)
cmrx64 - 4 hours ago
Ahhhh I was wondering why my desktop suddenly started opening
links in Edge!
glogla - 5 hours ago
Yep. This is super-scummy behavior. No surprise Google and
Microsoft engage in it!
draw_down - 4 hours ago
Good grief.
epoch1970 - 5 hours ago
I think the "Why?" section's conclusions are off the mark. It
basically blames Google's advertising of Chrome for Firefox's
decline, and even goes so far as to say "Firefox?s decline is not
an engineering problem."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.
emn13 - 4 hours ago
You seriously think that removing the ability to disable
javascript (well, not really, you still can - just not as easily)
is in any way a factor? Which other browser makes this
easier?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.
apostacy - 2 hours ago
I think that many of the changes that Mozilla has made to
Firefox that people in this thread are complaining about may
not have directly driven away a large number of users, but,
they indicate a serious problem with decision making within
Mozilla.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.1: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174462
0x0 - 3 hours ago
> Microsoft hasn't "supported" XP with any reasonable
browser... well, not ever (the highest IE version was
9!)Actually IE9 requires Vista, so XP is stuck with IE8.
ashark - 3 hours ago
I switched to Chrome in ~2011 or 2012 after being a Firefox user
and evangelist since... was the first one Phoenix or Firebird?
Anyway, that one.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.
DiThi - 2 hours ago
> Dev tools. Liked Chrome's better.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.
gorkonsine - 2 hours ago
I switched to Chrome around that time too, for many of the same
reasons (mainly performance and stability).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.
NewEntryHN - 2 hours ago
Those are tech-y reasons that might have repelled tech-y users
like us on Hacker News, but the bulk of the market are laymen who
don't know the difference between a browser and a search engine
on whom marketing is very efficient.
allengeorge - 5 hours ago
Performance is a big one for me. The Firefox UI feels slower, and
every so often it hangs, which is frustrating to no end. When I
used Chrome I took speed for granted - something I no longer can
with Firefox.
pishpash - 4 hours ago
People switch because Chrome is a superior product, just like
Internet Explorer was a superior product to Netscape at one time.
That's not a concern. The concern is using market position to
engage in anti-competitive behavior, like bundling.
Zardoz84 - 4 hours ago
People begin to use more IE, becasue lazines and that IE was
bundled with Windows. Netscape always was better that IE.
dep_b - 3 hours ago
Netscape 4 versus IE5 or 6 was pretty bad. They got stalled a
few years while rewriting their browser. Firefox was better
than IE almost from the very first alpha tests.
dboreham - 3 hours ago
This is so wrong. People used I.E. because it came bundled with
their computer. Source: I was there.
pishpash - 24 minutes ago
You may have, but that's not why people who used and were
fans of Netscape switched to IE voluntarily. While IE was
adding CSS support and other consumer friendly features,
Netscape was more interested in Communicator, the enterprise
suite.
nu5500 - 5 hours ago
From my experience, the reasons why people switched to Chrome
have been because it renders pages much smoother and everything
generally looks better. These were the original reasons that they
moved over to Firefox from IE as well. I personally helped a
number of relatives and friends make these switches.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.
abandonliberty - 3 hours ago
Firefox is the inferior product.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.
sandov - 4 hours ago
>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).Any example of this?.
Because I've never visited such a site.
Fej - 4 hours ago
Chrome font rendering on Windows is still broken. Fonts that
look find everywhere else are different in Chrome and usually
look worse. Why?!
pcwalton - 4 hours ago
I don't know the exact reason why, but it probably has to do
with the fact that Edge and Firefox both use Direct2D for
rendering and DirectWrite for text, while Chrome uses Skia
(which can call into DirectWrite or GDI for text rendering I
believe, but may not do so in the exact same way).
StillBored - 21 minutes ago
Skia is now the default on firefox/windows when direct2d
isn't available.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.
euyyn - 3 hours ago
Should file a bug, though.
snthd - 2 hours ago
For me the compelling features of Firefox over chrome are*
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)
problems - 2 hours ago
Definitely agree with the address bar, I'll add a few:* 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 terribleI'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.
bloaf - 1 hours ago
I switched away from firefox once they announced they were
moving to the Chrome extension model (and thereby sank
their "better extensions" selling point.)
fernandotakai - 2 hours ago
the address bar behaviour on chrome is so obnoxious! i can
never find stuff that is on my history -- with firefox,
couple of keywords and i can find almost anything.
unethical_ban - 4 hours ago
>These aren't Google properties so I'm not blaming them for
this bad behavior,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.
jff - 4 hours ago
I think he means he's not blaming Google for the behavior of
other website owners.
nu5500 - 3 hours ago
Yep, sorry poor grammar there. I've edited so hopefully
it's clearer now.
Silhouette - 1 hours ago
Proper web design should follow cross-platform standards and
implementations.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.
gorhill - 1 hours ago
> more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally
throw up a page that blocks access and says go download
Chrome).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.
pcurve - 37 minutes ago
For me, the deal breaker for Firefox was Youtube full-screen
playback performance. On my old Core 2 Duo E6600 machine,
Youtube stuttered playing 1080p videos while it didn't on
Chrome.
cannam - 4 hours ago
I'd be surprised if any of those, up to the last three, was a big
deal for more than 1% or so of users. And I am inclined to think
the original article probably has it right about simple
saturation marketing as the cause of most user switching.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.
emn13 - 4 hours ago
Yeah me too - and even the last three(perf/mem, extension
breakage, and OS support) are partially questionable - FF has
essentially always been better behaved in low-memory scenarios
that chrome; and desktop OS support is (again, to this day)
better that chrome's. Even XP still has FF 52 ESR support up
to june 2018, and v52 isn't that old yet.
aibara - 3 hours ago
I use Firefox (Linux) and Fastmail, and definitely don't have
any problems: the web UI is just as fast as always and have no
CPU issues. Maybe it's some addon or something?
ronjouch - 2 hours ago
Can definitely be due to addons. That innocuous Emoji
keyboard addon [1] for example, caused horrible page load
performance and unresponsiveness (due apparently to parsing
the entire DOM in order to replace/insert emojis); filed a
bug at [2]. Hope the move to WebExtensions lets Mozilla
provide less opportunities for extension developers to shoot
users in the foot.[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/emoji-keyboar...[2]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1339822
Dirlewanger - 3 hours ago
Yup, FF has just missed the mark on so many points that Chrome
just blows past them. Any JS-heavy web applications (YouTube, HBO
Go, Netflix) run like garbage in FF. Switch over to Chrome and
they are buttery-smooth. Sucks to say this too as someone who's
used FF since its beta.
foepys - 2 hours ago
For me Chrome and Firefox feel the same performance-wise. Are
you sure you don't have some add-ons or other changes in your
Firefox profile?
jhasse - 5 hours ago
This is my list, all of which Chrome does better than Firefox
(roughly related bug reports included):* 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.
E6300 - 5 hours ago
> 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.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.
mccr8 - 4 hours ago
> 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.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.
jhasse - 3 hours ago
Also happens on startup for me and others. See for example
this comment from the bug report: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."
digi_owl - 1 hours ago
Indeed. This in particular when launching Firefox in
response to opening urls from external sources.Hit two of
those quickly and hello dialog...
unknown2374 - 4 hours ago
While I do agree with a lot of the points:> * 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.
jhasse - 4 hours ago
> Saying that it's nitpicky to include this in your list
would be huge understatement, it's straight out
ridiculous.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.
fav_collector - 4 hours ago
I agree although ctrl+shift+q is still suboptimal because
ctrl+shift+tab is right next to it.
olejorgenb - 3 hours ago
I don't get why closing the whole window need a shortcut
at all.. Doesn't most OSes have a generic hotkey for
that?
jhasse - 3 hours ago
It actually closes all Firefox windows. The generic
hotkey for closing one window would be Alt+F4.I
definitely think that this should be handled by the OS
though.
reitanqild - 3 hours ago
Edit: I see now that jhasse answered most of this already
but I think mine adds some details so I'll leave it
here.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.)
coldpie - 3 hours ago
Nah, "Disable Ctrl+Q"[1] is one of the three extensions I
require to browse the web, alongside uBlock Origin and
NoScript. I have no idea what the Firefox devs are thinking
with that shortcut.[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/disable-ctrl-...
makecheck - 3 hours ago
At least on the Mac, I resolve this for browsers and other
tools with the Keyboard pane of System Preferences (very
powerful, if you've never dug through it). For that matter,
I also tweak other things I don't want to easily hit using
the keyboard, such as making it harder to Minimize.
eikenberry - 8 minutes ago
> * Frequent breakage of extensions when first switching to the
more rapid release schedule.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.
muppetman - 3 hours ago
Thank you! As soon as Pocket was "included" and the response to
everyone complaining was a politely worded "fuck you" then I
removed FF and haven't looked back.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.
Pxtl - 5 hours ago
Honestly, as a firefox die-hard who finally gave up, all of those
issues were dwarfed by the performance one. The only one I even
bothered to config away was the search-engine change.I stopped
using firefox because of performance. Nothing more, nothing
less.
kleiba - 5 hours ago
Something I could never quite understand. I'm using Firefox but
occasionally run Chrome for a few minutes. I do have a couple
of extensions installed in Firefox. To me, Chrome might be
faster, or maybe not. But honestly, I couldn't care less: even
if Firefox takes a second, or two or even three more to show me
a page sometimes, so what? I mean, two seconds? I guess I can
wait that long, even if I look at tens of websites each day
(which I'm not even sure I do).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.
Pxtl - 5 hours ago
The problem is that when you get more and more tabs going,
Firefox's single-threadedness becomes more and more painful.
When one misbehaving tab locks up (or crashes) the whole
browser, that's bad.
callahad - 4 hours ago
This has been fixed. Firefox is now fully multi-process on
all release channels.
jetpacktuxedo - 3 hours ago
Unless you have an add on that isn't compatible, like the
one that ubuntu for some reason bundles with the browser
out of the box.
pcwalton - 4 hours ago
Firefox is now a multiprocess browser.
kleiba - 3 hours ago
I have lots of tabs open all the time, it's not really an
issue for me most of the time. But it's true that every now
and then it happens that something goes wrong and CPU
consumption in Firefox stays way up. (I blame
plugins/extensions though.) In such a case, I don't mind
killing the process and restarting Firefox to remedy that.
krzyk - 1 hours ago
It is similar to Chromes memory usage, add one tab after
another and you will hit memory wall pretty fast (100
tabs?), with firefox 1000 tabs is not a problem.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.
Touche - 3 hours ago
I just tried on two popular websites, espn.com and cnn.com,
and Firefox was slower to first paint on both, noticeably. No
extensions installed on Firefox but a few on Chrome. It's
slower.
kleiba - 3 hours ago
Maybe I wasn't quite clear with what I've been trying to
say: even when Firefox is slower, it does not matter to
me.If it took a minute to render, it would matter. If it's
a matter of a few seconds, it doesn't.
Touche - 3 hours ago
That's fine, but I wonder if that carries over to most
people. There have been plenty of studies that suggest
perceivable slowness has a large effect on user
engagement. Amazon famously did a study on their website
that showed 100ms of latency cost them 1% of sales.
kleiba - 2 hours ago
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a large percentage of
people to whom rendering speed matters. Of course, you'd
have to have some frame of reference: if you've never
experienced Chrome's faster rendering times, you might
not think of Firefox as being particularly slow.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.
rpearl - 2 hours ago
Firefox was noticeably faster for me on first paint when I
just tried both of those. Caching effects? CDN latency?
Some part of the network? Nondeterministic browser
behaviors? who knows.This gut-check test isn't particularly
useful.
Touche - 2 hours ago
I did both in incognito fwiw, it prevent the caching
effect. It's not a thorough study, and I'm not concluding
that it is, but i'm not doing a study when picking a
browser. I just use it and stuff is slow, that's all I
have time to try.
jhoechtl - 40 minutes ago
The point of the OP was> 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 timesThe price you pay is much higher than you
think.Think twice, you have a choice.
superplussed - 4 hours ago
Are you saying that you only look at 10s of websites or 10s
of pages? As a (frontend or full-stack) web developer you
end up looking at many 100s of page views a day, and those
extra seconds matter. Both in maintaining a semblance of
flow, and in real cumulative time. I switched to Chrome the
very first time I tried it, very soon after it was released,
and never looked back because it made me happier and more
productive.
kleiba - 3 hours ago
That's exactly why I wrote "YMMV" and put a big focus on
stressing that this is how things work for me. I'm not a
web developer and so my usage pattern is certainly much
different from yours (if you are one).I'm glad to hear that
you found a web browser that makes you happy. So have I.
michaelmrose - 2 hours ago
This was the big part of why I dumped firefox. Others included
pending depreciation of addon apis, screwy behavior with dark
gtk themes and unreadable text, issues where video would
straight on skip or freeze max headroom style, yahoo
partnership, addon signing requirement, failure to add synced
reading lists to desktop browser in favor of pushing pocket.In
short screw you too mozilla.
epoch1970 - 5 hours ago
It was the extension signing that caused me to move on. I had
written several small, but useful, extensions for my own
personal use. I knew they were harmless, yet Firefox made it
difficult for me to actually use them.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.
dallamaneni - 4 hours ago
Firefox developer edition allows using unsigned webextensions
by toggling xpinstall.signatures.required to false in
about:config
vetinari - 3 hours ago
Firefox developer edition is the former Aurora
(development) channel. It is not the stable release
channel.
the8472 - 1 hours ago
It's not labeled as stable, that does not mean it is
unstable.
dblohm7 - 1 hours ago
FWIW, developer edition is now the Beta channel.
Semaphor - 5 hours ago
Same here. I read a bit about multi process having arrived, so
I'm planning to give ff another try soon. But at least all the
electrolysis pre release versions I tried ended up
disappointing. It's a real shame, I'd love to switch away from
chrome.
monochromatic - 4 hours ago
Firefox nowadays feels every bit as fast as Chrome, if not
faster.
jhasse - 3 hours ago
Not for me and definitely not on Linux, see
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523 for
example.
monochromatic - 2 hours ago
Haven't tried it on Linux, just Windows.
ss64 - 2 hours ago
The problem Firefox had for a long time was the terrible Flash
plugin combined with a lack of per-tab processes. That meant
that a single flash element on one page would slow down the
entire browser. I removed the flash plugin completely a couple
of years ago and havent looked back.
Narishma - 4 hours ago
It must be something subjective or system-dependant then
because I switched from Chrome to Firefox for that same reason.
[deleted]
Animats - 5 hours ago
Yahoo as the default search engine didn't help, 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.
kodablah - 4 hours ago
Yup, I fear for the future of tree style tabs. So much so, I am
developing an alternative browser that embeds Chromium but has
a tree-style tab interface from Qt [0] (disclaimer, nowhere
near ready yet).0 - https://github.com/cretz/doogie
gnicholas - 4 hours ago
Yep, I'll be limping along on the "old" version of Firefox so
that I can use Tree Style Tabs, which can't be made compatible
with the new extension framework. And my startup may or may not
update our own Firefox extension this year. We're waiting to
see how things shake out ? how many people update to the latest
version of Firefox, or whether folks are tied to the old
version because they have so many legacy extensions.
mavendependency - 1 hours ago
The testpilot program from mozilla has a beta test for
sidebar tabs. This is still not tree, but can be a decent
alternative if you need tree style tabs to reclaim screen
real-estate.
olejorgenb - 4 hours ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/ use
the new extension api AFAIK. Seems you have to go through
some hoops to hide the regular tabbar though.
jhasse - 3 hours ago
Unfortunately it draws its own context menu which looks
very ugly, doesn't behave native and interferes with
dom.event.contextmenu.enabled=false.
unknown2374 - 4 hours ago
They do need to make money in some way, ever since Google
didn't renew their contract with Mozilla (which iirc was 98% of
their revenue back in the day) after Chrome started taking off.
kibwen - 4 hours ago
Mozilla actually moved to Yahoo not because Google refused to
renew their contract, but because Yahoo was flush with cash
and desperate to gain any foothold at all in search engine
share (which they did, briefly; a friend of mine at Google
had the job of getting Firefox users to switch their default
search back to Google). Yahoo just offered better terms than
Google at the time.
lqdc13 - 3 hours ago
It was the only choice.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.
maxharris - 3 hours ago
I don't use Firefox because it's a power hog compared to Safari.
carussell - 5 hours ago
Side note. From Andreas's post:> looks like the site requires a
login now. It used to be available publicly for years and was
public until a few days agoI'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.
dao- - 1 hours ago
https://www.arewestableyet.com/ is for internal tracking and
rather hard to make sense of externally. It's cluttered with
jargon and abbreviations and raw numbers. (I can tell because I
just logged in. I work for Mozilla.) For example, this is how the
rows are labeled in one table: usage_khours, Main (M), M +
Content (M+C), C - Content Shutdown (C-S), M + C - S, NPAPI + GMP
Plugin Crashes (P), GPU.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.
glandium - 22 minutes ago
One could argue that if it's for internal tracking, it doesn't
need its own domain name.
the8472 - 1 hours ago
Locking out people because they might be confused by data
seems... quite patronizing.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.
dao- - 46 minutes ago
Dunno, can you make sense of the jargon I pasted? This site
really isn't useful to the outside and probably shouldn't
have been public in the first place. It would _never_ have
been public at Apple or Microsoft or Google. But Mozilla is
open by default, so people often don't think twice before
making something public.Also, (unpaid) Mozilla contributors
do get access to this stuff.
the8472 - 40 minutes ago
> Dunno, can you make sense of the jargon I pasted?yes, the
crash stats site shows similar categories
coldpie - 3 hours ago
GitHub isn't social media, dude.
0x006A - 1 hours ago
GitHub Is The Next Big Social Network, Powered By What You Do,
Not Who You Know
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/07/15/github...
satysin - 3 hours ago
I can only speak for myself but I didn't leave Firefox for Chrome
because of advertising. I left because a year ago Firefox was
painful to use. Sync was (might still be?) incomplete, setting up
quick searches was annoying, font rendering was poor, HiDPI support
was crap, overall performance was noticeably slower than Chrome and
they announced killing off advanced XPCOM based extensions so I
figured I would just change over now rather than later.
shmerl - 6 hours ago
It is indeed a monopoly problem. Google should be required to give
browser choice in such ads, same as MS were.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.
dblohm7 - 3 hours ago
We're already at that point IMHO.
shmerl - 2 hours ago
Yeah, I mean it will only get worse. And it is highly annoying,
since I have no interest in using Chrome.
oconnor663 - 6 hours ago
> monopoly position in Internet services such as Google Mail,
Google Calendar and YouTubeSeriously?
smacktoward - 6 hours ago
Name one video site that has anywhere near the usage level of
YouTube.
nerdshoe - 5 hours ago
Twitch. Not for hours viewed but because they seemingly have a
lock on their corner of the market. That Youtube has spent so
much on game streaming, and still failing, is a sign that
competition exists.
[deleted]
eterm - 5 hours ago
For live video, yes, but even a many twitch highlight reels
still end up back on youtube.
ajross - 6 hours ago
That's "success", not "monopoly". To be the latter you need to
show that the big player is preventing the entrance of new
competitors to the market. The existence of a robust and
competetive ecosystem alongside Netflix, Facebook, Instagram,
Amazon, (even smaller players like Imgur, Reddit, Gyfcat)
etc... indicates that "video hosting" isn't really a
monopoly.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.
jorvi - 5 hours ago
Windows was (is) considered a monopoly despite having a rock-
solid competitor in macOS. Monopolies don't necessarily mean
absolute control of the market, having the ability to
significantly sway it (say 80% marketshare) is also
considered a monopoly or at least monopolistic.
ajross - 5 hours ago
Arguments about Apple's and Netscape's ability to compete
were actually core to the windows antitrust case. It
wasn't about market share.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.
digi_owl - 5 hours ago
I think the legal term is antitrust. Bringing up the term
monopoly seems to always make people assume something with
100% marketshare. The only thing needed to come under
antitrust scrutiny is to be in a position that allows said
entity to warp market behavior, be it by bundling, price
fixing, or some other means.
Aissen - 5 hours ago
> That's "success", not "monopoly". To be the latter you need
to show that the big player is preventing the entrance of new
competitors to the market.No, what you're describing is
monopoly abuse.
Aissen - 5 hours ago
The tech industry is going to have to come to term that
it's comprised of fundamentally winner-takes-all markets.
The economies of scale the winner can get are tremendous,
while the spending efforts are relatively low for software.
So it's basically a monopoly machine. The only way this is
countered is that new markets keep being created, so that
helps new entrants.
ajross - 5 hours ago
> The economies of scale the winner can get are
tremendousOnce 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?
Aissen - 4 hours ago
Instagram is a new, focused product. Essentially a new
market.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.
[deleted]
adventured - 5 hours ago
Snapchat had temporary success as well. So much for
that.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.
ajross - 3 hours ago
Wait... how can Google and Facebook both be monopolies in
the same market?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.
wang_li - 5 hours ago
If this is to change then someone needs to develop a
method to request content by content and not by provider.
If links to videos specified a particular video you
wanted to show rather than the video on a particular
provider, then providers could compete to deliver the
best service to a particular set of customers.
thaumasiotes - 5 minutes ago
You mean magnet links?
oconnor663 - 3 hours ago
I agree that YouTube is the strongest example of the three, but
I don't see how to defend the idea of a Gmail or GCal monopoly.
It's hard for me to take the author objectively after that.
jfoster - 6 hours ago
Facebook. I don't know how close it is, and I'm sure YouTube is
still substantially ahead, but Facebook must be significant in
terms of # viewed. Certainly quite different video content,
though.
ghostbrainalpha - 5 hours ago
NPR just reported last week that the ratio of hours watched
on Youtube to Facebook is 10:1 right now.
Karunamon - 4 hours ago
I really don't think the author backed up their hypothesis here.
I'd place a lot more of that blame on Mozilla's poor decision-
making (detailed elsewhere in this thread) than any amount of
google.com popups.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)
owly - 1 hours ago
Lots of haters on here! :) Like most of you, I use all browsers to
test sites and applications. But Firefox is my main browser on all
platforms for a bunch of reasons and I have no issues with
performance. It has all the add-ins I need. I like the way it looks
compared to the alternatives. The test pilot add-ins have been
great. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments And last but not
least, by using it I'm supporting the open web and not feeding a
monopoly.
Rotareti - 18 minutes ago
Don't forget to mention privacy. Why would I use a browser which
is spying on me if there is an alternative that doesn't? Same
goes for other software.
cpeterso - 2 hours ago
The article's ADI charts do not account for Mozilla moving Windows
XP and Vista users from the Firefox release channel to the ESR
(Extended Support Release) channel in March 2017 [1]. New versions
of Firefox do not support XP or Vista, but XP and Vista users will
continue to receive ESR security updates at least through 2018 Q1.
You can see a similar "drop" in Mozilla's Firefox Hardware Report
[2].[1]
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/12/23/firefox-s...[2]
https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/
andreasgal - 1 hours ago
A comment said the same and I added a note to the text. If you
have concrete data happy to update charts. Pull request welcome
:) All code and data for charts on github.
FollowSteph3 - 3 hours ago
I disagree with the article. When Firefox first got popular the
default was internet explorer which was already installed on your
computer. However because Firefox was so far ahead word spread and
people took the time to install it.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.
DiThi - 2 hours ago
> no really big advantageNo _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.
tschellenbach - 3 hours ago
Chrome is just a (much) better product. Combination of building a
better product and a lot of advertising.
remir - 1 hours ago
The reality is that for a while, Chrome was simply a better
browser. Extensions "just worked", it silently auto-updated (huge
for non technical users), was very secure (anti-phishing), it came
with Flash, sandboxing from day 1, etc...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.
notatoad - 4 hours ago
With every new version, i give firefox another try and it always
just feels sluggish compared to chrome. The UI is not as
responsive and the pages don't seem to load as quickly. I don't
know if there's any actual data or measurements to back this up and
i haven't tried to measure any speed differences, but for me the
reason I use chrome instead of firefox is absolutely an engineering
problem and not a marketing one.I'd much rather use a Mozilla
product than a Google one, but chrome is simply a better browser.
nachtigall - 4 hours ago
I am running Firefox 56 (Nightly) and it is very fast due to
project Quantum. Even faster than Firefox 54 which also got a big
boost due to e10s.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...
piggybox - 3 hours ago
My experience exactly. Every time people told me it's getting
better I downloaded and just felt differently...to the point I'm
too tired to try it anymore.
mouldysammich - 4 hours ago
At least for me, since the e10s updates, firefox has been quite
snappy even compared to chrome. Ive been enjoying the experience.
iopq - 3 hours ago
I love the chart that goes from -7% to -22%it cuts off exactly
where you would think there's ten times fewer Firefox users
blunte - 5 hours ago
Google definitely has been a (major) contributor to the decline of
Firefox, both with all the google site notices suggesting users
switch to Chrome and the works-on-chrome-first features of Gmail,
Drive, etc. That last issue is years old, but I would bet it got a
lot of people to first try Chrome.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.
suby - 5 hours ago
The change over to yahoo as the default search, as well as the ui
changes a few years ago which made it a hassle to change search
engines has, I would wager, done more harm to mozilla than
whatever monetary benefit they gained from the switch. The fact
that they made it difficult to change search engines is probably
the worse offense. It's just blatantly anti user. i like
firefox, but they needlessly erode people's goodwill toward them.
pessimizer - 4 hours ago
Firefox's primary advantage was that it was pro-user. At some
point, it started consciously herding users by intentionally
making certain choices that they didn't like which users made
more difficult or impossible to find in the UI. That's a
distinct philosophical break, and an open user antagonism. That
didn't make it worse than other browsers; that made it the same
as other browsers. The only criteria you're left to choose on
are distinct features, and Firefox started methodically
eliminating theirs. After the ending of the old extensions API,
Firefox has finally reached its goal of having absolutely no
advantages compared to any other browser, with the bonus of not
working as well with google properties as the google-owned
browser.
reitanqild - 1 hours ago
For the Mozillans around here: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.
norea-armozel - 3 hours ago
I think half the problem with Firefox is that it has a marketing
problem. Most folks today just trust Google and so Chrome is a
product that has trustworthiness that will stand out for folks
especially on the matter of speed/reliability. If Mozilla wants to
do anything to save their project then they have to start
re/building their brand recognition and trustworthiness among
COMMON USERS (technical users tend to inform themselves so it's
really not an issue IMO beyond actually talking to us). It'll be an
uphill battle all the way but I think they'll find it's worth it.
rubatuga - 3 hours ago
Well maybe if they updated their shitty UI, I would be inclined to
install it. Why can?t firefox combine the search and address bar
like every other major browser? Why can?t Firefox ditch their slow
animations, buttons, menus, and do with less skeumorphisms? They
need a serious refresh if I were to ever start using it again.
bzbarsky - 2 hours ago
> Why can?t firefox combine the search and address bar like every
other major browser?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.
rubatuga - 2 hours ago
You can combine them and then turn off search autocomplete.
Seems like the best option for me.
bzbarsky - 1 hours ago
Except users actually want search autocomplete.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.
glandium - 16 minutes ago
Note that the URL bar does search autocomplete now (new in
55 maybe?).
callahad - 1 hours ago
Check back in November. Literally all of those things are in
progress and scheduled for Firefox 57.
hendersoon - 1 hours ago
I used Firefox since it was called Phoenix in 2002. Fifteen years.
None of my friends or acquaintances used Firefox. I was the last
man standing.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!
badpenny - 4 hours ago
Now and again I'll try switching to Firefox but it's just
incredibly sluggish compared to Chrome so I end up switching back.
blauditore - 1 hours ago
I've been saying this for years, that Chrome's market share is
mostly caused by Google's aggressive advertisement. Many users
don't even know exactly what a browser is, they just clicked that
button at some point because the text next to it told them to do
so.
cocktailpeanuts - 4 hours ago
I have both Chrome and Firefox installed but try very hard to stay
away from using FF unless I'm testing cross-platform stuff or if I
want to sign into multiple accounts of a same service (one on
chrome and one on firefox)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.
ksk - 5 hours ago
Its quite surprising that Google has avoided anti-trust scrutiny
for as long as it has.
digi_owl - 5 hours ago
EU seems more on top there than USA. And frankly USA seems
unwilling to engage any kind of antitrust against tech companies
since the anemic slap on the wrist Microsoft got.
bla2 - 6 hours ago
Google has been pushing chrome on their sites for years. Firefox's
drop in desktop is recent. So just marketing can't be the
explanation.
the_common_man - 6 hours ago
It's way more aggressive now. I have also dismissed the convert
to 'youtube red' popup like 20 times now and the damn thing keeps
coming up on the phone. I never expected my phone to be infested
with marketing and ad popups like this :/
[deleted]
adventured - 5 hours ago
I've been a loyal Firefox user since the earliest couple
versions. Something like 12-13 years or whatever. I like the
interface more than Chrome, among a few other things about how it
operates.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.
[deleted]
minitech - 4 hours ago
This is exactly the opposite of what I experience; Chrome eats
up 6GB of memory with a couple dozen tabs open, but I can have
as many and more active in Firefox on 2GB (and over 1000 tabs
open but inactive ? leftovers from when tab groups were
removed? that was a shame). Firefox just also feels faster in
general.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.
[deleted]
kronos29296 - 5 hours ago
Some Google services don't work properly on Firefox or show
annoying banners. It is just a pain. I just moved to chromium.
Touche - 3 hours ago
I still believe that Mozilla biggest mistake with mobile was not
Firefox OS, it was that they started on Android too late. They
should have been on Android from day one, but they weren't, and
when they did build Fennec, it was really bad. They eventually
fixed it, but by that point Chrome for Android was already out.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.
digi_owl - 1 hours ago
What has been going on with Mozilla as of late, as well as Gnome
and various other FOSS projects, is a overton distraction on
"social". This in the form of "helping" the third world etc.
Mostly all this ends up doing is adding to some execs ladder
climbing scorecard, and draining the project of focus and
manhours.