171–180 of 207 posts
Mozilla: We are a non-profit and we protect your privacy; we won’t use your data to make money. Most users: Nah, man. We’ll go with the search engine and ad network company.
Wow. I remember watching these stats, waiting for Firefox to edge past IE in the 2000s. Chrome really took the ball and ran with it. They had the advantage of seeing things that FF did that really worked (tabs, extensions, find-as-you-type) and the intelligence to iterate on that (multi-process support, a world-class debugger) and a really solid foundation in WebKit (née KHTML). In a way Chrome was in the right place…
> Chrome really took the ball and ran with it I'm still kind of bitter with the way they did that. A lot of windows installers, which usually installed you toolbars if you forgot to uncheck a box, started installing chrome as your default browser if you forgot to uncheck a box. I've seen a lot of non-technical people using chrome who have no idea what chrome is or remembering giving consent to installing chrome.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox became faster than Chrome quite a while ago already. Not sure what you were measuring.
I have a policy of keeping personal browsing on chrome and work based browsing on FF. Every now and then FF will inexplicably hang for over 5 seconds on a page that is probably already cached. I never notice this on chrome, and my connection speed is over 100MBps.. Other times, FF is lightning quick - near instantaneous loads - only other thing I can think of is that I'm running FF on Fedora?
Recently I experienced a high profile site throwing some errors in Firefox, and their support rep suggesting me to use Chrome (of course I didn't). This brought the memories of "best viewed in IE" times...
But that isn't the primary problem. The primary problem is that its simply too hard for most web developers to install/run a HTML validator in their web browser and fix the errors it finds.
Try it out, run html validator, for a few months while browsing the public web, its almost a surprise when a major web site actually has syntactically correct code. As a "systems" programmer spending about 30% of my time doing web development, simply having my code syntax checked (yah I run php and javascript validators in my deployment package too) before it makes to the the browser increases my productivity significantly. In the year or so after I started running validators/JSlint/etc (1) a lot of things started making sense in HTML/CSS and I went from a crappy web hack, to being the guy in the office helping the full time web guys when they get stuck...
Now if I could just find a good way to ask "experienced" web developers if they run a validator without leading them to the "right" answer I might have a good interview question.
(1) Part of this was I completely customized our "build" environment so that there was a debug vs release package/deploy process too. Things like JS minificantion/php obfuscation only happen during release deployment. JQuery/etc are actually checked into the version control in their unminified version. Plus, it usually only takes one or two calls from a web developer who can't figure out why their code won't deploy before they start checking the build logs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Firefox does have global freezes That's precisely the issue, it doesn't matter if Firefox just freezes for 250ms, it's enough to be perceptible and annoy me.
I'm a hardcore Firefox user. Its been my browser of choice since it came out. I'm a true Mozillian to the heart. But it kills me that I can mostly keep one window open with less than 15 tabs on a Macbook that has 16GB of ram and a fast SSD. I currently have 9 tabs/1 window and its using up 3.13GB of memory. None of the tabs have heavy Javascript processes.
The fact that tabbed browsing's inventor's said as much doesn't do much to dissuade me.
Vastly better bookmarking or state management seem needed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One example of "google only APIs" that I ran into recently is the chrome extension browserAction.openPopup API. This API is whitelisted (in stable) for use by the Google Cast extension. Extensions authored outside of Google cannot use it. This is creates an uneven playing field. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=436489
It seems it's not necessarily malicious. From https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399859 : "The popup is anchored to the extension icon, which might be in overflow or not even exist, in which case it is anchored to the Wrench menu. That kind of anchoring would make the message in the popup to appear to be from the Chrome browser (since it points to the chrome UI) and would present a vector for trick…
"While the Philips Hue system is based on open technologies we are not able to ensure all products from other brands are tested and fully interoperable with all of our software updates. For guaranteed compatibility you need to use Philips Hue or certified Friends of Hue products."
After all, it'd just be downright unthinkable that any non-Philips lightbulb should be compatible with our light sockets, that any brand of plug should fit into our wall sockets, or that non-Google-branded plug-in should be able to use a web browser's APIs... I mean, goodness, next we'll be thinking that the term "plug-in API" suggests its supposed to allow things that other people created to interoperate...
Wow. I remember watching these stats, waiting for Firefox to edge past IE in the 2000s. Chrome really took the ball and ran with it. They had the advantage of seeing things that FF did that really worked (tabs, extensions, find-as-you-type) and the intelligence to iterate on that (multi-process support, a world-class debugger) and a really solid foundation in WebKit (née KHTML). In a way Chrome was in the right place…
Wow. I remember watching these stats, waiting for Firefox to edge past IE in the 2000s. Chrome really took the ball and ran with it. They had the advantage of seeing things that FF did that really worked (tabs, extensions, find-as-you-type) and the intelligence to iterate on that (multi-process support, a world-class debugger) and a really solid foundation in WebKit (née KHTML). In a way Chrome was in the right place…
Regular users don't care for any of that. The reason why they are number one it's because they had the "internet's homepage" advantage and were able to spam everybody into installing it. If you happen to be on Firefox and you haven't installed the last two .0001 releases they start to spam you with the annoying "install chrome" messages on google.com. No wonder everyone and their uncle installed it instead of Firefox if only to get rid of that annoying ad. Reasonable people can disagree on Firefox vs Chrome but let's not pretend that this isn't how Chrome got to be numero uno.
In ther early 2010s I forced switch the whole company about 200s to Firefox, but few years down the road everyone quietly installed Chrome and was using it. It was fast, and they dont care about anything else. Forcing them back on Firefox were met with opposition, saying using somthing inferior was insane.
Complaining to Mozilla has been served with deaf ears. It was mostly an management issues from top to bottom, they were so full of themsevles, so righoutous, that they fail to relaize the marketing is changing. By the time they realize they have shrink below 20% market share already and were continuing downwads.
Somewhere along the line, Mozilla changed their tone, it wasn't about market shares. It is about Open Web, and always has been. How do you force the Web to be Open if had no influence on it what so ever? They wasted resources on Firefox OS, which is a dismal failure. They think JS is king, and evrything, including the OS should be someday written in JS.
Firefox is dying, and i am glad. Becasue as a users from Netscape era everytime Mozilla / FIrebird / Firefox reborn things has become better.
Firefox is very noble. But the world has never been about one way or the other.
Luckiy in the past year something happen within Mozilla. I have no idea what it is because i am not following their post anymore. ( e10s is STILL not shipped ) But things are getting better. User experience matters, less Janks, memory usage kept low and most importanly Chrome has been getting worst with every release. ( Strange indeed ) This mean more people are swithing back to Firefox.
And for users with specific workflow and 100s of Tab, Firefox is still the only option on the market.