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Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

arstechnica.com

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Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#191

Post by TheLML »

asimuvPR wrote: post #151
Aldo_MX wrote: post #45

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.

how? I currently have 118 tabs open and using a little under 450MB RAM.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#192

Post by netheril96 »

woodman wrote: post #167
netheril96 wrote: post #166

Firefox is really bad at rendering Chinese fonts. It chooses different font than other browsers, sometimes using a Japanese font to render Chinese text, and the pixelization is just palpable. I know most people here couldn't care less, but the poor internalization may be one of the reasons for a global disadvantage compared to Chrome. Internationalization is really something open source products have been lacking tra…

Sounds like there aren't enough Chinese open source contributors. As the saying goes, works for me - patches welcome, they'd be in a better position to do so anyway.

Yes, that is true. But at the same time, they should not lament about the global dominance of other browsers that do not have this attitude.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#193

Post by Aldo_MX »

acdha wrote: post #133
shmerl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox became faster than Chrome quite a while ago already. Not sure what you were measuring.

When talking about a piece of software as complicated as a modern browser, “became faster” is too broad to have any meaning at all — you can find specific features where almost any browser is faster. In the case of Chrome and Firefox, they're competitive enough that you really need to say both what you're measuring and how you measured it. People tend to say one is faster than the other when they most commonly mean “…

No, we are talking about the architecture of the browsers in areas where there is significant impact (ie. UI Responsiveness), this has nothing to do with extensions.

In Chrome when you load a JS-intensive website (ex. Facebook) you can switch to a different tab while the website finishes doing that JS-intensive task (ex. loading), but in Firefox the opposite happens, the entire browser freezes so you are forced to wait until the browser becomes responsive again.

We are talking in the order of magnitude of milliseconds, but unfortunately it is enough to be perceptible (and annoying).

Fortunately for FF, e10s[1] is almost baked, it still doesn't feel as responsive as Chrome BUT it feels significantly better so you can easily neglect the difference until it matures or something better (Servo[2]) gets baked.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

[2] https://servo.org/

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#194

Post by Aldo_MX »

tracker1 wrote: post #183
shmerl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox became faster than Chrome quite a while ago already. Not sure what you were measuring.

Honestly I just like Chrome's UI better... I have to use IE/Edge, Chrome, Safari and Firefox regularly to test things... I keep coming back. I had higher hopes for FF android, as it allows plugins (adblock), but the browser is so horrible on the platform, I wound up switching back... I also tried dolphin for a while. Neither was satisfactory. I just like chrome better...

My experience in Android is a different one, I'm using a FF fork (Adblock Browser) and my mobile life has never been better.

Unfortunately outside America the mobile web is a malvertising minefield, and the malvertisers target the carriers directly, so there is no way to expect ad networks (ex. AdSense) to proactively hunt for them.

A browser with integrated AdBlock is the most sensible option you can have in a non-rooted device, and the easiest one you can recommend to friends and colleagues.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#195

Post by tunap »

mordocai wrote: post #34
mmastrac wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I didn't see that - I assumed it was just a result of advertising it to everyone who searched on Google. Do you have any specific examples?

ccleaner and possibly the other piriform products do this

Correct: all Piriform products do this... unless chrome is already installed/detected.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#196

Post by KORraN »

I always wonder how big influence on these statistics have all kind of adblockers. Like a lot of you said, there are a LOT of "forced" installs of Chrome on computers of not-so-power users. Most of them don't even know what the browser is so I bet they don't have any adblocker (unless someone installed it for them). On the side, we have power users that have adblockers and (AFAIK) they are not visible for scripts from StatCounter and similar companies. So results of browsers like Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave may be understated, am I right?

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#197

Post by tunap »

pessimizer wrote: post #141
mmastrac wrote: post #10

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 had the advantage of being pushed by the largest internet company in the world, with one of the most widely used operating systems in the world. Firefox chased after the look of Chrome after being shocked by its sudden rise, and successfully made itself indistinguishable from it. Compelling things about Firefox that are wasted: 1) It's operated by a non-profit which lacks an ulterior motive. 2) It isn't inhere…

Thanks for this. I get downvoted everytime I try less succinctly to air my heartbreak for Mozilla. If I want the latest greatest functionality, I'd be happy to add another plug-in. Not so happy to have to edit a ton of cryptic about:config settings to reduce new, beta features that create gaping vulnerabilities that propagate a slew of new security fixes... talk about a vicious cycle.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#198

Post by tracker1 »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #194
tracker1 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I just like Chrome's UI better... I have to use IE/Edge, Chrome, Safari and Firefox regularly to test things... I keep coming back. I had higher hopes for FF android, as it allows plugins (adblock), but the browser is so horrible on the platform, I wound up switching back... I also tried dolphin for a while. Neither was satisfactory. I just like chrome better...

My experience in Android is a different one, I'm using a FF fork (Adblock Browser) and my mobile life has never been better. Unfortunately outside America the mobile web is a malvertising minefield, and the malvertisers target the carriers directly, so there is no way to expect ad networks (ex. AdSense) to proactively hunt for them. A browser with integrated AdBlock is the most sensible option you can have in a non-r…

Do you happen to use lastpass? Is there an integration there either with the android app, or with the browser itself that works? I'm just curious as the chrome app can tell what url is in the browser, and peak into the page... This detail doesn't work in ff, dolphin and others I've tried so far.

I know that is a separate issue... would really like my password manager & adblock & the app window/tabs where each "tab" is a separate window instead of integrated tab-bar, which isn't very nice at all on a phone.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#199

Post by tunap »

scholia wrote: post #121
eunoia wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does Google gain by monopolizing? I would guess control. Owning the dominant web browser allows them to: * Softly guide front end web tech in a direction of their choosing * Ensure the supremacy of Google the search engine. Also if things ever really come to head between ad-blockers and ad-providers owning the dominant platform the former runs on would be very beneficial to the latter.

> I would guess control. Most big companies want to control their own technology stack and optimize for their own products. So Google wants people using Android phones and Chromebooks (ideally, fed by Google Fiber), with Google Chrome browsers feeding traffic to Google Search, Google Docs (with all your files in Gdrive), Gmail, YouTube etc. This provides the maximum surveillance capacity for maximum tracking and thus…

I hate to defend them, as I choose not to use their products, but all that is stated in plain language in the first two paragraphs of their EULA. Nobody reads them, but if they did, they would know at least Goog is clear, unlike pretty much all the rest of the EULAs in the wild.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#200

Post by asimuvPR »

TheLML wrote: post #191
asimuvPR wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how? I currently have 118 tabs open and using a little under 450MB RAM.

I wish I knew. Luckily someone got in touch and we're working on figuring it out. Its probably an annoying corner case.
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