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Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)

#121

Post by shakna »

g00gler wrote: post #37

Why should I use Firefox, or any other browser, from a standard consumer prospective? Let me preface this by saying I am open to a new browser, especially one that is always in "incognito" and doesn't share sessions between tabs/windows. My favorite is Lynx but that doesn't always work . Facebook & Messenger for Android is pretty much spyware and they have over 1B downloads each, so that takes spying out of the discu…

Self-Destructing Cookies [0], for the security conscious.

It has near parity with Chrome's extension APIs now, so what works on one usually works on the other, but Firefox lets people dive deeper to build things like the above.

You can use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, NoScript and any of the others.

All for nearly Chrome performance, but probably less than half of the memory use of Chrome, and Firefox is getting faster.

As for the average user... That story won't fly.

It never has, and never will.

Chrome is not as damn good as it was when it first launched, and launched from the company that has nearly ubiquitous control over web searches.

Bigger issues to Firefox adoption from the public are things like, "This site only runs on Google Chrome. Download from here." Big name sites have been known to do this, like Netflix (on Linux, at least).

Or how Edge re-adds itself to the user's taskbar with nearly every Windows update.

Those things are what impacts day to day users, and that determines what they use to browse the web.

That being said, Chrome's more aggressive blocking of sites with poor SSL, and more aggressive blocking of Flash, might just push users to another browser... Which will probably be Edge. Because it's on their taskbar.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)

#122

Post by sgift »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #87
sgift wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> _That's_ why they "won" not because of fucking adverts. Given that Opera was basically "Chrome without Google marketing" I heavily doubt that. (The first version of Chrome was such a blatant Opera clone, it was just funny)

that's a fair point, I more wish to counter the idea that Firefox was a better or even equal product at the time. Chrome was a clearly superior product to Firefox.

Fully accepted. Firefox got comfortable in its position when IE was 'defeated', same as IE before. They had "won", so no reason to innovate anymore. Maybe Chrome was a much needed "kick in the ass". I checked Firefox again a few days ago and it seems to be faster than I remember it, which gives me at least hope that they haven't given up yet.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)

#123

Post by bobajeff »

smsm42 wrote: post #75
pyrale wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, no one can reasonably outcompete Google, because they leverage every inch of their monopoly power. This is where regulation is supposed to come into play.

No one could reasonably outcompete Microsoft. Then suddenly nobody even discusses IE anymore. And tons of people use Linux.

Well there was that browser ballot they had to show in Europe to Windows users as a result of a antitrust case.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)

#124

Post by necessity »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #97

Daily Firefox user here. Switched back from Chrome a couple years ago and haven't looked back. Just seeing the comments here exasperates me... So for those who don't know, the Internet is heavily biased towards Chrome. Simple pages that should render no differently in FF than Chrome are often broken. This "Chrome is great, screw everything else" attitude is exactly how we ended up with IE and stagnation in standards/…

Can you cite some of those pages? I have been using Firefox forever and haven't had any rendering issues in the past years. I imagine it must be some fancy niche node+webgl websites...

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)

#125

Post by pyrale »

pherq wrote: post #103
Quarrelsome wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox was over reliant on plug-ins, gave plug-ins too much power and the plug-in as well as firefox update mechanisms were messy. Chrome did more out of the box than firefox reducing the need for plug-ins, sandboxed plug-ins from destroying general browser performance and most importantly realised that updating was not a user concern and performed updates silently. There were also other innovations that Chrome did…

The flaw with this notion, is that neither Firefox nor Opera beat IE. Chrome did. Most of the people who argue things like this seem to agree that Firefox and Opera were superior browsers to IE. If that was the case, why hadn't they eaten IE's market share long before Chrome was ever produced? Could it be that Chrome being widely advertised on the most visited site on the internet helped?

Stats give FF at 45% market share, before Chrome got heavily advertised and took over.

Chrome didn't beat IE. Firefox fought an all-out war and was not going anywhere either. What beat IE is an antitrust lawsuit actually.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)

#126

Post by rch »

I switched from Mozilla to Opera when the former dropped the 'suite' approach to focus on Firefox. I was happy with Opera until Tetzchner left, and then switched to Chrome when Opera moved onto Blink. Now I keep both Chrome and Firefox open all the time so I can cmd-tab between views.

All it would take for me to prefer one browser over another would be for one of them to figure out rss, email, and irc. That would put them on par with browsers from a decade ago.

Maybe Slack could add a web browser?

Of course I wouldn't give up consistent rendering, performance, and modern dev tools to get an integrated rss reader.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)

#127

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jonchang wrote: post #28
abhpan27 wrote: post #13

People choose firefox over IE because firefox was better. People choose chrome over firefox and IE because chrome is better. Want to beat google? create better. Not negativity.

Not sure this is necessarily the case - Google cross-promoted Chrome extremely heavily across all its web properties, ran massive ad campaigns, and contractually obligated Android vendors to preinstall and use Chrome as the default on their handsets. Mozilla, lacking the power or money to do any of these things, wouldn't be able to compete on these fronts, regardless of who built the better product.

For me it was; I guess I was a relatively early adopter, and Chrome was just so much faster and less bloated than the competition at the time. Clean UI (and it's still clean, they're keeping that promise), superior performance, frequent updates, superior built-in developer tools, etc.

IDK if that caused it to grow to become the biggest browser, but it sold it for me.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)

#129

Post by autoreleasepool »

dvko wrote: post #53

I recently switched back to Firefox after years of using Chrome. Previously, the few times I had to fire up Firefox for development purposes it seemed sluggish to me. Not anymore. Firefox has been super responsive to me, using less memory than the same browsing activity would on Chrome & Firefox-only (afaik) add-ons like Self Destructing Cookies are A+. On Android, Firefox Mobile works just as good or better than Chr…

Firefox also offers amazing stability on FreeBSD when compared to Chromium. That alone is what converted me.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)

#130

Post by mfincham »

The only thing standing in the way of me returning to Firefox is them having a comparable rendering process sandbox to Chromium. It's coming, but it's hard to say how long it'll be before it's as good as Chromium.

More info: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox

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