141–150 of 755 posts
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The worst thing about Safari is the “Do you want to receive notifications from this website?” pop-up that appears every time you hit some random notification-supporting website for the first time. There has got to be a better way to implement notification subscriptions than this annoying pop-up.
Website push notifications shouldn’t be a thing. Way too ripe for exploitation.
Is there a way to see the raw numbers? Eyeballing last few months it seems that Chrome grew significantly mostly at the expense of internet explorer, but also other browsers. This trend could be explained by a large number of new chromium users. Or maybe Google figured out how to push Chrome better.
Now three major milestones I'm personally waiting for (for the Linux version) are Firefox using Webrender (efficiently) with Vulkan on Wayland.
Another one that's still missing is fully functional Servo, that can run in browser.html on some mobile Linux UX like Plasma Mobile.
Quantum I think was too incremental and conservative, trying to integrate Servo into Gecko. They’ve ended up making a desktop browser which is as good as Chrome, but not good enough to demand attention. Mobile, where parallelism should be most beneficial, has lagged behind, and parallel layout, which is where the real prize is, has disappeared over the horizon. Servo has been relegated to WebVR experiments which are…
It should be noted there have been side projects to back nodejs with spidermonkey [0] and have electron APIs backed with gecko [1].
I agree with you and the thing I want more than anything is a cross platform browser engine embeddable with a supported C API that's not Chromium. Servo was on its way, but work has definitely slowed. But I acknowledge that even though I would build my own browser UI on top of an embeddable gecko engine, it probably won't affect adoption that much to be worth the effort.
0 - https://github.com/mozilla/spidernode 1 - https://github.com/mozilla/positron
I didn't see any indication as to their methodology for how they're calculating these stats. It's probably been said a zillion times before, but if it's JavaScript-based you can safely assume that they are incorrect as it's likely there is a large intersection between people browsing with an ad-blocker, private browsing, or with content blocker and those people using Firefox.
It probably almost doesn't matter if they're wrong - if they see this decline in users, true or not, then so will people monitoring users to their websites, and they will be likely to stop testing their sites on Firefox. Also it's a drop - do you think the number of people turning off JavaScript has gone up since Quantum? Why would that be? It's either that or less Firefox users.
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Mozilla did this (below) once, about 15 years ago when knocking IE from it's 95+% 2004 marketshare, they need to find a way to do it again: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - R. Buckminster Fuller
It was quite a bit different then. IE was in the "first mover" batch. Chrome is the "last mover". It was easy to knock out the first mover as things had stalled yet there was still lots of innovation to be done. But browsers have since commoditized, and the door for differentiation has closed. Especially as browsers inherently need to match each other through web standards. I don't see a way for 2D browsers to rise u…
IE wasn't a first-mover, it was bundled with the computer, it won as the most available, just like Starbucks vs. Coffee Bean - later comers can be assumed as more readily available then their perceived equivalencies. Firefox broke through by shattering the consumer's perception of equivalence.
The door for differentiation in the same way as before has closed, but not for differentiation in other ways that people immediately perceive.
Lacking a prescriptive direction that Mozilla Inc should take to establish this doesn't invalidate the observation, you can describe an illness without knowing the cure.
I'd like to use Firefox. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the performance improvements, Safari still feels like a faster, smoother browser. Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the…
I don't use a Mac, so I am not sure if there are other features of the Safari omnibar which are appealing. But the example you provided is especially concerning to me since it suggests that Safari is sending user input in the location bar to some external service for analysis. This is what allows the browser to find and render a snippet of a Wikipedia article that best matches what you've typed in the location bar. If I were using Safari, I would definitely be looking for a way to turn that off. I can't tell you how many times I've (accidentally) pasted something into the location bar that I would never voluntarily send to any third parties.
On Firefox, I have a Wikipedia bookmark that uses the 'w' keyword and uses the URL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s
For whatever it's worth, I find the Firefox omnibar superb for many reasons, one being that it prioritizes my bookmarks and my history higher than directing me to a third-party search engine.
Haven't really paid attention to resource usage vs chrome. I don't immediately feel like it's incredibly lower, if lower at all, but that's just taking a cursory glance that having a decent amount of static tabs and a video player running (not 1080p) is using 2gb of ram. I feel like chrome would be right there, maybe higher, like 3gb.
edit: Also, I found this which turns the entire thing into a dark mode (I use Dark reader as well) https://github.com/overdodactyl/ShadowFox
It's got some quirks that bug me. On Windows (I use OSX mostly) it seems to have issues with dragging links out but nothing to get me running away from it.