Firefox desktop market share now below 9% • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#231

Post by Eridrus » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:52 AM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #204

Brakenshire wrote: post #79

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…

If you've been following #servo lately, you'll see that we're starting a reboot of parallel layout right now (which I'm leading, more or less). It just so happens that I'm also juggling a million other things simultaneously. For example, I'm working on power usage improvements on macOS that should help address some of the complaints upthread. Also there's the entirely new GPU font and SVG renderer (which is a novel t…

Is any of this work coming to Mobile? I agree with the GP that this is where Firefox has the biggest opening, but it seems like there's very little investment in Firefox on Android.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#232

Post by fabrice_d » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:55 AM UTC

flukus wrote: post #213

pcwalton wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience. But architectural improvements are done to improve performance and stability. I can't think of a single Rust component that shipped without extensive performance measurement to demonstrate improvements in the important metrics that users care about.

> demonstrate improvements in the important metrics that users care about And yet market share is plummeting, doesn't that indicated that your metrics for what users care about are completely wrong? It's hardly me alone having this experience, most firefox users had there extensions break for no visible benefit. Anyone with the non-default ubuntu theme has the same issue with text boxes, which indicates a complete la…

Unfortunately market share is more about being about to efficiently distribute your product than just the quality of said product.

Mozilla is suffering from not having its own platform - they could have done so by keeping FirefoxOS alive and use the growing success of KaiOS today. Looks like they are not ready to come back because... reasons.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#233

Post by qwerty456127 » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:56 AM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #143

I've never jumped on the whole Chrome hype train, and while Firefox for a while was slower, it didn't bother me that much. A pity many jumped and never returned, even when Firefox caught up. 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.h…

> I've never jumped on the whole Chrome hype train, and while Firefox for a while was slower,

Firefox has always been slower than Chrome. I was resisting Chrome very hard and long yet at some point Firefox's slowness became intolerable and I was forced to go Chrome.

With the introduction of the Quantum engine Firefox has became reasonably fast again and I switched back but as soon as I've installed all the extensions I want it became extremely slow again so again I have switched back to Chrome (which runs all the extensions I want without a noticeable slow-down).

I will switch to Firefox as soon as it becomes as fast as Chrome is (and I only have 5-8-years-old built-in Intel Graphics in my laptops, not fancy GPUs so GPU-accelerated rendering won't help).

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#234

Post by pmoriarty » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:57 AM UTC

0xADEADBEE wrote: post #183

Puer wrote: post #10

Just my personal $0.02: 1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser. This is partly because other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers, and mainly because (as an extension developer) why would you code for browser X when you can get more u…

I am an edge-case but my favourite extensions are AdNauseum [1], CookieAutoDelete and NoScript. The first isn't even available on the Chrome store (although you can install it via Dev Mode [2]), and that's before I weight concerns like Google's dragnet. Totally agree with the Network Effect point though, and I hear Chrome's dev tools are quicker than Firefox's in DOM rendering. With regard to 2, I've not found it to…

I used NoScript forever, but recently switched to uMatrix, and it's so much better in that it gives you much more fine-grained control over what to block/allow. I'd recommend giving it a try.

uBlock Origin is a great complement to it, for when I want to block specific page elements.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#235

Post by StillBored » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:58 AM UTC

The problem is that firefox is only getting faster if you happen to have a half dozen 4+Ghz cores to burn. If you run it on low end hardware all these rewrites in rust/etc to improve parallelism seem to actually be slowing it down and apparently increasing its overall resource consumption. Older versions would run up against a gig and a half or so, and start garbage collecting. Now, its not unusual for me to see 5+GB pinned across assorted firefox processes.

I've been meaning to play the high speed video capture game with a couple of versions running on the same hardware to see if my feeling that the GUI is actually getting laggier despite posting better benchmark numbers.

More and more I find myself spinning up falkon, or other browsers because I want to actually be able to play streaming radio in the background with my browser without having it skip if I open amazon.com, or some other JS heavy site. Worse, I'm still running 56 on a couple of my machines because I can't stand how laggy the newer versions are on those machines.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#236

Post by jbarham » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 5:00 AM UTC

I use Google Docs and noticed that one apparent dark pattern Google uses with Chrome is that you can print directly to a printer from Google Docs in Chrome whereas with Firefox (and presumably any other non-Google browser) you're forced to download a PDF first. It's confusing enough that my wife, who prints periodically from Google Docs, asked to switch back to Chrome.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#237

Post by taf2 » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 5:01 AM UTC

I like this http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-20090...

I just wish it went back further so you could see just how much marketshare IE6 held

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#238

Post by qwerty456127 » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 5:02 AM UTC

ngokevin wrote: post #81

jorblumesea wrote: post #40

Firefox is super fast and most importantly, isn't supported by a company who has a vested interest in tracking you. Unfortunate to see these results.

It is pretty fast for me. Although there is some vested interest, although indirectly. Decisions are still tied to money, which is why Google has traditionally been the default search engine in Firefox.

> Google has traditionally been the default search engine in Firefox.

There is little if anything wrong in tracking people who don't care about being tracked, those who do can easily switch the search engine to startpage.com, duckduckgo.com, Searx, Seeks or whatever.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#239

Post by Sylos » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 5:04 AM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #93

saagarjha wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Transforming itself to be visually nearly indistinguishable from chrome hasn't really worked in its favor. Chrome changed its style more recently and ended up being more similar to Firefox.

Is that the timeline here? In that case it was Chrome using its market position cleverly and Firefox not responding adequately. I can only speak for linux interfaces btw. Small "bullshit" interface changes can have dramatic user and marketshare impact. We can all sit around and wish the world didn't work this way but it's not going to change.

It was within a month or so after the official release of Firefox's new theme that it became publicly known that Chrome was working on a new theme, too. So, there was no way they could have adequately responded to that. You just can't rebrand twice within a year.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#240

Post by pmoriarty » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 5:07 AM UTC

mkl wrote: post #101

baby wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand, there is no side-tab plugin like Tree Style Tab plugin on Chrome. How do you handle more than 10 tabs?

Session Buddy and The Great Suspender. I have ~800 tabs open in Chrome right now on this PC. I haven't used Tree Style Tab, but Chrome's tab-shrinking is actually better for lots of tabs (up to a point) than Firefox's tab-scrolling. I have yet to try tab suspension extensions in Firefox, so there may be a workflow that works for me there (Chrome is not ideal).

I am envious, Firefox 60.3.0 performs like a snail for me on Linux with just 20 tabs.