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Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

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Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#241

Post by pcwalton »

Eridrus wrote: post #231
pcwalton wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not responsible for or in control of product plans, but we are testing and tuning much of the work for mobile, yes.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#242

Post by dralley »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #225
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…

I wish Mozilla would stop doing so much non-development stuff. Now that Thunderbird is moving on its own, FFox is their only product and yet they waste a lot of time sending out emails about various petitions and similar. They should definitely support pro-Internet petitions as a company (as does Google and others), but IDK why they are now running essentially a mailing list infrastructure for them.

The Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation are separate entities.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#243

Post by ngokevin »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #229

Now as Microsoft has given up and switched to Google's Blink engine, given importance of the web and scary perspectives of it becoming owned by a single corporation Google competitors (as well as its industrial customers - it's never good to rely on a single vendor that can always do just whatever it wants), NGOs and GOs should start funding and promoting Mozilla now IMHO...

It’s unfortunately already been the case. Mozilla’s money comes directly from Google and Google has had the heavy hand over all web standards decisions for years now.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#244

Post by pmoriarty »

shittyadmin wrote: post #61
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?

I miss the old XUL extensions, way better tab extensions and stuff like DownThemAll was amazing. Modernly Firefox can't be customized much more than chrome - extreme hacks are needed: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

The XUL extension I miss most is Pentadactyl. Tridactyl is a pale imitation, and still immature. Qutebrowser has potential, but still lacks critical extensions like uMatrix and uBlock Origin.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#245

Post by jcranmer »

acqq wrote: post #38
_wmd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome only exists because Google were afraid of lacking control over the stack they use to deliver their content. Firefox was already 'good enough' long before it ever appeared, and Google could easily have dedicated engineering resources if the problem with Firefox was purely technical, much as they do with Linux. FWIW a lot of Google behavior can be cast as an analogy to a paranoid control freak. Net neutrality is…

> Firefox was already 'good enough' long before Only if you as "good enough" define "with Javascript even slower than IE." I've personally never used Chrome, because since even the first days it already had more "protected" installation than some malware, and that never made me confident in their intentions (and I've never liked Chrome UI) but Firefox has always had performance problems. As Chrome appeared it had ext…

Mozilla was working on a tracing JIT for JS before Google announced V8, although I believe V8 was released before the first version of Firefox with TraceMonkey was.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#247

Post by TangoTrotFox »

StillBored wrote: post #235

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…

I've been having the exact same issue. I tend to leave a relatively large number of windows/tabs open and Firefox is starting to edge towards unusability on a 4x3.2ghz + 16GB RAM system simply because its performance and memory consumption is interfering with other applications.

Though I really think most major browsers are somehow all simultaneously losing the thread. Websites are fundamentally just formatted text and extremely basic graphics, for the most part. It's not like I have 50 high end webgl demos running. Rendering text and basic graphics is not something that should be consuming anywhere remotely near the resources that have become typical. If javascript is the problem, then that should be dealt with and not simply accepted as the price of doing business. In many ways I feel like the mantra that 'premature optimization is the root of all evil' has gradually turned into 'any form of optimization short of making sure you don't run O(n) in O(n^2) is not a priority.' But like anybody who's worked on a project knows those placeholders that 'you'll get to later' end up being exactly what goes live. And when optimization is disregarded, you get text/graphics rendering struggling to perform on systems millions of times stronger than what sent us to the moon.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#248

Post by dralley »

bscphil wrote: post #230
kristopolous wrote: post #3

Being visually nearly indistinguishable from chrome hasn't really worked in its favor. (quick, which is which: http://9ol.es/double-browser.png ). Probably north of 95% don't know about or understand licensing differences or differences in rendering engines or core architecture. Interfaces and obvious features with compelling narratives are what matter because that's how the user engages with the product. Asking user…

It's more than just visually indistinguishable; historically a big chunk of the Firefox user base have been (a) power users, and (b) people who listen to power users for computer advice. When this becomes necessary you know you've lost your power user audience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18589555

Power users ceased being particularly important or influential in the early 2010s. Computers have gotten easier for an average person to use and maintain without needing to be de-wormed every 4 months, all browsers are "good enough" unlike the times if IE6, Google's brand is ridiculously powerful and is further able to push Chrome via Android preinstall.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#249

Post by paraditedc »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #191
paraditedc wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously I don't have context on your work, but in general, do you have control over remote API? If yes, you can setup different environments (dev, staging, production) and set CORS accordingly for each of them. If no, how is it working in production?

I develop browser based video games that talk to a central API that I control. I mostly have the setup you describe, and most development happens against a CORS-free staging server. But it's often necessary to build a local prod version that is identical to the live version for debugging or analysis, that plays against real players and reads/writes to the same data store. It's an edge case, and in the past when I've…

I see.

Just a wild idea that I haven't tried yet:

Would it work if you configure your etc/hosts to point production domain to localhost and open the production domain in the browser?

I'm gonna try this when I get free time.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#250

Post by giancarlostoro »

cjcampbell wrote: post #140
sombremesa wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love using Firefox as my daily driver, and I can always pop open chrome if I really have to. What kind of life do you lead where your browser needs to have CORS constantly disabled?

This can be helpful in development scenarios. I’m supporting a team that uses localstack to support local development against some AWS services. Unfortunately, the CORS settings for localstack break the development environment. With Chrome allowing them to disable from the command-line, I can provide a shortcut to launch with degraded security, no plugins, no user settings, etc. My only wish is that Chrome would make…

Not sure if it might have this but have you tried using Firefox Developer Edition? I would suggest if disabling CORS is missing to request it for Firefox Developer Edition. Its Firefox bleeding edge with some developer focused plugins out of the box.
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