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Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

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Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#331

Post by depressedpanda »

11235813213455 wrote: post #292
eksemplar wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox for development, but I use safari (privately) and edge (professionally) for browsing, and see no real advantages to using either Firefox or Chrome for that. I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.

What I like in chrome is search shortcuts, example I start typing "thes" then press TAB, then I'm brought directly to https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hello (possibly with little configuration). I don't think Firefox has similar things, last time I checked we have to use bookmarks or something

You could just set duckduckgo as your default search provider. Then you can use their bangs[1] to quickly search on specific sites. "!thes test" will find synonyms for you.

It works flawlessly in all browsers I use.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#332

Post by richjdsmith »

dman wrote: post #217
Sylos wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servo is nowhere near ready. It's been a few months since I've seen actual results, but I'd be surprised, if it nowadays completed ACID3 (which was state of the art for browsers in 2009). The thing is that rewriting a browser engine doesn't just happen over night. No bigger browser engine has been written from scratch since the previous millennium. Also, no browser engine implements all currently specified webstandar…

Maybe we need simpler standards? Ones that are implementable without spending a billion dollars.

I'm sure the firefox team would agree with you wholeheartedly.

Chrome is the new IE though. Making whatever specs they need for Google Sites - standards be damned.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#333

Post by pseudalopex »

vatueil wrote: post #315
11235813213455 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I like in chrome is search shortcuts, example I start typing "thes" then press TAB, then I'm brought directly to https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hello (possibly with little configuration). I don't think Firefox has similar things, last time I checked we have to use bookmarks or something

As others have mentioned and I believe you were referring to, Firefox does let you create bookmarks with keywords to accomplish the same thing. Funnily enough, I've often seen Firefox users unaware that they can do the same with custom search keywords in Chrome, so the problem runs both ways. As someone who uses these features in both Firefox and Chrome, I do think it would be nice if Firefox copied how Chrome automa…

Firefox now highlights the search keyword and limits history matches to just that site.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#334

Post by michaelmrose »

protomyth wrote: post #50
bjz_ wrote: post #9

Been really enjoying Firefox, especially after Quantum. More devs should support and use it, lest we be beholden to Chrome for the rest of time.

More devs should support and use it, lest we be beholden to Chrome for the rest of time. Why support what already broke your work once without an actual transition plan? They didn't have a full replacement ready to go when they got rid of XUL, and seemed that they didn't really care.

They announced web extensions in summer of 2015.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...

At the end of August of 2018 they stopped supporting 52 ESR which is the last extended support release that supports the old addons.

During the 3 years between a and b mozilla worked to provide support for flexible interesting addons which is why all the notable interesting addons I'm aware of have new versions.

I'm sure that the will to port every useful addon in existence just isn't there but it seems challenging for firefox to move forward without ditching the old addons.

Did you realize the new addon system was released over 3 years ago? It kind of seems as if perhaps as a user you were only peripherally aware of matters and derived an erroneous interpretation of events.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#335

Post by InclinedPlane »

I use Firefox nearly every day and it's pretty good. If it was the only browser in existence it would be hard to complain. However, when switching between chrome and firefox I'm always much happier when I switch to chrome than I am when I switch to firefox. And it's not because of site rendering or anything like that, it's always a matter of UI, speed, and resource usage. The firefox UI is pretty clean but it has just too many weird clunky edges. For example, there are many situations where chrome just "does the right thing" while firefox does not (and it's more common for chrome to be easily configured to do something different if you want it to), this is especially true with handling tabs and the new tab page. Updates are another example though, chrome's updates are fast and nearly painless, firefox is a lot better than it used to be but updates are slow and it's far too common to launch the browser and for some reason see that it's not updated.

There are also many cases where doing "ordinary things" while browsing will lead to firefox slowing to a crawl or using crazy amounts of resources. Chrome is a notorious memory hog and yet somehow it manages to behave better than firefox in most situations, at least for my browsing habits. I also really like chrome's search integrations, if I want to search wikipedia all I need to do is hit ctrl-t then type "wiki search string" and boom I'm there. Same thing for youtube, amazon, etc. It's a small thing, but it's the addition of all the small things which make for an overall superior experience.

For reference Mosaic was my first browser and I've always been open to switching over to whatever browser had the best experience. I was using phoenix project builds before they renamed them, I was using Chrome back when it was in beta (speed, process isolation, minimalism, better acid2/3 scores, what wasn't to like?), and I keep checking on other browsers to see if they're worth switching to. The Mozilla org is great and firefox is a solid browser but it needs to up its game if it wants to be seen as a state of the art browser.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#336

Post by veddox »

Dunedan wrote: post #300
11235813213455 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I like in chrome is search shortcuts, example I start typing "thes" then press TAB, then I'm brought directly to https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hello (possibly with little configuration). I don't think Firefox has similar things, last time I checked we have to use bookmarks or something

In Firefox you can add a bookmark and set a keyword for that bookmark. If the URL of the bookmark contains "%s", it'll get replaced by everything you type in the URL bar after the keyword. For example I have a bookmark for Wikipedia with the keyword "wp". So when I type "wp Y Combinator" I end up on the Wikipedia page about Y Combinator. I really enjoy this feature and even catch myself regularly trying to use it on…

DuckDuckGo: `!w Y combinator` ?

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#337

Post by michaelmrose »

microcolonel wrote: post #102
bjz_ wrote: post #9

Been really enjoying Firefox, especially after Quantum. More devs should support and use it, lest we be beholden to Chrome for the rest of time.

Well, it would help if they would resolve the serious quality issues. I wrote a webpage the other day, fully standards compliant (at least as I read it), and Firefox got it completely wrong (one of the bugs, three days old and not triaged[0]) in a way Ed. I still have open bugs in Firefox from 2012. Firefox is riddled with layout and scripting bugs. I don't understand how they can afford all of this experimental deve…

Do you not work around the way chrome does things in any way shape or form?

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#338

Post by watt »

feanaro wrote: post #320
eksemplar wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox for development, but I use safari (privately) and edge (professionally) for browsing, and see no real advantages to using either Firefox or Chrome for that. I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.

> I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while. This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.

When you log out, Firefox will block it and warn you that you are about to close number of tabs. When you select "OK", your tabs are gone.

But Chrome will quietly exit, and when you start it next time, will offer to restore the tabs that were open last time. Chrome approach wins, hands down.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#339

Post by richjdsmith »

jabl wrote: post #294
jeswin wrote: post #23

I have switched to Firefox on mobile as well. There are some occasional hiccups (rare), but the speedup and battery life you gain from ad-blocking makes it totally worth it. For those who are evaluating, please install AdBlock before you take a call - and do try it for a few days.

I'm also using firefox, on both mobile and desktop. With ublock origin, decentraleyes, privacy badger, and https everywhere add-ons.

That's my exact config on all my devices as well!

Whenever I'm roped into fixing some family member's computer, I always install all of those except privacy badger.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#340

Post by michaelmrose »

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.

Do you mean is you disagree with what they do politically and so you are going to sit here and pretend you wish they didn't waste resources on non technical issues. This isn't terribly charitable.
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