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

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#381

Post by bromuro » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 8:58 AM UTC

atombender wrote: post #35

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 moved back to Safari exactly because the User Interface is much better and it does not feel like an electron app like firefox (and chrome) does. I love the native look and feel and it’s a pity Safari is the only browser on Mac OS working this way.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#382

Post by warpspin » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 8:59 AM UTC

I switched back to Firefox after Quantum (where its speed on my MBP became finally tolerable again, even if still slower than Safari) after a brief intermezzo with Safari (where the extension "eco system" plainly sucks) after being a long time Chrome user.

The problem is, I still have to actually force myself to actually like Firefox. Chrome IS, all-in-all, the better the browser - except that annoying privacy thing which caused me to switch in the first place...

A major source of pain are still the development tools in Firefox. They work flawlessly in Chrome, hardly work at all in Safari after their dev tools rewrite a couple of years ago, and show annoying quirks in Firefox (like the Debugger, which sometimes simply loses a source file, making it impossible to place breakpoints there) and have, in general, a slower UI than Chrome's.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#383

Post by randkyp » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 8:59 AM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #373

feanaro wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I switched from Chrome to Firefox after the google login controversy, and have been happy with the transition too. The only only thing that really annoys me is that when you snap a tab out of a window into a new window, the gesture is similar with snapping a tab into the favorite bar, and I end up with lots of "New Tab" or other unwanted favorites. Also a small personal annoyance. I got into the habit of always launc…

You can middle-click on the taskbar icon to do that -- and it works for other apps, too.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#384

Post by elken » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:00 AM UTC

I switched back to Firefox a few months ago and haven't looked back. I've also noticed that people are increasingly distancing themselves from the Google ecosystem. I have even had less technical friends looking at alternatives such as Brave.

Looking at the numbers, Perhaps the non-ie/Safari/Chrome crowd is being fractured by the alternatives available but to me it certainly seems to be growing.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#385

Post by tyteen4a03 » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:07 AM UTC

When you can make Quantum feel like Safari (or at least Chrome) on my Mac, then I'll switch. Right now it drains my battery faster than I can say the word "battery drain".

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#386

Post by blauditore » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:07 AM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #352

blauditore wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both browsers have this configurable in settings. So they just use different defaults, which depends on personal preference.

But which is the natural default? The one where you lose a lot of state seems like a far worse choice.

It warns you. And there are people who do browsing in a one-off fashion: Open many thing, then close everything and forget.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#387

Post by puzzlingcaptcha » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:07 AM UTC

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…

>Now, its not unusual for me to see 5+GB pinned across assorted firefox processes.

I've been using Firefox continuously since version 3.1 and it's been bothering me a lot recently. Circa 2011 Firefox was perceived as a memory hog, and MemShrink effort was started to keep it under control, which resulted in the nifty areweslimyet.com website (which was transparent and good PR too).

Now MemShrink seems defunct, areweslimyet is obsoleted with seemingly all the progress undone as of last update in 2017, and the new Perfherder website is inscrutable for an outsider.

In my case, Firefox balloons to gigabytes of RAM with just a few tabs open. If you need more than 8GB of RAM on your system to do basic office work something has gone rather wrong (and RAM prices are historically somewhat high right now).

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#388

Post by swoorup » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:08 AM UTC

I find quantum quiet fast for user-operation. But the initial page loading and data transfers appears to be so slower than all browsers.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#389

Post by ssvss » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:09 AM UTC

Their mobile market share is 1.2%. I tried to use Firefox in android, their scrolling behaviour doesn’t feel native.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#390

Post by veidr » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:09 AM UTC

sveme wrote: post #342

watt wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a setting in both browsers. Default is "Start with Startpage or empty page" in both browsers as well. You can always select "Restore last session" in both browsers.

Defaults really matter. Probably 1% of users would ever think to look for a way to change that behavior.

I think Firefox for a long time tried to optimize for those users who do want to tweak their software, and doing that can even be a way to make superior software (instead of aiming for the lowest common denominator), but it is certainly not the right approach to maximizing _web browser market share._

I didn't use Firefox for many years (because I thought it sucked; slow, bad defaults, always apologizing in this anoying way for having crashed the last time I used it) but I now use it every day again (though not as my default browser; I tend to keep all the major ones open) and I'm glad to see Mozilla recently seems to have changed their priorities and focused on usability and performance. I hope it's not too late.