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

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#431

Post by ittgsv » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:24 AM UTC

krageon wrote: post #412

botverse wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One day I just did it and the change wasn't as big a deal as I thought it to be. This is so true, if everybody here thinks that should change but worried about this. It takes just a few hours, almos all features have an equivalent if not exactly the same and in the same place.

Except FF's tools are slower and the experience is overall worse. A lot has improved about firefox (including my old main complaint, that the renderer was slow) but saying the dev tools are at all acceptable when you're used to Chrome's is sadly still a stretch.

Not only that, you will even find people here saying that Firefox dev tools are faster!! I wonder what kind of computers those people have.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#432

Post by isostatic » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:25 AM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #104

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.

I'd support it if it felt like a first-class citizen on macOS. It's ironic that everyone decries Electron for not being native, then says you should use Firefox when it violates so much about the platform that it's not even funny. A bug about overflow scrolling (the default bouncing when you scroll over in macOS) has been open for years. It doesn't fit in.

It's odd that firefox doesn't use the osx certificate store

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#433

Post by vvillena » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:26 AM UTC

askmike wrote: post #362

watt wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if Firefox is getting this default wrong, what else are they getting wrong? And it should realize user state is sacred, I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!

I'm very happy that when I close my browser it kills all my tabs. If I really want something back I just view it from the history. > I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input! I'm pretty sure no one expects nor wants this. You're definitely in a minority here. The problem you…

Lots of people actually expect that. It's how phone apps work. There's no concept of "closing an app" in the iOS and Android guidelines. You just get the app out of the way.

I think the lack of improvements in desktop UX in the last 10 years is making every desktop OS to slowly adopt mobile UX conventions. Some of those new conventions are a step back.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#434

Post by pedro2 » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:27 AM UTC

I think Firefox still needs performance improvement on the graphical side on Windows.

Chrome somehow bypasses compositing [it is a white window on OBS screen recorder].

Firefox seems to only get fast when I disable Windows animations; otherwise gets sluggish as soon as more than 4 tabs open.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#435

Post by ittgsv » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:27 AM UTC

jabl wrote: post #285

fabrice_d wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FirefoxOS never had a snowball's chance in hell against Android and iOS. I wish it were otherwise, but it's not, and never was. But yes, I agree that FF market share problems are not due to problems with the product itself.

Firefox OS was a terrible idea. Gecko is horribly slow as it is, and they put it on low-end, under-powered mobile phones. As it was expected, using it for a few minutes made you want to hang yourself. I know they met with bosses from telecos, I wonder what faces they made when they showed them how the mobile behaved.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#436

Post by sveme » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:28 AM UTC

veidr wrote: post #390

sveme wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I last installed Chrome in a fresh installation of Windows (so no saved settings from previous installations), it defaulted to an empty startpage. Might just have been me, mind.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#437

Post by vvillena » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:31 AM UTC

__d wrote: post #401

depressedpanda wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I switched to DDG for the privacy, and a general desire to ensure that competitors to Google survive. But I've found I use the "bang" commands all the time. Typing "w! foo" beats "wikipedia foo" every time.

Firefox/Chrome: You can right-click any search field on any web you visit and add it as a search engine, with the keyword of your choosing. I've been using "w foo" to directly search on English Wikipedia. It's half the characters! :)

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#438

Post by vetinari » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:31 AM UTC

isostatic wrote: post #432

Klonoar wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd support it if it felt like a first-class citizen on macOS. It's ironic that everyone decries Electron for not being native, then says you should use Firefox when it violates so much about the platform that it's not even funny. A bug about overflow scrolling (the default bouncing when you scroll over in macOS) has been open for years. It doesn't fit in.

It's odd that firefox doesn't use the osx certificate store

Firefox doesn't use certificate store on any OS. Only the ESR for Windows has an option, off by default, for respecting the cert store.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#439

Post by ojosilva » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:31 AM UTC

A few months back I've started a journey to move to FF.

1. First installed it on my Android phone so I could use uBlock Origin. Then found 2 other amazing extensions, Cookie Autodelete (less tracking, more privacy and no newspaper paywalls) and I Don't Care About Cookies (no more annoying Agree to Cookies popups). I couldn't be happier!

2. Despite some reports about FF issues on MacOS, I went ahead and installed it. Memory usage having many open tabs dropped considerably, maybe 30% to 40% compared to Chrome. Everything works great, speedy and solid.

3. I've installed FF on my home Windows 7 media center. Strange, but that's where FF is noticeably slower than Chrome and seems to have memory swapping issues, where some tabs will be swapped out of memory and take a while to load. The machine has only 4GB RAM though and is not very performant.

4. I've discovered Pocket and I'm really liking it. Although the recommendation engine is a total waste of time, the text extraction is great.

5. I love Firefox Focus, which I use sporadically, and I wish that was the default engine everywhere. I'm not sure if the next generation FF will be based on Servo or Blink. Whatever it may be, I hope it's as snappy as Focus.

Some issues or quirks I had with Firefox:

- Bookmarks with search keywords. Chrome OpenSearch integration was much nicer. I had to define several bookmarks on FF to have at least the searches I use the most.

- YouTube videos in Windows feel sluggish and I had to install a Windows Media extension to be able to see them. Chrome has video support out of the box.

- PDF viewing feels less responsive, but the FF viewer interface is fine.

- Downloading UX is better on Chrome. The FF down arrow on the top bar is very hidden, I tend to forget I was downloading something.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#440

Post by woolvalley » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:33 AM UTC

vvillena wrote: post #428

totfz wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't used Chrome, no wonder you haven't noticed Firefox sucking. But a side-to-side speed and responsiveness comparison of Chrome and Firefox is unfair even today.

When I notice a difference in responsiveness between Chrome and Firefox, it's usually due to the webpage being Chrome-optimized. I don't know why: maybe it was developed and tested under Chrome, maybe it uses features that work better on Chrome because they were developed and pushed by Google, or maybe the differences between the rendering engines favor Chrome. Google's own websites are some of the major culprits. Th…

I've noticed worse performance of firefox on macos compared to windows, to the point where firefox is unusable on many websites on a 2 core macbook pro. Even fucking facebook is slow on firefox, even with recent improvements.