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

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#441

Post by Reason077 » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:38 AM UTC

ianai wrote: post #123

Reason077 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst thing about Safari is the “Do you want to receive notifications from this website?” pop-up that appears every time you hit some random notification-supporting website for the first time. There has got to be a better way to implement notification subscriptions than this annoying pop-up.

Website push notifications shouldn’t be a thing. Way too ripe for exploitation.

I actually find notifications very useful and definitely don’t want to turn them off.

But the way the subscription mechanism is implemented with a pop up is annoying and archaic.

There must be a better way to let users know that notifications are enabled than sticking a pop-up in their face.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#442

Post by Shivetya » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:39 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…

on my iMac my issue with Safari is that if I tab away from streaming content or such it reduces the quality so when I switch back to that tab or the browser I have to wait a few seconds for the quality to go back up.

this was very noticeable with twitch where I tend to have more than one stream up. I will pop up mail to reply to something and watch Safari drop the resolution behind mail yet firefox does not do this. I haven't found a solution to it yet

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#443

Post by nathan_f77 » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:39 AM UTC

I just switched back to Chrome last night, after about 10 months on Firefox (on Mac). The only reason I switched to Firefox is because Chrome started showing these little blue notification dots on pinned tabs, and these were really distracting. Firefox had them too, but I figured out how to hack them away with CSS. I found out that these dots disappeared after Chrome redesigned their tabs, so I switched back.

Chrome feels much faster and nicer to use. Firefox would often get really slow and start freezing. The Firefox dev tools were often really slow and unresponsive. If I was working on a big React app the devtools UI would often just disappear and freeze for 10-15 seconds. I think it was known issue related to source maps. My workaround was to close the developer tools before I refreshed the page, and then reopen them. So I'm glad I don't have to do that anymore.

I really missed Chromecast support. If I ever wanted to watch a video on my TV, I would have to pick up my phone and open the YouTube app, or just open Chrome and paste in the URL.

I had to open Chrome every time I had a Google Meet call. Clearbit only provides a Chrome extension and doesn't support Firefox (but that's a problem with Clearbit. They really need to add support for Firefox.)

I liked Firefox's "Multi-Account Containers". It was nice that I could sign into multiple accounts at the same time, and have all the tabs in the same window. Chrome has profiles but they can only open in a new window. (But that works fine.)

One other advantage of Firefox: It kind of lags behind Chrome in some ways, so if your website works in Firefox, it almost always works in Chrome. When I was only developing and testing in Chrome, I would occasionally get an error report from a Firefox user. That never happened while I was using Firefox. Now that I'm back on Chrome, I'll need to be more careful about cross-browser testing.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#444

Post by jhasse » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:46 AM UTC

ripdog wrote: post #392

jhasse wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Become more popular by improving the product?

Firefox is improving by leaps and bounds every day. But the market is not a meritocracy, as much as some people like to pretend it is. Success in the market is much more to do with things like marketing, momentum, inertia, and general opinions. All of these things are favoring Chrome right now, and Mozilla is not in a position to turn this around. And you may not have noticed, but being popular doesn't actually give…

I disagree. IMHO Chrome is a better browser than Firefox. A few examples from the top of my head why Firefox is worse than Chrome (on Linux):

1. Hardware acceleration is still disabled by default on Linux

2. Pocket

3. Unwanted notifications about wanting to update / being updated / having updated

3. Ugly spacing left and right of the adress bar

4. Takes longer to start

5. No integration with GNOME keychain.

6. Ctrl+Q quits the browser.

7. Laggy UI

> How do you suggest they diversify their revenue stream?

I would suggest that they don't need to diversify their revenue stream. As long as they are a major player, Google (or any other search engine) will continue to fund them.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#445

Post by ionised » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:48 AM UTC

totfz wrote: post #398

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.

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.

I mean, I use both daily and this just isn't true.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#446

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:51 AM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #284

agumonkey wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a ~power related issue using Quantum. It "killed" my cpu (temp rising by 10s of degrees so fast I didn't have time to throttle before kernel thermal shutdown). I guess it's so parallel and so gpu intensive that my whole system goes into fever. ps: a x201 core i5 520m

What? Your system doesn't handle running at max CPU and GPU usahe even for what I presume is seconds before thermal shutdown? That seems like an extremely serious issue with your system.

All I can tell is that ffx quantum is the only program that triggers that behavior. And it's not seconds it's maybe one second. 70-80-90 off.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#447

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:52 AM UTC

DiabloD3 wrote: post #288

agumonkey wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a ~power related issue using Quantum. It "killed" my cpu (temp rising by 10s of degrees so fast I didn't have time to throttle before kernel thermal shutdown). I guess it's so parallel and so gpu intensive that my whole system goes into fever. ps: a x201 core i5 520m

Clean your heatsink out, and also consider replacing the heatsink paste: that CPU is so old, its entirely possible a cheap thermal pad is no longer usable (commonly used on laptops and stock desktop HSFs).

Doesn't matter, I burn the cpu with multiple gcc builds and it doesn't rise the same. I had thermal shutdowns it can happen, but not like ffx quantum.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#448

Post by PetahNZ » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:52 AM UTC

jholman wrote: post #271

viswaprasath wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to know your favorite add-ons that are broken and not available in AMO for FF57+ some of the contributors during their free time working on to bring extensions. can you share link or about the addon ( https://github.com/firefox-addons/ideas )

As one of the FF faithful, I almost quit when downthemall stopped working. https://www.downthemall.net/

This addon used to be the only reason I opened Firefox.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#449

Post by snaky » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 10:57 AM UTC

johnny22 wrote: post #430

snaky wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now it is faster, uses less resourses and doesn't crash XUL extensions removed, power users are angry and leaving. And the power users were the main driving force for Firefox adoption - mostly not by themselves, but as influencers for people around them. What an irony indeed.

so they switched to browers that have less powerful extensions? No current popular browser matches firefox's extension power, even after the change.

They switched to browser with the same powerless extensions indeed. Because the difference is no more. An attitude of Mozilla Firefox team is against power users clearly for so long, and that's an only logical outcome.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#450

Post by tscolari » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 11:00 AM UTC

I tried Firefox for the last few months as my default browser, I just switched back to chrome. The amount of lag it caused to the system was beyond bearable. It's a shame because I really like the features, like containers, unfortunately, it's just not good enough for my heavy use.