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

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#621

Post by microcolonel » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 3:05 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #337

microcolonel wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is virtually never required. Even Chrome's interpretation of undefined behaviours is convenient (i.e. margin: auto on elements with only a max-height; this doesn't work in EdgeHTML or Gecko)

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#622

Post by bfrydl » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 3:06 PM UTC

glenneroo wrote: post #571

rraghur wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I'm on nightly and it has been stable - even with WR turned on. I've been pushing my family and friends to use FF - but a lot of them are Chrome loyalists. Still - one must persist. I'd rather not have a world where only chrome and chrome clones exist - and I certainly don't appreciate that Chrome wants me to log in every time I use the browser (and getting more and more insistent at that lately from what I h…

Firefox Quantum also nags constantly about logging in and syncing devices, not that I'm against it, it's great when you have multiple devices and don't want to install the same plugins, sync bookmarks, etc.

What? I've never been nagged for this. I forget the feature exists.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#623

Post by zzzcpan » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 3:07 PM UTC

Mozilla can do a lot to help users that other browsers don't do, like block ads by default, ship with a bigger collection of fonts and block external fonts by default, make all animations click to play, disable annoying featuring by default, CSS features that are used primarily to break UX or render things too slowly, like "position: fixed", etc. But Mozilla chooses not to do any of that. It chooses advertising corporations and publishers over its own users, just like Google, but tries to offset that with controversial "privacy" PR.

What is the point in having a separate browser engine if you don't leverage any features to make it more attractive to users? You can't beat Google by just chasing it.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#624

Post by bluGill » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 3:10 PM UTC

kakarot wrote: post #587

mstade wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I pay $50/year for my Fastmail account. I use a custom domain, so total cost is a bit higher, probably something like $60-$70/year, not sure. Moving from gmail to fastmail, given their integrated migration process, was a complete breeze. I still have gmail forwarding set up to my new email address, but I haven't logged into the account for well over two years at this point. This reminds me to actually check how…

How is hosting your data with Fastmail and allowing them to sniff your traffic better than hosting with Google? Out of the frying pan and into the fire, if you ask me.

Since I'm paying them they answer to me. They don't get income from sources other than people paying for email. If they sniff my email they don't have anything to gain from the effort, so they are much less likely to.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#625

Post by glenneroo » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 3:13 PM UTC

MrRadar wrote: post #608

glenneroo wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox Quantum also nags constantly about logging in and syncing devices, not that I'm against it, it's great when you have multiple devices and don't want to install the same plugins, sync bookmarks, etc.

You can choose what to sync between devices. I personally only sync my bookmarks.

That's well and good but I'm replying to the comment above me which stated:

> I certainly don't appreciate that Chrome wants me to log in every time I use the browser (and getting more and more insistent at that lately from what I hear)

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#626

Post by feanaro » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 3:13 PM UTC

cf498 wrote: post #487

feanaro wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This I can relate with, but I would like to note that Firefox seems to be continually expanding its APIs and regaining functionality that was lost. In particular, [Tridactyl]( https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl ) (which tries to reimplement Pentadactyl, a kitchen-sink extension API consumer) works rather well. There are still some pain points, like the keyboard shortcut API which still hasn't been merged, but I a…

They rushed it and I find it hard to not see it as a giant "screw you". They didnt release the specifications early enough for people to rewrite their addons and at the end of ESR52 there where still multiple bugs open which prevented people from porting their addons. We didnt even get a normal 1 year ESR support frame for gods sake. All that ignoring the fact that there was no warning for the end users that all thei…

I was very pissed at them for exactly this reason and I still am to some degree. I would love to find an acceptable alternative that goes back to the roots, so to speak. For instance, I've been looking at qutebrowser, but it's still too limited (and might remain so for some time).

But Chrome as an alternative? That's not even on the table. Firefox is definitely the lesser of two evils.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#627

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #493

devxpy wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> paying for a domain and the price of one coffee per month That's some expensive coffee.

My FastMail account costs $50 / year or $130 / 3 years, thus with a monthly cost starting at 3.6 USD. That's less than the price of a Starbucks Grande Latte. Google's G Suite, which is still better than free web mail since you no longer have the lock-in, plus a better privacy policy, is $5 per month, which is almost the price of a Starbucks Venti Latte. And this is actually an expensive offering in the business. So n…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#628

Post by bootloop » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 3:18 PM UTC

nunodonato wrote: post #466

swozey wrote: post #150

I switched last week to Firefox after trying to go back to it over and over again, maybe once a year, for 5+ years. I absolutely love the Container system it has. I was fumbling around between Chrome profiles for GCP and back to my personal for gdrive/docs/etc. It just got cumbersome. I didn't really understand what the Containers were until I installed the extension and started to split up domains by Work and Person…

OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH! I was unaware of this. Been keeping chrome and chromium to use on specific cases for work accounts (email, banking, social media, etc). And now I can just consolidate everything with firefox, love it!! I can finally get rid of google's browsers :D

Don't really know what to say because I use 3 flavors of chrome + incognito mode to make sure my sessions are well separated. I didn't know about this. Guess I have to give it a try now.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#629

Post by glenneroo » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 3:18 PM UTC

bfrydl wrote: post #622

glenneroo wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox Quantum also nags constantly about logging in and syncing devices, not that I'm against it, it's great when you have multiple devices and don't want to install the same plugins, sync bookmarks, etc.

What? I've never been nagged for this. I forget the feature exists.

Did you have to disable the requests? Or are you really saying that on a virgin installation, Firefox never tried to get you to login and sync? Are you on Apple/Linux? I was able to disable most of the reminders to sync on both Android and Windows but I eventually gave in, in order to sync all my plugins and bookmarks.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#630

Post by smcg » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

I switched to FF from Chrome when I got a new computer for work and it has been great. I was a FF user back in the day when it was a massive improvement over IE. Now it feels "fine enough" in terms of feature richness, and it has great performance.