Live data from Hacker News

Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

netmarketshare.com

721–730 of 755 posts

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#721
post #435
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to have a Flame, the FirefoxOS development phone (which was the higher-end FFxOS device but was still bellow $200), and it was WAY snappier than my current Android phone (which is a $400 one!).

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because having code that behaves differently on development and production is never a solution, it's a workaround. Having bugs that can't be reproduced locally is the worst thing that can happen to a developer. So yeah, you can _just_ put environment settings if you have no other possible way, but you should really avoid it if there is any other one (like using chrome with CORS disabled, here).

Disabling CORS in your browser is not representative of production. Serving CORS headers is.

Mentioned this in another response. In this case, that requires the addition of another component. The app itself is serving a valid CORS policy. The stub we're using to support S3 development offline (LocalStack) ignores the configuration it's passed.

I agree with you that fixing the headers (via a proxy in this case) is the right solution. I'm just not able to prioritize right now.

Beyond that, there are always going to be occasions where developers, security analysts, and testers need to bypass default security enforcement. I'd like to see every browser provide a way to make these adjustments for a one-off session (e.g., via a command-line switch). It's an efficient solution that I can offer when I come across a nasty hack living permanently in a developer's web configuration.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My only wish is that Chrome would make it more obvious that it’s running with these protections disabled. I know this is beginning to become off-topic, but why? Presumably, if you're using a flag that has to be run from the command-line, you're either doing it on purpose or using hardware you don't own (and a keylogger is a much greater risk than anything else at that point)

I can't speak for OP, but for me the problem is that I likely already have normal Chrome windows open when I start a "special" Chrome instance with a private profile and other settings. So now when I see a Chrome window I would like to be sure whether it's my normal user profile or the special profile. In practice, it's not a problem for me, because the presence or absence of my usual row of extension icons and profi…

Exactly. If I need to run a browser in a special configuration, I want to take every precaution to avoid using it for anything but the intended purpose. Since I disable my profile and extensions, I get similar cues.

The problem I see is that not everyone takes the same precautions. And plenty of developers accumulate these sort of tweaks and hacks in their daily driver without realizing or remembering that they've crippled their own security posture.

From a UX perspective, my preference is to make it clear when normal security mechanisms are disabled.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be helpful in development scenarios. I’m supporting a team that uses localstack to support local development against some AWS services. Unfortunately, the CORS settings for localstack break the development environment. With Chrome allowing them to disable from the command-line, I can provide a shortcut to launch with degraded security, no plugins, no user settings, etc. My only wish is that Chrome would make…

Chromium pops up some yellow bar with a warning when you use those flags. Isn't Chrome doing the same?

There's a temporary warning.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#725
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be helpful in development scenarios. I’m supporting a team that uses localstack to support local development against some AWS services. Unfortunately, the CORS settings for localstack break the development environment. With Chrome allowing them to disable from the command-line, I can provide a shortcut to launch with degraded security, no plugins, no user settings, etc. My only wish is that Chrome would make…

I set up a separate profile for debugging stuff - you may want to do this anyway since you'll be free to install development extensions willy nilly. Then you can change the theme for that profile which makes it obvious which instance you're using.

I do the same for myself, including an obnoxious theme. Not all developers are this cautious.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of my gotchas (and I prefer to do so from the commandline). I also need a good extension manager and a session/tab manager. The extension manager makes it easy to disable extensions that are only used occasionally. The session manage makes it easier for me to keep tab count down. I have found a few session manager options on Firefox but most suffer from permission bloat and poor UI. Last I checked, there…

I just switched to FF and had a similar requirement. I found "Session Sync" to be a good replacement for what I used in chrome (FreshStart).

Thanks. I haven't checked in a few months, so I'll give it a look.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#727
post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't Firefox been around for longer than Chrome...? It's a bit off-putting when they can't seem to solve popular platform issues. I've been on Chrome for a long time, tried to switch to FF when Quantum came out and couldn't hear myself think over the sound of my laptop winding up.

Yes it is. Given that their team is top notch and their intent has been great so far, I will go with "it's a freaking hard problem and google could afford spending millions of dollars to solve it" kind of explanation.

Another reason could be that Google optimizes both sides of the Chrome/Google webapp interaction but doesn't care very much about optimizing for any other browser than Chrome.

Once you realize that not being evil isn't a priority at Google anymore this explanation actually makes some sense.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone with a domain at home and a working email server Maintaining your own email server is crazy and not feasible unless you're passionate about email servers. It's also a false dichotomy. Nobody with any experience and common sense suggests that you should install your own email server. Use FastMail, use Protonmail, use Office 365, heck, use Google's G Suite. Most such services have import tools that work an…

> Maintaining your own email server is crazy and not feasible unless you're passionate about email servers. Sorry but I think this is FUD and it potentially discouraged people from taking steps to be part of the solution and not the problem. I’ve run my own mail server for years on a $5/mo Linode VPS, and am not passionate about email servers. It was a little difficult to set up but no more difficult than a lot of we…

And you have no problems sending mail to Hotmail, and other more stringent mail providers?

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#729
post #452

Reading this breaks my heart. I have been a Firefox user for almost a decade now and I have good and bad memories with it. Since Quantum release my experience with FF has been nothing but exceptional. On a general day I have around ~15 pinned tabs and more than 50 other tabs open and FF handles it like a breeze. The memory usage is good given the fact that my workload is heavy. On a dual-core machine, I am able to re…

Firefox has noticeable delays and scrolling performance issues on OSX. I have a top of the line macbook from last year, with i7, 16GB RAM, etc. But even on that it's sluggish and stuttery. I've tried all sorts of performance tweaks, beta/nightly builds - nothing really makes it as snappy as Chrome or Safari. So, unfortunately, I have to go back to those.

> Firefox has noticeable delays and scrolling performance issues on OSX

On your machine perhaps. Not on mine. Just trying to be more precise here.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#730
post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really can't agree more with you. WebVR is not a good investment, when you are not even on par in terms of performance for displaying a web page, the last thing you look into is WebVR. This is one of the main problem at Mozilla, they often get influenced by the trend or they spread funds over many different projects ( that range from VR to Museum Arts, grants for LGBT, harassment prevention, Bioinformatics, etc. th…

It's understandable, but don't mix the Mozilla Foundation with Mozilla Corporation. The former wholly owns the latter, but they do rather different flavors of work/outreach and they're not really competing over the same one of resources.

> they're not really competing over the same one of resources.

They compete for the same money, no?

Post reply on HN