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Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

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Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#731

Post by pas »

Brakenshire wrote: post #79

Quantum I think was too incremental and conservative, trying to integrate Servo into Gecko. They’ve ended up making a desktop browser which is as good as Chrome, but not good enough to demand attention. Mobile, where parallelism should be most beneficial, has lagged behind, and parallel layout, which is where the real prize is, has disappeared over the horizon. Servo has been relegated to WebVR experiments which are…

Firefox and Gecko has a lot of tech debt, and it's big. It'd be too risky to just try to throw big chunks of it out and hope that the replacement will be great. Though the momentum seems lost, the WebRender integration is still ongoing. ( https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2018/11/29/webrender-newsle... ) And it's big, it's complex, it's hairy, the web is a mess. So, it's slow and full of terrors. (Shaders, caching, multi-threading, mobile, multi-core, C++ and Rust interfacing, etc.)

The next thing seems to be Fission, which is the continuation of the e10s (electrolysis) content process model into full/more Site Isolation. ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Project_Fission - but it seems hard as fuck: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2018-July/006... nowadays they seem to be stripping out the old Gecko XUL stuff and replacing it with something newer and better: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2018-November... )

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#733

Post by flukus »

littlestymaar wrote: post #720
flukus wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. Mozilla have put a tremendous amount of effort into the "ugly on every platform" cross platform tools over the years, from XUL to whatever the current one is. Developing a native UI for each platform would have been less effort and given much better results than continuing with this tried and failed approach. Their latest a…

> This is on top of things like their recent breakages to extensions so things that used to work (vertical tabs) still don't. The breakage in question is more than one year old now, and most things has been restored since then (including vertical tabs).

Has it? I've got a vertical tab extension that was made not long after but the tab bar along the top is still there. It broke something that worked great for the better part of a decade.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#734

Post by sudomakeup »

dorgo wrote: post #680
eternalny1 wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix and Firebird in a zip file as a faster alternative to Netscape. I am loving Quantum, and I don't understand why Firefox continues to slide. With this Edge announcement (a new Microsoft Chromium browser), I'm nervous we're getting into not a duopoly, but potentially a monopoly.

> why Firefox continues to slide They broke extension support. Half of the extensions disappeared (didn't migrate to Quantum). The other half works only partially. One year after Quantum i still have a blank new tab because a custom html file in new tab would require an extension AND a web server. Sure, it is harder now for non-technical users to shoot themselves in the foot. On the other hand, Mozilla took away cont…

>They broke extension support.

Was this intentional, or simply a consequence the architecture of quantum?

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#735

Post by latexr »

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the reason I don’t switch to Firefox is their lack of AppleScript support, and I’m certain several other automators share that feeling. Without AppleScript support, Firefox is unusable as the day-to-day browser for many of us.

And that’s just one of its problems on macOS. Every time there’s a Firefox thread on HN, I see people complaining about performance or lackluster support for a macOS feature, such as Keychain.

Firefox isn’t losing because people don’t care about privacy; it’s losing because it sucks so much in certain areas, many of us who want to use it just can’t bear to.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#737

Post by pas »

godelski wrote: post #30
jopsen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? Even if the measure is somewhat flawed it's hard to argue that drop isn't related to a drop in the underlying number of users. Mozilla is awesome, but growing Firefox is an uphill struggle.

Probably. Mozilla getting funding would depend on these numbers. And one of the most common addons is user agent switcher. For awhile Netflix allowed Chrome on linux and not Firefox (even though they assured me that wasn't the issue). But I could get around it by doing a user agent switch. People do this for fingerprinting too. I'm sure there are plenty of people that always have it on and set to Chrome. Also, Mozill…

> plenty of people

that's probably a drop in the bucket. really at best a few tens of thousands of people.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#738

Post by mehdix »

It's now close to one year that I have completely switched back to Firefox. For performance reasons and also fear. Fear of Google having full control over browser market and pushing forward their own agenda. Their revenue is mostly ad-driven. What if they decide to change technology in such a way that prevent people like me from using add-blockers and privacy-protection measures against their sophisticated tracking techniques? This fear above all other fears, drove me toward alternatives, including Firefox. Not only I use it and promote it, but I help with development, however limited. I report bugs and invest my free time fixing them. That's what I can do as an indie developer.

Web technology in general and DOM to be specific gives us freedom. They took parts of it away with DRM and pushing it into browsers and standardizing it. I don't want to see this happen for the rest of the web that is remaining.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#739

Post by red023 »

triangleman wrote: post #668
red023 wrote: post #178

Mozilla is way better then the others but still not great. The numbers are so low because people do not care about any privacy whatsoever. I hope the pay the price one day and regret it. To name just one reason FFX sync is prate and secure by default unless all the others who use your bookmarks to sell them. You by default (you can disable it) share all you bookmarks with Google. Hell yeah hi Google I have torrent si…

Red, you're dead. It looks like you were banned some time in 2017.

What are you trying to tell me? Banned from HN? Why are you reading me then?

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#740

Post by leandrod »

internalfx wrote: post #597
bad_user wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “ I am tired of listening to people screaming their lungs out about privacy when their actions don't reflect their opinions. ” Those screaming for privacy, like myself, are in fact a small minority. Also regardless of the topic, double standards are rampant in this community. You’ll often see people screaming against Google but still using @gmail.com because paying for a domain and the price of one coffee per month…

I have run a Zimbra server for several years now, it's a full size enterprise grade email server. I can run it on a $10 droplet from Digital Ocean. $10 is kinda high just for my email, but the bonus is I host _all_ my family's mail. Wife, kids even mom and dad! It's been nice not being concerned about email privacy. Zimbra is a great piece of software. I think more people should look into it.

Zimbra means MySQL. Run for the hills — or migrate to Archiveopteryx or something.
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