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State of web browsers in 2018

ferdychristant.com

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Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#31

Post by Y_Y »

adimitrov wrote: post #20

Firefox for mobile is an excellent browser, and the only one I use. It supports extensions, such as uBlock without rooting the phone. The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Honestly, I don't know why people aren't using it. I think most people just don't care, and just use what the system provides. As Google gets more invasive and evil, I hope that people will start to care, and Fi…

It also syncs nicely with the desktop version sharing tabs and passwords and whatnot. Even if Chrom* was as good as firefox there, the mobile aspect would make the difference

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#32

Post by SamWhited »

adimitrov wrote: post #20

Firefox for mobile is an excellent browser, and the only one I use. It supports extensions, such as uBlock without rooting the phone. The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Honestly, I don't know why people aren't using it. I think most people just don't care, and just use what the system provides. As Google gets more invasive and evil, I hope that people will start to care, and Fi…

> I don't know why people aren't using it.

Like the article said: no one cares (more or less) about how good the browser is. If you have to go install a new browser, that's more work than just using the builtin one, and Google can force every Android phone to install Chrome out of the box.

Also, though I use Firefox mobile out of a desire to not be a part of the Chrome problem (even though I know it's useless and I'm not actually helping by doing so), it's not fast, and it's not nice to use. It's painfully slow, crashes much more frequently than the other browsers, has confusing settings and constantly promotes garbage like Pocket (which you can disable if you dig through the confusing settings, but you can't actually uninstall it), etc.

Until Mozilla gets the performance problems under control (and they're finally attempting to do this with Quantum et al.) they won't stop the bleeding. Unfortuantely, stopping the bleeding is the easy part: getting new users is the hard part and I tend to agree with the article that they don't have a way to do that on mobile (though I know nothing about marketing, so hopefully I'm wrong and just spouting nonsense here).

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#33

Post by skybrian »

Even if some web sites don't care about cross-browser adoption, it seems like the browser vendors do, including people at Chrome who propose new standards?

As long as this is the case, the web standards process is still working much as it always has. Apple and Firefox still have a veto.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#34

Post by SamWhited »

lettergram wrote: post #18

Reading this on FireFox mobile, I think it's the best mobile browser out there (I've tried a lot of different browsers). Sad to see it not gaining market share. That being said, there is a way for it to pick up steam. It would just require a new platform to come a long (probably competing with Google) to use FireFox

That's been tried so many times I've lost count; none of them ever gain any traction. I'm not really sure why, but at a guess I suspect it comes down to Google being able to outspend and already having deals with every major phone manufacturer and mobile provider.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#35

Post by t0mislav »

LarryDarrell wrote: post #10
superkuh wrote: post #4

We're getting to the point where browsers are worthy of the decades old criticism Emacs has received. They have eventually become an OS with many fine features - simply lacking a good web browser. It's a large, sprawling project to make a good OS. Especially when the language of choice to run on it changes with such haste. Hopefully this nth re-imagining of dumb terminals dies off over the next few years and applicat…

I feel sad that through so many years of progress we ended up with multicore CPUs, obscene amounts of RAM, graphics cards that can heat a house... all to power one or more web browser engines.

I bet someone will say now RAM is cheap. :D I agree with you.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#36

Post by gilrain »

Reinmar wrote: post #17
sstangl wrote: post #11

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in…

You say that Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative to Google. That sounds realistic and I hope it will be able to team up with bigger companies which would like to compete with Google (instead of helping it). However, that made me think about Brave ( https://brave.com/ ). What are your thoughts about it? It's also privacy oriented, but it's actually built on top of Chromium. What is even more interesting,…

Brave is rent-seeking the entire Internet and doesn’t deserve serious mention.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#37

Post by tapoxi »

sstangl wrote: post #11

As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in…

What would be the downside of "pulling an Edge" and just making Firefox a Chrome fork with some Mozilla specific features? There's an alternative to Google, Mozilla saves a ton of money/time on duplicated effort, and developers only have to worry about testing against Blink/Webkit.

Servo/Quantum is cool, but it seems to be too late for that. I'm worried that Mozilla is simply in denial about this and when reality sets in course correction will be significantly more painful.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#38

Post by akavel »

SamWhited wrote: post #32
adimitrov wrote: post #20

Firefox for mobile is an excellent browser, and the only one I use. It supports extensions, such as uBlock without rooting the phone. The user interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Honestly, I don't know why people aren't using it. I think most people just don't care, and just use what the system provides. As Google gets more invasive and evil, I hope that people will start to care, and Fi…

> I don't know why people aren't using it. Like the article said: no one cares (more or less) about how good the browser is. If you have to go install a new browser, that's more work than just using the builtin one, and Google can force every Android phone to install Chrome out of the box. Also, though I use Firefox mobile out of a desire to not be a part of the Chrome problem (even though I know it's useless and I'm…

Uh, crashing??? I, like, never actually switched to Chrome in the first place (only using it sometimes for sites that "only work in IE^H^HChrome"), am using Firefox on multiple computers on Linux and Windows, and absolutely don't remember it crashing, for years at least!

(edit: tweaked to clarify)

edit 2: using Firefox on mobile (Android) too, for ~2 years now (i.e., since I have a smartphone), cannot recall a single crash over that timeframe either.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#39

Post by kibwen »

lettergram wrote: post #18

Reading this on FireFox mobile, I think it's the best mobile browser out there (I've tried a lot of different browsers). Sad to see it not gaining market share. That being said, there is a way for it to pick up steam. It would just require a new platform to come a long (probably competing with Google) to use FireFox

That was precisely the point of FirefoxOS. Mozilla knew years ago that the browser wars would come to hinge upon platform defaults. If you want to have a dominant browser these days, you also need to ship hardware yourself, and you then need to convince people to use it.

Re: State of web browsers in 2018

#40

Post by BostonEnginerd »

gilrain wrote: post #36
Reinmar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative to Google. That sounds realistic and I hope it will be able to team up with bigger companies which would like to compete with Google (instead of helping it). However, that made me think about Brave ( https://brave.com/ ). What are your thoughts about it? It's also privacy oriented, but it's actually built on top of Chromium. What is even more interesting,…

Brave is rent-seeking the entire Internet and doesn’t deserve serious mention.

I disagree. They have presented an alternative to the current system of surveillance capitalism without forcing anyone into their platform.

I don’t really love the browser and wish the Brave protocol was available for Firefox, but hopefully we can get there sometime in the future.

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