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The Firefox Dilemma

blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk

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Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#21

Post by onion2k »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #5

My main reasons for using Firefox are side tabs and being able to prevent tab reuse when searching or using the address bar. Chrome simply isn't configurable enough to make it nice to use for me.

I suspect this is partly why Firefox is losing the battle. By concentrating resources on nice-to-have user functionality rather than implementing core technologies that web developers actually build sites with, we end up with more and more websites that only work in Chrome. Far fewer users care about browser config than "does my internet banking site work?". Firefox probably needs to work on that, even if it means making the browser work with Chrome's non-standard implementations of things, to retain users.

I suspect that would be easier than persuading web developers to target more browsers unfortunately.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#22

Post by fogetti »

Chrome is full of bugs and getting slower by each release. Also regarding how they force people to log in just to use profiles it's pretty clear that we need good alternatives.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#23

Post by fimdomeio »

Crazy idea. what would happen if firefox would also become chromium based? You would now have a browser as fast as chrome but with better privacy features that chrome will never compete against. If chromium is open source other companies could share the control over code right? I suspect this is a terrible idea but still trying to find out why.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#24

Post by dTal »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #2

Out of curiosity, before Chrome came along, why didn't Firefox eat IE's lunch? The Microsoft anti-trust case was 1999-2001 but Chrome came out in 2008.

It was on its way. Most people just shrugged and used the default browser (IE) and there wasn't much mindset that browsers were meant to be power tools - IE didn't even have tabs, it was just a window that held a webpage with a couple of back buttons. And IE felt clean after AOL, which was many people's first browsing experience.

Among those who did switch, most switched to Firefox (and a small few switched to Opera). By the time Chrome was released, Firefox's market share was 20-25%, entirely through grassroots evangelism. It felt like a steady race that we were winning. Then Chrome came along with its minimalist interface, hyper-optimised JS engine, extreme attention to latency, and aggressive marketing from the front page of the internet (which was also growing more JS-heavy by the day), which contributed to Chrome not just feeling faster, but amazingly futuristic. Whereas Firefox was "you really shouldn't be using that crufty old IE, try this new hotness - it has tabs!", Chrome was more "OMG you have to try this, it makes your internet twice as fast". It didn't help that Chrome's strength was Firefox's weakness - for all its merits, its XUL-based interface sometimes made it feel a mite sluggish.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#25

Post by sydd »

I'd love to use Firefox, but always go back to Chrome because couple of small issues:

- Pinch zoom using the trackpad or the touchscreen is not smooth, it doesnt zoom the whole page just elements. Chrome/Safari/Edge does it well.

- Tab tearing is clunky compared to Chrome.

- The UI for bookmarks/history is awkward. For example it takes 4 clicks to reopen a recently closed tab compared to 2 in Chrome. When I add the history button its still 3 clicks...

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#26

Post by jeremyjh »

dTal wrote: post #7

>I think about Chrome’s usurping of Internet Explorer (IE), and I wonder (antitrust and all aside) would Chrome have usurped IE if it wasn’t for IE stagnating? I remember when I was younger and jumped ship to Chrome - personally, it wasn’t about using Chrome because it wasn’t IE, it was about Chrome beating IE in a foot race and offering me a clean user experience. Chrome ate Firefox's lunch, not IE's. Firefox was th…

That graph begins with IE at 60% share and ends with it at 20% share. It indicates pretty clearly that most of Chrome's growth came from IE, I'm not sure how you can interpret it another way.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#27

Post by oAlbe »

fimdomeio wrote: post #23

Crazy idea. what would happen if firefox would also become chromium based? You would now have a browser as fast as chrome but with better privacy features that chrome will never compete against. If chromium is open source other companies could share the control over code right? I suspect this is a terrible idea but still trying to find out why.

Firefox as it is now is much faster than Chrome already.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#28

Post by artificialidiot »

Mozilla lacks the financial strength to shove their merchandise down people's throats. Microsoft used OS market share, Opera used small device market share and Google used web search market share to promote their offerings. Mozilla never had a similar advantage, only technical superiority for a while, which others caught up in a few years and average users didn't care about that anyway.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#29

Post by eddieh »

lmm wrote: post #13
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #2

Out of curiosity, before Chrome came along, why didn't Firefox eat IE's lunch? The Microsoft anti-trust case was 1999-2001 but Chrome came out in 2008.

Firefox was always slow - the GUI felt slower than IE to me - and while it theoretically had better standards support, there were no websites that didn't work in IE. (Personally I was using Konqueror in that era - even then it felt like a much better browser - and wish the open-source community had rallied behind it. But the US open-source folks never seemed to pay much attention to anything that had been implemented…

Did Konqueror conquer the browser? It was based on KHTML which became WebKit and eventually Blink which is Chrome.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#30

Post by dTal »

jeremyjh wrote: post #26
dTal wrote: post #7

>I think about Chrome’s usurping of Internet Explorer (IE), and I wonder (antitrust and all aside) would Chrome have usurped IE if it wasn’t for IE stagnating? I remember when I was younger and jumped ship to Chrome - personally, it wasn’t about using Chrome because it wasn’t IE, it was about Chrome beating IE in a foot race and offering me a clean user experience. Chrome ate Firefox's lunch, not IE's. Firefox was th…

That graph begins with IE at 60% share and ends with it at 20% share. It indicates pretty clearly that most of Chrome's growth came from IE, I'm not sure how you can interpret it another way.

Look at the slope in the beginning. People would have switched away from IE anyway. The release of Chrome didn't change the number of people switching away from IE, but it stopped Firefox's growth dead in its tracks.
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