11–20 of 401 posts
I hope you don't take offense but I feel it's hard on my eyes to read text on a black background. I tried to read the article but it kind of hurt my eyes and had to leave.
Fortunately Firefox has a feature by default not found in Chrome, which can help with that: you can easily turn off the CSS.
My biggest complaint with firefox is that the devtools experience still lags behind chrome.
I agree with the author’s criticisms of Firefox. Maybe the new MS Edge is better positioned to take over where Chrome is leaving off. But I will say - I’ve been using Firefox as my daily driver for about 2 years, and I have to say I’m very happy... though I still use Chrome for the dev tools (but planning to switch to Edge as soon as their production release for macOS is out). Safari might be my next stop for a daily…
I would love a Quantumbook (or whatever) to be a thing. It would make for a nice change especially if they build a Linux Distro that is very secure much like ChromeOS is (rogue Chrome plugins aside).
Sitting each step of the browsing process into things like "They open it. Whoa! That’s a lot of stuff in my face." and then giving a much thriftier summary of the Chrome process doesn't automatically show that Chrome is simpler to get started with
I don't agree with this part. Though the bigger point is that not using Google as a default engine is very user hostile - as everyone is using Google. Of course this isn't ideal from a privacy perspective. But setting it to something else will only frustrate most common users. When I think Microsoft Edge I think Bing - and I don't like Bing.
My biggest complaint with firefox is that the devtools experience still lags behind chrome.
Ironically, whenever I've complained about those irritating first-run experiences (not necessarily for Firefox, but for other software), the response has always been "that's for the non-technical users". Remember that these users are accustomed to/desensitised to being bombarded with adverts and such, so perhaps it's not as irritating to them as it is for us. Ideally, I think the first-run experience for a browser should be to open a blank page with the address bar focused and ready for you to type a URL into; but maybe average users are so used to that bombardment of attention and mollycoddling that it would look "broken" to them.
I'm not sure if those users care much about privacy either, which seems to leave the only other reasons to use Firefox being more control/customisation (which is itself slowly disappearing...) and "not controlled by an advertising company", the latter a not-so-compelling argument for the non-technical user.
Firefox is in an unfortunate position, especially as it tries to become more Chrome-like; I don't think that's going to make it gain more users at all, and on the other hand only serves to anger its already-small userbase and threaten to drive them away.
My ideal browser is one that doesn't require any installation, is a single tiny executable that starts instantly (to a blank page, as mentioned above), and is both fast and low on memory usage. I wonder if that "instantness" or ease of using it for the first time might appeal to non-technical users.
I feel there's an opening for mobile experience on Android. Chrome is pretty terrible in that space. No extensions, no reader mode, no eacape from AMP, etc.
I strongly agree. It feels like Google has been mostly phoning it in on mobile chrome for a long time. Obviously it is very difficult to take something designed for a desktop and make it work well on a phone, but there definitely seems to be opportunity here.