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Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

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Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#21

Post by ferzul »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #15

I still wish FirefoxOS had pivoted on to Netbooks. As much as I appreciate the tech behind a Chromebook I rather buy a Macbook air than be another Chrome browser footprint. 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).

I've never seen a Chromebook, not from my friends not in a shop when I'm trying to buy something. I guess they're not in the market here - lots of things aren't since it's a physically very large, medium sized country a long way from the major markets.

Who has them? are they somehow useful?

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#23

Post by klingonopera »

I agree on most points, except for the part of changing the default search engine from Google. I do support not using Google, but I think that would definitely be too much change for a non-technical user to take in one go.

If the user thinks and feels "This is just like Chrome" on the surface, that's actually good, people hate changing habits (especially if they wouldn't understand why).

Most of the time, we're asking our non-technical relatives and friends to make the change for us technical users, to simply reduce the market share Chrome has, so that Google can't forcefully (and silently) change the web to their suiting.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#25

Post by Jerry2 »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #8

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…

> Safari might be my next stop for a daily driver browser. I hear Apple’s doing an incredible job with power management and security.

I switched to it last year. Best decision I made when it comes to browsers. It's super-fast, light and doesn't drain the battery.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#26

Post by devadvance »

dvduval wrote: post #2

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.

Out of curiosity, is it this page in particular that was hard on the eyes, or dark-theme pages in general?

The interesting part is that the body text appears to have a 5.71 contrast ratio, which meets the WCAG 2.1 Level AA criterion [1] but not Level AAA. I wonder if folks pursuing dark themes are making sure to give enough consideration to contrast.

Oddly enough, this is actually one of the reasons I prefer Chrome Dev Tools. They've been adding a lot of accessibility-focused features [2][3], and as it relates to my question, it seems much easier get some of these essential details from Chrome Dev Tools than Firefox.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#contrast-minimum

[2] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/acce...

[3] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/01/devtools#i...

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#27

Post by TimTheTinker »

hairui wrote: post #14
TimTheTinker wrote: post #8

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 hear this dev tools argument occasionally, but I don't really get it. The Firefox dev tools seem just as good to me. What am I missing?

Oh man, where do I begin?

- workspaces. This allows updating live code (JS, CSS, and languages that compile to them) without refreshing. Also allows editing and saving source files in place from DevTools, including CSS changes in the element inspector. It effectively turns DevTools into its own IDE. You can open, edit, and save any file from the workspace, regardless of whether it’s been requested/loaded by the web app.

- breakpoints on much more than just a particular line of JS. Set JS breakpoints on particular DOM and page events (including pre-navigation), XHR/fetch requests with a matching URL, and other exotic things. Find out where in the code a particular action is originating.

- hover info during debugging: lots of extended info available, like which JS file this function is defined in, or direct access to variables in the lexical scope(s) of a function

- stack traces that span async invocation boundaries, even fetch/XHR call to response

I’m sure there are others, but those are the big ones for me.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#28

Post by ferzul »

userbinator wrote: post #19

It’s the non-technical users, who are convinced by their technical relatives to install it, who need to be convinced. 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,…

Away to what? Where can an upset long time Firefox user go? hardly to Chrome or Edge.

There's nowhere better; Firefox may not be optimum, but if you don't want rebranded Google crap, you have basically no choice.

Maybe there's Safari, Epiphany, Konqueror: but only one of these is serious and it requires you to be willing to buy a Mac - which is clearly an easier choice than Google for an anti-Googling estranged Firefox user - but still not a likely choice if the reason you're leaving Firefox is they took away your options.

Epiphany took away all its options years ago, and now it's main purpose is to be replaced with Firefox.

I've barely used Konqi, but it doesn't seem like it's any more viable than Epiphany. It looks like it fell out of a 1990s office suite.

(Web browsers can be as light on memory as they want, but since they're not programs but rather runtimes for a specific programming language, they're always going to put a huge demand on your memory. Unless you change the JS programming model, they will be your biggest app.)

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#29

Post by fooker »

ferzul wrote: post #21
giancarlostoro wrote: post #15

I still wish FirefoxOS had pivoted on to Netbooks. As much as I appreciate the tech behind a Chromebook I rather buy a Macbook air than be another Chrome browser footprint. 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).

I've never seen a Chromebook, not from my friends not in a shop when I'm trying to buy something. I guess they're not in the market here - lots of things aren't since it's a physically very large, medium sized country a long way from the major markets. Who has them? are they somehow useful?

I bought one for my parents two years ago, zero 'tech support' calls since.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#30

Post by ferzul »

mehhh wrote: post #20
blaisio wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you tried Firefox Android? The only complaint I have is when it hits 100 tabs, the tab count becomes ∞ which is slightly humorous.

Yes, me too. It's funny, but once I can't measure my progress it's all over. I wish they would put into the number so I can at least tell if it's going up or down and hopefully get it lower. I don't want funny features, I want features that give me control.
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