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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

#31

Post by ferzul »

devadvance wrote: post #26
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 D…

I can't easily read dark theme apps. Basically if I start one, I have to closely study the app till I find its options and choose the light theme. (This was awful when I had to make a new install of the Gimp recently - it used to be much more user friendly. I was about a minute away from searching the internet for how to change the config file manually or - shock - asking a friend.)

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

#32

Post by NullInvictus »

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites.

As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to figure out what happened: The developer wrote his code, tested it on chrome alone, and then called it a day. No one booted it up in another browser and even smoke-tested to see if basic use-cases work as intended.

If developers are genuinely concerned with browser diversity and not handing the Web over to Google and whatever they deem to be the next IE6, it starts with having a test plan for other browsers. Testing on only one platform is tantamount to having official support for one platform because you only guarantee your product to work on that platform in so many words. Officially supporting one platform is pressuring your users into a vendor-lock.

They - even the tech savvy ones - can't even begin to make vendor choices when the products they use accidentally lock them out left and right.

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

#33

Post by philliphaydon »

thayne wrote: post #12

My biggest complaint with firefox is that the devtools experience still lags behind chrome.

Have you actually tried the dev tools in the last year? I can only use chrome for web socket support and that’s coming to ff dev tools sooooon.

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

#34

Post by Tistron »

Two things has me almost dropping firefox and going over to chrome:

- It still doesn't remember my credit card details, and is generally worse at filling out forms.

- On mobile, I regularly experience that the cookie jar gets broken somehow and all my logins are broken which will work again by closing the browser down and starting it again.

The only think keeping me on Fx is a sense of ethics, the same reason I don't eat meat even though I love it.

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

#35

Post by tasty_freeze »

Tistron wrote: post #34

Two things has me almost dropping firefox and going over to chrome: - It still doesn't remember my credit card details, and is generally worse at filling out forms. - On mobile, I regularly experience that the cookie jar gets broken somehow and all my logins are broken which will work again by closing the browser down and starting it again. The only think keeping me on Fx is a sense of ethics, the same reason I don't…

FF used to remember and autofill CC information, but about 10 years ago they removed it for security reasons. But this blog post from last 2017 says they were adding the option to securely store and autofill CC information:

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/online-shopping-autofill-cr...

However, the feature is still not available, probably because of nagging security worries. Apparently it can be enabled in a nightly build if you edit a config: option:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Form_Autofill

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

#37

Post by lultimouomo »

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.

I use Firefox on Android and prefer it a thousand times over Chorme (because ublock), but it's definitely not bug free.

In particular, at least a couple of times a week Firefox will stop loading pages on all tabs, like if the connection was abismally slow. Killing and restarting the app fixes the problem.

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

#38

Post by agumonkey »

Sounds like an exercise in pedagogy.. a billion full spectrum users exercise.

I agreed that chrome won me because it was at extreme lean points.

- binary setup to download was 600kB, a smart trick - UI .. was naked and to the point, yet it did show some stuff if you needed it (the tiny status bar that would pop right or left depending on context)

Personally, Firefox only issue is UI lag. Chrome is still ahead and it matters. But not for the average (non millenial) user.

Most people today, sadly, are on internet because they have to[0]. Taxes, utilities.. every service is now on internet, and these people are mostly urged to be able to be able to interact with these in the simplest manners.

The browser is just one more hurdle between them and these.

[0] remember when internet used to be a fun distraction or a gateway to learning ?..

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

#39

Post by Dylan16807 »

ferzul wrote: post #30
mehhh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Knowing exactly how many tabs are open doesn't make it easier to close tabs.

Also it wasn't exactly done as a joke, the number used to overflow onto a second line and not be readable.

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

#40

Post by [deleted] »

ferzul wrote: post #28
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 Firef…

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