Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#151

Post by speeder » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 12:59 PM UTC

To me that is not good. Firefox just suck.

I insisted on Firefox for a while because Google hegemony but in the end I switched to brave.

1. Firefox often loses settings

2. Also it is really, really bad at saving your session. After losing important tabs I ignited that but...

3. After painstakingly preparing a bunch of docked tabs, it lost these too.

4. Frequent interface changes, often for the worse (to be honest my favourite interface was firefox 2.0)

5. It often breaks extensions too, this is felt heavily on Thunderbird where I have to often teach my family all over again how to do what they want or have to code more extensions myself because some critical extension does not work anymore.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#152

Post by GuB-42 » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 1:00 PM UTC

NoboruWataya wrote: post #103

It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It s…

> Finally, and this is a bit of a tangent, but I've never quite understood why Mozilla got such a hard time from users about telemetry.

That's the consequence of marketing themselves as "privacy first". Many people use Firefox because they don't want to be tracked, and therefore, any tiny bit of tracking/telemetry will be frowned upon. Google makes no such claim with Chrome, in fact, it makes it pretty clear that it tracks you.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#153

Post by K0nserv » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 1:00 PM UTC

I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it.

Two things that I think are worth calling out:

1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms.

2. Why it's worth caring about this at all? So what if Chromium is the only engine, it would make things easier for developers after all. To this I say, go read some of the discussions in standard bodies(for example about FLoC). Engineers from Apple and Mozilla are largely our bastion against Google's harmful proposals for the web. Pushback from Apple and Mozilla are only relevant as long as they have market share to speak of. The recent lawsuit against Google(summary[0]) by many US states should be extremely worrying to anyone that cares about the open web and it should make handing over any more control to Google a terrifying prospect.

Mozilla maintains a list[1] of their positions on various standard suggestions that is also a useful resource.

0: https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205393819534131...

1: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#154

Post by yosito » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 1:01 PM UTC

If there is any validity to crypto and DAO governance, someone would start a DAO to buy Mozilla and run the org in a decentralized way. Why are people messing around with buying copies of the constitution and NBA teams?

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#155

Post by generalizations » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 1:02 PM UTC

Jnr wrote: post #44

vvoyer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The true reasons Firefox lost market share I would say: The true reasons Firefox lost market share is because we, developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox because it was safer & faster (way way faster). And we never came back from it. Performance is a feature.

I agree with this opinion. When Chrome came out, it was way better. Now I don't really see big difference in performance, they have similar extensions, frequent updates, sync, etc. I prefer Firefox but I don't really need to install it on family computers because whatever browser they use is probably good enough.

I recently moved back to chromium from Firefox. FF tended to waste a lot more cpu; and, I tend not to restart my machines for days on end, and those memory leaks were killer.

Chromium is just much better built.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#156

Post by akagusu » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 1:04 PM UTC

mepian wrote: post #136

akagusu wrote: post #130

The real problem of Firefox is one that nobody cares about: distribution. Let's say Firefox is the most advanced browser of the universe. How can you get people to install Firefox? Chrome has the advantage here because it is preinstalled in every Android phone and Android has more than 90% market share. The second advantage Chrome has is that it cannot be uninstalled from Android. The fact that Android phones have a…

Nobody cares about? Mozilla tried to solve this exact problem with Boot2Gecko/FirefoxOS phones and failed.

Users don't care.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#157

Post by jefftk » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 1:04 PM UTC

bluedays wrote: post #131

NoboruWataya wrote: post #103

It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It s…

Has Mozilla explained whether or not they are not handing your data over to Google?

Which data are you talking about?

The only thing I know of that's similar to that is how Mozilla has Google Analytics on some pages as part of the Firefox interface, but there they have a contract restricting how the data is used: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#158

Post by cout » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 1:06 PM UTC

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #81

samwillis wrote: post #65

Firefox is compromised by the fact it’s core active users are also its largest liability. It’s the innovators dilemma. They want it to (more or less) stay the same and not move forward and make changes to compete with Chrome. Whereas for them to achieve a larger market share it needs a radical overhaul. Really what Mozilla need to do is build a “new browser” called something different and put their weight behind that…

I use Firefox for the obvious reasons, but I desperately want it to be as polished as Chrome, which it is a far cry from, especially on Android.

What makes Firefox seem less polished to you than chrome? When I use chrome, the feeling I get is one of standing in an unfurnished office space with white walls and few windows. To me, that is the opposite of polished.

Firefox in comparison feels like being in a grand old house that was built before plumbing and electricity. You can tell that it used to be beautiful and polished, but the luster has faded over time.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#159

Post by jerieljan » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 1:06 PM UTC

speeder wrote: post #151

To me that is not good. Firefox just suck. I insisted on Firefox for a while because Google hegemony but in the end I switched to brave. 1. Firefox often loses settings 2. Also it is really, really bad at saving your session. After losing important tabs I ignited that but... 3. After painstakingly preparing a bunch of docked tabs, it lost these too. 4. Frequent interface changes, often for the worse (to be honest my…

Mind if I ask when you've last used Firefox?

I've had these problems before (on rare occasions) but ever since Firefox did its Quantum leap, these issues were pretty much resolved.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#160

Post by akagusu » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

DeathArrow wrote: post #143

akagusu wrote: post #130

The real problem of Firefox is one that nobody cares about: distribution. Let's say Firefox is the most advanced browser of the universe. How can you get people to install Firefox? Chrome has the advantage here because it is preinstalled in every Android phone and Android has more than 90% market share. The second advantage Chrome has is that it cannot be uninstalled from Android. The fact that Android phones have a…

To me some of the things you mention sound like anticompetitive practices from behalf of Google.

Microsoft used these same anti competitive practices with Windows and Internet Explorer and they got an antitrust lawsuit.