Firefox on the brink? • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#41

Post by seanw444 » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:37 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #4

>Firefox peaked at 31.82% in November, 2009 — and then began its long slide in almost direct proportion to the rise of Chrome. It will be a sad day when Firefox is truly dead. But what did Mozilla expect? They spent so much time and energy on activist bullshit that doesn't really matter for THE BROWSER.

Activist bullshit, and redirecting the dwindling funds to making sure their CEOs always have a minimum of 3 yachts on standby.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#42

Post by tokai » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:37 PM UTC

nequo wrote: post #19

tokai wrote: post #8

This article is like 6 years too late. The drop has happened, there's not really anything to base an "continuing free-fall" on. Even the articles own data show that Firefox usage has flatlined.

The article is specifically about US government guidelines for browser support.

I know. That doesn't change that there is no basis for claiming that there is a "continuing free-fall" for firafox usage. I might fall further, under 2%. But free-fall is misrepresenting the usage data.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#43

Post by sunng » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:38 PM UTC

Like linux, most firefox users has tracking protection so data is not collected for them.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#44

Post by lucasRW » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:38 PM UTC

I am shocked to realize that Firefox is that close to 2%, I thought it was way above that level. Google monopoly is to be avoided at all costs.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#45

Post by ParetoOptimal » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:38 PM UTC

dartos wrote: post #18

nequo wrote: post #3

I want Firefox to not be on the brink. I have had no problems with it on Linux over the last few years since I switched from Chrome. I do not wish to touch Chrome with a ten-foot pole.

Firefox regularly crashes for me on wayland. It slows down my whole system when it tries to load a page in first boot (but librewolf doesn’t for some reason) the HID and webgl/webgpu support is bad… It’s just not a very good browser compared to chrome forks or webkit based ones.

Firefox on Wayland for me has 0 problems.

Have you tried:

- running with terminal to see errors

- running with a new profile

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#46

Post by coconut08 » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:38 PM UTC

Mozilla has been a horrible steward for their project. They receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year and I have no idea where this money goes. It also doesn't help that their organization is full of purity testing and social activism nonsense that has nothing to do with making a good web browser. At this point I'm convinced that the reason that google is paying them so much is because they actually know that firefox is a failed project and keeping it alive as a zombie project actively protects them from anti-trust violations.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#47

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:38 PM UTC

nequo wrote: post #3

I want Firefox to not be on the brink. I have had no problems with it on Linux over the last few years since I switched from Chrome. I do not wish to touch Chrome with a ten-foot pole.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#48

Post by theboywho » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:38 PM UTC

A lot of people around me are switching back to firefox as chrome is showing signs of cracks, especially with the Youtube/ad-blocking saga on chrome.

Also, I don't think the US govt guidelines are going to have a dramatic worldwide impact on firefox numbers, the US is no longer the major online player it once was.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#49

Post by jjoonathan » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:38 PM UTC

nequo wrote: post #3

I want Firefox to not be on the brink. I have had no problems with it on Linux over the last few years since I switched from Chrome. I do not wish to touch Chrome with a ten-foot pole.

Google finally beat my hands with a stick firmly enough to get me off Firefox.

It was youtube. Not the ads -- I pay for premium -- but the fact that on FF they added an artificial 5s page load delay on firefox plus a bug has lingered for months where it always loads the last video, so you have to load every video twice. 12s/video is too much delay.

Ah well, it was good while it lasted.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#50

Post by BossingAround » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 2:39 PM UTC

nequo wrote: post #3

I want Firefox to not be on the brink. I have had no problems with it on Linux over the last few years since I switched from Chrome. I do not wish to touch Chrome with a ten-foot pole.

The one thing I miss from Chrome is the `thisisunsafe` feature to ignore whatever misconfiguration the webpage you're trying to access uses.

Recently, one of the dev servers that I tried to access misconfigured HSTS, which made it really difficult for Firefox to access the web UI. I fired up chromium, simply typed the magic word, and accessed it no problem.

Of course, ideally, there'd be no misconfigurations, but sometimes, I just need to access whatever dev server and I don't want to waste time on learning how to disable that particular security feature in Firefox temporarily.