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Firefox on the brink?

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#281

Post by john-radio »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #153
Chabsff wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the government HAS to make that determination in a data-driven way. It cannot be based on anything subjective, for what should be obvious reasons. On top of that, said lack of knowledge is a stated goal of all privacy-focused browsers. GA-blindness is an implementation detail of these policies. Any method the government could use to accurately track that information is effectively a bug in need of fixing fr…

Server-side tracking of user agent strings should still be possible.

Yeah, I think the root comment of this thread is talking out of his ass. Third-party trackers are not needed, and wouldn't make sense to use, to discern browser market share; browsers self-report their identity and operating system unless specifically configured not to. For example, my User-Agent string in my GET request to retrieve Hacker News is: "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0".

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#282

Post by estel »

irrational wrote: post #23
dartos wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s still safari at 34% usage. :badpokerface:

Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone.

> If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone

Chrome and Firefox are already on iOS – if they're allowed to swap out their rendering engine, is this something customers will actually care about?

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#283

Post by jeremyjh »

I don't think browser compatibility testing matters so much anymore. It's not like we're going back to the IE-only days. If an application works in both Chrome and Safari, its almost certainly going to work in Firefox without any special care.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#284

Post by lolc »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #110
loganmarchione wrote: post #36

Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down. https://stateof.mozilla.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382 https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60... Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market…

> Genuine question. What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? Nothing, of course. Absolutely nothing.

Their friends make more!

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#285

Post by red-iron-pine »

BossingAround wrote: post #25
dartos wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like a configuration problem. Firefox on Fedora/Wayland is very fast, haven't had it crash in a long time.

Same. About the only thing that's stable on F37. Updates to the kernel and other things have been giving me headaches, but FF and Steam are still solid.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#286

Post by timw4mail »

JohnBooty wrote: post #229
fishpen0 wrote: post #63

The main issue is every startup and small business ties themselves to the gsuite apps and ultimately falls down the path of using and then requiring gsuite auth and often chrome as a whole for all work browsing. It is quintessentially the new IE. almost all my browsing during the day has to be chrome whether I like it or not and that has been true at my last 4 organizations. Three of which are multi billion dollar co…

We're pretty GSuite/GAuth-oriented too but the parts we use work just fine on Firefox. What parts of that are forcing you guys to be Chrome exclusive?

IT staff browser management

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#287

Post by theta_d »

irrational wrote: post #23
dartos wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s still safari at 34% usage. :badpokerface:

Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone.

Hopefully it will force Apple to compete again and improve Safari.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#288

Post by Finnucane »

GeekyBear wrote: post #231
Finnucane wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, every day Google seems to be doing things to drive people away, but it's not really moving the kinds of numbers that are going to make a difference. Also, some of those users will move to Chromium-based alternatives like Brave and Vivaldi, which might blunt some of the worst abuses but doesn't help ecosystem on the whole if you want a browser engine to exist that isn't controlled by Apple and Google.

Alternately, the technically savvy users understand that allowing Google's control of Blink to replace open standards with whatever implementation details Google prefers is to be avoided at all costs. It's just a repeat of the IE 6 debacle.

Yes, which took years and years to resolve. And only because in the end developers refused to play along. If the people creating web sites decide collectively to support only open standards, then Google has less leverage. It kinda worked with Amp, so it's not impossible.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#289

Post by gafage »

loganmarchione wrote: post #36

Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down. https://stateof.mozilla.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382 https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60... Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market…

[flagged]

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#290

Post by pavon »

ndriscoll wrote: post #237
DrBazza wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It should support a standard like HTML 4 with no CSS or JS required. i.e. make the actual functionality on their sites simple to reduce the chance it doesn't work somewhere. You're right of course. It's not really a case of 'supporting' browsers, it's a case of testing their sites against other browsers in case developers have accidentally written some non-portable Chrome only code. This was very much the case in t…

> Developers wrote and tested their sites for and with IE6, and were then surprised they rendered (in)correctly on Firefox and looked wrong But that's the point: rendering shouldn't really matter. For things that are important like government systems, we should treat web "apps" much like TeX encourages: you specify the semantics, and let the rendering engine do what it will. Don't try to precisely control it. You can…

None of that negates the need to test on various browsers to ensure compatibility.
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