581–590 of 840 posts
If you care about the web, use Firefox. It's as simple as that.
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What compatibility? If Firefox breaks forms, then Firefox broke forms and needs to fix it. Not your bug. If Chrome renders differently from edge because they decided the default color on .gov sites will be pink on white and all padding will be multiplied by 1.5, then that's fine. Not a bug. Chrome just decided to present a different look. If it's even possible for basic functionality to break in a way where you would…
Testing on target platforms is an inherent part of shipping production software.
I worked on fibre channel networks at IBM. They were all about high touch customer service, and had great data gathering and would debug issues that ultimately were caused by some other vendor breaking the standard. After proving we were doing the right thing, our answer would always be to tell the customer to turn off the broken feature on their other vendor's device (other vendors would do things like inject fake ACKs for large transfers to reduce latency ("acceleration"), which is kind of a no-no in reliable networks. We lowered latency in a standard compliant way by using multiple concurrent exchanges that we put together at the application level).
We did test with some other vendors, but IIRC only at a fairly basic level, and didn't support any of their non-standard behavior. We just used them to validate our own compliance to standards.
Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first . If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. Mozilla focus way too much of their attention on privacy and non-browser related projects. Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and making an excellent b…
People don't use one browser over another because of performance, full stop. Certainly not over 10% to 20% differences. Even years ago when Chrome did have an advantage, they would never have gained marketshare so quickly if they hadn't spammed Firefox users visiting google.com with Chrome ads.
Even features don't matter. People use Safari, Safari is severely lacking in "features". 99% of users aren't power users.
What could get people to move to firefox? Is the only way really to have have your browser be popular is to have it either be installed by default, or being advertised on a page that people use daily? Would be crazy if facebook had a banner stating "switch to firefox now" suddenly
There is another way: make your browser THE browser for power users. Add crazy features that appeal to 0.1% of the userbase. Allow a free extension system that allows developers to come up with features you haven't even imagined and see what gets mindshare. Once you have committed power users who love your product, they will be more than happy to evangelize it to everyone they know. While their friends may not use an…
Blocking ads in Android. That was my gateway into going back on all of my devices.
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Leaving nonpaying users on old versions on browsers with security issues and who will no longer support the latest web standards will be bad for the web.
How would it be bad for the web? If users want to stay on an old version, why shouldn't they be allowed to? Sure, there may be additional security considerations or missing functionality, but there's nothing wrong with a user making that choice.
It results in users having a broken experience or sites being very conservative in what features they use.
Something has to change. Firefox is a GREAT browser. I think a lot of these things boil down to poor marketing. Things like these have to appear 'cool' and appeal to people. There has to be a reason for people to go out and actively want to download Firefox. Something akin to Apple's privacy adverts is how I'd go about it.
I agree. I'm not a Firefox fanboy. It has literally run better for me than Chrome for a few years now.
I switched to Firefox recently and many sites don't quite work: for example the pull request popup menu on GitHub appears off screen so can't be clicked on; the "new post" panel in Discourse is obstructed by the keyboard; FastMail alert box buttons don't work, and many other such annoyances.
It can be used as a main browser but it does have problems. I wouldn't bother with it if it wasn't for the manifest v3 situation
Something has to change. Firefox is a GREAT browser. I think a lot of these things boil down to poor marketing. Things like these have to appear 'cool' and appeal to people. There has to be a reason for people to go out and actively want to download Firefox. Something akin to Apple's privacy adverts is how I'd go about it.
Firefox is also no longer a developer-default browser. This too has been true for years now.
There's very little Mozilla can do about it. Chrome and Safari are big because they're shipped as a default to platforms with billions of users. And the web works well on both of those browsers. It's not an engineering problem. You can't improve Firefox and expect market share to rise.
It's pretty much a done deal, and Microsoft (as well as Brave) using Chromium cemented that deal.
What should Firefox do for you to select it as your default browser? (It’s my default browser, I’m pretty happy with it, also use the pocket functionality quite bit)
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