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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#761

Post by achenet »

lucasyvas wrote: post #722
mozTA wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla employee here. Truth of the situation is probably worse. We are losing users faster than anticipated.

Do you anticipate the losses are due to people with aging machines upgrading and using a different browser? As a very happy Firefox user, I have a very hard time believing it's because people find the experience to be poor. I feel as if the losses you are describing have to be losses to defaults on new devices and people that fairly don't care enough to change them. The desktop is virtually dead for any "normal" user…

longtime Firefox user here. I switched to Chromium recently bc Firefox started bugging on me.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#762

Post by Certhas »

mcfedr wrote: post #574
Certhas wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absurd. Firefox has been at parity with Chrome for a long time, both are extremely mature technologies. Sometimes one is ahead of the other in one way or the other, but they are largely identical. The exception is when Google or Microsoft "accidentally" break their websites on Firefox. It's pure fantasy to insist that the market share of Firefox is primarily driven by technical merit. Otherwise, you couldn't e…

Multiple profiles from chrome is such an important feature for me, I don't know people cope without it.

I regularly use multiple profiles in Firefox.

Firefox also has containers which (AFAIK) Chrome lacks. The UI for Profiles is probably worse, but Containers dramatically reduced the need for them for many (but by no means all) use cases.

It's definitely not the case that Firefox is behind here. I would say they are slightly ahead overall, but which of the Browsers is ahead depends on your specific use case.

It should be fairly obvious that this has nothing to do with the reason that Chrome has 10 times more users.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#763

Post by the_third_wave »

kemotep wrote: post #703
the_third_wave wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "complaining about identity politics" is part of the core reason for creating a non-politicised fork which can take over where Firefox left at a ~32% market share, i.e. it can attempt to regain part of the market lost to Chrome and its many descendants. The reason for Musk to get involved (apart from funding) is to make sure the project remains politically neutral as that would be one of selling points when compa…

No offense but nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox. Perhaps the Trillion dollar companies behind the phone duopoly, the Desktop OS with 80+% market share, and the search engine the world uses, leveraged their positions to advertise and promote their browsers to squeeze Firefox out of their 32% market share. Like Linux, so what if Firefox only has a 5% market share?…

> nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox

It does, though. It may not be directly (apart from a few annoyances with their 'colours of change' propaganda) but the fact that Mozilla now spends a large fraction of its lavish funds on CEO remuneration and activism while the main product languishes on the back burner certainly has an effect.

With the funding Mozilla gets through mostly search engine deals - more than $600 million in 2021 [1], about $1.1 billion in assets - it has the financial wherewithal to push development much harder than it does. Instead of using these funds where it matters they have divested themselves off a large fraction of the development base and are still reducing their development budget while earnings are going up.

[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#764

Post by fifteen1506 »

creatonez wrote: post #749
fifteen1506 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Firefox no longer has memory leaks. I just which they'd follow Brave's BAT idea, or something along those lines. Brave's BAT, while feeling kludgeful, is the only innovative idea in terms of funding sites nowadays. Micropayments => dead Coil => dead (sorry, on a open stewardship) Flattr => unknown, guessing dead So I want to block ads but I ain't depriving the websites of a way of earning money. If they want…

I want there to be a proper micropayments system (hopefully something supporting fiat money instead of just cryptocurrency) but this functionality doesn't belong in the base browser, browser extensions are a much more appropriate place to put this functionality.

Then you'll have to use Firefox because it's the only currently supporting extensions on mobile.

Still, I disagree. Extensions can be bought and sold. It's difficult to track those things. I believe micropayments mechanisms should be integrated in the browser -- even if the provider can be changed.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#765

Post by SkyPuncher »

hs86 wrote: post #117

I switched over after the Manifest v3 debacle, and after a couple of months, I wonder if the implications of using a browser with a lower market share are overblown. I haven't encountered any site that misbehaves, and the only missing feature so far is within the Google Drive web app because it uses a Chrome-only extension [1]. Maybe the ongoing standardization of the web shows its effects here, and using a standard-…

Outside of some subtle pixel variations, I know of a single bug in our product that is browser specific. Even then, it’s kind of our fault.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#768

Post by Emanation »

neltnerb wrote: post #714
nophunphil wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Echoing this. Just bought AA tickets through the airline’s website yesterday using FF and it worked.

It was selecting seats that was too broken to continue, though I mean, I already "worked around" the issue. I tried until it was less work to redo all the manual data entry in Chromium, I usually try pretty hard to avoid using it. I don't doubt that it works for a bunch of people, others have stated things that don't work and had others say they do work, so something is up. Maybe we're using different versions or ope…

That was broken for me in their phone app in July

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#769

Post by taylodl »

croes wrote: post #759
taylodl wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you support a crooked company like Google? Get back with me when the Mozilla Foundation has done a fraction of what Google has done in furthering our knowledge of computer science. Other companies making significant contributions to our knowledge of computer science are AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft. Would you prefer them to Google? Also, the Firefox against the world meme is juvenile.

It's not about Firefox against the world, it's we against Google and at the moment Firefox is all we have. >Get back with me when the Mozilla Foundation has done a fraction of what Google has done in furthering our knowledge of computer science. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

Like I said, get back with me when the Mozilla Foundation has done a fraction of what Google has done in furthering our knowledge of computer science.

I would also consider which Big Tech company you're fighting. Last I looked, Google wasn't cited as the cause of a significant uptick in US teenagers committing suicide and being plagued with mental health issues. I could go on, but in the realm of Bad Actors in the land of Big Tech, Google is actually one of the least problematic entities.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#770

Post by sleepybrett »

encom wrote: post #744
sleepybrett wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like actual facts to back up this opinion.

Fine, here's the one of the last changes that put me over the edge: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128 Mozilla removes "View Image" from the context menu for no reason at all, and a developer (he/him) explains why That's A Good Thing, and eventually shuts it down after almost 100 comments disagrees with it. There was a Reddit thread about it as well at the time, but I'm not digging through that tras…

Why do I care if I can no longer 'view image' but can still 'view image in new tab'? 99% of the time I want the later....

Also this was three years ago, and there is at least one extension that 'fixes' this if you want it.

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