Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

801–810 of 840 posts

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#801

Post by luuurker »

soundnote wrote: post #705
bambax wrote: post #278

> I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon. Is it possible that Manifest V3 will help Firefox? Of course most people don't know or care about Manifest V3, but if uBlock Origin or other effective ad blockers cease to work satisfactorily on Chrome, won't that make some users switch? I'd rather go back to fetching web pages from a terminal than suffering the insan…

Unlikely: You can make pretty good adblockers even with Manifest v3, and there are Chromium-based options with adblockers built in.

Can those extensions adapt to new methods of adblocker avoidance/detection and update their lists as fast as they can do now? I'm not sure if they can.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#803

Post by luuurker »

hughw wrote: post #517
28304283409234 wrote: post #500

Please oh dear god just let me pay for Firefox. This isn’t the nineties. I can and will afford it. I pay for Bitwarden, Fastmail, NordVPN, ElementaryOS. Just give me a paid version, Mozilla.

You can make monthly donations to the Mozilla Foundation.

Apparently it's not used for browser development...

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#804

Post by lproven »

Chabsff wrote: post #639
insanitybit wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clearly not about what is needed, it's about what is tested . And spending resources on a browser that appears to have 2% of the market is not going to be a high priority.

Exactly. There are a plethora of browsers out there, and no one can be expected to test against all of them. As long as we go for a "government conforming to industry" mentality, then the cutoff has to be somewhere, and if Firefox doesn't make that cutoff, then that's all there is to it. No browser deserves special treatment here. And this is as true for Firefox as it is for Lynx.

> There are a plethora of browsers out there

Three is not a plethora.

Blink engine, Webkit engine, Gecko engine. Three.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#805

Post by mcfedr »

Certhas wrote: post #762
mcfedr wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's my personal reason))

I've tried containers, maybe something got better, but I just simple, one window with everything in my work profile, another window, everything in personal, it's so easy to use in chrome. I can close the work window at the end of the day, and open it again the next morning, carry on

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#806

Post by wolpoli »

smegger001 wrote: post #726
wolpoli wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever the reason, Firefox does seem to enjoy playing with colors of the season more than trying to figure out where to take their rendering engine.

The thing that gets me about Mozilla is they were doing thing with xulrunner years ago that WebKit is being used for now with electron apps. But Mozilla didn't develop it. There were crossplatform apps being built with gecko.

I recall that Xulrunner, similar to the Firefox UI back in the day, hesitates just a little bit before responding to events. Perhaps xulrunner was too early in relations to computer performance back in the day, or they simply made a technical error when designing Gecko.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#807

Post by Newsharpha »

usr1106 wrote: post #677
iteratethis wrote: post #589

Firefox was already statistically irrelevant 5 years ago. On our dashboard, a global e-commerce site with billions of views per year, it's not even in the top 10. Even regional browsers sometimes surpass 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 platform…

Sorry, nothing personal. But as a 100% Firefox user I would very likely avoid to visit any global ecommerce site. It's the same world I want to avoid by not using Google products. I know I am a small minority, but you don't even see that minority.

minorities matter only if they serve a purpose, it seems.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#808

Post by [deleted] »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #715
Closi wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be great, if Chrome was actually open source, and if the Chromium and Chrome projects weren't run by a company with perverse incentives (see: Manifest v3).

That's just splitting hairs. Chrome is not holding back features from Chromium, so Chromium has everything that Chrome has. The only things it's missing are things that literally don't matter to Chromium users (like google sync, what are you going to do, make your own google corporation?) or things that literally can't be open-sourced (non-free codecs). The point here is that open-source "won" because nobody is tryin…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#809

Post by Closi »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #715
Closi wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be great, if Chrome was actually open source, and if the Chromium and Chrome projects weren't run by a company with perverse incentives (see: Manifest v3).

That's just splitting hairs. Chrome is not holding back features from Chromium, so Chromium has everything that Chrome has. The only things it's missing are things that literally don't matter to Chromium users (like google sync, what are you going to do, make your own google corporation?) or things that literally can't be open-sourced (non-free codecs). The point here is that open-source "won" because nobody is tryin…

Well the closed source bit is that you also cannot reproduce the binary yourself (so we don't actually know if there is other code in Chrome), and Chrome presumably adds a load of (non open-source) code around sending your browsing data and history to Google servers.

The open source version also doesn't include any way to do automatic updates, sync with your google account, or have access to the extensions store. None of this is inherent to the open source version, but presumably it benefits Google to push their closed-source version which includes all their secret-tracking-sauce and allows them to avoid people forking the project entirely to remove ads.

Firefox manages to support all different video types while having reproducible builds (see: OpenH264) :)

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#810

Post by hoherd »

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-…

webusb is another missing feature, and AFAIK Mozilla has a strong stance against enabling it because of the security implications. This is one of the only reasons I keep a chrome-ish browser installed.
Post reply on HN