Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somehow this chicken-egg problem isn't stopping GNU/Linux phones. Sent from my Librem 5.
And what is the market share of those phones on the mobile device market?
The market share is low for any new technology.
Firefox on the brink?
831–840 of 840 posts
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#832Earlier quoted context omitted.
The government shouldn’t work based on data, but on virtue. That’s the whole point of a constitution, common law, etc.
so govt should spend tax payer money to support a browser by the numbers no one uses? for "virtue" ? going to have a hard time convincing people of that one
it would be at least a little virtuous to seek accurate figures before making decisions
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#833Earlier quoted context omitted.
The data should be accurate though. Any data-driven decisions can easily miss the original intentions if they're made with bogus information. Looking at browser usage data from GA when Firefox specifically blocks it quite often is useless.
What's your proposal? Because taking an approach that isn't data driven means it needs to be a replacement, and you need to convince people that it's worth the risk of nepotism and bias.
My proposal was simply that data-driven decisions should be made based on accurate data.
Nepotism and bias aren't the alternative here. If you require that decisions are driven by data and you don't have access to accurate data, you should default to doing nothing. If anything, nepotism and bias sneak in when decisions are made despite the fact that no accurate data is avaliable.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#834Something 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 absolutely agree with you. Firefox must stay.
But.
I've been using both Firefox and Brave as my browsers, and Firefox is eating my memory way more than Brave (I have around 60+ tabs open at Brave, and just a few at Firefox). (I'm on Linux Fedora 36 with the latest versions available in the repository).
This is why I'm not using it much, but it saddens me.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#835Something 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.
When Google Chrome came out, what made it stand out for me was their impressive developer console.
This lead developers to switch from IE/Firefox where you had to install a plugin for developers, into using Google Chrome that had a native and more advanced tool for debugging.
*For me this is the key*.
If you provide a browser that greatly improve the developer's experience, they (the developers) will move to use it, making it the best compatible browser to use, which will then make the rest of the crowd to use it because the overall experience is better there.
I just hope the team at Firefox will realize this before Google ...
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#836Firefox is not on the brink.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#837It's worth nothing perhaps that Firefox is widely used outside the US. Monthly active users worldwide are about 200 million, of which about 10% are in the US. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#838Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same for me! I have been always using Firefox as my main browser for at least 15 years and never had any problems. Actually, I don't really understand why so many tech-savvy people continue to use Chrome... Just switch to Firefox, for foxs sake!
Part of it is that there are some genuine technical advantages to be had from Blink-based browsers. Most notably, tab process isolation: one tab crashing (and they do crash) generally doesn't bring the whole process down. There's also UX. Right now I can have proper vertical tabs in Edge by changing a single prominent option in settings, but Firefox is still dragging their feet (yes, I know there are extensions for t…
> Most notably, tab process isolation: one tab crashing (and they do crash) generally doesn't bring the whole process down.
Firefox has been doing this for several years now...
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#839I have been using Firefox for many years in Windows and in Linux. Indeed it is much slower than Chrome, but I cannot ditch it because:
- I need tab scrolling;
- I need a separate search box, where I can install and use different search engines. Google search started being crap about 5 years ago.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#840Nice. I totally noticed that FireFox was nearing 2% rule a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36776603 Glad this is getting more exposure. In my opinion 2% is probably too high. "There were 5.40 billion sessions over the past 90 days.". 2% is 108 million sessions in the last 90 days.
Author here. Yes, finding your comment during a search on HN for Firefox-related refs was what tipped me off to the issue.