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Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

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Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#121

Post by luckylion »

joelthelion wrote: post #87

> This raises some questions: why is Firefox usage going down, and what does Mozilla need to do to bring it back up? > How does an average user get started with Firefox? This misses the elephant in the room : the main reason Chrome is eating other browsers is that Google is putting its advertising might behind it. You know that little "want a better browser" pop-up displayed on Google's search engine? That's an absol…

> That's an absolute killer for other browsers.

I'm not so sure about that. First of all, most "normal" people I know don't actually know what a browser is ("open your browser" - "my what?" - "... open the internet" - "ohh, okay!") nor which one they are using. I've never had anyone ask for help in switching browsers - unless something is seriously wrong with the one they have, they don't see the alternatives, and most users aren't adventurous, they don't want to mess with their computers "just to take a look".

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#122

Post by Dragory »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #119
joelthelion wrote: post #87

> This raises some questions: why is Firefox usage going down, and what does Mozilla need to do to bring it back up? > How does an average user get started with Firefox? This misses the elephant in the room : the main reason Chrome is eating other browsers is that Google is putting its advertising might behind it. You know that little "want a better browser" pop-up displayed on Google's search engine? That's an absol…

not entirely true. firefox has solved a lot of startup and other performance issues, but the core rendering engine still lags when confronted with heavy loads, just a scrollable div of a couple dozen large images is enough to make it stutter seconds at time while they load and render, sure it's partly a developer issue for not using thumbnail in the listing, but chrome shows them all with zero lag. stating that the o…

just a scrollable div of a couple dozen large images is enough to make it stutter seconds at time while they load and render

I might be wrong, but with WebRender, isn't scrolling now done asynchronously so it doesn't stutter while things are loading? I certainly haven't experienced any scroll stutter since I turned it on.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#123

Post by elkos »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #11
userbinator wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately Firefox has a feature by default not found in Chrome, which can help with that: you can easily turn off the CSS.

On Firefox Android, you just reflexively hit the big reader mode button and choose one of three better modes (dark, light, white).

That's one of my favourite features. Sometimes I tend to read stuff on line when I'm in a dark room and I either use FF reader mode or one of the darm mode plugins. My only complaint is that the URL bar in my Android is always light and I can't seem to find a way to make it dark.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#124

Post by bad_user »

Firefox has plenty of room for improvement, but this article doesn't touch on it.

1. People don't install their own browser, unless they're on a new computer and want the browser they've always used — people are conservative when making technological choices and when they switch browsers, it's often because they get a friend to install it for them, or they buy a new computer, or install some app that tricks them into also installing a new browser.

How do you think Chrome became so popular anyway?

2. The Pocket integration has been good; there was always the issue that it's a third party proprietary service, however AFAIK it has been bought by Mozilla and I personally like it a lot — I do wish to see its source code soon, AFAIK it's not open source yet, but it's much more polished than open source alternatives (e.g. wallabag).

3. I've never had issues with Firefox's fonts. Maybe on Linux you have, but font problems on Linux are to be expected.

4. Google has the best search engine, especially for local searches. People want Google, they'll switch to Google anyway — and Mozilla might as well get a piece of the action.

Saying this as a DuckDuckGo user ... I would never advise my non-technical friends to use anything else but Google. Mozilla tried switching to Yahoo/Yandex/etc and failed. I'm pretty sure that they know what they are doing and random bloggers on the Internet with opinions don't.

Also let's be frank — Google is a big target. When you switch targeted advertising off, when you switch your app history off in your Google profile, I'm pretty sure that Google does indeed turn those off. Otherwise they risk huge fines, especially now post GDPR. I trust smaller companies less than I trust Google. I trust technology more of course, I trust open source, I trust encryption, but when we are talking of companies, I'd rather have a big target, than a smaller one.

Again, saying this as a DDG user — switching off Google for DuckDuckGo due to privacy issues is a stupid thing to do ;-) And it's not the same thing as with a Chrome to Firefox switch, because privacy claims for this one can be verified, instead of being something that's basically non-falsifiable for consumers.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#125

Post by blub »

klingonopera wrote: post #83
cosmodisk wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though Google is 250 times or so bigger, the point is still valid. Where the hell money gets spent? That kind of revenues are huge for any software company, especially for a one that is just making a browser.

Just making a browser? It's the piece of software I'd least be willing to touch. Even Microsoft gave up and switched their core to Chromium. Considering that, it's quite amazing that Mozilla is capable of not just making a browser, but also an email client, with a budget of 500 million.

MS didn't give up, their new strategy is similar to Google's, so they teamed up with Google to make Chrome an even better spying machine. They just have to change the telemetry URL in the source and replace the Google log in with their own.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#126

Post by n-gauge »

NullInvictus wrote: post #32

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

Could also be down to extra testing costing more $$$ to test and fix within a tight deadline to get the product shipped. I don't think the dev would have agreed to test on just a single browser - more likely a management decision.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#127

Post by Grue3 »

luckylion wrote: post #121
joelthelion wrote: post #87

> This raises some questions: why is Firefox usage going down, and what does Mozilla need to do to bring it back up? > How does an average user get started with Firefox? This misses the elephant in the room : the main reason Chrome is eating other browsers is that Google is putting its advertising might behind it. You know that little "want a better browser" pop-up displayed on Google's search engine? That's an absol…

> That's an absolute killer for other browsers. I'm not so sure about that. First of all, most "normal" people I know don't actually know what a browser is ("open your browser" - "my what?" - "... open the internet" - "ohh, okay!") nor which one they are using. I've never had anyone ask for help in switching browsers - unless something is seriously wrong with the one they have, they don't see the alternatives, and mo…

Google Chrome is bundled with a lot of freeware apps and the user needs to uncheck a checkbox to avoid it being installed as a default browser. That's literally how it got current market share, along with being heavily advertised on google.com.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#128

Post by JeanMarcS »

feanaro wrote: post #105
NullInvictus wrote: post #32

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working. What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site…

Maybe it’s the combination with ad blockers, but there are a lot of times I get stucked in the payment part.

And then I have to redo all the ordering process on Chromium.

It for long failed on Visa 3D secure (so not website dependant) until I found why with Badger blocking it.

But often when the payment system is included in the website it fails (and that’s really annoying)

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#129

Post by kilburn »

brianpgordon wrote: post #57

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR. It actually reminds…

> The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird.

Mozilla dropped Thunderbird years ago. It is now an independent project, financed through independent donations.

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/about/

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#130

Post by tomxor »

Kostic wrote: post #77
klingonopera wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 500 million are easily eclipsed if you compare it to what Google's revenue is... EDIT: It was 136 billion in 2018: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

But Google's revenue isn't only generated by Chrome. And even if it was, Mozilla shouldn't try to chase that revenue. It should generate only enough revenue to sustain and futher develop web technologies which allow people to stay free on the web.

> But Google's revenue isn't only generated by Chrome.

It has been driven by chrome though (by having improved web standards in general - note the past-tense). However the future is looking far more murky, now on top they are making changes that benefit only google (crippling ad blockers for one).

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