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The Firefox Dilemma

blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk

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Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#131

Post by zhte415 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #26
dTal wrote: post #7

>I think about Chrome’s usurping of Internet Explorer (IE), and I wonder (antitrust and all aside) would Chrome have usurped IE if it wasn’t for IE stagnating? I remember when I was younger and jumped ship to Chrome - personally, it wasn’t about using Chrome because it wasn’t IE, it was about Chrome beating IE in a foot race and offering me a clean user experience. Chrome ate Firefox's lunch, not IE's. Firefox was th…

That graph begins with IE at 60% share and ends with it at 20% share. It indicates pretty clearly that most of Chrome's growth came from IE, I'm not sure how you can interpret it another way.

IE6 stagnation was hated by developers and users alike. Growth of any browser came from something-must-be-better-than-this.

FF had the upper hand against Opera, who were still quite the serious contender. I'm sure someone has done a PhD thesis on this, and if not well worth doing on multi-factor influences on market share for web browsers. Very multi-disciplinary too, covering tech, consumer understanding, embedded incumbents, marketing (a big part in Chrome's boom in my opinion).

Chrome's growth came from IE, yet. But at the time, anyone's growth could have come from IE. Chrome did it better and faster.

* I was still using IE6 in a corporate enviornment in 2013. I have friends that still require IE6 on XP in a company because funding for the system upgrade can't be made. The system's not internet facing, not explicitly. IE6 tried to define the internet, thankfully the internet moved on, and would have moved on. FF was at their tails, Chrome sped that.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#132

Post by Felz »

olejorgenb wrote: post #45

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Fir…

About the omnibar: does anyone know what its limitations are? It seems to lose sites I only use somewhat infrequently. It's frustrating when I know I've been there plenty of times, but nothing pops up.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#133

Post by Yoric »

fireattack wrote: post #93
ginko wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at your Win7+nVidia bug, I'm kind of confused why you would expect Firefox to fix this when this seems to be a bug in the nVidia graphics driver.

It's hard to define it as an nVidia bug or a browser bug. You may say it's an nVidia bug because it only happens on nVidia; but then you can also say it's a "Win 7 bug" because it only happens on Win7. Anyway, as a fact: it works fine in IE and Chrome (after they fixed it). So at very least, it is fixable on browser's end. It also works fine in any video player you can think of. Also, from what I can see, neither Chr…

It's a problem of resources. There are simply not enough devs to do everything. So Mozilla needs to prioritize bugs and features aggressively.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#135

Post by Yoric »

mjlee wrote: post #39

I'm not sure even technical users care what engine their browser is using. I think most web devs would prefer a smaller number of engines. I use Firefox mainly for privacy and containers. Is there a good reason Firefox couldn't provide features based on Chromium/Blink too (like Brave)?

Yes, there are many reasons. I'll give a few examples.

If Firefox adopts Chromium, there becomes effectively no way for Mozilla to shape the futures in manners that are not blessed by Google. For instance, Google doesn't seem to be interested in WebVR/WebAR, so there is no way to bring a Chromium-based browser in this direction until Google says so. The same thing happens with compression formats, for instance.

Also, as Google controls Chromium, a monopoly of Chromium also means that Google can decide to deprecate and/or customize web features without any counter-power. For instance, Google could decide to restrict WebPay to GooglePay, effectively leveraging their monopoly against PayPal and credit cards. There are also a number of manners in which Google could, in theory, make Netflix or Facebook or any competitor less usable or entirely unusable on the web. No Chromium-based browser can do anything against this.

Don't forget that Mozilla is also working on a next-gen rendering engine, Servo, that is expected to kick the ass of both Gecko and Blink on recent platforms, in terms of both performance, battery use and security. Making Chromium the only web browser means abandoning any hope to switch to this new architecture, as everything would need to be bug-for-bug compatible with Chromium, instead of following the standard.

(edit) typos

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#137

Post by ordu »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #2

Out of curiosity, before Chrome came along, why didn't Firefox eat IE's lunch? The Microsoft anti-trust case was 1999-2001 but Chrome came out in 2008.

Firefox ate IE's lunch. Really, it was Firefox who begun a revolution in a web-space. At some point Mozilla rebranded their browser suite named 'Mozilla' into Seamonkey, and started Firefox as a separate product (not a part of suite of apps like mail client, IRC client, web browser, and calendar). It was around 2005, though I believe wikipedia can tell the precise date. The result was a rapidly growing market share, I remember celebrating this as the end of IE domination. I was linux-user then and IE domination and IE-only sites was a pain in the ass.

Then in a couple of years Chrome emerged. It was a way simplier than FF, it had no firefox's complex dialogs to customize a lot of things. Chrome helped Firefox to eat the rest of IE market share, and then started to eat into Firefox market share.

It was like this. Funnily that people doesn't remember that, believing instead that it was Chrome who overthrown IE. It was Firefox who changed web to a point when web-developers couldn't ignore non-IE users, and had to check compliance with standards, not just check whether their sites works with IE.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#138

Post by deuzj »

toyg wrote: post #74
dTal wrote: post #7

>I think about Chrome’s usurping of Internet Explorer (IE), and I wonder (antitrust and all aside) would Chrome have usurped IE if it wasn’t for IE stagnating? I remember when I was younger and jumped ship to Chrome - personally, it wasn’t about using Chrome because it wasn’t IE, it was about Chrome beating IE in a foot race and offering me a clean user experience. Chrome ate Firefox's lunch, not IE's. Firefox was th…

I agree, and Chrome did that in one simple way: marketing and monopoly power. They leveraged their position in search and webmail to push people to switch, and hammered the message in mainstream advertising (on buses and newspapers, even in Europe). If they had pushed FF instead of building their own browser, now FF would be in that position - regardless of technical merits (which were minor, and basically boiled dow…

That's dishonest. At least, mark it as your point of view. I was eager to switch to Chrome when it came out because Firefox was very slow. Firefox 3 was terrible in that regard and it never got any better.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#139

Post by Yoric »

Delmania wrote: post #38
cyberjunkie wrote: post #3

I wonder if there is a term to describe the sheer ignorance of the (tech-aware) masses. Sadly, Firefox is fighting a hard battle that it's possibly, and slowly losing.

Perhaps Firefox should research why Chrome is so successful and adopt that? I use Edge, Safari, FF Dev Edition, and Chrome, and I consistently return to Chrome because of the smooth user experience. In my uninformed opinion, FF is losing for the same reason the FSF's products never went mainstream, which is they're focusing too much on their message than delivering a solid product. Which is sad, because I do remember…

By this reasoning, users should have been flocking to Firefox since Firefox 57. It's technologically great, in terms of both performance and UX, in addition to the good message.

Doesn't seem to work, though.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#140

Post by mjlee »

Yoric wrote: post #135
mjlee wrote: post #39

I'm not sure even technical users care what engine their browser is using. I think most web devs would prefer a smaller number of engines. I use Firefox mainly for privacy and containers. Is there a good reason Firefox couldn't provide features based on Chromium/Blink too (like Brave)?

Yes, there are many reasons. I'll give a few examples. If Firefox adopts Chromium, there becomes effectively no way for Mozilla to shape the futures in manners that are not blessed by Google. For instance, Google doesn't seem to be interested in WebVR/WebAR, so there is no way to bring a Chromium-based browser in this direction until Google says so. The same thing happens with compression formats, for instance. Also,…

All good points, thank you! I think I underestimated the level of control Google holds over Chromium.
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