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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

#131

Post by hutzlibu »

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…

But Mozilla cannot enforce idealism on the developers.

They do already a great job with documentation, but they could and should improve on the dev-tools.

Chrome dev tools are now in a state, that I only use them for developing and debugging. Built in code editor with autocomplete. And I can debug ... and change code while debugging. And it works great (mostly).

Firefox dev tools on the other hand barely work for me to do some debugging and it is no joy. So no wonder more and more developers skip it alltogether, given the low market share of firefox.

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

#132

Post by brianpgordon »

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.

Microsoft still makes a browser; they just don't make their own rendering engine anymore. Which makes sense because it's hard and Blink works just fine. I wouldn't mind if Mozilla did the same thing. The Vivaldi folks are using that strategy and managing to make the best web browser out there with what I assume must be a microscopic fraction of $500 million/yr.

And I don't share your opinion of how far a $500 million budget goes. They're not rewriting the entire thing every year.

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

#133

Post by ryacko »

JeanMarcS wrote: post #128
feanaro wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

Blocking fingerprinting can cause anti-fraud to think you’re a bot.

As it turns out in recent news, credit card companies sell weakly anonymized information about cardholder purchases so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#134

Post by mmwelt »

avinassh wrote: post #86

For me, I have found Firefox to drain my laptop's battery more (Macbook Pro, 2017) compared to Chrome (and Safari). Once it changes, I would gladly go back to using Firefox.

They're working on it, it seems to already be a lot better in the nightly builds[1]. Hopefully the fixes will make it into FF70.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522

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

#135

Post by fapjacks »

Except... Chrome is a non-starter because it fails on the one axis I care about as a user -- along many many other users -- which is the axis upon which Google has every intention of enforcing filter rule limitations in order to neuter adblock extensions like uBlock Origin, so they can more easily force users to endure advertising. Whether or not people vehemently complain to Google will have zero bearing on Google pushing these changes into production.

We are all frogs in boiling water, so to speak. Consider if the you of 2005 would have used Chrome (or Firefox!) knowing about things like WebRTC leaks or "extension signing" walled gardens or binary blobs with microphone access or injection of executable to promote TV shows.

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

#136

Post by danielscrubs »

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…

Chrome lags on some webpages that Firefox don’t and vice versa. Overall I get a smoother experience on Firefox but ymmv.

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

#138

Post by mcbits »

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.

The most recent financial statement I could see is from 2017: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...

They spent $253 million (45% of revenue) on software development, presumably the bulk going to Firefox. Other major expenses were $66 million for marketing (yay Moz://a!), $72 million for the dubious "general and administrative" category, a few million here and there for other things, and the rest went into the $500 million nest egg.

So they could certainly spend a lot more on Firefox if needed, but it's not evident to me that Firefox's weaknesses are money related.

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

#140

Post by privethedge »

hutzlibu wrote: post #131
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…

But Mozilla cannot enforce idealism on the developers. They do already a great job with documentation, but they could and should improve on the dev-tools. Chrome dev tools are now in a state, that I only use them for developing and debugging. Built in code editor with autocomplete. And I can debug ... and change code while debugging. And it works great (mostly). Firefox dev tools on the other hand barely work for me…

I personally prefer firefox's dev tools to chrome's ones.
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