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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

#171

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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…

For instance, my bank (Lloyds) has a login screen where you have to select letters from three long drop down lists containing all letters and numbers.

With Safari or Chrome, I can select the dropdown (by clicking it or navigating there using the keyboard) and then enter the letter or number on the keyboard.

With Firefox, I have to click on the dropdown, scroll down looking for the right letter/number and then select it with the mouse. It takes at least 10 times as long as with other browsers. So I'm not using Firefox for that site.

Of all the interactive sites I use regularly about 10% have some sort of bug when visited with Firefox. And this is getting worse at an alarming rate.

I think many mainstream sites not created by actual tech companies have simply stopped testing with Firefox.

(I don't use ad blockers, just browser default settings)

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

#172

Post by ricardobeat »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #78
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…

> I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. Mostly agree. > The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird. I can understand your view. With that said, I am quite happy they funded Rust and also gave a grant to the Godot project to develop their webassembly interface.

I'm not sure it's possible to put a price on Rust (probably in single-digit millions so far), but that Godot grant was $50k. That's pocket money for a $500m org.

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

#173

Post by mamon »

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 little "want a better browser" pop-up displayed on Google's search engine?

I actually do not know what you're talking about. Been using Firefox for the last few years and haven't seen this pop-up once.

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

#174

Post by mda »

brianpgordon wrote: post #132
klingonopera wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Chromium based Edge is definitely much more than the rendering engine. Do they use their own networking, process management, Javascript engine, extension system? It is probably still 80-90% chromium.

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

#175

Post by privethedge »

Can I say please that it's very annoying that Chrome (and everything Blink based) doesn't let you to open a file in an application you can choose and see the size of the file before downloading it?

https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/firefox-do...

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

#176

Post by mda »

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…

It was also an enormous improvement over other browsers on performance, usability and security perspective. People are not mindless drones, they use it because they see a benefit not because of an ad.

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

#177

Post by garaetjjte »

dsissitka wrote: post #91
pacavaca wrote: post #66

It has to freaking stop crashing first. And stop freezing my computer with just 20 tabs open (for 32gb of ram). And complete their password manager. And implement recent standards to make apps work. And... Yeah, I'm still using it instead of Chrome just because I want to depend less on Google, but dammit Chrome is better.

> And implement recent standards... And maybe even some not so recent standards. Chrome has an extremely novel feature: I can use my media keys... ...to control the playback of my media. Why didn't anyone think of that before? :)

Uh? Media keys are supposed to control system volume.

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

#178

Post by AsyncAwait »

bad_user wrote: post #124

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…

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

Not really. On Linux for a decade, fonts have been fine. It's just some distros perhaps don't ship with the best defaults.

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

#179

Post by realusername »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #171
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…

For instance, my bank (Lloyds) has a login screen where you have to select letters from three long drop down lists containing all letters and numbers. With Safari or Chrome, I can select the dropdown (by clicking it or navigating there using the keyboard) and then enter the letter or number on the keyboard. With Firefox, I have to click on the dropdown, scroll down looking for the right letter/number and then select…

This used to work on Firefox as well with Lloyds, I don't know what changed but it stopped working about a year ago.

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

#180

Post by wongarsu »

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.

The majority of Google's revenue is generated through websites accessed via browsers. I don't know how much Google spends on controlling the browser market with Chrome, but I have little doubt that Google would spend a billion per year on it if they had to.
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