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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

#181

Post by quantummkv »

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…

Let me tell you about a fascinating anecdote that happened to me a few years ago. My grandfather bought a new laptop. I set it up with firefox and saved his common sites (gmail, facebook, etc) to the new tab page so that he dosen't have to do anything else to open them.

A month later I get a call from him asking about why he is unable to find gmail and facebook. What happened is that my grandpa ended up with google chrome on his machine, which obviously did not have the pinned sites on the front page.

Here's the real kicker - He does not know the difference between about "firefox" and "chrome" and browsers, nor he did not install any other app that bundled google chrome with it. He did not go around adventuring with his browsers.

He was literally baited by google into installing chrome in a completely sneaky and underhanded way. How? Through the front page ads.

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

#182

Post by benzoate »

tambre wrote: post #170
hazz99 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "dev" Drop those apostrophes - a web developer is a completely valid, skilled profession. Web apps unequivocally compete with native apps, that is a fact. I prefer the Slack web client to the native version. I use Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word. I use Google Drive, iCloud, Google Photos etc. instead of my own harddrive. To think that web apps don't compete with native apps is simply untrue.

> I prefer the Slack web client to the native version. Slack doesn't have a native version, does it? They have a desktop client, but that's just the web version wrapped inside Electron.

The iOS and iPad apps are native, as far as I can gather, and there are differences in how the conversations are laid out (e.g. date separators).

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

#183

Post by brianpgordon »

mda wrote: post #174
brianpgordon wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rendering/layout engine is an admittedly sloppy term referring to the whole stack, except for the JavaScript engine.

I think my point is still valid, that Microsoft hasn't given up on their browser, just most of the technology underlying it - which their users don't care about. The fact that Edge is a pretty decent epub reader (for now... https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/microsoft-edge/2...) isn't necessarily tied to the fact that it's EdgeHTML based. If they wanted to, Microsoft could implement the same feature set on top of Chromium.

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

#184

Post by Razengan »

On macOS, I've never used Chrome unless I needed to use some specific addon. Safari just works better, especially if you also have an iPhone/iPad, and takes fewer system resources.

Firefox just has to provide the strengths of Safari on Windows and that would be good enough.

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

#185

Post by frutiger »

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…

It’s likely that we visit vastly different corners of the internet. As a full time Safari user I can’t remember the last time I had such an issue.

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

#186

Post by fauigerzigerk »

realusername wrote: post #179
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's some sort of anti-keylogger pattern that Lloyds are using. The select options all look like this:

   c
I suspect the nbsp is what blocks the usual keyboard behaviour on Firefox but not on Chrome.

This is quite strange, because it could mean that the anti-keylogger feature only works as intended with Firefox but not with Chrome.

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

#187

Post by tambre »

garaetjjte wrote: post #177
dsissitka wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Volume controls aren't the only type of media keys. There's also pause, backwards, forwards and others. Most of them don't make much sense in the context of the OS, so applications need custom handling for them.

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

#188

Post by nailer »

nailer wrote: post #55

I'm voting for Edge. Chromium, but with all the Google shit ripped out, a massive privacy dashboard, responsive developers, popular rendering engine, not ad supported. There's telemetry so Microsoft knotter if it works (which you may not like and I get it) but that's it.

'know' not 'knotter'. Odd HN doesn't seem to agree, but:

Firefox relies on Google for revenue. Edge doesn't.

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

#189

Post by mths »

xioxox wrote: post #70
mehhh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Firefox Android? The only complaint I have is when it hits 100 tabs, the tab count becomes ∞ which is slightly humorous.

I mostly use Opera on mobile, as it's the only browser I've found that can properly scale and reflow text.

Many years later, still nice to come across this kinda comment. :)

It had actually been taken out of scope when I unwittingly started working on it. I had enough success within the first week or so that I managed to convince my manager that we should bring it into scope again for the initial release of the Chromium-based browser.

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