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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

#201

Post by j1elo »

mehhh wrote: post #20
blaisio wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree. It feels like Google has been mostly phoning it in on mobile chrome for a long time. Obviously it is very difficult to take something designed for a desktop and make it work well on a phone, but there definitely seems to be opportunity here.

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 use Firefox and Brave, and the latter does the same but with a smiley: :D

which is even funnier

Firefox has its problems; most times after opening it for the first time, I have time to input some search terms and _then_ Firefox ends loading up, and suddenly my search blanks out and stops loading. That happens a lot.

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

#202

Post by omaranto »

mda wrote: post #176
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.

I use Firefox on Linux and (current) Edge on Windows, in both cases because they feel faster than Chrome (which I used to use when it felt faster). I still use Chrome on my phone because I can't uninstall it. :)

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

#203

Post by majewsky »

Dragory wrote: post #122
LoSboccacc wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

WebRender is not really used by Firefox yet. They're currently rolling it out to some very narrow sets of end users.

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

#204

Post by kkarakk »

ferzul wrote: post #28
userbinator wrote: post #19

It’s the non-technical users, who are convinced by their technical relatives to install it, who need to be convinced. Ironically, whenever I've complained about those irritating first-run experiences (not necessarily for Firefox, but for other software), the response has always been "that's for the non-technical users". Remember that these users are accustomed to/desensitised to being bombarded with adverts and such,…

Away to what? Where can an upset long time Firefox user go? hardly to Chrome or Edge. There's nowhere better; Firefox may not be optimum, but if you don't want rebranded Google crap, you have basically no choice. Maybe there's Safari, Epiphany, Konqueror: but only one of these is serious and it requires you to be willing to buy a Mac - which is clearly an easier choice than Google for an anti-Googling estranged Firef…

you haven't dived into the rabbithole of firefox forks yet huh. every hardcore firefox user ends up with a litany of these options on hand coz they do one thing or the other well.

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

#205

Post by pjmlp »

goatinaboat wrote: post #200
userbinator wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If developers are genuinely concerned with browser diversity and not handing the Web over to Google and whatever they deem to be the next IE6, it starts with having a test plan for other browsers. I'd say it starts with dialing back the "new feature/change fetish" that a lot of web developers have. Yes, I know some things simply can't be done without a JS webapp, but not all and probably not even a majority, so if HT…

Webdevs don’t seem to have much of a user-centric view of the sites they develop. The vast majority of use cases on the web are “I want to see a list of options then fill in a form”. All the tech needed to shop online or bank or pay bills or book travel or whatever existed 20 years ago (SSL being the last piece of the puzzle, all the rest is just plain HTML).

Fully agree, plain old cached SSR with a little sprinkle of JavaScript when it really matters.

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

#206

Post by cannonedhamster »

timwis wrote: post #102
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…

Interesting. I'm a full time Firefox user as well and honestly can't think of an example where this happened to me. There have been a couple times where I was warned my browser wasn't supported, which is stupid, but it usually works fine anyway.

I've definitely had sites where FF doesn't work properly with LastPass. I've already had sites that plainly don't work at all with FF. I've never blamed the browser for that though. It's the developer responsibility to make sure I can access their site or I go elsewhere.

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

#207

Post by GeekyBear »

brianpgordon wrote: post #168
AsyncAwait wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't mind if Mozilla did the same thing. Then there would literally be no point to Firefox existing as a counterbalance to Google deciding the web's future.

Theoretically they could still focus on developing a privacy-first browser on top of the core engine, and continue to influence web standards by implementing them as plugins with some glue patches maintained as a running fork on top of the Chromium code. As it is now, the fact that Firefox uses Quantum instead of Blink and SpiderMonkey instead of V8 isn't really a differentiator for the vast majority of users. There'…

Given the rise of devices with many cores that are not particularly powerful, technology that moves web page rendering to a multithreaded model, like Servo and WebRender will only become more important, no?

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

#208

Post by klingonopera »

brianpgordon wrote: post #168
AsyncAwait wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't mind if Mozilla did the same thing. Then there would literally be no point to Firefox existing as a counterbalance to Google deciding the web's future.

Theoretically they could still focus on developing a privacy-first browser on top of the core engine, and continue to influence web standards by implementing them as plugins with some glue patches maintained as a running fork on top of the Chromium code. As it is now, the fact that Firefox uses Quantum instead of Blink and SpiderMonkey instead of V8 isn't really a differentiator for the vast majority of users. There'…

I disagree, it's a good thing that Mozilla develops their own engine, this way, when we give either browser some data, we can verify that both engines are doing what they're supposed to be doing by comparing the results, and they should be the same.

If we switch to a single, universal engine for all browsers, bugs, faults and errors in that engine may slip through, and no one would really notice for absence of comparison.

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

#209

Post by CDSlice »

novaRom wrote: post #118
fiblye wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has been hilariously bad for Macs for as long as I can remember. I refused to touch for over 15 years because it was incredibly slow each time I tried. Now that I'm trying to get out of Google's sphere of influence, I'm kind of forced back into it (Safari just doesn't feel right to me). Speed seems much better than it used to be and I can't really tell any difference between it and Chrome. Memory usage is an…

This is probably OSX issue, my FF works great on Ubuntu. I wish more users will install Linux on their Macs, it is eons better than OSX Toy.

Well, since Chrome and Safari both don't have this issue I doubt it is something intrinsic to MacOS itself.

Also, how is MacOS a toy? It's literally a certified Unix system.

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

#210

Post by johnmarcus »

I don't think too many people actually care about all that. People stop using Firefox because enough sites just plain don't work on it, and it lacks browser extension parity. Fix the actual browser and users will stay. Continue being too clever with the rendering engine, and people will continue to abandon it.
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