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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

#291

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

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…

One of the biggest issues with Firefox for me has been the U2F support - because they came so late to that party and so many of the web sites that do support U2F gate it by user agent instead of feature detection, because Firefox was so slow on the uptake, they made a lot of problems for everyone and set back one of the better security standards.

I also have a big issue with their handling of webm/webp. There was one single guy at Mozilla killing that for years - may still be - despite heavy demand for support.

Both were really disheartening because it showed that Mozilla had lost its fight and had become so complacent that it didn’t even feel the need to match its competitors much less try to lead.

On the flip side Chrome has now become so comfortable with their position that their users are more of an annoyance, which lets them do very unpopular things like pinching off all of the ad blockers. This is where Mozilla could make a comeback because I think a lot of people (myself included) would take another look at Firefox if that is what it took to keep ublock and ghostery functioning.

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

#292

Post by ipozgaj »

Manifest V3 and killing web.request API were the reasons that finally convinced me to go back to Firefox. Almost a month later, I didn’t find a single thing that would make me go back to Chrome.

My main complaint about fresh Firefox installations is that it takes a lot of time to fine tune everything. Every single time I have spend hours changing settings in about:config, from disabling telemetry, Pocket, changing networking/DNS settings, pipelining etc. Vanilla installation is just not well optimized.

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

#293

Post by muizelaar »

ipozgaj wrote: post #292

Manifest V3 and killing web.request API were the reasons that finally convinced me to go back to Firefox. Almost a month later, I didn’t find a single thing that would make me go back to Chrome. My main complaint about fresh Firefox installations is that it takes a lot of time to fine tune everything. Every single time I have spend hours changing settings in about:config, from disabling telemetry, Pocket, changing ne…

Do the changes to pipelining settings to have a noticeable effect?

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

#294

Post by jcranberry »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #260
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…

I don't remember many times that I encountered Firefox-specific web bugs. I've had bugs where the site doesn't work in Firefox but works in Chrome, but as far as I can tell, those were always caused by the aggressive privacy settings I use in Firefox (whereas the Chrome profile is mostly default). I'm not particularly concerned with the article's complaint about onboarding. The problem is that Firefox is simply sligh…

I don't have this experience at all with mobile firefox. I find it faster and with better UX.

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

#295

Post by grosswait »

Medicalidiot wrote: post #223
torben-friis wrote: post #215

Everyone's talking about what Firefox should do to beat chrome, and meanwhile here I am still suffering the bug that makes it unusable for many MacBooks with retina screens set to "more space". Start Firefox and fans are blaring in seconds, hundreds of reports, years of waiting and no solution... Maybe making it usable in one of the most common devices for devs would be a start, I've got a full building of coworkers…

Firefox is a dumpster fire on Mac. No pinch to zoom? Whatever. Scrolling issues? Whatever. Lighting up my CPU to the point it's noticeably warm on idle? Not cool. Having 60% of the battery life as Chrome and 50% of Safari? Unacceptable. Simply idling Firefox on my Mac would use almost the same amount of battery as actively browsing Safari. I love Firefox on my home Linux desktop, but that's as far as my love goes at…

Wierd. I've been using Firefox Quantum Dev Edition on MBP for a few years now and it consistently uses less CPU and RAM than Chrome, with way too many tabs, and consequently better battery life by far.

Power usage still lags behind Safari, but at least it doesn't give me the spinning beachball for 30 seconds on every other new tab after 3 hours of browsing with tons of tabs.

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

#296

Post by jcranmer »

kilburn wrote: post #129
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…

> The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird. Mozilla dropped Thunderbird years ago. It is now an independent project, financed through independent donations. https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/about/

Half-true. Thunderbird is still a Mozilla project, relying on Mozilla to own its trademarks and other legal issues, as well as for all of the infrastructure (source code hosting, issue tracking, continuous integration, etc.).

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

#297

Post by ipozgaj »

muizelaar wrote: post #293
ipozgaj wrote: post #292

Manifest V3 and killing web.request API were the reasons that finally convinced me to go back to Firefox. Almost a month later, I didn’t find a single thing that would make me go back to Chrome. My main complaint about fresh Firefox installations is that it takes a lot of time to fine tune everything. Every single time I have spend hours changing settings in about:config, from disabling telemetry, Pocket, changing ne…

Do the changes to pipelining settings to have a noticeable effect?

Yes, a small but measurable improvement. The biggest perf bump you can get is probably enabling various prefetching, but most of time you are doing a performance/privacy tradeoff (e.g. enabling DNS prefetching)

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

#298

Post by cronix »

FF needs a google sandbox like the facebook one. I'm tired of sites knowing who I am, showing my picture and name and asking if I want to sign in with my google profile, when I get to their site that I've never been to before. I just hit the back button and don't browse those sites, but it's really annoying google tracking you everywhere and in your face about it.

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

#299

Post by woranl »

If Firefox wants to beat Chrome, it has to lead on the technical front and focus on the developer communities. Developers won't wait for you to implement a feature (i.e. Filesystem API, custom scrollbar styling, etc...). Developers won't care about your political stand. When a critical feature already existed in Chrome, they will simply move on without you; while at the same time, bringing their users with them.

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

#300

Post by jcranberry »

mcbits wrote: post #138
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.

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…

>General and administrative expenses pertain to operation expenses rather than to expenses that can be directly related to the production of any goods or services, including rent, utilities, insurance, and managerial salaries....Examples of general and administrative expenses include building rent, consultant fees, depreciation on office equipment, insurance, supplies, subscriptions, and utilities. Salary and benefits attributable to corporate management, as well as any legal staff, are also classified as general and administrative expenses.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/general-and-administrat...

Doesn't sound 'dubious' to me.

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