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Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

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Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#31

Dropping support for legacy extensions absolutely gutted what made Firefox different from every other browser. I'll use Firefox 56 and NoScript until the end of time before I use a browser with tabs above the address bar.

Dropping support for these extensions made it possible to create Firefox Quantum. Also, I'm using Firefox with tabs on the side with Tree Style Tab and a simple userChrome.css hack. No need to stay with an outdated version just for that.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#32
How sad... I have switched to Firefox about 8 months ago and have been really enjoying the browser. It's just difficult to compete against the giants of Google and Microsoft. I mean anywhere you go there will be messages like "Try a faster browser- Download Chrome" on any Google site, or the extremely difficult user interface to switch default browser on Windows. I really wish for Firefox to succeed in the long run, just dont know how it could be possible.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#33

Firefox is still slow on a very beefy Win10 PC and a MacBook Pro 2015, if you have more than 7-8 tabs open. I keep giving Firefox a chance but not much is changing. Not sure if the rewrite in Rust was worth it.

It's nice and responsive on my 4-year-old Win8.1 desktop and my 1-year-old Win10 laptop, with dozens of tabs open. I'd be curious to see the common factor between the people who say it's slow, because it certainly isn't for most (some?) of us.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#34
post #10

Just my personal $0.02: 1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser. This is partly because other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers, and mainly because (as an extension developer) why would you code for browser X when you can get more u…

What extensions in particular do you use that you can't find equivalents on Firefox?

Dirac Devtools for Clojurescript use the custom formatters api to render Clojure data structures and Firefox hasn’t implemented it.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#35
I'd like to use Firefox. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the performance improvements, Safari still feels like a faster, smoother browser.

Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated.

Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search.

I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago, and it wasn't as nice as Safari. For there to be a point to this, I'd need the same browser in both places, with perfect syncing of bookmarks, cookies, tabs, etc., just like Safari.

Lastly, migrating is a pain. There's apparently no way to import my current Safari session (I have probably 60-70 tabs) or history (I keep everything I visit, going back years), which means I'd lose stuff by migrating and would have to migrate tabs over incrementally. Hard to try out a browser in any significant way this way.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#36
post #26
post #10

Just my personal $0.02: 1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser. This is partly because other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers, and mainly because (as an extension developer) why would you code for browser X when you can get more u…

> 2. Anecdotal evidence, but every time an update of Firefox (and most notably Quantum) is released people laud how fast it is. On my 2015 Macbook running Mac OS Firefox has never been faster. Maybe there are things behind the scenes such as caching playing a role, but web pages load slower, scrolling feels sluggish, videos drop frames and freeze or get out of sync. It isn't an enjoyable experience compared to Chrome…

Really? I'm on Linux and I saw immediate changes once Quantum hit. It runs better for me on Ubuntu{16,18} and Arch. I had some glitches at the beginning, but not anymore.

The only glitch I have now is that I can't use send tabs to push a tab to my phone (but the reverse works and it is fine to any other computer). So that's not that big of an issue.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#37
post #31

Dropping support for legacy extensions absolutely gutted what made Firefox different from every other browser. I'll use Firefox 56 and NoScript until the end of time before I use a browser with tabs above the address bar.

Dropping support for these extensions made it possible to create Firefox Quantum. Also, I'm using Firefox with tabs on the side with Tree Style Tab and a simple userChrome.css hack. No need to stay with an outdated version just for that.

Yeah, I resisted the upgrade to FF Quantum for a while, but ultimately made the move and it's worked out well. The biggest things I needed were a WebExtension version of Tree Style Tabs, plus the restyling options from https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx .

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#38
post #18

All of the other browsers have some other vector to push their browser. Safari, Edge and Chrome are all preinstalled on OSs and chrome is advertised on the biggest website in the world. Even if firefox is slightly better than the rest it doesn't matter. Chrome only exists because IE was so bad people went out of their way not to use it.

Chrome only exists because Google were afraid of lacking control over the stack they use to deliver their content. Firefox was already 'good enough' long before it ever appeared, and Google could easily have dedicated engineering resources if the problem with Firefox was purely technical, much as they do with Linux. FWIW a lot of Google behavior can be cast as an analogy to a paranoid control freak. Net neutrality is…

> Firefox was already 'good enough' long before

Only if you as "good enough" define "with Javascript even slower than IE." I've personally never used Chrome, because since even the first days it already had more "protected" installation than some malware, and that never made me confident in their intentions (and I've never liked Chrome UI) but Firefox has always had performance problems. As Chrome appeared it had extremely fast JS, and only then others "woke up."

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