31–40 of 90 posts
I am still a firefox user...but I don't want to be. I will admit the whole Eich thing, when we was promoted I quickly lost my attachment to Mozilla - they clearly were not the organization I thought they were. But aside from that Firefox seems to be the worst of all choices - the only thing keeping me attached to it is the lack of an open source alternative. Chrome seems to be far ahead in terms of security (XSS prot…
I am still a firefox user...but I don't want to be. I will admit the whole Eich thing, when we was promoted I quickly lost my attachment to Mozilla - they clearly were not the organization I thought they were. But aside from that Firefox seems to be the worst of all choices - the only thing keeping me attached to it is the lack of an open source alternative. Chrome seems to be far ahead in terms of security (XSS prot…
I am still a firefox user...but I don't want to be. I will admit the whole Eich thing, when we was promoted I quickly lost my attachment to Mozilla - they clearly were not the organization I thought they were. But aside from that Firefox seems to be the worst of all choices - the only thing keeping me attached to it is the lack of an open source alternative. Chrome seems to be far ahead in terms of security (XSS prot…
"Back in the day" (read: when the world relied on internet explorer) tabbed browsing was not a mainstream feature. Nor was pop-up blocking, containerized scripting(active-x anyone?) and browsing not being tied to window managers. Times have changed and now while we have diversity, we also strangely have more of the same. Aside from interface, Safari, Chrome and Firefox all offer very similar experiences. Those game changing features that made Firefox popular are now mainstream.
The stats mentioned above are interesting but should not be surprising to anyone here. Google has heavily promoted Chrome and built it in to the android platform. Apple has done something similar with Safari and iOS. No surprises here. Also, keep in mind that Mozilla walked away from an entire market of mobile users. (Source: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=firefox+ios )
Wrt moving forward, what about listening to current trends in the market? Security, privacy and speed all seem to be popular buzzwords these days (now, if more than ever). Why not focus here first?
Users have proven time and time again that unless there is a major compelling reason to change they will stick with what they know and what has worked in the past. With the built-in browsers being 'good enough', what reason(s) do they have to change?
Man, it almost seems like we've been here before..
I really don't want to develop web code in a world where the only two popular browsers are one developed by and for Google, and one by and for Microsoft. But every time I come to a thread that mentions Firefox on this website, there are people claiming (usually wrongly) that it doesn't implement x, y, or z that someone else does. I really think the development community needs to wake up a bit, and start promoting FF…
Actually there will be three Google, Microsoft and Apple. Whilst it is better to have some competition there really does need to be an open alternative.
The problem I feel with Mozilla is that they mistook why they were successful. They attributed the success of Firefox to the openness of the browser and the company and have doubled-down on that. In reality though, that wasn't why it was successful at all. Firefox was great because it was a great browser at a time when other browsers weren't so good. The fact that it was open-source was a huge plus for people in tech…
The problem I feel with Mozilla is that they mistook why they were successful. They attributed the success of Firefox to the openness of the browser and the company and have doubled-down on that. In reality though, that wasn't why it was successful at all. Firefox was great because it was a great browser at a time when other browsers weren't so good. The fact that it was open-source was a huge plus for people in tech…
I don't think Mozilla is naive enough to think that your average user cares about open source. But it is one of their core philosophies and not something that they will abandon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually there will be three Google, Microsoft and Apple. Whilst it is better to have some competition there really does need to be an open alternative.
Doesn't Apple use Webkit, same as Google? Isn't that functionally the same, except for Google's optimizations?
My choice to dump Firefox has absolutely nothing to do with Eich's termination. Or his comments. Firefox on the Mac has gotten increasingly slower for me, since about version 28. Version 36 is when it became absolutely intolerable, where the pinwheel pauses during navigating to a new page or opening a new tab achieved a duration of 10 - 30 seconds. I could handle 1-2 seconds. Even 3-5 seconds was annoying but not eno…
Furthermore, Firefox has been consistently smoother than my near-virgin install of Chrome. It's weird -- while Chrome definitely finishes loading pages a bit faster, it performs incomplete page repaints in the process, causing unpleasant whole-of-screen flashes as I jump from page to page. With Firefox, moving from page to page is butter smooth.
The latest FF builds have been rock solid for me (Win7 x64 with 4 or 5 big name extensions and that's it). I've currently got about 130 tabs open, FF is using ~ 1.1GB of RAM and has been sitting open & running in this state for 3 or 4 weeks with no problems or slow downs whatsoever. The plugin container also finally works reliably so shitty sites with buggy flash code don't take the browser down when flash decides to…
Firefox has responded well to Chrome for the most part, but when Chrome was released, Fx had some long-standing problems that Chrome obviated, and many in the tech community have been Chrome devotees since. Mozilla sometimes gets confused and makes bad choices, like manually reviewing all code that gets published in its addon store and refusing to ship patent-encumbered H.264 codecs, that further hurt adoption and reinforce the reputation that Firefox makes it "harder" than necessary to use the web.
Google made a deal with Adobe to fix up some of the stability and performance issues in Flash and they ship the improved plugin as "Pepper", part of Chrome; Mozilla still doesn't have a good solution for this, though it has a small start in Shumway.
Google built an internal PDF reader so that people didn't have to worry about Adobe Reader popping up as they clicked around. Mozilla eventually copied them, though Mozilla's reader is written in JS, and Chrome's is written in C++.
Google systematically attacked the most annoying things about internet browsing and dispatched of them effectively in Chrome, didn't make excuses about how the bad experience was Adobe's fault. Mozilla is less effective because it's usually too busy with infighting over what technically counts as "open" and what doesn't to get the real work done, or at least to get it done before Google has already shipped the change to their users.
I used Chrome for about 18 months full-time but have been back on Fx since version 4, so I'm not a Chrome apologist, but these are the reasons why Firefox isn't crushing Chrome.