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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

#381

Post by ummonk »

userbinator wrote: post #42
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…

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…

As a web developer, I love using new features. 90% of the time though, the new features can easily be covered by a polyfill, and there is no excuse not to use poly fills.

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

#382

Post by toastal »

Silhouette wrote: post #318
Accacin wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, at my place we have about eight front-end developers. Guess how many (excluding me) use Firefox? None. When I started I found a tonne of little bugs just because no one thought to test in Firefox.

There is definitely a vicious circle here. For many web sites/apps, the browsers that matter are Chrome on desktop and Chrome and Safari on mobile. There is now a huge gap between the number of people using those and the second tier browsers, which in most contexts are IE, Firefox, Edge and (desktop) Safari. That inevitably leads to development and testing resources concentrating on the 80% with the other 20% often b…

But not testing Safari I can understand since it's only officially on Mac. Sure you can kind use it via Epiphany and Midori but a lot of features, like Service Workers for instance, don't exist and therefore can be tested with a download. For me, even after wasting time trying to build from source, it didn't seem like the feature flags worked.

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

#383

Post by Tempest1981 »

anthony_doan wrote: post #211
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…

Also buggy firefox extensions that will crash firefox or eat up resources.

Is Firefox able to identify misbehaving extensions at runtime? And alert the user?

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

#384

Post by tsimionescu »

userbinator wrote: post #42
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…

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…

From my experience, JS is relatively portable, at least if you stay away from some corners. CSS (and some aspects of HTML) are a much more likely reason for strange differences between browsers. Another common culprit for browser-specific bugs is simply using browser-specific CSS extensions, because sometimes it is simpler than fiddling with standard CSS until it looks right.

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

#385

Post by csdreamer7 »

ddtaylor wrote: post #166
csdreamer7 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. Mostly agree. > The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird. I can understand your view. With that said, I am quite happy they funded Rust and also gave a grant to the Godot project to develop their webassembly interface.

> I can understand your view. With that said, I am quite happy they funded Rust and also gave a grant to the Godot project to develop their webassembly interface. I agree, but it seems problematic they aren't monetizing that. They're making money doing the things users don't really like while not making a dime of good things like fostering a legitimate free and open web.

Directly monetizing programming tools is quite difficult.

And, as other have said, Rust has already paid off for them with the vastly improved performance of FF Quantum.

I think a better avenue for Mozilla would be offering an equivalent to Chrome Enterprise and GSuite. A paid set of services and managed functionality for Firefox.

Last I heard, the performance issues for GMail and GSuite was due to them using an outdated draft version of an internet standard that Chrome implemented, but no one else did. Offering a paid 'Mozilla Mail' may bring some needed competition.

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

#386

Post by DCoder »

echelon wrote: post #276
TheGoddessInari wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's practices pushing web non-standards haphazardly are so heinous that even Electron can't usually handle general web apps, like WhatsApp (especially) because it depends on Chrome-specific, not even Chromium, features. Many others are the same way.

Can you cite this? I'm collecting a laundry list of reasons Google has degraded the web, and this is certainly evidence.

I wrote up one example that was particularly frustrating when I realized it [0].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ar1qj1/_/egl52...

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

#387

Post by DCoder »

kiaulen wrote: post #357
GordonS wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was going to say much the same thing. I've been a full-time Firefox user for 10+ years. I've also worked on web apps and tested against Firefox, Chrome, IE (and later Edge), for 10+ years. In all that time, I don't think I've ever seen a Firefox-specific bug or layout issue. I saw them on IE all the time ( obviously ), sometimes in Edge, rarely in Chrome, and never in Firefox.

Also a full time Firefox user. Another bug that I believe is actually Firefox doing the right thing: if you make an event handler function but give it no parameters, Firefox will have no local named event. Chrome will create an event variable for you. Caused several "Firefox bugs" in our app.

The behaviour you're referring to is actually a global property `window.event` [0]. Although it's part of the DOM spec, it's only there for historical reasons and should definitely be avoided.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/even...

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

#388

Post by techsin101 »

Ff should just mimic chrome down to last detail but be open source and pro privacy. Guarantee all features that chrome will have as soon as they will and faster. Mozilla has shown they don't know UI, probably artifact of user base and developers being heavy Linux users which is no where near other two os. Linux has lot of configuration, good, but too many steps / tedious. Mozilla should have developed mobile os by now as well. They should have built fuschia.

Pro tip for Mozilla stop focusing on Linux users.

Mozilla could capitalize on its reputation and offer cloud storage and partner with duck duck.

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

#389

Post by novaRom »

CDSlice wrote: post #209
novaRom wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MacOS is complete junk. If you want to get software security, hardware, and system stability problems then good luck. Latest MBP and Airs are total crap. Just go to nearest Apple Store and you can even see how it reboots randomly; or create a text file and chances are you will see different problems as you type.

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

#390

Post by neop1x »

jancsika wrote: post #259

This isn't a problem with FF. It's a problem with the author's pitch. "You want to be using Firefox for the foreseeable future" is plenty. If they're technical tell them FF plus Ublock Origin. If not, install FF plus Ublock Origin for them.

Firefox addons are awesome! Highly-configurable about:config is awesome! Developer tools are bit behing Chrome, true... But Firefox is what saves us from Google monopoly and I am really glad it exists. Thanks to all FF devs! ️
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