Firefox desktop market share now below 9% • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#401

Post by __d » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:29 AM UTC

depressedpanda wrote: post #331

11235813213455 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I like in chrome is search shortcuts, example I start typing "thes" then press TAB, then I'm brought directly to https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hello (possibly with little configuration). I don't think Firefox has similar things, last time I checked we have to use bookmarks or something

You could just set duckduckgo as your default search provider. Then you can use their bangs[1] to quickly search on specific sites. "!thes test" will find synonyms for you. It works flawlessly in all browsers I use. [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I switched to DDG for the privacy, and a general desire to ensure that competitors to Google survive. But I've found I use the "bang" commands all the time.

Typing "w! foo" beats "wikipedia foo" every time.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#402

Post by childintime » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:31 AM UTC

Coincidence or not, I got a request from the Microsoft Feedback Hub just yesterday, asking me about my experience with Firefox. I found it very strange, Microsoft asking about a non-Microsoft product. Today I read that MS is replacing Edge with Chromium. Or maybe not?

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#403

Post by karmakaze » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:32 AM UTC

There's a very interesting pattern in the data if you look back from 2016-05 to 2018-04 (chart has 24 month limit). Each April and October shows an appreciable drop in Firefox market share. This tells me that the Firefox desktop/laptop we are losing are on Linux and decide to switch to another browser when they upgrade their (probably Ubuntu based) disto.

I myself run Firefox on Xubuntu but stick to the LTS releaaes. The biggest impediment from switching from Chrome to Firefox was being familiar with the Dev Tools. One day I just did it and the change wasn't as big a deal as I thought it to be.

We really need to keep Firefox alive, it's our best, free-est option. With Microsoft replacing Edge with a Chrome-based browser this is as important as ever.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#404

Post by gronne » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:34 AM UTC

totfz wrote: post #398

feanaro wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while. This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.

If you haven't used Chrome, no wonder you haven't noticed Firefox sucking. But a side-to-side speed and responsiveness comparison of Chrome and Firefox is unfair even today.

I use both and could never feel the speed difference. On the contrary the lack of control over browser behavior in chrome is a constant annoyance.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#405

Post by varjag » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:35 AM UTC

but now it has own programming language

https://twitter.com/varjag/status/1069890007597506560

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#406

Post by Silhouette » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:36 AM UTC

feanaro wrote: post #320

eksemplar wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox for development, but I use safari (privately) and edge (professionally) for browsing, and see no real advantages to using either Firefox or Chrome for that. I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.

> I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while. This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.

This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.

To this day, my browsing experience is still worse with Firefox than it was before 57, because so many useful little add-ons have never been replaced or have been replaced only with inferior versions. In some of those cases, that useful functionality can't be provided in the new environment, because the APIs to support it aren't there. I was unpleasantly reminded of this just a few days ago, when the same problem infected the latest Thunderbird update.

More seriously, I am running into increasing numbers of sites that simply don't work properly with Firefox. Sometimes this is because of the privacy/blocker extensions I use, but often the problem persists even if I disable those. Whether it's due to bad web developers doing Chrome-only things or bugs in recent versions of Firefox, the unfortunate result is still the same from the user's point of view.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#407

Post by lmedinas » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

kerng wrote: post #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,…

Unfortunately this is becoming more and more frequent. We are back to 2000s I.E. only websites... :(

I'm afraid there are only some options:

1) Mozilla aggressively tries to be Chrome compatible. 2) Focus on Developer Tools in order to "motivate" Developers to use Firefox instead to develop their apps. 3) Somehow a miracle comes and they gain market share.

Actually i like the direction of Mozilla is taking now days where they are adding lots of interesting usability to Firefox. Like taking screenshots, share/send menu etc... But it seems this is not enough to get new users :(

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#408

Post by botverse » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:42 AM UTC

karmakaze wrote: post #403

There's a very interesting pattern in the data if you look back from 2016-05 to 2018-04 (chart has 24 month limit). Each April and October shows an appreciable drop in Firefox market share. This tells me that the Firefox desktop/laptop we are losing are on Linux and decide to switch to another browser when they upgrade their (probably Ubuntu based) disto. I myself run Firefox on Xubuntu but stick to the LTS releaaes.…

> One day I just did it and the change wasn't as big a deal as I thought it to be.

This is so true, if everybody here thinks that should change but worried about this. It takes just a few hours, almos all features have an equivalent if not exactly the same and in the same place.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#409

Post by Silhouette » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:43 AM UTC

watt wrote: post #356

sveme wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a setting in both browsers. Default is "Start with Startpage or empty page" in both browsers as well. You can always select "Restore last session" in both browsers.

The problem is that if Firefox is getting this default wrong, what else are they getting wrong? And it should realize user state is sacred, I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!

But this isn't wrong, it's just your entirely subjective personal preference being different to someone else's.

Personally, I don't like it when browsers implicitly keep tracking things when I close the application and then fire up some half-baked version of the same stuff when I come back later. If I want to remember where I am, I can easily bookmark some or all of my tabs.

Firefox has had a particular problem in recent versions where it seems to think it crashed on the previous shutdown, even though there was no user-visible evidence of this, and then tries to restore the previous session even when it otherwise wouldn't. That's not helpful if your previous session involved shopping for surprise Christmas presents for the SO who is now standing behind you as you open the browser again several hours later for some entirely unrelated purpose, in a totally hypothetical example.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#410

Post by mkl » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 9:43 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #240

mkl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Session Buddy and The Great Suspender. I have ~800 tabs open in Chrome right now on this PC. I haven't used Tree Style Tab, but Chrome's tab-shrinking is actually better for lots of tabs (up to a point) than Firefox's tab-scrolling. I have yet to try tab suspension extensions in Firefox, so there may be a workflow that works for me there (Chrome is not ideal).

I am envious, Firefox 60.3.0 performs like a snail for me on Linux with just 20 tabs.

That's weird. I currently have ~100 tabs open in Firefox (yes, on the same computer as 800 in Chrome), and it's fine. Back in 2008, I had ~800 tabs in Firefox on Linux for a project (with TabMixPlus); it was pretty slow and unstable, but it worked.