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Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

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Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#411

Post by TranquilMarmot »

toper-centage wrote: post #15

It's honestly a pity. Firefox is it perfect but the Internet is becoming worse because of chrome. Google is able to fast track any non standard Web tech and the hordes follow. Soon after, that become the standard. I don't want to cheer for a broken browser, but only Safari is able to stop this madness now. Also, Firefox on the Desktop is really good and still let's you do so much more than chrome clones. But it suffe…

> it suffers specially when using Google websites

I keep seeing this rhetoric, but I've never experienced this myself. I use Firefox as my main driver and use Google Search, Docs, Mail, Sheets, Slides, YouTube, and whatever other Google products literally every day and everything works just fine. I've tried them out in Chrome/Edge/whatever and they all work exactly the same.

The only thing that doesn't work 100% is search on Firefox on Android, but there's no reason for it and changing the user agent fixes all the problems (Google intentionally makes it bad to try and drive you to Chrome).

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#412

Post by arp242 »

ordu wrote: post #308
mfer wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be useful to end users. Differentiate on that. Useful to people can be understood and is a selling point. What is technical merit? Some CS insider form of bragging rights?

> Be useful to end users. Differentiate on that. What does it mean today? Most people want a browser that is invisible. They use sites, not browser.

That companies like Vivaldi and Brave can build successful for-profit businesses on top of a browser seems to indicate that it's a bit more complex than that.

It's like the old quote about Microsoft Word, which was something along the lines of: "it's true that Word is bloated and that most people only use 10%, but everyone uses a different 10%".

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#413

Post by TranquilMarmot »

soperj wrote: post #32
toper-centage wrote: post #15

It's honestly a pity. Firefox is it perfect but the Internet is becoming worse because of chrome. Google is able to fast track any non standard Web tech and the hordes follow. Soon after, that become the standard. I don't want to cheer for a broken browser, but only Safari is able to stop this madness now. Also, Firefox on the Desktop is really good and still let's you do so much more than chrome clones. But it suffe…

>only Safari is able to stop this madness now Safari is usable on less than 20% of machines, it absolutely will not be stopping anything. It's also the bane of my existence as a web developer.

The past few years I've been saying "Safari is the new IE" in terms of web development. I can't tell you how many bugs I've had to fix because Safari was doing something weird with JS/CSS.

IE11 is going EOL "soon" and at that point Safari is really going to be the odd one out. Chromium and Firefox are at least _mostly_ consistent with each other, save for when Chromium adds some crazy new feature that's nonstandard (but at that point only niche websites are usually using the new feature).

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#414

Post by TranquilMarmot »

christophilus wrote: post #128
DavideNL wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing a huge percentage now spends more time browsing on their iPads instead of Desktop/Laptop…

Can confirm. Writing this from Brave on my iPhone.

Does Apple still require using Safari as the engine for all browsers on iPhone or has that changed?

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#415

Post by thefounder »

gibba999 wrote: post #227
eitland wrote: post #143

I have contacted local authorities twice about anti competitive behavior from Chrome. If two - three other Norwegians do the same that should start to look like an earthquake ;-) Same if ten - twenty Germans or Brits or French do the same. I would mention: 1. that some of their web properties (calendar and YouTube) have been intentionally incompatible with Firefox as evidenced by how well they work in Firefox if one…

My child's school uses Google Classroom. The Google experience is unusable in Firefox. Meet doesn't work (e.g. he sees nothing when the teacher screenshares). This seems really quite anti-competitive. My child cares about privacy and switches browsers. Chrome for Meet, Firefox for most non-Google things.

I believe Chrome also has better support for new technologies/APIs thus the reason firefox doesn't work that well. But as others said that's not always the case.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#416

Post by ficklepickle »

pjmlp wrote: post #45
pupppet wrote: post #14

With Google's relentless Chrome dickbars for anyone daring to use one of their services without it, I don't see how any other browser stands a chance.

They even push Chrome when you dare to use their services with another Chrome based browser that isn't theirs like Edge Chrome.

My personal favorite, it complains when it can't update itself on my Debian workstation and tries to get me to re-install it from the web, on every launch. Yes, I know google, it is intentional. That is why I installed it from the repos.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#417

Post by gorhill »

mmis1000 wrote: post #363
gorhill wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The slowness and slugishness. Mozilla has a nice tool to help identify sources of "slowness and slugishness"[1], you may want to give it a try -- oftentimes it's found that the issue is not Firefox itself, but some extensions, external processes, or undesirable modifications in `about:config`. --- [1] https://profiler.firefox.com/

That is indeed a powerful tool that gives you the god view of everything what could happened.(Which normal web devtools definitely can't) However, it is also sometimes really hard to interpret the results. There are so many data there, some of them comes from Firefox internal, some of them comes from 3rd extension. Something in different thread actually chains together, but the ui does not show. I think it need some…

If you suspect the issue is with Firefox, you can open an issue with the profiling data attached, Firefox devs know how to interpret the data.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#418

Post by TranquilMarmot »

xcambar wrote: post #42
nsilvestri wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is already the standard. Firefox usually works, but more and more often nowadays I encounter a glitchy or poorly performing page, which I switch to Chrome to use properly. I use Firefox to not be part of the Chrome monopoly, not because it's actually a fundamentally better browser.

Chrome is not better because you witness some pages to render better in Chrome. It is actually the opposite: pages are more and more built for and with Chrome in mind. And that omnipresence of Chrome allows Google to force their own moves as de facto standards, which is dangerous overall. Firefox is better because it follows standards and it is open-source and it is not tied to a behemoth like Google. The authors of…

Especially with the prevalence of sites that "work" in browser but really expect you to download yet-another-Electron-app (i.e. Slack)

Develop for Chrome first, all other browsers second. Why worry if other browsers don't work when the solution is "download our desktop Electron application :)"

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#419

Post by sp332 »

tehbeard wrote: post #150
eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you perhaps not using an adblocker and thereby being trapped into wrongly believing that the slowness induced by ad+tracking Javascripts is the fault of Firefox?

Let me give you another datapoint. My old uni laptop, an Intel T4400 with 4gb RAM. Both chrome and Firefox have adblock. Never ran in to a problem with Chrome, despite the wider internet calling it a memory hog. Firefox struggled after 4/5 tabs, couldn't even playback video on YouTube or Vimeo reliably.. Don't run into these issues on desktop, and the Android version seems somewhat competent. But I've lost a lot of t…

Poor video playback in one browser might mean that it's not configured to use the hardware decoder. I think performance there should be basically the same for video playback if they're configured the same way.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#420

Post by TranquilMarmot »

rmsaksida wrote: post #144
bluedevil2k wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how they make a minimum $450M a year in revenue, how on Earth is Mozilla not swimming in cash?! How high can their expenses be?

Mozilla pays millions of dollars per year to their CEO, despite the decrease in usage and user base. Could be a symptom of a larger problem in the organization.

Fire the CEO, start paying open source developers for quality pull requests. Maybe in another dimension...
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