A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status • Hacker News Board

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#51

Post by Mahn » Mon, Mar 09, 2015, 1:10 AM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #40

corford wrote: post #22

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…

Google has put a lot of time and money into getting Chrome mainstreamed. IE Tab was a big help for enterprise adoption and that made more normal people accept it as a "normal" browser. Most people use Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube, all of which heavily promote Chrome. 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…

> Mozilla sometimes gets confused and makes bad choices, like manually reviewing all code that gets published in its addon store

To be fair, extension malware runs rampant in Google Chrome, so it wasn't necessarily a bad idea per se. Just perhaps not a great execution.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#52

Post by protomyth » Mon, Mar 09, 2015, 1:10 AM UTC

bobajeff wrote: post #21

unknownian wrote: post #2

The comments on that site are sickening. Yes, I do not agree with Eich's views. Mozilla owned up to it. Someone should tell them to disable JS everywhere because of Eich. Plus, Firefox is a community project with more momentum than almost any FOSS project. It won't die. edit: read that in reverse

The article wasn't talking about the browser's development but it's marketshare. To me it doesn't look like they have too much to worry about there. They are still ahead of Safari on the desktop and are still way ahead of Opera. I don't believe Firefox will ever gain marketshare again but Mozilla still has some time to come up with another bread winner before they've lost relevance. They got some serious technology i…

"The article wasn't talking about the browser's development but it's marketshare. To me it doesn't look like they have too much to worry about there. They are still ahead of Safari on the desktop and are still way ahead of Opera."

What's the leading browser on mini-computers and mainframes? Mozilla is not a significant player in mobile and that does not look to be changing and that's where we are headed.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#53

Post by IgorPartola » Mon, Mar 09, 2015, 1:10 AM UTC

byuu wrote: post #46

Who knew that continually ignoring your userbase and changing things in ways they don't like for roughly a decade could have negative consequences? The list is getting too long for me to even remember, but I'll try: they moved tabs to the top (can't even toggle it via about:config anymore), they killed regular download dialogs, they killed the regular status bar, they removed the ability to keep browser history but n…

Funny, the list you provide are all the changes I really like. I wish they made these sooner and more of these types of changes. Awesomebar, tabs on top, all that just makes good sense to me.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#54

Post by barrkel » Mon, Mar 09, 2015, 1:10 AM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #37

batiudrami wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then why spend the time and money producing videos about being open and choice. I am a person that is knowledgable about OSS, free software, etc. and even I don't care to watch them. Instead, maybe they should worry about user experience a bit more. For example, can they make the browser look a bit slicker by default? Less buttons, no separate search bar? It's just so 2006. Honestly, most users care far more about a…

If Firefox is to ape Chrome so much, it should just give up.

(Not a fan of Chrome.)

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#55

Post by corford » Mon, Mar 09, 2015, 1:11 AM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #40

corford wrote: post #22

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…

Google has put a lot of time and money into getting Chrome mainstreamed. IE Tab was a big help for enterprise adoption and that made more normal people accept it as a "normal" browser. Most people use Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube, all of which heavily promote Chrome. 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…

Insightful points, thanks! I guess from all of that, the optimist in me only sees "Most people use Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube, all of which heavily promote Chrome." as an on-going threat.

On every other front FF is either at parity, will be shortly or already better. Plus Mozilla has the privacy card, which at least for me, means something. So... I'm calling it! This is the bottom and FF's fight back starts now :)

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#56

Post by protomyth » Mon, Mar 09, 2015, 1:12 AM UTC

nobleach wrote: post #47

protomyth wrote: post #20

You have to seek out Firefox, so it has to be worth seeking out. Chrome comes with Android, Safari comes with Mac and iOS, and IE comes with Microsoft. So, as mobile increases, Firefox is not a default player. Here's a question: "Why would a System Administrator take the time to install Firefox on all the company machines?"

A system administrator is going to most likely be using some sort of push tool or have Firefox in the default image - if they care enough to use it at all. In all my years of doing Network/Sysadmin (1999 - 2010), Microsoft always told us their browser was the best and easiest to configure with system policies... so the higher ups just bought it, hook, line and sinker. Never mind that Microsoft had never PROVEN that c…

or deploy a package with some 3rd party... but it still takes effort, what are the reasons for spending it?

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#57

Post by Mahn » Mon, Mar 09, 2015, 1:14 AM UTC

batiudrami wrote: post #28

kaolinite wrote: post #8

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.

They've been marketing Firefox with a strong focus on openess for sometime now. Someone at Mozilla clearly decided that openness was their main USP at some point.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#58

Post by lobster_johnson » Mon, Mar 09, 2015, 1:14 AM UTC

corford wrote: post #22

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…

I'm a Mac user, and FF still stands out as not being very Mac-like. The big tabs look like something from Windows (not sure if third-party themes can improve this), the preferences look like something from an early version of OS X, etc.

I have considered switching since Safari has its share of problems, and extension support is lackluster/limited, but the main blocker for me is the location bar having a separate search field. Safari's single "omnibar" is just too good. It provides real-time search results from Google, bookmarks and history, and it's eerily exact. When you do a search, the search phrase stays in the location bar instead of giving me an unreadable Google search URL.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#59

Post by smhg » Mon, Mar 09, 2015, 1:15 AM UTC

ironsides wrote: post #34

Its not about Eich - or, gasp, open source. Neither of those words capture the attention of your 'mainstream' users staring at their mobile phone as they walk down the street. Don't believe me, ask the next 20-something you see. "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 brows…

Mozilla "walked away" from a platform that doesn't allow Firefox. I don't think you can blame them for not doing what Google did with Chrome for iOS.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#60

Post by sjwright » Mon, Mar 09, 2015, 1:15 AM UTC

guylhem wrote: post #7

Unless you want bloatware that sucks RAM and battery, what else are you supposed to use? I went from Firefox to Safari to Chrome and back to Firefox. Firefox was bloatware before. Now it's acceptable when compared to Chrome and Safari. Either Firefox was improved, or wasn't improved while hardware was, and while Safari and Chrome added useless feature after useless feature. In any case, I do not see any alternative t…

I had moved to Chrome, then switched back because I just couldn't stand it any more. Sure, at its best, Chrome is a bit faster than Firefox. At their worst, Chrome bogs down more heavily and more often than Firefox ever has for me.