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Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

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Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#541

Post by Nextgrid »

scrollaway wrote: post #535
Nextgrid wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security and privacy. I mean real privacy, not Firefox’s current illusion of privacy. Advertising is a common vector for malware, telemetry can inadvertently expose PII or corporate intel and so can their bullshit features such as Pocket that are foisted upon unsuspecting users. Make a browser that addresses these problems out of the box . The enterprise will be all over it and will be paying actual money for it so t…

It's delusional to think that building a browser that will appeal to a tiny tiny niche of users will win by word of mouth over billions of dollars in marketing. And let's go with your theory and assume enterprise will be all over this. Do you remember nothing of the IE6 era? Enterprise is the worst customer to have as a browser. It sounds like you're just pitching for a browser you wish people would build for you. I…

> Do you remember nothing of the IE6 era? Enterprise is the worst customer to have as a browser.

Can you elaborate?

> It sounds like you're just pitching for a browser you wish people would build for you. I mean, just use the Tor browser, it fits your description just fine.

I've already built said browser - Firefox can be configured this way. I'm just offering options & opinions on how they could turn the ship around, because clearly appealing to the mainstream by copying Chrome doesn't work, so maybe appealing to the power-user crowd (which was the reason Firefox and Mozilla became popular) would fare better, especially when it just requires minor config changes and bundling uBlock Origin out of the box.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#542

Post by Nextgrid »

andai wrote: post #272
Nextgrid wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security and privacy. I mean real privacy, not Firefox’s current illusion of privacy. Advertising is a common vector for malware, telemetry can inadvertently expose PII or corporate intel and so can their bullshit features such as Pocket that are foisted upon unsuspecting users. Make a browser that addresses these problems out of the box . The enterprise will be all over it and will be paying actual money for it so t…

If Firefox becomes truly private out of the box, most of their funding goes away.

But their funding will go away over time anyway as their marketshare plummets to zero. Furthermore, competitors such as Brave have successfully built businesses based on privacy & out-of-the-box ad blocking.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#543

Post by Nextgrid »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #383
Nextgrid wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t need in-browser telemetry to see that uBlock Origin is one of the most downloaded add-ons, and it’s yet to be built-in to the browser despite its license allowing it. They also don’t need telemetry to read threads like this one and there’s been plenty of those on HN (and I’m sure elsewhere) and the general consensus is always that Mozilla is letting power users down in favour of trying to copy Chrome. Give…

Building in such a powerful ad blocker could negatively impact how sites and services are funded.

"Better security practices could negatively impact how malware authors and cybercrime are funded."

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#544

Post by lobocinza »

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…

To be fair Google's products are not great as they were. GDrive sometimes does not work at Chromium. You can't disable 3rd party to download cookies. Console is a pile of errors. UX is not consistent. And new services don't integrate properly even with Google services.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#545

Post by Kye »

freediver wrote: post #524
Kye wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably mean a bar at the bottom that shows what's going on. All browsers used to have it. Then it dropped to just showing which URL was currently loading. I don't think they even show that now. Most of what it had is accessible in greater detail with developer tools, but it was nice to have a little summary down there.

Status bar nowadays usually refers to the information usually showing the URL you are hovering. Do you have any references to the old-school status bars and what they used to contain?

It depended on the browser, but I remember IE6 showed how long a page took to load, zone/where it came from (local, internet, "Trusted Sites," etc). All I can find when Googling are old posts on how to fix it when some plugin broke it. I think Firefox's version used to be something you could add, remove, and edit with Firefox's toolbar customizer thing.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#546

Post by paulryanrogers »

Nextgrid wrote: post #543
paulryanrogers wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building in such a powerful ad blocker could negatively impact how sites and services are funded.

"Better security practices could negatively impact how malware authors and cybercrime are funded."

So advertisements are malware and cybercrime?

If the presence of bad actors poisons the well then I don't see a stronger case for non-Firefox browsers.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#547

Post by tarsinge »

soperj wrote: post #430
eitland wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was people pretending to be web developers but only testing in IE. Being IE only made life a lot easier. Same today. Some people think it is OK to test only in Chrome. That lets one get away with a lot of bad habits. Dealing with different browsers is part of what makes one a competent web developer.

The problem with their comment is that they're too busy dunking on people. I do deal with different browsers, hence why I get headaches from Safari. If I didn't, I wouldn't complain about it. I've been a web developer for a long long time. I know what a pain IE was, and I'm just experiencing it all over again with Safari, although they've gotten better lately.

My comment was maybe a bit provocative but you didn't just say Safari had a few quirks (like the slow release cycle for bugs like the recent ones with LocalStorage and IndexedDB that is a pain), you said it was your bane. That usually mean using Chrome as the main development browser and waiting years for new experimental API to be (sometimes) implemented in other browsers, particularly Safari. In that case like the parent said the pain is more similar to the one a IE dev would have experienced back in the day (early 00's, not late) when some IE specific advanced features would not have been widely available on other browsers.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#548

Post by bfrog »

crazygringo wrote: post #347
gibba999 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Meet absolutely works in Firefox, there's nothing anti-competitive going on. As do Google products generally (though there are occasionally performance issues where Firefox simply doesn't provide an API that Chrome does and the polyfill is slower, but then Firefox catches up). But try disabling browser extensions and see if that fixes it -- a majority of the time that's the culprit. With videoconferencing specificall…

It stopped working about two weeks ago or so. No video or screen share, only audio works

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#549

Post by crazygringo »

bfrog wrote: post #548
crazygringo wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meet absolutely works in Firefox, there's nothing anti-competitive going on. As do Google products generally (though there are occasionally performance issues where Firefox simply doesn't provide an API that Chrome does and the polyfill is slower, but then Firefox catches up). But try disabling browser extensions and see if that fixes it -- a majority of the time that's the culprit. With videoconferencing specificall…

It stopped working about two weeks ago or so. No video or screen share, only audio works

Tried it literally just now to check, it works fine on my Mac.

And there are no widespread reports of it not working on Firefox, so it's something specific to your machine. Not a general case.

Re: Firefox lost 50M users since 2019

#550

Post by PufPufPuf »

rishikeshs wrote: post #468

Are you guys aware of Brave? It's the best browser I have ever used

I find Brave's business model unethical. Blocking ads... well, fine, everybody does that anyways. But monetizing on it by replacing website ads with your own, pocketing the revenue, and pretending that it's fine because you give everyone your custom made-up currency? Genius move by taking advantage of modern trends (ad-blocking, cryptocurrency, micropayments, ...), but it's not the "web revolution" they pretend it to be.

If you want to stick to Chromium, both Edge and Vivaldi are better options.

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