Firefox is no longer just a browser. It's a brand. The gecko engine needs promoting; not Firefox any longer. The name confusion is going to destroy any hope, IMHO.
Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
621–630 of 675 posts
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody cares about? Mozilla tried to solve this exact problem with Boot2Gecko/FirefoxOS phones and failed.
Did it really fail? The fork, KaiOS, seems to do pretty well: https://www.kaiostech.com/company/our-story/ They claim that they are on 160 million devices. And based on this: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity Firefox has about 220 million users at the moment. So, I wouldn't say that FirefoxOS failed, it just failed in their hand.
>They claim that they are on 160 million devices.
How many of those are active devices?
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#623I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it. Two things that I think are worth calling out: 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance…
> Engineers from Apple and Mozilla are largely our bastion against Google's harmful proposals for the web. Brave also deserves a mention. As long as Brave exists in its current form, there will be a version of Chromium without Google’s “bad” stuff.
Does Vivaldi deserve a mention here alongside Brave?
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they're going to be paying developers to do it they'd need an expectation of a stronger ROI than their other efforts. I wonder if the size of the macOS automation community is large enough to make much of an impact on their market share. Would you estimate they'd gain hundreds of users? Thousands? Tens-of-thousands? If they're relying on volunteers then they'd need a few folks with the right set of skills and a mo…
> I wonder if the size of the macOS automation community is large enough to make much of an impact on their market share. The automation communit ies (plural) create tools for themselves and for others . That’s the important bit. It’s common for non-coders to resort to those communities (which can be as simple as a subreddit) to achieve a simple recurring task. If they use Firefox, they get turned away from it becaus…
> Not only do those developers abandon Firefox, so do all their users.
Noted. The underlying question stands: what is the size of this (combined) community and is it large enough to make a meaningful impact on Firefox's market share? Some software can survive by finding a loyal niche, but a browser engine is probably not one of them as it requires a certain market share threshold to be a target for web developers.
> What good is it to gain market share if you can’t stop the bleed?
When the gain exceeds the loss from the bleed. (With the caveat that not all users are equally valuable -- users who are vocal, enthusiastic, and/or do not require niche functionality can be more valuable than others.)
> I noticed that no matter how polite or constructive the criticism, it was invariably met by defensiveness of the “I don’t care for that feature, so it’s not the problem” kind.
If it's any consolation, that is not my specific issue. I would love to have better automation on macOS and it frustrates me that I have to choose between an open web and end-user automation. I hear your frustration that you cannot help people use your tools with Firefox.
I also have no idea what Mozilla's expected return on their projects like file-sharing services were. (Marketing stunts are usually done to attract advertiser dollars, not users.) They don't seem to be making the tradeoffs and allocations I would personally make. Having said that, trying to halt or reverse a death spiral means making hard choices that invariably alienate some number of users.
Personally I am impressed that Mozilla has been able to outlast Microsoft and Opera in keeping up with Apple and Google for so long. But I would not be surprised if they too are forced to switch to Blink (or WebKit) eventually.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idk, I'm a big fan of what companies like Motorola are doing by taking a 4000mah+ battery and pairing it with some of those low end SoC's that sip battery. Androids power usage can be complete trash, but I've managed 4 days of battery out of these cheap Motorola phones while still using discord/twitter/telegram like normal. If apple actually went up on their battery sizing they could easily achieve Monday to Friday b…
This might not always work - low end SoCs might also be built on older process node, making them less efficient. A higher end SoC also can complete tasks faster, meaning the device can sleep more of the time instead of crunching stuff on old slow cores and keeping the device fully up.
Well while not the fanciest, the 11nm node in the 2020 and 2021 Moto G Power were still plenty modern enough 8-core SoC's to get the job done. Their main problem lies in being stuck with 4GB of RAM. You end up with apps reloading from time to time as other applications pushed it out of memory. Even with that taken into consideration they still make for fine phones and the person I handed mine down to is still using it as their main phone without much issue.
Current phone has 12GB of RAM which is a bit extreme given I rarely seem to use more than 6GB. More Sub $250 phones are creeping up to 6GB which makes for a nicer experience for those on tight budgets.
Now if only we could solve the lack of updates most Android phones experience.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not innovation if it’s just catching up to what another platform has been able to do all along.
In a walled garden, the ability to for the user to do what they want, where they want is perceived as innovation.
The user can’t do what they want where they want on the web. The web is an adware and privacy destroying machine.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#627Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox just pushed yet another pointless UI change six months ago. People using their software just to go about with their lives don't like pointless UI changes.
I'm not ironic just puzzled: what was the UI change months ago? I'm using Firefox on two laptops and one Android and haven't noticed it...
On desktop (Windows 10) Firefox, I can't see which tab is active because all the buttons on the "tab" bar look almost exactly the same.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really a you problem. The market share of Linux desktops is low enough that in reality it doesn't matter, and you're pulling the rug(binaries) from underneath a web browser (one of the most complex software projects known to man) and expect it to keep running flawlessly. I'm using NixOS where every version of every dependency of every program I install will be saved until I cleanup the garbage (1 command) so I d…
Linux also does not allow you to overwrite a running program; you'll get ETXTBSY. The difference to Windows is that Linux allows you to delete (unlink) files that are in use. The inode actually owning the data continues to exist until the program is dead.
Yes the file still exists physically in disk, but if you were to execute the binary path again, would that give you the old or new result? I'm not sure how Firefox process isolation works, but it could be (armchair guess) that they just spawn the binary with inputs, which would be a possible cause of incompability.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Them having the ulterior motive of stifling PWAs >the effect is that innovation is stifled. There's no such thing as PWA. There are several dozen of standards, and any combination of them is called PWAs by various people. And quite a few of those combinations work perfectly fine on Apple devices. What's worse is that too many of those standards are extremely badly designed (service workers) or are pure Chrome-only "…
Supporting manifests to "install" a webapp to my home screen isn't something difficult for Apple/Safari team. They just don't get their cut from it, so, not a priority.
According to web.dev, the Chrome propaganda site:
--- start quote ---
Talking about mobile phones and tablets, a Progressive Web App is installable with offline capabilities using the following browsers and app stores:
- iOS and iPadOS
Safari (since iOS 11.3), AppStore (since iOS/iPadOS 14, with some limitations), Mobile Configuration for enterprise distribution.
--- end quote ---