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

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#651

Post by superkuh » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

newscracker wrote: post #647

I'll never give up on Firefox (been using it since the Phoenix days). Mozilla has the right intents for its users, and Apple probably comes a distant second if you consider both privacy and the open web. I believe we would all lose if we don't evangelize Firefox and improve its numbers, since its marketing budget may not be as big as the others'. More people need to know that Firefox is good (or good enough). As othe…

I used it since the Phoenix days too. But I stopped at version 37 because they no longer had the right intent for it's users. In fact, they no longer target the same users at all.

Now it's all about making sure DRM protected video plays, making sure Facebook works, and making sure ignorant users doesn't accidentally break their config or install malware. No longer can the user determine what add-ons they can use without switching to a buggy beta build. And lets not forget the removal of all of the customization code and the add-on holocaust right before this. Most new add-ons still have only a fraction of their former functionality. And they'll never get it back because Mozilla isn't about that any more.

Mozilla has abandoned their long time users in an attempt to become Chrome. And it has, just like all the other browsers. And that's why it's losing market share. It's the same crap but without a monopoly position to promote itself like Google or Apple.

I used to install it for my family and friends that needed help in building or setting up their computers. Now I do not because Firefox has the same anti-user policies as Chrome or Safari.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#652

Post by Cyphase » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:11 PM UTC

vvillena wrote: post #437

__d wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firefox/Chrome: You can right-click any search field on any web you visit and add it as a search engine, with the keyword of your choosing. I've been using "w foo" to directly search on English Wikipedia. It's half the characters! :)

I've also had 'w foo' as a keyword for years and years, along with many others for varying lengths of time. So convenient.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#653

Post by bayindirh » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:13 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #646

Copernicron wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Paid e-mail addresses are not meaningless, but they're harder to justify in most people's eyes. It's not just paid email addresses. It's paid anything. My father constantly pesters me to tell him where he can get free movies, music, software and so on. He wanted to know where he could make unlimited online backups for free and I told him that stuff costs money. Somehow people have gotten it in their heads that if i…

The thing is that a lot of things ARE free - or, there is a free option available. Piracy is a great example, because it is (was?) free, convenient, and you have pretty much an unlimited selection. Streaming services like Netflix and digital game delivery like Steam have made it easier and more trustworthy than piracy.

Actually, for me piracy was more about availability and unfair pricing. Especially for music.

After I started my job and the prices came down with the help of online music sales and streaming, I bought a lot of CDs and digitally distributed music. Most of them were albums that I already have, because I wanted to support the artists which brought that feelings into my life.

Same is also valid for software, movies, or anything. If I can justify price of a software, I buy it. Otherwise, I use something FOSS instead.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#654

Post by jhcl » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:14 PM UTC

The internet Moloch has thrown its weight around and now most of us sheep are using its browser to get tracked daily. I'll hang on to Firefox as long as I can and might move to Chromium (i.e. NOT Chrome) if necessary.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#655

Post by Krasnol » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #578

Krasnol wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As FF allows me to install ublock origin, I never seen a single reason to use Chrome on my Android.

I switched back to Chrome on Android, and will stay there until FF Mobile and LastPass start playing together nicely. I'm not sure which party is responsible, but it's a dealbreaker in general for me.

OK, I'm not familiar with LastPass on Android. It sounded too insecure compared to KeePass so I never considered it.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#656

Post by zymhan » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #446

mort96 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Your system doesn't handle running at max CPU and GPU usahe even for what I presume is seconds before thermal shutdown? That seems like an extremely serious issue with your system.

All I can tell is that ffx quantum is the only program that triggers that behavior. And it's not seconds it's maybe one second. 70-80-90 off.

Run Prime95 on torture mode and then tell me it's just Firefox. Because what you've said makes no sense.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#657

Post by Bartweiss » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:16 PM 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.

For several years, Firefox was punishingly slow and had awful tab control compared to Chrome. It may not have 'sucked', in the sense that I still vastly preferred it to IE or even Safari, but switching was an immediate and dramatic improvement.

There have been major speedups since, and container tabs help fix the other issue. At this point, I still find Firefox worse than Chrome in a large number of ways, but they're small and often preference-based - but lots of people seem to agree that were a lot of users lost (or not gained) during a stretch where Firefox was pretty much objectively behind.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#658

Post by leevlad » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

kansi wrote: post #452

Reading this breaks my heart. I have been a Firefox user for almost a decade now and I have good and bad memories with it. Since Quantum release my experience with FF has been nothing but exceptional. On a general day I have around ~15 pinned tabs and more than 50 other tabs open and FF handles it like a breeze. The memory usage is good given the fact that my workload is heavy. On a dual-core machine, I am able to re…

Firefox has noticeable delays and scrolling performance issues on OSX. I have a top of the line macbook from last year, with i7, 16GB RAM, etc. But even on that it's sluggish and stuttery. I've tried all sorts of performance tweaks, beta/nightly builds - nothing really makes it as snappy as Chrome or Safari. So, unfortunately, I have to go back to those.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#659

Post by futurix » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:31 PM UTC

kmundnic wrote: post #127

atombender wrote: post #35

I'd like to use Firefox. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the performance improvements, Safari still feels like a faster, smoother browser. Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the…

I completely agree with you. However, I tried containers in Firefox and miss them so much when using Safari.

I use Safari and Safari Technical Preview as 2 semi-containers (TP uses it's own storage for everything, but still syncs with iCloud).

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#660

Post by satysin » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

I like Firefox but I don't use it as my main browser anymore as it just feels too out of place. I use macOS and it doesn't zoom with pinch to zoom, it doesn't scroll like everything else on the system, etc.

I know these are pretty small things in the grand scheme of things but they make it feel awkward to me. Chrome isn't perfect but it feels a lot more 'at home' on macOS than Firefox does.