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A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

computerworld.com

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Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#71

Post by millietaint »

I dumped Firefox ages ago, when I first heard of Eich's hatred towards the gay and lesbian community.

It is inconceivable that his colleagues at Mozilla did not know about his bigoted beliefs and the financial support he gives to similarly bigoted organisations. Yet they decided he was the best person to run Mozilla, a company that only pays lip service to equal rights - clearly at the top levels of management it is a vile, homophobic, racist organisation.

There is no way I am using a homophobic web browser on any of my desktops, so off it went.

I now happily use Safari for my everyday browsing, knowing that Apple is in the safe hands of Tim Cook, a proud gay man who I admire greatly.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#72

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

itg wrote: post #69
sjwright wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're over-thinking things -- only a tiny proportion of people pick browsers on technical or philosophical merit. Chrome is popular because they have the support of Google's marketing heft. It really is that simple.

Every non-technical friend I have installed Chrome because "Google told them it was faster" from the link Google has on their site when you use a different browser or it is bundled with so much software.

That, or they had a technical friend who laughed at them for using IE and told them to use Chrome.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#73

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

millietaint wrote: post #71

I dumped Firefox ages ago, when I first heard of Eich's hatred towards the gay and lesbian community. It is inconceivable that his colleagues at Mozilla did not know about his bigoted beliefs and the financial support he gives to similarly bigoted organisations. Yet they decided he was the best person to run Mozilla, a company that only pays lip service to equal rights - clearly at the top levels of management it is…

Eich resigned less than two weeks after being made CEO after the outcry from both outside and within Mozilla.

Mozilla isn't homophobic. They put him in that position because they thought he was the best candidate - clearly they were wrong, but I expect this is a Hanlon's razor case.

I was saddened that he was made CEO, but he was only CEO for a very brief period and Mozilla has learned its lesson.

(Speaking as an LGBT person myself)

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#75

Post by dankohn1 »

Mahn wrote: post #51
cookiecaper wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could you please give some examples of extension malware running rampant?

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#76

Post by sjwright »

itg wrote: post #69
sjwright wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're over-thinking things -- only a tiny proportion of people pick browsers on technical or philosophical merit. Chrome is popular because they have the support of Google's marketing heft. It really is that simple.

Every non-technical friend I have installed Chrome because "Google told them it was faster" from the link Google has on their site when you use a different browser or it is bundled with so much software.

That's exactly the marketing heft I'm referring to.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#77

Post by greendestiny »

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 used to use Firefox, so when I saw some hype around its tab collection stuff the other week I downloaded it and gave it another try. It was slow and paused the whole interface regularly for a second or two. I can't say I used it exactly like I use Chrome, but there wasn't much point using it if I can't use the tab collection stuff properly. Just another anecdote, this one from an outdated Macbook Air.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#78

Post by ironsides »

smhg wrote: post #59
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.

First, I don't blame them, but wonder if more could not have been done. However, I do appreciate how that is your only take away. Kudos.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#79

Post by bobajeff »

protomyth wrote: post #52
bobajeff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but they still have time before we get there and like I said before there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of web browsing on mobile. There is a reason people prefer to use apps instead of the web on mobile but not the desktop.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#80

Post by IgorPartola »

Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd wrote: post #68
IgorPartola wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The separate search bar is for privacy reasons. Mozilla doesn't want to send all key presses in the url bar to a search engine, yet search suggestions are useful enough to show them when users actually want to search.

So does it actually accomplish any privacy protection? There are two cases:

You blindly type in your search query into the Awesomebar and it works correctly. For users that do this, it works just like Chrome, no privacy protection.

You use the provided search bar for searches, and Awesomebar for URL's. Your searches are in no way protected. This does protect the URL's you type in, such that example.com is not sent to Google/Bing/Yahoo/DDG/etc. as you type out "example". Did Mozilla actually show that this is worth protecting, and that most people don't just type in "example", hit Enter, go to Google, then click on the first link? This is what I see 99.9% of users doing already.

Note that the autocomplete can pick up the difference between a URL and a search by the presence of a pattern that doesn't follow a URL. Chrome does this. Type in "example.com" vs "?example.com". The "?" is specifically there to indicate that you want search. Perhaps privacy conscious FF users could learn this shortcut, and everyone else can get the convenience they expect?

I am not trying to downplay the importance of privacy in browser implementations, just questioning the privacy implications of this feature.

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