I'm not surprised with 70% for Chrome. Every Android phone comes with a Chrome browser. Too bad Mozilla mobile strategy didn't work. times and times again I said to whoever was in charge with the project :"Target hipsters, and hackers, not emergent economies and low hand devices, make it the phone for those who can afford a third one with good specs and are trend setters, or engineers, they'll develop cool shit for Firefox OS!", but no, they went with cheap and low end, ignoring the fact that a pure HTML/JS phone will perform worst than a phone that runs C apps and Java... People in third world countries don't give a f. about HTML/JS, they want their phone to run skype and whatsapp ...
For what it's worth, agreeing on a strategy with phone vendors and OEMs is much harder than it looks. Decision-makers in this domain have very different processes and goals than in software development. Plus it's very much a shark-eats-shark world.
So I don't actually know who took the decisions, but I wouldn't be so sure that it's Mozilla.
I wonder why countries aren't pursuing Apple and Google about the monopoly of their browsers on their platforms as they did with Microsoft over IE. Apple in particular is obviously extremely anti competitive, at least you can install a gecko based Firefox on Android, on iOS it's webkit based.
It's worse than the author even envisioned, we're seeing apps like notion and atomic be chrome only with no sign of Firefox support. So the exclusivity has extended beyond Google properties.
When you can't even use the browser it's very hard to keep marketshare.
And even more relevant today. Especially after yesterday's fiasco where Chrome doesn't allow installing self-made extensions permanently—forcing you to publish on the Chrome Web Store [0].
There were a few years (2010-2014) when Chrome was a clear industry leader: in design, web standards, resource consumption, and championing openness on the Internet. Not anymore, at least for me:
* Firefox has built-in Reader mode and RSS, while Chrome still doesn't.
* Firefox's ES-next compatibility is comparable to Chrome, and Safari Technology Preview is ahead [1].
* Chrome hasn't embraced the WebExtensions specification (I'd love to be wrong on this).
* Killing Chrome Apps [2].
* Chrome displays an ambiguous/dissuasive popup when you attempt to enable Do Not Track [3].
I hope once Servo is production-ready, it performs far better than Chrome that the browser performance enthusiasts are also willing to switch.
That said, Chrome's Web Inspector is top-notch, and it is the only thing I miss from switching to Firefox.
> * Chrome hasn't embraced the WebExtensions specification (I'd love to be wrong on this).
I'm by no means an expert on this, but aren't WebExtensions based on the chrome extension API? Says pretty much that on the developers page[0] of Mozilla as well.
Yes. But according to wiki.mozilla.org on WebExtensions [0]:
We strive for compatibility to make developers lives easier and are participating in a W3C community group to work on a standard.
Although Chrome is by no means obligated to, it would be nice to see a company such as Google—that claims to support openness on the Internet—adopt this more open standard. (That is, "browser.storage.local" instead of "chrome.storage.local").
"Killing Chrome Apps" is actually a good thing, at least for the an open web. It means, that apps on the web are supposed to be on the web and not packaged in the browser. Google has said that this was a temporary measure.
Essentially, for those apps or websites it shouldn't matter if they run in Chrome, Safari, Edge, or Firefox.
I use Firefox on both mobile and desktop, they've made massive strides recently and it now feels lighter and faster than Chrome, however there is some sort of memory leak in either Firefox and one of my (limited) extensions and it slows down slowly until it no longer is responsive and I need to restart it.
I too can't wait for Servo, although the reality is that it's still an experiment and is miles away from being anywhere near feature complete or compatible with the years worth of edge cases coded into Gecko, I wouldn't hold my breath on Firefox being based on Servo in the medium term, however Servo will find a use in quite a few niches where the content is much more controlled, courtesy of it's compatibility with the CEF.
Maybe these other browsers should stop being complete shit and maybe I will. You want to know why people pick Google products? Because they work and they work well with each other. The only people that don't like Google are tech people that write stupid blogs like this. Sorry, but the general population doesn't give a fuck if Google does any of this. They just want products that work. They don't even give a fuck about how much Google knows about them.
"They just want products that work" sounds like an explanation of why people buy iPhones, because I don't know anyone who's had that experience with Google products (other than Chrome, I suppose).
It's so bad that I've stopped even considering giving a Google product to family. They quickly get fed up with the Android phone or Chromebook and replace it with something else, like an iPhone or a macbook or a windows laptop.
Personally, I've owned about 6 different Android devices, and all of them either stopped getting essential firmware updates, or broke of their own volition. Most recently my Nexus 5X randomly stopped working, and then the warranty replacement spontaneously corrupted its internal flash a week after I got it. In my experience, buying from Google directly is worse than buying from third parties.
Still not gonna buy an iPhone though, because I like being able to actually run free and open software on my phone.
P.S. are you going to argue that Safari is the only good browser and the others all suck, just because tons of people use Safari? The real answer is that Safari's market dominance is in large part due to the iPhone and iPod banning third-party browsers, aside from whether Safari is a good browser at all (at most, it's a decent one).
> "They just want products that work" sounds like an explanation of why people buy iPhones, because I don't know anyone who's had that experience with Google products (other than Chrome, I suppose).
Uhm... Gmail is an amazing Google product that people are very happy with, and that (at introduction) had no equal. Same goes for Maps.. at introduction there was nothing like it, and it has only gotten better. Hell, Apple Maps still sucks if you're not in the US. YouTube is (arguably) another product that people are very happy using.
And Safari is an amazing browser. The macOS version is by far the most battery friendly of all browsers (where Chrome and Firefox have an 'energy use' of 40-50 when playing H264, Safari is in the low 20s). The tricks used to get there are too many to name, but I take my hat off to Apple for going the extra mile.
The iOS version is also very very battery friendly and oh so smooth.. although since all browsers have to use Safari's webkit backend, there isn't really a good way to compare.
"because I don't know anyone who's had that experience with Google products (other than Chrome, I suppose)."
You don't know anyone who has used Gmail, Youtube, or Google search before?
"It's so bad that I've stopped even considering giving a Google product to family. They quickly get fed up with the Android phone or Chromebook and replace it with something else, like an iPhone or a macbook or a windows laptop."
Those aren't Google products. Those are Samsung, Acer, or whoever decides to use Android/Chrome OS. How do you not understand this? You worked for Google. You should know that they don't actually build physical products, except for the Pixel. I think the Pixel is the first phone they built. They don't even control the Android on the Galaxy S. Samsung does. They decide what goes on and in the phone. Google doesn't.
I'm not going to argue Safari is a good browser lol. Firefox and Chrome are the only browser I will ever use, but right now I'm using Chrome because it has the best browsing experience out of all of them.
And what people don't know can't hurt them, right?
More seriously, there is a battlefield on the web. Since the demise of Opera, Firefox is the only mainstream browser left standing that actively attempts to not violate your privacy.
This doesn't mean that Firefox developers don't need to work on ways to make Firefox the best browser – incidentally, Firefox in January 2017 is orders of magnitude better than Firefox in January 2016. But it also means that some of the most important of Firefox are invisible, because they're all about what Firefox refuses to do.
It used to be but the current opera has 0 innovation in it, it even dropped the innovating par the previous opera had to make the switch to being a google chrome clone.
vivaldi is the browser from opera founder which strive to recreate this innovation and more.
As the company refused to open source the old opera, there is an open source project to recreate it: otter[2].
Firefox was always my default browser since ever but 2-3 years ago I switched to Chrome full time.
Every month or so, I try Firefox again with all the websites I care about, check how fast it feels, the JS performance, etc and, while it's pretty good, Chrome still is/feels faster. My tests are pretty subjective at times but I never find a huge reason to switch from Chrome (privacy issues aside). Each time I think I've spend too much time doing this dance and I take longer to do it again.
So I don't know about the 2016/2017 comparison you made and it being orders of magnitude better today. Maybe in some other area that is not performance?
To be clear, Firefox is not bad. It's actually pretty good... maybe browsers have matured enough that the low hanging fruits have all being addressed and it's hard to make Earth shaking progress (that would justify a switch).
It's been a while since there's no significant performance difference between the biggest web browsers. I'm curious about the websites you care about, would they be tied to google in any way ?
Thanks for admitting that your tests were subjective.
My only suggestion is that people do not use phrases such as "felt faster" with friends and relatives who might take the (admittedly subjective) test results at face value and choose Chrome over Firefox.
Yeah, and that thinking isn't going to make Firefox popular. People don't care about privacy. Do you not realize that Facebook has over a billion users, most of them sharing location, posts, pictures, videos, likes, friends, family, and so much more. People want you to know about them. They want you to feel envy over their vaction pictures. People want people to see their photos.
I don't understand when you say firefox is not actvely attempting to violate privacy, Mozilla is almost entirely financed by google through advertising money a.k.a a very notorious privacy violations. They deliberately and knowingly made this choice to give away their not knowing better user privacy to google in exchange for money.
This one of the main reason why google search engine has been and is still so popular in Europe. Not such a good record for someone who pretends to champion users right and privacy.
Interesting that you say firefox gets better, I have been using firefox since it was called firebird and to me firefox gets worse with time by adding features I do not want (persona, sync, pocket, hello, botched speed dial, drm), removing features I use (status bar, ui redesign to look more like chrome, disabling script, panorama) and lacking useful features (a working history, a full text search of history, usable bookmarks over time, integrated adblock, live edit of source, an editable speed dial, side bar, disabling author css, ...).
I actually asked people around me and none of the answer I got is the one you put forward. The most common answer is that they feel they didn't have a choice, they have an android phone because they needed a phone and didn't want to pay the overpriced premium for an apple product and they seem to hate android with a passion. they have a gmail account because they didn't have a choice and had to make one to use their phone and they'd rather use the email they had before getting the phone. They have chrome on their computer because it just popped up one day and replaced their browser (it came bundled with a freeware they installed and set itself as default browser).
When asked about google, they pretty much all knew google was spying and selling ads, which they hate, but all said they felt powerless and didn't what to do.
Totally different from the answers I got from tech aware people who either use google's product and don't care / love google or stay away from google / use them through habit and inertia and feel bad about it.
Personally I hate what Google did to Sun, forking Java which is only going to get worse with Java 9 and 10 planned features, and how constrained the NDK is versus what the iOS and WP SDKs allow for.
Also that Google has the balls to put all sets of restrictions on Play Store certifications, but "forgets" to put a clause related to device updates.
I own a few Windows Phone devices and still look forward to a possible Surface phone coming up.
I notice Firefox does not feel as responsive as Chrome is. On my reasonably powerful system, switching between tabs is slow, even slower when large photos load. It's holding me back.
I'm typing this from Vivaldi, because I'm constantly looking for a replacement that feels fast and I can have the few 4-5 extensions I typically use.
Yeah, this is an unavoidable consequence of their (current) 1-process model for tabs. They have a system for running tabs in a process separate from the browser, but they don't currently split tabs out into multiple processes, so you can get lag on switching tabs.
IIRC they are working on expanding this so that tabs are split across multiple processes, without using Chrome's resource-hungry Process Per Tab approach.
I'd suggest creating a new profile in Firefox and checking it again. I use Firefox with tons of tabs and don't notice any lag in tab switching. I also don't have multiprocess enabled automatically (when I tried it about a year ago or so it was slower, but it has improved quite a bit in my reading).
Well, if there's one thing to always keep in mind about technology and software, many things can go wrong in different ways for different people. For me, Firefox has always "just worked" too, but a response like that to the GP would've been completely useless.
For me, Google Chrome has always been a resource killer that's sluggish and consumes almost all system RAM (on 8GB total) with just 10 or 20 tabs. I see Firefox consuming a lot less with a few hundred tabs. While your response states your experience, it also sounds like you're meaning to say that Google Chrome is better solely because of your experience. So I don't see how such a response is helpful, overall.
Chrome is just as bad for me. I've installed extensions that suspends tabs I'm not using on both browsers and the experience is significantly better. Since I'm not seeing Chrome being clearly better than Firefox in my day to day, I use Firefox simply because of idealistic reasons.
At this point, it's not anymore about customer choice, the problem is systemic.
Serving Google with the same kind of antitrust Microsoft got would be highly deserved and beneficial, but unfurtunately google made the political investments that Microsoft lacked.
Which means we get to hear officials say Google is indeed in a situation deserving the antitrust, but it's fine "because their products bring value to customers"...
Genuine question from someone not well versed in this topic but interested in learning more, can you give me some examples of what Google is doing that is abusive of their monopoly power, particularly as it relates to Chrome?
I'm aware of some of the issues involving Android licensing/bundling of apps but not well informed on other aspects.
I'm not trying to be contrarian here but why do you consider ChromeOS to be an abuse of monopoly power? Is it because ChromeOS development is being subsidized by ad revenue to enter into a new market?
No. But unless I'm mistaken ChromeOS doesn't come close to having a dominant position in the OS market. Isn't this somewhat analogous to not being able to install another OS on an iOS device or even a non Webkit based browser?
Again just to be clear, these questions are in good faith, I'm not simply trying to be argumentative, I'm hoping to get a better understanding of the issues.
The author might argue that this is weak resistance because it's just adding fuel to Google's fire. They have co-opted the open source community by building their tools this way. I prefer this to the nearest alternative, which is a company that pushes closed software on the world.
IMO, the best alternative is a fully open ecosystem in which the players are very small relative to the overall size of the markets in which they operate. Such things don't last long on their own. We need to decide to support them as a community or they will be overwhelmed.
Chromium is a better choice from a privacy standpoint, certainly. It unfortunately doesn't help prevent the vendor lock-in situation.
The ideal equilibrium for the open web right now would be 33% each for evergreen Chrome (or other Webkit/Blink browsers), Edge, and Firefox.
Bleeding edge prove-of-concepts aside; developing a website or web application that works in all modern browsers has never been so developer-friendly with all the wonderful tools and mature frameworks we have (e.g., Babel), and is trivial with just HTML and CSS. It's a shame to see a class of developers emerge that target Chrome exclusively.
Wow! your ideal equilibrium is really scary. It leaves no room for a lot of the existing browsers and features two that I do not want to use ever and one that I use reluctantly because it lives on google advertisement money. So your ideal open web is 66% google and 33% microsoft which seems pretty closed up for something open.
Use Wireshark, Chromium still talks to Google even if you disable all configs it allows you to disable. Firefox is the only one you can configure to not talk to it's servers (Mozilla's).
From a pragmatic perspective, the fewer browsers we as developers need to support, the better. There has never been any meaningful standardization between browsers. Even "modern" browsers are all different enough that you need to test and code specific paths for each of them unless you stick to trivial things.
Personally, I want the same thing I wanted back in 1996 when I started this ride: One browser to win, and the others to drop to such a tiny share that we don't need to support them anymore.
Firefox performed a service in convincing Microsoft to update IE6. But that was fifteen years ago. Since then, Chrome has arrived and demonstrated that it is far and away the best. In my opinion, Firefox would serve us best by simply stepping aside. All it does today is force us to code yet another path into everything we build.
I'm sorry, but most of the good things that have happened with the browser are directly because there was competition. If one wins and the others disappear it's simply going to be too tempting for the winner to abuse it's position because nobody will have another choice.
To add to that, Google already abuses its position with Chrome (see the stuff surrounding AdNauseum in the past couple days). One company having as much power over the shape of the web as Google already has is scary enough, the notion of them "winning" the browser wars is even worse.
Actually, most of the good things that have happened with the browser have a reference implementation in IE6. Their current "modern" standards were all written after that point.
The stagnant few years after Netscape screwed up Navigator 6 was actually a little mini golden age for web developers. Essentially one target, with a ton of features that are only now being recreated in modern browsers.
It's just a shame that Microsoft was so hated by everybody. Things like their sane Box Model endured 15 years of people referring to it as a "bug" until finally it got introduced as a CSS option and people were overjoyed to finally be able to specify the width of a DIV and have it end up being that size after borders and padding.
You did not do much web development then, did you?
It was not "reference implementation", most of the nice things were not implemented at all and many that were there were buggy.
And even if the box model makes more sense it was still a bug because it did not behave as the spec say. Or rather did not behave under some conditions. Lucky are the people who forgot or never new the joys of standards/quirks/whatever-in-between modes.
Because the less competition, the more stagnant the web will be. Then vendors like Microsoft will shove proprietary tech into their browsers and we'll be back to IE6 + Flash. Is it what you want?
Firefox is the only serious open source browser project out there. Chrome isn't, Google could drop Chromium development any day, it wouldn't be the first time they did something like that.
Of course, I believe Mozilla & Firefox shot themselves in the foot by refusing to implement specs like WebSQL,File System API and a few others, no matter what the reason was. I use these API to deliver complex offline applications, I had no choice but to tell my clients to use Chrome. And yes IndexedDB sucks.
sgoraete v mussornom pozhare, ty prescriptivist web developer scum. da, da, my've all heard the philosophers babble about "oneness" being "beautiful" and "holy". But let me tell you that {this} kind of oneness certainly isn't pretty and if you're not careful you*ll will scare the bejeezus out of your an self.
Personally I want the same thing that I wanted back in 1995, for narrow minded people who wants a one size fits all solution and do not understand the importance of openness of the web and standards to disappear so we get rid of the stupid "I'm developing for the most popular browser because I don't care".
Firefox is going to need a large UI overhaul before I even consider laying my eyes on it. It looks terrible compared to Chrome. Maybe if Mozilla would employ me, I could fix that.
It's very hard to stop Chrome's brand at this point.
On the bright side, anyone who dislikes Chrome's UI can wait 6 months for them to completely overhaul it again, like clockwork :-)
Agreed that it is much more polished, if only because they aggressively remove everything they can from the UI, including features. Definitely provides a visually relaxing look, even if they crammed it full of unnecessary margins and whitespace. Works pretty well on tablets, too.
Chrome's UI remains an anathema to me--its strict requirements regarding how one is supposed to organize tabs and so forth are bogwash, and I'll be sticking with Firefox, which allows me to do whatever the fuck I want re UI component placement and usage, with the help of some extensions, until death do us part.
Chrome is the Apple of browsers and it should burn in a fire wrt how it mandates and imposes specific UI patterns on users. Mozilla, for all their "we're trying to make extensions more chromelike" seems to be holding onto that.
Good that you don't use firefox then, because the chrome UI is awful (at least to me) and the trend from firefox and other browsers to copy it and all look the same is highly irritating.
At least firefox allows for some customization, though not as much as the old opera used to offer.
As a long term Firefox user, the number of times I have to fire up Chrome because a site will not display correctly in Firefox grows month by month. :(
I have been using Opera. It behave really like Chrome ( I guess it's based on Blink). With less memory consumption. VPN included, add blocker included, and most of all, the best stuff I'd really like to see ported to Chrome: extensions opening at the left Sidebar of the page. So now I can access Google Keep, Translation, 2048 ...on the same page while reading HN, or anything.
But is this because FF is faulty or because the site is faulty?
I don't think I've experienced it, except when I watch HBO (Netflix and C-More works fine, so it's on HBO to get their stuff together in that instance).
In most cases, the latter. See https://compat.spec.whatwg.org/ for some of the resulting fallout, for example: the entirety of that spec is due to sites being faulty, not browsers....
People choose firefox over IE because firefox was better. People choose chrome over firefox and IE because chrome is better.
Want to beat google? create better. Not negativity.
This is a pretty naive view that ignores market effects. You can get away with reasoning like this when you're talking about userbases on the order of 100000, but not when literally dozens or hundreds of millions of people use your software.
Not sure this is necessarily the case - Google cross-promoted Chrome extremely heavily across all its web properties, ran massive ad campaigns, and contractually obligated Android vendors to preinstall and use Chrome as the default on their handsets. Mozilla, lacking the power or money to do any of these things, wouldn't be able to compete on these fronts, regardless of who built the better product.
Firefox was over reliant on plug-ins, gave plug-ins too much power and the plug-in as well as firefox update mechanisms were messy.
Chrome did more out of the box than firefox reducing the need for plug-ins, sandboxed plug-ins from destroying general browser performance and most importantly realised that updating was not a user concern and performed updates silently.
There were also other innovations that Chrome did first that put them ahead of the field (I particularly remember their genius tab closing behaviour).
_That's_ why they "won" not because of fucking adverts.
> _That's_ why they "won" not because of fucking adverts.
Given that Opera was basically "Chrome without Google marketing" I heavily doubt that. (The first version of Chrome was such a blatant Opera clone, it was just funny)
that's a fair point, I more wish to counter the idea that Firefox was a better or even equal product at the time. Chrome was a clearly superior product to Firefox.
Fully accepted. Firefox got comfortable in its position when IE was 'defeated', same as IE before. They had "won", so no reason to innovate anymore. Maybe Chrome was a much needed "kick in the ass". I checked Firefox again a few days ago and it seems to be faster than I remember it, which gives me at least hope that they haven't given up yet.
The flaw with this notion, is that neither Firefox nor Opera beat IE.
Chrome did.
Most of the people who argue things like this seem to agree that Firefox and Opera were superior browsers to IE. If that was the case, why hadn't they eaten IE's market share long before Chrome was ever produced?
Could it be that Chrome being widely advertised on the most visited site on the internet helped?
For reference, most of the surveys listed by Wikipedia[0] (not including that one, for some reason), list Firefox at about 30% in that period. I assume that the stats in your link comes from visitors to their own site, which given the focus (web development) seems like it could easily be biased towards more technical users (and thus over-represent Firefox compared to wider surveys).
The point I'm making is that despite FF being a better alternative for years, it didn't actually crush IE's market share. Chrome did, and I'd put that down to marketing more than quality (as evidenced by quality not being enough for Firefox or Opera).
I actually use firefox at home, but for watching twitch streams I have to open chrome because firefox just fucking crawls if I've got a stream in another tab.
No idea why. Chrome seems to cope fine so I just use it for that. Since I want my stream in a separate window on my other screen anyway it works out pretty well.
Might be that it falls back to software rendering on your system and therefore stresses out the CPU. Try updating your graphics card driver, if it's not up-to-date.
Of course they "won" (or their "win" achieved its current magnitude) because of adverts. It's naive to say otherwise. The technical innovations put them ahead of the curve for a brief period of time. Firefox reacted quite quickly (and was accused of blindly copying Chrome for it), and today there really is little to differentiate the two browsers in terms of performance. That's been the case for a while now. The difference is in google leveraging both its own platform as well as buying billboards and TV ad space for Chrome. That's unprecedented. If you don't think that's having an effect you're essentially saying the people who decided to finance that ad push are idiots.
Despite that, Firefox still leads in market share in Germany (though with current trends that will change this year).
For me it was; I guess I was a relatively early adopter, and Chrome was just so much faster and less bloated than the competition at the time. Clean UI (and it's still clean, they're keeping that promise), superior performance, frequent updates, superior built-in developer tools, etc.
IDK if that caused it to grow to become the biggest browser, but it sold it for me.
yeah, an update or two back on Android, Google Home App now opens link cards in some stripped down version of Chrome despite the fact that Firefox is set as the default browser on my phone.
I think we've seen throughout societal history that if you want to affect change you have to do it through the path of least resistance for consumers; this means creating a better browser experience that people use not because they want to revolt, but because they gain utility from doing so.
Can I ask something? For me Firefox IS better. Chrome on Android doesnt seem to support extensions (so no uBlock), doesn't have reader view, and would highly prefer it if I signed in. Orfox and Firefox both do not have these issues.
Even on desktop, I prefer Firefox (although mostly due to higher familiarity with it). Does Chrome really have some killer feature that I'm not seeing? I can't seem to figure out where exactly Firefox lacks.
It was too slow and sluggish for too long. I just fired it up, and although that is not the case any more, at the end of the day... it is useful to just be mainstream when mainstream is good. https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...
As Fifer says, it's a popularity issue. As a web dev, for me, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem that relies on who is the majority that I need to support — and that's where all my energy and time go. As a result, it becomes my browser of choice because I have to test in it so much. I also prefer the dev tools.
For me, knowing that Firefox doesn't spy on me is an enormous advantage. I don't care about a tiny speed difference or reliability. All browsers are mostly equal when it comes to what I do with them. But the spying stuff, naaahh, that's completely different.
Your "suddenly" did not come out of thin air, it happenned after regulation.
Microsoft was not broken down or fined to oblivion, but they did change their behavior a lot when they started hitting regulatory boundaries. Internet Explorer was practically put into maintenance mode for many years when it became clear that Microsoft would not be allowed to own the web like they owned the PC.
We cannot know the outcome of an alternative history where Microsoft was given free hand to leverage the stranglehold on the web a fully enforced Internet Explorer (e.g. enforced like Safari in iOS?) could have developed. For all we know the outcome might even be Microsoft driven phones in every pocket, with everybody else unable to innovate on their own because they would be completely preoccupied with chasing compatibility with an ever-changing "Microsoft Html".
Apple and Google are far, far worse than Microsoft ever had been and I'd take a Microsoft monopoly any day of the week over those two.
You can't do shit these days without having to deal with Apple's ridiculously selfish and tyrannical business model or Google's all-knowing, ever watchful gaze.
> You can't do shit these days without having to deal with Apple's ridiculously selfish and tyrannical business model
Actually I do shit every day these days without coming into contact with Apple's selfish and tyrannical business model. So do millions of other people. iOS developer is a choice, not a sentence. If you don't like it, don't do it. There are tons of other things to do.
OK, but we're on HN and we're talking about building software and/or webpages... So let me rephrase - you can't make software and/or a webpage without having to deal with Apple and Google in some way. You're either going to have to put it in the app store and do some advertising with Google or you're going to have to make that webpage work with crappy Safari or make it AMP compliant or something else in order to get ahead. Of course you don't HAVE to do that stuff, but then you'll just get left behind. Seeya!
I was expecting some details about why these business models are far, far worse.
> So let me rephrase - you can't make software and/or a webpage without having to deal with Apple and Google in some way.
If you exclude extra-vague words "is some way", yes you can. Of corse, you'd come into contact with software made by these companies from time to time, but that software would be just like any other you use, regardless of their business model.
> You're either going to have to put it in the app store
No I don't. I've been gainfully employed as a software developer for more than 2 decades now and never put anything in any app store.
> you're going to have to make that webpage work with crappy Safari
I've not have to deal with browser compat issues for many years now, but if they exist I'm pretty sure that a) there are toolkits to deal with them, and b) that has nothing to do with business model, every browser has its quirks, including Firefox (in fact, last 2 times I had to deal with browser compat issues the Firefox was the problem and it worked fine in Chrome and Safari - of course, nobody cared about IE).
Pretty sure I mentioned those in my initial complaint.
> If you exclude extra-vague words...
OK, is "the only search engine that matters" too vague? How about "the only app store that makes money"?
If you just want to build some software, then fine: you don't have to deal with Apple or Google if you don't want to. If you want to be successful and make money though? You're going to have to deal with one of them whether you like it or not.
At the very least, you need Google to search and you need Google to help people find your product. Good luck getting customers if Google removes your pages from their results.
True. But also the pendulum of which is better (Firefox vs Chrome) has swung back and forth a couple of times since Chrome first came out and overtook FF. At this point though most people are just using whichever was best N years ago, and haven't thought to compare recently.
Yeah, you still regularly see people claiming that Chrome's JavaScript engine is so much better than the competition, when in reality things have been neck-on-neck for years already. I think last time Chrome really had a major advantage was in 2012.
Similarly, Opera. People will still tell you with absolute confidence that Opera is terrible compared to Chrome. It's been a Chrome-clone since 2013. You'd think people would fact-check their opinions somewhen within almost 4 years, but unfortunately they don't.
I think it can start with developers choosing firefox over chrome. Hackers were the first people to try out linux, when it was sub-par, didnt have most drivers. If not for those initial few foragers, we would still be stuck with Windows for most of our computing. Change in this space hardly ever starts because someone made the most consumer friendly, best performing piece of software. Change starts by the way of foragers who become contributors that leads to improved performance.
Better can mean more than just "faster" or "more responsive". This post argues that Firefox is better in that it does not lock you in in the long term.
Since it is not as visible as responsiveness, it is useful to have these discussions so people can decide what really is the "best" browser to them with full knowledge.
This is how I feel also. I want to use Firefox but Chrome just works better. Mostly things actually sync properly with Chrome. Tabs, settings, extensions, etc. I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix days but switched to Chrome exactly a year ago as Firefox just wasn't meeting all my needs. Want me to switch back? Then fix things like sync and transparent restore of the user profile on a new install, etc.
Should I remind you that the article we're looking at is not about the convenience of a speedy browser, but the political choice of a browser that is not tied to a global company (or not much tied, I dunno for sure).
I know this sounds like RMS but with a problem the size of Google, then things gets political.
I personally use Chrome and I teach a class that involves some lessons on HTTP/web scraping/web app dev and I ask the class to use Chrome. For me, my bias is towards how much I like Chrome's dev tools, though I haven't used Firefox's in awhile. The ease of creating multiple browser profiles is great, too, though I hear FF has the same thing.
I'm not much of a plugin user, but I'll be using Chrome's Secure Shell [0] for the first time ever and will be advising Windows students to use it over PuTTY (at first, anyway). It's kind of a lifesaver for me because PuTTY, from my experience a couple years ago, is a much more stilted experience than OS X Terminal. I see Firefox has FireSSH [1] and will give that a try, but the high user base of Chrome's Secure Shell (600K+) gives me a little assurance about the reliability of the plugin.
Can it be said that your bias is purely based on the familiarity?
Yes, Firefox has multiple profiles.
Putting "all your eggs in one basket" in security context is suspicious. For SSH, Putty is a small program compared to the whole Chrome, security-wise much easier to evaluate. I don't know how using Chrome for SSH can be rationalized. Who is behind of that "Secure Shell" plugin ("offered by chrome-secure-shell-publishers")?
Definitely, the bias is familiarity, as it usually is. I started my webdev days when Firebug was big, so FF was my main browser. Then Chrome came, and besides being a nice browser, its dev tools had the same familiarity of Firebug's. IIRC, FF's default tools, for some time, were different than Firebug's and I think I just liked not having to fight with the FF defaults over time (as I moved between machines frequently).
As for my class, yes, I'm not enthusiastic about shelling from the browser no matter how many people like it. But the main mitigation is that the class work we do is based off of my AWS setup: I spin up the EC2 instances and I manage/distribute the keys. None of the assignments require using their own personal info. And another reason for teaching them how to use browser profiles (something I've never seen students have set up) is so that they if they want to build something with Twitter's API, i can strongly advise for them to make a fake account and operate it in a different profile, to prevent accidental Twitter snafus (among other problems).
Why Chrome shell over PuTTY? I remember struggling with things like copy and paste, to the point where I think it is easier to use the mouse...but I push students pretty hard on using the mouse as little as possible. Chrome Shell feels as close to the OSX Terminal with the exception of key handling and the inability to access or transfer files from your own system.
You can always consider using Chromium if you want "the best of both worlds". You'd protect your students' privacy, which for them can be a valuable lesson. Furthermore you can introduce them in that way to another OSS project, which might spark their interest in OSS.
All without losing the convenience that you talk about.
A little off topic, I've extensively used the secure shell plugin for chrome and I find it a very good experience compared to putty. The only minor issues I hit were:
- Some keyboard combinations will be intercepted by the browser before going to the plugin (big one was ctrl-w which I used in vim a lot). The fix for this is to run the extension in it's own window; you can do this by right clicking the extension on chrome://apps and selecting "Open as window".
- It doesn't handle mixed width fonts very well and they jumble up the screen a little. This came up for me when using powerline. I couldn't find a fix for this at the time.
OK Google is more powerful than ever before but eg. Google docs are not "winning" - docs are not forcing you to use blessed OSes (you can use docs from Firefox) and I'm still more afraid of Windows domination since it's still desktop where you create real content than Android which is basically dumb multimedia player and browser.
The sad thing is Mozilla had a great Electron alternative way before Chrome even existed (apps like Songbird used it, and I shipped a mass-market product using it), but it was dropped due to complexity and lack of resources. Google has the resources to support scenarios like this more easily, and the community is happy to do the rest of the work for them. Market effects are tough :/
As Facebook shows, most folks don't mind being locked in, even when they're aware of it, to varying extents. The reasons are complex, but basically can be boiled down to easy and seamless use for the "first world" and "cheap" or "free" for the rest of the world.
So, if Mozilla can make FF as fast and "hip" to use as Chrome AND they can make it as free (which in this sense means being bundled in everywhere), then yes, they stand a chance of overtaking Chrome...
What is the best way to prevent big companies (like Google, but not only), that have a de facto monopoly on certain and important parts of the internet, from applying vendor lock strategies to kill their competitors?
For one thing, when the tech giants act like dicks - which is getting more frequent nowadays, be sure to complain loudly and gratingly and leave that record for everyone to see. The big companies have much more organized PR than the little folks, so best if you don't pull your punches. Companies don't have feelings, but since software engineers are big suckers for mottos like "Don't be evil", your complaints may give them pause. (Except FB, where everyone is clearly already tuned out). That may not prevent the lock-in happening, but it will improve the odds of recruiting folks who can help with the more positive strategies.
And with that vent out of the way, here are some positive ideas:
1. At some point, the giants tend to get too heavy handed for their own good. Try your best to keep alternatives alive until that point.
2. If possible, see if you can make the user on-boarding experience of your favorite OSS software much better. Usually it is easy because the standards around documentation/user on-boarding are generally pretty poor.
3. The reason people usually don't do 2 is that there is no incentive. See if you can figure out a sustainable way to incentivize it. Throwing out a wild idea: Say a StackOverflow like gamification website for people who create OSS documentation and fix OSS issues.
And if you are one of the committers, help users' with their problems when you actually have time to do something about it. FireFox was asleep at the wheel for quite a while not addressing its real defects. Chrome would have been another Safari like browser (i.e. dominant, but only within its ecosystem) if FireFox had actually improved at the rate you would expect from a heavily used software product.
I'm running Chromium instead of Chrome. I like to think of it as Chrome without the bad parts, even though google has influence in the Chromium project.
The main reason I would not switch to Firefox is because, at least when I last tried it, I did not like their dev tools as much.
Why should I use Firefox, or any other browser, from a standard consumer prospective?
Let me preface this by saying I am open to a new browser, especially one that is always in "incognito" and doesn't share sessions between tabs/windows. My favorite is Lynx but that doesn't always work .
Facebook & Messenger for Android is pretty much spyware and they have over 1B downloads each, so that takes spying out of the discussion.
The last time I checked Chrome performed best (even if it is only marginal) on all benchmarks.
I know there are lots of serious reasons not to trust Google aside from user tracking (changing search results for political reasons[1], Eric Schmidt being a little too friendly w State Dept.[2]) but they make damn fine products.
> Why should I use Firefox, or any other browser, from a standard consumer prospective?
Because your techie friends tell you to. This moved people off of IE6 to Firefox and this is what initially got people to move to Chrome from Firefox. Google's muscle on its web properties did the rest. Even you admit that Chrome is only marginally better on all benchmarks. For me, it's worth it to help your non-technical friends keep the web a bit more open by making them wait 0.1s (or however much longer) to open Facebook.
People listened to the real benefits in terms of speed, tabs and UX while moving from IE, not to the rheotric about freedom, OSS etc. Do we have any such reasons now?
Firefox is just as responsive as Chrome (or even better). Default configs is what ruins the experience, Mozilla is way too conservative with their defaults.
Choosing linux at the time when you had to compile drivers, apply patches before you could get a monitor properly running was also not very user "standard" from a consumer perspective. But that spirit of trying out a piece of software that gives your more freedom, or allows a more open ecosystem to thrive is and will always be a good reason.
Browsers and mobile OSes are two places where I think even we as developers have accepted the closed and encumbered ecosystem as the status quo because the alternatives are not user friendly.
I think your answer is in the title. I'm not sure how concrete you want to go in terms of answers?
The reason you should is mostly constituted from all the things your browser does that you don't know about.
I get that's a hard sell.
Firefox is (currently) measurably much less binary exploit secure than Chrome, but it is the browser with a development community thats trying hard not to sell you out.
Self-Destructing Cookies [0], for the security conscious.
It has near parity with Chrome's extension APIs now, so what works on one usually works on the other, but Firefox lets people dive deeper to build things like the above.
You can use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, NoScript and any of the others.
All for nearly Chrome performance, but probably less than half of the memory use of Chrome, and Firefox is getting faster.
As for the average user... That story won't fly.
It never has, and never will.
Chrome is not as damn good as it was when it first launched, and launched from the company that has nearly ubiquitous control over web searches.
Bigger issues to Firefox adoption from the public are things like, "This site only runs on Google Chrome. Download from here." Big name sites have been known to do this, like Netflix (on Linux, at least).
Or how Edge re-adds itself to the user's taskbar with nearly every Windows update.
Those things are what impacts day to day users, and that determines what they use to browse the web.
That being said, Chrome's more aggressive blocking of sites with poor SSL, and more aggressive blocking of Flash, might just push users to another browser... Which will probably be Edge. Because it's on their taskbar.
I would really like to support Mozilla again, but they have had an unreasonable amount of exploits recently, add to this the fact that support for my most beloved tools are gone (Firebug & TamperData) I really see no other point in sticking with FF than a political or ideological agenda.
In my experience the firefox devtools are much better (more features, better UX) than Firebug nowadays. I've been using them for one and a half years now (Firebug before).
In my experience from yesterday in the latest firefox: firebug still works and firefox devtools are lacking from the start and I go back to firebug after 2 minutes trying to edit live code.
I still miss the old opera dev features that offered way better and advanced features years ago.
You mean JS code in the debugger? You may want to raise an issue for this in the new debugger which seems much faster developement progress: https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html
Just checked and firebug is still here and works and will be supported until firefox 52 when firefox moves to become a multiprocess program. The firebug team is working to integrate firebug into firefox.next because it would be too complex to port firebug to a multi process architecture.
I didn't know about this and am not happy about it, I guess this means I switch to firefox esr and pale moon to continue using firebug if the dev tools are not to my taste (as they are now and have been since their introduction)
I've recently forced myself to switch back to Firefox after 2 years of Chrome, but honestly the performances even on high end machines aren't on par with Chrome, it all feels a bit more sluggish and slower.
And I'm having a lot of issues with html5 video playback especially on prime video.
I'm hoping that Electrolysis will improve the general performance at least.
I recently switched back to Firefox after years of using Chrome. Previously, the few times I had to fire up Firefox for development purposes it seemed sluggish to me. Not anymore.
Firefox has been super responsive to me, using less memory than the same browsing activity would on Chrome & Firefox-only (afaik) add-ons like Self Destructing Cookies are A+. On Android, Firefox Mobile works just as good or better than Chrome.
From a developer standpoint, Mozilla's recent work on the Web Extensions API (which is an almost complete match with Chrome's) is outstanding.
I tried Chrome when it first came out, but I always find myself going back to Firefox. I use Chrome only for the development tools or if I have to do anything that will only rely on Chrome, and if I do use Chrome it's on my laptop which has Chromium. I rather not have my whole browser linked to my entire email account.
Probably better to block ads on your cellphone via hostfiles or a custom nameserver that blocks ads. Try turning your phone on and sniffing its packets with tcpdump on a notebook (use Wireshark to decrypt if WPA). You'll be surprised by the amount of servers from ad companies that are contacted before you even unlock your screen, if you let apps start at boot.
Oh yes. I love being able to install uBlock on my phone! Wasn't sure if Mobile Chrome allowed for browser add-ons this but at least I was never able to find it.
The only effective monetization strategy I've seen for a browser is search. So Google is in a very strong position to make money on Chrome. The problem that Firefox has is that there is no real competition for search anymore. That limits their ability to monetize and their ability to invest in the browser.
> Unlike Apple and Microsoft, Mozilla is totally committed to the standards-based Web platform as a long-term strategy against lock-in.
This may sound great in theory, but I have serious doubts that Mozilla can deliver on that. At least from my perspective, their decisions in the more recent past have been erratic at best. They even happily implemented DRM when everyone else was doing it. At the moment it feels like Firefox is just copying what everyone else is doing, slightly worse.
And even if Chrome "wins", it's still open source, for the most part. If Google abuses their power, then the thing will be forked and their hole user base will be split. I'm pretty sure Google doesn't want that.
If you want to worry about something, worry about Google controlling Android. They already implemented lock-in there, it's a huge pain to fork in any reasonable way (see CynogenMod) and they control > 85% of the market. But sadly, Mozilla failed here quite spectacularly, because they simply didn't have the resources for it.
> They even happily implemented DRM when everyone else was doing it.
This is a totally disingenuous interpretation of EME. I think you mean when Google, despite their ~open source bona fides~ with Chromium, collaborated with Microsoft and Netflix to introduce DRM to the browser and used their crushing market dominance to force Mozilla to comply or fall even further behind?
I'm perfectly aware that they didn't want to. But if Mozilla can be bullied into implementing it anyway, then how does using Firefox stop Google from doing whatever they want?
Don't backpedal, you literally said they were happy to implement DRM! To address your point, if Firefox had a 90% market share on both desktop and mobile the other vendors would have had a much more difficult time doing an end around on the open web with EME. The only way for Firefox to gain market share is for people to use it... hence the title of the blog post.
If Firefox had a 90% market share, we wouldn't have this discussion about how we should use Firefox instead of Chrome. But the fact of the matter is that the majority of users doesn't care, and won't change their opinion because of a random blog post.
Now, Mozilla could have decided to make Firefox a privacy focused, truly open browser for those who do care. They could've been the first major browser who blocks privacy invading Ads by default, and that didn't implement DRM like all the others.
Partially related, but they didn't demonstrate massive focus. FirefoxOS - why did they start that?
It was like they forgot why they started Firefox (I used it when it was still called Firebird) in the first place - to have a streamlined focused browser that didn't include Mozilla's other suite (email, Frontpage clone, browser) but in the end has ended up being Mozilla 2.0.
Like you at first I did not understand, their focus is the open web, not that much the browser.
I think (we could actually check Mozilla meetings notes to know for sure) that :
- They saw that mobile web/internet would be where most of the traffic in some years.
- They saw most of the mobile internet was webkit prefix specific.
- They also saw they would not be able to provide Firefox by default on most phones, and people were unlikely to change the default browser.
- They finally saw that internet was moving to use "apps" in walled garden silos platform control by 2 companies (3 if you account for MS) instead of an open specced web.
They started FirefoxOS to provide an alternative option to users when buying a phone that is focussed, streamlined and was fulfilling Mozilla mission in providing a better open web.
FirefoxOS 1.0 was a basic smartphone OS really great for a grandpa moving to a smartphone. I could not tell such a thing for the Samsung Galaxy S3 The latter the versions, the better the features. Last FFOS version before being killed was actually fcking awesome (not perfect yet but it was close to be able to,some more month and that would be it) thanks to the webextensions being implemented OS wide. This puts the (power) user in control, really.
I found this enough appealing ( also after I've done some small web apps and deployed them to my FFOS phone, it was just sooooo simple) to look for a big and hopefully powerful phone (I just had this toy FFOS for less than 50EUR) with the latest FFOS on it, instead of my android phones I had since the G1.
But they killed FFOS right when I was searching for this next phone.
I was ready to pave the way and really write the apps (and/or webextensions) I was not finding yet to my tastes for a primary phone, it was not that hard, actually really easy for a web developer compared to even any webview based app. I was even OK to write my own keyboard for matching my expectations regarding it( not that the original was really bad, but it was no great either, but for the multiple keyboard switch system). I was eager to try to write the code (and waiting for the API on bluetooth was complete enough ) for conversing with my bluetooth devices ( including my Pebble ), and I was happy any website could actually do it once a simple JS lib published on npm would do the hard part of the job.
But when they saw the market for small priced device was invaded by Android devices because the cheap phones spec became good enough, they knew their inteneded market was never getting grounds, so they stopped it. In fact, once at this point they should have IMO switched and target the middle-high end power user, which would have gave them a new kind of influence, and access to actual hacker needing apps and able to write them.
But this was not that much an option as they wanted to get rid of the way they were financed at 90% by Google, in order not to be locked by it, notably to be able to focus on privacy like they did since (and containers are fcking awesome, thanks guys :), I have my own walled garden for you, web, I the user ! ), and they would likely lack of money to do this switch and the needed deals to achieve that.
I would but for some reason the UI thread for Firefox stutters every couple of minutes for a few seconds. No idea why, I'm not using any addons. I keep trying every 4 months, always the same result on my macbook air and imac.
I don't use Signal for that exact reason. The value in having the unified chat client on my desktop and phone outweight the potential privacy issues, so I'm using Telegram.
Firefox is my default browser but I have Chrome handy too in case I have to use Google Docs (things like Copy paste don't work properly in Firefox). I find that Firefox is maybe 50% slower than Chrome on initial load, but thereafter, I can't tell the difference. I really cannot see how an extra second or so of load time for a software product that one uses all day every day (ie you probably load it only once), represents a material performance difference. I think Chrome at this point is much more about inertia, and it is entirely reasonable to argue that we need competition and to request for people to use Firefox. Moreover I find Mozilla to be quite credible on its Firefox roadmap; after all, they invented a whole new, advanced, programming language, just for Firefox, and there's a lot of noise coming out of Mozilla on its various strategies IMO (including the logo, for example) which suggests to me that the organization is dynamic and has a strong future. Therefore I'm supporting Mozilla, and it's essentially costing me nothing, while hopefully doing a small bit to prevent a dangerous hegemony from forming.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadSo I don't actually know who took the decisions, but I wouldn't be so sure that it's Mozilla.
When you can't even use the browser it's very hard to keep marketshare.
There were a few years (2010-2014) when Chrome was a clear industry leader: in design, web standards, resource consumption, and championing openness on the Internet. Not anymore, at least for me:
I hope once Servo is production-ready, it performs far better than Chrome that the browser performance enthusiasts are also willing to switch.That said, Chrome's Web Inspector is top-notch, and it is the only thing I miss from switching to Firefox.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13325507
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13133135
[2] http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/19/google-will-kill-chrome-ap...
[3] http://imgur.com/a/fHAyx
I'm by no means an expert on this, but aren't WebExtensions based on the chrome extension API? Says pretty much that on the developers page[0] of Mozilla as well.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions
We strive for compatibility to make developers lives easier and are participating in a W3C community group to work on a standard.
Although Chrome is by no means obligated to, it would be nice to see a company such as Google—that claims to support openness on the Internet—adopt this more open standard. (That is, "browser.storage.local" instead of "chrome.storage.local").
[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ#Are_they_compatib...
Essentially, for those apps or websites it shouldn't matter if they run in Chrome, Safari, Edge, or Firefox.
I too can't wait for Servo, although the reality is that it's still an experiment and is miles away from being anywhere near feature complete or compatible with the years worth of edge cases coded into Gecko, I wouldn't hold my breath on Firefox being based on Servo in the medium term, however Servo will find a use in quite a few niches where the content is much more controlled, courtesy of it's compatibility with the CEF.
"They just want products that work" sounds like an explanation of why people buy iPhones, because I don't know anyone who's had that experience with Google products (other than Chrome, I suppose).
It's so bad that I've stopped even considering giving a Google product to family. They quickly get fed up with the Android phone or Chromebook and replace it with something else, like an iPhone or a macbook or a windows laptop.
Personally, I've owned about 6 different Android devices, and all of them either stopped getting essential firmware updates, or broke of their own volition. Most recently my Nexus 5X randomly stopped working, and then the warranty replacement spontaneously corrupted its internal flash a week after I got it. In my experience, buying from Google directly is worse than buying from third parties.
Still not gonna buy an iPhone though, because I like being able to actually run free and open software on my phone.
P.S. are you going to argue that Safari is the only good browser and the others all suck, just because tons of people use Safari? The real answer is that Safari's market dominance is in large part due to the iPhone and iPod banning third-party browsers, aside from whether Safari is a good browser at all (at most, it's a decent one).
Uhm... Gmail is an amazing Google product that people are very happy with, and that (at introduction) had no equal. Same goes for Maps.. at introduction there was nothing like it, and it has only gotten better. Hell, Apple Maps still sucks if you're not in the US. YouTube is (arguably) another product that people are very happy using.
And Safari is an amazing browser. The macOS version is by far the most battery friendly of all browsers (where Chrome and Firefox have an 'energy use' of 40-50 when playing H264, Safari is in the low 20s). The tricks used to get there are too many to name, but I take my hat off to Apple for going the extra mile. The iOS version is also very very battery friendly and oh so smooth.. although since all browsers have to use Safari's webkit backend, there isn't really a good way to compare.
Plus this: https://github.com/5digits/dactyl/issues/99#issuecomment-263...
You don't know anyone who has used Gmail, Youtube, or Google search before?
"It's so bad that I've stopped even considering giving a Google product to family. They quickly get fed up with the Android phone or Chromebook and replace it with something else, like an iPhone or a macbook or a windows laptop."
Those aren't Google products. Those are Samsung, Acer, or whoever decides to use Android/Chrome OS. How do you not understand this? You worked for Google. You should know that they don't actually build physical products, except for the Pixel. I think the Pixel is the first phone they built. They don't even control the Android on the Galaxy S. Samsung does. They decide what goes on and in the phone. Google doesn't.
I'm not going to argue Safari is a good browser lol. Firefox and Chrome are the only browser I will ever use, but right now I'm using Chrome because it has the best browsing experience out of all of them.
More seriously, there is a battlefield on the web. Since the demise of Opera, Firefox is the only mainstream browser left standing that actively attempts to not violate your privacy.
This doesn't mean that Firefox developers don't need to work on ways to make Firefox the best browser – incidentally, Firefox in January 2017 is orders of magnitude better than Firefox in January 2016. But it also means that some of the most important of Firefox are invisible, because they're all about what Firefox refuses to do.
Caveat: I'm a contributor to Firefox.
vivaldi is the browser from opera founder which strive to recreate this innovation and more.
As the company refused to open source the old opera, there is an open source project to recreate it: otter[2].
[1]: https://vivaldi.com/ [2]: https://otter-browser.org/
Every month or so, I try Firefox again with all the websites I care about, check how fast it feels, the JS performance, etc and, while it's pretty good, Chrome still is/feels faster. My tests are pretty subjective at times but I never find a huge reason to switch from Chrome (privacy issues aside). Each time I think I've spend too much time doing this dance and I take longer to do it again.
So I don't know about the 2016/2017 comparison you made and it being orders of magnitude better today. Maybe in some other area that is not performance?
To be clear, Firefox is not bad. It's actually pretty good... maybe browsers have matured enough that the low hanging fruits have all being addressed and it's hard to make Earth shaking progress (that would justify a switch).
My only suggestion is that people do not use phrases such as "felt faster" with friends and relatives who might take the (admittedly subjective) test results at face value and choose Chrome over Firefox.
People love to share data.
This one of the main reason why google search engine has been and is still so popular in Europe. Not such a good record for someone who pretends to champion users right and privacy.
Interesting that you say firefox gets better, I have been using firefox since it was called firebird and to me firefox gets worse with time by adding features I do not want (persona, sync, pocket, hello, botched speed dial, drm), removing features I use (status bar, ui redesign to look more like chrome, disabling script, panorama) and lacking useful features (a working history, a full text search of history, usable bookmarks over time, integrated adblock, live edit of source, an editable speed dial, side bar, disabling author css, ...).
When asked about google, they pretty much all knew google was spying and selling ads, which they hate, but all said they felt powerless and didn't what to do.
Totally different from the answers I got from tech aware people who either use google's product and don't care / love google or stay away from google / use them through habit and inertia and feel bad about it.
Also that Google has the balls to put all sets of restrictions on Play Store certifications, but "forgets" to put a clause related to device updates.
I own a few Windows Phone devices and still look forward to a possible Surface phone coming up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm typing this from Vivaldi, because I'm constantly looking for a replacement that feels fast and I can have the few 4-5 extensions I typically use.
IIRC they are working on expanding this so that tabs are split across multiple processes, without using Chrome's resource-hungry Process Per Tab approach.
For me, Google Chrome has always been a resource killer that's sluggish and consumes almost all system RAM (on 8GB total) with just 10 or 20 tabs. I see Firefox consuming a lot less with a few hundred tabs. While your response states your experience, it also sounds like you're meaning to say that Google Chrome is better solely because of your experience. So I don't see how such a response is helpful, overall.
Serving Google with the same kind of antitrust Microsoft got would be highly deserved and beneficial, but unfurtunately google made the political investments that Microsoft lacked.
Which means we get to hear officials say Google is indeed in a situation deserving the antitrust, but it's fine "because their products bring value to customers"...
I'm aware of some of the issues involving Android licensing/bundling of apps but not well informed on other aspects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228
So if you have a browser based OS, which happens to be loved by the USA school system, which browser do you think many US devs will care mostly about?
Again just to be clear, these questions are in good faith, I'm not simply trying to be argumentative, I'm hoping to get a better understanding of the issues.
Yes if you think in Global market share, Chromebooks don't matter. I hardly see them on sale here when traveling across Europe.
However any US software company doing web applications for the American school system will probably be biased to focus on Chrome.
Advertising Chrome as "a better browser" in (IIRC) search results, gmail, possibly other places as well counts as abuse of monopoly IMO.
Microsoft was punished for similar tactics back when the default desktop was equally important as top of Google search results and top of Gmail inbox.
Margrethe Vestager is a tough customer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/technology/google-eu-antit...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2016/09/18/apples...
The author might argue that this is weak resistance because it's just adding fuel to Google's fire. They have co-opted the open source community by building their tools this way. I prefer this to the nearest alternative, which is a company that pushes closed software on the world.
IMO, the best alternative is a fully open ecosystem in which the players are very small relative to the overall size of the markets in which they operate. Such things don't last long on their own. We need to decide to support them as a community or they will be overwhelmed.
The ideal equilibrium for the open web right now would be 33% each for evergreen Chrome (or other Webkit/Blink browsers), Edge, and Firefox.
Bleeding edge prove-of-concepts aside; developing a website or web application that works in all modern browsers has never been so developer-friendly with all the wonderful tools and mature frameworks we have (e.g., Babel), and is trivial with just HTML and CSS. It's a shame to see a class of developers emerge that target Chrome exclusively.
From a pragmatic perspective, the fewer browsers we as developers need to support, the better. There has never been any meaningful standardization between browsers. Even "modern" browsers are all different enough that you need to test and code specific paths for each of them unless you stick to trivial things.
Personally, I want the same thing I wanted back in 1996 when I started this ride: One browser to win, and the others to drop to such a tiny share that we don't need to support them anymore.
Firefox performed a service in convincing Microsoft to update IE6. But that was fifteen years ago. Since then, Chrome has arrived and demonstrated that it is far and away the best. In my opinion, Firefox would serve us best by simply stepping aside. All it does today is force us to code yet another path into everything we build.
The stagnant few years after Netscape screwed up Navigator 6 was actually a little mini golden age for web developers. Essentially one target, with a ton of features that are only now being recreated in modern browsers.
It's just a shame that Microsoft was so hated by everybody. Things like their sane Box Model endured 15 years of people referring to it as a "bug" until finally it got introduced as a CSS option and people were overjoyed to finally be able to specify the width of a DIV and have it end up being that size after borders and padding.
I, for one, am happy to have the option of a browser that doesn't decimate my battery life
Because the less competition, the more stagnant the web will be. Then vendors like Microsoft will shove proprietary tech into their browsers and we'll be back to IE6 + Flash. Is it what you want?
Firefox is the only serious open source browser project out there. Chrome isn't, Google could drop Chromium development any day, it wouldn't be the first time they did something like that.
Of course, I believe Mozilla & Firefox shot themselves in the foot by refusing to implement specs like WebSQL,File System API and a few others, no matter what the reason was. I use these API to deliver complex offline applications, I had no choice but to tell my clients to use Chrome. And yes IndexedDB sucks.
Personally I want the same thing that I wanted back in 1995, for narrow minded people who wants a one size fits all solution and do not understand the importance of openness of the web and standards to disappear so we get rid of the stupid "I'm developing for the most popular browser because I don't care".
Agreed that it is much more polished, if only because they aggressively remove everything they can from the UI, including features. Definitely provides a visually relaxing look, even if they crammed it full of unnecessary margins and whitespace. Works pretty well on tablets, too.
Chrome is the Apple of browsers and it should burn in a fire wrt how it mandates and imposes specific UI patterns on users. Mozilla, for all their "we're trying to make extensions more chromelike" seems to be holding onto that.
At least firefox allows for some customization, though not as much as the old opera used to offer.
I don't think I've experienced it, except when I watch HBO (Netflix and C-More works fine, so it's on HBO to get their stuff together in that instance).
_That's_ why they "won" not because of fucking adverts.
Given that Opera was basically "Chrome without Google marketing" I heavily doubt that. (The first version of Chrome was such a blatant Opera clone, it was just funny)
Chrome did.
Most of the people who argue things like this seem to agree that Firefox and Opera were superior browsers to IE. If that was the case, why hadn't they eaten IE's market share long before Chrome was ever produced?
Could it be that Chrome being widely advertised on the most visited site on the internet helped?
Chrome didn't beat IE. Firefox fought an all-out war and was not going anywhere either. What beat IE is an antitrust lawsuit actually.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
It is true, however, that chrome came at about the right time to capture a large share of its users (as well as a good share of FF users).
You seem to have messed up the timeline, or disregard the importance of being the first alternative to IE spread by word of mouth in the public.
No idea why. Chrome seems to cope fine so I just use it for that. Since I want my stream in a separate window on my other screen anyway it works out pretty well.
Despite that, Firefox still leads in market share in Germany (though with current trends that will change this year).
IDK if that caused it to grow to become the biggest browser, but it sold it for me.
I think we've seen throughout societal history that if you want to affect change you have to do it through the path of least resistance for consumers; this means creating a better browser experience that people use not because they want to revolt, but because they gain utility from doing so.
Even on desktop, I prefer Firefox (although mostly due to higher familiarity with it). Does Chrome really have some killer feature that I'm not seeing? I can't seem to figure out where exactly Firefox lacks.
This is where regulation is supposed to come into play.
Microsoft was not broken down or fined to oblivion, but they did change their behavior a lot when they started hitting regulatory boundaries. Internet Explorer was practically put into maintenance mode for many years when it became clear that Microsoft would not be allowed to own the web like they owned the PC.
We cannot know the outcome of an alternative history where Microsoft was given free hand to leverage the stranglehold on the web a fully enforced Internet Explorer (e.g. enforced like Safari in iOS?) could have developed. For all we know the outcome might even be Microsoft driven phones in every pocket, with everybody else unable to innovate on their own because they would be completely preoccupied with chasing compatibility with an ever-changing "Microsoft Html".
You can't do shit these days without having to deal with Apple's ridiculously selfish and tyrannical business model or Google's all-knowing, ever watchful gaze.
Worse in which regard?
> You can't do shit these days without having to deal with Apple's ridiculously selfish and tyrannical business model
Actually I do shit every day these days without coming into contact with Apple's selfish and tyrannical business model. So do millions of other people. iOS developer is a choice, not a sentence. If you don't like it, don't do it. There are tons of other things to do.
Their respective business models?
> Actually I do shit every day...
OK, but we're on HN and we're talking about building software and/or webpages... So let me rephrase - you can't make software and/or a webpage without having to deal with Apple and Google in some way. You're either going to have to put it in the app store and do some advertising with Google or you're going to have to make that webpage work with crappy Safari or make it AMP compliant or something else in order to get ahead. Of course you don't HAVE to do that stuff, but then you'll just get left behind. Seeya!
I was expecting some details about why these business models are far, far worse.
> So let me rephrase - you can't make software and/or a webpage without having to deal with Apple and Google in some way.
If you exclude extra-vague words "is some way", yes you can. Of corse, you'd come into contact with software made by these companies from time to time, but that software would be just like any other you use, regardless of their business model.
> You're either going to have to put it in the app store
No I don't. I've been gainfully employed as a software developer for more than 2 decades now and never put anything in any app store.
> you're going to have to make that webpage work with crappy Safari
I've not have to deal with browser compat issues for many years now, but if they exist I'm pretty sure that a) there are toolkits to deal with them, and b) that has nothing to do with business model, every browser has its quirks, including Firefox (in fact, last 2 times I had to deal with browser compat issues the Firefox was the problem and it worked fine in Chrome and Safari - of course, nobody cared about IE).
Pretty sure I mentioned those in my initial complaint.
> If you exclude extra-vague words...
OK, is "the only search engine that matters" too vague? How about "the only app store that makes money"?
If you just want to build some software, then fine: you don't have to deal with Apple or Google if you don't want to. If you want to be successful and make money though? You're going to have to deal with one of them whether you like it or not.
At the very least, you need Google to search and you need Google to help people find your product. Good luck getting customers if Google removes your pages from their results.
Similarly, Opera. People will still tell you with absolute confidence that Opera is terrible compared to Chrome. It's been a Chrome-clone since 2013. You'd think people would fact-check their opinions somewhen within almost 4 years, but unfortunately they don't.
Since it is not as visible as responsiveness, it is useful to have these discussions so people can decide what really is the "best" browser to them with full knowledge.
I know this sounds like RMS but with a problem the size of Google, then things gets political.
I'm not much of a plugin user, but I'll be using Chrome's Secure Shell [0] for the first time ever and will be advising Windows students to use it over PuTTY (at first, anyway). It's kind of a lifesaver for me because PuTTY, from my experience a couple years ago, is a much more stilted experience than OS X Terminal. I see Firefox has FireSSH [1] and will give that a try, but the high user base of Chrome's Secure Shell (600K+) gives me a little assurance about the reliability of the plugin.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firessh/
Yes, Firefox has multiple profiles.
Putting "all your eggs in one basket" in security context is suspicious. For SSH, Putty is a small program compared to the whole Chrome, security-wise much easier to evaluate. I don't know how using Chrome for SSH can be rationalized. Who is behind of that "Secure Shell" plugin ("offered by chrome-secure-shell-publishers")?
As for my class, yes, I'm not enthusiastic about shelling from the browser no matter how many people like it. But the main mitigation is that the class work we do is based off of my AWS setup: I spin up the EC2 instances and I manage/distribute the keys. None of the assignments require using their own personal info. And another reason for teaching them how to use browser profiles (something I've never seen students have set up) is so that they if they want to build something with Twitter's API, i can strongly advise for them to make a fake account and operate it in a different profile, to prevent accidental Twitter snafus (among other problems).
Why Chrome shell over PuTTY? I remember struggling with things like copy and paste, to the point where I think it is easier to use the mouse...but I push students pretty hard on using the mouse as little as possible. Chrome Shell feels as close to the OSX Terminal with the exception of key handling and the inability to access or transfer files from your own system.
All without losing the convenience that you talk about.
- Some keyboard combinations will be intercepted by the browser before going to the plugin (big one was ctrl-w which I used in vim a lot). The fix for this is to run the extension in it's own window; you can do this by right clicking the extension on chrome://apps and selecting "Open as window".
- It doesn't handle mixed width fonts very well and they jumble up the screen a little. This came up for me when using powerline. I couldn't find a fix for this at the time.
Hope that info is useful!
May as well just use Chrome at this point, rather than Chrome Lite.
So, if Mozilla can make FF as fast and "hip" to use as Chrome AND they can make it as free (which in this sense means being bundled in everywhere), then yes, they stand a chance of overtaking Chrome...
Google's already been denied strategies before
And with that vent out of the way, here are some positive ideas:
1. At some point, the giants tend to get too heavy handed for their own good. Try your best to keep alternatives alive until that point.
2. If possible, see if you can make the user on-boarding experience of your favorite OSS software much better. Usually it is easy because the standards around documentation/user on-boarding are generally pretty poor.
3. The reason people usually don't do 2 is that there is no incentive. See if you can figure out a sustainable way to incentivize it. Throwing out a wild idea: Say a StackOverflow like gamification website for people who create OSS documentation and fix OSS issues.
And if you are one of the committers, help users' with their problems when you actually have time to do something about it. FireFox was asleep at the wheel for quite a while not addressing its real defects. Chrome would have been another Safari like browser (i.e. dominant, but only within its ecosystem) if FireFox had actually improved at the rate you would expect from a heavily used software product.
The main reason I would not switch to Firefox is because, at least when I last tried it, I did not like their dev tools as much.
Let me preface this by saying I am open to a new browser, especially one that is always in "incognito" and doesn't share sessions between tabs/windows. My favorite is Lynx but that doesn't always work .
Facebook & Messenger for Android is pretty much spyware and they have over 1B downloads each, so that takes spying out of the discussion.
The last time I checked Chrome performed best (even if it is only marginal) on all benchmarks.
I know there are lots of serious reasons not to trust Google aside from user tracking (changing search results for political reasons[1], Eric Schmidt being a little too friendly w State Dept.[2]) but they make damn fine products.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-think-tank-launch...
[2] https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
Because your techie friends tell you to. This moved people off of IE6 to Firefox and this is what initially got people to move to Chrome from Firefox. Google's muscle on its web properties did the rest. Even you admit that Chrome is only marginally better on all benchmarks. For me, it's worth it to help your non-technical friends keep the web a bit more open by making them wait 0.1s (or however much longer) to open Facebook.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks
... works for me
Browsers and mobile OSes are two places where I think even we as developers have accepted the closed and encumbered ecosystem as the status quo because the alternatives are not user friendly.
Chromium holds almost all of Chrome and is open source. Multiple (!) alternative browsers are based on this.
You could argue against the WebKit monoculture, but that's a different topic. The browser ecosystem has never been this open
The reason you should is mostly constituted from all the things your browser does that you don't know about.
I get that's a hard sell.
Firefox is (currently) measurably much less binary exploit secure than Chrome, but it is the browser with a development community thats trying hard not to sell you out.
It has near parity with Chrome's extension APIs now, so what works on one usually works on the other, but Firefox lets people dive deeper to build things like the above.
You can use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, NoScript and any of the others.
All for nearly Chrome performance, but probably less than half of the memory use of Chrome, and Firefox is getting faster.
As for the average user... That story won't fly.
It never has, and never will.
Chrome is not as damn good as it was when it first launched, and launched from the company that has nearly ubiquitous control over web searches.
Bigger issues to Firefox adoption from the public are things like, "This site only runs on Google Chrome. Download from here." Big name sites have been known to do this, like Netflix (on Linux, at least).
Or how Edge re-adds itself to the user's taskbar with nearly every Windows update.
Those things are what impacts day to day users, and that determines what they use to browse the web.
That being said, Chrome's more aggressive blocking of sites with poor SSL, and more aggressive blocking of Flash, might just push users to another browser... Which will probably be Edge. Because it's on their taskbar.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...
Give it a try: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Migrating_fro... and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools
I still miss the old opera dev features that offered way better and advanced features years ago.
You mean JS code in the debugger? You may want to raise an issue for this in the new debugger which seems much faster developement progress: https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html
Or html in Inspector or CSS in the rule view?
Just checked and firebug is still here and works and will be supported until firefox 52 when firefox moves to become a multiprocess program. The firebug team is working to integrate firebug into firefox.next because it would be too complex to port firebug to a multi process architecture.
I didn't know about this and am not happy about it, I guess this means I switch to firefox esr and pale moon to continue using firebug if the dev tools are not to my taste (as they are now and have been since their introduction)
And I'm having a lot of issues with html5 video playback especially on prime video.
I'm hoping that Electrolysis will improve the general performance at least.
Firefox has been super responsive to me, using less memory than the same browsing activity would on Chrome & Firefox-only (afaik) add-ons like Self Destructing Cookies are A+. On Android, Firefox Mobile works just as good or better than Chrome.
From a developer standpoint, Mozilla's recent work on the Web Extensions API (which is an almost complete match with Chrome's) is outstanding.
[pihole](https://pi-hole.net/) is a project aimed only at that niche.
>Mozilla Foundation just reported a 28% leap in revenue for 2015, to $421 million, with cash flow more than tripling, to about $80 million.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2016/12/01/mozilla-...
This may sound great in theory, but I have serious doubts that Mozilla can deliver on that. At least from my perspective, their decisions in the more recent past have been erratic at best. They even happily implemented DRM when everyone else was doing it. At the moment it feels like Firefox is just copying what everyone else is doing, slightly worse.
And even if Chrome "wins", it's still open source, for the most part. If Google abuses their power, then the thing will be forked and their hole user base will be split. I'm pretty sure Google doesn't want that.
If you want to worry about something, worry about Google controlling Android. They already implemented lock-in there, it's a huge pain to fork in any reasonable way (see CynogenMod) and they control > 85% of the market. But sadly, Mozilla failed here quite spectacularly, because they simply didn't have the resources for it.
This is a totally disingenuous interpretation of EME. I think you mean when Google, despite their ~open source bona fides~ with Chromium, collaborated with Microsoft and Netflix to introduce DRM to the browser and used their crushing market dominance to force Mozilla to comply or fall even further behind?
If Firefox had a 90% market share, we wouldn't have this discussion about how we should use Firefox instead of Chrome. But the fact of the matter is that the majority of users doesn't care, and won't change their opinion because of a random blog post.
Now, Mozilla could have decided to make Firefox a privacy focused, truly open browser for those who do care. They could've been the first major browser who blocks privacy invading Ads by default, and that didn't implement DRM like all the others.
But they didn't. And so my point stands.
It was like they forgot why they started Firefox (I used it when it was still called Firebird) in the first place - to have a streamlined focused browser that didn't include Mozilla's other suite (email, Frontpage clone, browser) but in the end has ended up being Mozilla 2.0.
I think (we could actually check Mozilla meetings notes to know for sure) that :
- They saw that mobile web/internet would be where most of the traffic in some years. - They saw most of the mobile internet was webkit prefix specific. - They also saw they would not be able to provide Firefox by default on most phones, and people were unlikely to change the default browser. - They finally saw that internet was moving to use "apps" in walled garden silos platform control by 2 companies (3 if you account for MS) instead of an open specced web.
They started FirefoxOS to provide an alternative option to users when buying a phone that is focussed, streamlined and was fulfilling Mozilla mission in providing a better open web.
FirefoxOS 1.0 was a basic smartphone OS really great for a grandpa moving to a smartphone. I could not tell such a thing for the Samsung Galaxy S3 The latter the versions, the better the features. Last FFOS version before being killed was actually fcking awesome (not perfect yet but it was close to be able to,some more month and that would be it) thanks to the webextensions being implemented OS wide. This puts the (power) user in control, really.
I found this enough appealing ( also after I've done some small web apps and deployed them to my FFOS phone, it was just sooooo simple) to look for a big and hopefully powerful phone (I just had this toy FFOS for less than 50EUR) with the latest FFOS on it, instead of my android phones I had since the G1. But they killed FFOS right when I was searching for this next phone. I was ready to pave the way and really write the apps (and/or webextensions) I was not finding yet to my tastes for a primary phone, it was not that hard, actually really easy for a web developer compared to even any webview based app. I was even OK to write my own keyboard for matching my expectations regarding it( not that the original was really bad, but it was no great either, but for the multiple keyboard switch system). I was eager to try to write the code (and waiting for the API on bluetooth was complete enough ) for conversing with my bluetooth devices ( including my Pebble ), and I was happy any website could actually do it once a simple JS lib published on npm would do the hard part of the job.
But when they saw the market for small priced device was invaded by Android devices because the cheap phones spec became good enough, they knew their inteneded market was never getting grounds, so they stopped it. In fact, once at this point they should have IMO switched and target the middle-high end power user, which would have gave them a new kind of influence, and access to actual hacker needing apps and able to write them.
But this was not that much an option as they wanted to get rid of the way they were financed at 90% by Google, in order not to be locked by it, notably to be able to focus on privacy like they did since (and containers are fcking awesome, thanks guys :), I have my own walled garden for you, web, I the user ! ), and they would likely lack of money to do this switch and the needed deals to achieve that.
https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop/issues/415