I love their Android app, actually found it better than chrome on Android. Plus they have the same sync features across browsers on different devices. That is honestly the Reason I switched to Firefox about 18 months ago. Chrome at the time (still might), was slower and worked less well on Android.
I use Firefox Focus/Klar for everyday Web surfing, and Firefox beta for websites where I need to be logged in (quite rare actually).
It's great to know that every site I visit now can't track me (easily). It's like a have a fresh new browser every time. I recommend them both.
On Firefox beta, I also have installed uBlock Origin, Cookie Auto-delete, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere and Decentraleyes. Quite happy with my setup.
I use it and like it, and they'll be rolling out an update somewhat soon with a complete makeover of the rendering engine (switching to GeckoView from whatever they have now), so I'm hopeful that rendering will get faster.
I like it because:
- syncs with desktop Firefox
- has extensions (I mostly use Bitwarden and an ad blocker)
- interface is nice to use
- available in F-Droid
It's fast enough for me, though I haven't used mobile Chrome for years, so I guess I don't know what I'm missing.
The switch to Geckoview is for Firefox Focus, which previously used Blink (the Chrome rendering engine).
Standard Firefox for Android has used Gecko from the start. It is gradually being upgraded using the Quantum improvements, but the rate of change seems slow. I thought that the emphasis on multi-threaded processing in Quantum would be particularly useful for mobile, because the single threaded processing capability of mobile (and particularly non-Apple mobile chips) is very limited, but there don't seem to have been massive improvements.
I think it’s a shame they relegated Servo to a research project, integrating Servo into Gecko has been long-winded, and the most important target of porting a parallel/multi-threaded layout engine isn’t even being discussed. Frankly, given their $500m budget, their core mission of browser development, and the massive importance of mobile, they probably should have pursued both Gecko and Servo at the same time. Even if Servo only supported flexbox layouts it could be very useful as a wrapper while wider compability was being pursued. The emphasis now is on WebVR, which seems not very relevant to the mass market.
Unfortunately, it's trying to hit a fast-moving target, and that's really hard. Which is the reason for which I believe nobody else is currently pursuing any new web engine.
I also used Firefox on Android for a pretty long period, but to be honest I ended up moving to Brave.
I run Nightly so I get the improvements quickly, but even with that Firefox is still far behind Chrome.
- Firefox does not have a JIT for 64-bit ARM (AArch64). Didn't benchmark but this does make a difference.
- Running a extension based ad blocker seems to degrade performance and the difference visible on a smartphone SoC. I think Brave has it written in native code and deeply integrated, and it seems to perform without making things super slow.
- While I can't judge on the UI (actually I miss the tab gestures on Firefox), Firefox often glitches like not loading custom tabs, page search getting stuck and some others. This was quite stressful.
- The sync is super glitchy. It can easily be days outdated unless you trigger it manually.
if you're concerned about performance, why would you use nightly? i've never benchmarked the difference between other people's release, beta, and nightly builds, but i know at my day job the daily builds are likely to have performance regressions that won't necessarily be fixed until beta or release.
Because it's also the first to get major rewrites. The Stylo CSS engine used to be Nightly only, and Nightly is basically the only channel you can test the latest Quantum components.
Fennec (Firefox for Android) is basically in maintenance mode.
FWIW: Firefox Focus Nightly is a much better implementation of Gecko on Android than Fennec ever was, with the caveat that Sync, sessions, or extensions are not available.
I use an Android without Google Play Services. Firefox (Fennec on F-Droid) probably isn't as fast as Chrome, but it's very usable. Being able to use desktop addons like uBlock is great. I haven't found any compatibility issues with the websites I use.
In the settings there's an option to add a 'Quit' button to the menu, which will clear all cookies / history / etc. when you quit FF using menu->quit (so your session is still saved if you just go to the home screen and come back later). IMO that's better than Firefox Focus, which has adblocking and ephemeral sessions built in but doesn't let you have tabs.
I use the mobile Firefox on stock Android. There are certain issues like emails from Gmail not showing up correctly. But that's a minor pain compared to the adblockers and other features that I can use.
Works very well. I've been using it as my main mobile browser for at least a year now. Latest version is great and I recently noticed it even supports Firefox extensions (at least some of them!), which I don't believe android Chrome does.
Browsing on ff on Android right now. I think its great. Probably once a week I see a site that I have to use chrome for, but other than that small inconvenience, Firefox is great.
Looks like it's only available to some countries in Asia [0].
I've been using Firefox Focus on my phone (uses Webkit under the hood), since regular Firefox is too slow.
Human beings are pretty good, on the whole, about tradeoffs. For most people, the information they're trading away is only theoretically valuable, but the products they receive in return have very tangible value.
So if I didn't voluntarily giving up my privacy for something (an invaluable product to use) you wouldn't let me? Why? It's none of your business what I desire from my personal privacy.
Because your personal valuation is likely very off-the-mark because the consequences of that action may lie far into the future or may actually happen to others and not yourself.
Also, if the product is really "invaluable" to you (e.g. you have no choice but to use it) then your choice to give up privacy wouldn't be voluntary either.
> humans generally seem to be pretty bad at including more than the immediate here and now in their tradeoff calculations
I disagree with this assessment. What human beings are generally bad at is including the concerns of other people in their calculations. The probability that the information Google, Facebook, etc are gathering on them will ever be used to cause them significant harm is incredibly small. While one can imagine some future holocaust scenario enabled by it, no reasonable person would see that as likely from our current vantage point. The people affected by the way it is currently used, or the ways it is likely to be used in the future, are in a minuscule minority (and any competent authority wishing to abuse this information will no doubt endeavor to keep it that way).
> I'd see this as an argument why stuff like privacy can't be left to individual choice.
Yes, it's not like China is implementing a social credid system right now that shows how you can use that information to fundamentally restrict individual freedom.
Makes me think that we've already made the same mistake with fossil fuels and climate change :/ (Tangible benefit: material wealth and prosperity. Theoretically valuable: a balanced ecosystem)
(not to start an off-topic discussion about that, but just an observed parallell)
I am disheartened though that I feel compelled to use Chrome now in some cases because Google's UI's are poorly optimized outside Chrome (looking at your GCloud UI and YouTube) and some companies have made a decision to only support Chrome (looking at you Slack voice chat).
How have we not learned this lesson from when Microsoft did it? Believe it or not, there are still companies that require sites built for them to be compatible with IE7 because that’s what they standardized on and they don’t want to go through the trouble of an upgrade.
When you hitch your wagon to the same horse you eventually get left behind.
Microsoft was only held back by their own incompetence. GFWL, Internet Explorer, Zune, Windows mobile, the Microsoft Store,... they had all the power in the world to force that upon us but failed because their products were _so_ bad even non-tech people went through the trouble of finding alternatives.
Google, however? Their stuff at least works. They never had the luxury to send people through hoops, 3 seconds and people give up on the web. So that’s what makes Google so scary. They’re omnipresent _and_ competent.
My only hope ist that, as they grow, their products get worse which empowers better competitors.
Agreed. Google is already doing things to make their products bad. Companies that size seemingly can’t help it. Maps looks real nice and all but the old version was WAY easier to use. They won’t stop with these changes because they feel like they need to stay relevant and fresh and no amount of user complaining will outweigh their hubris.
I think Slack is actually using standardized tech that hasn't been implemented/or not implemented well in Firefox. Chrome doesn't have an ActiveX analogy. Anything you use in Chrome is based on a standard, although some, like the directory traversal, are standards that never saw completion and exist only because Chrome kind of jumped the gun and can't remove those things now.
Well, it's not ActiveX, but Google has been known (and is still known) to use a number of non-standards (often, as you point out, could-have-been-standards-but-weren't) in their own web properties, locking away non-Chrome users. Last time I checked, this was still the case with Google Hangouts, for instance, which used non-standard WebRTC.
I don't know about Slack specifically, but third parties have been known to follow suit.
There are some similarities, but it's not an identical situation.
When IE6 was parked and browsers were considered 'done', it was a closed source monolith tightly coupled to the dominant OS. Today Chromium is open source, even if Chrome isn't, and browsers are used on a greater variety of operating systems. Just as it's common for an owner of a new Mac or PC to install Chrome as a first task, there are no technical reasons why something else couldn't be the dominant choice - just familiarity and inertia. Those things change.
The other reason things are slightly different is because of better compliance with Web standards. For a web developer in the late 90's, it was easy to get drawn in to using Microsoft's proprietary tinkering with the DOM (only now are they able to resist the temptation to EEE, probably not through choice or natural instinct). Browsers now put much more emphasis on standards compliance, making web site and app portability common and expected.
The fact that Chromium is open source is completely irrelevant.
Fact of the matter is that Google controls its development, which means that whatever they push in Chrome becomes a de facto standard.
DRM for HTML to prevent ads from being blocked? Sure. Want to bet it will happen due to Google and Chrome?
We've got the same situation with Android too. That AOSP is open source is completely irrelevant, it's still a Google controlled monopoly, nobody can fork it due to the massive resources required and Google can effectively coerce phone makers into doing whatever they want via the threat of blocking access to Google Play.
The blind spot and double standard people have for Chrome and Android is huge.
---
Also, do you know what's most hilarious?
People switching to Chromium-derived browsers to get away from Google. I can almost hear the evil laugh from Mountain View.
> The fact that Chromium is open source is completely irrelevant.
Of course it is relevant. The fact that I can run Chrome in Linux/macOS/Windows means I am not forced to run some OS just to get compatibility with sites that I use. This is completely different from IE6/7 era, where in some cases it was impossible to use Linux/macOS simply because you had a site compatible with only IE.
BTW, I use Firefox, and I don't remember the last time that a site doesn't work in Firefox.
> DRM for HTML to prevent ads from being blocked? Sure. Want to bet it will happen due to Google and Chrome?
This is simply FUD. Does Google have the power to do it? Sure. Does it mean it will do it? Don't know, this is why it is FUD.
> We've got the same situation with Android too. That AOSP is open source is completely irrelevant, it's still a Google controlled monopoly, nobody can fork it due to the massive resources required and Google can effectively coerce phone makers into doing whatever they want via the threat of blocking access to Google Play.
Another FUD. Yeah, people can fork it and we even have a big example that is FireOS from Amazon.
Sure, Amazon is even bigger than Google so they have the massive resources required, however it can happen.\
> People switching to Chromium-derived browsers to get away from Google. I can almost hear the evil laugh from Mountain View.
This is completely irrelevant. People who use alternative browser are not simply using it "because it is not code from Google", but generally wants some features that Chrome does not offer (at least by default). The three major Chromium-forks (Brave, Opera and Vivaldi) are not focusing in "we're not Google", they're focusing in having new features.
The only reason Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox got a foothold was that IE6 was basically abandoned and there was so much low hanging fruit (Tabs! Ad blockers!).
But then Firefox got complacent with their performance, giving Chrome an in, and in the meantime IE/Edge got a lot better, so there is less incentive to try something else.
At this point, Firefox doesn't really solve any pain points for most users. Some people like the greater flexibility Firefox has (had?) with extensions, some people care about the anti-tracking work they're doing, but at this point the selling point seems to be an abstract notion of competition/freedom, which most people don't really care about.
Firefox needs a vision of what is missing from the browser that really resonates with people. They seem to be banking on the idea that privacy is that differentiator, and it's smart in the sense that it's not a direction that Google will go with Chrome, but all signs point to people not actually caring that much about privacy.
My personal take is that Firefox should really invest heavily in their Android browser (e.g. improve reliability of the media stack, get e10s, etc), build in an ad blocker, or bundle uBlock in the default install, and market that. Chrome will never ship an ad blocker on Android, and blocking ads is far more of a thing people care about than privacy.
[EDIT]: Maybe all the Rust stuff will pay off and Firefox will have a really good performance/security(battery life?) story. That would be a good path as well.
I don't have a strong opinion on what the market share of various browsers should be, but I don't think "we're a competing implementation that exists to keep Google/Apple/Microsoft honest" is really enough of a reason for most people to care about it. If Firefox wants to see their usage grow, they need to be providing a real value proposition to users, because there are real costs for users of using software with low adoption numbers, e.g. in compatibility & support.
Reading view keeps me coming back to Firefox. Some articles are good enough to read, but not enough to bother with sending to a reading app. It's usually when I'm busy researching and really need the one page with the right information to stop bouncing around. I'd spend more time zapping elements in uBlock Origin than I would reading it.
The growing unfriendliness of the web has reached meme status, so it might be a good selling point. One-click usability.
Sadly using Firefox on Android is an exercise in frustration. There are numerous sites I have to open in Chrome as they are in some way broken in Firefox.
I think firefox android user experience can be improved in a lot of cases by simply setting the User Agent to chrome. I have found that this works very well with a lot of sites. For example, doing a google search for any sports league gives you a nice interactive table with matches and standings in chrome, but with firefox the table lacks any interactivity. However, setting the UA to chrome makes the table work very well.
Also, I feel firefox consumes less battery than chrome on Android. I used to use chrome exclusively, and it would always show up as the largest consumer of battery. After switching to firefox battery life has been much better.
Really? Such as? I love Frefox on Android and have not noticed any issues, but I also admit I really don't do a lot of web browsing outside the handful of websites o care about.
> using Firefox on Android is an exercise in frustration
It seems strange to say, but my experience is the opposite. Because my Android Chrome experience was so bad, I went looking everywhere... and FFox was the answer.
With the advent of Firefox Quantum, and with the god awful Chrome 69-70 updates, I abandoned Chrome once and for all and it feels great. There's no point in the foreseeable future where I'll be going back.
I was a die hard Chrome user until about 4 years ago, switched to Firefox since then and I rarely feel the need to open Chrome, which I keep around just for the occasional testing of websites.
I never had problems with YouTube. That said Gmail or the GSuite Admin are a little slower in Firefox.
But you know what?
They are slow enough in Chrome too. Latest Gmail is a piece of shit.
So the solution to that was to switch to a desktop client (Mailmate, which can handle Gmail just fine) and for my personal email I switched to FastMail. And I'm very happy about it.
Get out of the Google bubble. The air is clean on this side of the fence ;-)
Latest Gmail is, indeed, a piece of shit. I think it's for the same reason a lot of websites now are (including my university's course portal): everyone is using frameworks that purport to work just as good on mobile as desktop but in reality end up compromising both platforms down to a mediocre workable level.
That's not a Google issue, and I honestly don't know if a resurgence of desktop apps in general would be a good thing or not.
I'm making a point to use FF because of privacy concerns, but the experience is poor. It hangs/crashes at least once a week, and the Reddit infinite scroll thing doesn't work for some reason.
That sounds odd. I haven't had issues with Firefox in forever.
Any chance you're using an antivirus? They've been known to hack the Firefox binary in... interesting manners. Also, if you have anything reproducible, I can help you file a bug.
Don't forget Google Hangouts and Google Analytics (the interface). I had to stop even trying to use Firefox for those. Granted, I haven't tried Firefox in those in about 2 years. I haven't had any trouble using Youtube in Firefox.
Has Chrome fully taken over yet?
No
These 3 brave countries still have managed to resist Google's charm
Cuba
Liberia
Eritrea
So, essentially yes.
These countries combined have less than 4 million people with Internet access. Most of them are in Cuba. Eritrea is the country with the lowest number of people with Internet access per resident and a rate of increase that is as low as that of industrial nations with saturated Internet penetration[1].
Digging into this a bit deeper on statcounter[2] there are a few other surprises:
- Firefox is only number four after Chrome, Safari and UC Browser.
- Still Chrome is the market leader in China - by far.
- Germany has been a Chrome holdout for a long time, but not any more, apparently.
Sub-100% market share in a populated country still means that a lot of people are using alternatives. That is why it seems absurd to break it down by country in order to declare a "total" victory. I sometimes use Firefox in the US - that fact alone says you cannot say it's "fully taken over" in my country.
analytics.usa.gov provides Google Analytics-collected stats of all the users who visit U.S. federal websites, including browser and OS info. As of right now, Chrome is at 46.4%.
I couldn't find at the moment a historical dataset > 90 days. The Internet Archive snapshot of the JSON from April 2015 [0] shows Chrome's share at 35.3%.
edit: the 2018 vs 2015 numbers for the other browsers:
Having switched back to Firefox and Duckduckgo very recently, I'm feeling much more optimistic about the future of a free web. Both have been on par with Chrome/Google in terms of speed and performance.
Now just need to break away from gmail and calendar.
I have noticed that too :-). That's one problem with Google: On the one hand I think they should be restricted but on the other hand their products are just very good.
Firefox is not on par in terms of performance at all, at least on the Mac. I use it at home and at work but it just uses too much CPU for me to recommend it to anyone.
I keep wanting to use Firefox on Mac, but the CPU issues cause constant fan churn.
I end up having to stick with Safari as my resistance browser. (Which isn't so bad, actually. I feel like Safari is pretty underrated in these discussions.)
I appreciate I'm a single data point and it's not scientific but with the same "typical" session open, the idle stats spread across all processes, on MBP2017:
For me the problem with Firefox on Mac are random CPU spikes, the average idle usage is OK. Or some tab getting stuck and skyrocketing to 100% CPU, killing 10% of my battery if I don’t notice it in time.
If you check on Bugzilla, there are many bug reports about it.
Just recently moved to fastmail with my own domain, and I am slowly moving all my accounts to it.
It definitely has fewer features than gmail/calendar, and a less "slick" UI, but you know what? I don't even care. It's just a webmail! Do it, the experiment will cost you very little, if you don't already own your own domain (I'm going to take a stab and guess you already own your own domain...)
Are those countries fighting back in any real sense, or it's a consequence of limited internet access? In Liberia, you can only get very limited and slow internet costing as much as $6 / hour [1]. And for Cubans, the problem was severe enough to make an offline version of the internet (a periodically updated hard-disk) be of any practical value [2]. The stats are meaningless without total traffic share of these countries.
"The stats are meaningless without total traffic share of these countries"
They do publish the sample sizes per country. I assume the sample size is proportional to traffic share, but it's not stated explicitly. Some of it does look odd...the sample size for Turkey is close to the sample size for the US. http://gs.statcounter.com/sample-size/StatCounterGlobalStats...
By resisting Google, which to me implies that they're instead using Firefox. That may not be true, as they may be stuck on IE or dominated by some other browser. I don't know the numbers...it was just a bad attempt at humor.
Chrome is a really nice browser, but we're creating a monopoly for it, not Google, ourselves.
I'm not going to talk about Google being evil or not. But as history has shown, monopolies never result in anything good for the people.
That's why I'm choosing Firefox as my day to day browser, not because it's better or free from a controlling enterprise, but because I want to keep the web as an open and diverse system, and for that, we need different players to play in equal conditions.
It's up to every one of us to achieve this, and to be honest, what are you missing in Firefox that Chrome does? It's quite a nice and decent browser nowadays.
I love Firefox, but I'd also recommend Epiphany. It's basically Safari but for Linux, maintained by GNOME and integrated with Firefox Sync. Best of all possible worlds.
I use Epiphany on both my desktop (Fedora) and my laptop (OpenBSD). It's nearly perfect, but it's annoyingly crashy. Random web pages (usually news sites, weirdly) will make it bomb right out.
It’s our fault? Good luck betting on the general population researching alternatives, then. I use Firefox religiously but have no illusions that it will take over because people’s idealism.
I tried switching from Chrome (actually I use chromium) to Firefox, but I switched back after one day. I didn't have any problems with any websites in Firefox, but the user interface of Firefox is just lightyears behind Chrome. What really was a deal breaker for me is how Firefox handles tabs, it's just not usable if you open more than 15 tabs in total because you can't move more than one tab at a time.
When I look online for say a RAM upgrade for my computer, I open a few tabs with online shops, then I open a new tab for each product, now there are ~40 tabs open and I want to move half of them to the beginning of the tab bar or to a new window. In chrome I press shift, select multiple tabs and move them, In Firefox I have to drag each tab to it's new position one after another.
In about:config there's a flag to enable tab multiselect, but you still can't move more than one tab at a time.
There's a few more minor issues like this and a 5 year old unfixed bug with tiling window managers in Firefox. With Firefox I just spend more time fighting the browser than browsing the web.
I generally have ~300 tabs open on Firefox without problem. If tabs are the main issue for you, can I suggest you give a try to the Tree Style Tabs extension?
At least for me, Firefox has taken over again. I am using it on macOS, iOS and of course Linux. The tipping point for me was the new rendering engine, written in Rust, but I really like features like sending tabs to my other machines. On iOS, I prefer the user interface with tabs shown as small icons to the one of Safari.
It's just a listing of countries where Chrome is not the most used browser. I'm guessing IE is more popular in those countries, due to old computing equipment being popular.
Is there a browser with something like uBlock Origin/Matrix built into the browser engine? Something like SELinux for the web. The user should have the option to take fine-grained control over the content in their browser on a site-by-site basis.
Does anyone know what the actual metrics being used for this site are? Maybe it was discussed in a previous HN? I don't see in the present environment how Chrome can ever reach the kind of power IE once had given the existence of iOS if nothing else. It's not just about pure marketshare either, it's about value share (which is often the stat that companies actually care about, with marketshare only being an occasionally useful proxy measure). Even if alternate platform users like iOS/Mac/Linux who don't use Chrome were only 10-30% of users say, what percent of revenue do they represent? It's not a uniform distribution amongst the general population.
And while there remain and probably always will be quirks between browsers and standards one implements that others don't yet and so on, I don't think there is anything quite like ActiveX remaining in the modern web.
How many countries Chrome is ranked #1 in doesn't matter and is a distraction.
Overall market share is infinitely more important.
E.g. assuming a two-browser world, it would be drastically more of a problem for Chrome to have 99% market penetration in 98 countries and 49% in the other 97 (so ranked #1 in only half, but still a huge problem)... than it is to have 51% market penetration in 192 countries and 49% penetration in a remaining 3 (so ranked #1 in nearly all, but no problem at all).
The real question from a healthy competition standpoint is, what is the market share which we consider to be "fully taken over", where competitors are no longer viable?
Switch to FF recently was entirely painless - the seem functionally identically for my usage cases. Probably prefer chrome on the whole but ugh fk google and their stance to privacy
A lot of comments in this thread seem to argue that the share of countries is less important than the overall market share. I think it's not completely unimportant either. Not everyone uses the same corners of the internet. Yes, many things are centralised but there are still a lot of language/country specific sites around, which will adopt to the specific ecosystem in their country. So if Chrome has 99% market share in a certain country, it's likely that local sites will optimize for it and using other browsers will generally be harder in that country.
The other way around, if Chrome is not dominant in a certain country, that might not have effects in other countries where they are.
As an extreme example, suppose China and Russia banned Chrome and mandated the use of special domestic browsers - but Chrome climbed to 99% market share everywhere else. Then the global market share would be far below 90%, nevertheless you wouldn't have an actual choice anywhere in the world.
But a count of countries is a pretty arbitrary way to slice market share, and one of the worse ways in my opinion.
If you want to measure the degree of competition in different corners of the internet, then 1) it's still about market share and not about which is top-ranked, and 2) better slices could be market share in desktop vs. mobile, in workplace vs. home, and in something more macro such as "more free" populations (U.S., Europe) vs "less free" populations (China, Russia).
Obviously it heavily relies on Electron + Chrome internals but the fact that I can control the full browser is pretty amazing.
This is a hybrid desktop+browser app which allows me to some pretty awesome things.
For example, I can inject myself directly into the networking stack in Electron.
This is how Polar implements offline browsing. It captures the traffic of a web page you're visiting and then keeps it in a cache for your usage forever. No worrying about the site vanishing or your network going offline.
Now I COULD do this with a PWA and service workers, possibly, but I think the main thing I'm worried about is Google's control over the extension install process.
I'm anticipating at some point that they might block service workers that essentially register for * ... that actually DOES make a lot of sense to prevent malware - but then I'm not malware.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 56.2 ms ] threadIt's great to know that every site I visit now can't track me (easily). It's like a have a fresh new browser every time. I recommend them both.
On Firefox beta, I also have installed uBlock Origin, Cookie Auto-delete, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere and Decentraleyes. Quite happy with my setup.
I like it because:
- syncs with desktop Firefox - has extensions (I mostly use Bitwarden and an ad blocker) - interface is nice to use - available in F-Droid
It's fast enough for me, though I haven't used mobile Chrome for years, so I guess I don't know what I'm missing.
Standard Firefox for Android has used Gecko from the start. It is gradually being upgraded using the Quantum improvements, but the rate of change seems slow. I thought that the emphasis on multi-threaded processing in Quantum would be particularly useful for mobile, because the single threaded processing capability of mobile (and particularly non-Apple mobile chips) is very limited, but there don't seem to have been massive improvements.
I think it’s a shame they relegated Servo to a research project, integrating Servo into Gecko has been long-winded, and the most important target of porting a parallel/multi-threaded layout engine isn’t even being discussed. Frankly, given their $500m budget, their core mission of browser development, and the massive importance of mobile, they probably should have pursued both Gecko and Servo at the same time. Even if Servo only supported flexbox layouts it could be very useful as a wrapper while wider compability was being pursued. The emphasis now is on WebVR, which seems not very relevant to the mass market.
Unfortunately, it's trying to hit a fast-moving target, and that's really hard. Which is the reason for which I believe nobody else is currently pursuing any new web engine.
I run Nightly so I get the improvements quickly, but even with that Firefox is still far behind Chrome.
- Firefox does not have a JIT for 64-bit ARM (AArch64). Didn't benchmark but this does make a difference.
- Running a extension based ad blocker seems to degrade performance and the difference visible on a smartphone SoC. I think Brave has it written in native code and deeply integrated, and it seems to perform without making things super slow.
- While I can't judge on the UI (actually I miss the tab gestures on Firefox), Firefox often glitches like not loading custom tabs, page search getting stuck and some others. This was quite stressful.
- The sync is super glitchy. It can easily be days outdated unless you trigger it manually.
Fennec (Firefox for Android) is basically in maintenance mode.
FWIW: Firefox Focus Nightly is a much better implementation of Gecko on Android than Fennec ever was, with the caveat that Sync, sessions, or extensions are not available.
In the settings there's an option to add a 'Quit' button to the menu, which will clear all cookies / history / etc. when you quit FF using menu->quit (so your session is still saved if you just go to the home screen and come back later). IMO that's better than Firefox Focus, which has adblocking and ephemeral sessions built in but doesn't let you have tabs.
There's a specific plugin for it, Google Search Fixer.
It was a bit tougher a year ago but recent versions are spot on, I've largely forgotten it's not chrome as it just stays out the way.
[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/get-started-firefox-lit...
I'd see this as an argument why stuff like privacy can't be left to individual choice.
Also, if the product is really "invaluable" to you (e.g. you have no choice but to use it) then your choice to give up privacy wouldn't be voluntary either.
(Edit: added first paragraph)
I disagree with this assessment. What human beings are generally bad at is including the concerns of other people in their calculations. The probability that the information Google, Facebook, etc are gathering on them will ever be used to cause them significant harm is incredibly small. While one can imagine some future holocaust scenario enabled by it, no reasonable person would see that as likely from our current vantage point. The people affected by the way it is currently used, or the ways it is likely to be used in the future, are in a minuscule minority (and any competent authority wishing to abuse this information will no doubt endeavor to keep it that way).
> I'd see this as an argument why stuff like privacy can't be left to individual choice.
Is for your own good comrade!
(not to start an off-topic discussion about that, but just an observed parallell)
I am disheartened though that I feel compelled to use Chrome now in some cases because Google's UI's are poorly optimized outside Chrome (looking at your GCloud UI and YouTube) and some companies have made a decision to only support Chrome (looking at you Slack voice chat).
Well, there you have it. The beginning of the process that will remind everybody why browser monocultures are horrible things.
When you hitch your wagon to the same horse you eventually get left behind.
Google, however? Their stuff at least works. They never had the luxury to send people through hoops, 3 seconds and people give up on the web. So that’s what makes Google so scary. They’re omnipresent _and_ competent.
My only hope ist that, as they grow, their products get worse which empowers better competitors.
I don't know about Slack specifically, but third parties have been known to follow suit.
https://www.w3.org/TR/webrtc/
When IE6 was parked and browsers were considered 'done', it was a closed source monolith tightly coupled to the dominant OS. Today Chromium is open source, even if Chrome isn't, and browsers are used on a greater variety of operating systems. Just as it's common for an owner of a new Mac or PC to install Chrome as a first task, there are no technical reasons why something else couldn't be the dominant choice - just familiarity and inertia. Those things change.
The other reason things are slightly different is because of better compliance with Web standards. For a web developer in the late 90's, it was easy to get drawn in to using Microsoft's proprietary tinkering with the DOM (only now are they able to resist the temptation to EEE, probably not through choice or natural instinct). Browsers now put much more emphasis on standards compliance, making web site and app portability common and expected.
Fact of the matter is that Google controls its development, which means that whatever they push in Chrome becomes a de facto standard.
DRM for HTML to prevent ads from being blocked? Sure. Want to bet it will happen due to Google and Chrome?
We've got the same situation with Android too. That AOSP is open source is completely irrelevant, it's still a Google controlled monopoly, nobody can fork it due to the massive resources required and Google can effectively coerce phone makers into doing whatever they want via the threat of blocking access to Google Play.
The blind spot and double standard people have for Chrome and Android is huge.
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Also, do you know what's most hilarious?
People switching to Chromium-derived browsers to get away from Google. I can almost hear the evil laugh from Mountain View.
> Fact of the matter is that Google controls its development, which means that whatever they push in Chrome becomes a de facto standard.
Which is why webp, webm, Amp has dominated over other standards?
> Want to bet it will happen
Weak speculation.
The context under discussion was "fully taken over yet", and "dominant".
Of course it is relevant. The fact that I can run Chrome in Linux/macOS/Windows means I am not forced to run some OS just to get compatibility with sites that I use. This is completely different from IE6/7 era, where in some cases it was impossible to use Linux/macOS simply because you had a site compatible with only IE.
BTW, I use Firefox, and I don't remember the last time that a site doesn't work in Firefox.
> DRM for HTML to prevent ads from being blocked? Sure. Want to bet it will happen due to Google and Chrome?
This is simply FUD. Does Google have the power to do it? Sure. Does it mean it will do it? Don't know, this is why it is FUD.
> We've got the same situation with Android too. That AOSP is open source is completely irrelevant, it's still a Google controlled monopoly, nobody can fork it due to the massive resources required and Google can effectively coerce phone makers into doing whatever they want via the threat of blocking access to Google Play.
Another FUD. Yeah, people can fork it and we even have a big example that is FireOS from Amazon.
Sure, Amazon is even bigger than Google so they have the massive resources required, however it can happen.\
> People switching to Chromium-derived browsers to get away from Google. I can almost hear the evil laugh from Mountain View.
This is completely irrelevant. People who use alternative browser are not simply using it "because it is not code from Google", but generally wants some features that Chrome does not offer (at least by default). The three major Chromium-forks (Brave, Opera and Vivaldi) are not focusing in "we're not Google", they're focusing in having new features.
But then Firefox got complacent with their performance, giving Chrome an in, and in the meantime IE/Edge got a lot better, so there is less incentive to try something else.
At this point, Firefox doesn't really solve any pain points for most users. Some people like the greater flexibility Firefox has (had?) with extensions, some people care about the anti-tracking work they're doing, but at this point the selling point seems to be an abstract notion of competition/freedom, which most people don't really care about.
Firefox needs a vision of what is missing from the browser that really resonates with people. They seem to be banking on the idea that privacy is that differentiator, and it's smart in the sense that it's not a direction that Google will go with Chrome, but all signs point to people not actually caring that much about privacy.
My personal take is that Firefox should really invest heavily in their Android browser (e.g. improve reliability of the media stack, get e10s, etc), build in an ad blocker, or bundle uBlock in the default install, and market that. Chrome will never ship an ad blocker on Android, and blocking ads is far more of a thing people care about than privacy.
[EDIT]: Maybe all the Rust stuff will pay off and Firefox will have a really good performance/security(battery life?) story. That would be a good path as well.
The growing unfriendliness of the web has reached meme status, so it might be a good selling point. One-click usability.
You're really selling Brave browser when you mention a bundled android solution with an adblocker.
However, you can install 'android' supported plugins into your android FFox... I'm running uBlock, decentraleyes, etc, etc, and it's great!
See here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/
Also, I feel firefox consumes less battery than chrome on Android. I used to use chrome exclusively, and it would always show up as the largest consumer of battery. After switching to firefox battery life has been much better.
It seems strange to say, but my experience is the opposite. Because my Android Chrome experience was so bad, I went looking everywhere... and FFox was the answer.
I never had problems with YouTube. That said Gmail or the GSuite Admin are a little slower in Firefox.
But you know what?
They are slow enough in Chrome too. Latest Gmail is a piece of shit.
So the solution to that was to switch to a desktop client (Mailmate, which can handle Gmail just fine) and for my personal email I switched to FastMail. And I'm very happy about it.
Get out of the Google bubble. The air is clean on this side of the fence ;-)
That's not a Google issue, and I honestly don't know if a resurgence of desktop apps in general would be a good thing or not.
Move away from their client based products though: Chrome-> FireFox, Gmail app->any other, Maps->Bing/OpenStreetMap.
(Personally I still use maps, because the others aren't quite quite up to par in my region).
(Signed: an ardent FF user :) )
Credits goes to @pcwalton: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18048844
Any chance you're using an antivirus? They've been known to hack the Firefox binary in... interesting manners. Also, if you have anything reproducible, I can help you file a bug.
These countries combined have less than 4 million people with Internet access. Most of them are in Cuba. Eritrea is the country with the lowest number of people with Internet access per resident and a rate of increase that is as low as that of industrial nations with saturated Internet penetration[1].
Digging into this a bit deeper on statcounter[2] there are a few other surprises:
- Firefox is only number four after Chrome, Safari and UC Browser.
- Still Chrome is the market leader in China - by far.
- Germany has been a Chrome holdout for a long time, but not any more, apparently.
[1] http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/
[2] http://gs.statcounter.com/browhttp://gs.statcounter.com/brow...
I couldn't find at the moment a historical dataset > 90 days. The Internet Archive snapshot of the JSON from April 2015 [0] shows Chrome's share at 35.3%.
edit: the 2018 vs 2015 numbers for the other browsers:
- Safari (iOS and macOS): 28.6% / 19.9%
- IE (all versions, but not Edge): 10.9% / 28.2%
- Firefox: 4.7% / 11%
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150412223314/https://analytics...
"Removed Brave from the User Agent HTTP header to reduce fingerprinting" https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/CHANGELO...
Now just need to break away from gmail and calendar.
I end up having to stick with Safari as my resistance browser. (Which isn't so bad, actually. I feel like Safari is pretty underrated in these discussions.)
If you check on Bugzilla, there are many bug reports about it.
It definitely has fewer features than gmail/calendar, and a less "slick" UI, but you know what? I don't even care. It's just a webmail! Do it, the experiment will cost you very little, if you don't already own your own domain (I'm going to take a stab and guess you already own your own domain...)
Next step: Android. Any suggestions?
[1]: https://www.lonelyplanet.com/liberia/internet-access
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-i...
They do publish the sample sizes per country. I assume the sample size is proportional to traffic share, but it's not stated explicitly. Some of it does look odd...the sample size for Turkey is close to the sample size for the US. http://gs.statcounter.com/sample-size/StatCounterGlobalStats...
I'm not going to talk about Google being evil or not. But as history has shown, monopolies never result in anything good for the people.
That's why I'm choosing Firefox as my day to day browser, not because it's better or free from a controlling enterprise, but because I want to keep the web as an open and diverse system, and for that, we need different players to play in equal conditions.
It's up to every one of us to achieve this, and to be honest, what are you missing in Firefox that Chrome does? It's quite a nice and decent browser nowadays.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web
Probably talking about Web Developers, of which there are many here.
When I look online for say a RAM upgrade for my computer, I open a few tabs with online shops, then I open a new tab for each product, now there are ~40 tabs open and I want to move half of them to the beginning of the tab bar or to a new window. In chrome I press shift, select multiple tabs and move them, In Firefox I have to drag each tab to it's new position one after another.
In about:config there's a flag to enable tab multiselect, but you still can't move more than one tab at a time.
There's a few more minor issues like this and a 5 year old unfixed bug with tiling window managers in Firefox. With Firefox I just spend more time fighting the browser than browsing the web.
Working hardware acceleration that makes videos play instead of stutter.
One really bad point about it is that on MacBooks, it seems to use up the battery charge really fast.
I guess even North Korea are active Chrome users? Who would have guessed.
And while there remain and probably always will be quirks between browsers and standards one implements that others don't yet and so on, I don't think there is anything quite like ActiveX remaining in the modern web.
Overall market share is infinitely more important.
E.g. assuming a two-browser world, it would be drastically more of a problem for Chrome to have 99% market penetration in 98 countries and 49% in the other 97 (so ranked #1 in only half, but still a huge problem)... than it is to have 51% market penetration in 192 countries and 49% penetration in a remaining 3 (so ranked #1 in nearly all, but no problem at all).
The real question from a healthy competition standpoint is, what is the market share which we consider to be "fully taken over", where competitors are no longer viable?
The other way around, if Chrome is not dominant in a certain country, that might not have effects in other countries where they are.
As an extreme example, suppose China and Russia banned Chrome and mandated the use of special domestic browsers - but Chrome climbed to 99% market share everywhere else. Then the global market share would be far below 90%, nevertheless you wouldn't have an actual choice anywhere in the world.
If you want to measure the degree of competition in different corners of the internet, then 1) it's still about market share and not about which is top-ranked, and 2) better slices could be market share in desktop vs. mobile, in workplace vs. home, and in something more macro such as "more free" populations (U.S., Europe) vs "less free" populations (China, Russia).
Specifically V8, Chromium, NodeJS, and Electron.
I've been working in an offline browser and documentation platform named Polar which is based on Electron.
https://getpolarized.io/
Obviously it heavily relies on Electron + Chrome internals but the fact that I can control the full browser is pretty amazing.
This is a hybrid desktop+browser app which allows me to some pretty awesome things.
For example, I can inject myself directly into the networking stack in Electron.
This is how Polar implements offline browsing. It captures the traffic of a web page you're visiting and then keeps it in a cache for your usage forever. No worrying about the site vanishing or your network going offline.
Now I COULD do this with a PWA and service workers, possibly, but I think the main thing I'm worried about is Google's control over the extension install process.
I'm anticipating at some point that they might block service workers that essentially register for * ... that actually DOES make a lot of sense to prevent malware - but then I'm not malware.