Out of curiosity, before Chrome came along, why didn't Firefox eat IE's lunch? The Microsoft anti-trust case was 1999-2001 but Chrome came out in 2008.
There was basically no marketing of browsers in 2000... I found opera and Firefox on a cd from pc world. But never saw anything on the internet about it... Google pushes chrome easily by plastering it in front of you every time you go to Google or gmail...
In the right circles, Mozilla Browser/Phoenix (and then Firefox) did eat IE's lunch until Chrome launched and Firefox started becoming slower and more bloaty. The only time I used IE from IE 5.5/6 onwards was to download Mozilla Browser and/or Opera after a fresh install. It was common knowledge to disable ActiveX and download Mozilla.
Firefox was always slow - the GUI felt slower than IE to me - and while it theoretically had better standards support, there were no websites that didn't work in IE.
(Personally I was using Konqueror in that era - even then it felt like a much better browser - and wish the open-source community had rallied behind it. But the US open-source folks never seemed to pay much attention to anything that had been implemented in Europe)
Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple picked it up to make WebKit.
The truth is that working on browser engines is hard and unfashionable work, nobody in opensource really wants to do it. Every desktop environment made its crappy half-baked reimplementation when it looked like deep desktop integration was inevitable and Netscape was a black-box (the IE 4/5 era), then dropped it when Firefox came about - it was good enough, and the integration fashion had passed.
I do agree that KDE was (still is) ridiculously ignored in the US. The licence schism generated a certain tribalism that is now difficult to overcome. Which is funny, considering GPL is now The Devil in the US.
> Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple picked it up to make WebKit.
How so? The browser kept working nicely the whole time. Eventually Webkit was offered as a rendering engine option when development overtook mainline KHTML, but that was long after Apple first adopted it.
It was basically deprecated as a file manager, in favour of Dolphin, and all-around de-emphasized. It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project.
> It was basically deprecated as a file manager, in favour of Dolphin
Well sure, but I saw that more as splitting out the file manager and browser into separate apps, which seems perfectly sensible.
> It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project.
Shrug. It was always a shoestring project in terms of how many developers they had, but the browser kept working well, was my experience.
Web standards weren’t a thing. You had to be bug compatible with IE or websites wouldn’t work. Firefox was slowly catching up. It was up to some 30 something percent after the big operations at the grassroots to popularize It. Mozilla was making web standards a thing.
When Chrome arrived, though, the paradigm shifted. Chrome was blazing fast. You double clicked it and it opened instantly. You closed it and it was gone. When you typed somrthing into the bar, it searched it or it went to the url. When you opened a new tab it opened instantly. It was amazing. And everyone knew who Google were - they’d made real search, they’d given us Gmail (upending all of webmail).
It was on its way. Most people just shrugged and used the default browser (IE) and there wasn't much mindset that browsers were meant to be power tools - IE didn't even have tabs, it was just a window that held a webpage with a couple of back buttons. And IE felt clean after AOL, which was many people's first browsing experience.
Among those who did switch, most switched to Firefox (and a small few switched to Opera). By the time Chrome was released, Firefox's market share was 20-25%, entirely through grassroots evangelism. It felt like a steady race that we were winning. Then Chrome came along with its minimalist interface, hyper-optimised JS engine, extreme attention to latency, and aggressive marketing from the front page of the internet (which was also growing more JS-heavy by the day), which contributed to Chrome not just feeling faster, but amazingly futuristic. Whereas Firefox was "you really shouldn't be using that crufty old IE, try this new hotness - it has tabs!", Chrome was more "OMG you have to try this, it makes your internet twice as fast". It didn't help that Chrome's strength was Firefox's weakness - for all its merits, its XUL-based interface sometimes made it feel a mite sluggish.
This is true. I wasn't much tech savvy back then. I switched to Chrome because it made my internet fast.
Of course it might not really have, but the sleek look, the circular loader instead of a progress bar kind of a loader that Firefox had at that time, faster JS engine – all this combined to give me a wow factor in terms of browsing speed.
Remember, this was at the time when 250kbps of broadband speed was the "normal". And speed was easily a critical factor.
Firefox ate IE's lunch. Really, it was Firefox who begun a revolution in a web-space. At some point Mozilla rebranded their browser suite named 'Mozilla' into Seamonkey, and started Firefox as a separate product (not a part of suite of apps like mail client, IRC client, web browser, and calendar). It was around 2005, though I believe wikipedia can tell the precise date. The result was a rapidly growing market share, I remember celebrating this as the end of IE domination. I was linux-user then and IE domination and IE-only sites was a pain in the ass.
Then in a couple of years Chrome emerged. It was a way simplier than FF, it had no firefox's complex dialogs to customize a lot of things. Chrome helped Firefox to eat the rest of IE market share, and then started to eat into Firefox market share.
It was like this. Funnily that people doesn't remember that, believing instead that it was Chrome who overthrown IE. It was Firefox who changed web to a point when web-developers couldn't ignore non-IE users, and had to check compliance with standards, not just check whether their sites works with IE.
I wonder if there is a term to describe the sheer ignorance of the (tech-aware) masses. Sadly, Firefox is fighting a hard battle that it's possibly, and slowly losing.
There is a term for describing the attitude of if not the masses then at least a large subset of the very much tech-aware HN crowd - a subset never too many wristflicks away from the downvote button if anyone dares question the necessity of the Google empire and all its attendant blessings.
That term is 'complacency'.
Perhaps Firefox should research why Chrome is so successful and adopt that? I use Edge, Safari, FF Dev Edition, and Chrome, and I consistently return to Chrome because of the smooth user experience. In my uninformed opinion, FF is losing for the same reason the FSF's products never went mainstream, which is they're focusing too much on their message than delivering a solid product. Which is sad, because I do remember when Firefox was released just how good it was.
They could have the best browser on the planet and they would still be a bit player. Google owns mobile and webmail like MS owned the desktop, and most people will use what the platform owner tells them to use. As long as the ruler doesn't fall asleep at the wheel, like MS did with IE, everyone else will be a bit player.
I think market share is the wrong metric to fixate on. FF market share has never been particularly big, that shouldn't be the target and it never really was. The target used to be improving the web and being the most innovative and reliable engine for web standards. This is what Mozilla was good at, before they started thinking like your run-of-the-mill big company ("we need to find the Next Big Thing! Market share! Leverage! Competitive advantage!"...) and wasted years in pointless side-bets.
1) If your market share is too low, sites don't bother testing in your browser. Since most sites are not written based on standards but rather by trying things until they work [1], this means that sites will start breaking in your browser and it will become harder and harder for anyone to actually use it. This is what happened with Opera and Edge.
2) If your market share is too low, you don't get much say in standards discussions.
It's not about having "big" market share. Having 90% market share or whatnot is a not really a goal for Firefox. But it does need "enough" market share that it can actually meaningfully achieve its mission [2]. Producing a browser that no one can actually use in practice and having no impact on the evolution of the web would both be failures in mission terms. 0.01% market share is "not enough". 20% is "enough". Where the line is in between is hard to tell.
[1] Hard to fault web developers for this; the standards are so complex that writing "to the standard", which requires understanding it, is hard. It doesn't help that recent web standards have had a tendency to be over-engineered, partly due to being created by a large company at the behest of other parts of that large company, so having a tendency to be designed to be usable by large companies but not necessarily worrying about anyone else.
By this reasoning, users should have been flocking to Firefox since Firefox 57. It's technologically great, in terms of both performance and UX, in addition to the good message.
I suspect this is partly why Firefox is losing the battle. By concentrating resources on nice-to-have user functionality rather than implementing core technologies that web developers actually build sites with, we end up with more and more websites that only work in Chrome. Far fewer users care about browser config than "does my internet banking site work?". Firefox probably needs to work on that, even if it means making the browser work with Chrome's non-standard implementations of things, to retain users.
I suspect that would be easier than persuading web developers to target more browsers unfortunately.
No, but you can't move Mozilla forward without firing incompetent directors flying chartered jets and getting $1M USD remuneration for nothing.
All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers who pulled out Firefox, and all the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years.
P.S. There is a whisper going around that Google's only reason to keep paying Mozilla so generously is just to keep them down, and quiet — a kind of unwritten non-aggression pact
What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO.
Mozilla's intentions and fears seem to be very reasonable, driving what they do from AV1 to fighting DRM, though they have hit dead ends with Firefox OS (now Kai OS) and other side projects, the organization is still doing work that is in the best interest of the common person, unlike what the tech giants have been doing.
> What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO.
Many things been coming out of their house, but not a usable browser — a raison d'etre stated in their charter.
I asked you for citations for your claims, yet instead I get diversion...
Wrt having a usable browser, I'm literally using Firefox for Android to talk to you right now. Firefox has been a usable browser for years, seems your salty tho.
Please provide citations for:
- Incompetent directors flying chartered jets and getting $1M USD remuneration for nothing.
- All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers
- All the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years.
And a list of 8 people with six digit salaries, out of whom 4 have their roles not even tangentially related to Mozilla's charter activities. And this is for Mozilla Foundation only. Mozilla corporation (M. F. Technologies) is keeping really below the water in terms of publicity.
> All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers
All popularity Firefox had gained was in time of it being a community project, when Mozilla did nothing but provide a CVS server and a bugzilla. You should've seen how they bled user share the more they turned into a commercial business for the past 17 years.
> All the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years.
First take their revenue from getting generous payouts from Google, then from all others affiliate programs, including the ill famed pocket. $300m is a not a joke sum, very generous, more than they pay to any other affiliate http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almos...
"Many things been coming out of their house, but not a usable browser — a raison d'etre stated in their charter. "
And yet here I am reading this on Firefox. Like, I get that someone might prefer Chrome, but how anyone could call FF unusable is baffling to me. What on Earth would make it unusable in your opinion?
>I think about Chrome’s usurping of Internet Explorer (IE), and I wonder (antitrust and all aside) would Chrome have usurped IE if it wasn’t for IE stagnating? I remember when I was younger and jumped ship to Chrome - personally, it wasn’t about using Chrome because it wasn’t IE, it was about Chrome beating IE in a foot race and offering me a clean user experience.
Chrome ate Firefox's lunch, not IE's. Firefox was the first browser to take a chunk out of IE, in large part because of the stagnation of IE6. People were switching away from IE at a fairly consistent rate. When Chrome came along, the rate remained the same, but people started switching to Chrome instead of Firefox.
This graph shows it clearly (starts a little late to catch Firefox's initial bump but you can see the trend): http://i.imgur.com/7bP2pmj.png
That graph begins with IE at 60% share and ends with it at 20% share. It indicates pretty clearly that most of Chrome's growth came from IE, I'm not sure how you can interpret it another way.
Look at the slope in the beginning. People would have switched away from IE anyway. The release of Chrome didn't change the number of people switching away from IE, but it stopped Firefox's growth dead in its tracks.
IE6 stagnation was hated by developers and users alike. Growth of any browser came from something-must-be-better-than-this.
FF had the upper hand against Opera, who were still quite the serious contender. I'm sure someone has done a PhD thesis on this, and if not well worth doing on multi-factor influences on market share for web browsers. Very multi-disciplinary too, covering tech, consumer understanding, embedded incumbents, marketing (a big part in Chrome's boom in my opinion).
Chrome's growth came from IE, yet. But at the time, anyone's growth could have come from IE. Chrome did it better and faster.
* I was still using IE6 in a corporate enviornment in 2013. I have friends that still require IE6 on XP in a company because funding for the system upgrade can't be made. The system's not internet facing, not explicitly. IE6 tried to define the internet, thankfully the internet moved on, and would have moved on. FF was at their tails, Chrome sped that.
I agree, and Chrome did that in one simple way: marketing and monopoly power. They leveraged their position in search and webmail to push people to switch, and hammered the message in mainstream advertising (on buses and newspapers, even in Europe). If they had pushed FF instead of building their own browser, now FF would be in that position - regardless of technical merits (which were minor, and basically boiled down to a single one: process-per-tab, which meant the browser never crashed if a single website misbehaved).
FF was not without responsibilities (they got bogged down in backend work on gecko that never really delivered, then got distracted by side bets like FFOS and friends), but without Google's other properties and market share, this would never have happened.
That is not my recollection. When Chrome debuted, some people had bazillion of FF extensions that were bogging it down, installed an extension-free Chrome, and went "much speed so wow". Later Google started pushing JS performance.
It doesn't matter that much anyway - Google didn't make the difference by converting FF users, but by being better than Mozilla at pushing IE users to switch. Which, again, was not a technical issue at all. I would bet that 90% of those users never even tried FF. A lot of them installed Chrome on Windows so they could synchronize settings from their main device, i.e. an Android phone.
At the time I remember this was a huge performance gain on my machine with my workflow (dozens of tabs), since you could easily open up the Chrome Task Manager and see which tab was causing problems. It was also the first browser to make updates invisible, so I installed it on every family member's PC.
This seems like an attempt to rewrite history. I was an avowed Firefox user, but Firefox was slow. I bought a EEE PC and Firefox was just too heavy to run, whereas Chrome ran fine.
Eventually all my computers ran Chrome because Firefox wasn't the best option anywhere any more.
As an avid Firefox user, I must admit that Chrome was better for a long time – largely due to two reasons:
- Mozilla diverting devs towards Firefox OS;
- Mozilla attempting to maintain the old XUL/XPCOM-based add-ons architecture.
Both of these hurt Firefox a lot. Since Firefox 57, though, Firefox is back to being really quick.
On the other hand, most (non-dev) people I know who installed Chrome did it for marketing reasons – oftentimes simply because they had installed an anti-virus or Flash, which came bundled with Chrome – not out of actual merit.
That's dishonest. At least, mark it as your point of view. I was eager to switch to Chrome when it came out because Firefox was very slow. Firefox 3 was terrible in that regard and it never got any better.
This is what I remember. Back in 2008 I had a Intel Core Duo laptop with 1GB RAM, and Firefox 3 (I think that was the version number), was horribly slow on it, when previous versions ran extremely smoothly.
When Chrome came out sometime in Fall '08, I used it, and it was faster than whatever FF version I had installed. So I kept using it.
I was an earlier believer in FxOS and while it made huge mistakes, I don't think it was a waste of time.
A lot of the work that went into getting Fx running well on bottom-of-the-barrel specs (256MB RAM, 4GB flash, 1GHz single CPU etc.) I would argue we still see gains from today.
They also helped pioneer Web APIs, improve web permissions, and even useful web tools were made for FxOS that could be used for Fx on Android. Hell, even Google thought the main ideas were solid - look at ChromeOS!
A fantastic write-up of FxOS is written about here: https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-story-of-firefox-os-cb5bf79...
I wouldn't rush into it, but with webassembly I can't help but think that a browser rendered mobile OS is a concept worth reviving at some point. And google is unlikely to pursue that since they have Android.
Regrading Pocket, why? I was ready to pull my torch out for Mozilla when I realized that Firefox included first-party Pocket support, until I learned that Mozilla now owns Read It Later (the developers of Pocket). I see no problem with Firefox including support for a product that Mozilla has complete control over, especially as a browser extension is a natural use case for Pocket.
They need that to make money in the dark future when they are not getting enough money anymore from Google because of their low marketshare. They call it "becoming independant".
b.) The ads are entirely local and do not track you. They're an attempt to diversify revenue sources away from Google. Chrome doesn't have to do that, since Google tracks you.
A big problem is that the web standard is too complicated. Browsers are pretty much a virtual os that can do almost everything. For anyone to make a browser from scratch today is not feasible. We will move towards a monoculture, because there is no alternative unless we make a drastic shift in rethinking how the web should work.
Yeah. In the early days of internet, web won, because of its relative expressiveness and lack of -rigidity- structure, compared to gopher for example. Now we see that the same unbounded expressiveness led to a monolithic system within a system, that is only feasibly maintainable by large organizations. One program should do one thing, (and do it well): that's what leads to healthy systems.
For me, it's not the bloated browser centric computing experience that's the biggest problem. In my eyes, it's eclipsed by the armies of web developers whose only professional purpose is to work with this technological mishap. If our only document delivery system, i.e. web, wasn't such a mess, the same could be accomplished by a fraction of the current workforce.
But the web has also allowed for things which are way more than document delivery; imageboards, for instance, weren't around before the web, and the fact of carrying images made them unsuitable for previous technology.
Yeah, it became hard to define. That's pretty cool for users in the short run, but pretty bad in the long run, from a systems point of view. In other words, web surely had its moments, but unfortunately the biggest one is this peak-web thing we're talking about.
> Maybe Chrome can compete with itself by swapping out the rendering and Javascript vms.
Not that I have any insider information but from the complaints I've read about how the committees that handle promotion requests at Google, I'd be surprised if there aren't Google engineers already trying their hand at this.
What I'd like to know is how much does Chrome cost Google? I've read that Mozilla spends just under half a billion dollars a year so I'd expect Google likely spends at least a billion a year on Google Chrome (and associated tasks). Not sure how we'd come up with a number though because I wouldn't know how to put a price tag on things like webp, webm, depot tools, or the Google infrastructure that Google Chrome team gets to use (presumably for free).
I remember estimates (so, take them with a laaaaarge pinch of salt) on ads promoting Chrome, which were expected to be ~4x the total budget of Mozilla.
I would be surprised if (without counting ads), the Chrome paid devs were not at least 3x the number of Firefox paid devs.
Oh, good point. I didn't think of that. I think the fact that Google promotes Chrome on Google Search and so on is worth more than the ads I see all over the web as well.
This. The pain of developing apps for the web could be tolerated as long as there was a vision for browsers becoming a kind of universal runtime. But that has failed miserably.
Think about what Chrome's dominance means: Chrome can push users and developers around as it wants. There is no long-term viability, and anything is at stake. Chrome already has QUIC support, will soon gain Grid Layout Level 2 support, etc. At the end of this decade, we'll be left with a generation of developers lost in the cloud.
For too long, the situation on the web has been that the inmates run the asylum, including so-called standard bodies financially dependent on Google. As they say, the road to a dystopian future is littered with good intentions.
I'd be very happy with a fixed, lower tier of web standard that is easy to implement against. It should contain enough standards to build attractive, solid (eg) online banking interfaces, blogs and news sites, commenting etc. In other words, a minimum for media consumption, rather than apps.
That is true it is a problem. Also the problem is use of web pages for stuff where it isn't a good idea. And also, any browser seems pretty terrible to me, I have found (I wrote some ideas about how to make a better one, but also there is the use for other kind of programs, including telnet, plain text email (without HTML), IRC, NNTP, gopher, etc). Even HTTP is misused.
This is indeed what people expect but it’s still pretty far from true. There are still a bunch of CSS quirks that are vendor specific. Also if you want to have fun read about the history of the innerText API - it even works different in different versions of IE! And wasn’t adopted by Firefox until about two years ago. These are only a few of the myriad mines you dodge when developing a library for the web at large. Have a look at caniuse.com for a journey down a compatibility rabbit hole. :)
Chrome is full of bugs and getting slower by each release. Also regarding how they force people to log in just to use profiles it's pretty clear that we need good alternatives.
Crazy idea. what would happen if firefox would also become chromium based? You would now have a browser as fast as chrome but with better privacy features that chrome will never compete against.
If chromium is open source other companies could share the control over code right?
I suspect this is a terrible idea but still trying to find out why.
Not even close. I wrote a comment [0] with my examples recently. I like FF (though besides Containers, most reasons boil down to "it's not Chrome"), but fast is a word I'd only use in comparison to IE/Edge.
Having different rendering engines means that at least theoretically the W3C are in control of web standards; having only one rendering engine, Chromium, means the W3C is irrelevant and the standard is "what Chomium does".
You'd lose out on the WebRender and all the other Quantum/Servo-related improvements, their influence over web standards, their extended extension APIs and pretty much all respect they've built up over the years.
> If chromium is open source other companies could share the control over code right?
The sole governing body for Chromium is Google. Other companies get exactly as much control as Google decides.
That's the opposite of, say, the Linux Kernel or Rust. It is my understanding that Firefox is also heading in the same direction as these, i.e. towards shared control by all stakeholders.
I'd love to use Firefox, but always go back to Chrome because couple of small issues:
- Pinch zoom using the trackpad or the touchscreen is not smooth, it doesnt zoom the whole page just elements. Chrome/Safari/Edge does it well.
- Tab tearing is clunky compared to Chrome.
- The UI for bookmarks/history is awkward. For example it takes 4 clicks to reopen a recently closed tab compared to 2 in Chrome. When I add the history button its still 3 clicks...
Mozilla lacks the financial strength to shove their merchandise down people's throats. Microsoft used OS market share, Opera used small device market share and Google used web search market share to promote their offerings. Mozilla never had a similar advantage, only technical superiority for a while, which others caught up in a few years and average users didn't care about that anyway.
When I tell people to use Firefox they just laugh like it's a quirky personality trait that I use the underdog browser instead of the one everyone knows is best.
I respect people choosing products based on ideality, but I personally will just use what suits my demand/preference best.
When I first switched from IE to Firefox 1.5, it's because it has tabs. And I loved it more and more once I figured out how well-built it is and how powerful addons can be.
When Chrome firstly came, it was pretty bad in term of functionality. The extension system is weak (compared to what Firefox can offer at the time), it lack TONS of what I personally consider as "essential features" (font settings for different languages is a big one for me as a non-Latin character user, for example), so I continued to use Firefox.
But Chrome catched up very quickly. Today, the features of two browsers are basically on par in my user case, especially after Firefox switched to WebExt (which I think is the right direction, by the way). I started to use Chrome more and more due to some small details, like better sync experience etc. Again, purely personal choice based on my heavy use of both.
Another thing that pushed me away from Firefox is my personal experience in bug reporting. I'm not a software developer, but I do report bugs semi-frequently. I feel like I was treated better in Chromium project than Firefox's one. I have lots of unhappy experiences there (the one that I still can't get over is that they won't fix a video playback bug that affects all Win7 + nVidia GPU users [1]). I think in Chromium everytime you report a bug with clear repro steps, there will at least an employee (or volunteer? Not sure) that will attempt to repeat your steps and attach a screencat of that in 1-2 days. It feels good.
People always say "we can't do anything about it" when some bad situation happen.
Except it happens because it emerges from the collective behavior.
Now, one can't fight a all the fights, and I don't think somebody that decides to avoid this one is a bad person. But one should definitly pick up some fights. Choose some things to pay for, decide some things to consume or be part of, not just by the nature of it, but by the consequences of doing so. Although I do think like in the article that it's better to fight _for_ something than _against_ something.
Anyway, if one doesn't makes, on daily basis, regular, endless, conscious choices, one is not taking part of the world but is just passively living in it.
Looking at your Win7+nVidia bug, I'm kind of confused why you would expect Firefox to fix this when this seems to be a bug in the nVidia graphics driver.
It's hard to define it as an nVidia bug or a browser bug. You may say it's an nVidia bug because it only happens on nVidia; but then you can also say it's a "Win 7 bug" because it only happens on Win7.
Anyway, as a fact: it works fine in IE and Chrome (after they fixed it). So at very least, it is fixable on browser's end.
It also works fine in any video player you can think of.
Also, from what I can see, neither Chromium dev nor Firefox dev claim it's an "nVidia bug". Chromium dev just went ahead and fixed it. Firefox dev said they're not going to fix it because (from previous ticket [1]) "We don't intend to add new features such as this code is only used on Windows 7." Which IMHO makes no sense because when this bug firstly appeared, it was 3-4 years ago; and Win 7 is still one of the most used OS and is in the supported OS list of Firefox.
Yes, there are many reasons. I'll give a few examples.
If Firefox adopts Chromium, there becomes effectively no way for Mozilla to shape the futures in manners that are not blessed by Google. For instance, Google doesn't seem to be interested in WebVR/WebAR, so there is no way to bring a Chromium-based browser in this direction until Google says so. The same thing happens with compression formats, for instance.
Also, as Google controls Chromium, a monopoly of Chromium also means that Google can decide to deprecate and/or customize web features without any counter-power. For instance, Google could decide to restrict WebPay to GooglePay, effectively leveraging their monopoly against PayPal and credit cards. There are also a number of manners in which Google could, in theory, make Netflix or Facebook or any competitor less usable or entirely unusable on the web. No Chromium-based browser can do anything against this.
Don't forget that Mozilla is also working on a next-gen rendering engine, Servo, that is expected to kick the ass of both Gecko and Blink on recent platforms, in terms of both performance, battery use and security. Making Chromium the only web browser means abandoning any hope to switch to this new architecture, as everything would need to be bug-for-bug compatible with Chromium, instead of following the standard.
One of the reasons I use Firefox is because Gecko is simply better than Blink, which becomes completely unusable when having many tabs open on a PC with 8GB RAM.
I think there's another factor at play that isn't often mentioned: Google uses the dominant position of its services, as well as the strength of their brands, to promote Chrome as the better browser, in not-so-subtle ways.
One is often repeatedly prompted to install Chrome when visiting Google on other browsers[1][2]. Most normal users would just give up and install just to get rid of the pop up.
Microsoft has been doing the same (e.g. trying to trick you into keeping Edge when trying to select another browser as default on Windows 10), but their product wasn't good enough for it to work, it seems.
That's been fixed recently but there is another issue - Google search results from the home screen always open in a Chrome view, even if your default browser is Firefox. You end up with an awkward mix of Chrome and Firefox.
1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of.
2. Firefox have bookmark tags.
3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width)
4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked.
5. Firefox have a built-in reader-mode. I don't use it much on desktop, but on on mobile it's very useful for pages that doesn't reflow.
6. There's an ad-block extension for firefox-mobile.
[1] Could of course be because I'm more used to it and have more history in firefox :)
Not fantastic, but necessary in any web development activity. Being logged in as different users in the same browser, while at the same time not suffering from the limitations private mode has. Makes testing and developing very easy and saved me a lot of time.
if only i could open a container without automatically loading all tabs inside it, but lazy loaded like when you restart the browser and only the active tab is loaded.
Firefoxs omnibar history search is significantly better than chromes; although i imagine that is down to them having no stake in sending google searches which google obviously does
Recently switched to firefox and am quite happy to see it has lots of feature I didn't think it had.
Chrome allows me to do use the built-in search engine of any website supporting it by pressing tab and then typing my search query. In firefox, it seems what I have to do is type my search query than use my mouse to click on the wikipedia icon (or amazon/etc). This also requires me to setup said search engine in firefox preferences. Ain't there anyway I can get that search experience using only the keyboard?
The search box is separate in Firefox (next to the address bar). You can get to it by typing Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on Mac). Once you type your query, you can use the Down Arrow or Tab key to navigate to the site/engine you want to use and then hit Enter. You can also rearrange the order of those search engines to make the frequently used ones easier to reach.
If you don't mind a network round trip, you can also setup DuckDuckGo as your default search engine and use bang commands [1] to do different kinds of searches on many sites.
You can do this sort of search in Firefox as well. Right click on pretty much any search box, then click "Add a Keyword for this Search..." You'll get an add-bookmark dialog that you can put a keyword into (e.g. "w" for Wikipedia) -- I like to save the resulting bookmark in "Unsorted Bookmarks" so that it doesn't clutter up my menus. After that just typing "w Firefox<enter>" in your address bar will bring up the Wikipedia page for Firefox.
These differences do not affect the general audience's choice (except maybe #6, but it's a non-standard setup which means it requires multi-step user opt-in which is non-obvious to the market). They're hardly differences at all. Imagine if we were asked to pick between another two pieces of same-purpose software, we'd see such a list as saying they are essentially the same thing.
No, that’s bookmark keywords, which are not widely used and difficult to discover, and for which there’s a rough alternative in search engines. I believe it’s on the chopping block, or at least it looked to be a few months ago, as I discovered when looking through Bugzilla to see about exposing bookmark keywords to WebExtensions so that I could make an extension that would implement DuckDuckGo’s !bangs in the browser.
Tags, on the other hand, are actually shown in the regular UI without needing to open the full bookmark manager. Much more discoverable, at least.
If they get rid of bookmark keywords, without some other equivalent mechanism (i.e. one that lets me set up URL bar commands so that "wp X" -> roughly "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X", "g" -> "mail.google.com/u/0/h", and so on), then I will be really annoyed.
It’s possible to use search engines instead, but creating your own basically requires you to find or craft a search box that is equivalent to the desired action. It’s in no way easy to work with (not like making a bookmark with the %s placeholder), and isn’t quite as pleasant to use in the awesome bar either. I’m with you that removing bookmark keywords would be very annoying at present.
To alleviate the pain somewhat, I switched a while ago to setting DuckDuckGo as my default browser, and simply using their bangs. Saves a lot of configuration when setting up a new browser, and all the expected ones (!w, !yt, !g, etc.) work.
I was about to try Side View yesterday -- I usually run two Firefox windows side by side anyway -- but I couldn't be bothered to find out what data exactly they would extract from it[1], and I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt. I fully expected to find it as a standalone extension, but if it exists, I couldn't find it.
[1] By proceeding, you agree to the terms and privacy policies of Test Pilot and the Side View privacy policy.
Weird, why is Side View in Test Pilot now? They had something like this[1] for a long, long time - I can find references to it dating back to 2007 - in the form of the "load this bookmark in the sidebar" toggle.
For instance, I'll queue up a bunch of infant related tabs to email to my wife. If I'm unsure whether the site will stand the test of time, I can send the entire article (with an index) to her in the email as a kind of archive. I've also been sending myself my programming-related tabs when I go down a particularly deep rabbit hole.
About the omnibar: does anyone know what its limitations are? It seems to lose sites I only use somewhat infrequently. It's frustrating when I know I've been there plenty of times, but nothing pops up.
For future notice though, the answer in the first link is wrong; you want "places.history.expiration.current_max_pages", not "places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages". Apparently the max "pages" are automatically calculated by default- mine was around 160k, so my history only went back about 2.5 years. I've set it to the maximum value for a 32 bit integer, which I guess should fix the problem for the next 20 or so years.
Kind of annoying that Firefox's default is to delete things when you told it not to delete things.
They do it for performance reasons, but I've not noticed any slowdowns yet at least. Still - would be better if they had a limit on how long back they searched instead of actually deleting data. That would most likely be more work ofc.
6) Even better: Built-in Tracking Protection can likely serve the same use case and gives you better performance, because jumping into JavaScript code and back for every request is costly (it's not a high cost, depending on hardware though).
Firefox is also more touch friendly on Windows 10. If I touch the menu button or touch-and-hold to bring up the menu, the menu items are spaced wider to make it easier to touch the required option.
Chrome on Windows 10 doesn't appear to differentiate between tapping and mouse clicking on a menu item. The spacing between items remains the same narrow spacing, making it somewhat harder to select the correct item using touch.
I've noticed that Firefox's awesomebar does a full text search, and will find the text you've entered in the middle of words, but Chrome doesn't.
For example, I have bookmarked my blog (theandrewbailey.com) in both. Typing "rew" into Firefox suggests my blog. Chrome doesn't, and I need to type it out from the beginning in order for it to get the clue.
is supported on it. It completely changed my browsing experience, and I cannot use any other browser except for quick, temporary browsing (like how one might use Notepad on Windows in a bind).
I'd highly, highly recommend this extension to anyone who has never had the pleasure to use it.
Chrome doesn't support the APIs needed to make a full Tree-style Tabs replacement. Anything that attempts to do it by necessity runs in a separate window disconnected from your browser.
So it's there, but it's nowhere near as seamless and convenient as it is in Firefox.
As @slavak mentions, Chrome APIs are far more hobbled and every tree-style implementation I've seen has been glaringly deficient in comparison to Tree-style-tabs on Firefox. TST should be the way all browsers handle tabs, especially considering that vertical screen real-estate is far more expensive. I've been using it for 6+ years and can't imagine browsing any other way.
1. I really dislike the firefox omnibar and that I can't set it to just be an address bar. I sometimes visit washingtonpost.com but not often enough that I have a bookmark, and every time firefox insists it should be wasingtonpost.com.co, which I must have visited at some point but it is not bookmarked and the suggestion never goes away (I have firefox set to clear history when exiting, but I tried to do a "clear now" and it still appears). This means I can't type washingtonpost.com and go to washingtonpost.com, which is all I really want from typing in an address bar.
3. userChrome.css is poorly documented but a nice option, not sure if Chrome has something similar. I have firefox set so that each tab is just a favicon and an extra pixel on each side. It mostly works well, except at some point the audio icon started appearing (it didn't when I first made the change) and it appears over the next tab, that makes it impossible or nearly impossible to directly select the next tab.
5. Reader mode is exellent if you use a more comprehensive javascript blocker, since many pages work in reader mode that wouldn't otherwise. Hopefully this isn't because it is actually running some javascript in reader mode or otherwise avoiding the usual blocking rules.
I think the reason there is a focus on "firefox is better than crome in some fundamental ways" is that once you get down to individual features they both change frequently and a feature that one person likes might really annoy someone else. The reasons to avoid chrome are not likely to change unless firefox gets as bad as chrome. If you convince someone to switch for some random feature then there is a much better chance they will switch back in a few releases when the random feature breaks in some way. Additionally, it isn't clear that firefox has an opportunity to convince all that many end users.
That being said, anyone who wants to do a feature comparison should go ahead and do it. The article seems to be saying "the real problem here is that other people are writing about the differences they care about".
regarding your first point, I believe you can make the address bar behave like you want simply by Edit->Preferences->Uncheck 'Provide Search Suggestions' and removing a result from your address bar results with shift-delete might also be what you're missing
Thanks for the suggestions. Unchecking 'Provide Search Suggestions' didn't help and I already had 'Show search suggestions in address bar results' unchecked. Shift-delete didn't help either. I made a somewhat longer reply to the sibbling comment of your comment but it turned out I did have a sub-page of washingtonpost.com.co bookmarked and for some reason it was just completing to the domain name and not showing the star. Deleting that fixed the problem. I also found browser.urlbar.autoFill to make it stop changing what I type. So yay firefox configurability.
1. Try to type wasingtonpost.com.co and press delete (more generally - hover the mouse over a url-suggestion and pressing the "delete" button will remove it from history.
Very strange that clearing the history doesn't resolve it though..
I tried that on each character where it shows that completion after seeing your initial suggestion, but it didn't help (it makes the suggestion go away that time, but it is shown again next time). I finally figured out that I had bookmarked a scam page under washingtonpost.com.co at one point and deleting that made it stop (I looked before but must have typoed the address). The confusing part is that it didn't complete to the full bookmarked page and didn't show the star like it does for everything else. And I did have the home page of the Washington Post bookmarked, just not in an accessible place to click on it, so I don't know why it didn't choose to autocomplete to that.
Also, I found browser.urlbar.autoFill that gets it to not modify what I type but still show suggestions from bookmarks. I think I had tried to disable browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled at some point and enabled it again since it is sometimes helpful to quickly find bookmarked pages. It still searches if the entered text doesn't look like a domain name or url and there seems to be no way to disable that. Still, I appreciate that Firefox is configurable in a lot of ways and that there is a way to get it to mostly do what I want :).
i wish i could prioritize the search suggestions in the search/addressbar: tabs first, then bookmarks, and only then history. or make three groups, and give me the top 3 tabs, top 3 bookmarks and top 3 history matches.
Not quite what you described and maybe you already know this, but you can prefix (or postfix) your query with %, *, or ^. This will restrict the results to tabs, bookmarks, or history, respectively.
i didn't know that. thank you! that's going to be a huge help, because like some others here, i have hundreds of tabs open and am often searching for one that i knew i had already opened.
Why not try Seamonkey https://www.seamonkey-project.org/. Since Mozilla split the old application into the "lean & mean" Firefox and Thunderbird, they have both become so bloated that the old navigator combo is looking svelte by comparison!
> I think this kind of conversation is naturally fatiguing, and creates a particularly negative means of ushering new users into the platform - almost as hostages, rather than excited participants.
Definitely true. Asking users to respect certain principles is tantamount to guilting them which doesn't work.
> It’s time we analyse what Firefox does better than Chrome, and sing those praises.
From the perspective of a non-technical user, the differences are not noticeable. Firefox and Chrome have continued to converge (...er...maybe one following the other) to the point that the differences listed are not real differentiators.
Oddly enough, you could argue that telemetry and the constant push for user happiness and adoption is what is hurting FF. FF looks like Chrome. I'm not saying stop listening to your users, but in general it's ok to differentiate yourself in ways that don't appear to be immediately beneficial to adoption. The primary way this can be done is in the UI. We can all recognize that there are still lots of efficiencies to be gained around the current state of internet navigation. Other approaches may not be better, and I understand the maintainability fear of multiple UI paradigms in the same software, but at least it's a way of differentiating yourself.
Hands down there is one objective thing that Firefox does well and nobody else comes remotely close. DOM access. For some reason Firefox is thousands of times faster than other browsers when it comes to executing the standard DOM API methods.
I know that is a bold statement but it is easily verified with numbers using a perf tool. Chrome is faster at executing JavaScript than Firefox, but even still Firefox leaves everybody completely in the dust when executing the DOM API.
DOM access is so incredibly important to how the web works and nobody really talks about. For some unknown reason most developers are deathly afraid of the DOM and will do everything possible to hide from it. It is common in every job I have worked to see mountains of querySelectors and 10mb of supporting framework code so that developers don't have to fear the DOM buggy man. I could sympathize if the DOM were complicated, but it isn't.
I really believe if Firefox goes away and that competition is gone the web will get fundamentally slower. Everybody will see this slowness and yet very few people be able to diagnose why, and that is tragic.
My understanding is that DOM manipulation and queries will always be far far slower than the logical equivalent in JavaScript. Does "thousands of times faster" challenge that?
Ie. React's virtual DOM is a phenomenal idea because it greatly reduces actual DOM interaction. Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?
The DOM is a structured API to markup (HTML/XML). That means DOM instructions are access to something outside the language. Leaving the language, for any reason, is slower than executing within the language. That said the execution speed of DOM instructions is orthogonal to the execution speed of JavaScript alone.
> Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?
The DOM is the standard technology the browsers use to communicate from JavaScript to markup. QuerySelectors are strings, so they have to be parsed into DOM instructions by the browser using a native code engine. Since the DOM is a well defined standard and it is the standard that all browsers use DOM instruction performance can be directly compared between the different browsers.
> DOM manipulation and queries will always be far far slower than the logical equivalent in JavaScript.
That really depends on what you're doing.
Reimplementing querySelector in JavaScript (even if you do it on top of JS-only node representations, not on actual nodes) is likely to be slower than the built-in version, for example.
If you're doing a "modify-read-modify-read" cycle, then things are different because the contract is different: the DOM promises that reads will see all modifications, while some of the other systems built around it don't.
> Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?
It really depends on the shape of your workload. There are various cases where React's virtual DOM is pure overhead and just makes things slower.
[Disclaimer: I work on a browser rendering engine, and have done a fair amount of performance work, so I may have my biases about what I see in profiles.]
One thing Chrome does better than Firefox is third-party coookie blocking: It's MUCH simpler to whitelist certain cookies in chrome - simply go to the site's cookies dialog, open the blocked tab and whitelist the cookie..
Somewhat ironically since many people say Firefox is better at blocking tracking.
When it's hard to whitelist the cookies I need, I might cave and simply allow all third-party cookies.
As much as I would have liked them to, it doesn’t fix the problem of people not testing in Edge, which is why they’ve gone for Chromium in the first place.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] thread(Personally I was using Konqueror in that era - even then it felt like a much better browser - and wish the open-source community had rallied behind it. But the US open-source folks never seemed to pay much attention to anything that had been implemented in Europe)
The truth is that working on browser engines is hard and unfashionable work, nobody in opensource really wants to do it. Every desktop environment made its crappy half-baked reimplementation when it looked like deep desktop integration was inevitable and Netscape was a black-box (the IE 4/5 era), then dropped it when Firefox came about - it was good enough, and the integration fashion had passed.
I do agree that KDE was (still is) ridiculously ignored in the US. The licence schism generated a certain tribalism that is now difficult to overcome. Which is funny, considering GPL is now The Devil in the US.
How so? The browser kept working nicely the whole time. Eventually Webkit was offered as a rendering engine option when development overtook mainline KHTML, but that was long after Apple first adopted it.
Well sure, but I saw that more as splitting out the file manager and browser into separate apps, which seems perfectly sensible.
> It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project.
Shrug. It was always a shoestring project in terms of how many developers they had, but the browser kept working well, was my experience.
Google pushed Chrome a lot. We need another antitrust for Google honestly. They are promoting Chrome everywhere they can.
When Chrome arrived, though, the paradigm shifted. Chrome was blazing fast. You double clicked it and it opened instantly. You closed it and it was gone. When you typed somrthing into the bar, it searched it or it went to the url. When you opened a new tab it opened instantly. It was amazing. And everyone knew who Google were - they’d made real search, they’d given us Gmail (upending all of webmail).
Among those who did switch, most switched to Firefox (and a small few switched to Opera). By the time Chrome was released, Firefox's market share was 20-25%, entirely through grassroots evangelism. It felt like a steady race that we were winning. Then Chrome came along with its minimalist interface, hyper-optimised JS engine, extreme attention to latency, and aggressive marketing from the front page of the internet (which was also growing more JS-heavy by the day), which contributed to Chrome not just feeling faster, but amazingly futuristic. Whereas Firefox was "you really shouldn't be using that crufty old IE, try this new hotness - it has tabs!", Chrome was more "OMG you have to try this, it makes your internet twice as fast". It didn't help that Chrome's strength was Firefox's weakness - for all its merits, its XUL-based interface sometimes made it feel a mite sluggish.
Of course it might not really have, but the sleek look, the circular loader instead of a progress bar kind of a loader that Firefox had at that time, faster JS engine – all this combined to give me a wow factor in terms of browsing speed.
Remember, this was at the time when 250kbps of broadband speed was the "normal". And speed was easily a critical factor.
Then in a couple of years Chrome emerged. It was a way simplier than FF, it had no firefox's complex dialogs to customize a lot of things. Chrome helped Firefox to eat the rest of IE market share, and then started to eat into Firefox market share.
It was like this. Funnily that people doesn't remember that, believing instead that it was Chrome who overthrown IE. It was Firefox who changed web to a point when web-developers couldn't ignore non-IE users, and had to check compliance with standards, not just check whether their sites works with IE.
I think market share is the wrong metric to fixate on. FF market share has never been particularly big, that shouldn't be the target and it never really was. The target used to be improving the web and being the most innovative and reliable engine for web standards. This is what Mozilla was good at, before they started thinking like your run-of-the-mill big company ("we need to find the Next Big Thing! Market share! Leverage! Competitive advantage!"...) and wasted years in pointless side-bets.
1) If your market share is too low, sites don't bother testing in your browser. Since most sites are not written based on standards but rather by trying things until they work [1], this means that sites will start breaking in your browser and it will become harder and harder for anyone to actually use it. This is what happened with Opera and Edge.
2) If your market share is too low, you don't get much say in standards discussions.
It's not about having "big" market share. Having 90% market share or whatnot is a not really a goal for Firefox. But it does need "enough" market share that it can actually meaningfully achieve its mission [2]. Producing a browser that no one can actually use in practice and having no impact on the evolution of the web would both be failures in mission terms. 0.01% market share is "not enough". 20% is "enough". Where the line is in between is hard to tell.
[1] Hard to fault web developers for this; the standards are so complex that writing "to the standard", which requires understanding it, is hard. It doesn't help that recent web standards have had a tendency to be over-engineered, partly due to being created by a large company at the behest of other parts of that large company, so having a tendency to be designed to be usable by large companies but not necessarily worrying about anyone else.
[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
Doesn't seem to work, though.
Chrome simply isn't configurable enough to make it nice to use for me.
I suspect that would be easier than persuading web developers to target more browsers unfortunately.
Like a Shadowdom API v0 (v1 is standartized by W3C) used by Google in Polyfill so Youtube is way slower?
> even if it means making the browser work with Chrome's non-standard implementations of things
How good the compatibility between Internet Exploder's features and FF/Chrome was?
I should probably give Firefox's tools another chance, but last time I checked Chrome's dev tools was alot better.
All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers who pulled out Firefox, and all the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years.
P.S. There is a whisper going around that Google's only reason to keep paying Mozilla so generously is just to keep them down, and quiet — a kind of unwritten non-aggression pact
What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO.
Mozilla's intentions and fears seem to be very reasonable, driving what they do from AV1 to fighting DRM, though they have hit dead ends with Firefox OS (now Kai OS) and other side projects, the organization is still doing work that is in the best interest of the common person, unlike what the tech giants have been doing.
Many things been coming out of their house, but not a usable browser — a raison d'etre stated in their charter.
Wrt having a usable browser, I'm literally using Firefox for Android to talk to you right now. Firefox has been a usable browser for years, seems your salty tho.
Please provide citations for:
- Incompetent directors flying chartered jets and getting $1M USD remuneration for nothing.
- All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers
- All the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years.
Page 7.
Mitchel Baker 1,054,536.
Jim Cook 985,899
And a list of 8 people with six digit salaries, out of whom 4 have their roles not even tangentially related to Mozilla's charter activities. And this is for Mozilla Foundation only. Mozilla corporation (M. F. Technologies) is keeping really below the water in terms of publicity.
> All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers
All popularity Firefox had gained was in time of it being a community project, when Mozilla did nothing but provide a CVS server and a bugzilla. You should've seen how they bled user share the more they turned into a commercial business for the past 17 years.
> All the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years.
First take their revenue from getting generous payouts from Google, then from all others affiliate programs, including the ill famed pocket. $300m is a not a joke sum, very generous, more than they pay to any other affiliate http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almos...
And yet here I am reading this on Firefox. Like, I get that someone might prefer Chrome, but how anyone could call FF unusable is baffling to me. What on Earth would make it unusable in your opinion?
Chrome ate Firefox's lunch, not IE's. Firefox was the first browser to take a chunk out of IE, in large part because of the stagnation of IE6. People were switching away from IE at a fairly consistent rate. When Chrome came along, the rate remained the same, but people started switching to Chrome instead of Firefox.
This graph shows it clearly (starts a little late to catch Firefox's initial bump but you can see the trend): http://i.imgur.com/7bP2pmj.png
FF had the upper hand against Opera, who were still quite the serious contender. I'm sure someone has done a PhD thesis on this, and if not well worth doing on multi-factor influences on market share for web browsers. Very multi-disciplinary too, covering tech, consumer understanding, embedded incumbents, marketing (a big part in Chrome's boom in my opinion).
Chrome's growth came from IE, yet. But at the time, anyone's growth could have come from IE. Chrome did it better and faster.
* I was still using IE6 in a corporate enviornment in 2013. I have friends that still require IE6 on XP in a company because funding for the system upgrade can't be made. The system's not internet facing, not explicitly. IE6 tried to define the internet, thankfully the internet moved on, and would have moved on. FF was at their tails, Chrome sped that.
FF was not without responsibilities (they got bogged down in backend work on gecko that never really delivered, then got distracted by side bets like FFOS and friends), but without Google's other properties and market share, this would never have happened.
I might have faulty memory, but this is not some minor detail. It is world changing.
For young teenager me, Chrome had a vastly better UX than both IE and Firefox when it debuted.
(now I prefer Firefox though)
I never had Firefox crash on me, so I never saw it as a selling point.
I however saw tabs crash all the fucking time in Chrome, so to me it just seemed like a workaround for bad engineering.
If anything was world changing to me, it was that now we were being told that tabs crashing all the time was normal.
When Chrome came out, it was much faster than Firefox.
IIRC, it was also an evergreen browser from the start and you could install plugins without restarting.
It was in many ways a superior product.
Google did to Firefox what it did to Yahoo, Altavista, Excite etc. When you can sell ‘6 minutes Abs’ who would buy ‘7 minutes Abs’?
Chrome was faster when it came out. I was on Win7 back in the days and I was being down voted. The proof is in the pudding.
It doesn't matter that much anyway - Google didn't make the difference by converting FF users, but by being better than Mozilla at pushing IE users to switch. Which, again, was not a technical issue at all. I would bet that 90% of those users never even tried FF. A lot of them installed Chrome on Windows so they could synchronize settings from their main device, i.e. an Android phone.
At the time I remember this was a huge performance gain on my machine with my workflow (dozens of tabs), since you could easily open up the Chrome Task Manager and see which tab was causing problems. It was also the first browser to make updates invisible, so I installed it on every family member's PC.
Eventually all my computers ran Chrome because Firefox wasn't the best option anywhere any more.
- Mozilla diverting devs towards Firefox OS;
- Mozilla attempting to maintain the old XUL/XPCOM-based add-ons architecture.
Both of these hurt Firefox a lot. Since Firefox 57, though, Firefox is back to being really quick.
On the other hand, most (non-dev) people I know who installed Chrome did it for marketing reasons – oftentimes simply because they had installed an anti-virus or Flash, which came bundled with Chrome – not out of actual merit.
When Chrome came out sometime in Fall '08, I used it, and it was faster than whatever FF version I had installed. So I kept using it.
I don't like it either, that's why I give to Mozilla once in a while.
b.) The ads are entirely local and do not track you. They're an attempt to diversify revenue sources away from Google. Chrome doesn't have to do that, since Google tracks you.
For me, it's not the bloated browser centric computing experience that's the biggest problem. In my eyes, it's eclipsed by the armies of web developers whose only professional purpose is to work with this technological mishap. If our only document delivery system, i.e. web, wasn't such a mess, the same could be accomplished by a fraction of the current workforce.
Not that I have any insider information but from the complaints I've read about how the committees that handle promotion requests at Google, I'd be surprised if there aren't Google engineers already trying their hand at this.
What I'd like to know is how much does Chrome cost Google? I've read that Mozilla spends just under half a billion dollars a year so I'd expect Google likely spends at least a billion a year on Google Chrome (and associated tasks). Not sure how we'd come up with a number though because I wouldn't know how to put a price tag on things like webp, webm, depot tools, or the Google infrastructure that Google Chrome team gets to use (presumably for free).
I would be surprised if (without counting ads), the Chrome paid devs were not at least 3x the number of Firefox paid devs.
Oh, good point. I didn't think of that. I think the fact that Google promotes Chrome on Google Search and so on is worth more than the ads I see all over the web as well.
Think about what Chrome's dominance means: Chrome can push users and developers around as it wants. There is no long-term viability, and anything is at stake. Chrome already has QUIC support, will soon gain Grid Layout Level 2 support, etc. At the end of this decade, we'll be left with a generation of developers lost in the cloud.
For too long, the situation on the web has been that the inmates run the asylum, including so-called standard bodies financially dependent on Google. As they say, the road to a dystopian future is littered with good intentions.
I'd be very happy with a fixed, lower tier of web standard that is easy to implement against. It should contain enough standards to build attractive, solid (eg) online banking interfaces, blogs and news sites, commenting etc. In other words, a minimum for media consumption, rather than apps.
(Disclosure: I work for Google on AMP ads. I also know how much people here dislike AMP, so this is not entirely serious.)
I'd quite like an RSS+reader view browser. At a guess, RSS+reader view+AMP could cover pretty substantial amounts of existing content.
The hardest part is that amp probably isn't restrictive enough: you can still use a very large subset of HTML and CSS.
I'm not sure what you mean?
No-one expects Windows programs to work on macOS or Linux. But with the web that's different.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18620671
I posted a few reasons for this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655028
Also
> If chromium is open source other companies could share the control over code right?
The sole governing body for Chromium is Google. Other companies get exactly as much control as Google decides.
That's the opposite of, say, the Linux Kernel or Rust. It is my understanding that Firefox is also heading in the same direction as these, i.e. towards shared control by all stakeholders.
- Pinch zoom using the trackpad or the touchscreen is not smooth, it doesnt zoom the whole page just elements. Chrome/Safari/Edge does it well.
- Tab tearing is clunky compared to Chrome.
- The UI for bookmarks/history is awkward. For example it takes 4 clicks to reopen a recently closed tab compared to 2 in Chrome. When I add the history button its still 3 clicks...
Be vocal! Use your influence!
And if you have the means: donate!
When I tell people to use Firefox they just laugh like it's a quirky personality trait that I use the underdog browser instead of the one everyone knows is best.
I respect people choosing products based on ideality, but I personally will just use what suits my demand/preference best.
When I first switched from IE to Firefox 1.5, it's because it has tabs. And I loved it more and more once I figured out how well-built it is and how powerful addons can be.
When Chrome firstly came, it was pretty bad in term of functionality. The extension system is weak (compared to what Firefox can offer at the time), it lack TONS of what I personally consider as "essential features" (font settings for different languages is a big one for me as a non-Latin character user, for example), so I continued to use Firefox.
But Chrome catched up very quickly. Today, the features of two browsers are basically on par in my user case, especially after Firefox switched to WebExt (which I think is the right direction, by the way). I started to use Chrome more and more due to some small details, like better sync experience etc. Again, purely personal choice based on my heavy use of both.
Another thing that pushed me away from Firefox is my personal experience in bug reporting. I'm not a software developer, but I do report bugs semi-frequently. I feel like I was treated better in Chromium project than Firefox's one. I have lots of unhappy experiences there (the one that I still can't get over is that they won't fix a video playback bug that affects all Win7 + nVidia GPU users [1]). I think in Chromium everytime you report a bug with clear repro steps, there will at least an employee (or volunteer? Not sure) that will attempt to repeat your steps and attach a screencat of that in 1-2 days. It feels good.
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1410693
Except it happens because it emerges from the collective behavior.
Now, one can't fight a all the fights, and I don't think somebody that decides to avoid this one is a bad person. But one should definitly pick up some fights. Choose some things to pay for, decide some things to consume or be part of, not just by the nature of it, but by the consequences of doing so. Although I do think like in the article that it's better to fight _for_ something than _against_ something.
Anyway, if one doesn't makes, on daily basis, regular, endless, conscious choices, one is not taking part of the world but is just passively living in it.
And that's how we fail to build a society.
Anyway, as a fact: it works fine in IE and Chrome (after they fixed it). So at very least, it is fixable on browser's end.
It also works fine in any video player you can think of.
Also, from what I can see, neither Chromium dev nor Firefox dev claim it's an "nVidia bug". Chromium dev just went ahead and fixed it. Firefox dev said they're not going to fix it because (from previous ticket [1]) "We don't intend to add new features such as this code is only used on Windows 7." Which IMHO makes no sense because when this bug firstly appeared, it was 3-4 years ago; and Win 7 is still one of the most used OS and is in the supported OS list of Firefox.
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1161349#c46
I use Firefox mainly for privacy and containers. Is there a good reason Firefox couldn't provide features based on Chromium/Blink too (like Brave)?
If Firefox adopts Chromium, there becomes effectively no way for Mozilla to shape the futures in manners that are not blessed by Google. For instance, Google doesn't seem to be interested in WebVR/WebAR, so there is no way to bring a Chromium-based browser in this direction until Google says so. The same thing happens with compression formats, for instance.
Also, as Google controls Chromium, a monopoly of Chromium also means that Google can decide to deprecate and/or customize web features without any counter-power. For instance, Google could decide to restrict WebPay to GooglePay, effectively leveraging their monopoly against PayPal and credit cards. There are also a number of manners in which Google could, in theory, make Netflix or Facebook or any competitor less usable or entirely unusable on the web. No Chromium-based browser can do anything against this.
Don't forget that Mozilla is also working on a next-gen rendering engine, Servo, that is expected to kick the ass of both Gecko and Blink on recent platforms, in terms of both performance, battery use and security. Making Chromium the only web browser means abandoning any hope to switch to this new architecture, as everything would need to be bug-for-bug compatible with Chromium, instead of following the standard.
(edit) typos
One is often repeatedly prompted to install Chrome when visiting Google on other browsers[1][2]. Most normal users would just give up and install just to get rid of the pop up.
Microsoft has been doing the same (e.g. trying to trick you into keeping Edge when trying to select another browser as default on Windows 10), but their product wasn't good enough for it to work, it seems.
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/1192441/is-it-possible-to-te... [2] https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/922025
That definitely is using their dominance in search to make people.use their web browser.
However you're right in general Google are using the position to enforce Chrome
There's always duckduckgo, though.
It stopped because IE and Windows were not dominent anymore.
Surprised Google didn't get at least a warning for force feeding his browser.
2. Firefox have bookmark tags.
3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width)
4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked.
5. Firefox have a built-in reader-mode. I don't use it much on desktop, but on on mobile it's very useful for pages that doesn't reflow.
6. There's an ad-block extension for firefox-mobile.
[1] Could of course be because I'm more used to it and have more history in firefox :)
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...
[3] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1193670
Chrome allows me to do use the built-in search engine of any website supporting it by pressing tab and then typing my search query. In firefox, it seems what I have to do is type my search query than use my mouse to click on the wikipedia icon (or amazon/etc). This also requires me to setup said search engine in firefox preferences. Ain't there anyway I can get that search experience using only the keyboard?
If you don't mind a network round trip, you can also setup DuckDuckGo as your default search engine and use bang commands [1] to do different kinds of searches on many sites.
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Then you can just type 'y rick roll' to make a search.
Alternatively, set your default browser to duckduckgo.org and use it's bangs, no need to manually add shortcuts!
The previous example would then be '!y rick roll'.
Tags, on the other hand, are actually shown in the regular UI without needing to open the full bookmark manager. Much more discoverable, at least.
Not enough time to write one myself these days, but if keywords disappear, I might.
I'm a fan of Firefox Color: https://color.firefox.com - which allows you to express the UI color scheme in a shareable/saveable URL.
There's also Side View: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/side-view - which allows a persistent column to the side regardless of which tab you're in. Useful on widescreens.
[1] By proceeding, you agree to the terms and privacy policies of Test Pilot and the Side View privacy policy.
It can be installed from here: https://testpilot.firefox.com/files/side-view@mozilla.org/la...
(From their GitHub page.[1])
Also note that the Test Pilot page [2] contains a summary of the data they collect. Most notably:
> Side View does not collect any information about sites you visit.
The data is does collect seems related to whether and how you use it - it is an experiment, after all.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/side-view
[2] https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/side-view
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Add-ons/Cod...
For instance, I'll queue up a bunch of infant related tabs to email to my wife. If I'm unsure whether the site will stand the test of time, I can send the entire article (with an index) to her in the email as a kind of archive. I've also been sending myself my programming-related tabs when I go down a particularly deep rabbit hole.
Details on the ranking algorithm: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places...
For future notice though, the answer in the first link is wrong; you want "places.history.expiration.current_max_pages", not "places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages". Apparently the max "pages" are automatically calculated by default- mine was around 160k, so my history only went back about 2.5 years. I've set it to the maximum value for a 32 bit integer, which I guess should fix the problem for the next 20 or so years.
Kind of annoying that Firefox's default is to delete things when you told it not to delete things.
Chrome on Windows 10 doesn't appear to differentiate between tapping and mouse clicking on a menu item. The spacing between items remains the same narrow spacing, making it somewhat harder to select the correct item using touch.
For example, I have bookmarked my blog (theandrewbailey.com) in both. Typing "rew" into Firefox suggests my blog. Chrome doesn't, and I need to type it out from the beginning in order for it to get the clue.
is supported on it. It completely changed my browsing experience, and I cannot use any other browser except for quick, temporary browsing (like how one might use Notepad on Windows in a bind).
I'd highly, highly recommend this extension to anyone who has never had the pleasure to use it.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
So it's there, but it's nowhere near as seamless and convenient as it is in Firefox.
3. userChrome.css is poorly documented but a nice option, not sure if Chrome has something similar. I have firefox set so that each tab is just a favicon and an extra pixel on each side. It mostly works well, except at some point the audio icon started appearing (it didn't when I first made the change) and it appears over the next tab, that makes it impossible or nearly impossible to directly select the next tab.
5. Reader mode is exellent if you use a more comprehensive javascript blocker, since many pages work in reader mode that wouldn't otherwise. Hopefully this isn't because it is actually running some javascript in reader mode or otherwise avoiding the usual blocking rules.
I think the reason there is a focus on "firefox is better than crome in some fundamental ways" is that once you get down to individual features they both change frequently and a feature that one person likes might really annoy someone else. The reasons to avoid chrome are not likely to change unless firefox gets as bad as chrome. If you convince someone to switch for some random feature then there is a much better chance they will switch back in a few releases when the random feature breaks in some way. Additionally, it isn't clear that firefox has an opportunity to convince all that many end users.
That being said, anyone who wants to do a feature comparison should go ahead and do it. The article seems to be saying "the real problem here is that other people are writing about the differences they care about".
Very strange that clearing the history doesn't resolve it though..
Also, I found browser.urlbar.autoFill that gets it to not modify what I type but still show suggestions from bookmarks. I think I had tried to disable browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled at some point and enabled it again since it is sometimes helpful to quickly find bookmarked pages. It still searches if the entered text doesn't look like a domain name or url and there seems to be no way to disable that. Still, I appreciate that Firefox is configurable in a lot of ways and that there is a way to get it to mostly do what I want :).
Me too. I've hated that thing since it was first introduced.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...
Definitely true. Asking users to respect certain principles is tantamount to guilting them which doesn't work.
> It’s time we analyse what Firefox does better than Chrome, and sing those praises.
From the perspective of a non-technical user, the differences are not noticeable. Firefox and Chrome have continued to converge (...er...maybe one following the other) to the point that the differences listed are not real differentiators.
Oddly enough, you could argue that telemetry and the constant push for user happiness and adoption is what is hurting FF. FF looks like Chrome. I'm not saying stop listening to your users, but in general it's ok to differentiate yourself in ways that don't appear to be immediately beneficial to adoption. The primary way this can be done is in the UI. We can all recognize that there are still lots of efficiencies to be gained around the current state of internet navigation. Other approaches may not be better, and I understand the maintainability fear of multiple UI paradigms in the same software, but at least it's a way of differentiating yourself.
I know that is a bold statement but it is easily verified with numbers using a perf tool. Chrome is faster at executing JavaScript than Firefox, but even still Firefox leaves everybody completely in the dust when executing the DOM API.
DOM access is so incredibly important to how the web works and nobody really talks about. For some unknown reason most developers are deathly afraid of the DOM and will do everything possible to hide from it. It is common in every job I have worked to see mountains of querySelectors and 10mb of supporting framework code so that developers don't have to fear the DOM buggy man. I could sympathize if the DOM were complicated, but it isn't.
I really believe if Firefox goes away and that competition is gone the web will get fundamentally slower. Everybody will see this slowness and yet very few people be able to diagnose why, and that is tragic.
Ie. React's virtual DOM is a phenomenal idea because it greatly reduces actual DOM interaction. Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?
> Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?
The DOM is the standard technology the browsers use to communicate from JavaScript to markup. QuerySelectors are strings, so they have to be parsed into DOM instructions by the browser using a native code engine. Since the DOM is a well defined standard and it is the standard that all browsers use DOM instruction performance can be directly compared between the different browsers.
That really depends on what you're doing.
Reimplementing querySelector in JavaScript (even if you do it on top of JS-only node representations, not on actual nodes) is likely to be slower than the built-in version, for example.
If you're doing a "modify-read-modify-read" cycle, then things are different because the contract is different: the DOM promises that reads will see all modifications, while some of the other systems built around it don't.
> Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?
It really depends on the shape of your workload. There are various cases where React's virtual DOM is pure overhead and just makes things slower.
[Disclaimer: I work on a browser rendering engine, and have done a fair amount of performance work, so I may have my biases about what I see in profiles.]
Somewhat ironically since many people say Firefox is better at blocking tracking.
When it's hard to whitelist the cookies I need, I might cave and simply allow all third-party cookies.