I downloaded an extension to spoof my user agent this morning, haven't tried doing much yet, but messages certainly seem to work and that's 99% of what I do anyway.
I don't know why I couldn't have be treated to a "this might not work 100% warning" instead of being completely locked out.
It's a top down decision, probably, and probably related to internal quality requirements of software and support.
Also possible (but unlikely) is that Firefox doesn't support some certain thing, the absence of which might corrupt some state or data (error handling ain't exactly a thing javascript land, unfortunately.
This is like a highway operator saying "You can only enter our highway with a ford or a fiat. We didn't take time to test if an opel can properly ride our highway, so opels are not allowed".
(Yeah I get it that they don't want to have people complaining that a niche corner case that was never tested in Firefox doesn't work. But this is a ridiculous way to do it.)
Not really - it's about the surface area of the interface. It's pretty easy to know if a car will work on a road - it needs tires and the ability to control it's own movement.
But if the road had thousands of different connections to the car, there certainly would need to be testing for each manufacturer.
> Also possible (but unlikely) is that Firefox doesn't support some certain thing, the absence of which might corrupt some state or data (error handling ain't exactly a thing javascript land, unfortunately.
Considering that it works with current Edge (which hasn't switched to Blink, yet), it's unlikely, as you say.
It's probably my plugin settings, but I regularly run into issues logging into random websites like for bank or credit cards on firefox. You input your credentials into the log in window, and absolutely nothing happens when you hit login. For these websites, I'm still shackled to chrome.
And because, "accidentally", it cements the Chrome monopoly, at least in regard to Google web properties.
That can't be just a coincidence. "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" and all that.
> It's more that they figured they're unable to make a dent there.
Considering how Microsoft has been shifting to support open platforms (I mean, .net now officially runs on linux and Microsoft even integrates Docker) my guess is that they decided to focus on core businesses and don't waste resources implementing redundant support infrastructure.
> .NET runs on Linux because the developers are here.
It's not that simple. The developers have always been there, but until recently Microsoft refused to even acknowledge that there were were platforms other than the Windows ecosystem.
I get a crash when I try to paste text in the chat, but it otherwise works. As an aside, it's wild seeing an "App has crashed and needs to reload" on a damn javascript application. You would think it would be able to recover and continue serving content.
Great, but let's understand it's not going to tilt the scales. It's still going to count Chrome as the final winner since popularity is measured more by User Agent in visits, and less by download stats (atleast that's what I have seen so far, would be very happy to know otherwise).
Mismanagement : could you give some details ? I was under the impression that mozilla was doing quite amazing things on the contrary : keeping firefox the only really usable alternative to chrome (when even microsoft didn't manage to do it), and even innovating in PL space with Rust.
What do you think they should have done differently ?
They have made some weird decisions to include some marketing campaigns into Firefox once, and I believe the whole Pocket thing didn’t land well with many of their users.
They made the same mistake IE made: around Firefox 3, they allowed their browser to become terribly slow, and so Chrome ate their lunch. Because let's be honest, Chrome was and still is so much faster than Firefox, and that's why they won. You could argue that Chrome has infinite ad budget, and that obviously helps, but I'm a Google hater and I'd gladly use Firefox if it was better or at least on par with Chrome, but it's not.
I understand fixing something like that takes a lot of effort, but they lost a lot of time and money in projects that had no chance of working out, such as FirefoxOS (really? making an entire OS using the slowest browser engine that there is on the cheapest ARM hardware they could find?), Hello, Persona, etc. They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive, the same way I will never forgive Google for abandoning Reader. Servo is a nice project but the chances it will be abandoned after years in development are over the roof.
So now they are focused on their privacy improvements, but they can't stop shooting themselves in the foot (sending your browsing history to the advertisement company Cliqz, remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr. Robot show, installing Pocket by default...)
Then, if it is slower, and they don't seem to be able to take my privacy seriously despite their claims to the contrary, why in hell should I use Firefox?
I switched about a month ago and I honestly couldn't tell a difference. The only thing people have to get over with Firefox is the browser controls and settings.
Performance of Chrome is consistent: always snappy. Firefox on the other hand will turn laggy from time to time, especially when opening or closing tabs, when it sometimes freezes noticeably. It is also slower when doing DOM manipulations, and their developer tools are simply crap (MUCH slower, and with fewer features).
But if they want to jerk off looking at how they reign in their synthetic benchmarks, who am I to disagree?
ABP, umatrix, 16G, spinning rust, first gen i7. FF does take about 10G right now (Linux), so it is not exactly super efficient but given the amount of windows and tabs open I really can't complain.
While actually many versions before, like 58 or some, Firefox has released a impressive update that brought a entirely new way to play many tabs. Their experiment is that they can open over a thousand tabs in several seconds.
My point being, Mozilla has to try to innovate, and they have to try these projects. They're being reproached that some failed, but no one is questioning Rust now that it's taking off...
They're also one of the founders of LetsEncrypt, maintain MDN, etc.
Furthermore, one time long ago, Mozilla might have thought they didn't need to build a mobile browser, and focus on their main product: Firefox for Desktop.
Next thing you know, Firefox is completely irrelevant on what's becoming the dominant computing platform.
I don't know whether VR/AR or IoT will be a thing, and I'm sure that they will be criticised for their projects there when they don't, but I'm certainly glad they're at least trying to make those open platforms - just in case they do become mainstream.
Hey, Cliqz employee here. I'd like to clarify a few things since I don't think your comment is accurate.
1. Cliqz is not an advertising company, it's a search company and we push hard for privacy protection in everything we do (private search, antitracking, adblocking, etc.)
2. Privacy policies are legally binding, and in ours we state that no personal data is collected. We designed our features and products to not require collection of any private data (that includes our search engine).
3. I'd like to point out that in Firefox, by default, your queries are sent to advertising company Google. So I don't understand all the heat when Mozilla tries to find more privacy-friendly alternatives to Google. In this case, they replaced Google by Cliqz (again, an independent German search company focusing on privacy, building its own index: no Bing results involved) in Germany, for 1% of the users. That seems to perfectly fit in Mozilla's mission of protecting users' privacy.
1st, Cliqz is majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media, an advertising and media company. You don't set the fox to guard the henhouse.
2nd, sending the user's complete browsing history to a 3rd party which is owned by an advertising and media company without telling the user was a terrible idea. It's simply mismanagement by the Mozilla Corporation.
>This experiment also includes the data collection tool Cliqz uses to build its recommendation engine. Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit.
Fortunately for our users, the way our technology was communicated by Mozilla is not accurate. Cliqz has never collected the "complete browser history" of any of our users (and it's the last thing we want to do). We have some data collection in place and it is limited to collected anonymous information about search results found on SERP page. If you want to know more about how we do it without putting user privacy at risk, feel free to read this document: https://gist.github.com/solso/423a1104a9e3c1e3b8d7c9ca14e885...
Is there something a person could do to objectively settle the disagreeing statements about what Cliqz was sent? Your document there is impressive, but Firefox was fairly explicit in its statement. We're in a case of he said she said
I enjoyed the read BTW, somebody put some real time into that sort of system
FWIW it sounds [#] exactly like a scummy advertising company - I'd address that if the company is not getting revenue through placements or advertising at all.
I notice you said your products are designed to not require private data collection; presumably that means they do it, but could in theory work without doing it. That comes across as weasel words.
# Edit: I mean the name, I don't know the company.
We're currently proposing a mix of client-side private offers (not unlike Brave) and paid products (e.g.: Ghostery premium, and more are being worked on as we speak). Users should have a choice.
> I notice you said your products are designed to not require private data collection; presumably that means they do it, but could in theory work without doing it. That comes across as weasel words.
No. That means that we do not collect personal data. And being able to do so took (and still takes) a lot of research and careful design.
Since it was literally the first thing I said in my answer, I consider it pretty up-front. I'm happy to give you more details about it since you seem interested. The basic idea is this:
1. All clients download a database of offers locally (they are basically vouchers, we call them offers because they have the potential to make users save money).
2. While browsing with this feature enabled, URLs of pages as well as some other information accessible locally are processed by the extension which tries to detect the intent of buying something online.
3. When an intent corresponding to one of the items in the local database is found, an offer is shown with a coupon that can be used to save money.
What sets it apart from ads in my opinion is that everything happens client-side and that the offer is only shown when there is a clear intent to buy something (instead of all pages with traditional ads). This means that users will actually see very few of them, but that they should be very relevant and useful (you save money).
This seems similar to how Firefox Directory Tiles worked, except when/where the ad was presented to the user (new tab page in the FF DT instance). I thought it was a good idea, and I'm pretty skeptical of advertising (tax ads is my preference). I don't think trying to call it not ads gets you anywhere though, other than lost credibility.
Wow, someone from Cliqz! I always wondered: hasn't your company name been tainted too much? It might be because of the circles I'm in, but Cliqz has become synonymous with "privacy invasion", and though I know it's often misrepresented, that's some bad branding for a company focused on selling privacy tools. Is this seen as a problem internally?
Hi, due to few factually incorrect posts, Cliqz is often seen as a privacy invasive tool (at least in some circles), on the contrary we care a lot about users' privacy and continuously develop technologies to help users and other developers adopt privacy by design. Yes, this is sometimes seen as a problem internally and it's very disheartening when people label the products without actually taking a look at what it's doing. There are a lot of people at Cliqz who care very deeply about privacy and we put a lot of hard work into what we do, to make sure it's done right. But as long as we get a chance to explain and discuss what we are doing and why, it is not "too tainted".
Actually there is no proof showing Chrome works more efficiently than Firefox, especially provided with same computer resources. BTW, Thunderbird is restarted.
Proof? I don't know, but anecdotally... My late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina is still my work machine, I attach it to two screens, one of which is a 4K screen. Firefox struggles to play embedded video on that screen. Chrome does not. FF also seems to have a lot of weird copy/paste issues with the Slack web client and Jira.
I really don't want to use chrome but FF ended up annoying me so much I went back to it.
(Safari almost worked... but the outlook webmail we use didn't play well, and with safari I had to refresh and re-login every hour or so, rather than daily on other browsers)
If this sort of experience is true for most users, then it's bad.
If it did I'd still be using it. I've always seen this UI lag with Firefox (on macOS) so while I'd love to support them to prevent a monoculture, I get worse performance and no obvious benefits out of the switch.
(Sure, "not Google" but I can also just use Safari.)
That was an experimental, lightweight Skype alternative, that didn't take too much effort to build beyond introducing WebRTC into Gecko (which they had to do anyway) and which probably helped them iron out bugs in Gecko's WebRTC implementation. Also, for the record, when I used it, it worked mostly fine.
> Persona
It worked, but almost nobody used it (you could argue that that is "not working out" from a social, if not technical point of view).
> They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive
They didn't abandon it. They transferred it into other people's caring hands. They still provide some support for it under the Mozilla umbrella and they still coordinate (to some extent) with Thunderbird's current developers when modifying the common base Firefox and Thunderbird depend on.
> Cliqz
Partially true, if rather overblown. It affected a tiny number of people (~ 1 % of new users, in only one country), the data was anonymised and the code running on the server to which the data was sent was FOSS, though obviously there's no definitive proof that Cliqz didn't substitute it with malicious code. It was an order of magnitude less bad than what Google always does and considering that the point was to build an alternative to Google search, if it had worked out, it would have been a massive privacy gain. The most disappointing part was it being opt-out, not opt-in, for the randomly selected users.
> remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr. Robot show
That was a very silly (and stupid) gimmick, but it didn't invade your privacy.
> installing Pocket by default
Having Pocket installed by default is not a privacy violation, even if it is slight bloat-ware.
Good grief. I use Chrome, Firefox, and Safari across Mac, Windows, and Linux. None of them make me think, "Oh wow, this is so 'slow' that I'm going to switch." Is there some objective rating which compares this, and shows Chrome is faster than all competition in every situation? I've just Googled this (ha!) and it would seem that different rendering engines optimize for different things, and there's no clear winner. But plenty of sites want to tell me that Chrome is "the best," so I got that going for me.
How is Mozilla responsible for the actions of Microsoft? The reason why Microsoft abandoned their own engine is because they can't keep up with whatever chrome does. Firefox was never a choice because then they'd be stuck with turning a 10% marketshare engine into a 20% marketshare engine rather than making the 60% marketshare engine a 70% marketshare engine.
They are stuck with such low marketshare because their browser was way slower than chrome. They were in the market before google, but they didn't make the right investments.
I also blame the Mozilla Corporation for that: including WebKit in your software is a piece of cake. So that's what the default browsers of GNOME/KDE/etc do. Gecko not so much (in fact, has there been any effort in this arena, after XULRunner was discontinued?)
Not all, I'm noticing a trend of including Chromium on the more niche distros like the Fedora spins (I noticed this about 1-2 years ago, the situation may have changed).
Do you even listen to yourself before making these statements?
Linux desktop share = 1.3%
Of which 80% of users will use the browser they want to, irrespective of what is currently installed. So 20% of 1.5% = 0.26%
Fortunately firefox is not at a stage where they have to care about 0.26% usage share of worldwide desktop.
And I have rarely seen Linux distro maintainers acting in any bigger-sense-of-good or in technologically better solutions. They have their own favourites.
If firefox wants to succeed- it should ship default with uorigin, kills google and makes firefox snappier. Instant win. If I were making firefox- I'd also ship a power user edition with uMatrix enabled
> One of the greatest fears (...) is that Web developers would increasingly take the easy way out and limit their support and testing to Chrome
Now, I must ask, why should we (web developers) be the responsible for making everything work with every browser? It's literally the same thing as asking application-oriented developers to code and test their apps for every major compiler out there.
We can't be the responsible for making every webpage compatible with every browser. Period.
There are standards, and it's not really our problem that Chrome implements them in a week, while Firefox takes 6 months, Edge 2 years, Konqueror 10 years, and so on.
It takes a lot of time and energy to build and test websites for 3 or 4 different browsers. And it takes even more time to implement workarounds for every browser that doesn't support that thing that your boss asked you to implement. And "shit must be done by the end of the day".
Don't take me wrong. Go go browser diversity! But not if that means that I should take the burden.
Sure. But you're missing a point here. IE6 was bad because it didn't follow any standards. You had to, literally, "code the IE6 way".
Chrome on the other hand is starting to be a problem because it's too damn fast at implementing new stuff (which are accepted as standard). Web-developers then start using those new features and the code they write suddenly doesn't work on other browsers, because those browser just don't support those new features yet.
That's why we got webpack. That's why we got babel and polyfills. And that's why frontend development sucks a lot lately. Because you have the choice of doing X the easy and fast way, that currently works only with Chrome, because no other browser implemented that yet. Or, you can do it the hard and slow way, that works with all browsers.
And this is not something that I'm pulling out of thin air. This has been discussed several times here, in HN.
A standard is only a standard when there is more than one implementation. Chrome DRM or Chrome RTC are no better than ActiveX, except for hindsight (_now_ it is obvious ActiveX is crap).
The central point is avoiding lock-in, with the long term objective of maintaining a competitive browser landscape. Code for one browser, and we'll be collectively screwed when Chrome development reaches Google Reader status.
CSS Flex is a standard. If Konqueror, Firefox, Edge, or whatever other browser doesn't support it (I know they support it now, but that wasn't the case 2 or 3 years ago), it's not any of my business. I'll keep using Flex because it's an accepted standard. And my webpages will work on any browser that supports that standard. If that means that my website works only on Webkit-based browsers, well, then that's really not up to me to fix, isn't it? That is something that the people behind other browsers should fix, by implementing "Flex".
You're obviously correct about the problem, and I don't think anyone is denying that targeting Chrome only is a lot easier than targeting "works with all browsers". The point is that if 'we' want to call ourselves "web developers" then we probably should be doing things the "hard and slow way, that works with all browsers".
The problem is deeper than you imply. It's not just standards, at least not for everyone. I'm currently replacing a website that was developed several years ago that does not work on Firefox.
It is nothing special. It's your standard CRUD app. Not even an SPA. From what I can tell the tech they use is all at least 5 years old.
They obviously never even checked to see if it worked in Firefox. It should work in Firefox. There is no excuse for it not to.
If you are actually analyzing your featureset and saying "I could really use these new standards Firefox doesn't support", that's one thing. If you are just coding whatever and seeing it works in Chrome and calling it a day, you aren't coding to a standard, you are coding to whatever happens to work in Chrome.
Hey just wanted to say I really appreciate your comments. I came looking for content like this, and I have grown tired of HN's blind "moral" stance against Chrome lately.
I must ask, why should we (web developers) be the responsible for making everything work with every browser?
Because if we don't are we really "web" developers or are we Chrome developers.
literally the same thing as asking application-oriented developers to code and test their apps for every major compiler out there.
Back in the 'olden days' we used to do that too. Some developers would claim their program ran on "Unix" when all they'd actually tested with was GCC on Linux. Sure, sometime it worked or other Unix platforms out of the box and sometimes it could be made to work, but it was still a "Linux" app, and 'we' did complain about that too (and got promptly ignored by a lot of developers who felt just like you do).
And to confess my own 'sins' the web app I'm currently working on is officially Chrome only, and it makes my life so much easier, so I'll admit I'm part of the problem.
I think the issue is that developers will go around glitches and bugs of Chrome because that's what they use, but won't do the same for Firefox. Or even will literally code to Chrome's glitches and not really support the standard way, which would have worked in Firefox. There are also things like Google putting invisible div over YouTube, which breaks Firefox rendering optimisations but not Chrome's ones.
> It's literally the same thing as asking application-oriented developers to code and test their apps for every major compiler out there.
Not at all, the build step is not supposed to be done by the user in the native world. A more apt comparison would be that outside the occasional hiccup, video games run on all GPU, you do not see e.g. AMD-only games.
> There are standards
Most of the problems IME stem from web developers not thoroughly following the standard, but rather implementing a “it works on my Chrome, so it should work everywhere”.
> why should we (web developers) be the responsible for making everything work with every browser?
You do whatever you want. But if you propose a service, expect potential users either to leave or complain if it does not work on their setup.
I see games that are only for 1 OS. And most of the games won't behave the same way running on AMD than on NVIDIA. Also, most of the games require at least XYZ version of DirectX. So, yeah, I'd say your argument is kind of flawed.
And sure, I'll do whatever I want, or whatever my limited time allows me to do. And if that means supporting only the browser with major quota (like games running only on Windows, because that's what has major quota; using your argument), so be it.
Nobody's saying you can't do whatever you want. Pissing on the common lake is, in the short-term, better. What everyone is pointing to is the long-term effects, which are really so obvious you can only ignore with conscious effort.
> And most of the games won't behave the same way running on AMD than on NVIDIA.
I see you must not have played a lot of games recently – granted, you will notice some problems form time to time, but they are rather the exception (and often fixed by post-launch drivers updates) than the norm.
> Also, most of the games require at least XYZ version of DirectX
Also, most of webapps require at least version XYZ of browser ABC. What is your point exactly, that developers use new features of APIs/libraries?
> that's what has major quota; using your argument
No it's not my argument. In my argument, Windows + DirectX is a standard akin to the web standards, and this standard is implemented by multiple controller makers, GPU founders, screen producers, etc.
Thankfully, I can play Il-2 or Rainbow 6 as well with my GTX1070 and ASUS than my friend with is Vega GPU & LG screen.
> What is your point exactly, that developers use new features of APIs/libraries?
Exactly. We use whatever new standard makes our live easier. If Firefox or Edge don't support that standard (because they are always lagging behind), there's not much we can do (except going the hard way and implementing workarounds for each browser, which is a no-no most of the time, because of lack of manpower/time). "My website requires Flex support" is pretty much the equivalent of "My game requires DirectX 11".
I have been down this road. I've explained this almost two decades ago, I've enjoyed the quiet vacation from actively promoting the benefits of an open web, but will explain everything again if need be. I hope we escape again.
Web developers should absolutely be a responsible party here. If other parties eschew their responsibility, this does not excuse web developers from being correct about their trade.
What does being correct about their trade mean? In this instance, it means making sure users aren't locked in one browser, allowing for the browser landscape to remain competitive, because it leads to a better future. If I may use an example from the last time we did this dance, it means not using ActiveX plugins, because it ultimately leads to a local optimum and stagnation on the web.
The web is our common lake, a common good. We all have a duty to protect it.
> It's literally the same thing as asking application-oriented developers to code and test their apps for every major compiler out there.
No, the end user is not usually in control of their compiler. It's closer to making sure thatthe program works on every screen size or OS you're targeting, because these are the thing the user controls directly.
> We can't be the responsible for making every webpage compatible with every browser.
Not directly. You can do that by coding to the standards that all browsers support. To extend the compiler analogy, if your customer is in control of their own compiler, then you don't code to MSVC or GCC, but you code to C89 or C++03, knowing that the standards-compliant compilers are able to support that. The burden is definitely on the coder there.
You might argue that you need the newest standard, and then I agree that part of the responsibility is on the browser vendor, but I still hope that you're going to implement graceful fallback.
What web developers should be doing is testing for features, not UA-sniffing. In this case, to the extent known, it appears that Skype for "web" functions on Firefox and Safari without any issues, if you change the UA. (It would also be nice if web sites provided graceful degradation if features are not available, but that doesn't even appear to be necessary here.)
Also, as others have pointed out, do you really want to live with a Chrome-only monopoly? For instance, do you value having a full-featured Adblocker? Recently, Chrome was considering withdrawing some of the extension APIs needed for one (they've since partially, though AFAIK not completely backtracked). I won't pretend to have an insight into Google's internal politics, but I think it's plausible that the existence of a privacy-friendly alternative such as Firefox (apart from obviously being valuable in itself for its users) discourages Google from being too privacy-hostile for fear of users eventually getting fed up and switching (or it provides an argument for the Google engineers, the vast majority of whom want to be user-friendly, for resisting introducing more egregious privacy violations).
I think Firefox/Mozilla is still a bit on the "too big" side, and they've done some mollycoddling/anti-user-freedom stuff in the past too.
IMHO if you want to "protest" the browser monopoly, use something more like Dillo or NetSurf. They have no JS, so web apps are out of the question, but work well for the document-centric sites.
I would love Dillo and Netsurf to be usable web browsers on the modern web, unfortunately they aren't. We should be able to do better than 2 rendering engines though.
Arguably there are 3, depending how you view webkit vs blink; yes, they come from a common ancestor, but there's been quite a bit of divergence by now.
But yes, the loss of EdgeHTML (following a few years after the loss of Presto) is a sad thing for the health of the web.
NetSurf has the most hope for becoming a new capable engine, but a lot of work still remains to get it to feature parity. I love how it performs on very constrained systems, though.
> I think Firefox/Mozilla is still a bit on the "too big" side
One of the machines I use is an old Dell Latitude D620 (2006, Intel Core2 CPU T7200 2.00GHz[0]) on a debian base. I can tell you from personal experience, on this machine, that Mozilla's latest Quantum Browser is heads above Chrome and their "clones".
It is so quick to load (even loaded with extensions), it replaced Pale Moon as the default browser for this laptop. I was stunned at the performance improvements in Quantum. I remain surprised, every single day, that the modern web has been made available on a laptop that's 13 years old.
All other Chrome-like browsers (Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, etc) take much longer to load, cause the cpu to throttle (fans kick in) which can lead to overheating and shutdown issues. They are essentially unusable on that machine. Firefox Quantum, otoh, is snappy on this machine.
I say this because I'm genuinely curious by the "too big" comment. I honestly find it puzzling (unless you're comparing a modern, full-featured browser to Dillo or Links2/GUI: both of which are favs of mine for their use cases).
I had turned my back on Firefox for a few years because of performance issues, caching problems. They didn't just correct these issues, they've done so in a way few software upgrades have ever managed to do in my experience (dating back three decades) and have blown past their competitors from a purely performance standpoint.
Anecdotally I have the opposite experience. On my 2 computers (MBP/Win10 Desktop) Chrome starts up near instantly and Firefox has a noticeable delay. I just tried it and it took about 5 seconds to load. Not that this is really a deal breaker anyway. On my MBP it also makes the fans spin up.
Same here. Every few months when Firefox is in the news, I give it a try again, and I keep wanting to like it, but everything just seems slightly laggy compared with Chrome on my 2014 MBP.
> On my 2 computers (MBP/Win10 Desktop) Chrome starts up near instantly and Firefox has a noticeable delay.
You may be experiencing OS caching. If you normally use Chrome, Chrome is already cached in memory by the OS and will open faster than something you haven't started recently.
> On my MBP it also makes the fans spin up.
I've noticed that Chrome tends not to do this while still being slower. This may be related to the way it uses more processes, which consequently requires more resources per operation (and thereby higher visible latency) but splits the load better between cores so that no individual one gets hot enough to require additional cooling.
In theory this could be "better" if the browser actually needed to use 8+ cores for some reason, but in general if that is happening it is some kind of anomaly or defect (like some adspam mining Bitcoin in javascript) rather than any normal behavior. And Firefox does use other threads/processes for most of the few things that actually benefit from it.
Exactly the same with me: I've been trying to use Firefox over the past month on a MBP, but Chrome is definitely faster (both UI-wise and seemingly with connections/requests - maybe Chrome is pre-empting some things?), and for me Firefox demonstrably uses more CPU across multiple cores, so laptop temp is noticeably hotter for the same sites, and fans spin a lot more, and battery life is worse.
I would be very upset to see Firefox fade into oblivion. My at home workflow has Firefox baked in: separate containers for G Suite, Twitter, HN, for paid web apps, etc.
I don’t think that Chrome supports anything like Firefox containers, right?
You need around 70mb of sheer complexity to render a page fully correct and you need millions of dollars to build a competitor that would lose because level of complexity is increasing daily .By the time you cover what you thought the web was ,the most used browser chrome had already came up with more complexity to add to the web.Web sucks and this helps the monopoly.
I would use it and recommend it to people I know, as I already do.
But how about no browser at all? How about I use my own video player to watch a file I received over network?
We have essentially operating systems(web browsers) with pipelines, processes and sandboxing just to be completely ignored by websites which instead shove a message "install our app" down our throat.
Impossible. Look at what your memory usage in a browser goes to (about:memory). Most of it is DOM/JS, images, media, etc.: things that are used by well over 90% of pages.
One thing the article doesn't mention is the effect of Apple's browser engine policy on iOS. Forcing everyone to use WebKit may be anticompetitive, but it's also the main thing keeping the Chrome/Blink monoculture at bay.
The only market Apple has a dominant market position in is Apple phones. In the US and many of the other richest countries, Apple is like Pepsi in terms of market share; in the rest of the world it's more like Dr. Pepper.
(Yes, I know this is the Jolt Cola of analogies, I will stick to cars in the future.)
Yeah, I've started to grow conflicted on that too. I used to hate it because Safari was lagging behind so far and users couldn't switch, but it also forces web developers to test for interoperability with at least one other browser engine, making it more likely to work in others as well.
Safari has caught up a bit, luckily, but it'd be great if it would actually compete with other browsers on features. Unfortunately, I guess if Apple opened up iOS to other browser engines, it'd also compete against Google's marketing machine and reach.
I too wish Safari was better about feature parity, but I console myself with the fact that WebKit is significantly more power-efficient than Blink, which is extremely valuable in a battery-powered portable electronic device. Maybe not as important for a desktop computer, but even there using less CPU means the browser works better when my computer is under heavy load (such as when I'm compiling).
I use FF as my daily driver on all devices. It is a very, very, competitive browser compared to Chrome and it's offshoots. In some area's, or with some plugins, it wins, and in other's it looses. I also really like the that Mozilla is actively involved in activism and thereby does a huge service to our safety/privacy online (refer to the recent DarkMatter story).
I'm sad FF share is declining. I wonder what I can do to counter this trend.
Keep using Firefox! Encourage everyone you know (without being too obnoxious of course) to switch. Help them switch if they’re receptive to the idea. Support them in staying with Firefox if they have extension requirements, workflow concerns, whatever.
The pitch for Firefox should be easy nowadays. Talk about how it’s privacy-focussed while still being competitive with Chrome in performance and ease of use. A lot of people know that Fa$ebook is evil and gobbling up all their data, but they don’t feel like there’s that much they can practically do. Switching to Firefox and using Containers is something anyone can do easily.
Of course there’s probably bigger things that you could do. But thinking locally (if you’re not already) is absolutely required before you then think globally, IMO.
I wish I could agree, and if I were experiencing a different situation, I would be in the same camp.
Firefox 65 keeps crashing on my Linux box. I've tried downgrading to 64 and below. But whatever updates were installed when I installed FF65 also crash FF64 and under.
It was either change OS or let FF go. I've since moved to brave browser, but would happily go back to FF if/when I figure out and troubleshoot the issue.
Also on FF65 on Ubuntu (KDE Neon) to be exact, and runs like a charm. Yes it hogs memory (with lots of tabs open), but Chrome does that too, so I consider something outside my realm of control.
I see that you've unsuccessfully tried to install various versions of FF. The problem might be in your FF config, which persists across versions and types (stable vs nightly).
The ~/.Mozilla/firefox folder contains all your FF profiles, there should just be one profile named something.default. Delete that folder and start FF and it should work.
That folder does contain all your settings so those will be lost (and you can also copy this folder to other computers to copy your entire FF configuration :).
Interesting - I use Fedora 29 and the defaul fedora repo version of FF with no issues on my end. I know that doesnt help, but it sounds like something specific to your setup (which I know still isn/t much solace :( )
I had serious stability problems on Fedora a few months ago which sounded just like yours - I've since switched to debian for other reasons (with same exact profile data) and things are fine, which made me suspect something in the runtime or build toolchain is different and triggered some subtle bug.
not to blame fedora specifically (and who knows if this was a 'me' problem); but distros do differ slightly esp. w/r/t kernel params/threading/builds etc.
Might be worth trying FF ESR or running in a different distro container to see if this helps (yes, not convenient, but..)
also possibly rebuild your profile (pretty sure I tried this.. but anyhow)
Do you mind sharing any Crash Report IDs from your Firefox's about:crashes page? They should point to the crash stack trace, which might be fixable or at least suggest a workaround.
I wish I could trust Firefox not to be basically the same evil Chrome is if it gets to roughly the same position. It has already betrayed the trust of its userbase twice in recent memory.
False equivalence. Yes, Firefox has screwed up, but the errors were relatively minor compared to the privacy tire fire that Chrome is, and the errors were corrected quickly when pointed out.
It depends on what your threat model is. A lot of people prefer the no doubt privacy tire fire that Chrome is over the security tire fire that Firefox has become. It's one thing to trust Google, quite another to trust Mozilla and ever more 3rd parties which it adds to Firefox.
In my old version of Linux I've been using straight Firefox primarily for one-off financial transactions. On the scratch installation of the new version I'm now reminded again of all the intrusive third party screwups. I'm moving my primary browser, with shields like a very paranoid uMatrix, to Chromium to party address the privacy issues, and have about decided to also install Chrome, starting it up just for my financial transactions and then exiting. I think there's a lot lower chance Google will siphon off my account information than one of Mozilla's current or future 3rd party partners, especially as Firefox's declining market share makes it ever more desperate.
Ubuntu 18.04, stock Firefox installed with the desktop, version 64.0.1, has in your face "Recommended by Pocket" items. One encourages me to use DuckDuckGo, but....
According to Wikipedia, it's run as an "independent subsidiary". Echoing AnIdiotOnTheNet, it's in your face bullshit that clearly tells us about Mozilla's mindset today.
The Firefox security story has sailed compared to Chrome's, Pocket was independent but bundled in from June 2015 to February 2017, the Mr. Robot stunt, and Cliqz. Through the lens of corporate governance, three strikes and you're out till a long period passes with good governance.
Support for X search doesn't matter in the start up a browser with a single tab to do a financial transaction and then close the browser, which is how I've been using a single installation of Firefox, and will now be using Chrome. That scenario doesn't demand a good session manager, something that Firefox's transition to Quantum has ruined as I say in another comment in this topic.
> According to Wikipedia, it's run as an "independent subsidiary".
It still means its goals aligns with Mozilla's, so you have to trust them as much as you have Mozilla. (Though of course, it should have been open sourced by now.)
But really, if three strikes and you're out is your policy, you really shouldn't use Chrome - it has an order of magnitude more strikes, and they are far worse, at that. But to each their own.
You're confounding security with privacy strikes. How many 3rd party vulnerability security strikes does Google have? And I distrust Pocket at least as much as I distrust Mozilla.
It should be obvious I disagree in scoring Cliqz, Pocket and Mr. Robot as security issues. Of course, many if not most security issues are in the subset of privacy issues as well, but surely you see the difference between not wanting others to know what web pages you've visited and not wanting your bank account emptied by a criminal?
And when it comes to security, not hazarding my bank accounts and credit cards beyond what's unavoidable in doing business on the net, Google is massively more trustworthy than Mozilla. If for no other reason than Mozilla having entered its corporate endgame.
Firefox is not fit for purpose for any of my use cases, although I've still have a copy of Waterfox that I can move to my new Linux installation with a abandoned but adequate session manager for one use case. Maybe Mozilla will fix those two dozen plus bugs and feature requirements for a good session manager before no one cares anymore and I'll continue using that line of browsers if/when Waterfox becomes unsustainable.
There is absolutely nothing you can say that will make me use a program that doesn't work for me, and Firefox does not work for me except for the most casual of browsing.
> not wanting your bank account emptied by a criminal?
So are you saying that Cliqz, Pocket and Mr. Robot led to emptying even one person's bank account?
I don't know why you keep bring up the session manager. If you don't like Firefox's features, fine, go ahead and use another browser and ignore Mozilla's role in protecting the open web. But it has nothing to do with security or whatever.
> Well, you were referring to Cliqz, Pocket and Mr. Robot, which where trust issues, not security issues. Google has at least as many of those.
Yes, but here's the thing: these issues have shown that Firefox is not at all more trustworthy, they just don't have as easy a time getting away with it because they aren't in the lead. I have no reason to trust that they won't be just as bad if they think they can get away with it.
They don't have an easy time getting away with it because they're largely a community project and exist with the aim of doing better. That will remain the case - even in the unlikely future where they'll be in the lead. In the present day, however, we don't even need them to be in the lead - they just need a somewhat significant market share.
Furthermore, trustworthiness is a spectrum, and Mozilla's issues are still peanuts compared to Google's. It's a valid stance to criticise those issues, but it's flawed reasoning to use those as a reason to jump to Chrome.
I'm not making an argument for which browser to support (what a stupid concept, who cares), I'm making an argument that Mozilla has violated its users trust in the past and no one should reasonably expect they won't do so again.
The reason I care is because it's not about supporting a piece of software, but about protecting the open web, and therefore civil rights.
> I'm making an argument that Mozilla has violated its users trust in the past and no one should reasonably expect they won't do so again.
And I'm making the argument that you can expect Mozilla to not violate its users' trust anywhere near the extent that Google does, and that you can expect its community to keep it in line to ensure that.
I use both uMatrix and uBlock on Firefox for Android. I must say, compared to desktop both are comparatively awkward to use. It'd be nice if Firefox could overhaul the way extensions are handled on Android.
As an example the reload button in the extensions screen does not work (it doesn't seem to open in the context of the current page). As well I needed ages to find out that after opening the uMatrix screen I had to tap the phones back button to get back to the originating page.
Thanks for the feedback :-). However opening new tabs doesn't help for the following workflow:
A site breaks due to missing Javascript. I open uMatrix in via the Firefox menu. The matrix page is displayed in a new tab. After changing settings I press the refresh button on top of the uMatrix page (that's my workflow on desktop). Only the tooltip is shown (it says "Press shift to bypass browser cache", but the originating site is not reloaded.
If you think it's worth opening a bug report for uMatrix, I'll gladly do so.
Firefox did some great things to increase speed in the last couple years (Servo!) but their share still seems to be declining or constant which leads me to a scary thought: Chrome and ilk are just too big to fail.
It’s possible Chrome is large enough they could be objectively worse and sites just optimize to Chrome or people just end up not caring about alternatives.
I Wish Mozilla could come up with a some kind of promotion system where all indie developers who have apps, websites, blogs etc. could request our users to use Firefox instead of chrome. For example a "Best Viewed In FF" image or Some kind widget in app.
Actually, I'd argue Mozilla wouldn't want a "best viewed in Firefox" campaign since the standards should apply to everyone, even if some browsers do better with some feature sets than others. There are already existing ways to show your support, such as https://mozilla.github.io/for-firefox/
I'm a Mozilla employee. I'm not speaking for the org as a whole, but I share your view, and I'd expect most/many other employees to agree with you on that point.
Pages should strive to be compatible with all browsers, and self-dealing in the space of compatibility is something that would go against the ethos and mission (IMHO, and I would expect many others).
That said, I expect that we would support a similar campaign, just advocating for Firefox using other points instead of "best viewed" style compatibility.
Again do not read too much into my specific choice of words. It could not worded that "Use the best standard adherent browser like FF" or similar.
If Mozilla's mission is a more open and standard compliant web instead of walled gardens that message needs to be conveyed to ordinary users and explained as to why it is better. I am not a copywriter so I do not what that messages should be but I think it should be done.
Of course - I'm not assuming anything much about your suggestion. It seems like a great idea in fact.
I personally don't have a read on how much support there would be among well known independent/commnity-aligned services for such a campaign. If there did exist a widespread sentiment of that sort, it'd be great.
I use firefox all the time, but the do a terrible job at creating a good browser that I can recommend to people. Biggest problems:
1. Tab handling is horrible compared to chrome. Vertical tab plugins are theoretically better, but are broken by the new extension system. If you install the plugins you still get tabs across the top.
2. Handling of native themes. Mozilla started attempting this and failed miserably with obviously no QA. They will match my themes dark background but not match the lighter colored text, making the inputs black on black.
3. Non-native UI's. They can support a cross platform UI framework but not a cross platform browser?
4. Whatever the hell is going on with that hamburger menu, they seem to change it all the time and I can never find my bookmarks.
The spend so much on experiments, rewriting things in rust, switching UI frameworks and barely used experiments like webasm and webgl but won't invest in making their core browser experience better. They're stuck doing things that are fun for developers to work on.
It just proves they keep breaking Skype updates, nothing new.
Kind of ironic coming from the people who gave us IE/EDGE, the browser with the most incompatibility issues.
One thing they got right, Linux/Firefox people are probably not their target audience so why bother. Especially after year of broken Skype updates in Linux. There are better alternatives now.
I can come up with a list too, and many more sites have lists alternativeto.net and slant.co are my go-tos. The point of asking here is to get a thoughtful response with a genuine user preference from someone technically inclined; your comment really doesn't help.
Have you heard the Good News?!? Waterfox is FF before it dropped support for well loved extensions like Tab Mix Plus. It is actively maintained with security patches.
"IE's hegemony presented an enormous challenge for the upstart Firefox browser, which was built to support Web standards rather than Microsoft's particular spin on those standards."
A bit of revisionist history here. Firefox, nee Phoenix, was a branch of Mozilla because its authors felt (correctly) Mozilla was too bloated. I remember 1-2 minute load times when trying to open Mozilla back in the day.
I think GP interprets the quote as meaning that supporting standards was the primary goal of Firefox, rather than just something they did instead of supporting Microsoft's implementation.
It's a slight simplification. The Mozilla Suite was "built to support Web standards rather than Microsoft's particular spin on these standards". Firefox/Phoenix/Firebird is the second generation Mozilla browser.
I would still like to know what kind of features are unavailable in Firefox to warrant a complete block on the browser. This would also help Firefox developers to implement them or fix the bugs. I mean I always see "Firefox does not implement all the features we need for our cutting edge web app" but I've yet to see anything more specific. Do any of you with more frontend experience care to comment?
A competent session manager. The old "Session Manager" died in the transition to Quantum, and several developers of quasi-replacements, who acknowledge they don't come very close to it, maintain a list of two dozen or more bugs and missing features compared to Chrome they need to do better, like Chrome's Session Buddy.
If I couldn't simply copy my entire configuration as I upgrade versions of Linux I'd be making a painful one time change completely to Chrome and Chromium, which I'd really rather avoid.
The bottom line is that Mozilla let Firefox's market share decline so much that the only two reasons people kept using it were it's not Chrome, and the extension ecosystem. Which is reported to have included a superior debugger, which indirectly made sure a lot of sites implicitly supported Firefox because they were developed using it.
Users don't give the slightest damn that keeping the old XPI ecosystem was hard, and had serious security issues. A huge number of extensions that they depended on have become roadkill on the information superhighway, even if some made the transition with significant changes. Making Firefox into an inferior version of Chrome means for most that the only reason to use it is that it's not Chrome.
While possibly valid criticisms, these all seem rather irrelevant to the comment you are replying to, which was asking about server-facing features, of the type whose absence would justify discriminating on the basis of user agent and not even attempting to run $FANCY_WEB_APP.
Of course the answer is no, or "it depends," but it goes both ways. Because of my company's goofy proxy situation, I'm using FoxyProxy on Firefox. There's a Chrome version, but it doesn't work. I like that Chrome bundles Flash, but I need FoxyProxy more.
I still test on Firefox because it has been my main browser since the Netscape days (pre-Firefox), but for most customers Chrome, Safari (on iOS) and IE 11 make the bulk of our RFPs browser acceptance matrix (in Germany).
According to GA, on our site, FF is the most used browser, followed by Chrome desktop. 3rd is Chrome mobile and then Safari mobile, tablet, desktop. Only after those, it's IE11 and then Edge. Uniting mobile, tablet and desktop still makes FF 3rd with a 6% lead on IE+Edge.
I used Firefox before, but I stopped because 1) it was and continues to be dog slow on Linux, 2) stupidly restrictive policies for extensions. It's obvious to me that Firefox developers don't care about its users. And also at some point they expelled somebody for political views. That was plain stupid on their part.
People who choose chrome because of a view UX enhancements, or choose Google because Gmail syncs better than iCal/idav, or decide to use Google search over duckduckgo because of blah, is the reason why Giant Corporations rule the planet.
Why not support the underdog that actually cares about your privacy and liberties, rather than choosing an option that feeds the beast and sends us down a path to a dystopian future complete with global surveillance?
There are easier ways to fight the "path to a dystopian future complete with global surveillance" than sticking with an organization that's not making software fit for purpose, and is so political and privacy disdaining it will without question enthusiastically join that dystopia in due course, if it hasn't already.
> Why not support the underdog that actually cares about your privacy and liberties, ...
I don't think many people use products because of their politics. They use what works for them. Chrome seems to be doing so extremely well, despite its flaws and questionable competitive practices.
I have three browsers on my laptop. I hate Chrome because it is a battery/memory/data hog. But I can't comfortably switch profiles (work/various orgs/non-profits/personal) on FF like I do with Chrome. The feature is actually in FF, but it isn't available in the interface for whatever reason.
This feature is nonexistent on Safari.
Despite the alternatives on FF, this one feature is what keeps me on Chrome. Had FF had that, I probably would've switched by now.
Nothing political (unless the politics suddenly begins to matter)
> Why not support the underdog that actually cares about your privacy and liberties
I, for one, am not convinced they do. I'm convinced that's the message they're trying to sell right now because they can't compete in other ways, but history has not shown that they really do.
I use chrome for gmail, and Firefox for everything else. And it's quite quick on Linux. In fact, with that send.firefox.com bit that was talked about earlier, I just sent them a message and asked them to build that link directly into Firefox, so I can tell my friends who want to share files with me (I do a lot of charter sailing), 'hey, just open firefox and click Tools->Send'. No dropbox or anything else needed.
In general, I choose the best tool that provides the best cross platform use case. Unlike many, I'll often reach for web apps, or electron apps mostly because my biggest concern is being able to use the program in windows, macos and linux with the least friction.
I'm now using Hyper, rather than iterm2 because it's not mac only. Hyper isn't great, but I don't have a better cross platform general terminal. I use VS Code everywhere, absolutely love it. I tend to use Chrome, because it pretty much works everywhere, though Brave is my default on my phone.
There's a lot to be said for a better UI/UX, and programs that work everywhere. Also, google doesn't sell their data, they do sell ads using their data. I do wish they'd lock down their advertisers a bit (restricting to text + images, no JS should be needed in-ad).
I have mixed feelings about Google as a company and their culture. I don't trust most of their services/apps to stick around, so tend not to use them beyond browser, search and gmail.
Hopefully this can't be read as downplaying the negative character of political discrimination. It's dangerous to expel people from their jobs based on their political views, unless you're an 1800s sweatshop boss working to stop unions. Otherwise you will face all of the downsides of other forms of discrimination (not having the best talent for the role, nobody to watch your cultural blind-spots, and so on) while running a high chance of ending up as an active fighter on the wrong side of history.
True, but someone's politics at least says something about them as a person. Kinks have almost no correlation to how people are in real life. I'm not saying that justification for firing anybody, though.
If we're talking about Brendan Eich, I'm not sure how you class financial support to a bill opposing gay marriage equality a "kink" and not a "political view". If that's not who you mean, I'd love to know who did get kicked out for their kinks.
(Nor was Eich "kicked out", per se, in a top down fashion - merely the publicizing of his views practically fomented a revolution within the Mozilla community, including volunteers and donors, to the extent that it was untenable for him to continue to attempt to lead. And so he resigned.)
Who's even left from the leadership team around the time of Brendan Eich's departure? Mitchell Baker? Anybody else? Anyway, some say he was fired, some say he resigned. Are we ever going to know what really happened there? And finally, that happened 5 years ago (an eternity in tech time), how long does Mozilla need to be raked over the coals for it? At some point, do we ever move on?
> Further, users who have tried changing their user-agent—the identification string, sent by browsers, that tells Web servers what version of which browser they are—have reported that much of the app works in both Safari and Firefox, with reports that even voice and video calls work in Firefox. It's not clear that everything works, and WebRTC is arguably persnickety enough that Microsoft would have to explicitly test and perhaps tweak its code to work in Firefox or Safari. But ultimately, none of this appears to be a fundamental tech issue.
Goes to show that companies will cut corners in silly ways whenever possible. Unless MS is called out on this repeatedly, it won't change. The noise needs to be louder on supporting Firefox (and other non-Chrome browsers). Otherwise everybody could lose.
I recently switched to brave because I'm tired of having to trust 5-10 extension authors who may or may not sell their extension one day (adblock had to fork to ublock iirc because of something like that). Most of what my extensions do is baked into brave, so its both idiot proof and requires less trust.
If Firefox sold a privacy version of Firefox, I'd buy (edit: ie, with my privacy features/extensions built in)
Indeed! The current practice where one has to install obscure software plugin from unknown author to make browser relatively complete is absurd. (download video? change default css? tweaking headers? this should be in the browser, period.) The paranoid would say this lack of basic power-user features is because it makes users compromise their security.
Then you have to trust Mozilla won't sell your data one day, and once they do, all your privacy tools need to be replaced at once. Except, there won't be any to switch to because there was no competion. Multiple competing, single-purpose, composable modules is best. It keeps the developers honest as long as the users call them out on any bad move they make, the second they make it. Too many users let Google slide on ever shitty move they've made and now here we are, again.
The entire reason why I switched to Firefox in 2003 was because of its superior user interface (tabbed browsing) and performance. Likewise, the reason I switched to Chrome in 2011 was because of performance, syncing, and auto-updating. For me, it was never about privacy, breaking monopolies on rendering engines, or open source. It was always a pragmatic decision based on what browser gave me the best experience.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadI don't know why I couldn't have be treated to a "this might not work 100% warning" instead of being completely locked out.
Also possible (but unlikely) is that Firefox doesn't support some certain thing, the absence of which might corrupt some state or data (error handling ain't exactly a thing javascript land, unfortunately.
(Yeah I get it that they don't want to have people complaining that a niche corner case that was never tested in Firefox doesn't work. But this is a ridiculous way to do it.)
But if the road had thousands of different connections to the car, there certainly would need to be testing for each manufacturer.
Considering that it works with current Edge (which hasn't switched to Blink, yet), it's unlikely, as you say.
That can't be just a coincidence. "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" and all that.
Considering how Microsoft has been shifting to support open platforms (I mean, .net now officially runs on linux and Microsoft even integrates Docker) my guess is that they decided to focus on core businesses and don't waste resources implementing redundant support infrastructure.
I wonder why Skype for Web doesn't run in a browser on Linux, given how much 'Microsoft ️:heart: Linux'.
It's not that simple. The developers have always been there, but until recently Microsoft refused to even acknowledge that there were were platforms other than the Windows ecosystem.
What do you think they should have done differently ?
I understand fixing something like that takes a lot of effort, but they lost a lot of time and money in projects that had no chance of working out, such as FirefoxOS (really? making an entire OS using the slowest browser engine that there is on the cheapest ARM hardware they could find?), Hello, Persona, etc. They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive, the same way I will never forgive Google for abandoning Reader. Servo is a nice project but the chances it will be abandoned after years in development are over the roof.
So now they are focused on their privacy improvements, but they can't stop shooting themselves in the foot (sending your browsing history to the advertisement company Cliqz, remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr. Robot show, installing Pocket by default...)
Then, if it is slower, and they don't seem to be able to take my privacy seriously despite their claims to the contrary, why in hell should I use Firefox?
Safari works pretty OK with G properties, except offline editing of docs
Performance of Chrome is consistent: always snappy. Firefox on the other hand will turn laggy from time to time, especially when opening or closing tabs, when it sometimes freezes noticeably. It is also slower when doing DOM manipulations, and their developer tools are simply crap (MUCH slower, and with fewer features).
But if they want to jerk off looking at how they reign in their synthetic benchmarks, who am I to disagree?
Anecdotally I get the tab opening/closing lag often in Chrome, but not Firefox
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654540
Every tech company has failed projects, you can't blame them for trying.
Look at Google: google wave, google plus, google buzz, their clusterfuck of IM / phone calls.
I mean knock yourself out, there's a whole list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...
My point being, Mozilla has to try to innovate, and they have to try these projects. They're being reproached that some failed, but no one is questioning Rust now that it's taking off...
Furthermore, one time long ago, Mozilla might have thought they didn't need to build a mobile browser, and focus on their main product: Firefox for Desktop.
Next thing you know, Firefox is completely irrelevant on what's becoming the dominant computing platform.
I don't know whether VR/AR or IoT will be a thing, and I'm sure that they will be criticised for their projects there when they don't, but I'm certainly glad they're at least trying to make those open platforms - just in case they do become mainstream.
I'd imagine Apple will team up with Mozilla, so we would have two major browser engines.
1. Cliqz is not an advertising company, it's a search company and we push hard for privacy protection in everything we do (private search, antitracking, adblocking, etc.) 2. Privacy policies are legally binding, and in ours we state that no personal data is collected. We designed our features and products to not require collection of any private data (that includes our search engine). 3. I'd like to point out that in Firefox, by default, your queries are sent to advertising company Google. So I don't understand all the heat when Mozilla tries to find more privacy-friendly alternatives to Google. In this case, they replaced Google by Cliqz (again, an independent German search company focusing on privacy, building its own index: no Bing results involved) in Germany, for 1% of the users. That seems to perfectly fit in Mozilla's mission of protecting users' privacy.
2nd, sending the user's complete browsing history to a 3rd party which is owned by an advertising and media company without telling the user was a terrible idea. It's simply mismanagement by the Mozilla Corporation.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
>This experiment also includes the data collection tool Cliqz uses to build its recommendation engine. Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit.
I enjoyed the read BTW, somebody put some real time into that sort of system
FWIW it sounds [#] exactly like a scummy advertising company - I'd address that if the company is not getting revenue through placements or advertising at all.
I notice you said your products are designed to not require private data collection; presumably that means they do it, but could in theory work without doing it. That comes across as weasel words.
# Edit: I mean the name, I don't know the company.
We're currently proposing a mix of client-side private offers (not unlike Brave) and paid products (e.g.: Ghostery premium, and more are being worked on as we speak). Users should have a choice.
> I notice you said your products are designed to not require private data collection; presumably that means they do it, but could in theory work without doing it. That comes across as weasel words.
No. That means that we do not collect personal data. And being able to do so took (and still takes) a lot of research and careful design.
What's that mean, it sounds like you mean "advertising with discounts in?", not sure what "offers" means if that's not it?
Brave browser has advertising, so it sounds like you're saying your income _will_ come from ads?
That's not an awful thing, so it's weird you're not up front about it??
1. All clients download a database of offers locally (they are basically vouchers, we call them offers because they have the potential to make users save money).
2. While browsing with this feature enabled, URLs of pages as well as some other information accessible locally are processed by the extension which tries to detect the intent of buying something online.
3. When an intent corresponding to one of the items in the local database is found, an offer is shown with a coupon that can be used to save money.
What sets it apart from ads in my opinion is that everything happens client-side and that the offer is only shown when there is a clear intent to buy something (instead of all pages with traditional ads). This means that users will actually see very few of them, but that they should be very relevant and useful (you save money).
Are you audited by any independent, respected privacy watchdog organizations to make sure that you're adhering to your published policies?
If not, how can I be sure that you're doing what you say you are?
Also, even ostensibly non-personally-identifying data can be de-anonymized.[1]
The only way to be sure that your data can't be used against you is for it not to be collected in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deanonymization
I really don't want to use chrome but FF ended up annoying me so much I went back to it.
(Safari almost worked... but the outlook webmail we use didn't play well, and with safari I had to refresh and re-login every hour or so, rather than daily on other browsers)
If this sort of experience is true for most users, then it's bad.
(Sure, "not Google" but I can also just use Safari.)
That was an experimental, lightweight Skype alternative, that didn't take too much effort to build beyond introducing WebRTC into Gecko (which they had to do anyway) and which probably helped them iron out bugs in Gecko's WebRTC implementation. Also, for the record, when I used it, it worked mostly fine.
> Persona
It worked, but almost nobody used it (you could argue that that is "not working out" from a social, if not technical point of view).
> They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive
They didn't abandon it. They transferred it into other people's caring hands. They still provide some support for it under the Mozilla umbrella and they still coordinate (to some extent) with Thunderbird's current developers when modifying the common base Firefox and Thunderbird depend on.
> Cliqz
Partially true, if rather overblown. It affected a tiny number of people (~ 1 % of new users, in only one country), the data was anonymised and the code running on the server to which the data was sent was FOSS, though obviously there's no definitive proof that Cliqz didn't substitute it with malicious code. It was an order of magnitude less bad than what Google always does and considering that the point was to build an alternative to Google search, if it had worked out, it would have been a massive privacy gain. The most disappointing part was it being opt-out, not opt-in, for the randomly selected users.
> remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr. Robot show
That was a very silly (and stupid) gimmick, but it didn't invade your privacy.
> installing Pocket by default
Having Pocket installed by default is not a privacy violation, even if it is slight bloat-ware.
Linux desktop share = 1.3%
Of which 80% of users will use the browser they want to, irrespective of what is currently installed. So 20% of 1.5% = 0.26%
Fortunately firefox is not at a stage where they have to care about 0.26% usage share of worldwide desktop.
And I have rarely seen Linux distro maintainers acting in any bigger-sense-of-good or in technologically better solutions. They have their own favourites.
If firefox wants to succeed- it should ship default with uorigin, kills google and makes firefox snappier. Instant win. If I were making firefox- I'd also ship a power user edition with uMatrix enabled
Instant search on "omnibar" is useful. Spellcheck is great too.
But not everybody aware data are sent to google server for those functions...
> One of the greatest fears (...) is that Web developers would increasingly take the easy way out and limit their support and testing to Chrome
Now, I must ask, why should we (web developers) be the responsible for making everything work with every browser? It's literally the same thing as asking application-oriented developers to code and test their apps for every major compiler out there.
We can't be the responsible for making every webpage compatible with every browser. Period. There are standards, and it's not really our problem that Chrome implements them in a week, while Firefox takes 6 months, Edge 2 years, Konqueror 10 years, and so on.
It takes a lot of time and energy to build and test websites for 3 or 4 different browsers. And it takes even more time to implement workarounds for every browser that doesn't support that thing that your boss asked you to implement. And "shit must be done by the end of the day".
Don't take me wrong. Go go browser diversity! But not if that means that I should take the burden.
I thought it is new generation that reinvents the wheel but it seems I'm mistaken.
Chrome on the other hand is starting to be a problem because it's too damn fast at implementing new stuff (which are accepted as standard). Web-developers then start using those new features and the code they write suddenly doesn't work on other browsers, because those browser just don't support those new features yet.
That's why we got webpack. That's why we got babel and polyfills. And that's why frontend development sucks a lot lately. Because you have the choice of doing X the easy and fast way, that currently works only with Chrome, because no other browser implemented that yet. Or, you can do it the hard and slow way, that works with all browsers.
And this is not something that I'm pulling out of thin air. This has been discussed several times here, in HN.
The central point is avoiding lock-in, with the long term objective of maintaining a competitive browser landscape. Code for one browser, and we'll be collectively screwed when Chrome development reaches Google Reader status.
CSS Flex is a standard. If Konqueror, Firefox, Edge, or whatever other browser doesn't support it (I know they support it now, but that wasn't the case 2 or 3 years ago), it's not any of my business. I'll keep using Flex because it's an accepted standard. And my webpages will work on any browser that supports that standard. If that means that my website works only on Webkit-based browsers, well, then that's really not up to me to fix, isn't it? That is something that the people behind other browsers should fix, by implementing "Flex".
it's not any of my business.
So what is your business?
It is nothing special. It's your standard CRUD app. Not even an SPA. From what I can tell the tech they use is all at least 5 years old.
They obviously never even checked to see if it worked in Firefox. It should work in Firefox. There is no excuse for it not to.
If you are actually analyzing your featureset and saying "I could really use these new standards Firefox doesn't support", that's one thing. If you are just coding whatever and seeing it works in Chrome and calling it a day, you aren't coding to a standard, you are coding to whatever happens to work in Chrome.
Are Chrome devs implementing new standards after they become standards, or are Chrome representatives turning Chrome features into standards?
Because if we don't are we really "web" developers or are we Chrome developers.
literally the same thing as asking application-oriented developers to code and test their apps for every major compiler out there.
Back in the 'olden days' we used to do that too. Some developers would claim their program ran on "Unix" when all they'd actually tested with was GCC on Linux. Sure, sometime it worked or other Unix platforms out of the box and sometimes it could be made to work, but it was still a "Linux" app, and 'we' did complain about that too (and got promptly ignored by a lot of developers who felt just like you do).
And to confess my own 'sins' the web app I'm currently working on is officially Chrome only, and it makes my life so much easier, so I'll admit I'm part of the problem.
Not at all, the build step is not supposed to be done by the user in the native world. A more apt comparison would be that outside the occasional hiccup, video games run on all GPU, you do not see e.g. AMD-only games.
> There are standards
Most of the problems IME stem from web developers not thoroughly following the standard, but rather implementing a “it works on my Chrome, so it should work everywhere”.
> why should we (web developers) be the responsible for making everything work with every browser?
You do whatever you want. But if you propose a service, expect potential users either to leave or complain if it does not work on their setup.
And sure, I'll do whatever I want, or whatever my limited time allows me to do. And if that means supporting only the browser with major quota (like games running only on Windows, because that's what has major quota; using your argument), so be it.
I see you must not have played a lot of games recently – granted, you will notice some problems form time to time, but they are rather the exception (and often fixed by post-launch drivers updates) than the norm.
> Also, most of the games require at least XYZ version of DirectX
Also, most of webapps require at least version XYZ of browser ABC. What is your point exactly, that developers use new features of APIs/libraries?
> that's what has major quota; using your argument
No it's not my argument. In my argument, Windows + DirectX is a standard akin to the web standards, and this standard is implemented by multiple controller makers, GPU founders, screen producers, etc.
Thankfully, I can play Il-2 or Rainbow 6 as well with my GTX1070 and ASUS than my friend with is Vega GPU & LG screen.
Exactly. We use whatever new standard makes our live easier. If Firefox or Edge don't support that standard (because they are always lagging behind), there's not much we can do (except going the hard way and implementing workarounds for each browser, which is a no-no most of the time, because of lack of manpower/time). "My website requires Flex support" is pretty much the equivalent of "My game requires DirectX 11".
Web developers should absolutely be a responsible party here. If other parties eschew their responsibility, this does not excuse web developers from being correct about their trade.
What does being correct about their trade mean? In this instance, it means making sure users aren't locked in one browser, allowing for the browser landscape to remain competitive, because it leads to a better future. If I may use an example from the last time we did this dance, it means not using ActiveX plugins, because it ultimately leads to a local optimum and stagnation on the web.
The web is our common lake, a common good. We all have a duty to protect it.
No, the end user is not usually in control of their compiler. It's closer to making sure thatthe program works on every screen size or OS you're targeting, because these are the thing the user controls directly.
> We can't be the responsible for making every webpage compatible with every browser.
Not directly. You can do that by coding to the standards that all browsers support. To extend the compiler analogy, if your customer is in control of their own compiler, then you don't code to MSVC or GCC, but you code to C89 or C++03, knowing that the standards-compliant compilers are able to support that. The burden is definitely on the coder there.
You might argue that you need the newest standard, and then I agree that part of the responsibility is on the browser vendor, but I still hope that you're going to implement graceful fallback.
Also, as others have pointed out, do you really want to live with a Chrome-only monopoly? For instance, do you value having a full-featured Adblocker? Recently, Chrome was considering withdrawing some of the extension APIs needed for one (they've since partially, though AFAIK not completely backtracked). I won't pretend to have an insight into Google's internal politics, but I think it's plausible that the existence of a privacy-friendly alternative such as Firefox (apart from obviously being valuable in itself for its users) discourages Google from being too privacy-hostile for fear of users eventually getting fed up and switching (or it provides an argument for the Google engineers, the vast majority of whom want to be user-friendly, for resisting introducing more egregious privacy violations).
IMHO if you want to "protest" the browser monopoly, use something more like Dillo or NetSurf. They have no JS, so web apps are out of the question, but work well for the document-centric sites.
But yes, the loss of EdgeHTML (following a few years after the loss of Presto) is a sad thing for the health of the web.
One of the machines I use is an old Dell Latitude D620 (2006, Intel Core2 CPU T7200 2.00GHz[0]) on a debian base. I can tell you from personal experience, on this machine, that Mozilla's latest Quantum Browser is heads above Chrome and their "clones".
It is so quick to load (even loaded with extensions), it replaced Pale Moon as the default browser for this laptop. I was stunned at the performance improvements in Quantum. I remain surprised, every single day, that the modern web has been made available on a laptop that's 13 years old.
All other Chrome-like browsers (Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, etc) take much longer to load, cause the cpu to throttle (fans kick in) which can lead to overheating and shutdown issues. They are essentially unusable on that machine. Firefox Quantum, otoh, is snappy on this machine.
I say this because I'm genuinely curious by the "too big" comment. I honestly find it puzzling (unless you're comparing a modern, full-featured browser to Dillo or Links2/GUI: both of which are favs of mine for their use cases).
I had turned my back on Firefox for a few years because of performance issues, caching problems. They didn't just correct these issues, they've done so in a way few software upgrades have ever managed to do in my experience (dating back three decades) and have blown past their competitors from a purely performance standpoint.
[0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+T72...
You may be experiencing OS caching. If you normally use Chrome, Chrome is already cached in memory by the OS and will open faster than something you haven't started recently.
> On my MBP it also makes the fans spin up.
I've noticed that Chrome tends not to do this while still being slower. This may be related to the way it uses more processes, which consequently requires more resources per operation (and thereby higher visible latency) but splits the load better between cores so that no individual one gets hot enough to require additional cooling.
In theory this could be "better" if the browser actually needed to use 8+ cores for some reason, but in general if that is happening it is some kind of anomaly or defect (like some adspam mining Bitcoin in javascript) rather than any normal behavior. And Firefox does use other threads/processes for most of the few things that actually benefit from it.
I don’t think that Chrome supports anything like Firefox containers, right?
I doubt it.
(Yes, I know this is the Jolt Cola of analogies, I will stick to cars in the future.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/225464/market-share-of-l...
Safari has caught up a bit, luckily, but it'd be great if it would actually compete with other browsers on features. Unfortunately, I guess if Apple opened up iOS to other browser engines, it'd also compete against Google's marketing machine and reach.
I'm sad FF share is declining. I wonder what I can do to counter this trend.
The pitch for Firefox should be easy nowadays. Talk about how it’s privacy-focussed while still being competitive with Chrome in performance and ease of use. A lot of people know that Fa$ebook is evil and gobbling up all their data, but they don’t feel like there’s that much they can practically do. Switching to Firefox and using Containers is something anyone can do easily.
Of course there’s probably bigger things that you could do. But thinking locally (if you’re not already) is absolutely required before you then think globally, IMO.
Firefox 65 keeps crashing on my Linux box. I've tried downgrading to 64 and below. But whatever updates were installed when I installed FF65 also crash FF64 and under.
It was either change OS or let FF go. I've since moved to brave browser, but would happily go back to FF if/when I figure out and troubleshoot the issue.
FWIW I'm on 65.0.1 (64-bit) on Ubuntu 18.04.2 and have had no major issues. I use Firefox exclusively and use my browser heavily all day long.
The ~/.Mozilla/firefox folder contains all your FF profiles, there should just be one profile named something.default. Delete that folder and start FF and it should work.
That folder does contain all your settings so those will be lost (and you can also copy this folder to other computers to copy your entire FF configuration :).
I had serious stability problems on Fedora a few months ago which sounded just like yours - I've since switched to debian for other reasons (with same exact profile data) and things are fine, which made me suspect something in the runtime or build toolchain is different and triggered some subtle bug.
not to blame fedora specifically (and who knows if this was a 'me' problem); but distros do differ slightly esp. w/r/t kernel params/threading/builds etc.
Might be worth trying FF ESR or running in a different distro container to see if this helps (yes, not convenient, but..)
also possibly rebuild your profile (pretty sure I tried this.. but anyhow)
In my old version of Linux I've been using straight Firefox primarily for one-off financial transactions. On the scratch installation of the new version I'm now reminded again of all the intrusive third party screwups. I'm moving my primary browser, with shields like a very paranoid uMatrix, to Chromium to party address the privacy issues, and have about decided to also install Chrome, starting it up just for my financial transactions and then exiting. I think there's a lot lower chance Google will siphon off my account information than one of Mozilla's current or future 3rd party partners, especially as Firefox's declining market share makes it ever more desperate.
But you're right, it does include support for Google search, by default, which is a third party. Not that that'd leak your financial details.
Does this really matter from the user perspective? It's still bullshit.
The Firefox security story has sailed compared to Chrome's, Pocket was independent but bundled in from June 2015 to February 2017, the Mr. Robot stunt, and Cliqz. Through the lens of corporate governance, three strikes and you're out till a long period passes with good governance.
Support for X search doesn't matter in the start up a browser with a single tab to do a financial transaction and then close the browser, which is how I've been using a single installation of Firefox, and will now be using Chrome. That scenario doesn't demand a good session manager, something that Firefox's transition to Quantum has ruined as I say in another comment in this topic.
It still means its goals aligns with Mozilla's, so you have to trust them as much as you have Mozilla. (Though of course, it should have been open sourced by now.)
But really, if three strikes and you're out is your policy, you really shouldn't use Chrome - it has an order of magnitude more strikes, and they are far worse, at that. But to each their own.
Well, you were referring to Cliqz, Pocket and Mr. Robot, which where trust issues, not security issues. Google has at least as many of those.
> I distrust Pocket at least as much as I distrust Mozilla.
That makes sense, because they're the same. You should distrust Google even more.
And when it comes to security, not hazarding my bank accounts and credit cards beyond what's unavoidable in doing business on the net, Google is massively more trustworthy than Mozilla. If for no other reason than Mozilla having entered its corporate endgame.
Firefox is not fit for purpose for any of my use cases, although I've still have a copy of Waterfox that I can move to my new Linux installation with a abandoned but adequate session manager for one use case. Maybe Mozilla will fix those two dozen plus bugs and feature requirements for a good session manager before no one cares anymore and I'll continue using that line of browsers if/when Waterfox becomes unsustainable.
There is absolutely nothing you can say that will make me use a program that doesn't work for me, and Firefox does not work for me except for the most casual of browsing.
So are you saying that Cliqz, Pocket and Mr. Robot led to emptying even one person's bank account?
I don't know why you keep bring up the session manager. If you don't like Firefox's features, fine, go ahead and use another browser and ignore Mozilla's role in protecting the open web. But it has nothing to do with security or whatever.
Yes, but here's the thing: these issues have shown that Firefox is not at all more trustworthy, they just don't have as easy a time getting away with it because they aren't in the lead. I have no reason to trust that they won't be just as bad if they think they can get away with it.
Furthermore, trustworthiness is a spectrum, and Mozilla's issues are still peanuts compared to Google's. It's a valid stance to criticise those issues, but it's flawed reasoning to use those as a reason to jump to Chrome.
The reason I care is because it's not about supporting a piece of software, but about protecting the open web, and therefore civil rights.
> I'm making an argument that Mozilla has violated its users trust in the past and no one should reasonably expect they won't do so again.
And I'm making the argument that you can expect Mozilla to not violate its users' trust anywhere near the extent that Google does, and that you can expect its community to keep it in line to ensure that.
Civil rights? Really?
As an example the reload button in the extensions screen does not work (it doesn't seem to open in the context of the current page). As well I needed ages to find out that after opening the uMatrix screen I had to tap the phones back button to get back to the originating page.
A site breaks due to missing Javascript. I open uMatrix in via the Firefox menu. The matrix page is displayed in a new tab. After changing settings I press the refresh button on top of the uMatrix page (that's my workflow on desktop). Only the tooltip is shown (it says "Press shift to bypass browser cache", but the originating site is not reloaded.
If you think it's worth opening a bug report for uMatrix, I'll gladly do so.
It’s possible Chrome is large enough they could be objectively worse and sites just optimize to Chrome or people just end up not caring about alternatives.
Pages should strive to be compatible with all browsers, and self-dealing in the space of compatibility is something that would go against the ethos and mission (IMHO, and I would expect many others).
That said, I expect that we would support a similar campaign, just advocating for Firefox using other points instead of "best viewed" style compatibility.
If Mozilla's mission is a more open and standard compliant web instead of walled gardens that message needs to be conveyed to ordinary users and explained as to why it is better. I am not a copywriter so I do not what that messages should be but I think it should be done.
I personally don't have a read on how much support there would be among well known independent/commnity-aligned services for such a campaign. If there did exist a widespread sentiment of that sort, it'd be great.
1. Tab handling is horrible compared to chrome. Vertical tab plugins are theoretically better, but are broken by the new extension system. If you install the plugins you still get tabs across the top.
2. Handling of native themes. Mozilla started attempting this and failed miserably with obviously no QA. They will match my themes dark background but not match the lighter colored text, making the inputs black on black.
3. Non-native UI's. They can support a cross platform UI framework but not a cross platform browser?
4. Whatever the hell is going on with that hamburger menu, they seem to change it all the time and I can never find my bookmarks.
The spend so much on experiments, rewriting things in rust, switching UI frameworks and barely used experiments like webasm and webgl but won't invest in making their core browser experience better. They're stuck doing things that are fun for developers to work on.
Kind of ironic coming from the people who gave us IE/EDGE, the browser with the most incompatibility issues.
One thing they got right, Linux/Firefox people are probably not their target audience so why bother. Especially after year of broken Skype updates in Linux. There are better alternatives now.
https://www.waterfoxproject.org/
A bit of revisionist history here. Firefox, nee Phoenix, was a branch of Mozilla because its authors felt (correctly) Mozilla was too bloated. I remember 1-2 minute load times when trying to open Mozilla back in the day.
What you're saying doesn't seem to contradict it?!?
If I couldn't simply copy my entire configuration as I upgrade versions of Linux I'd be making a painful one time change completely to Chrome and Chromium, which I'd really rather avoid.
The bottom line is that Mozilla let Firefox's market share decline so much that the only two reasons people kept using it were it's not Chrome, and the extension ecosystem. Which is reported to have included a superior debugger, which indirectly made sure a lot of sites implicitly supported Firefox because they were developed using it.
Users don't give the slightest damn that keeping the old XPI ecosystem was hard, and had serious security issues. A huge number of extensions that they depended on have become roadkill on the information superhighway, even if some made the transition with significant changes. Making Firefox into an inferior version of Chrome means for most that the only reason to use it is that it's not Chrome.
[0]: http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/germa...
People who choose chrome because of a view UX enhancements, or choose Google because Gmail syncs better than iCal/idav, or decide to use Google search over duckduckgo because of blah, is the reason why Giant Corporations rule the planet.
Why not support the underdog that actually cares about your privacy and liberties, rather than choosing an option that feeds the beast and sends us down a path to a dystopian future complete with global surveillance?
I don't think many people use products because of their politics. They use what works for them. Chrome seems to be doing so extremely well, despite its flaws and questionable competitive practices.
I have three browsers on my laptop. I hate Chrome because it is a battery/memory/data hog. But I can't comfortably switch profiles (work/various orgs/non-profits/personal) on FF like I do with Chrome. The feature is actually in FF, but it isn't available in the interface for whatever reason.
This feature is nonexistent on Safari.
Despite the alternatives on FF, this one feature is what keeps me on Chrome. Had FF had that, I probably would've switched by now.
Nothing political (unless the politics suddenly begins to matter)
I, for one, am not convinced they do. I'm convinced that's the message they're trying to sell right now because they can't compete in other ways, but history has not shown that they really do.
I think it could be a killer feature.
I'm now using Hyper, rather than iterm2 because it's not mac only. Hyper isn't great, but I don't have a better cross platform general terminal. I use VS Code everywhere, absolutely love it. I tend to use Chrome, because it pretty much works everywhere, though Brave is my default on my phone.
There's a lot to be said for a better UI/UX, and programs that work everywhere. Also, google doesn't sell their data, they do sell ads using their data. I do wish they'd lock down their advertisers a bit (restricting to text + images, no JS should be needed in-ad).
I have mixed feelings about Google as a company and their culture. I don't trust most of their services/apps to stick around, so tend not to use them beyond browser, search and gmail.
Hopefully this can't be read as downplaying the negative character of political discrimination. It's dangerous to expel people from their jobs based on their political views, unless you're an 1800s sweatshop boss working to stop unions. Otherwise you will face all of the downsides of other forms of discrimination (not having the best talent for the role, nobody to watch your cultural blind-spots, and so on) while running a high chance of ending up as an active fighter on the wrong side of history.
(Nor was Eich "kicked out", per se, in a top down fashion - merely the publicizing of his views practically fomented a revolution within the Mozilla community, including volunteers and donors, to the extent that it was untenable for him to continue to attempt to lead. And so he resigned.)
Some good coverage of this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ce...
Goes to show that companies will cut corners in silly ways whenever possible. Unless MS is called out on this repeatedly, it won't change. The noise needs to be louder on supporting Firefox (and other non-Chrome browsers). Otherwise everybody could lose.
If Firefox sold a privacy version of Firefox, I'd buy (edit: ie, with my privacy features/extensions built in)