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What always strikes me about these pleas is how familiar they sound. They're reminiscent of all the things we "should" -- eat better, exercise more, lower our

• glogla 10y ago
  It's not quality of Firefox. On desktop it's google having (almost) monopoly on search and abusing it market its other products. On mobile, it's Google abusing its power over the platform to make OEMs use Chrome in the same way MS pushes OEMs to ship Windows and Secure Boot and various other shit. Firefox could be perfect (and it isn't, because what do you know, developing good software takes insane amount of money) and it wouldn't help.
  • moxie 10y ago
    Yes, Google has market leverage. However, when IE was Firefox's competitor, MS was in just as powerful of a position, and Firefox was a success. They were a success because they clearly had the better browser. These days, that's no longer the case. I know that I certainly did not switch from Firefox because of Google's marketing efforts or underhanded tactics. But what if you're right? In a world where, I agree, it takes an insane amount of money to develop good software, where Google has more of that money than Firefox does, and where Google has really effective market leverage, do the "shoulds" have a chance? Is the future we want even a possibility? I don't personally think that it is, which is why I wonder what larger changes we would need to see for that to become true.
    • maftieu 10y ago
      I think people think Chrome is a best browser is because it performs better on Google products than any other browser. And as people are using GMail, Youtube or other, they see Chrome as the best browser.
      • verroq 10y ago
        Sorry but that is just not true, Firefox has miserable DOM performance that results in laggyness, freezes on pages that work fine with Chrome. Until the Firefox people accept that their browser sucks can they finally try to make it better. There is no sandboxing (in the works for how many years now?), their pdfjs is not as fast as the chrome native plugin, they force me to use the insecure and terribe flash plugin that crashes every time, one frozen tab still freezes the entire browser. No I don't want to use Chrom{e,ium}. I wasn't tricked into choosing google. I just want something that works.
        • carussell 10y ago
          > they force me to use the insecure and terribe flash plugin that crashes every time You mean Adobe's terrible plugin. It's a totally black box. Mozilla has nothing to do with the plugin development.
        • michaelmrose 10y ago
          If pages lag or freeze it might be the developers fault. I realize some are providing complex app like experiences but most web sites are just text and images artfully arranged. Making this simple thing slow requires dedicated stupidity.
          • dogma1138 10y ago
            Users can't fix websites, they can fix their experience by switching to a browser that works.
            • michaelmrose 10y ago
  • Scarbutt 10y ago
    Agree with everything you said but you are blaming everything on google, mozilla dropped the ball with mobile, they were too late.
    • blub 10y ago
      They didn't drop the ball. They tripped on it and fell on their face. Remember FirefoxOS? iOS not allowing competitors also stuck a knife in their back.
• aluhut 10y ago
  I rather have people write such texts to encourage people to switch to Firefox then have Chrome installed accidentally because they again bundled it like some crappy AntiVirus software in the installer of another program (together with the google updater service and god knows what).
  • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    One of those things I only realized recently: Google CEO Sundar Pichai's claim to fame at Google was the Google Toolbar. Under him, how can we expect Google to do anything but push pack-in bloatware? Dark patterns like prechecked bloatware install boxes aren't going anywhere under him.
    • aluhut 10y ago
      Ugh. Nice find. Even more reasons to keep away.
• wallace_f 10y ago
  >(MS) was actively trying to make their own browser bad Is this conspiracy or fact?
  • mpol 10y ago
    The fact is, after releasing IE6 around the year 2000, MS dissolved the IE team. Only around 2006 a new team was formed to create IE7 (which wasn't much better). Conspiracy mixed with facts is... At the end of the nineties, Netscape was pushing to make the browser the platform, instead of the desktop. MS was quite worried about that, they had a monopoly on the desktop and used that to create a monopoly with their browser, so Netscape had no chance to do what they wanted. MS succeeded, as in delayed the process, it took maybe 15 years, after the death of Netscape and the rise of Google, to have Google and others make a platform out of the browser. Having the web stagnate and locked in to a browser like IE6 was for MS a desirable situation.
    • justinlardinois 10y ago
      So it's conjecture. Going by Occam's razor, Microsoft just had no need to innovate because it had no competition.
      • mpol 10y ago
        And they had no competition because they had it destroyed with illegal practices. And all they got fined with was a slap on the wrist while earning billions. More ontopic... IE6 was slightly better than Netscape 4, so almost everyone switched to IE6. Just as now Chrome is only slightly better than Firefox to a lot of people (not to me though). And a lot of people are switching to Chrome. If you trust Google (an advertising company) to not play the same tricks as MS did, then good luck with your Google Chrome :). Once Google has a lock on the browser market, who knows what will happen. Another lock-in, and more years of stagnation. Yes, more conspiracy :).
        • fixermark 10y ago
          Stagnation like Chromecast? Google has market incentive to improve on the browser's capabilities that Microsoft did not.
• ookdatnog 10y ago
  The public at large will never be swayed to use less convenient alternatives for ethical reasons. But even so, if a small, dedicated group of people are convinced, they can keep the ethical alternative just alive enough that it remains a somewhat viable alternative. I don't think vegetarianism will ever be the norm, but there are enough vegetarians to create a market for vegetarian food. This creates options for people who don't want to eat meat for ethical reasons, increasing their freedom to live life the way they want without it being prohibitively inconvenient. A similar argument can be made for desktop Linux or using Firefox.
  • sabujp 10y ago
    googlers need more kale in their diet
  • TAForObvReasons 10y ago
    Vegetarianism can be the norm, but for that to happen one of two things must happen: either the cost of meat has to be prohibitively expensive ("the stick") or vegetarian dishes have to be more appealing to the public at large ("the carrot"). Neither of those things have happened yet. For Firefox to gain market share, either the perceived "cost" of using Chrome has to skyrocket or Firefox has to be superior for a common use case. Ethical arguments attempt to do the former, but imho nothing short of google charging for chrome will increase the cost. Mozilla needs a killer web app that people want to use. Something like gmail that attracts millions of people, with features added to Firefox (new APIs or whatever) to make the app much more effective.
    • ajbetteridge 10y ago
      "the carrot" I see what you did there.
    • qplex 10y ago
      People are far removed from seeing the actual results of their decisions. Humans are also very good at self deception. Even if you sort of know your beef is butchered, it carries little meaning since you never have to see it happen. Same goes for Google stealing your data or Apple making pretty phones with slave labor. Basically pretty much everybody needs to be smacked hard with a stick now and then and told what kind of picture they are really painting.
• gordon_freeman 10y ago
  Limiting features such as Google Docs offline access to only Chrome is bad. I don't see that as Google is making efforts to make chrome good. I see it as Google is trying to promote Chrome browser through the demand it has generated for its core products. That kind of exclusivity is what worries me most. Especially when Google built chrome on open source Chromium.
• emn13 10y ago
  This is a misleading comparison. You imply that firefox is far behind chrome in terms of general quality. Although I use chrome a lot, I also use firefox daily. And the quality difference is essentially nil(1). In many relevant ways firefox was at times better; but the details shift from release to release. I certainly isn't true that typical users would run into huge problems by using firefox. 1: on a desktop. I also regularly use FF/chrome/edge on a laptop, where FF's slowness+ power usage is possibly slightly noticeable (not very), and I also use multiple browsers on mobile, where FF clearly is behind (though it's not clear how much of that is due to FF+chrome, and how much is due to websites simply only ever testing on mobile chrome and possibly iOS - not that it does the end-user any good) The difference between the browsers is overstated. If it weren't for vendor lock-in effects, you could use FF today and barely notice the difference.
  • TwoBit 10y ago
    It's largely a problem of Web sites making mobile Web pages not follow the Standards but rather use browser specific code.
  • seba_dos1 10y ago
    In my experience, while Firefox does lose with Chromium when it comes to slowness (e10s and APZ helps a lot, but still doesn't win), it definitely wins when it comes to power usage and leaves Chromium in dust.
  • Nexxxeh 10y ago
    Firefox is unusually slow on my low-end Windows tablet, while Opera/Chrome is grand. My desktop will power through anything, so Firefox on there. My phone, however... Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin is the best mobile browsing experience I've ever had.
    • soylentcola 10y ago
      Yep. For people who run Android and don't have superuser privileges for system-wide ad blocking, I typically recommend Firefox and uBlock Origin for a simple way to at least improve web browsing. On mobile it's even more important than desktop I find. On your larger screen and faster machine with a broadband connection, ads are an annoyance. On mobile, they tax the relatively weaker hardware, use up more data, and can pop over/fill the whole screen without much effort and ruin any attempt at productive browsing. It's no wonder people don't bother leaving the silos of Facebook and friends where at least their ads are just inline with the "content" instead of popping over and constantly getting in the way of what you're trying to read.
• javipas 10y ago
  I do agree with you. It's difficult to convince anyone with those kind of arguments. As I've written on The Unshut, I'd say the problem is the perception of value: http://theunshut.com/2016/09/26/firefox-chrome-and-the-perception-of-value/ http://theunshut.com/2016/09/26/firefox-chrome-and-the-perce... When I switched to Chrome I did because it felt better. The decision would be tougher today because Firefox, Chrome and Opera (Edge has to mature) are great options and not that different in performance and features. Change is tougher now because the perceived value isn't really there in most cases.
• hoffcoder 10y ago
  From my own experiences, Firefox is a better product than Chrome in a lot of ways. For my daily needs, Firefox can easily survive 150 tabs, while Chrome nearly chokes my machine in 30. Firefox on Android has a quaint reader mode, which I use to read at night. Firefox on Android supports extensions. It stays the most standard implementation of web standards that I know. I have been using it for over 5 years, and though I am forced to use Chrome occasionally (for Chromecast related work), it remains my primary browser. I will use it as long as I can.