33 ms·

Chrome Won

• fiatjaf 9y ago
  If web browsers won't matter in the near future why all the fuss about Javascript, ES6, ES7, ES8 and whatever? What about WebRTC and all its implications? What about new exciting new API getting shipped to browsers everyday? What about CSS improvements and so on? Do you think all this people is wasting their efforts in trying to make web apps much more like native apps?
• millstone 9y ago
  Chrome may be technically great, but we should also acknowledge the fact that it was the sole advertisement for years on the most valuable piece of web real estate in the universe, the google.com home page. I can't think of any other product with that distinction. What would the browser war look like if google.com advertised Firefox instead?
  • cpeterso 9y ago
    Google has for years paid Adobe to bundle Chrome in the Flash plugin installer on Windows. Imagine: a Firefox or IE user visits a website that needs Flash, so they download Adobe's installer. Because they are eager to get back to that Flash website or they don't read the installer's fine print, they don't realize they need to opt out of the "Make Chrome my new default browser" checkbox. Ironically Chrome bundles its own Flash PPAPI plugin, so the Firefox or IE user has now downloaded two Flash plugins but won't actually use the one they downloaded from adobe.com. This has probably been a long, slow leak of Firefox users to Chrome and a hole that should have been plugged.
    • digi_owl 9y ago
      Not just Flash. I recall seeing it bundled with all manner of Freeware over the years. Google was spending some big bucks to get Chrome onto every damn Windows install out there.
• cetra3 9y ago
  No mention of Servo, which is quite interesting. A targeted omission?
  • nemothekid 9y ago
    Seems irrelevant. In the author's style - Servo is just a new kind of horse.
  • fiatjaf 9y ago
    Well, I don't use Firefox mostly because debugging Javascript in it is much much slower in all the old computers I use. I'm hoping Servo will change that.
    • kbrosnan 9y ago
      Servo is not rewriting the JavaScript engine. Spidermonkey will continue to be C++ for the foreseeable future.
• aerovistae 9y ago
  > I started Firefox OS in 2011 because already back then I was convinced that desktops and browsers were dead. Not immediately–here we are 6 years later and both are still around–but both are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential going forward. I don't understand this perspective. Browsers are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential? What? I feel like the web dominates our lives more than ever, and everyone uses a laptop or desktop for any actual work they have to do, professional or hobby. While people use their phones for internet access throughout the day as they move about, it must be one in 1000 or fewer who uses their phone or tablet for real work. Does someone see a replacement on the horizon for the supposedly "legacy" laptop/desktop power combo?
  • fiatjaf 9y ago
    The mobile thing is just mass distraction. Everybody says "mobile" is eating the world, but when you look at it, 99 in 100 mobile core users are stupid facebookers who don't even know what is the internet and wouldn't be using the internet at all if it wasn't for Facebook, Instagram or whatever share-your-stupid-life network they may be using.
    • madeofpalk 9y ago
      ...who cares? Why are your sites so superior and quality for 'proper internet' but these things that people actually use doesn't?
      • Retra 9y ago
        Because the things that tend to be the most valuable to society tend to also be hard to achieve. If you could be a good person by doing what is easy and immediately gratifying, there would be no trouble in the world.
    • aerovistae 9y ago
      I have secretly held this opinion for years. 4 out of 5 times that I look over someone's shoulder at their phone on the train, they're rapidly scrolling through a feed of photos, memes, and emote-filled status updates, endlessly. It scares me, to be honest. I wonder where this tendency in people will lead in the very long run, particularly when you consider the ideas suggested by companies like Neuralink. It brings Black Mirror to mind. Will people permanently have an inexhaustible feed of vapid garbage playing in their mind while they ignore most of everything going on in reality, in their actual real life? However, this is unrelated to the original point. Just a side thought.
• Yuioup 9y ago
  Browsers and desktops are legacy? Who knew? Do we need to invest in OP's embedded AI technology now?
  • Spivak 9y ago
    Not really legacy, but not really a big growth area.
• kakarot 9y ago
  > if the trend continues If I used this argument 16 years ago it would have meant "Internet Explorer won". Browsers will rise and fall and eventually a series of bad decisions by Google will pave the way for a new leader. I will never leave Firefox as long as Mozilla fights the good fight. As internet privacy becomes an increasingly public issue, Google will face evermore scrutiny over Chrome and all it takes is one fuckup on their part for people to realize they've been supporting the wrong company.
  • math0ne 9y ago
    Yup seems to me all this shows is it's a volatile market.
  • bitmapbrother 9y ago
    Likewise, all it takes is one fuckup from Mozilla to bleed even more users and sink into irrelevance.
• RodericDay 9y ago
  I will never ever leave Firefox voluntarily for an ad-infested Chrome alternative.
  • zeta0134 9y ago
    I use Chrome / Chromium with uBlock Origin, and am basically ad free. uBlock Origin works great on Firefox too, and I'm a Firefox user on Android solely because this extension exists, and Chrome for Android refuses to run extensions. Heck, even Microsoft Edge can run ad blockers now. There's no shortage of options if ads are the primary thing keeping you away from competitors.
  • sparkling 9y ago
    Ad-infested?
  • whymsicalburito 9y ago
    Not sure what you're referring to, I see the same amount of ads regardless of which browser is used... Have you tried using an ad-block extension?
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • dashundchen 9y ago
    Especially on Android, where Chrome doesn't have uBlock or extensions, and Firefox does. Not to mention the million hooks Google's apps put into Chrome search, browsing history, etc. If you use the Google Search launcher to open an app, it sends which app and the time it was opened to Google! I'm disappointed that the death of Firefox OS and Ubuntu phone leaves us with little choice for FOSS smartphones.
    • a2decrow 9y ago
      Android is not FOSS. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is, but that excludes all the closed Google apps upon which more and more Android apps rely on. Almost every smartphone ships with Android, not AOSP, therefor there really isn't a FOSS smartphone market.
• yuhong 9y ago
  As a side note, Mozilla bought Pocket more than a year after this debacle: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3vijxi/psa_mozilla_does_make_money_off_of_the_pocket/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3vijxi/psa_mozilla... Removal of Firefox Hello took only 6 months: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1287827 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1287827
• TACIXAT 9y ago
  Funny to see this. I just downloaded Vivaldi [1] today. I still have all my work stuff in Chrome, but I'm giving Vivaldi a second shot now that a more stable version has been released. I like the idea of a browser with more features for developers (as they put it, a browser for our friends). I'm hoping it lives up to expectations. This motivated me to go even further. I'm sick of the 1999 style popups and redirects I get on mobile sites, especially the Android webviews that so many applications have. I'm setting the AdBlock Browser to my default and disabling in-app web browsers where possible. Until I can trust mobile sites to have respectable ads, they lose revenue. The more I think about this, the more annoyed I'm getting. The Youtube app has also been redesigned to have a less 'friction free' UI. You now open a video, see an ad first. Ok, that's fine. Back out of a video, it minimizes and you view 'suggested videos' (which feel like more ads). Swipe video away, you're still on the ad screen. Back out of Youtube. I want to watch a video and get out, maybe be pestered by 1 skippable ad for a relevant product. Not hit back 8 times and swipe a video away. The time might be right for disruption. On the other hand, I might just be spoiled by debt supplemented user acquisition strategies that have very low monetization. We'll see. 1. https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com
  • drivingmenuts 9y ago
    I've been using Vivaldi as my daily driver for about two months or so and I'm about to switch away. I'm not impressed with the performance on any level. In fact, ATM, the only thing I like about it is the bookmark handling, which is not really all that unique. It's a tossup for me whether I'll go back to Chrome or Safari (there's positives and negatives for both of them in my case). YMMV.
• richdougherty 9y ago
  Here are two ways that Mozilla could have a lot of impact: - If it is indeed too challenging for Firefox to compete against Chrome with a separate browser, there might be value in Mozilla maintaining an open-source fork of Chrome. This would allow Mozilla to borrow the good bits of Chrome for relatively low effort, and focus development effort on the the things that Google might not value so much (e.g privacy). It would also be a hedge against a Google monopoly by having an open source competitor available. - I'd love to see a solid open source clone of Android—including a full clone of Google Play Services. I think Mozilla could help a lot here, especially if they integrated their fork of the browser.
  • oridecon 9y ago
    https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Windows_2 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Windows_2 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions
    • richdougherty 9y ago
      So these links are all about technology (shared libraries, APIs) from Chrome that has made it into Firefox?
  • bitmapbrother 9y ago
    Isn't that what Chromium is? Or did you want Firefox to fork Chromium and be reliant on Google and keep pulling in all changes they pushed? As for an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called Replicant. Mozilla already tried the mobile OS thing and failed. Not sure why you think they would suddenly have success. It's all about ecosystems in the mobile space and Mozilla doesn't have it nor will they ever.
    • richdougherty 9y ago
      > did you want Firefox to fork Chromium and be reliant on Google and keep pulling in all changes they pushed? I guess I was thinking that Mozilla could both contribute to the core browser (Blink?) and maintain a fork similar to Chromium, but perhaps with more independent features. This is obviously not ideal for the ecosystem, compared to having a separate browser engine. However it could be a useful approach if Firefox has trouble getting enough users to be relevant, because at least it would mean that Mozilla is influencing the web and its development. > an open source clone of Android, it already exists and it's called Replicant I don't think Mozilla needs to start an independent project. They could fund, promote and improve one of the existing open source forks of Android.
• buu700 9y ago
  In fairness to Firefox, at this point I'm just waiting for their dev tools to get as good as Chrome's before I seriously consider switching, and other efforts like Quantum certainly make the prospect even more attractive. Once they have me on desktop, I'll want to switch on mobile as well for the state syncing benefits. I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable portion of Chrome users were in a similar boat, quietly waiting for some small aspect of Firefox to improve.
  • cracell 9y ago
    Yeah the war is certainly not over. Chrome is vulnerable in a lot of ways. Heck at this point I can imagine IE making a huge comeback even. We'll see.
    • dingo_bat 9y ago
      IE has been abandoned by Microsoft. No comebacks. Edge is pretty good though.
      • ams6110 9y ago
        All the older administrative workers at my office, who have used IE for years (often because their enterprise apps required it) are pretty grumpy about Edge. I think it's mainly just because it's different. A lot of people don't like gratuitous change (something most tech companies don't understand at all). I'm sort of in that camp myself. I basically abandoned Office when they came out with the Ribbon UI, and I still haven't liked any new Windows compared to the "classic" NT desktop.
  • ishbits 9y ago
    2 things keep me on Chrome. First, the overly large titlebar on Linux. I've tried some addons to make it more like Chrome but they all look like shit. And second, the dev tools. I find dev tools in Firefox clumsy to use. I believe I originally switched to Chrome for the dev tools when I ventured into frontend development.
    • 9y ago
• esaym 9y ago
  Weird, because here are the browser stats from my personal blog page http://imgur.com/a/1COo4 http://imgur.com/a/1COo4 Edit: Err correction, looks like 3,294 of those FF hits are from a bot trying to break into my fake wp-login.php page with an agent id of "Firefox/34". But still, minus those hits, FF is neck and neck with Chrome.
• yellowapple 9y ago
  I don't understand the graphs. Chrome's growth seems to be slowing according to the raw data part of the graph, yet the trend line suggests Chrome's growth to be speeding up. The trend line basically doesn't seem to fit the data at all in the case of Chrome, aside from the fact that both point more-or-less upward.
  • cyphar 9y ago
    It's a classic example of someone who hasn't had to deal with "hard" statistics thinking that just drawing a trendline (and dismissing biases out-of-hand) is all that statistics is. The author is right that Chrome has a massive share, but everyone knows that. Any analysis more specific than that requires more than just overplotting exponentials on a graph.
• amq 9y ago
  A rather toxic read which I wouldn't expect from a former CTO.
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    Indeed. I don't think it was out of line, since he basically ran the tech side for awhile, but it's in kind of poor taste to do that at this point. If you read the end though, he really is just using an attention grabbing headline and article to bring up his startup. Not very classy.
  • agentgt 9y ago
    I have to agree. The fact that he was their tech leader and was running things when Chrome took over is especially damning . The entire article he didn't take any ownership for this failing and then goes on to mention how he is heading up another company. > All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users. I call BS. When Chrome came out it was a lot better experience than Firefox. That is IMO how chrome got so much velocity. Chrome was more stable and faster. Now that may not be true now but it was the early technical failure of Firefox that caused a great deal of uptake of chrome. But once you make it to the top these days even after failure you still get funding and get to to lead another company. Andreas is rightfully very impressive but maybe he shouldn't be an executive.
• Mathnerd314 9y ago
  > exponential trend They're market shares & hence bounded by 0 and 1, so exponential seems pretty unrealistic. The logistic curve is a better starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_economics_and_sociology:_diffusion_of_innovations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_economics...
  • ttoinou 9y ago
    + the fact that the sum of shares shouldn't be over 1
  • zumatic 9y ago
    This is what I came here to post, and you can see that, in the mobile chart, Chrome and Safari already seem to be levelling off. Maybe a better model would be like an ADSR (attack decay sustain release) envelope in sound synthesis where the logistic curve represents the attack / initial adoption phase, possibly followed by a mirror logistic curve representing mature saturation then eventual replacement by competitors. That said, some products do come back from the dead, like Mozilla itself; the Apple Mac is another example. Saying "Chrome won" now feels like saying "IE won" in 2002 or so. Look at the chart here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_5
    • BigJono 9y ago
      2004 was a dark time...
    • Mathnerd314 9y ago
      I couldn't find a single chart from invention of the web browser to present, but these two cover most of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Browser_Wars_(en).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Browser_Wars_(en).svg http://i.imgur.com/kVocSvo.png http://i.imgur.com/kVocSvo.png What strikes me is the diversity. Chrome has mostly been stealing market share from IE; Safari is growing too and is by no means dead; FF has been declining, but not that much. There are 4-ish strong browsers in the market now when before there was only 1 (IE) and a half (Mozilla). Certainly a different picture from the chart in the article.
• porfirium 9y ago
  >Browsers are a commodity product. They all pretty much look the same and feel the same. All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users. Not really. Buy a cheap laptop and see Firefox freeze all the time rendering pages while Chrome keeps up like a champ. All your remaining users are the die-hard users like me, who stay because they like the addons, or some other thing. But Mozilla has decided they'll remove those too, so...
• brian-armstrong 9y ago
  I use firefox for entirely idealistic reasons, but it's hard to ignore the fact that it is slower. There are times when it just feels so bloated, though thankfully a quick restart gets it running smoothly again. I know firefox team has had passes of perf improvements in the past, but it seems like it still isn't a high priority. When it comes to browsers, speed is the #1 feature.
  • insickness 9y ago
    I switched from Firefox to Chrome just last week. I was using Firefox for years until it began crashing multiple times per day. Chrome is far faster at browsing. Tabs close quicker.
  • mverwijs 9y ago
    That, and though Firefox may be slow, but last time I checked Chrome sucked my battery dry. With firefox my battery lasts way longer.
  • Crisco 9y ago
    Honestly, recently I've consistently noticed Firefox running faster than Chrome for my usage scenario. It might be bias, but I find browsing on Firefox a more enjoyable experience and uses a lot less of my system resources. I stuck with Firefox through the times where it was much slower than Chrome for idealistic reasons as well, but now I feel like speed is less of an issue because they are both pretty even.
    • km3k 9y ago
      It might be a placebo effect, but I find that I switch back and forth between Chrome and Firefox every 6-12 months after the one I'm using feels slow and the other feels faster. Maybe they're actually leapfrogging each other in performance, maybe not. I'm currently on my Chrome phase.
      • brian-armstrong 9y ago
        One thing that I think could be an interesting variable is how many tabs you've accreted. Browser A with 100 tabs open versus Browser B with 1 tab.
• utku_karatas2 9y ago
  Mozilla the foundation did deserve this. This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.
  • yuhong 9y ago
    I remember this debacle: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/497ebm/rewe_dont_want_to_be_negative_about_mozilla/?st=j353zvms&sh=37deece1 https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/497ebm/rewe_dont_w...
  • lern_too_spel 9y ago
    Don't kid yourself. Firefox was losing long before Eich left and was even more technically inferior relative to its competitors at the time of his departure.
  • 467568985476 9y ago
    I don't buy it. Eich was hardly a wunderkind capable of carrying a browser on his shoulders alone. And in a market for engineers that currently favors labor, do you really want to be on the wrong side of the social issues that your staff generally care about? Maybe they would have left to work on Chrome if Eich had stayed. That doesn't even speak to the myriad technical and resource issues that Mozilla faced prior to that particular incident.
    • reedlaw 9y ago
      > Eich was hardly a wunderkind capable of carrying a browser on his shoulders alone. How about Brave [1]? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)
      • detaro 9y ago
        Has most of the engineering done by Google, since it is based on chromium?
• sliken 9y ago
  Thank god, before chrome run using firefox on linux has a frustrating experience. Sites often targeted IE or even mozilla. Trying to file taxes, connecting to a school website, libraries, etc often hit various snags. Some would work but you'd have to lie about your agent. These days with chome being so popular linux users can feel like a first class citizen. Reminds me of the comic showing a dog using a computer and "On the internet nobody knows you are a dog". With chrome nobody on the internet knows you are running linux. You can even gasp use office/adobe clouds based apps.
  • pcwalton 9y ago
    > Sites often targeted IE or even mozilla. Er, Firefox and Mozilla are/were both Gecko.
• aplummer 9y ago
  I disagree with the horse / car metaphor. Each platform is different, radio or TV is a better metaphor for still being popular but different. I highly doubt PCs will be relegated to a novelty few dozen in a cities.
  • andreasgal 9y ago
    Roc has a similar comment in the comment section. I agree and disagree. Desktop PCs will be around, but the vast majority of interaction minutes will be on mobile (and maybe in the future elsewhere). Most of the 6bn people or so who arrived online once the Web took off don't have PCs, and don't need it. Its a geographic/infrastructure issue (lots of LTE in Africa and Asia but no landlines etc), and also a generational one. Kids grow up with smartphones. Why use a PC if the phone works? PC won't go away, but if 90% or 95% or online minutes are mobile, do PCs still matter?
    • roca 9y ago
      My kids are in school. Their peers aren't doing homework on their phones.
  • dorfsmay 9y ago
    And beyond the mobile vs desktop, even on mobile I don't want to install an apps just to read an article, view an image or buy an airplane ticket. The one app I use the most on my phone is a browser.
• eveningcoffee 9y ago
  What I find most heart breaking is that too many people who stick around here helped it to prosper. Web site not fast enough, use Chrome, web site broken in other browsers, use Chrome. Google services suspiciously slow in other browsers, use Chrome.
• ProfessorLayton 9y ago
  Firefox was my browser of choice on desktop, but its overall decline in performance forced me to switch. Now I use Safari when I care about saving battery life, and Vivaldi for everything else. Vivaldi is basically Chrome without the annoying Google bits. I still use Firefox occasionally, but mostly for testing.
• gkoberger 9y ago
  I agree with this blog post. But I don't think Mozilla lost. I worked for Mozilla for a few years, after seeing John Lily (CEO at the time) speak. It was right after Chrome started getting popular, and a smug person in the crowd asked him about how he felt about Chrome. John's response was awesome. "This is the web that we wanted. We exist not because we want everyone to use Firefox, but because we wanted people to have a choice" Firefox was a response to a world of "best viewed in IE" badges, and it changed the browser landscape. Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox. There's a lot of options out there, and they're all standards compliment. And that's thanks to Mozilla. So, in my mind, Mozilla won. It's a non-profit, and it forced us into an open web. We got the world they wanted. Maybe the world is a bit Chrome-heavy currently, but at least it's a standards compliment world. I hope Mozilla sees that. I hope they take credit, and move on to what's next: privacy and net neutrality. Our privacy is under attack, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that can (and would want to) help. I know, I know. Nobody cares about privacy. Nobody cared about web standards, either, but Mozilla bundled it into an attractive package and it worked. It's time for Mozilla to declare victory, high five the Chrome team, and move on to the next big challenge. We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song. ----- EDIT: Hey cbeard - My email is in my profile; I'd love to talk.
  • MBCook 9y ago
    The problem is we're moving extremely fast to a chrome only world. If it wasn't for corporate sites and the success of the iPhone chrome would probably be dominating the way IE used to. I definitely run into sites that only work on chrome and not in any other browser. In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to. Unlike IE and FireFox and Safari it comes from a company that is notorious for wanting to know everything about you. The time to celebrate victory was a few years ago. Now it's starting to look like the new boss is the same as the old, maybe worse.
    • zacmps 9y ago
      Chrome is improving on the resource usage front. It's far from perfect but it's getting better. As for privacy you could use the open source chromium, there's a fork somewhere which has all the Google removed.
• mnm1 9y ago
  "All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users." Faster browsing and less memory use is the only reason I've ever heard anyone switch browsers outside of privacy issues. If Servo is significantly faster and uses less memory, and if it can keep that up for years like Chrome did, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this flipping in a few years. Thankfully, he's no longer CTO at Mozilla so this actually has a chance of happening.
  • acdha 9y ago
    The key word is “slightly”. Beating IE6 after years of neglect was possible; going against a very good team which isn't slowing down is much harder.
    • andreasgal 9y ago
      Google definitely not standing still. I hope that doesn't change despite the near-monopoly status.
      • acdha 9y ago
        Agreed on both points
  • spodek 9y ago
    > Faster browsing and less memory use is the only reason I've ever heard anyone switch browsers outside of privacy issues. Stability. License, at least for me. I would only use a free as in speech browser. Add-ons and success blocking ads.
  • grogenaut 9y ago
    Most of my non-tech friends really don't know what ram is or how to check the usage. And they're not the type to actually do repeatable measurement to know if it's actually faster or not. Tech users are I'd be 10% of the total browser user base these days. So I doubt your statement having any sway on these numbers.
• tedajax 9y ago
  I finally switched to Chrome from Firefox just last week. I just couldn't take the hang ups anymore. Here I am with an absurdly beefy game development workstation and it's hitching switching tabs and scrolling pages. Absolutely unacceptable. Moving everything over to Chrome took about 2 minutes since the importer pretty much grabbed everything and it wasn't hard to get the extensions I needed. The only thing that annoys me is that clicking on links/bookmarks while on a pinned tab opens the link/bookmark on the pinned tab and not in a new tab like Firefox does. Makes pinned tabs less permanent and I have to remember to middle click these things but it's a minor inconvenience compared to just how slow and unresponsive Firefox had gotten.
  • andreasgal 9y ago
    I had the opposite experience. I used Firefox the last 48 hours on Mac and it works really well. I can't find a reason to not use it, but also no reason to use it. Commodity products. I think this is the choice most users face. Add a lot of marketing dollars and defaults on Android and you can explain Chrome's growth curve.
• jonnycomputer 9y ago
  Probably counts all those chromebook users. Can't install Firefox on a Chromebook. Or at least, not easily.
• cies 9y ago
  So Mozilla lost Firefox OS. And their browser share is smaller then Chrome, and then it was, but still top tier and winning from M$. I'm much less pessimistic. Besides a cross platform and extensible browser we see also the following coming out of Mozilla: * Rust, a modern low-level programming language with cutting edge "safety" build in at zero runt time cost, luring many system programmers. * Servo, tomorrow browser, from scratch, in Rust. * Thunderbird, x-platform desktop email client (interesting for those not trusting the cloud enough). * MDN, everything MSDN and w3school wish they could be. :) A lot with revolve around privacy and safety in the future, a space that Mozilla is very well positioned to florish in. Chrome is a good product. But I prefer Firefox. And seeing what is becoming of Servo I will soon start using that. Form me Firefox has won, and is not at all losing. I dont need the "most popular" browser, I need the most secure one. And when I see what programming languages Google came up with... (Seriously? Is Go the best money can buy?) Then I think Rust shows single handedly that Mozilla beats Google in that arena as well.
  • bobajeff 9y ago
    If they run out of funding many of those great things they are working on won't get the resources they need. The amount of funding they get is in direct correlation to how much market share they have in Firefox at the time they negotiate a search deal with one of the big search sites.
  • StevePerkins 9y ago
    I understand that people who like rust REALLY like Rust, but you do realize that your examples of a purpose for existence consist of: 1. A programming language, that hasn't yet shown "escape velocity" to go beyond D and other would-be-C++-successors in traction. 2. The only major application of that language... a pre-alpha browser engine, which may or may not eventually replace the engine in a browser that is seriously declining in market share with no reversal in sight. 3. A desktop email client, from which Mozilla has repeatedly made clear their intentions to divest and move on. 4. A JavaScript and HTML reference manual. Mozilla is an organization with over $400 million in annual revenue. Where that money is going baffles me.
    • 9y ago
• reedlaw 9y ago
  I've stuck with Firefox for years because I value open source and open web but today I finally switched to Chrome. It feels like I have a new computer. Firefox constantly pegs my CPU. It seems to have gradually gotten slower.
• systematical 9y ago
  I only jumped ship to Chrome when FireFox was having performance issues way back in the day. Since then FireFox improved its performance to be on par with Chrome, but Chrome isn't broke so I'm not switching back. FireFox probably had the greatest contribution ever to modern browsing though giving us developer tools, plugins, and tabbed browsing.
• hl5 9y ago
  how awesome would it be if mozilla forked chromium?
  • hl5 9y ago
    i guess it's more awesome to have a bunch of talented developers working on a dead product :/
• aashishkoirala 9y ago
  I like Chrome, it is my go-to browser as a user. As a developer, though, I hate how it spits on the face of standards, like not expiring cookies when the HTTP response says, and instead turning them into session cookies instead.
  • wfh 9y ago
    file a bug - https://new.crbug.com https://new.crbug.com or is there an existing one?
• 101km 9y ago
  Ideological leanings aside as an end user I went back and forth between Chrome and Firefox several times. In fact I would visit https://arewee10syet.com https://arewee10syet.com every couple of months and sigh for years wanting to switch back. On Firefox I used to have hundreds of tabs open and no visible ui chrome most of the time, just vimperator/pentadactyl and usually hidden treestyle tabs. Along with a rotating collection of adblockers and privacy extensions. These days? I just use Safari on a Macbook with Content Blockers (https://webkit.org/blog/3476/content-blockers-first-look/ https://webkit.org/blog/3476/content-blockers-first-look/). My battery lasts double digit hours and everything is always snappy. Readability and integrated 'read it offline later' mode is a cherry on top. Ultimately I think we forget that with Flash being truly dead and buried on pages with no junky javascript trackers even a NeXT computer, far less powerful than your phone, should be enough. And all the browsers are now able to limit the damage a heavy/crappy page (like gmail) does to its own tab. tldr; And Jesus wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.
  • baby 9y ago
    > Readability and integrated 'read it offline later' mode is a cherry on top Pocket was a good move, but it is still not fully integrated to Firefox like the 'read it offline later' mode of Safari. I really wish it was.
• Houshalter 9y ago
  Maybe they could compete on having a better extension system. Chrome extensions are absolutely awful. Every single one I've ever used has had some kind of serious bug, often deal breaking. I could easily fix many of them, but there is no method to do so. Let alone fork it or submit a pull request. You can't even load your own extensions, and you have to pay money to submit them to the web store. A scary percentage of them are sold to malware developers, and they silently update in the background. They remove anything that violates the terms of service of a website. Like popular extensions that modified youtube or reddit in ways the sites didn't approve of. The only reason they don't remove adblock is because it has so much momentum and there would be an uproar if they did. But they do pay to have their ads whitelisted on the most popular adblock extension, and see to it that it's the top result. They also try to be a minimalist browser and shove any functionality to extensions that can be shoved there. Since 99.999% of people never change the default settings on anything, they miss out. I wonder if a browser could be successful going the other way. Being "batteries included" and bundling it with lots of useful extensions and features.
  • digi_owl 9y ago
    Sadly Firefox is going the opposite way right now, because "security". But at the same time we have Vivaldi, a Chrome "fork", that seems to be gunning for just that. I swear there is a disease in the FOSS world these days, one carried by SJW busy bodies. Thing is that they are not in it to actually correct social ills, but personal aggrandizement. Thus what we get are shallow platitudes and economic sinkhole projects.
  • enra 9y ago
    You can easily your own extensions in Chrome by clicking the "Load unpacked extension" which can be just a folder from your computer that has a manifest.json file in. You can also easily inspect the extensions that you have installed with the chrome developer tools, ie. copy them and fix them if needed. If anything, I'd say my experience between the Chrome and Firefox extensions are completely opposite to yours. For one, Firefox has some 1-3 different extension types/apis, so you have first understand which one to use from their convoluted developer docs. Secondly, when you submit the extension, some volunteer "reviews" it whenever they have the time, which can take days to weeks. Once I got feedback and got rejected because there was a typo in the extension. With Chrome it's very easy to create an extension, you basically only need that manifest.json file and then you can submit it to the store and it's online less than an hour.
• wodenokoto 9y ago
  > We all drive cars now. Some people still use horses, and there is value to horses, but technology has moved on when it comes to transportation. This rings untrue to me, because I cannot believe he wrote this on his smartphone. I get that desktop/laptop are no longer the main entry device to the connected world, but they are essential to the connected world in a way that horses are not important to the world of transportation.
• TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
  I think we're actually in a great spot right now. Safari is my main browser on macOS, since it doesn't cause my computer to chug as much when the tabs start to pile up. For development my primary browser is Chromium, because I prefer their dev tools. On mobile I use Firefox Mobile, since it lets me install uBlock Origin. On Linux and Windows I use Firefox, because it has the least invasive default settings out of all the big-name browsers. I'll admit I hold a rather strong resentment towards Internet Explorer. Aside from having made me waste countless hours dealing with its quirks, I also feel a bit better supporting browsers that are more open. I haven't heard a single person in real-life saying they use Edge as their main browser.
• skybrian 9y ago
  Focusing on market share will miss anything new, since it's not mainstream yet. Use your imagination. There's a pretty popular sort-of-fork of Chromium called Electron. People claim it's bloated though. Could Servo do better? Also, this looks interesting from a privacy standpoint: https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/
• digi_owl 9y ago
  Mozilla lost its way the day Firefox started chasing Chrome on look and feel rather than sticking to its guns and making the most standard compliant technical browser there is.
  • floatboth 9y ago
    That doesn't make sense, both Firefox and Chrome are working on being "the most standard compliant technical browser there is". Check browser scores on https://caniuse.com https://caniuse.com — Firefox and Chrome are very close, Safari is behind, Edge is way behind.
    • digi_owl 9y ago
      Thing is that Chrome has a history of exposing all manner of "experimental" stuff to the world, leading to situations where Firefox either have to be seen as a laggard or implement things that have yet to be formally defined. This then allows Chrome to de-facto define the standard.
• grizzles 9y ago
  Judged on it's own mission statement, Mozilla has failed as an organization, and that's been clear for at least the last 5 years. The two biggest internet trends over the last decade have been app store distribution of mobile apps and the social graph. Mozilla has did little, maybe nothing to make either of those open and accessible to all. This is due to an ongoing lack of vision and leadership for an organization that tries to do 1000 things and fails at doing the 1 or 2 important things. It's pretty safe to say that the nextgen decentralized internet will be built, but it won't be built by Mozilla. Instead, they will do probably do something silly like buy Brave. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • swiley 9y ago
    I'm pretty glad Mozilla avoided both of those. They where probably some of the most unpleasant fads of the past decade. It's nice to have a company that isn't pushing them as an alternative to those that are.
    • grizzles 9y ago
      They are not fads. Both are still growing strongly.
• 10165 9y ago
  "Mozilla's founding mission was to build the Web by building a browser." I have been using the Web since 1993. I always thought the Web had the definition given in its Wikipedia entry. Web servers and hyperlinks. Apparently some people believe "the Web" is actually a browser, or a small set of them. This is like suggesting a galaxy is actually a telescope, or a small set of "standards compliant" telescopes. Browser-centrism is truly myopic. What is relevant is the ever expanding practice of installing web servers into all sorts of devices, not simply racks of computers in server rooms and offsite data centers.
• kenshi 9y ago
  I started Firefox OS in 2011 because already back then I was convinced that desktops and browsers were dead. Not immediately–here we are 6 years later and both are still around–but both are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential going forward. ...snip... To stick with the transportation metaphor: Google makes the best horses in the world and they clearly won the horse race. I just don’t think that race matters much going forward. It certainly doesn't matter if what you are interested in is: catching whatever the next technology wave is. But the browser certainly still matters to all those Firefox users who switched to Chrome, and are using it every day. "Legacy" isn't seen as sexy in tech. It might not be exciting for someone who wants to explore the next frontier or create the next platform. But, legacy is important for users (customers). Legacy is your brand. It's your influence. The foothold that will help you set the direction of what happens next. It's what you bootstrap your play in the next tech wave upon. Legacy is yesterday's hard earned success ready to be leveraged as a head start for tomorrow. (It's just important that you remember to do the leveraging part, and not just sit pretty and self-satisfied with your legacy). Firefox's decline is abysmal and a failure of leadership. FirefoxOS was a terrible, terrible decision. How much influence does Mozilla really have on the direction of web if they have don't have influence on the desktop? Don't many features in mobile browsers start on the desktop browser first? I hope whoever is in charge of Firefox now is a true believer of the power and importance of the web browser, and the desktop that it's used on, by the most influential band of users you can wish to have: creators. Edits: formatting
  • bobajeff 9y ago
    The desktop couldn't save them either. Remember their biggest source of funding and promotions came from Google. With Chrome out Google had no reason to promote Firefox anymore. So now Firefox has to look for more partners but there is little sense in partnering with a browser vendor for anything outside of websites. Among those nothing is as lucrative as and ubiquitous as a search engine. Now a OS vendor could maybe get funded and promoted by a manufacturer or a phone service company.
• woranl 9y ago
  Firefox failed to innovate and alienate developers. Refusing to implement File System API is a perfect example! Mozilla can choose to be arrogant. Well.. guess what? We can also choose to move on without you. Broken apps make users to switch browsers. It's that simple. Mozilla can only blame itself for the vicious cycle.
  • kevingadd 9y ago
    It's not standard and wasn't a standard. Why is it 'arrogant' not to implement it? Incidentally, they did. About... a year ago or so?
    • woranl 9y ago
      Firefox's implementation is laughable at best. It doesn't support much of the local filesystem api. And that's just an example. Tons of other examples in bugzilla.
  • flukus 9y ago
    Good, a website doesn't need access to my file system. Stuff like that is why we need firefox and why SaaS companies shouldn't be making browsers.
    • woranl 9y ago
      It's sandboxed. I would love to see Firefox to succeed. That would be good for the web. But Firefox cannot succeed if Mozilla is unwilling to innovate. Stuff like this is why Firefox is falling behind. Stuff like this is what differentiated Chrome. Without Chrome and Google's push on the technical boundaries of the browser, many HTML5 features wouldn't exist. I, like many, don't want to stay in the web Stone Age.
      • Spivak 9y ago
        Look, at some point we either need to decide that the 'web' is just a VM bolted to a downloader or there need to be some limits on how it can interact with the host system.
• sengork 9y ago
  The single most effective thing I've done to speed up my web browsing is to install an advertisement blocker extension/plugin/addon. Based on this I wonder whether web browser benchmarks should be based on how fast they are after adverts are blocked, not only their rendering engine per se.
• theprop 9y ago
  I primarily use the Epic Privacy Browser (it is chromium based). No other browser except TOR comes close to them in terms of privacy.
  • iamiam 9y ago
    I also use Epic -- Epic is a great Chrome alternative...it takes a little getting used to, but it's fast & private.
  • nabaraz 9y ago
    So many mention of Epic browser in this thread. Is this some kind of marketing effort? How can a closed-source software be better in terms of privacy?
• jjawssd 9y ago
  I am eternally grateful for Firefox being a viable alternative which properly supports low level HTML5 <video> tag features with less crazy behavior than Chrome. Videos are not seekable in Chrome unless the server implements HTTP 206. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=66631 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=66631 This has been a bug since 2010. I simply cannot seek in arbitrary h264 videos without glitching and failure in any version of Chrome.
• deleted 9y ago
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• partycoder 9y ago
  Regardless of what the outcome was, I think we all owe kudos to Blake Ross, a guy that at age 16 became an intern at Netscape, and shortly later became the driving force behind Firebird, the browser that later was renamed to become Firefox, the browser that inspired a new generation of web browsers that would later kill IE's market share and set the Internet free. Also the unsung heroes behind KHTML, the HTML layout engine from the Konqueror web browser (part of KDE), the ancestor of Webkit and Blink, the technologies that power modern web browsers such as as Chrome, Safari and Opera.
• yamaneko 9y ago
  I switched to Firefox because Chrome was keeping my fan always busy (high CPU usage and temperature) and using too much RAM. It was always around 5GB for my common usage. In Firefox it's always around 2.7GB. There were some privacy concerns too. Having said that, Firefox also has its issues. It is so unresponsive sometimes, giving long hangs. That's the main problem to me. There are others, like it being slower in some pages and some of its extensions UI give me a pre-web 2.0 vibe or look abandoned. (But its Mendeley importer extension is way better than Chrome's).
  • Markoff 9y ago
    funnily i have exactly opposite experience on 2gb desktop, Chrome is responsive and works work many tabs, Firefox just freeze and freeze and freeze and i don't have time to wait all the time to switch tab
  • floatboth 9y ago
    Check about:support. Are Multiprocess Windows and Asynchronous Pan/Zoom enabled?
    • yamaneko 9y ago
      They are disabled: Multiprocess Windows 0/1 (Disabled by add-ons) Asynchronous Pan/Zoom none How can I enable them? EDIT: I tried toggling browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true in about:config, but it still gives the same message. Looking into it now. EDIT2: I did it! Multiprocess Windows 1/1 (Enabled by user) Asynchronous Pan/Zoom wheel input enabled Besides disabling all my extensions (except for uBlock) I had to disable Ubuntu Modifications. EDIT3: Wow!! This is so much better! I didn't know project Electrolysis was already out. Thanks!
• wnevets 9y ago
  It's simple UI and it's fastest start up time are the main reasons why I use chrome most of the time.
• deleted 9y ago
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• JoshMnem 9y ago
  Firefox took marketshare from IE when that was impossible. It could do it again with Chrome, if things change a bit. Some problems with Mozilla are that they don't do community management well any more. In the old days, there were amazing grassroots-driven projects like spreadfirefox.com. It is not like that any more. Grassroots supporters have trouble participating, even if they try. For example, I tried to create a Firefox programmers' meetup group in Berkeley, and even though some community people from Mozilla joined the group, no one from Mozilla would reply to my inquiries. (I still would like to restart that idea, but I don't have time to chase them down. We have 4,000 members in our various meetup groups at the moment.) Another problem is that they are doing things that make their most-dedicated core users lose interest. They should have realized the incredible enthusiasm for Firefox that plugins like Pentadactyl were creating. They're killing off the API that it depends on. Instead, they should have funded the development of Pentadactyl and made it a reason why tech-savvy users choose Firefox. Tech-savvy users drive adoption, but they have abandoned many of their tech-savvy supporters. There is still hope for Firefox if they are able to get the messages about privacy across. Chrome is slower to use out of the box, partially because of the auto-completion algorithm that tends to send people to Google Search to click on ads before reaching their destination. The older Firefox search box didn't waste users' time like that. (Recently it changed so that it shows titles rather than URLs, which is also slow, because there is an extra security risk of going to phishing sites, if you don't stop to look at the URLs.) Also, Firefox is the only mobile browser that allows add-ons, so that's another benefit that they should be promoting.
  • sowbug 9y ago
    Tech-savvy users don't drive adoption. They provide insight on product direction to help a nascent company with an immature tech product cross the chasm to mainstream usage, saving it from the usual fate of foundering aimlessly until it runs out of funds. These two suggestions -- Mozilla getting involved in meetups and not deprecating an API allowing vim navigation in the browser -- would take Mozilla even farther from relevance, assuming any nonzero opportunity cost to those actions.
    • JoshMnem 9y ago
• EdSharkey 9y ago
  The discussion here got me thinking about my own sluggish Firefox vs. Chrome experiences. I took a look at my extensions config panel in Firefox 53.0.3, and wondered if there was a way to tell which of my myriad of addons (most of which I don't use regularly) might be blocking electrolysis from turning on. Well, there's an addon for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/?src=api https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat... If you install it, it will mark on the panel which of your extensions are not using the new plugin API, and it will tell you at the top of the panel if Multiprocess Firefox is enabled. I got mine enabled by cleaning house. I'm curious to see how well it behaves under load now!
  • floatboth 9y ago
    Just use Nightly. It disables the incompatible addons and marks all (even e10s compatible) legacy addons with a big "LEGACY" mark. Also use about:support to see if e10s and async pan/zoom are enabled.
• yladiz 9y ago
  I don't have the perspective of a Mozilla CTO, but I feel like it's just history repeating itself. 15ish years ago, IE had "won", but eventually Firefox had pushed for better web standards with extensions, and then Chrome doing the same thing, but at the time, significantly faster and more secure than other browsers. But trends always change, and I'm sure in a few years (maybe a short few, maybe a long few) we will have a browser that will "win" over Chrome. The major advantage that Chrome has currently is that it's pushed heavily by Google, but that is also fickle, as evident by older search engines that went away like Yahoo, Ask Jeeves. I know a lot of people that won't use Chrome because it sucks on a laptop. The major benefit now is that we have all major browsers targeting standards compliance, unlike when IE was biggest. Besides, why is it a competition? It's not a zero sum game to see who is the biggest, best browser.
• digitalshankar 9y ago
  If there's anything i can trust in the web it's none other than Mozilla Firefox. Google Chrome is not Open Source and your privacy is not guaranteed, you don't know what's happening under the hood. Please wait for the Servo project to complete, then you'll know who won. Mozilla Firefox is not just a browser, it's the community of freedom, it's what I have grown up with. Finally Firefox with Ublock Origin is just enough to enjoy the Web. #MozillaFirefoxMasterRace
  • jkoll 9y ago
    What about all the FOSS Chromium forks?
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• f4rker 9y ago
  Google has integration. My CC info, address, passwords - all stored in the google cloud. I trust google. I dont trust Mozilla or FF with the same info. Mozilla is a browser company - and not that good of one. Mz is trying to be PC, trendy hip internet human rights hipster bullshit. I dont care about any of this from my browser company Google makes products that work well. i made an addon for chrome and FF. submitting and updating to google is worlds easier and faster. extensions updates go live in 30min or so. i think my FF addon update will be finally approved in 2 weeks or so.
• notsohuman 9y ago
  I am curious are browsers like brave, Vivaldi etc... that depend on chrome being classified as chrome??.
• zebraflask 9y ago
  "low market share numbers further accelerate the decline because Web authors don’t test for browsers with a small market share" Very true. There is absolutely no point in spending dev hours on a browser that might net you . . . I don't know . . . a fraction of a percent of whatever audience or target you're after? I had to do that before, it makes the developers upset and their managers even more upset.
• employee8000 9y ago
  I use Firefox and chrome regularly. Firefox is worse by an order of magnitude but I still use it. The main issues for me are any type of video is terrible on FF vs chrome. It also feels much much slower. But I trust it a bit more than I do chrome. I don't feel like they are storing all my data like Chrome does. Maybe that's the angle they should be pursuing.
• shmerl 9y ago
  Chrome can't properly compete privacy wise, same as Google in general can't. Privacy will be an issue, and increasingly so. Personally, I never understood Chrome hype, though I admit, that Mozilla's focus on FirefoxOS was distracting, and slowed down their desktop progress. It's good they are back on track now.
  • a2decrow 9y ago
    > Privacy will be an issue, and increasingly so. Do you really believe that? The way I see it, most people just don't care. At all. Else they wouldn't sell their souls to private companies (e.g. Facebook and Google) without a second thought and we'd see more outrage against government surveillance that's being pushed in nearly every country all over the world. Firefox is unlikely to gain much of a market share with only privacy-focused changes. People care about ease of use and especially performance. FF lost a lot of market share due to its horrible performance, compared to Chrome.
    • shmerl 9y ago
      I think more people care about it than you think, when their attention is brought to the issue. Mozilla should keep that in mind, and make it part of their marketing efforts.
      • a2decrow 9y ago
        Every time I try to educate friends or family about it, I get the tinfoil look and they call me paranoid. Same with strangers when the topic comes up. The most common (pretty much only) answers I get are that I'm nuts or that they don't care. And this is in Germany, a country where data protection laws and privacy are usually valued and cared about. But recent development over the last few years has shown that it's really just a small subset of the population that cares.
• hsivonen 9y ago
  I think the general sentiment that things that aren’t on a huge growth curve aren’t relevant or worth doing is very unhealthy–especially for the purpose of drawing conclusions about what Mozilla should do. What should the conclusion have been from growth graphs back when IE was growing? Everyone else just give up? The growth of phones doesn’t make desktop irrelevant. Phones can’t replace the desktop paradigm for many tasks, so desktops will stick around. When they stick around, things are better if desktop browsers stay in good health. As for mobile, people do browse the Web a lot of mobile. Maybe the numbers for Facebook and Twitter apps are even greater in terms of minutes of use, but that doesn’t make the Web on mobile irrelevant or not worth caring about. Whether on mobile or desktop, we’d all be worse off if the Web becomes less healthy due to neglect arising from being thought as not growing enough to be cool or being left to only to operating-system-bundled browsers. (The low switching cost of browsers due to not having to switch devices keeps the browser space competitive even if also tough for Mozilla when Mozilla doesn’t have an OS as an anchor.) Sure, non-Web things (IoT and other) will exist and individual people may be a bit tired of doing Web and go do those other things. That doesn’t mean that the Web isn’t worth caring about anymore or that it doesn’t continue to be important for the health of the Web for Mozilla to be there with an independent engine–doing what Mozilla has always done without pivots to new shiny. When individuals grow tired of Mozilla or the Web, going to do some other thing elsewhere for a change is cool, but I think spreading defeatism about what those of us who stay do is not cool.
• deleted 9y ago
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• staticelf 9y ago
  The issue I have with Mozilla is that they seem too technical focused. They do stuff like Rust which must be an incredible investment of time. If you're going to make a new browser engine from scratch, why not use a language that already exist? I understand there's reasons but stuff like that is just wtf imho. Also, they've done stuff like Firefox Hello, that login thing etc. Many were good ideas but they should really focus on their core product and making it solid as a fucking rock. I still feel that Chromes developer tools are better, that Chrome is snappier and doesn't crash as often etc. etc. I use Chrome at my work computer but Firefox at home because Chrome developer tools is still better when it comes to stuff like debugging, viewing json and profiling. I mean why is that not more awesome in Firefox?
  • pcwalton 9y ago
    > The issue I have with Mozilla is that they seem too technical focused. All of your complaints are technical. > They do stuff like Rust which must be an incredible investment of time. Rust is a very small team. > If you're going to make a new browser engine from scratch, why not use a language that already exist? Because no language other than Rust offers good support for safe concurrency and memory safety without performance compromises. > I understand there's reasons but stuff like that is just wtf imho. > Many were good ideas but they should really focus on their core product and making it solid as a fucking rock. The desire to do that is the reason for Rust.
    • staticelf 9y ago
      Okay, well I hope the best for the new engine. Can't wait untill it's actually deployed live into normal Firefox builds. I love Firefox and I really like Mozilla (even though they like everyone else does stupid stuff sometimes, like fireing Brendan). I hope Firefox will take back some market share from Chrome.
• notsohuman 9y ago
  How was this data collected?? could you provide the source of the data??
• Grue3 9y ago
  It sure did. We could've had at least one open-source, configurable, programmable browser for power users, now Firefox is removing XUL, and power users don't have a choice of a browser anymore. And for what purpose? Mozilla's management should be listed in the dictionary as the definition of "incompetency".
• iuguy 9y ago
  Chrome didn't win. Android did. The proliferation of Android devices with Chrome is where that popularity is coming from. Ironically, had FirefoxOS been a success, we'd probably see a very different graph. Safari shows up for the same reason, just a different platform. As for a turnaround, I'm using Firefox to type this. It's easy to think desktops don't matter in a world of tablets, phones and mobile devices but they do. Firefox is about choice and an open web. Chrome is about user tracking and advertising. As long as Firefox exists, there will be people using it.
  • Markoff 9y ago
    Firefox on Android is just slowest browser you can try, simple as that, everything else is excuse. tried many browsers recently and without hesitation Firefox is slowest out of all and that's not some completely budget device but SD808 with 3GB RAM, can't imagine how it's running on some budget phone
• galfarragem 9y ago
  As an early adopter, I felt that Chrome had won since the beggining and they had only 1% market share. The speed difference was evident and it would be a matter of time until the market acknowledge it.
• peter_retief 9y ago
  Chrome are on top at the moment, like Internet Explorer was, Mozilla is still a powerful force, used by many developers. I am using FireFox ESR at the moment and its great
• doktrin 9y ago
  I can credit this post and resultant discussion from pushing me to try FF again, and I have to say I'm happy with what I'm seeing. Chrome has been disappointing for a while now from both a privacy and performance standpoint - I simply kept using it out of habit.
• baby 9y ago
  Be realistic, the browser war has ended a long time ago. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, (Edge?)... are all good browsers now. It's wonderful that we have choice. I personally wouldn't switch to chrome just because it doesn't have tabs on the side (tree style tabs on firefox). This headline doesn't make much sense for many of us.
  • milesrout 9y ago
    Except Safari, which sucks, and Opera, which is irrelevant, and IE, which still matters, and Edge, which is behind. Firefox and Chrome are both good.
• hacalox 9y ago
  I will not leave Firefox as long as I can keep working with it. I don't find any substantial difference when I compare it with Chrome, so for me is just a choice based on the Company behinds the product. Mozilla values and mine are aligned and I would like people to think more about the companies and less about the product. At the end that's what matter. What kind of Internet are you willing to see in 10 years? It can be very different depending on your choices.
  • ShinTakuya 9y ago
    I much prefer Chrome's dev tools to Firefox's. Besides that I'm with you, I use Firefox for everything else.
  • granitosaurus 9y ago
    well said, unfortunately majority of the userbase just don't care about this enough to vote with their choice.
  • vopi 9y ago
    Unfortunately I wish I had that experience. Firefox crashed more than chrome and felt slower even with the multiprocessed​ thing. This happened on both windows 10 and x/ubuntu
• ultim8k 9y ago
  It's not only chrome. Actually Google, FB and Amazon have eaten the whole IT market. There is no space left to innovate or do anything else. They will copy the shit out of you in no time. IT is a lost ground.
  • drdaeman 9y ago
    There is some space, but it's highly unlikely it'll be explored by anyone with enough weight to make an impact. I'd really want to see a browser that's a collection of very loosely coupled independent cooperating programs. There are Uzbl and Surf, but they're only modular systems around a big monolithic core. That would mean the real end of the browser war, because there won't be any browsers. There will be rendering engines, there will be UI layers, cookie storages and databases, data synchronization programs, etc - and compilations of those (because while everyone wants to have flexibility options and ability to customize and control, no one normally wants to build system piece by piece). I doubt something like this would happen.
• a_imho 9y ago
  Imo all rendering engines are fine as they are, content and 3rd party blocking is what makes web browsing fast. My 2 cents is if you want to offer the best web experience today you need to add in blazing fast native content blocking and make it default (without shady whitelists). Don't underestimate the power of defaults and network effect. Then let's see how long does it take from start to watch a youtube video. Will beat default Chrome experience anywhere between 20-90 secs. Let's see whether Google can match that.
• Markoff 9y ago
  the reason went Firefox lost it's because it's extremely see and unstable i try it usually once a year to confirm there is no progress and experienced this few weeks ago, loading and rendering pages it's slowest compared to Chrome, CAF browsers or Brave, heck Firefox doesn't even have pull down to refresh which is showstopper, add-ons are nice but most of the users don't care and i can block ads just with adaway as for desktop, again unable to handle more tabs properly, freezing and unresponsive while no such problems on Chrome i dunno maybe Chrome devs test their browser on actual real life desktops and mobiles, while Firefox devs think everyone has flagship and computer with 16gb of RAM? TLDR: Firefox is significantly (not slightly as article honey talk) slower on mobile and freezing and unresponsive on desktop compared to Chrome and real users notice this, they don't care about add-ons
• romanovcode 9y ago
  No king rules forever
• keybits 9y ago
  The only thing preventing me from switching from Chrome to Firefox on the desktop is poor support for multiple profiles. Chrome's 'People' feature is essential for my workflow. (I know you can launch multiple Firefox profiles, but it's awkward at best.) On Android, Firefox is my favorite browser. So much better than Chrome. Thank you Mozilla :-) Now please make using multiple profiles on the desktop as easy as Chrome does.
  • drdaeman 9y ago
    Check out container tabs. Either built-in (activate with `privacy.userContext.enabled` and `privacy.userContext.ui.enabled` in about:config) or if you don't mind some telemetry (non-sensitive stuff but YMMV) and random updates you can use their Test Pilot experiment https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers (or you can just grab yourself an XPI and update on manual basis).
    • keybits 9y ago
      Thank you, container tabs look great :-)
• z3t4 9y ago
  Web developers! Try opening your site in a text based web browser (like w3m) ...
• tbihl 9y ago
  Clearly my experience is not normal, but chrome is on its way out in my life. On Android, I've been pushed to Firefox for ad blocking, while on Windows it's such a battery hog that I've switched to edge almost completely (they finally added ad blocking.)
• TekMol 9y ago
  Chrome won because Mozilla forgot what made FireFox successful in the first place. That it was a slim alternative to the bloated Netscape. Everytime FireFox got some new feature I checked if they still don't support GPU accelerated Video on my Linux machine. No. They don't. They don't to this day. This is how I imagine FireFox Devs: https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/ Chrome is simple and fast. And that's why it won. I wonder when the Google devs will forget about it and some other browser will take over by focussing on making core features work fast and flawless.
• shermozle 9y ago
  Statcounter? Really?
  • IshKebab 9y ago
    What's wrong with statcounter?
• yy77 9y ago
  Chrome is good, but not that better than firefox to lead to a chrome only world. Just like in the past, whenever you open a windows PC, you see IE on it, so IE ruled. Now whenever you open google to search something, you see suggestion to ask you to install chrome. However, nowhere on internet will suggest you to install firefox. That is a huge difference.
• SeanDav 9y ago
  > "If even Eric–who heads Mozilla’s marketing team–uses Chrome every day as he mentioned in the first sentence, ..." Right there is why Chrome is eating Firefox's lunch.
• threepipeproblm 9y ago
  When you get a new long distance plan, do you worry if the plan you picked isn't the most popular plan? Do you decide it means you got a 'loser plan'? Me neither. To me, this article was written from the perspective of a zero sum game mentality. The author clearly wanted to be #1. Does this mean Firefox is failing? I think the evidence is lacking there. And all the guy really offers as evidence is, "From these graphs it’s pretty clear that Firefox is not going anywhere." But Firefox market share was going up at some point... by the same standard, why wasn't that valuable evidence that Firefox would take over everything? As an explanation, it's devoid. The article would more sense if it were critical to Mozilla's mission that Firefox have a dominant market share. But 18% of desktop installs is far more than sufficient to influence standards (recent studies show that as little of 3-5% of a market can basically set standards). IMO Mozilla should just focus on a browser that 10-30% of users -- especially 'influencers' and those who care about digital freedom -- love, and consider that success.
  • Paul-ish 9y ago
    One issue is that building a browser take engineers, and that takes a lot of money. Mozilla makes its money from search partnerships; they make money every time someone uses default search. If less people are using Firefox, less people are using default search, which in turn means less revenue. This means fewer engineers. If they don't have enough engineers to maintain Firefox, the browser falls apart. I am skeptical that Firefox could be maintained by donations or volunteers when its competitors are backed by large companies. A response is that even if Firefox's share falls, that the absolute number of Firefox users continues to rise. ie that the total market is growing. In this case Mozilla would still be generating the revenue it needs to keep going. The author brushes this possibility off in the beginning of the article, saying that browsers are a thing of the past.
• timwaagh 9y ago
  i really like ff. more specifically i like vimperator. i like to use that. since i discovered it, i have not used chrome very much. performance is great already. but firefox would be even better if it 'loaned' these two features from chrome. 1. built-in flash player. i do not like that i have to install chrome just so that i can view flash videos on ubuntu. html5 is not everywhere yet. 2. better debugging. although i like the ui, the debugger suffers from a real flaw. today i was evaluating the value of some piece of code in the debugger. i expected it to be 1. it reported a 0 because the code had not executed yet. chrome does this better and does not report anything. then after the code has executed it gives the correct value, 1. these two issues make firefox hard to recommend to 1. users and 2. developers, unless they are vim addicts. oh yeah: perhaps firefox should do something to support vimperator. perhaps incorporate it into firefox. support it. vim users are a small group but they are the people who will be advising others on technical things.
• sriku 9y ago
  While this goes on, Safari is still more complete on functionality that matters to some folks like me. Here is a chrome bug that's unaddressed for over a year, but works perfectly on Safari - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=591346 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=591346
• jokoon 9y ago
  A better question is, apart from memory usage, which of the two had more security issues. That would matter to me...
• dmh2000 9y ago
  I understand why Google gives Chrome for free, to bring people into their sphere of influence. But what does Mozilla get for giving out Firefox? Is it monetized somehow? Or is it just to win an imaginary distinction.
  • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    One of the ways Firefox makes money is the default search provider. Google gave Firefox a billion dollars at one point to keep Google as the default search. More recently, when Firefox switched it's default to Yahoo in the U.S., it would be because Yahoo outbid Google. The defaults are set by country, in many places it still defaults to Google, and I think it may default to other search engines in some countries too.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• jrs95 9y ago
  Despite all of this, I refuse to use Chrome on anything other than my desktop because it's a battery killer. Safari/Edge have a strong advantage here. I pull out Chrome only when I need its dev tools, which isn't very often these days.
• stuaxo 9y ago
  I think as we see Servo components move over to Firefox it will become significantly faster once more, and things might start moving in the other direction.
• voidmain0001 9y ago
  I use SRWare Iron, a privacy aware derivative of Chrome. It's fast, supports the Chrome store, and claims to send less data to Google. In the end though, what does it matter if Google owns the browser? The browser could change to a non-Google product and they will still collect their data on everyone regardless.
• VectorLock 9y ago
  "democratizing the IoT with AI" thats buzzword bingo.
• VectorLock 9y ago
  "democratizing the IoT with AI" thats buzzword bingo.
• ryanmarsh 9y ago
  I'm not so worried about a near browser monoculture if Chrome is the dominant browser. With IE Microsoft was originally driven to use the web to maintain Windows lock in, to control the platform. Google (I would assume) is driven by the desire to keep the web as desireable a development platform overall. Web usage means ad sales. Google has knocked it out of the park on this one. Chrome really is an incredible piece of software. IE by comparison has always been a piece of shit because it never mattered. Microsoft was leveraging it for OS adoption not a successful web. Today it's the web vs. apps and who knows what it will be in the future. This may sound crazy to some but the web will become a "truck" to some other technology's "car". Sort of how desktop office productivity apps are a monoculture and no one really cares.
• rufugee 9y ago
  I use Chrome begrudgingly at times because I value its security record. The fact that in 2017 you still can't do tabs in a vertical row down the side, or the fact that when too many tabs are open (you know, like...always), you can't tell what is actually open in that tab...these are the reasons I'll never feel great about a full switch. Firefox makes similar things easy. Oh, and I don't like that Google tracks everything I do while using it... If you're looking for a Chrome experience without the privacy concerns, take a look at http://iridiumbrowser.de http://iridiumbrowser.de. It's Chrome will (supposedly, I've not personally verified) all the Google tracking stripped out to the extent possible.
• apatters 9y ago
  Whatever war Mozilla dives into next, I really hope it's a winnable one, because free software can't afford to have execs who keep on making dumb mistakes. I was telling anyone who would listen from day one that both Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone were doomed to failure. All it took to make that prediction was a basic understanding of network effects and the history of client platform businesses. Jumping into the mobile market after Google and Apple had carved it up was insanity. As a consumer, changing the platform you use to access your apps and services carries a high switching cost--most likely you'll lose some of those apps and services and be forced to find replacements. Customers don't like to make that switch because it's hard, and it's exceedingly hard to think of cases where it's happened. Microsoft established its dominance over the APIs for building IBM PC software in the 1980s and is still the only game in town. It established its dominance over the formats for business documents in the 1990s and is still the only game in town (nearly - Google Docs is at around 20%). Facebook established its dominance over the social graph by the end of the aughts and, you guessed it, is still the only game in town. Now the web platform is an interesting case because Mozilla and Google really did succeed in wresting that away from Microsoft, but this situation was special for two reasons: one, because Microsoft stopped investing in its browser for more than half a decade (discouraged in part by government action), and two, because the web platform was largely standardized so most sites that worked with IE worked with other browsers. But it was still a tough fight. Perhaps winning that battle made Mozilla overconfident and contributed to their belief that they could lay a claim to the mobile platform as well. But it was almost impossible from the beginning because there were no users left to win. Once people have settled on a platform they just don't want to leave it. Mozilla did identify the necessary strategy: you have to go after people who aren't yet locked in, and it was their intent to do that in emerging markets. But there really weren't that many people left who were ready to own phones yet didn't, and this time they were facing incumbents who weren't asleep at the wheel. So, they lost, and underinvested in the desktop browser market in the process, and lost market share there too. When your management team makes bets it can't win and loses its core market in the process, it's just called bad management. Anyone who was involved in these decisions and is still at Mozilla should be sacked. I think Andreas is wrong about the desktop browser market being lost because in 2017 a website will still render just as well in Firefox as it does in Chrome. In 2022 that might not be the case. As an aside, with a $400M annual budget and a big win against Microsoft back in the day under their belt, I can see how hubris could have gotten the better of Mozilla. But what I cannot see is how Mark Shuttleworth went and did the same thing: fighting an unwinnable platform war against Apple and Google. He is a smart guy. The decision to do Ubuntu Phone boggled my mind from day one. If I were at Mozilla I would focus on the desktop browser and I would aim to win there. It's where they have the best shot. If they lose and Google comes to truly dominate the market then Google will use every dirty trick they can to lock it down, control it, and turn it into profits, they are a corporation. If they're going to try to fight some other battle, it should be for a blue ocean, preferably one they can leverage their existing position into.
• deckarep 9y ago
  Is it just me or do the chart lines all makeup Googles typical colors?
• joemi 9y ago
  Without starting any holy war arguments, why is Chrome adoption so high? On the Windows machines at work, I use both Firefox and Chrome all day long for customer support and light web development. They're both pretty interchangeable for me, neither really being any better than the other. Since such high adoption of Chrome means the general public are using it, not just the more tech-saavy people like us, I doubt the reason is any deep developer niceties. So I don't really know why...
  • notamy 9y ago
    Personal opinion: Chrom/ium is significantly snappier for me, on a R7 1800X / GTX 1080 / 64GB RAM box. I can't speak to why from a technical perspective, but that's simply what I've experienced. Firefox feels significantly slower, so I stay away from it unless I have absolutely no other choice.
    • nerflad 9y ago
      This is it. Firefox feels half as fast, or worse, for JS performance. For example, I have Chromium installed just to use sites like Zillow and Google Maps. I know these aren't the best examples, for a variety of reasons (Zillow is a mess and of course Google Maps performs better in Google's browser), but those are the main two in recent memory.
• kn8 9y ago
  Interesting that there's no mention of UC Browser in this thread. I actually only learned about this browser myself today, but seems to be gaining a lot of marketshare: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268254/market-share-of-internet-browsers-worldwide-since-2009/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/268254/market-share-of-i...
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• ksec 9y ago
  As a long time Firefox users, ( back to Netscape Netvigator Era ) I think what Firefox / Mozilla end up now were faults of their own, and personally I think it was their Management's problem. From My Memory: If we look back now from a grand Overview, IE5, IE6 and IE 7 wasn't that much difference. And these browsers were formed and used widely during the Internet explosive growth era. M$ didn't care about Web Standard, and they dont want to improve either. So in the very early stage of Web and Internet we have a Industry Giant stopping all the improvement to make the Web usable. And the Firefox "movement" started, not only is Firefox leaner, faster, better and there were a lot of love and organisation pushing for it, at least from a Web standard prospective, they ALL wanted something better then IE. From Macromedia, Adobe, Yahoo, etc. And Firefox wasnt that good of a browser, it was simply better then IE. So you could argue Mozilla were simply in the right place at the right time. And it didn't really succeed like Chrome had now, at its best Firefox only had 30% of the market share. We all wanted a faster browser. And Firefox didn't deliver, somewhere around 2008 Google show the world what a fast browser really meant. In reality we already knew how fast it was possible looking at ( old ) Opera. ( Opera failed to gain traction because it wasn't playing well with old IE code. ) Being Google they get a lot of press about it. And since Google being the Gateway to the Internet, we all knew if your site dont play well with Chrome, what the possible consequence were. If I remember correctly, 2008 was around Firefox 3 time. Lot of bloat were already added to Firefox. People wanted a Multi Process ( a la Chrome ) and a much faster browser. And e10s ( Electrolysis ) were born. What was suppose to be an Firefox 4 features nearly became Duke Nukem Forever, shipped sometimes this year, in Firefox 5x. Reading from the post and comment, Mozilla never intend Firefox to win the browser war and hence it didn't matter. Sometimes in 2010 or 2011, Firefox 4 was released, If I remember it was a long delay at the time when Chrome was rapidly improving. But Mozilla didn't give a damn, they thought offering an alternative was enough. And they were happy with their market share. They thought both Firefox and Chrome will both eat into IE's market. They thought they were safe on the Desktop, or they didn't care, or they really think they could do another Firefox in Mobile Market. So they decide to neglect the much needed attention of Desktop Firefox, and start chasing the Firefox OS for Mobile. Only this time, their oppenont is no longer Microsoft sitting still with IE, it was Apple who has a head start of nearly 10 years if you include the R&D spent before the release of first iPhone. And Google who has a head start of nearly 5 years with 100x the resources of Mozilla, and Google actually has an Engineering company culture compared to Microsoft. You could argue Mozilla were very noble to put up a fight ( if it was ever a fight at all ), or they were, silly. Not only did they choose the worst possible tools to develop on, ( They wanted EVERYTHING to be Javascript ) they also aimed at the WORST possible market segment, the low end $25- $50 dollar Smartphone. So they want to use an inefficient system + tools with the lowest end Smartphone. And they thought it was an good Idea. Fast forward a few years where they still could not accept defeat on their Mobile OS, no pivot, their Desktop Firefox was making a slow death. Browser Market share used to an Interesting Story, Ars used to run an article on it every month, and now no one cares. And Later Firefox OS was stopped, my guess were the new Desktop Firefox finance wasn't enough to continue it. Mozilla relent and supported H.264, which it didn't support for the longest time it could. The Never Firefox on iOS became an Abandoned Firefox Sync, discontinued, and reappeared on iOS again. So Mozilla, by putting it Values and Ideals first, even if it is against its own users' interest or UX, lost its user base, and with that also lose the influence it onces ( barely ) had on the Web.
• suckerberg 9y ago
  Google giving "free" money for mozilla org ? - you should know by now, google is not your friend. - why tesla do not give free development money to bmw ? Wakeup Mozilla, this sounds silly.
• rhabarba 9y ago
  Firefox 57 will be just another Chrome clone with a different rendering engine. Yeah, totally curious why Firefox loses market share...
• cx42net 9y ago
  I don't know if it's just me or others feel the same, but for me, the main reason why Chrome gained more market shares than the others was primarily because of their developer's toolkit embedded with Chrome. This helped a lot of developers to switch from Firefox (which was the best at the time) to Chrome and the result was that most websites were first Chrome compatble, then the others. Visitors quickly understood it, and made the switch too. I sincerely believe that the core reason is the developers, and if Firefox would focus more on that part, it would help get back many of it's old users. I don't say here that the dev toolkit on Firefox is garbage, absolutely not, but it feels clumsy, and a lot of elements are not evident to use and requires more thinking than Chrome. (this is MY opinion). I'm curious to know if you feel the same?