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> I don't know why people aren't using it. Like the article said: no one cares (more or less) about how good the browser is. If you have to go install a new br

> I don't know why people aren't using it. Like the article said: no one cares (more or less) about how good the browser is. If you have to go install a new browser, that's more work than just using the builtin one, and Google can force every Android phone to install Chrome out of the box. Also, though I use Firefox mobile out of a desire to not be a part of the Chrome problem (even though I know it's useless and I'm not actually helping by doing so), it's not fast, and it's not nice to use. It's painfully slow, crashes much more frequently than the other browsers, has confusing settings and constantly promotes garbage like Pocket (which you can disable if you dig through the confusing settings, but you can't actually uninstall it), etc. Until Mozilla gets the performance problems under control (and they're finally attempting to do this with Quantum et al.) they won't stop the bleeding. Unfortuantely, stopping the bleeding is the easy part: getting new users is the hard part and I tend to agree with the article that they don't have a way to do that on mobile (though I know nothing about marketing, so hopefully I'm wrong and just spouting nonsense here).

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akavel 8y ago
Uh, crashing??? I, like, never actually switched to Chrome in the first place (only using it sometimes for sites that "only work in IE^H^HChrome"), am using Firefox on multiple computers on Linux and Windows, and absolutely don't remember it crashing, for years at least! (edit: tweaked to clarify) edit 2: using Firefox on mobile (Android) too, for ~2 years now (i.e., since I have a smartphone), cannot recall a single crash over that timeframe either.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  Chrome or Firefox? I meant that Firefox mobile crashes more frequently than the others (in fact, specific sites make it crash consistently and have done for years; I could probably dig some up, but I gave up reporting them since none of the bugs have been fixed for years to my knowledge). For the most part it's still not a frequent occurrence I suppose, but it only has to happen once or twice on a popular website to make someone switch away.
  - akavel 8y ago
    Would be curious about the websites indeed!
    - dbrgn 8y ago
      Me too. I've been using Firefox for quite a while now (on a Fairphone 2, which is rather slow) and it performs fine and never crashes. I particularly love the possibility of opening multiple links at once in the background, and buffering them until I switch to the Firefox app.
CWuestefeld 8y ago
Until Mozilla gets the performance problems under control Performance is 1/2 of the reason that I prefer Mozilla. As one of those people that typically has 50-100 tabs open, the Firefox model for memory management is vastly superior. The other half of the reason is TreeStyleTab, again because I'm one of those zillion-tab users. Vertically-stacked tabs in a sidebar is the only way to manage that mountain of tabs - horizontal at the top just doesn't work. And Chrome doesn't have any extensions that support this.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  That's actually really interesting; I don't tend to have a ton of tabs, but coworkers always told me Firefox did a terrible job with 100+ tabs and that Chrome worked better. This always made sense to me because of the multi-process architecture of Chrome, but I've never seen it myself. So you're suggesting that Firefox actually performs better now? Maybe all my coworkers complaining about it are just repeating lore that no longer exists? Many tabs aside though, I still have a lot of performance problems with Firefox (although it's getting better; Quantum was fantastic, I was getting really fed up with Firefox for a while before that).
  - detaro 8y ago
    The Quantum change introduced multi-process to Firefox too. With a proper adblocker, hundreds of tabs are not a problem in my experience ( Chrome needs one too: in hundreds of random pages it's just too likely some crazy ads stress the system by playing video, constantly loading data, ...).
  - CWuestefeld 8y ago
    Chrome has separate processes for each tab, as well as for each extension. In my Windows install I right now have only 3 tabs open, but it's using 24 processes. And in my experience, those processes all carry a goodly amount of overhead: even a simple page seems to consume 10s of MB, as does even a simple extension with no UI. I just created a HelloWorld page with nothing but that text, and it alone is consuming one process with 22.9MB. In contrast, Firefox pools those processes. I currently have 56 tabs open, but only 6 Firefox processes running, consuming a total of 1.7GB. So for example, there is (AIUI) just one single process that's responsible for all rendering behavior. I don't have the same detailed information about how much resources that HelloWorld page is taking, but it feels more efficient to me.

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akavel 8y ago

Uh, crashing??? I, like, never actually switched to Chrome in the first place (only using it sometimes for sites that "only work in IE^H^HChrome"), am using Firefox on multiple computers on Linux and Windows, and absolutely don't remember it crashing, for years at least! (edit: tweaked to clarify) edit 2: using Firefox on mobile (Android) too, for ~2 years now (i.e., since I have a smartphone), cannot recall a single crash over that timeframe either.

SamWhited 8y ago
Chrome or Firefox? I meant that Firefox mobile crashes more frequently than the others (in fact, specific sites make it crash consistently and have done for years; I could probably dig some up, but I gave up reporting them since none of the bugs have been fixed for years to my knowledge). For the most part it's still not a frequent occurrence I suppose, but it only has to happen once or twice on a popular website to make someone switch away.
- akavel 8y ago
  Would be curious about the websites indeed!
  - dbrgn 8y ago
    Me too. I've been using Firefox for quite a while now (on a Fairphone 2, which is rather slow) and it performs fine and never crashes. I particularly love the possibility of opening multiple links at once in the background, and buffering them until I switch to the Firefox app.

CWuestefeld 8y ago

Until Mozilla gets the performance problems under control Performance is 1/2 of the reason that I prefer Mozilla. As one of those people that typically has 50-100 tabs open, the Firefox model for memory management is vastly superior. The other half of the reason is TreeStyleTab, again because I'm one of those zillion-tab users. Vertically-stacked tabs in a sidebar is the only way to manage that mountain of tabs - horizontal at the top just doesn't work. And Chrome doesn't have any extensions that support this.

SamWhited 8y ago
That's actually really interesting; I don't tend to have a ton of tabs, but coworkers always told me Firefox did a terrible job with 100+ tabs and that Chrome worked better. This always made sense to me because of the multi-process architecture of Chrome, but I've never seen it myself. So you're suggesting that Firefox actually performs better now? Maybe all my coworkers complaining about it are just repeating lore that no longer exists? Many tabs aside though, I still have a lot of performance problems with Firefox (although it's getting better; Quantum was fantastic, I was getting really fed up with Firefox for a while before that).
- detaro 8y ago
  The Quantum change introduced multi-process to Firefox too. With a proper adblocker, hundreds of tabs are not a problem in my experience ( Chrome needs one too: in hundreds of random pages it's just too likely some crazy ads stress the system by playing video, constantly loading data, ...).
- CWuestefeld 8y ago
  Chrome has separate processes for each tab, as well as for each extension. In my Windows install I right now have only 3 tabs open, but it's using 24 processes. And in my experience, those processes all carry a goodly amount of overhead: even a simple page seems to consume 10s of MB, as does even a simple extension with no UI. I just created a HelloWorld page with nothing but that text, and it alone is consuming one process with 22.9MB. In contrast, Firefox pools those processes. I currently have 56 tabs open, but only 6 Firefox processes running, consuming a total of 1.7GB. So for example, there is (AIUI) just one single process that's responsible for all rendering behavior. I don't have the same detailed information about how much resources that HelloWorld page is taking, but it feels more efficient to me.