7 ms·

> On the other hand, this denies me from using an actual Mozilla Firefox web browser on iOS. At the same time, most desktop computer users are able to use Fire

> On the other hand, this denies me from using an actual Mozilla Firefox web browser on iOS. At the same time, most desktop computer users are able to use Firefox and we can see how often they choose to do so.

jakub_g 4y ago
According to stats from GitHub, 12% of their traffic is from Firefox. 3x more than Safari. https://github.blog/2022-06-10-how-we-think-about-browsers/ https://github.blog/2022-06-10-how-we-think-about-browsers/ Of course this is just part of the story. In every country it's different. In some EU countries Firefox is up to 20%. In UK it's almost non-existent. Local markets shape the browser support. If a few major websites are too lazy to support a browser properly, users will leave, and then others can say "there are no users, so we can stop supporting!".
- techdragon 4y ago
  GitHub visitors are definitely not a representative sample of the web browsing public.
  - jenny91 4y ago
    Absolutely. Including the 2% from Python scripts :P
    - asdff 4y ago
      Those are probably running headless chrome though
  - threeseed 4y ago
- acdha 4y ago
  It's more traffic than Safari, but Firefox also runs on platforms like Windows or Linux and has disproportionately large mindshare among open source developers. Give how much higher that number was 10 years ago, I think this counts in support of the original point: Google has poured a ton of effort into promoting Chrome and “accidentally”[1] offering a worse experience for other browsers in their site and nobody other than Apple seems to have been successful at resisting this. 1. Whether this is an overt policy or simply choosing to skimp on testing, it's a choice.
  - nneonneo 4y ago
    Ran into a fun Google bug today: on the default macOS Safari install, Google Drive refused to download a folder once it had more than about a dozen files. It would go through the entire “zipping the files up” step and then mysteriously fail at the end, blaming cookies (?). The workarounds are to use Chrome, download files in tiny batches (much fun with 500 photos in the folder), or work out through trial and error that Google wanted the Safari tracking prevention disabled before it would download a file.
echelon 4y ago
> most desktop computer users are able to use Firefox Desktop-using software engineers can write software for desktop users in a ton of different ways. There's so much freedom and there exist multiple mechanisms and platforms to deploy your code. Desktop-using software engineers are not free to choose how to deploy software to mobile audiences. They've got to go through Apple to reach 50+% of the US market. Apple sets unreasonable rules. Unfortunately, Americans spend most of their time computing with mobile devices now. We've been forced into this situation. Both Apple and Google have made our industry worse and more locked down than Microsoft in the 90's and 00's, and they both deserve to the the target of smartphone and browser antitrust lawsuits.
- worik 4y ago
  Apple/iOS is not the only mobile platform.
  - afiori 4y ago
    A duopoly has 90% of the problems of a monopoly.
  - echelon 4y ago
    Apple and Google are 99% of the smartphone market. Together they set an unreasonable set of rules for mobile application development and distribution. They control search, advertising, and web technology, and there's little control individuals or other companies - even big ones - can exert against them. They both need to be stripped of their extraordinary powers so that user freedom and proper capitalistic competition can be restored. It's likely that any regulatory action taken against Apple and Google will force the companies to innovate more and become healthier themselves.
    - NonNefarious 4y ago
      I detest many policies of both those companies, but neither company was created by the government. Are they not the result of "capitalistic competition?" Motorola and Blackberry shat the bed year after year, allowing the current situation to develop. Even while being called out on their incompetence by customers. The companies who should be punished for anti-competitive behavior are the telecom companies. Not only do they restrict what devices can be activated on their networks, but they force Android users to wait months, years, or forever for them to dribble out a garbage-laden, proprietary version of the OS for every specific model of phone, one at a time. And then there's the idiotic locking of phones; it's not just that it should be illegal, but it's also backward: U.S. phone companies lock the phones of people who are UNDER CONTRACT. Talk about stupid. These people are contractually obligated to keep paying, so who cares if they take their phones to another network? That's a net win for the phone company, since they're paying for NO service!
vnkr 4y ago
I don't use FF on desktop partly because I don't use it on mobile and so can't sync open tabs, bookmarks, etc.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  You can use Firefox on both desktop and mobile and sync it all. At least if your mobile is Android or Linux. And you can use ublock origin, too!
  - briffle 4y ago
    you can sync your bookmarks and tabs with the IOS version of firefox too, but no extensions.
    - vnkr 4y ago
      Yes, but FF on iOS sucks precisely for the reason stated in the article.
    - antifa 4y ago
      I'm OK with extensions not syncing, I'm just thankful Firefox for Android exists and has extensions.
commoner 4y ago
A competitor having a minority market share is not a justification for suppressing competition. The suppression (Apple preventing Mozilla from implementing features on Firefox for iOS that are available on Firefox for non-iOS platforms) is part of the reason Firefox has an even lower market share on iOS.
afiori 4y ago
Also since Firefox for android removed one of its distinctive features a few years ago; once you could set it to ask how to open a link (send to another device, share, copy to clipboard, open normally) when an app tried to start a browser; now you can no longer do that. I use different browsers for different things so I want to chose how to open external app links. I would install a shim browser that does just that if I knew of one.
- commoner 4y ago
  URL Checker is the shim browser you're looking for: https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker It also integrates ClearURLs functionality (https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls) to let you remove tracking from links before sending it to the browser or app. This feature is optional.
- antifa 4y ago
  I'm not sure if it will do everything you need, but I've had great experiences with "Open Link With" on f-droid. https://f-droid.org/packages/com.tasomaniac.openwith.floss/ https://f-droid.org/packages/com.tasomaniac.openwith.floss/
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    "Open Link With" is indeed great for routing between different apps, but the problem remains that within Firefox you currently no longer have any choice of what to do with the link – it'll always open the full browser and open a new tab first. Previously, 1. you had the choice of activating the "tab queue" system for links opened with Firefox, i.e. the URLs would then only be saved in a list in the background instead of launching the full browser. 2. when sharing an URL with Firefox, you had the aforementioned choice of "actually open the link", "bookmark it", or "use Firefox Sync to send the URL to some other Firefox instance in your Sync account". The latter two choices happened in the background, so you didn't have to wait for the full browser UI+engine to start first, the page to load, etc. etc.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
Much more often than they choose to do so on iOS.

jakub_g 4y ago

According to stats from GitHub, 12% of their traffic is from Firefox. 3x more than Safari. https://github.blog/2022-06-10-how-we-think-about-browsers/ https://github.blog/2022-06-10-how-we-think-about-browsers/ Of course this is just part of the story. In every country it's different. In some EU countries Firefox is up to 20%. In UK it's almost non-existent. Local markets shape the browser support. If a few major websites are too lazy to support a browser properly, users will leave, and then others can say "there are no users, so we can stop supporting!".

techdragon 4y ago
GitHub visitors are definitely not a representative sample of the web browsing public.
- jenny91 4y ago
  Absolutely. Including the 2% from Python scripts :P
  - asdff 4y ago
    Those are probably running headless chrome though
- threeseed 4y ago
acdha 4y ago
It's more traffic than Safari, but Firefox also runs on platforms like Windows or Linux and has disproportionately large mindshare among open source developers. Give how much higher that number was 10 years ago, I think this counts in support of the original point: Google has poured a ton of effort into promoting Chrome and “accidentally”[1] offering a worse experience for other browsers in their site and nobody other than Apple seems to have been successful at resisting this. 1. Whether this is an overt policy or simply choosing to skimp on testing, it's a choice.
- nneonneo 4y ago
  Ran into a fun Google bug today: on the default macOS Safari install, Google Drive refused to download a folder once it had more than about a dozen files. It would go through the entire “zipping the files up” step and then mysteriously fail at the end, blaming cookies (?). The workarounds are to use Chrome, download files in tiny batches (much fun with 500 photos in the folder), or work out through trial and error that Google wanted the Safari tracking prevention disabled before it would download a file.

echelon 4y ago

> most desktop computer users are able to use Firefox Desktop-using software engineers can write software for desktop users in a ton of different ways. There's so much freedom and there exist multiple mechanisms and platforms to deploy your code. Desktop-using software engineers are not free to choose how to deploy software to mobile audiences. They've got to go through Apple to reach 50+% of the US market. Apple sets unreasonable rules. Unfortunately, Americans spend most of their time computing with mobile devices now. We've been forced into this situation. Both Apple and Google have made our industry worse and more locked down than Microsoft in the 90's and 00's, and they both deserve to the the target of smartphone and browser antitrust lawsuits.

worik 4y ago
Apple/iOS is not the only mobile platform.
- afiori 4y ago
  A duopoly has 90% of the problems of a monopoly.
- echelon 4y ago
  Apple and Google are 99% of the smartphone market. Together they set an unreasonable set of rules for mobile application development and distribution. They control search, advertising, and web technology, and there's little control individuals or other companies - even big ones - can exert against them. They both need to be stripped of their extraordinary powers so that user freedom and proper capitalistic competition can be restored. It's likely that any regulatory action taken against Apple and Google will force the companies to innovate more and become healthier themselves.
  - NonNefarious 4y ago
    I detest many policies of both those companies, but neither company was created by the government. Are they not the result of "capitalistic competition?" Motorola and Blackberry shat the bed year after year, allowing the current situation to develop. Even while being called out on their incompetence by customers. The companies who should be punished for anti-competitive behavior are the telecom companies. Not only do they restrict what devices can be activated on their networks, but they force Android users to wait months, years, or forever for them to dribble out a garbage-laden, proprietary version of the OS for every specific model of phone, one at a time. And then there's the idiotic locking of phones; it's not just that it should be illegal, but it's also backward: U.S. phone companies lock the phones of people who are UNDER CONTRACT. Talk about stupid. These people are contractually obligated to keep paying, so who cares if they take their phones to another network? That's a net win for the phone company, since they're paying for NO service!

vnkr 4y ago

I don't use FF on desktop partly because I don't use it on mobile and so can't sync open tabs, bookmarks, etc.

fartcannon 4y ago
You can use Firefox on both desktop and mobile and sync it all. At least if your mobile is Android or Linux. And you can use ublock origin, too!
- briffle 4y ago
  you can sync your bookmarks and tabs with the IOS version of firefox too, but no extensions.
  - vnkr 4y ago
    Yes, but FF on iOS sucks precisely for the reason stated in the article.
  - antifa 4y ago
    I'm OK with extensions not syncing, I'm just thankful Firefox for Android exists and has extensions.

commoner 4y ago

A competitor having a minority market share is not a justification for suppressing competition. The suppression (Apple preventing Mozilla from implementing features on Firefox for iOS that are available on Firefox for non-iOS platforms) is part of the reason Firefox has an even lower market share on iOS.

afiori 4y ago

Also since Firefox for android removed one of its distinctive features a few years ago; once you could set it to ask how to open a link (send to another device, share, copy to clipboard, open normally) when an app tried to start a browser; now you can no longer do that. I use different browsers for different things so I want to chose how to open external app links. I would install a shim browser that does just that if I knew of one.

commoner 4y ago
URL Checker is the shim browser you're looking for: https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker It also integrates ClearURLs functionality (https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls) to let you remove tracking from links before sending it to the browser or app. This feature is optional.
antifa 4y ago
I'm not sure if it will do everything you need, but I've had great experiences with "Open Link With" on f-droid. https://f-droid.org/packages/com.tasomaniac.openwith.floss/ https://f-droid.org/packages/com.tasomaniac.openwith.floss/
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  "Open Link With" is indeed great for routing between different apps, but the problem remains that within Firefox you currently no longer have any choice of what to do with the link – it'll always open the full browser and open a new tab first. Previously, 1. you had the choice of activating the "tab queue" system for links opened with Firefox, i.e. the URLs would then only be saved in a list in the background instead of launching the full browser. 2. when sharing an URL with Firefox, you had the aforementioned choice of "actually open the link", "bookmark it", or "use Firefox Sync to send the URL to some other Firefox instance in your Sync account". The latter two choices happened in the background, so you didn't have to wait for the full browser UI+engine to start first, the page to load, etc. etc.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

Much more often than they choose to do so on iOS.