9 ms·

Fighting Apple's monopoly behaviour around Safari is not fighting for chrome. Since you asked, Firefox is the browser to use if you do not want chrome.

by onli 4y ago

boxed 4y ago
I mean.. not intentionally maybe.
kristiandupont 4y ago
As a Firefox user who is very upset with Apple for (clearly intentionally) lacking support for PWA features, I am still happy that Safari exists as a counter-weight to Chrome. Any contribution counts.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
  As a Firefox user on Linux I'm about to switch honestly. The browser is in a terrible state on Linux in terms of performance. There is video playback on without fan noise (Chromium) or a very audible fan noise on Firefox (Notebook & Steam Deck + Fedora/Pop/Arch/Ubuntu) => More use of power resulting in less time for me. Switching to Linux resulting in me ditching my forever browser Firefox is something I would not have guessed.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    You might want to check out that it's using hardware acceleration properly, and that's it's configured correctly to use wayland if you're on wayland. Personally, I bounce between macOS, Windows and Linux (mostly Linux, with Wayland), between Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari (mostly Firefox), and also between laptops/desktops and Firefox on Linux is consistently the fastest one with the least amount of crashes for me. Also the combination that lets me get the most battery life out of my laptop.
    - FpUser 4y ago
      >"You might want to check out that it's using hardware acceleration properly, and that's it's configured correctly to use wayland if you're on wayland." Maybe it should be browser's task to do it. As a user I just do not want to waste my time on things like that unless they're vital. In this case I'll just use different browser.
      - nicoburns 4y ago
        > Maybe it should be browser's task to do it. Unfortunately you don't really get that luxury if you use Linux.
      - TillE 4y ago
        Running Linux on a desktop pretty much guarantees that you have an endless parade of small problems to fix. I really wish this weren't true, but the user experience has barely improved in the past 15-20 years. The specific problems may be different, but it's still the same struggle.
      - capableweb 4y ago
        Takes time to migrate to a completely new display manager :) For now it's opt-in, in the future it'll obviously be default if you're on Wayland. If you don't like bleeding edge, warts or sometimes unpolished experiences, might be better to go with Windows or macOS, no one would blame you.
        FpUser 4y ago
        I use both Windows and Linux. Linux runs on server and workstation class hardware dedicated for deployment mostly so the last thing I care about is what / how browsers run on those.
        capableweb 4y ago
        So you don't run browsers on Linux, I don't see what you have a problem with then? The particular issue you're complaining about doesn't seem to affect you at all.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    To add to that, Firefox sandboxing on Linux is awful. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html#linux-sandbox https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
  - jadbox 4y ago
    While based on chrome without the privacy issues, I'd highly recommend Vivaldi browser (the company is also a worker co-op). They removed a lot of proprietary stuff too from the source.
  - sbaiddn 4y ago
    That's weird, I use Mac (x86) and Linux (x86 Debian) and Firefox works great on Linux but is unusable on Mac (at least it was two or so years ago when I last tried). I have an nvidia card and non free drivers if that matters
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      Firefox has improved a lot on mac in the last two years. It's still less battery efficient than Chrome, but not by too much anymore. I've just switch for it's better tab management features (tab groups).
  - drdebug 4y ago
    Please try to resist. I bought an external battery, it's less convenient but if that's the cost of privacy then so be it. Supporting Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird is critical, some sites are now chrome-only, this is a nightmare. The battle for a free phone is already lost it seems as banks mandate google or iphone apps for 2FA and we don't have functional linux-only phones with browsing/email/mapping/sms/calls/photos that work reliably yet. I'm truly concerned we might loose the ability to use a linux desktop too: MS-Windows was required for many things in the past, these things are now possible on Linux, I'd hate to see Chrome become the next Windows.
  - josefx 4y ago
    Are you running a distro provided build or one downloaded from mozilla?
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Firefox notoriously has bad performance on Linux compared to Chromium. Chromium does a pretty good job at implementing new hardware acceleration features while Firefox just got around to it like a year ago and it is still no where as performant. There is noticeable delays for me on Firefox when doing things like resizing windows in a tiling window manager as well.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  Nobody is arguing Safari shouldn't exist. They're arguing that Apple shouldn't get to force monopolize it on iOS even more aggressively than Microsoft was doing with IE 20 years ago.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Microsoft was hardly even aggressive about leveraging their OS monopoly to promote their Internet Explorer browser. All they did was switch from selling it as a separate product to giving it away for free in order to crush Netscape. And Microsoft made IE the default handler for web links. But they never did anything to prevent users from installing third-party browsers on Windows.
    - saiya-jin 4y ago
      ... and that was enough to completely destroy competition, and get a near monopoly for many years. Clearly amoral move enough that they got slapped with quite a big anti-competition fine from EU for this.
    - angoragoats 4y ago
      I guess we'd have to argue what "aggressive" means here, but what you describe as "all they did" can and has been found to be monopoly behavior and against the law in the US. This is known as bundling and there are a bunch of prior cases which confirm it can be considered a violation of antitrust law. The bundling concept was the basis of the antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the late 90s. That said, Apple is doing something worse with Safari, in that not only are they bundling the browser, they are using their tight control over the operating system to prevent other browsers from being installed in the first place. It's slighly murkier than the MS antitrust case because the counter-argument is "but they do allow other browsers! You can see Chrome/Firefox/Brave/etc in the App Store!" and then you have to get into a technical discussion of the difference between a browser application and a browser engine. Sigh.
      - nradov 4y ago
        Describing what Microsoft did as "bundling" seems a little silly in retrospect. I mean of course a desktop OS should come with a browser. If they had just added IE as a standard feature of Windows from the start without ever selling it as a separate product then they would have had a stronger legal case. It would be absurd for antitrust regulators to prohibit software vendors from enhancing their products just for the sake of protecting competitors' revenue.
- runjake 4y ago
  Do you mean "upset with Mozilla"? The PWA Wikipedia article claims that Safari has better PWA support than Firefox.
  - Snitch-Thursday 4y ago
    Per [1], PWAs on webkit lacks push notifications, full-screen display, hardware acceleration, web bluetooth as major headline features needed, which Firefox on mobile appears to generally support per a 5-second glance (I didn't see web bluetooth, but the rest I did) [2]. That wikipedia page has a support table saying IOS supports PWAs as YES and Firefox as NO is odd considering Apple requires Mozilla to ship a crippled form of safari on IOS, if Firefox could ship their own true application, I suspect they would have better PWA support as a differentiator with Safari. [1] https://thenewstack.io/owa-takes-on-apples-browser-ban-for-pwa-parity/ https://thenewstack.io/owa-takes-on-apples-browser-ban-for-p... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
    - Wevah 4y ago
      If I’ve read correctly [1], Safari on macOS 13 (released after the mentioned article) supports the standardized Web Push APIs. [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/sending_web_push_notifications_in_safari_and_other_browsers https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > web bluetooth as major headline features needed "web bluetooth" and many other hardware APIs are Chrome-only non-standards that OWA pretends are standards and core features for PWAs.
- musicale 4y ago
  > Apple for (clearly intentionally) lacking support for PWA features It's in Google's interest to replace native iOS apps with web apps. It's in Apple's interest to replace web apps with native iOS apps. Native apps also tend to be more power efficient and to present a platform-native look and feel. I don't see any incentive for Apple to support PWAs (or Google's vision for web apps) ever.
lelandfe 4y ago
https://gs.statcounter.com/ https://gs.statcounter.com/ Firefox is not a serious competitor at this point and its tiny 4% of the market has already slipped to 3% in the last year. That’s inching close to the “can we please drop IE11” sort of numbers from some years ago.
- MerelyMortal 4y ago
  Are you suggesting that people shouldn't use it since it has a small market share, and thus should allow it to get smaller until it dies out?
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    Moreso that Safari truly is the only bastion against Chrome’s hegemony.
    - mtomweb 4y ago
      Safari is not competing. It only runs on MacOS and iOS. It doesn't compete on Linux, Windows or Android. - It comes last out of the three major browser engines in feature support. - It has the most number of bugs out of the three engines. - It has the worst support for Web Apps. Apple has deprived the Safari/Webkit team of funding for the past decade. Safari places no competitive pressure on chrome, and has deprived Mozilla and thus Firefox of 100's of millions of dollars in search engine revenue. Apple has done untold damage to the web and this needs to be fixed.
      - rvz 4y ago
        Firefox is almost no where to be found and hardly has anything to bring to fight against Chrome [0]. In fact, Mozilla is on life support with Google's money with the Mozilla CEO being the one laughing all the way to the bank as Firefox continues to be irrelevant. Safari (WebKit) is the only one competing against the Chrome ecosystem, especially on mobile devices market. The EU Digital Markets Act will just declare Chrome the winner and will increase Chrome's dominance and will make Mozilla even more irrelevant. [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/ https://gs.statcounter.com/
kivle 4y ago
I tried to switch to Firefox as my main browser, but sadly the blocker for me was the absolutely horrible battery life on my Macbook Pro M1. It's like it's continuously running a spinning loop or something. It reduced my battery life to somewhere between 4 to 6 hours. I have since switched to Vivaldi (which is based on Chromium unfortunately), but I will probably switch back to Firefox if those battery issues are ever resolved.
- gls2ro 4y ago
  If Firefox will focus _everything_ on making FF on MacOS reduce their batter consumption to the minimum possible (less than Safari should be the goal) then I think this is the only _winning strategy_ for FF not going into irrelevance. not sure it is also possible to compete on battery performance with Safari but that is the only one I see. Drop any other project, any initiative and just focus on this. Why: 1. Because there is a big chunk of developers who code web on MacOS thus winning them means what they build will run on MacOS 2. Becoming default for this group of technical people means they will recommend it for their families and more important install it for their young kids laptops 3. Can do it with Google money :)
  - kibwen 4y ago
    There are approximately as many Firefox users are there are MacOS users, on the order of 200 million users. In fact, there are probably more Firefox users than MacOS users. Concrete numbers are hard to come by, but you have to take optimistic estimates of MacOS's userbase to match moderate estimates of Firefox's userbase. If Firefox is a global also-ran, then so is MacOS.
    - gls2ro 4y ago
      You might be right - I did not check the numbers. My idea was primarily based on my experience is something like this: I know (meaning I know what they use) around 15-20 devs on MacOS. Almost all of them have FF installed. Some may open it occasionally but just as an alternative to open in private mode or check some weird behavior to see if it is cross-browser or cache related. - personal usage: except maybe 2, all the others are using Safari (most of them) and Chrome few - professional usage: except for the same 2, here I think Chrome is more used and Safari less Thus in these developers' case, I don't think they will recommend FF to their friends or relatives even if FF is installed on their machine as it is not their daily driver. I am in the same category regarding usage: I forced myself multiple times to use FF. Still try to do that couple of times per year. But fallback to Safari because the battery lasts so much longer and because it is integrated with the MacOS keychain. One might think that with M1, people might afford to lose a bit of battery but it is the reverse. Seeing how long it lasts one barely thinks of cutting those hours short :) Could mean starting to carry again the power adapter or always looking for a table near a power socket. Here is a browser that I installed not long ago and start to like it more and more: https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com
Gorbzel 4y ago
It functionally is. Many of those who have not learned from history are so anti-Apple (or possibly subpar webdevs) that they completely ignore the lessons we've previously learned about why browser monoculture is dangerous. Even more worrisome, these people often ignorantly call Safari "the new IE", meaning they're aware of the history and problems and choose to pursue their own broken interpretation. If these people will ignore a browser with 50% market share on mobile and 20% overall due to their own shortsightedness, clearly they're going to ignore Firefox or others hanging out in the single digits.
- error503 4y ago
  > Many of those who have not learned from history are so anti-Apple (or possibly subpar webdevs) that they completely ignore the lessons we've previously learned about why browser monoculture is dangerous. I'm confused, because to me it seems that the pro-Apple folks are the ones ignoring the lessons from large corporations using their weight to force monocultures. Firefox is the only meaningful browser that is open and won't be leveraged by its steward to promote their business interests.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    Please read "Breaking the Web Forward" https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_the_we.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th... --- sart quote --- Back fifteen years ago IE held back the web because web developers had to cater to its outdated technology stack. “Best viewed with IE” and all that. But do you ever see a “Best viewed with Safari” notice? No, you don’t. Another browser takes that special place in web developers’ hearts and minds. --- end quote ---
    - error503 4y ago
      Oh you're absolutely right about Chrome, I'm just not sure why you mention 'anti-Apple', because Apple's leverage is being used in many of the same ways, just much more aggressively than 'best viewed in IE', instead it's 'App Store/WebKit/<choose your monoculture> or pound sand'.
vehemenz 4y ago
If you are in favor of Chrome on iOS, then you are in favor of a Chrome monopoly, or you don't understand how browser monopolies work. Or maybe you weren't around during the browser wars (a lot of < 30s on HN).
- tristan957 4y ago
  This is a false dichotomy. Open competition is not an endorsement for monopolies.
  - vehemenz 4y ago
    First, can you explain how you came to interpret my particular statement as a universal one? It doesn't seem like a good faith reading. If you doubt that a Chrome monopoly results from Chrome on iOS, that's an argument you can make, but it doesn't look terribly plausible. Second, your use of "open competition" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, suggesting that browser market share is determined by ordinary market forces (it's not) or that Apple isn't competing openly with Google already. Why would allowing the competitor's browser on your hardware be considered "open competition?" Again, it's not clear.

Fighting Apple's monopoly behaviour around Safari is not fighting for chrome. Since you asked, Firefox is the browser to use if you do not want chrome.

by onli 4y ago

Fighting Apple's monopoly behaviour around Safari is not fighting for chrome. Since you asked, Firefox is the browser to use if you do not want chrome.

boxed 4y ago

I mean.. not intentionally maybe.

kristiandupont 4y ago

As a Firefox user who is very upset with Apple for (clearly intentionally) lacking support for PWA features, I am still happy that Safari exists as a counter-weight to Chrome. Any contribution counts.

ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
As a Firefox user on Linux I'm about to switch honestly. The browser is in a terrible state on Linux in terms of performance. There is video playback on without fan noise (Chromium) or a very audible fan noise on Firefox (Notebook & Steam Deck + Fedora/Pop/Arch/Ubuntu) => More use of power resulting in less time for me. Switching to Linux resulting in me ditching my forever browser Firefox is something I would not have guessed.
- capableweb 4y ago
  You might want to check out that it's using hardware acceleration properly, and that's it's configured correctly to use wayland if you're on wayland. Personally, I bounce between macOS, Windows and Linux (mostly Linux, with Wayland), between Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari (mostly Firefox), and also between laptops/desktops and Firefox on Linux is consistently the fastest one with the least amount of crashes for me. Also the combination that lets me get the most battery life out of my laptop.
  - FpUser 4y ago
    >"You might want to check out that it's using hardware acceleration properly, and that's it's configured correctly to use wayland if you're on wayland." Maybe it should be browser's task to do it. As a user I just do not want to waste my time on things like that unless they're vital. In this case I'll just use different browser.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      > Maybe it should be browser's task to do it. Unfortunately you don't really get that luxury if you use Linux.
    - TillE 4y ago
      Running Linux on a desktop pretty much guarantees that you have an endless parade of small problems to fix. I really wish this weren't true, but the user experience has barely improved in the past 15-20 years. The specific problems may be different, but it's still the same struggle.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Takes time to migrate to a completely new display manager :) For now it's opt-in, in the future it'll obviously be default if you're on Wayland. If you don't like bleeding edge, warts or sometimes unpolished experiences, might be better to go with Windows or macOS, no one would blame you.
      - FpUser 4y ago
        I use both Windows and Linux. Linux runs on server and workstation class hardware dedicated for deployment mostly so the last thing I care about is what / how browsers run on those.
        capableweb 4y ago
        So you don't run browsers on Linux, I don't see what you have a problem with then? The particular issue you're complaining about doesn't seem to affect you at all.
- jacooper 4y ago
  To add to that, Firefox sandboxing on Linux is awful. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html#linux-sandbox https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
- jadbox 4y ago
  While based on chrome without the privacy issues, I'd highly recommend Vivaldi browser (the company is also a worker co-op). They removed a lot of proprietary stuff too from the source.
- sbaiddn 4y ago
  That's weird, I use Mac (x86) and Linux (x86 Debian) and Firefox works great on Linux but is unusable on Mac (at least it was two or so years ago when I last tried). I have an nvidia card and non free drivers if that matters
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Firefox has improved a lot on mac in the last two years. It's still less battery efficient than Chrome, but not by too much anymore. I've just switch for it's better tab management features (tab groups).
- drdebug 4y ago
  Please try to resist. I bought an external battery, it's less convenient but if that's the cost of privacy then so be it. Supporting Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird is critical, some sites are now chrome-only, this is a nightmare. The battle for a free phone is already lost it seems as banks mandate google or iphone apps for 2FA and we don't have functional linux-only phones with browsing/email/mapping/sms/calls/photos that work reliably yet. I'm truly concerned we might loose the ability to use a linux desktop too: MS-Windows was required for many things in the past, these things are now possible on Linux, I'd hate to see Chrome become the next Windows.
- josefx 4y ago
  Are you running a distro provided build or one downloaded from mozilla?
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Firefox notoriously has bad performance on Linux compared to Chromium. Chromium does a pretty good job at implementing new hardware acceleration features while Firefox just got around to it like a year ago and it is still no where as performant. There is noticeable delays for me on Firefox when doing things like resizing windows in a tiling window manager as well.
kllrnohj 4y ago
Nobody is arguing Safari shouldn't exist. They're arguing that Apple shouldn't get to force monopolize it on iOS even more aggressively than Microsoft was doing with IE 20 years ago.
- nradov 4y ago
  Microsoft was hardly even aggressive about leveraging their OS monopoly to promote their Internet Explorer browser. All they did was switch from selling it as a separate product to giving it away for free in order to crush Netscape. And Microsoft made IE the default handler for web links. But they never did anything to prevent users from installing third-party browsers on Windows.
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    ... and that was enough to completely destroy competition, and get a near monopoly for many years. Clearly amoral move enough that they got slapped with quite a big anti-competition fine from EU for this.
  - angoragoats 4y ago
    I guess we'd have to argue what "aggressive" means here, but what you describe as "all they did" can and has been found to be monopoly behavior and against the law in the US. This is known as bundling and there are a bunch of prior cases which confirm it can be considered a violation of antitrust law. The bundling concept was the basis of the antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the late 90s. That said, Apple is doing something worse with Safari, in that not only are they bundling the browser, they are using their tight control over the operating system to prevent other browsers from being installed in the first place. It's slighly murkier than the MS antitrust case because the counter-argument is "but they do allow other browsers! You can see Chrome/Firefox/Brave/etc in the App Store!" and then you have to get into a technical discussion of the difference between a browser application and a browser engine. Sigh.
    - nradov 4y ago
      Describing what Microsoft did as "bundling" seems a little silly in retrospect. I mean of course a desktop OS should come with a browser. If they had just added IE as a standard feature of Windows from the start without ever selling it as a separate product then they would have had a stronger legal case. It would be absurd for antitrust regulators to prohibit software vendors from enhancing their products just for the sake of protecting competitors' revenue.
runjake 4y ago
Do you mean "upset with Mozilla"? The PWA Wikipedia article claims that Safari has better PWA support than Firefox.
- Snitch-Thursday 4y ago
  Per [1], PWAs on webkit lacks push notifications, full-screen display, hardware acceleration, web bluetooth as major headline features needed, which Firefox on mobile appears to generally support per a 5-second glance (I didn't see web bluetooth, but the rest I did) [2]. That wikipedia page has a support table saying IOS supports PWAs as YES and Firefox as NO is odd considering Apple requires Mozilla to ship a crippled form of safari on IOS, if Firefox could ship their own true application, I suspect they would have better PWA support as a differentiator with Safari. [1] https://thenewstack.io/owa-takes-on-apples-browser-ban-for-pwa-parity/ https://thenewstack.io/owa-takes-on-apples-browser-ban-for-p... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
  - Wevah 4y ago
    If I’ve read correctly [1], Safari on macOS 13 (released after the mentioned article) supports the standardized Web Push APIs. [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/sending_web_push_notifications_in_safari_and_other_browsers https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > web bluetooth as major headline features needed "web bluetooth" and many other hardware APIs are Chrome-only non-standards that OWA pretends are standards and core features for PWAs.
musicale 4y ago
> Apple for (clearly intentionally) lacking support for PWA features It's in Google's interest to replace native iOS apps with web apps. It's in Apple's interest to replace web apps with native iOS apps. Native apps also tend to be more power efficient and to present a platform-native look and feel. I don't see any incentive for Apple to support PWAs (or Google's vision for web apps) ever.

lelandfe 4y ago

https://gs.statcounter.com/ https://gs.statcounter.com/ Firefox is not a serious competitor at this point and its tiny 4% of the market has already slipped to 3% in the last year. That’s inching close to the “can we please drop IE11” sort of numbers from some years ago.

MerelyMortal 4y ago
Are you suggesting that people shouldn't use it since it has a small market share, and thus should allow it to get smaller until it dies out?
- lelandfe 4y ago
  Moreso that Safari truly is the only bastion against Chrome’s hegemony.
  - mtomweb 4y ago
    Safari is not competing. It only runs on MacOS and iOS. It doesn't compete on Linux, Windows or Android. - It comes last out of the three major browser engines in feature support. - It has the most number of bugs out of the three engines. - It has the worst support for Web Apps. Apple has deprived the Safari/Webkit team of funding for the past decade. Safari places no competitive pressure on chrome, and has deprived Mozilla and thus Firefox of 100's of millions of dollars in search engine revenue. Apple has done untold damage to the web and this needs to be fixed.
    - rvz 4y ago
      Firefox is almost no where to be found and hardly has anything to bring to fight against Chrome [0]. In fact, Mozilla is on life support with Google's money with the Mozilla CEO being the one laughing all the way to the bank as Firefox continues to be irrelevant. Safari (WebKit) is the only one competing against the Chrome ecosystem, especially on mobile devices market. The EU Digital Markets Act will just declare Chrome the winner and will increase Chrome's dominance and will make Mozilla even more irrelevant. [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/ https://gs.statcounter.com/

kivle 4y ago

I tried to switch to Firefox as my main browser, but sadly the blocker for me was the absolutely horrible battery life on my Macbook Pro M1. It's like it's continuously running a spinning loop or something. It reduced my battery life to somewhere between 4 to 6 hours. I have since switched to Vivaldi (which is based on Chromium unfortunately), but I will probably switch back to Firefox if those battery issues are ever resolved.

gls2ro 4y ago
If Firefox will focus _everything_ on making FF on MacOS reduce their batter consumption to the minimum possible (less than Safari should be the goal) then I think this is the only _winning strategy_ for FF not going into irrelevance. not sure it is also possible to compete on battery performance with Safari but that is the only one I see. Drop any other project, any initiative and just focus on this. Why: 1. Because there is a big chunk of developers who code web on MacOS thus winning them means what they build will run on MacOS 2. Becoming default for this group of technical people means they will recommend it for their families and more important install it for their young kids laptops 3. Can do it with Google money :)
- kibwen 4y ago
  There are approximately as many Firefox users are there are MacOS users, on the order of 200 million users. In fact, there are probably more Firefox users than MacOS users. Concrete numbers are hard to come by, but you have to take optimistic estimates of MacOS's userbase to match moderate estimates of Firefox's userbase. If Firefox is a global also-ran, then so is MacOS.
  - gls2ro 4y ago
    You might be right - I did not check the numbers. My idea was primarily based on my experience is something like this: I know (meaning I know what they use) around 15-20 devs on MacOS. Almost all of them have FF installed. Some may open it occasionally but just as an alternative to open in private mode or check some weird behavior to see if it is cross-browser or cache related. - personal usage: except maybe 2, all the others are using Safari (most of them) and Chrome few - professional usage: except for the same 2, here I think Chrome is more used and Safari less Thus in these developers' case, I don't think they will recommend FF to their friends or relatives even if FF is installed on their machine as it is not their daily driver. I am in the same category regarding usage: I forced myself multiple times to use FF. Still try to do that couple of times per year. But fallback to Safari because the battery lasts so much longer and because it is integrated with the MacOS keychain. One might think that with M1, people might afford to lose a bit of battery but it is the reverse. Seeing how long it lasts one barely thinks of cutting those hours short :) Could mean starting to carry again the power adapter or always looking for a table near a power socket. Here is a browser that I installed not long ago and start to like it more and more: https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com

Gorbzel 4y ago

It functionally is. Many of those who have not learned from history are so anti-Apple (or possibly subpar webdevs) that they completely ignore the lessons we've previously learned about why browser monoculture is dangerous. Even more worrisome, these people often ignorantly call Safari "the new IE", meaning they're aware of the history and problems and choose to pursue their own broken interpretation. If these people will ignore a browser with 50% market share on mobile and 20% overall due to their own shortsightedness, clearly they're going to ignore Firefox or others hanging out in the single digits.

error503 4y ago
> Many of those who have not learned from history are so anti-Apple (or possibly subpar webdevs) that they completely ignore the lessons we've previously learned about why browser monoculture is dangerous. I'm confused, because to me it seems that the pro-Apple folks are the ones ignoring the lessons from large corporations using their weight to force monocultures. Firefox is the only meaningful browser that is open and won't be leveraged by its steward to promote their business interests.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  Please read "Breaking the Web Forward" https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_the_we.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th... --- sart quote --- Back fifteen years ago IE held back the web because web developers had to cater to its outdated technology stack. “Best viewed with IE” and all that. But do you ever see a “Best viewed with Safari” notice? No, you don’t. Another browser takes that special place in web developers’ hearts and minds. --- end quote ---
  - error503 4y ago
    Oh you're absolutely right about Chrome, I'm just not sure why you mention 'anti-Apple', because Apple's leverage is being used in many of the same ways, just much more aggressively than 'best viewed in IE', instead it's 'App Store/WebKit/<choose your monoculture> or pound sand'.

vehemenz 4y ago

If you are in favor of Chrome on iOS, then you are in favor of a Chrome monopoly, or you don't understand how browser monopolies work. Or maybe you weren't around during the browser wars (a lot of < 30s on HN).

tristan957 4y ago
This is a false dichotomy. Open competition is not an endorsement for monopolies.
- vehemenz 4y ago
  First, can you explain how you came to interpret my particular statement as a universal one? It doesn't seem like a good faith reading. If you doubt that a Chrome monopoly results from Chrome on iOS, that's an argument you can make, but it doesn't look terribly plausible. Second, your use of "open competition" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, suggesting that browser market share is determined by ordinary market forces (it's not) or that Apple isn't competing openly with Google already. Why would allowing the competitor's browser on your hardware be considered "open competition?" Again, it's not clear.