Firefox has <7% desktop and <1% mobile use!

[E-waste]

Before Google Chrome in 2009, we had Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera (and opera mobile) and Firefox.

 

Then Chrome came along and people gobbled it up because it's the first thing they see when they go to that homepage.

 

Everybody thought oh Google I know them they make the Internet or something.  This should be the best ever--and it's free!

 

Mozilla Firefox usage took a nose-dive because there wasn't equal amounts of advertising (especially on television with chromecast and then chromeboooks with that familiar chrome logo).

 

This was and is NOT because Chrome is better, in fact many people say it eats rams for breakfast lunch dinner and a dessert with many tabs open.

 

Firefox is open-source and Mozilla, the company producing the browser just laid off 150--that's actually 250 https://www.protocol.com/mozilla-layoffs

developers and you can read the rest.

 

On iOS devices, (which are quality software, no disrespect) the Firefox browser can not use its opensource Gecko rendering engine. It's forced to render with Apple's WebKit engine which (probably has zero firefox users on apple) *could* reduce mobile firefox use numbers.

 

Chrome is default on android and every browser except firefox will use WebView (not to be confused with Apple's webkit) or chrome which uses Blink.

 

Microsoft Edge also uses Blink because it's using Chromium as the code behind it instead of EdgeHTML.

 

Why does any of this matter?  Do you want to see the internet dominated by a piece of software from a company whose profit comes from mining your data to target you with relevant ads?  Google doesn't care about your privacy online--they make money from the very opposite of that!

 

To learn more, here's an EFF (Electronic Frontier) article that goes VERY deep into this rabbit hole:

 

https://www.eff.org/wp/school-issued-devices-and-student-privacy

 

I hope you all choose to support a clean privacy-minded web rather than one dominated by Google.

[Radium_Angel]

The "problem" is more complex than this.

Way back when, you had Netscape, which wasn't free.

MS comes along and makes IE, which, while not better (at the time) WAS free, and for many, that was enough.

 

Netscape made the error of not improving enough (and yes, MSes dirty dealings had much to do with it as well)

But other browsers popped up, including Firefox.

 

Personal Opinion: I quit using firefox because they wouldn't leave well enough alone. They constantly had to tinker with the UI and left a lot of people frustrated.

Chrome comes along and was, at the time, demonstrably better in almost every way that mattered. Consistency was the key.

 

Firefox to this day keeps mucking about their the UI and how things are done on the surface (stuff the users sees and is directly impacted by)

Is Chrome bad? POV.

I have 64GB of RAM in my system. With proper locking down of Chrome (and indeed, every browser should do this) the amount of RAM is takes is tiny.

 

You want me to use FF? Cool, make it better than what I have already.

 

[riklaunim]

Some of Firefox problems were that it doesn't work as well as Chrome. Looking case by case it could be "intended" disadvantage (like say YouTube working better on Chrome) or just random repeatable events. Like not so long ago I could not search on Aliexpress on Firefox while it worked on Chrome. It likely was some sort of JS error that broke subsequent code on FF but Chrome managed to keep search working (and it's not a good website design when it breaks with some JS error).

 

And Firefox had some annoying released. There was when typing an url caused a big lag because they were trying to do something on a server. Nex they changed how tab works so that it started to focus UI elements so that so if you wanted to tab from url bar to search you have to tab through icons in-between. Plus the url bar behaves weirdly - like you can't reliably search with it and often assumes you entered a domain name.

[kvuj]

Firefox seems to have made many weird design decisions throughout the years. A list of issues I have in no particular order:

• Pocket ads and sponsored top sites.
• They still have not merged tab isolation (their project fission) and they have horrible security records.
• Please remove the old gtk2 glue code and move to wayland by default (on Linux).

 

Finally my biggest:

 

Why does it connect to a bunch or ip adresses when I open a blank page? Take a look at the ports it opens with netstat and check the activity with wireshark. Meanwhile Epiphany (WebKit/Safari but on Linux) and ungoogled-chromium produce radio silence on an empty page.

[LogicalDrm]

Firefox has been my main browser for 15+ years. It wasn't even called Firefox when I started using it as "better" Netscape. But I wouldn't recommend Firefox to anyone, not on desktop at least. Its too unstable, has constantly issues with certificates and AV, and is copying too much what others do so starting from scratch is like switching from iOS to Android. I wouldn't recommend Chrome either, currently I say to go with Opera or Edge.

 

On mobile its bit more difficult. The main issue I have with most of the browsers is lack of control. I need tabs to be easy to access, I need to have controls over zoom even when pages try to prevent it. And I need browser to actually close when I close it. The last of these was feature of Firefox before they updated to this latest shitshow. Otherwise its still better than others, even though I would probably still go with Dolphin if it was supported by forums.

[igormp]

On 2/22/2021 at 1:41 PM, Timpster said:

This was and is NOT because Chrome is better, in fact many people say it eats rams for breakfast lunch dinner and a dessert with many tabs open.

I actually stopped using FF around 2015~2016 because it was so freaking slow, used WAY more ram than chrome and crashed every so often (mind you that was pre-Servo).

On 2/22/2021 at 1:41 PM, Timpster said:

Firefox is open-source

So is chromium

 

On 2/22/2021 at 1:41 PM, Timpster said:

will use WebView

Webview is not an engine, it's just a class that allows for in-app browsing using your favorite engine. You can choose firefox as the default webview engie under developer settings.

 

On 2/22/2021 at 1:41 PM, Timpster said:

Why does any of this matter?  Do you want to see the internet dominated by a piece of software from a company whose profit comes from mining your data to target you with relevant ads?  Google doesn't care about your privacy online--they make money from the very opposite of that!

I honestly don't care. I have work to do, and firefox hinders my productivity. Chrome just works flawlessly for me, so there's that.

 

I'm not sure how's firefox performance and ram usage nowadays, but I can't see any reason to leave chrome when it comes to stability and productivity.

 

I used to use firefox on mobile until last year, when they killed the mobile add-ons. No reason to use it over chrome anymore, sadly.

[flibberdipper]

1 hour ago, igormp said:

I actually stopped using FF around 2015~2016 because it was so freaking slow, used WAY more ram than chrome and crashed every so often (mind you that was pre-Servo).

I actually switched sometime around September of last year just out of curiosity to see where Chrome was (since I hadn't used it for a few years), only to find out the same things. Chrome was quite a bit faster and used notably less RAM even though I've got a couple more extensions.

 

The literal ONLY thing I miss from FF is that YT videos autoplay as soon as you click on their tab. Yes, I know there are extensions to get around this, but in my experience they've kinda blown chunks.

[Eigenvektor]

1 hour ago, igormp said:

I used to use firefox on mobile until last year, when they killed the mobile add-ons. No reason to use it over chrome anymore, sadly.

Is this on iOS? Because I can use add-ons on my Android phone just fine.

[igormp]

1 hour ago, Eigenvektor said:

Is this on iOS? Because I can use add-ons on my Android phone just fine.

Android.

For some reason I can't use ublock origin anymore, says it's exclusive to the desktop version. All of the desktop add-ons used to be available, but now only a handful are useable on the mobile version.

[Eigenvektor]

2 hours ago, igormp said:

Android.

For some reason I can't use ublock origin anymore, says it's exclusive to the desktop version. All of the desktop add-ons used to be available, but now only a handful are useable on the mobile version.

Strange, that's exactly the plugin I'm using here.

 

Spoiler

 

[igormp]

1 hour ago, Eigenvektor said:

Strange, that's exactly the plugin I'm using here.

 

  Hide contents

 

Huh, looks like they removed most of the add-ons and are slowly adding them back:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/02/update-on-extension-support-in-the-new-firefox-for-android/

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/01/20/extensions-in-firefox-for-android-update/

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/02/11/faq-for-extension-support-in-new-firefox-for-android/