Firefox On the Brink? (brycewray.com) 239
An anonymous reader shares a report: A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla's Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the 'fox's auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope. The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government's many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a "2% rule" from its British counterpart: "... we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov." (Firefox's market share was 2.2%, per the traffic for the previous ninety days.)
[...] "So what?" you may wonder. "That's just for web developers in the U.S. government. It doesn't affect any other web devs." Actually, it very well could. Here's how I envision the dominoes falling:
1. Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government's visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don't have to support Firefox anymore.
2. When that word gets out, it spreads quickly to not only the front-end dev community but also the corporate IT departments for whom some web devs work. Many corporations do a lot of business with the government and, thus, whatever the government does from an IT standpoint is going to influence what corporations do.
3. Corporations see this change as an opportunity to lower dev costs and delivery times, in that it provides an excuse to remove some testing (and, in rare cases, specific coding) from their development workflow.
[...] "So what?" you may wonder. "That's just for web developers in the U.S. government. It doesn't affect any other web devs." Actually, it very well could. Here's how I envision the dominoes falling:
1. Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government's visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don't have to support Firefox anymore.
2. When that word gets out, it spreads quickly to not only the front-end dev community but also the corporate IT departments for whom some web devs work. Many corporations do a lot of business with the government and, thus, whatever the government does from an IT standpoint is going to influence what corporations do.
3. Corporations see this change as an opportunity to lower dev costs and delivery times, in that it provides an excuse to remove some testing (and, in rare cases, specific coding) from their development workflow.
What's to stop Mozilla (Score:4, Insightful)
Internet Explorer all over again. (Score:5, Insightful)
What's to stop Mozilla from making Firefox compatible with these sites by themselves?
Back when Internet Explorer was king, everyone made sites for Internet Explorer. The issue is proprietary behavior which means what you are really asking is "Why doesn't Mozilla play an eternal game of catch up, never being complete and always lagging behind?"
The obvious answer is this kind of behavior will always result in a substandard outcome for Firefox users resulting in a homogeneous "Works with Chrome" lock-in.
Re:What's to stop Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)
From making Firefox compatible with these sites by themselves?
The Mozilla Foundation has decided to focus the organizations funds and efforts on things that are mostly unrelated to the browser that they were founded to create.
They collected enough funds to run forever, and immediately pivoted to focus on things other than what we gave them the money for.
Yes, I am bitter about that.
Re:What's to stop Mozilla (Score:5, Interesting)
From making Firefox compatible with these sites by themselves?
Nothing and I'm betting they'd be the easier to work with than the other browser developers. Admittedly, though, I only have experience working with the Firefox/Thunderbird devs on Bugzilla and not with the other browser devs ... Although I do have experience being not helped by the Google Android devs.
I'll note that the FF devs even helped investigate an issue on my bank's website where something stopped working after a FF update. I did note that it could be an issue with the site (it was) and not FF, but they checked it out anyway. Me being able to assist using the built-in FF information and profiling tools and "mozregression" was nice.
Re: What's to stop Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)
Switch to chrome's engine? How is that modded insightful? Really?
The real answer is that Firefox devs need to stop trying to alienate their users with UI games and removing features, and focus on implementing and fixing their browser engine to render things properly. The user agent and browser engine simply shouldn't matter. I realize that Chrome is the IE now and Google plays fast and lose with the standards. But there's a lot firefox can do to make themselves more compatible without caving in like everyone else did.
The only thing stopping Firefox right now is Mozilla themselves. It's ridiculous. Mozilla pulls in half a billion dollars a year! If they can't build a widely-used and widely-compatible browser for that money, there's something seriously wrong.
Re: What's to stop Mozilla (Score:2)
Browsers are widely used because they come bundled with a system or because when people Google things they get a box telling them that they are using the internet wrong if they do not use Chrome. Quality and marketing have nothing to do with it.
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Yeah, we seem to be re-living the "this site works only with IE-6" era lately, only this time it's google. How hard can it be to make a site which works with any browser?
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"Render things properly" means following standards, not following Google.
Browser markets are not exactly perfect competition.
Just wait till Chrome breaks ad blocking extension (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Just wait till Chrome breaks ad blocking exten (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Just wait till Chrome breaks ad blocking exten (Score:5, Interesting)
I operated a well trafficked website for nearly 20 years (about 500k visitors per day). I shut it down in 2022, and over the past few years of its life the rate of users using ad blockers hovered consistently around 50%. For what it's worth, it was not a website targeting geeks/nerds/engineers.
Ad blockers recently came up at work as well because for some reason we're using Pendo to drive certain "new feature" dialogues, and there was concern raised from Product claiming that these "features" weren't working with ad blockers. Of course we engineers said "that's a feature, not a bug!" but I digress.
Point being, the data that I've been exposed to suggests that a good amount of people outside of "geekdom" uses ad blockers as well. The web is virtually unusable these days without one.
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The web is virtually unusable these days without [an ad blocker]
I totally agree. Thanks for your observation on ad blocker usage.
Re: Just wait till Chrome breaks ad blocking exten (Score:5, Insightful)
That's been true for 20+ years.
I used "web washer" back then and one day had to use someone else's browser for something. I had no idea how bad it was even then. All these pop ups and other things flashing at me. My content buried deep under crap. I freaked out and never ran a browser without a blocker again.
If I can't use a site without a blocker, I just don't. I find the content elsewhere or do without. Sometimes the reader mode in safari works via anti-ad-block sites.
Fuck those guys who do anti-ad-blocking.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Ironically, Google seems to be helping the adoption of ad blockers. People don't like being forced to do something even if they were doing that thing anyway. Google, by bringing up the issue of blocking ad blockers on YouTube, brought it to everyone's attention. Now everyone is running an ad blocker when previously they never thought about it.
If Google keeps pushing, maybe making ad blockers impossible in Chrome. Well, people will stop using Chrome just out of spite.
Google is not the company it was when it
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This small minority only needs to be above 2%.
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Re:Just wait till Chrome breaks ad blocking extens (Score:4, Informative)
I have uBlock Origin installed in Firefox and don't see the YouTube block message at all as long as I let uBlock Origin continue to auto-update its blocking lists.
As for Chrome, look up "Manifest V3" and all the stuff going on around that to see why Ad-Blockers will most definitely NOT work better on Chrome going forward.
easy fix (Score:5, Insightful)
So in theory there is an easy fix: Firefox has to increase its market share. The hard part, you will say, is how? That's also an easy fix: give the users the browser they want. Unfortunately, for many years Mozilla seems to be hellbent on alienating its users.
And I say it with bitterness, 15-20 years ago we were pushing Firefox everywhere, telling people to use it. Then Mozilla turned against us, and I talk about removing extensions, limiting customisability, forcing poket, cloning Chrome and so on.
Comment posted from Firefox.
Re: (Score:2)
also read on FF,
the extension did throw me for a loop and it has never been the same
Re:easy fix (Score:5, Interesting)
How so? I've never left Firefox, and I've yet to see a change that went against my preferences as a user. I see many people here bitching about every new release, so I'm sure there are some things have gotten people worked up. But, why? I love Firefox, and also Thunderbird, for that matter.
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Firefox kept fucking with the UI on zero notice and back around version 36, dropped support for a huge number of extensions, several of which I was using.
I moved to Palemoon, which has grown from FF 36, but the main dev on that project is kind of a jackass and eventually a lot of stuff stopped working.
I've always and only used Firefox on Android but these days I use Vivaldi and just accept that I can't do some of the things I used to.
Re:easy fix (Score:5, Insightful)
still the old extensions?! people still didn't understand that the old extension could control everything in the browser, making then unsafe, both for crash/leaks, but also malicious intents. That was a HUGE risk for firefox and had to go away. It was a hard decision, but either it would go away and force extensions to use the new API, or tried to keep compatibility and having years of half working extensions and people complaining how firefox broke the extensions. At least the first one had a clear path and you could see what worked and what didn't. Also, the old extension was build for the old single process firefox, with multi-process being added, keeping compatibility would be a mess and error prone, so again, dropping the old extension was still the best choice.
Yes, i do miss some extensions, but the old way could not be accepted anymore. Palemoon cam get away from it, because of very low market share, but firefox had been target already by malicious extensions, the risk was too high
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That's fine. So eliminate the old-style extensions from the Mozilla extension web site. But don't eliminate the mechanism itself. If I want to build and run an extension that reaches deep into Firefox and changes things, even manipulates the http requests and the html, that's my prerogative. Mozilla chose to address this whole issue in a way that patronized users and said, we know what's best for you. This attitude is what kills me about Firefox these days. If I want a browser that knows what's best for
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Allowing extensions to do that is a nightmare for software maintenance; having well-defined interfaces for extensions makes refactoring possible with breaking things being more predictable and less frequent.
Re: easy fix (Score:5, Informative)
"people still didn't understand that the old extension could control everything in the browser,"
Look kid, we understand perfectly well. We also understand the larger issue that you don't, so listen up. By not replacing key functionality that was critical for some types of extensions with ANYTHING they drove users to their browsing-activity-collecting Pocket horseshit. They could have provided another mechanism to let extensions like Scrapbook+ to function, but they chose not to do that.
We are not upset that they changed the model for extensions. We are upset that they didn't make the kinds of extensions we were using possible again. You don't even understand the argument, and you want to lecture us? GTFOH immediately.
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Firefox 36 was released in 2015, 8 years ago.
Re:easy fix (Score:5, Insightful)
I've yet to see a change that went against my preferences as a user.
They made the theme worse and made theming harder.
They took away plug-in functionality that users depended on.
To replace the lost functionality they spent $20M of donations on Pocket and put it into the browser instead of making it an extension, even though it does absolutely nothing an extension cannot do. Pocket collects browsing information every time you use it and it phones home giving usage stats even more often than that.
Remember when the browser was a platform and you got functionality through add-ons, or not if you didn't want it? They ruined that.
If you don't care about functionality or privacy, fine, but it negatively impacted thousands of users and continues to provide inferior functionality to what we used to have on the same browser.
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read my above comment about extensions. The same apply to the theme, they could be used to hide important features/options from the user, blocking them ot taking the browser back.
Pocket, i do agree that it should have been a extension, but pocket consumes only the icon size if you don't use it, only if you use it it will use more resources or "phone home" (or how else it could store your page in the remote server). people make it look lot worse than it is.
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Again, more of that I know what's best for you from Mozilla. Let's not forget who Firefox's users were. They weren't necessarily the mythical new users. they were the long-time users. These changes force them out, but still don't appeal to new users. I mean really why should new users choose Firefox over Chrome?
Re:easy fix (Score:5, Insightful)
The amount of misinformation in this post is pretty astounding.
1. Donations to Mozilla go to the Mozilla Foundation, not Mozilla Corporation, which is who makes Firefox.
2. Pocket does not phone home constantly if you don't use it.
3. Firefox supports more functionality through their webExtension system than Chrome does, I use their TLS bits constantly.
4. Pocket is profitable, it helps support Firefox and not the other way around.
Re: easy fix (Score:3)
1. Irrelevant where they go before they spend the money
2. Pocket has to phone home every time you save a page, plus every time it fetches more bullshit to show you
3. Firefox supporting more functionality than Chrome is irrelevant, you are moving the goalposts
4. Pocket makes money is also irrelevant to the point being made
Got any relevant and/or correct commentary, guy who doesn't know how the web works?
Re:easy fix (Score:5, Insightful)
I've also never left Firefox, not because I love it but because I dislike more the alternatives. But I've left advocating Firefox, that's for sure.
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How so? I've never left Firefox, and I've yet to see a change that went against my preferences as a user. I see many people here bitching about every new release, so I'm sure there are some things have gotten people worked up. But, why? I love Firefox, and also Thunderbird, for that matter.
I personally find the constant churn annoying and counterproductive. They've repeatedly gone out of their way to make UX unpleasant some of it irreversibly so. Having to waste time screwing around with userchrome just to reverse the disaster that was the tab design they introduced a couple of years ago making it impossible to discern the active tab while repeatedly reducing information density.
Just recently they randomly removed "browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled" after decades of people using it to preve
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Have you used the latest Thunderbird? Makes my eyes burn. I had to go back to the earlier version and block DNF from upgrading it.
As for Firefox, well let's see. They removed every easy method of configuring the UI. They forced a Chrome look on everyone. They removed tabs and replaced them with silly buttons. What used to be simple preferences now is buried in about:config. Then they constantly change things in userChrome.css, and rumors are they want to eliminate it altogether.
I found a fork of Firef
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I use Firefox as my daily driver on both desktop and mobile. There have been a few annoying UI changes on the desktop, but nothing that I didn't get over after a little bit of grumbling. I'd far rather accept those than be a Google spyware/adware product.
On mobile, Firefox is noticeably slower than Chrome on many web sites, which is concerning. While I'm willing to put up with some inconvenience to escape the Google surveillance economy, I'm not sure most people will.
So IMO: Desktop Firefox is fine.
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I've never left Firefox, and I've yet to see a change that went against my preferences as a user.
As an example, they revert browser.launcherProcess.enabled back to true every single time a point release comes out. As a result, the common Windows UI paradigm of dragging URLs to folders doesn't work. This is how I've maintained my bookmarks since 1998 or so.
Reverting user preferences for no reason is disrespectful. If I want my preferences to be reverted, I don't need Firefox. Google and Microsoft are fi
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Just because you weren't made upset about some arbitrary change or another that Firefox keeps making that fuck over your user experience, doesn't mean it hasn't happened. Like, a lot.
This is what happens when you start making decisions for your users rather than listening to them - they stop being your users and become someone else's users.
The quicker they figure that out, the more likely it is that they pull out of the swirling-the-drain vortex they're currently orbiting.
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I'll join you in your bitter disappointment. They took away just about everything I valued in Firefox, and pretty much laughed at what had been a loyal user base. I have yet to see any evidence that the people responsible for pissing all over their (former) users have paid a price.
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The easier fix is to allow the API to give ad blocking extensions more leeway. If this is done, people will be back.
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give the users the browser they want.
They will never do that. There are likely several entire careers within Mozilla invested in this strategy. Admitting it didn't work, and deciding to, say, bring back full XUL-levels of customizability, would cause heads to roll. Since those heads want to stay employed, they'll just double down on the same strategy of removing features, removing customizability, removing options, removing, removing, and then removing some more.
Once Firefox hits zero features and 0% market share, then they'll say "ops, too ba
Re:easy fix (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the obvious "easy fix" is to require US government websites follow web standards - none of this "viewed best in Internet Explorer I mean Google Chrome" crap.
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Modern HTML, CSS, and JS are collectively an API,so it wil
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Firefox removed the old-style extensions in 2015, 8 years ago. Do you have a more recent concern?
Re:easy fix (Score:5, Insightful)
So in theory there is an easy fix: Firefox has to increase its market share.
This is a daft response. The proper response for sites to strictly adhere to W3C standards while not relying on any standard that may be disabled. This means the site must be fully functional with no JavaScript disabled, not have excessive cookie use, and no use bleeding-edge standards, They should just make a functional website with HTML and static CSS. You can add support for all those things but the site needs to work with them disabled.
Be bitter all you want but don't be daft.
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Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
Also happy Firefox user. It's the only decent browser that isn't controlled by a corporation or a government hostile to liberty and democracy.
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Corporations that also control the entire web development environment. The web was supposed to be a free and open environment. But free ended up being free work, free contributions. While open ended up meaning we will keep hording your free work until we sell it all to a corporation and cash out.
The problems started way back, I think before the corps really got involved. Browsers became fragmented early on and it became normal to have to take special measures to make your site compatible with this or that browser.
Re:Sad -- browser password manager why??? (Score:2)
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trust a local store vs trust a cloud store
choose your venom, the local one can be setup without password, that is bad, and even with password, if weak, can be hacked
the cloud, you trust all your passwords to a services, that may do things correctly, but may also make mistakes (see lastpass) and if one day go out of business, you may end losing your passwords. either way, you put all your trust in their side and have no control over it...
Neither solutions are perfect, but you can say one is better than the o
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"Firefox" on iOS really just seems to be a skinned version of Safari, so there isn't much of a point in installing that version on your phone.
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Re:Sad (Score:5, Informative)
That's because Apple dictates that any "browser" on it's iOS app store is just a skin over their WebKit browser engine (read: Safari).
It's not Firefox at all. It's a Firefox skin on mobile Safari. Just like iOS Chrome.
Direct all complaints about iOS browsers to Apple, as Apple is enforcing that THEIR engine be the only engine allowed.
Re:Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Listening to some of the people in this thread whine about some decision FireFox made years ago while they gleefully keep using Chrome who has clearly stated they're going to do everything in their power to kill ad blockers is just laughable to me. I never switched to Chrome because I didn't like the idea of giving Google any more control over the web or any more data to mine, and after the Quantum update the performance was excellent so I never felt like I was missing anything. And then there are things that Chrome will never have, like the multi-account container plugin. I just don't get why people still love Chrome so much given all that.
Re: Sad (Score:2)
Yeah, it is weird that people will boycott Firefox for minor UI changes and then use Chrome despite the fact it gobbles up their data and destroys the free web. There are plenty of forks of Firefox that have the UI they want.
Re: Blunt truth (Score:2)
Yeah, they have egregiously violated your trust, it makes sense to trust Google.
Re: Sad (Score:2)
Me too. Govt sites are notoriously bad piles of obscure ie tech that locks out users. Why dont they instead work with open standards Firefox implements? Why does govt have to be a tool to use obscure bugs in popular browsers to lock out competition? Was not the Obamacare website boondoggle enough?
rally the flag (Score:5, Interesting)
Start by re-merging all the forks.
Then convince as many distros as possible to use FF (ESR) as their std web browser.
Yes, this reminds me of herding cats, but when you are 0.3% to that edge (pun intended) every little bit counts.
USPS heavily biased (Score:2)
Look at the stats and you see that much of the top sites are just people tracking their patches on USPS.
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So?
I'm pretty sure that both the USPS and it's customers (basically everyone inside the United States) appreciate wide compatibility of the USPS package tracking system with a wide array of web browsers.
Also, why wouldn't you want to use the user data gathered by one of your most trafficked sites for collecting user data? Seems like exactly the place to get accurate browser usage statistics to me.
Are you saying that USPS usage data is skewed against Firefox users? Or that Firefox users somehow consciously
not how geeks and nerds work (Score:3)
> it spreads quickly to not only the front-end dev community
That is not exactly how Geeks and Nerds work on Open Software tools.
Even if the US Govt stops using Firefox, several countries still use it, and >7% of desktop users still do. These people will need to have their Frontend frameworks / libraries work with the mozilla browser. And even if that number goes to 1%, you will still have geeks and nerds working on supporting the browser just because they feel like it.
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Maybe on hobby websites, yes, but the big ones maintained by webmasters and other people who generate the content won't. Modern websites are hugely complicated things and nerds and geeks alone can't manage all the work required to keep such websites working.
This is especially so to a project that has routinely discarded said nerds and geeks feedback. I mean there have been
Mobile letting it down (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox's share of the desktop browser market is 6.69%, compared to 11% for Edge, 13% for Safari, still quite respectable. It's the lack of penetration into the mobile market that's really dragging it down, and no surprise, because Firefox on Android sucks, and has always sucked. I hope it survives though, I was actually considering switching back.
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For starters, it's quite slow compared to, say, Vivaldi. Even the big update a few years back (Quantum? or something like that) that was supposed to be a big improvement only improved speed a bit; not nearly enough to tempt me to go back to it.
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What does suck exactly?
That many popular extensions didn't work, although that appears to have changed.
I'll have to reinstall and check it out again on my devices.
Re:Mobile letting it down (Score:5, Informative)
Using it here too. Well Fennec from F-Droid. It's still the only android browser that supports privacy badger and uBlock origin. And I have an extension installed to let me click on a block of text to reflow it. Even on mobile sites sometimes the text is way too small so I can zoom in and then press on the column to reflow it, which makes things so much better on mobile.
The one thing that nearly turned me away was forcing me to create a silly collection of extensions just to add the ones I wanted. I think that's finally going away. But Mozilla sure does a lot of inexplicable, anti-user things with their browser.
Game the system! (Score:4, Funny)
So Mozilla/FF can do what all the congresspeople do: game the system
A few vm's running FF browsing various US govt sites 24x7 and they're back above the threshold.
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So Mozilla/FF can do what all the congresspeople do: game the system
A few vm's running FF browsing various US govt sites 24x7 and they're back above the threshold.
I truly admire the suggestion for this futile, stupid gesture [youtube.com].
"Official" Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't "officially support" what web standards were supposed to obviate?
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That was kind of my thought, as well. I'm surprised I had to scroll down so far to find that one. Why does a website even need to "officially" support firefox? That's like talking about Netscape vs. IE from days of old. I thought we were passed the designing for a specific browser phase.
If this is all about just saying the devs for government websites don't have to specifically test against FF anymore... So? If the site is broken in FF then one of two things are happening. Their developing away from
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And I hope you we don't go back to the Netscape/IE battles of old where websites will work in one browser and not another because of proprietary "stuff".
We've been there for some time. Actually, I don't think we ever broke free from those days. Different browsers support different features and standards and market share dictates what the web developer decides to support. Unfortunately, that has resulted in Chrome becoming even more arrogant and forcing enshittification on the world through ads. I'm having to switch between browsers daily because of website support or brokenness in one site or another. It's very, very frustrating.
I don't see Firefox doing mu
meh (Score:2)
I never became a chrome user in the first place. I've used Firefox before it was called Firefox, and I suspect I'll continue to use it until it's no longer available.
I don't see this as the problem people are always making it out to be, save for a long time ago when some sites or apps were designed with Internet Explorer in mind, I've never once had a compatibility issue so severe that I've had to switch to another browser.
So what is the danger? That the powers that be, which control Chrome/Chromium may g
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I've never once had a compatibility issue so severe that I've had to switch to another browser
I just recently went to renew my US passport, and had to use Chrome. Try going to the USPS website and setting up an appointment for your passport with Firefox.
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Old Android bugs remain (Score:2)
%2 is a bad rule. (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly government websites should probably be way more conservative than that. It should probably not just %2 of the market but 2% of the market at any point in the past decade or so.
Access to government forms is one place where we should be especially careful to not cut anyone off. There is ZERO need outside some rare corners like GIS services and stuff for government websites to be doing anything fancy.
Users need for 99% of cases to be able to look up stuff, and submit forms. That's it. Special sensitivity to to things like screen readers for the disable should also be of paramount import.
Basically most government websites should be doing server side templates with plain jane HTML, probably should not even use CSS. Other than disabling things that are broken like DES and RC4 encryption, I should be able to use client code for 1997 to view a government site.
The standard should be Netscape 4.0 with stunnel in front of it can't handle it, its broken for gov sites.
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There isn't enough overlap between Netscape 4 and modern browsers in terms of things they can support to make that reasonable. Government sites would be crappy, backwards things if they went by that metric.
I can sympathise somewhat with the spirit of your comment, just not the specifics.
4% (Score:2)
Strangely, according to StatCounter, Firefox in USA is 4.21% [statcounter.com] in the US, not 2.3%.
Mozilla Making Chainges Against Users (Score:2)
History (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox was incredibly important. When it came out in 2004, Microsoft had a total stranglehold on the internet with IE 6 (which was already 3 years old, and it would still be another 2 years before IE 7 was released!). Internet Explorer had stagnated, which had the chilling effect of stagnating the web in general. I can't tell you how many bits of HTML I had along with comments like "hack for IE BS". IE was slow, buggy, and was bastardizing HTML as any kind of actual standard. They expected web developers to develop for IE and nothing else mattered. You have to remember, this was coming out of the era when MS was terrified that the web and Java could potentially destroy the Windows market. HTML and Java were not specific to Windows at all, thus if they became the dominant modes of content delivery and app development, Windows could be totally removed from the equation. So MS was actively trying to hinder HTML as much as possible (along with Java).
Firefox was a breath of fresh air, and not only performed much better, but actually adhered to HTML far better. I was on a mission to switch as many co-workers, clients and family members as possible to Firefox - and most did. Firefox was incredibly important because it had an actual impact on the market. It was a wake-up call and broke Microsoft's monopoly. It forced Microsoft to finally improve IE and actually have some respect for HTML. It also set the stage for a true 3rd party browser market outside of IE.
Four years later, in 2008, Chrome was released. Google simply had more resources to pour into taking browsing to another level. It was faster, less buggy, introduced stuff like per-process tabs and other innovations. I switched the Chrome for the same reason I switched to Firefox years before - it was better.
Of course now all these browsers - Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc - have most of these features by default, and the differences between browsers has really narrowed down, to the point most are using the same core HTML rendering engines underneath their UIs.
Still it's sad to see the very successful Firefox, which managed to go head to head against the Microsoft behemoth and actually win, fade into oblivion. One of the reasons Firefox was a success was because it was so lean and streamlined - it was a drastically trimmed down and optimized version of the bloated Mozilla. It was quick to install, easy to use and lightweight. It just doesn't stand out enough to warrant a compelling reason for its use over the alternatives.
As someone mentioned in another comment, ad blockers could potentially be the thing that keeps Firefox alive, if Google / Chrome decides to crack down on them. In the last month Google has gone to war against ad blockers on YouTube, which has resulted in an arms race between ad blockers (uBlock Origin seems to be leading the fight here) and Google. This amount of effort in trying to block ad-blockers really makes me wonder when Google will make changes to Chrome that will not allow ad blockers to be affective. They have already tried this, under the auspices of security or stability, etc, but for now Chrome still allows low-enough level access via the plugin API for them to function. I don't see that lasting forever, and if Chrome really does shut down ad blocking, I will switch to Firefox.
A simply stuipid premise. (Score:2)
It's a nonsense argument (Score:2)
6% on the desktop ... (Score:2)
Any site that blocks even 2% of it's potential customers is idiotic - when it's a government service it's just being deliberately awkward
We are already on #3 (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The "Brave Browser [brave.com] is what happens when an organization, like Mozilla, fires one of its best developers over a political contribution. Because that organization disagrees with that developer's views. That person becomes the founder & CEO of an arguably better open source browser [github.com] project without all the revenue that Mozilla is receiving from Google.
I am sorry to say... Brave, as a Chromium offshoot, is becoming a much better browser than Firefox.
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Mozilla didn't fire anyone. This outright lie needs to die.
He quit because he fucked up so badly that staying would have nuked the organisation. As CEO that's literally his job to take such an action if necessary.
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And he didn't fuck up anything at all. He expressed his opinion with a political contribution. Mozilla, in its wonderful egalitarian way, couldn't handle that.
"Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard."
It was certainly hard for them.
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His employees are a bunch of little babies who couldn't stand someone having a different political opinion from theirs. And now the company is going to bite the big one. Oh well.
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user agent (Score:2)
US Federal Government should determine this by the user-agent identifier in the logs of those who use its websites, coupled to cookies. Then, all we have to do is use Firefox when accessing such sites, in order to keep this above 2%. Am I right?
Safari is at risk when the EU ends app store locki (Score:2)
Safari is at risk when the EU ends app store lockin the forces web kit.
and apple used to have Safari for pc. They never pushed it for android.
Stop reading logs, start following w3c standards! (Score:2)
That is what they should do.
I used to have that message in my User-Agent string ... (before I switched to Chrome, and forgot about it ...)
Government encouraging the chromium monopoly (Score:2)
Sounds like some anti-trust action is needed to break up the chromium monopoly.
really? (Score:2)
Browser Desktop Share: Firefox at #3 (Score:2)
Google Chrome 77.03%
Safari 8.87%
Mozilla Firefox 7.69%
Microsoft Edge 5.83%
Internet Explorer 2.15%
Opera 2.43%
QQ 1.98%
Sogou Explorer 1.76%
Yandex 0.91%
Brave 0.05%
Side-effect (Score:3)
Case in point: Valve's steam client will be dropping support for Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 on January 1st, 2024 because of this: "This change is required as core features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of Windows"
https://help.steampowered.com/... [steampowered.com]
Re: (Score:2)