
State of web browsers in 2018 - petethomas
https://ferdychristant.com/the-state-of-web-browsers-f5a83a41c1cb
======
sstangl
As a Mozilla employee, speaking from my own limited perspective, it seems the
company as a whole broadly agrees with this analysis even if it isn't
vocalized quite this succinctly. Chrome started out being force-installed
alongside Flash, and there is no solution to the bundling problem -- the
problem is even larger in scale than the article suggests because of
Chromebooks affecting desktop. People who use Firefox in the future will
increasingly be people who do so consciously, presumably because they view
Mozilla as helping them protect their privacy. Chrome is and will continue to
be the default.

Eventually, Google will do something that is an abuse of their monopoly power.
Either there will eventually be a privacy/creepiness fiasco, or Google will
attempt to use Chrome as leverage to squeeze a competitor out of a market.

When that happens, Mozilla will be well-positioned as an alternative. The path
forward in this view would look more like Mozilla as a constellation of
disaffected companies and users attempting to free themselves from Google. It
won't look like Mozilla on the side doing something by itself. We will largely
be defined in opposition to Google.

The article correctly points out that a wiser Microsoft could have gotten a
head-start on this inevitability by partnering with us early.

~~~
Yizahi
Arguably Google is already abusing their monopoly power but in the way that
people like. I'm talking about AMP. In the future AMP/regular page boundary
will blur and Chrome/GSearch/AMPpages will merge in the ubiquitous googlenet
hosted on google servers (because it will work better than regular internet
pages). Almost everybody will be happy after this and Mozilla will fall into
obscurity.

Basically you can't create a revolution in tech by failing once and then
trying harder the second time and it looks like Mozilla failed even while
being better. The only way for Mozilla to win is (like linked article
suggests) is to dominate somewhere else and then leverage that to push web
browser. They won't do this and don't want to really.

PS: maybe they could buy/merge with other privacy oriented players in tech and
create end-to-end privacy services that are usable, seemingly secure and
integrated and then push this offering. But I can't see a big market today for
this offer if it would exist.

PPS: also to add to less known evil moves by Google - their U2F websites
refuse to work in Firefox, despite it supporting U2F for a long time.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
> Arguably Google is already abusing their monopoly power but in the way that
> people like. I'm talking about AMP.

 _Do_ people actually like AMP?

I hate it and strongly wish I could disable it for all Google search results.
It's supposed to make pages load in more quickly, but for some reason they
always seem to be _slower_ for me.

~~~
untog
Broadly speaking, yes they do. It _is_ faster in the vast majority of cases,
and non-techie friends of mine speak enthusiastically about the lightning bolt
icon. Of course, they don't understand the implications of it.

~~~
Izkata
> and non-techie friends of mine speak enthusiastically about the lightning
> bolt icon.

Which makes me think it's just confirmation bias. They expect it to be faster,
and so perceive it as faster. Just like when Windows Vista was presented to
users as the new Windows 7 (only the branding was changed for the experiment),
and they openly stated it was noticeably better/faster than Windows Vista.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
I'm not quite so quick to dismiss this out of hand, despite my own (negative)
experiences with AMP.

Google is _certainly_ capable of making mistakes, but I find it hard to
believe they would invest so much into AMP without strong metrics to indicate
that AMP pages load faster overall. And on a theoretical level, the
explanations of why AMP _should_ be faster also make sense.

~~~
Izkata
Note the phrasing, that's an important part of what I'm referring to: they're
talking about the icon instead of the speed directly.

------
adimitrov
Firefox for mobile is an excellent browser, and the only one I use. It
supports extensions, such as uBlock without rooting the phone. The user
interface is good, the browser is responsive and reasonably fast. Honestly, I
don't know why people aren't using it.

I think most people just don't care, and just use what the system provides. As
Google gets more invasive and evil, I hope that people will start to care, and
Firefox and other browsers start to flourish again.

~~~
SamWhited
> I don't know why people aren't using it.

Like the article said: no one cares (more or less) about how good the browser
is. If you have to go install a new browser, that's more work than just using
the builtin one, and Google can force every Android phone to install Chrome
out of the box.

Also, though I use Firefox mobile out of a desire to not be a part of the
Chrome problem (even though I know it's useless and I'm not actually helping
by doing so), it's not fast, and it's not nice to use. It's painfully slow,
crashes much more frequently than the other browsers, has confusing settings
and constantly promotes garbage like Pocket (which you can disable if you dig
through the confusing settings, but you can't actually uninstall it), etc.

Until Mozilla gets the performance problems under control (and they're
_finally_ attempting to do this with Quantum et al.) they won't stop the
bleeding. Unfortuantely, stopping the bleeding is the easy part: getting new
users is the hard part and I tend to agree with the article that they don't
have a way to do that on mobile (though I know nothing about marketing, so
hopefully I'm wrong and just spouting nonsense here).

~~~
CWuestefeld
_Until Mozilla gets the performance problems under control_

Performance is 1/2 of the reason that I prefer Mozilla. As one of those people
that typically has 50-100 tabs open, the Firefox model for memory management
is vastly superior.

The other half of the reason is TreeStyleTab, again because I'm one of those
zillion-tab users. Vertically-stacked tabs in a sidebar is the only way to
manage that mountain of tabs - horizontal at the top just doesn't work. And
Chrome doesn't have any extensions that support this.

~~~
SamWhited
That's actually really interesting; I don't tend to have a ton of tabs, but
coworkers always told me Firefox did a terrible job with 100+ tabs and that
Chrome worked better. This always made sense to me because of the multi-
process architecture of Chrome, but I've never seen it myself.

So you're suggesting that Firefox actually performs better now? Maybe all my
coworkers complaining about it are just repeating lore that no longer exists?

Many tabs aside though, I still have a lot of performance problems with
Firefox (although it's getting better; Quantum was fantastic, I was getting
really fed up with Firefox for a while before that).

~~~
Semaphor
I don't understand how anyone can claim FF is faster. I love FF and I switched
completely from chrome. But Chrome is far faster. I don't know maybe it is
because I have an abundance of RAM (32 GB) and others don't and that's why
they think FF is faster.

But for me, it's easy to test. Go to
[http://addic7ed.com/](http://addic7ed.com/) and open the (very long, nearly
5k entries) [Select a TV Show] drop-down. On FF (and IE/Edge FWIW) there is a
noticeable delay in opening. I'd say 200-400ms. On Chrome it opens instantly.

Next, have something playing that consumes decent amounts of CPU in a tab. I
used twitch. Then go somewhere and rapidly open new links (I middle-clicked
around on Wikipedia). After about 10 tabs, FF starts slowing down (opening
tabs that look like blank tabs and only starting to load after a delay) and
possibly interrupts playback in the background tab. IE/Edge are even worse and
will start opening tabs slower than you click and keep opening for a while
after you are done. In Chrome on the other hand, everything is instant.

I'm on Windows 10 and everything is up to date. I'd love for someone to tell
me that it's different for them.

~~~
seba_dos1
I have 8GB RAM. It doesn't matter to me that Chrome would be faster if it
could eat 4 times the whole RAM I have - what matters is that it's not.

Also, it's a pretty weird test case to compare performance, probably not
related to anything that actually matters. What's more, Firefox tries to style
the drop-down to match with the system UI, while Chrome doesn't even bother.

~~~
Semaphor
> I have 8GB RAM. It doesn't matter to me that Chrome would be faster if it
> could eat 4 times the whole RAM I have - what matters is that it's not.

I specifically said that I can see it being a problem in low ram cases.

> Also, it's a pretty weird test case to compare performance, probably not
> related to anything that actually matters.

This is not some random benchmarks. Both of these problems are things that I
regularly encounter on actual websites. And it's great that FF styles it, but
I'd rather have performance than system appropriate dropdowns.

~~~
seba_dos1
The only reason 8GB RAM can be considered "low" instead of "appropriate for
most workloads" is Chrome.

~~~
Semaphor
I don't even run Chrome outside of testing compatibility. I do run Visual
Studio, often multiple instances. Right now I don't, only FF, a few apps and
Stellaris (which only uses around 500 MB), yet I'm still at nearly 16GB of
Memory usage. 8GB might be enough for many (most?) people, but not for me, and
it has nothing to do with Chrome.

~~~
seba_dos1
I also sometimes long for more RAM, but those situations definitely aren't
what can be sanely considered "most workloads".

------
Reinmar
Amazing read! Very insightful and open at the same time. I've literally
highlighted every other sentence in it. Thank you, Ferdy!

I basically went through the same thinking process myself. I'm a moderate
idealist and would like Firefox to succeed because it's important for the web
that there's no monopoly. However, my realist soul tells me that Firefox is
losing badly and it's hard to tell where it's going to end. It's a pity that
Microsoft didn't choose Gecko – I wonder if they even seriously considered it.

With Microsoft joining Chromium, we're slowly entering a duopoly of WebKit and
Chromium. It's still a much better situation than the dark IE6 times. However,
it's hard to tell whether WebKit (AFAIU, supported mainly by Apple and
Samsung) will keep up with Chromium (Google and Microsoft) in a long term. I'm
afraid that it will look like a Cold War's arms race – one of the parties will
invest so much that the other will just lose economically (not being able to
afford that many developers). Such economical wars make developers happy,
because the web progresses very fast, but I think it actually leads to a
monopoly.

Anyway, I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for Gecko. They do a great job
there and perhaps will be able to partner with a big enough company to keep
its pace and market share.

~~~
bergie
> I'm afraid that it will look like a Cold War's arms race – one of the
> parties will invest so much that the other will just lose economically (not
> being able to afford that many developers).

Given all the "Safari is the new IE6" posts that have been here over the past
few years, that seems to be already happening.

Apple is lagging behind quite a bit with implementing newer web standards,
especially in areas where they have anticompetitive interest in doing so (PWAs
cannibalising native apps). Of course, they're the only game in town on iOS,
so that ensures them some captive market.

~~~
Reinmar
I'm not sure how long they can keep doing so. At what point it may affect
iOS's reception in general?

From my own experience, making the app I'm working on (CKEditor 5 - a web
based rich-text editor) compatible with mobile Safari is right now impossible.
None of the RTEs work well in mobile Safari because of its quirks and bugs.

If Apple will overdo this (just like Microsoft did with IE6), that may affect
iOS's usefulness. Sure, right now you can't build a business without your
presence there, but there may be a breaking point. It's hard to imagine and I
kinda doubt it will happen (I rather agree with the author of this article
that Apple will invest enough to keep Safari alive), but it's a possibility.
Microsoft screwed it up once, so can Apple.

~~~
wvenable
If you care about iOS, you don't build a web application you build a native
one (perhaps using web technologies). This ultimately benefits users and Apple
so there is no incentive to improve this.

------
Cynox
If it had been introduced today, would PNaCl have been rejected which
ultimately lead to a better solution (WASM), or would it have been broadly
accepted since it had sufficient market reach though Chrome?

~~~
jhpriestley
Five years on, asm.js/wasm has been completely rewritten, has almost no
adoption from developers, and lacks many of the features from PNaCl ... it may
turn out well eventually but I don't think it's a great success story for web
standards.

~~~
pcwalton
PNaCl didn't have adoption either, and the entire foundation was flawed.
Starting with LLVM may have made it easy to add features quickly, but the only
reason to do that would have been to get early adoption at the expense of
long-term engineering benefits. That bet failed.

------
superkuh
We're getting to the point where browsers are worthy of the decades old
criticism Emacs has received. They have eventually become an OS with many fine
features - simply lacking a good web browser.

It's a large, sprawling project to make a good OS. Especially when the
language of choice to run on it changes with such haste.

Hopefully this nth re-imagining of dumb terminals dies off over the next few
years and applications go back to the OS where they belong. Otherwise thing
are going to get rough.

~~~
tokyodude
Browsers to me are amazing. I can run untrusted code in my computer from all
over the world and at least with Chrome the odds of my machine getting pwned
are pretty low. The Chromium team fixes security issues quickly. For that I
get this amazing environment where I can see things as incredible as Google
Maps 3D, games, music apps, etc all sandboxed incredibly well.

The whole thing is far far more secure than running native apps on Windows,
MacOS, or Linux, they're arguably far more secure than Android and maybe more
secure than iOS.

In other words, they aren't just an OS, they're a secure OS. Something most
OSes don't give me.

~~~
superkuh
This is getting worse and worse though as browsers expose more and more of
their host operating system's functionality. The benefits of using a website
instead of a native app are quickly disappearing, while the drawbacks have
only been somewhat mitigated. And this leads back to my original post.

Additionally, it promotes the software as a service milking of fees and online
only access. It prevents end users from ever being able to tell what code is
going to be run on this computer since it changes on a whim. No hash checking
of binaries is going to help you here.

There's no doubt browsers are supremely complex, amazing things. But that
isn't good.

~~~
tokyodude
Well to each there own. For me I'd prefer everything in the browser. I hate
having to trust native software. Native software can read/upload my entire
home folder, all files, .ssh keys, browser history, password database, photos,
videos, etc... Websites can't. Native apps have access to every open exploit
on my machine. Webapps don't. Native apps can scan my network for other
exploitable devices. Webapps can't. So, more webapps for me please.

~~~
superkuh
Web apps that use electron (for example, Discord's desktop client) have full
filesystem access and can do just what you say. Many people think it's safe
because it's 'web'. It isn't. It's worse because of the misperception.

They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME +
'/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even
notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client
is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their
servers every time you launch it).

And with both remaining big browsers dev group announcing they'll be adding
greatly expanded filesystem access to browsers for normal websites this will
likely apply there too.

~~~
tokyodude
Electron is a native app. so agree, don't like it, prefer web app

------
jacobherrington
I'm a developer and a Firefox user. I'm always a little sad when I pair with
another developer, and they ask why I'm not using Chrome.

Mozilla is one of the few tech companies that care about the well-being of its
users. In my opinion that is very special.

~~~
azangru
> I'm a developer and a Firefox user.

By developer, do you mean web developer?

I tried to use Chrome dev tools, and they were incredibly easy to pick up;
however whenever I try to use Firefox dev tools, they feel embarrassingly
awkward. Perhaps it's just the familiarity with the tools (and if so, I am
very curious to hear whether you prefer Firefox dev tools over Chrome's), but
have a nagging feeling that it's just an inferior developer tool.

~~~
vanadium
Both have their pluses and minuses.

It was delightful when auditing the experiences from a potential new client in
Firefox Dev Tools the other day, and realizing that I could see, inline to the
target DOM element, JS events tied to them while looking through the source.
Saved me a good amount of time.

When I'm looking for pure-play performance auditing, Lighthouse integrated
into Chrome's Dev Tools are an obvious win.

So yeah, each have their strengths and weaknesses.

~~~
azangru
Also, finally they made the whole web console into an editable area, like in
Chrome dev tools. I used to be so frustrated that you had only one line where
to write code.

------
lettergram
Reading this on FireFox mobile, I think it's the best mobile browser out there
(I've tried a lot of different browsers).

Sad to see it not gaining market share. That being said, there is a way for it
to pick up steam. It would just require a new platform to come a long
(probably competing with Google) to use FireFox

~~~
kibwen
That was precisely the point of FirefoxOS. Mozilla knew years ago that the
browser wars would come to hinge upon platform defaults. If you want to have a
dominant browser these days, you also need to ship hardware yourself, and you
then need to convince people to use it.

------
jaredcwhite
This article's assessment of Safari is way off. It's an _excellent_ browser,
and my default browser as a web designer and application developer. The
interface is night and day superior to Chrome, it's very very fast on macOS
and iOS, and it's often been at the forefront of design-related improvements
to the web.

The one area it's historically been behind on (progressive web apps) is the
reason it gets knocked by people who care primarily about progressive web
apps. Personally I'm more interested in the web primarily as a visual
interface communications medium, and so in that sense, I'm actually _against_
a number of decisions Google has made in its development of Chromium over the
past few years (because Google has also prioritized PWA over other use cases
for the web).

Anyway, if you don't care for Safari, that's your jam, but to state
objectively that Safari is mediocre and Chrome is much better is simply
unjustifiable and reveals the bias of the author.

~~~
lazzlazzlazz
I haven't seen a single sober argument in favor of Safari. Even now, before
writing this comment, I did a small side-by-side comparison and I can't find a
single place Safari really stands out as better.

I'm not saying you're wrong - opinions about usability have some subjectivity
- but the opinion that Safari is an `excellent` browser are a small minority.

~~~
thirdsun
> I haven't seen a single sober argument in favor of Safari. Even now, before
> writing this comment, I did a small side-by-side comparison and I can't find
> a single place Safari really stands out as better.

I'm not a Safari user, but for owners of Apple laptops battery life should be
a big one. It's my impression that Safari is significantly more efficient when
it comes to energy consumption.

------
bad_user
From TFA:

>> " _For developers, it’s one less browser engine to worry about_ "

>> " _For the open web: it’s complicated. If I were to put on the hat of a
pragmatic developer, I fail to see the big gain in having competing browser
engines._ "

The author does not understand web standards and probably doesn't remember
IExplorer's monopoly and the era of " _works best in IExplorer_ " websites.
And what fewer and fewer people remember is that IExplorer 5 was the best
browser of its generation, the Chrome of its days.

And actually I fail to see what this article is doing on HN. Surely there must
be better rants around.

~~~
wvenable
The author says "Microsoft had a browser that sucked (IE6)." This is not true.
Microsoft had the best browser -- fastest, most stable, and friendliest for
development. They created many of the standards we now take for granted. IE
was literally the Chrome of the day -- the best browser installed by default
on the biggest operating system.

~~~
joel_ms
Then they decided to stop improving IE6 (outside security updates) because
they (correctly) realized that the web was a threat to the company. IE7 was
released 5 years later, literally due to the pressure of other browsers on web
standards support.

That's when IE 6 sucked, and we all had to live with that suckiness for years
on end because of microsofts insane backwards compatibility policies keeping
deprecated software alive on life support.

Even Microsoft has a IE6 countdown timer now
[https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
edge/ie6coun...](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
edge/ie6countdown/)

IE6 was an unfathomably damaging disaster for the web.

------
tokyodude
Personally I see the bigger issue right now as Apple. Apple basically has all
their iOS users hostage to WebKit. Maybe we'll get lucky and Apple will lose
the current app store case and another store will be able to allow other
browser engines on iOS and hopefully that will light a fire under their butts
so they start implementing all the missing APIs.

As a dev there are so many features missing from iOS WebKit and because iOS
has such a huge market share I'm basically forced to design without those
features.

I don't personally see the issue with one browser engine. It can be skinned
differently and different features can be enabled or disabled. More people
from more companies can contribute to the same basic engine. Kind of like so
many Linux distros contribute to the same basic kernel.

~~~
pcwalton
Again: How do I get Chromium to accept our Rust code, in the world where it's
the only browser engine?

------
singularity2001
There is a different way to interpret this: Firefox is irrelevant on mobile,
but not on Desktop. Will mobile kill desktop? No, these are two different
markets/use-cases/applications. Just like video didn't kill the radio*.
Firefox will stay relevant on desktop a.k.a. in work environments.

~~~
snaky
> Firefox is irrelevant on mobile

That's pretty sad, considering the fact it's the only mobile browser not only
with the support of extensions, but _the same_ extensions as the desktop
version.

Future might not be that grim for mobile Firefox actually, with more and more
modern Android smartphones and tablets support more and more RAM, and 4GB is
pretty much standard.

~~~
Kye
Mobile Firefox didn't support all extensions last I checked. It at least has
uBlock Origin on Android, but almost everything else I looked for wasn't
available. Firefox on iOS doesn't support them at all.

~~~
snaky
I think most of extensions that are not listed as compatible with Android
version of Firefox is due the developer's lazyness to test it on Android and
check the additional checkbox submitting it to the store. There are some
differences in API, but they are minor [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Differences_between_desktop_and_Android)

------
scblock
Web developers "building for Chromium" is a travesty. It's every mistake made
when IE was dominant, repeated. Just do a find and replace from Microsoft to
Google. If you are a web developer, please don't do it, and don't try to
convince yourselves that it's OK. It's not OK. It wasn't OK before, it's not
OK now, and it won't be OK down the road. I don't care that it's expedient;
like your reliance on third party tracking scripts it shows you don't respect
me.

Microsoft has done us no favors today.

------
austincheney
> At least those browsers are compatible with the web. Websites will work in
> them because websites are built to work in Chromium.

That is a poorly drawn conclusion. Edge is compatible with the web. Developers
are solely developing for Chrome and not caring for cross browser testing. As
a Firefox user I sometimes encounter this myself.

~~~
fchristant
hi, I'm the author. Agree with your point when you read it like that, so I'll
clarify what I meant.

"Compatible with the web" in the context of this article means compatible with
the web that is primarily built to work on Chromium/Webkit. Because at this
point of time, the web is Chromium.

You're right that Edge is compatible with web standards, albeit that they are
lagging a bit behind in implementing newer standards. By that logic, IE11 is
also compatible with web standards.

------
ksec
May be I am in the extreme minority. I don't have problems with Safari. (
Judging from the 170 Comments so far and not a single supporter of Safari, I
really think I am )

Instead of implementing every single iteration of Web Standard that Google
dished out, kill it and rework much like all of their products, Safari decide
to pick it up once everything has been stabilise.

Instead of trying to turn everything on the Web as Web App and give everything
on the computer a Web API, they have been perfecting the Web Pages. ( Which in
terms of publishing standard is still far from perfect )

------
skybrian
Even if some web sites don't care about cross-browser adoption, it seems like
the browser vendors do, including people at Chrome who propose new standards?

As long as this is the case, the web standards process is still working much
as it always has. Apple and Firefox still have a veto.

~~~
bzbarsky
As far as I can tell, people at Chrome have _very_ strong incentives to
propose new standards and ship implementations of them in the browser.
Incentives around then responding to feedback on those standards and getting
them into a state where anyone else would implement them are much weaker.
Incentives to not ship until this process has happened are nonexistent; in
fact lack of interest from anyone else is very explicitly never a reason to
not ship something for Chrome, as far as I can tell.

Disclaimer: I work on Firefox, but read the blink-dev list fairly regularly;
the last sentence above is repeated pretty often on that list.

~~~
skybrian
Hmm, what do you think of Blink's feature launch process? [1]

(I'm no expert, but to me it seems impressively bureaucratic.)

[1] [https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-
features](https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features)

~~~
bzbarsky
I think it's a lot better than not having a process, for sure! The hearts of
most of the people involved are in the right place, as far as I can tell, and
they do listen to feedback some of the time. That said, they feel that if they
think something is a good idea then that means they should do it even if
others disagree. Which is understandable, of course.

------
xte
IMO the actual state of web browsers is: "there is NO browsers.", we have
labeled as browsers awful monsters that are a sort of OS-cancer that try to
reduce OS itself as a mere kernel and basic userland needed to run that
monster.

Actual size of those project is so big that practically no one, their devs
included, can know the entire big picture, there are so any day new critical
security vulnerabilities and a constant refrain, repeated following the nazi
Goebbels principles of "repeat a lie enough and it became reality", that
desktop is dead and the sole possible evolution are those monsters and, of
course, "the cloud", because "we need integration and the sole really
integrated platforms are cloud and mobile" and other classic marketing
phrases.

Unfortunately, as with physical cancers, he are in the process of succumb. And
even worse there are many people happy with that, like few crazy individual
happy to have AIDS "so they know that they can get nothing worse STM and they
feel free"... Or like south Koreans that pay a "prison hotel" to "free them
for daily life"...

I think a ~60g rifle cartridge charged with salt and a small forest can be a
good playground, only I fear we may run out of salt...

~~~
kiriakasis
Which is part of the reason for Microsoft switch. To bring new life to the
desktop via vastly better electron performance.

Which can be seen as the best and worst of both world at the same time. For
sure we live in interesting times.

------
jchook
I want to switch to Firefox.

The few things preventing me seems small, but have made the transition
unfriendly and/or tedious.

1\. Chromium "Multiple Users" feature allows me to separate business and
personal life very conveniently. Now that I have this feature, I cannot give
it up. It seems Firefox has this functionality, but it's difficult to use
without additional extensions and "Import from Chrome" doesn't support it.

2\. 1Password and other extensions I use on a daily basis have inconvenient
drawbacks on Firefox. For example, 1Password dropdown does not show in form
fields like it does in Chromium.

3\. Firefox UX still feels... meh. The ugly dotted focus ring around any link
I click stands as a good example. I don't see any preference to turn it off.
Menu navigation... there's no submenu peeking-- you have to click in then
click back. The whole browser feels jerky compared to Chrome.

It's easier and more pleasant for me to ignore Chrome's lack of privacy and
forget about Firefox.

I think Mozilla should give some serious thought and focus on making it
incredibly easy and smooth to switch to Firefox.

------
nix0n
Comparing default Chrome vs default FireFox it's easy to think they're
similar, and say "Chrome is ok."

But FireFox-with-blockers is in a class by itself in terms of speed and
usability on both desktop and mobile.

Most of the things that work on Chrome but not Firefox end up being blocked
and I don't even notice they're gone.

The recent change to make tracker blocking default in FireFox gives me hope.

------
asituop
I really don't find this insightful, just repeating what everyone thinks :
"people don't care about privacy", "Chrome is successful because it is
installed by default", etc. thx captain obvious

------
miles_matthias
Great article.

Discussion question - what incentives need to change to make Apple invest more
in Safari? They've always been invested in native apps first and foremost,
because that's where they make their money - the app stores.

The other place they make their money is hardware. And it's hard to say you
buy a MacBook or iPhone because of safari. You don't.

So I just don't know what it will take for Apple to make significant
investments in the web. Whereas Google makes all their money on the web.

~~~
kitsunesoba
I’m not sure that Apple specifically avoids investing in Safari… I think it’s
more that their vision of the web differs significantly from Google’s. They
still see Safari as a web browser while Google sees Chrome as a platform akin
to an operating system.

Apple also just prioritizes different things in WebKit than Google does with
Blink. Where Apple implements energy saver and privacy protection features,
Google implements whizz-bang bells and whistles to keep the attention of front
end web developers.

------
SamWhited
Great read, although I thought it wasn't quite cynical enough about the bad
things Chrome can do with Blink (is that their rendering engine? Whatever it's
called, I forget, but it doesn't really matter) dominance: the article
suggested that the way forward is to ensure that the standards process has
equal representation, and I agree with that, but once all the other browsers
are using your rendering engine you don't have to care about the standards
process. Just like IE back in the day, or Netscape before that, you can
introduce a blink tag and everyone else has to do it or it gets to be
standardized later to be compatible with what you've done. The standards
process becomes more or less useless every single time we get into this
situation. Google's already doing this to a certain degree, see also SPDY and
QUIC, or any of the various Chrome-only CSS things that everyone else adopts.
For SPDY/QUIC they're still working within the process, but they basically get
to force their baseline without any competition even so. Later they won't even
have to pretend to work within the process.

------
lostmsu
I stopped reading the article after the statement about Edge and FF, that a
lot of sites do not work in them. I am yet to see any of those websites
outside of google.com. And the author did not name any examples. That made me
think the author does not know what he is talking about.

------
mike22223333
As a publisher, most of us do not care about Firefox either. They have done us
no good. So we don't even bother to test on it.

Their so called "Tracking Protection" is nothing more then a gimmick. It can
be bypassed easily using methods other then cookies. All it did was reduce the
revenue from ads because of no cookies (the legitimate way to track id's). It
did an insignificant harm to Google. But it reduced the revenue from Firefox
users by a huge percentage for publishers.

Firefox is losing because it favors the wrong demographics. Firefox offers
nothing much exclusive to users and neither to developers. Most people using
ad blockers, use Firefox on mobile.

Sad to see it the way it is. Safari did the same. But the market share is
still relevant, but it is declining as well. Once it reaches a certain point,
no one will bother to test for it either.

DNT was a shit show. DNT should have always required manual user intervention
to be respected.

Google's interests apart from their AMP project aligns with the publishers. If
we win, they win.

~~~
GonzaloQuero
So Firefox's Do Not Track is harming the way you track people through
advertising?

I'd say it's working perfectly, then. Maybe it is your business that is
broken.

~~~
Spivak
Businesses that make their money on ads have no reason to ensure their product
works on a segment of the browser market that almost entirely blocks ads.

------
fiatjaf
I don't understand why people don't use Firefox for Android. It's easily the
best mobile browser: allows addons (like uBlock Origin) and connects with the
desktop browser (share tabs etc).

------
djhworld
An on point article and excellent read, but I felt deflated by the end.

This is the end of days for the open web I'm afraid, and this article lays out
the path travelled and road ahead.

------
aklemm
As good a place as any to ask something I've been wondering about: Is a
Chromebook a complete computing environment now that WebAssembly is getting
adoption?

~~~
sehugg
Depends on your definition of "complete" \-- ChromeOS now has Android and
Linux container support, so you've got options for command-line apps.
Ironically, you have to run Electron apps (based on Chromium) in a Linux VM.

~~~
aklemm
Interesting, thank you. I could see Electron apps replaced with WebAssembly
apps eventually.

------
Wowfunhappy
The author of this article hand-waves away the speed advantages of one browser
engine over another.

I'd be inclined to agree, except, am I the only one who has seen a marked
speed advantage in Firefox Quantum over other browsers? I'm reminded of how I
felt about Chrome in the early days. Everything just seems to load in ever-so-
slightly more quickly.

I still use Safari on macOS due to Apple's nice touchpad gestures, but on
Windows I'm now Firefox all the way. Not just because I like what Firefox
represents, but because I find the experience markedly superior.

~~~
fchristant
hi, author checking in.

Just doubling down on my statement. I've seen hundreds of discussions and
flame wars on browser performance, RAM usage, the ability to keep open 200
tabs.

I mean it when I say that I cannot reproduce any of these differences. Perhaps
I could if I would actively measure things, but in terms of just experiencing
the speed of all major browsers, I really do not see a meaningful difference.

It could be device related, but I'm on a 6 year old PC (a pretty sizable one
though), not having any issues on my mediocre work laptop either.

Doesn't mean it doesn't matter in absolute terms, I'm just saying I don't see
it. The more important point though is non-technologist do not tend to pick
browsers in such rational ways.

------
Domark
This blog post was tough to read! Seems to have capped out at a 6th grade
level.

Re: the topic, the author shows clear bias toward Firefox. It might be better
to just acknowledge this: the best browser wins on each platform. Period.

Safari is up there because it runs the best/fastest/with least trouble on
iPhones and iPads.

20/20 means PERFECT vision. Above that is ‘abnormally good’.

In other words, the author has a clearly biased view, tries to figure out the
obvious, and doesn’t ‘agree’ with definitions for words. Right!

~~~
fchristant
hi, author here.

"This blog post was tough to read! Seems to have capped out at a 6th grade
level."

I'm not a native speaker, and this is the best I can do. I was expecting less
than 6th grade, so thanks!

"Re: the topic, the author shows clear bias toward Firefox"

Yes, the article literally says I am biased towards Firefox success. You
didn't discover a secret plot or anything.

"It might be better to just acknowledge this: the best browser wins on each
platform."

No, the one shipped to user's home screens wins. Even crappy ones.

"20/20 means PERFECT vision. Above that is ‘abnormally good’."

If it would mean perfect, there would not be a level above it. I do agree the
statement isn't as clever as I planned it to be.

