It's worth pointing out that Mozilla can only continue to put pressure on Google and fight for the open web if people continue to use Firefox and support them. Consider switching to Firefox even if you prefer Chrome. Report websites that don't support FF. We are all better off for the existence of Mozilla, and strong viable competition to Chrome and IE.
Even if thousands of developers from HN switch, that would hardly move the needle. Ordinary users just won't care about any of this.
Servo, which I think is the most important software project in the world, is where it will start to change. That's when those of us who may not be directly contributing code into Servo need to come out and do our thing. I still fondly remember the NYT ad and the crop circle. We should do it all over again.
> Even if thousands of developers from HN switch, that would hardly move the needle. Ordinary users just won't care about any of this.
Thousands of developers from HN make websites. If they switch to Firefox, at the very least, the websites they make will support Firefox. This won't necessarily make Mozilla commercially viable, but if people are really that concerned about it, they can donate to the Mozilla Foundation.
I am horrified by the number of developers who only test in Chrome. At my last gig I found glaring UI bugs (whole menus not responding to mouse clicks, for ex) in FF. Sad.
At my job I work in Firefox, a coworker works in Chrome, and a third person works in Safari (to be honest we don't bother checking the site in any Microsoft browser). That way we are able to do cross browser testing fairly easily.
Not really. Assertions like yours are a moral assertion that we should ignore the moral points at issue and instead favor some unspecified pseudo-business-y ones.
But even taken on business terms, you're sweeping a lot under the rug. As developers and entrepreneurs, we've benefited hugely from the web being an open, competitively specified platform. The more one large company can control the platform, the more it will get tilted toward that company and away from the rest of us.
That may not be bad for any given business next week; these things take time. But for anybody building a serious business, you're going to have to worry about the long-term, large-scale stuff. Google's been going 20+ years; Microsoft and Apple, 40+; IBM, 100+. They didn't get there by only thinking about the next quarter, and you won't either.
if using Chrome meant you needed to step on three kittens a day, I think I would agree with you.
but it's just browser preference, so the whole "moral" thing factors in less than whatever logo is printed on the pen I take from the junk drawer. I just want a pen that works.
One of those words that is often a tell is "just". That's where people sweep a lot of things under the rug. Including here, where you've hidden the fact that you made an unsupported assertion that assumes an answer to the question we're discussing.
I'll note that it's a different bad argument, one about consumer choice, than the one I was addressing, which was about business choices. But consumer choices too always have implications. That's why, e.g., boycotts are a thing: small decisions add up.
I'm going to have to agree with 2bitencryption here.
Everything is a "moral choice" when the person demanding the choice feels strongly about it, but that typically means you just lack perspective.
At the end of the day we're talking about browsers and websites, and while people may not LIKE it, when a business writes software it's a business decision as to whether or not they'll target all browsers or a subset.
By all means, keep on asserting things without demonstrating them and ignoring arguments and examples to the contrary. It doesn't actually convince, but I'm sure it makes you feel better.
Firefox got big in large part because they had good developer tools long before anyone else did. I worked several places where management would say things like, "don't waste time, we only need this to work in IE". The developers would nod and go right back to creating in Mozilla and then fixing it in IE after, because it was faster.
In that way there was a quiet revolution toward cross browser support.
I can confirm this, everyone I knew at the time was coding on Firefox even if no-one required any compatibility with it just for that reason, it was just much easier to code with.
When I shared my observations with coworkers, they would nod and say they had experienced the same thing. Same with peers I knew outside of work. Either we were in a very large bubble, or that was happening everywhere. And I think the rise of Mozilla aligns with those observations. It 'just worked' because everyone quietly made sure it did, even when people told them not to.
Our business decision is that Firefox needs to be supported as well. The fact that most of the developers use Chrome as their daily driver, however, results in a lot of bugs being seen and caught early (or at all) there.
This is just flat inaccurate. Given the GP comments' premise of optimizing only for the business's direct interests, the expected value of your contribution against monoculture is so negligible that it won't balance out changing damn near any habit that you had already chosen. It's a pretty basic collective action problem; if you're optimizing for yourself and your business alone, ignoring the wider picture is still the optimal decision.
The actual argument against (which others are making and which I'm sympathetic to) is that one shouldn't optimize only for direct bottom-line business interests, that businesses and people have a social responsibility, etc etc.
But that's entirely different from what you're talking about.
That's it. I didn't say we should optimize for direct bottom-line business interests. I said IT IS A BUSINESS DECISION.
It is not the decision of the developers unless the BUSINESS GIVES THEM THE ABILITY TO CHOOSE.
And even in THAT, it's a business decision.
That's all I said. The business that pays for the labor and chooses the direction they go in.
This idea that a business targetting a specific browser is some horrible social problem is silly. If I'm making a product that's meant to sit in a kiosk running Chrome OS, I'm sure as shit not going to pay for FF and Edge support. If I get it on accident, fine, but if something breaks in FF I'm not putting any effort in fixing it.
Eh, I'd rather not force my views onto people, against their interests, without their knowledge or consent. That strikes me as pretty dishonest.
I use both Firefox and Chrome pretty regularly, but I'm under no illusions that the quality of Firefox isn't quite a bit lower in multiple very concrete ways for my day-to-day usage (presumably because Mozilla has less resources than Google).
In the past, I have switched family members to a _better_ browser, but I'm talking about IE6 to Firefox, the usability gap between which was 1) in favor of the switched-to browser and 2) waaaayyy bigger than Firefox v Chrome in 2017. Even then, if I had to make that same decision again today, I would probably first convince the person whose computer I was modifying. Especially for non-technical users, having things suddenly change out from under you can be really jarring in an environment that's already pretty confusing.
Given the original posters perspective, Servo is certainly te least concern to change the tides. For an end user it makes absolutely no difference if Mozilla reloaded will be written in C++, OCaml, Rust, wathever. Features, performance, security and speed of evolvement do count.
Servo's WebRender sub-project has amazing performance (GPU accelerated compositing and rendering), and is scheduled to be merged in Firefox as fast as possible.
Stylo (Servo's style subsystem) has already landed in Firefox behind a preference flag (not everything is wired at this point), and it also improves perf.
So, yes Servo is of paramount importance for Mozilla's future, because it does make a difference to end users.
Another advantage of Rust is that it allows devs to avoid a whole range of bugs making it easier for them to iterate and ship updates without introducing new tricky bugs (race conditions can be hard to debug).
While dynamic languages may be nice when you want to explore a problem space, the stronger/most static type system is a benefit for upgrading large, mature code bases...
> Stylo (Servo's style subsystem) has already landed in Firefox behind a preference flag
Stylo is still a compile-time option, but will soon be built by default and controlled by an about:config flag. You can watch the progress to build by default in this Firefox bug:
> Servo's WebRender sub-project has amazing performance
Have you gotten amazing results on your machine? I ask because I think Servo, Rust, WebRender are awesome and I'm rooting for them, but the performance has not been great when I try Servo or WebRender in Firefox on multiple machines. Maybe it's just the machines I've tried on though.
And impact wise fast default on content blocking is the feature that gives the biggest bang for your buck. It makes for a nice, fast and more secure browsing experience, plus it is a differentiation Chrome might be reluctant to enable (without crippling it too much).
Browser benchmarks should include how long does it take to watch a 30 sec youtube video from application start to finish or how much 3rd party feature/bloat/mal/adware it downloads connecting to $major_site.
As the lead dev of VLC in a recent interview said, they’ve been offered huge amounts of money to include Google Chrome in their installer, and saying no was the hardest decision he’s ever made.
As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites, as long as Google intentionally makes the experience worse for Firefox (see the youtube redesign), as long as Google pays developers to ship Chrome as malware with every single installer, as long as Google forces OEMs to install Chrome with Android, Chrome will rule the market.
MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again. Having a great product and grassroots evangelism certainly help.
(Not that I think Chrome is THE ENEMY. It's constantly evolving, multiplatform and open source. IE was none of that. But I agree Google's practices you described are despicable. Huge kudos to VLC for doing the right thing)
With IE, Microsoft was influencing what the web was viewed with via its control of the client - Windows.
Google is influencing what the web is viewed with by simply being such a key part of the web itself, and using its weight from that direction instead.
(One could argue that they have Android for the client, but as a percentage of web users it's still far from what Windows had in the IE6 days.)
Firefox won back the web by having a great product, grassroots evangelism, and a Microsoft who badly neglected their competing product for many years. They left an opening.
Chrome might be losing its lustre but it's certainly not being treated the same way. I think Firefox's new battle for market share might be harder than it was vs IE, simply because Google is still so active on this front. In response, the only real new thing in our arsenal is hindsight, which I guess is what the VLC example above is a result of.
> With IE, Microsoft was influencing what the web was viewed with
Microsoft was trying (and succeeding) for the web not to be a preferable API to Win32, so as to keep that way a high barrier to entry into the OS business. Which is why IE was squarely against standards.
> MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again.
The Web won because a) its introduction was a one-time technological change whose social impact was on the order of the printing press, and b) Microsoft had gotten fat and lazy on their monopoly revenues from Windows and Office.
We can't get cocky here. It is perfectly plausible that HTML will still render 500 years from now. And I'm dead certain that it will still dominate 20 years from now.
Growing up in a major technical revolution, it's easy for us to assume that the future will have a lot of technical revolutions that will keep knocking monopolists, rentiers, and authoritarians off their perches. And if that happens, great. But we should really be planning for the opposite case.
Internet Explorer wasn't really multi-platform. The Mac version used a different rendering engine (Tasman as opposed to Trident) and it of course didn't have support for ActiveX extensions.
For a long time being a 90s Mac user sucked as different websites required you to use IE on a Windows PC.
Mobile is where the war is being fought. A better browser can ship with hundreds of millions of mobile devices. Firefox-next with ad blocking and better support for parallelism is just what phones need. Users will use what came with the phone.
It's the default browser I'm using right now on Android. Performance is still not on par with Chrome but it did improve since the last time I tried it a few months ago. The ability to install extensions surpasses anything else for me so I'm sticking with FF.
And saves battery and data. The absence of plugins on ios/safari and android/chrome is a severe deficiency. It is also interesting that adblocking firewalls get denied by the app stores...
It doesn't has text reflow after zooming, which Opera has. For all the other features I don't see anything horrible. It used to be slow at drawing pages but it's not anymore. I've been using it since Opera changed hands and it's nice to have uBlock on the phone too.
I've been using Brave[1] on my Android phone for the past two months. It's been brilliant. A much better experience than Firefox, which was a bit slow and some pages loaded as a white screen.
I'd love to use Brave on my desktop too, but their lack of plugin/extension/add on support cripples it a little. There's a couple I just can't live without. Using Iridium[2] on the desktop instead.
How do you get Firefox on devices? If OEMs want to use the Google Play store on any single of their devices, they have to make Chrome the default browser on all of them.
> In practice this means that the position of packages in node_modules is computed internally in Yarn, which causes Yarn to be non-deterministic between people using different versions.
I believe Chrome has to be installed, but it clearly doesn't have to be the default. Just see all the Samsung phones with the default Samsung Internet Browser as evidence.
Do you have a link to the interview? And how is the YouTube experience worse on Firefox? I didn't know of Google's practices except for the banner in other browsers.
> "To be honest we’ve been offered some insane amounts of money to do bad stuff around VLC, like shipping tool bars at the same time of the installer of VLC or or installing other software like Google Chrome and so on. And when you see the numbers they propose to you, you’re just like: How the fuck am I going to say no to that?"
> "The thing is, it’s not only my project so I’m not allowed to do that. [It’s the] legacy of other people. That wouldn’t be moral."
The European Commission has successfully acted against Microsoft in the past and has repeatedly tried to act against Google on various antitrust concerns.
I think, I could be wrong but I think he/she is referring to what the European Union did with Microsoft and asked them to include a way that asks new Windows users to select a default browser and offer them choices besides Internet explorer.
Perhaps he means a similar thing to what they did to Microsoft by forcing them to make it possible to choose a different browser when installing Windows.
It heavily makes heavy use of parallelism and the GPU which increases the responsiveness. It's also uses Rust as a programming language instead of C++ which will prevent a whole category of bugs like buffer overflows and use after free.
Demonstrated a successful code execution attack against Safari to gain root privileges using an use-after-free vulnerability in Safari and an out-of-bounds vulnerability in Mac OS X.
Demonstrated a successful code execution attack against Microsoft Edge in the SYSTEM context using an uninitialized stack variable vulnerability in Microsoft Edge
Demonstrated a successful code execution vulnerability against Microsoft Edge in the SYSTEM context using an out-of-bounds vulnerability in Microsoft Edge and a buffer overflow vulnerability in the Kernel.
etc. Highlights mine. All of these are prevented in safe Rust.
Do you have any evidence that's why users are switching away?
My general belief is that general-audience users don't care at all about bugs like those. Which is why we have so very many of them, and have for decades.
Rust's fearless concurrency[0] allows devs to write and refactor performant parallel code without the risk of introducing bugs, enabling them to ship upgrades faster.
It's the same benefit you get from strong, static types in a large project vs one with dynamic/weak types, but for another category of bugs. In large projects, it makes a difference.
I switched away from Firefox because at the time it was bloated, buggy, and slow. I haven't switched back because I am more familiar with Google's developer tools.
I can tell you exactly why I'm not using FF: due to extremely poor support for switching between multiple profiles. Oh, it's possible, but compared to Google's seamless support for the same, its very awkward, even if you install an extension (which is only available from a third party).
I think it's important to scale back expectations for Servo. Given that Servo itself won't be ready to be used as a main engine for quite some time do to insufficient site compatibility.
Project Quantum will use only pieces of Servo coupled along with Gecko. Maybe Mozilla will fully replace all of the old single threaded code at some point in the future but I imagine that's a ways off.
Given the gradual progress of these changes it's likely that any successes in performance it brings will be copied in the other engines before they are too far ahead.
I don't follow these things pretty closely but why is chrome so much more popular than firefox these days amongst non-technical users?
I use Firefox as my main browser but my girlfriend uses chrome on her computers so I get to use it from time to time. I don't notice any major differences, the extensions I care about are available on both browsers, the speed is not noticeably different etc... On top of that Firefox predates chrome so it's not like people not switching away from IE because they didn't know better. So what happened exactly? Is there some chrome killer feature that I just happen not to use myself?
There are people who actually do that because otherwise they get an inferior version of a website even though it works perfectly fine on Firefox as well.
Do you remember when chrome dropped? Gosh it was so blazing fast in comparison to everything else. I think that initial period is why so many regular people use chrome. It hasn't gotten to the point to look anywhere else yet, at least in my opinion. I think the other thing that pushed it this far is just the fact that it's new.
> Gosh it was so blazing fast in comparison to everything else.
It was dead slow, actually, unless you were running a modern (i.e. very fast) multicore PC and with a very small number of tabs. For example, when trying Chrome out soon after release, it managed to grind my PC to a halt because I dared open something like 5 tabs (whereas Opera was happily running double to triple digits). Back in 2008 multicore CPUs weren't as widespread as they are today, so for the most common cases Chrome was just slow, context switching PCs into the ground.
> I think that initial period is why so many regular people use chrome.
Regular people don't simply install new browsers, it's the people familiar with computers (like the family geek, or the guy maintaining PCs for a living) who push them unto regular people. Anecdotally it went something like this: technically inclined people were supporting Firefox (because it wasn't IE and because of A LOT of marketing) despite it being a crappy browser and there being better alternatives. Now, Firefox was not slow per se, but if definitely FELT slow, so when Chrome was launched the same people who had popularized Firefox started promoting the new shiny trinket. Everybody kept saying "it's so fast!" - well, it certainly FELT faster than Firefox, at least when it came to the UI, and that was enough to switch.
> I think the other thing that pushed it this far is just the fact that it's new.
I think so too. Shiny new things have the side effect of attracting the enthusiastic bandwagon jumping types, and enthusiasm can be contagious.
> It was dead slow, actually, unless you were running a modern (i.e. very fast) multicore PC and with a very small number of tabs.
I totally dispute that. I had a very modest PC at the time and I remember vividly using Chrome for the first time, noticing how much better it performed compared to firefox, especially if you had many tabs open.
I remember other people telling me it was much faster. I don't remember it actually being much faster, but I switched anyway because of horrific memory leak problems with firefox.
> noticing how much better it performed compared to firefox
Given that I used Opera's performance as a basis for my statement I guess your comment, instead of being a glowing praise of Chrome, simply reflects very poorly on Firefox.
At the end of the day, Chrome ended up using too many system resources to be a viable option for me at the time. People accused me on occasion of being an Opera fanboy, but, objectively, it was hard to justify why Chrome would need more resources than Opera while delivering significantly less features.
The same thing happened when Phoenix dropped. Over the years though it packed on the pounds though and started to look more like Navigator. Chrome's waist line has been expanding as well.
I don't have a good answer to your question, but for me it was actually performance. And this is particularly baffling, since Firefox seems to do extremely well in all benchmarks, often beating out Chrome.
But, as a quick test, I closed Chrome, and it was up again instantly (say 500ms). I did the same with Firefox (after a generous warmup / caching session), and got 4 to 6 seconds each time. Clicking links and page loading feels similar; on Chrome I don't notice it, on Firefox I always do. Am I the only one that feels this way?
> Clicking links and page loading feels similar; on Chrome I don't notice it, on Firefox I always do.
Because Chrome, by default, enables prefetching [0] (it loads links before you decide to click on them). Firefox will never do that due to obvious privacy concerns.
It's the usual "principle vs convenience" thing, where most people choose the latter.
> Link prefetching is when a webpage hints to the browser that certain pages are likely to be visited, so the browser downloads them immediately so they can be displayed immediately when the user requests it. This preference controls whether link prefetching is enabled.
> Possible values and their effects
> true
> Enable link prefetching. (Default)
You can check the value in your Firefox with about:config and searching for network.prefetch-next
My one is "false" and it's shown in bold face, meaning that I changed it to that value. Privacy concerns and also legal concerns: what if a site links another site that the legislation of your country (or the country you're travelling to) doesn't allow you to access? At least I get some hints of where I'm heading to if I'm loading pages myself.
How does prefetching affect things like the not-yet-viewed website's stats? Since it is a Google browser and Google Analytics is so dominate, is it to Google's advantage to do this for reasons other than convenience to the user? (Inflated stats for the prefetched website even though the user never viewed it?)
Nope. I really want to like Firefox but its performance is just so much worse across the board than Chrome.
Another example is video playback: Firefox, when viewing video, heats up my laptop to the point where the fans kick in at full blast. Chrome stays nice and cool on the same material. The difference in battery life is noticeable too.
For VP8 and VP9, Firefox and Chrome use the same video decoding backends, so it's likely not video decoding that is causing the problem. For H.264, Firefox uses the OS-provided codecs; I'm not sure what Chrome does, but in any case that's the only possible solution for Firefox due to patent issues.
If it's making that much of a difference in heat, it's probably using a software renderer instead of passing the decoding to the GPU. Check (Menu)->Help->Troubleshooting Information and see if it says "Supports Hardware H264 Decoding: No;". If you can't fix it, I recommend using an extension that adds video URLs to your VLC playlist. VLC supports playing YouTube URLs natively.
I'm on Linux and I don't feel any noticeable speed difference using FF vs Chrome (startup time doesn't bother me at all, my browser is always running and I rarely restart my machine). I've been using FF since the early days and never found enough reason to switch to any other browser and I'm quiet happy with the improvements that have been coming to FF lately and what the future holds.
I think for me it's specifically UI performance. Opening a new tab in Chrome is instantaneous. In Firefox there's a slight but noticeable stutter that annoys me just enough to avoid using it.
Session restore can make firefox take a lot longer to start. It's possible your profile has a very old session with a lot of tab history. Maybe try unpinning and closing all your tabs (there should be a 'bookmark all tabs' you can use to get them back later), and then exit firefox. This should prune all that tab data and history (session restore saves a pretty considerable amount of back and cookie history for each tab.)
> but why is chrome so much more popular than firefox these days amongst non-technical users?
Google aggressively pushed Chrome on web users.
Banner messages claiming the users browser was out of date (it wasn't, they just weren't using Chrome), or that this website works better on Chrome.
Redesigning their web services to be coincidentally worse on Firefox.
The numerous and excessive ways it was bundled with various other application installers. Most users don't customise and application install, they just stick with the defaults and the result was, they ended up with Chrome as the default browser.
Whilst Microsoft eventually started advertising Explorer as a response, Chrome was the first browser I'd ever seen advertised on billboard posters (liberally plastered all over London at least) and in non-technical magazines and newspapers.
I can't speak for anyone else, but for me personally, the deep integration with Google is a feature for me. Almost everything I do is on Google (email, domains, drive, Cell Carrier), so having the deep integration with Google on Chrome makes my life that much more convenient.
I got into chrome as a teenager, though, when my dad switched from firefox to chrome due to Chrome being apparently faster than firefox at its debut.
Firefox worked to close all memory leaks a few years ago. New ones are treated as bugs and fixed quickly. They even got aggressive about limiting memory that addons use. You can check about:performance to keep an eye on them.
> Consider switching to Firefox even if you prefer Chrome.
I have given Firefox plenty of chances. It's just too slow: webpages load slower, and when they are loaded interactions feel awful (low FPS on large webapps).
I haven't noticed this myself, and I use both extensively on a daily basis. I currently only use Chrome for work because of Google Meet. Drives me batty that I don't have a choice there.
I have the opposite problem somehow. Chrome is incredibly slow and pages take dozens of seconds to load. Firefox feels so fast and responsive. I think the issue is due to adblock though, which I keep off of firefox.
You pretty much sum things up as they were for me half a year ago. I'm not happy about them putting the sword of Damocles over Vimperator and Pentadactyl though, which is why I'm mainly using Qutebrowser on the desktop now.
That said, Mozilla is still awesome and FF will most likely remain my second go-to browser.
One other thing I stumbled upon, the responsive design mode in Chrome was not working correctly. I was pulling my hair out when developing with it. I switched over to Firefox in their responsive mode and it worked correctly and reflected what I saw on an actual phone.
What has always frustrated me most about Chrome is that certain bugs or fixes can take an eternity to fix despite there be many reports on an issue.
You make it sound like Mozilla is somehow fighting against Google for the open web. But virtually all browser vendors are aligned on this issue, and have been working towards improving the web through standardization, improved performance, and functionality for years now.
The point of the article is that while Google is mostly aligned on the issue, Google also does things like creating PNaCl, which is not an aligned behavior.
(P)NaCl was introduced to replace NPAPI, at a time when the majority of rich web interaction still happened through plugins.
I'm glad to see it killed off, and have been expecting it for a few years now. JS/asm and (hopefully soon) WebAssembly have supplanted many of its features and benefits.
Still, this doesn't strike me as anti-open web. Google offered a solution when one was needed - it didn't gain traction, so they eventually retired it.
Google introduced PNaCl and made it available as a feature any Web page could use, knowing that there was effectively zero chance it would ever become a cross-browser Web standard. That was anti-open-Web.
And yet I can still only use Google Meet in Chrome. And many "standards" are only partially implemented in other browsers, or require browser-specific prefixes.
I'd also go so far as to say that Google's AMP project, as implemented, displays a distinct step away from an open web.
I use FF, although Mozilla focuses on thousand of other things instead of making FF a great browser.
As a developer I'm annoyed every time I enter "com.scala.List" in the address bar and FF does not use google to search but thinks this is an url. No, "List" is not a TLD and no that website does not exist.
As a developer I'm annoyed every time I enter "defined.in.hosts.file" in the address bar and Chrome does not believe this is a url but performs a search instead. Yes, I can define anything as a valid domain in hosts and yes that website exists on my computer.
It does a DNS lookup and if it's a valid domain shows you this. If you see it for complete nonsense, then it's possible your ISP is doing DNS Hijacking like mine!
Eg. if I type "cheese", it shows "Did you mean to go to http://cheese/"? If I click that link I get TalkTalk's "Error Replacement Service" full of ads (or at least I did, till I switched to Google DNS because TalkTalk's "opt-out" system has been conveniently broken for years)!
Ah, that explains that. I always found that feature annoying, I didn't know it was because my ISP misbehaving. I always get a century link search page when I typo urls.
The new Google "did you mean to go to ?" nonsense is something else to add to that link!
My ISP (TalkTalk) claims to have an opt-out page but the forums suggest it's been broken for years, and today it is a 404. I have an open issue with the CEOs office to opt me out manually but they've been pretty useless so far.
If you add a slash to the end, it'll always treat it as a domain. eg. "cheese/".
I did see someone from Google ask if it'd be useful if after the first time, when Google knows it's a valid domain, it should just go there directly (even without the slash). Everyone said yes, but it doesn't seem like it was ever implemented!
I feel exactly the other way about Chrome; whenever I need to type in a test site URL, it thinks it's a search query, and I need to go back and stick http:// in front.
Does the 'g' prefix do anything? On my Firefox it still searches for 'g com.scala.List' in Duck Duck Go, my default search engine. When I run that on Chrome it searches for 'com.scala.List' on Github because I've chosen g as a search leader for Github (which is super convinient and I wish I could do that on Firefox).
Why should Firefox work like Chrome? They're two separate products, and Firefox offers an explicit search bar for disambiguating searches from addresses. Especially important since 'List' could indeed be a TLD in the near future.
The point of these commands (invented by Opera by the way) is to give you choice what search engine to use while not sacrificing your performance. Google's approach is different: remove choices that might confuse or distract you. Choose what you like.
I agree. I dont know where Mozilla is spending their money, but they are years behind in regards to security enhancements in comparison with Chrome, Edge, and IE11. Around IE7 nivea. Still waiting for 64 bit Firefox with Sandbox and per-tab-process and CFI.
I thought that's what Electrolysis was. We've switched to an ESR release with e10s disabled because of an incompatible add-on listed as compatible. Annoying, because the idea is if an add-on doesn't work with e10s, e10s will be automatically disabled. And of course in this case it doesn't since the add-on works "great" with it!
I believe the main thing Electrolysis does is split the UI and rendering into separate processes. It also creates separate processes for some other tasks. But as far as I know it doesn't give each tab a separate process.
Unfortunately it's not as easy as that. My web development is hugely dependent upon chrome's browser debugging. It's made my life a lot easier being a JavaScript dev. I'm sure Firefox has made strides but does it offer something better than Chrome? Probably not, there is a reason most web development shifted to Chrome in the first place.
It's true. I've been using firefox again for about a month now. It's pretty decent, but definitely lags behind. Stack trace errors in the console don't respect source maps. A 3D scene ive been working on has been slow to load/refresh, where it's a non issue in chrome. I'm sticking with it for now, as I don't want to be all in on one company, but it's hard at times.
I'll try Firefox after they complete the switch to Project Quantum. It will be a very serious competitor, especially on mobile phones, where using multiple processors and GPU rendering matters even more. But I'll switch because it will be safer and faster, not because of ideological reasons.
At my office, there is a proxy to access internet. When a site is blocked by blue coat filter, I launch putty to open a tunnel to my webserver and I launch firefox portable using my tunnel as a proxy. I used to do it using chrome, but the enterprise has set a policy to block configuration of chrome proxy (like internet explorer). firefox is the only browser that allows uncensored (and private) internet access in my office.
At my house (ubuntu gnome), windows firefox on wine is the only way I have found to access some webTV based on flash.
It may not be sufficient to just switch to FF. I think it likely that what FF needs is people putting in the grunt work of continuing to optimize the hell out of it so that it's performance-competitive with Chrome.
Users will choose the fastest browser that works, in general.
I'm more interested in the elusive-but-oh-so-important "Feels faster" metric, which is harder to capture in benchmarks.
To my taste, Chrome juuuust edges out at a cursory glance, but barely (though at this point, it's a little sticky for me because it has my Google account credentials, my bookmarks backed up to the cloud, etc., etc.). But it's definitely looking better than it did when last I tried that comparison.
No, I won't support Mozilla. I used Firefox for a long time, but then they decided to drop their extension capabilities for something very similar to Chrome's. Why wouldn't I just use chrome?
Second, the zoom functionality in Firefox is broken. On a 4k display, pages just get jacked up after doing Ctrl-+ a few too many times. Chrome's zoom is far superior. People have told me, "just change the default pixels per inch" nonsense. No, Firefox's zoom is just broken.
Lastly, after the SJW witch hunt and ousting of Brendan Eich, I don't care what happens to Mozilla.
