This is why I use installable PWAs wherever possible. On my Android phone right now, the Outlook PWA uses 281kB. You still get notifications, but I haven't measured if data usage is higher.
In my limited career I have been in several projects whose plight didn't make any sense -- with all the smart people and the effort poured over them, how could the disaster continue to unfold! -- until I realized failure rather than success was the goal.
I can't understand how this keeps coming up when Google just lost an antitrust case largely because they pay Firefox and Safari for their default search. Chrome only exists to funnel people into Google, they wouldn't risk their search monopoly so there's browser competition.
1. A marketing department that can get it more than 2% market share
2. A legal and advocacy department that can work with governments to stop monopolists like Google and Apple privileging their own browsers on platforms they control
3. To use its seat on standards boards to stop abhorrent practises like the W3C endorsing DRM, or Google dropping effective web-blocking APIs from extensions.
Firefox should focus on not hemorrhaging users, they're about to reach the cutoff (1%) where the US government will no longer even support their browser.
No normal person will switch to Firefox for tor, despite us nerds thinking it's cool. And if they can't get actual users to switch, the browser has no future.
I'm trying to use it right on mac right now. It's still slow with many tabs (even with autosleep enabled), visibly slower than both Safari or any Chromium based browser.
Also they killed visual tab expose, and any extensions that could replace it, so all I have for managing the tabs is a vertical list.
In addition to what everyone else said, comments like yours confirm that it would be a waste for me to check out Firefox for the hundredth time. You are among a sea of comments enumerating the specific reasons why it sucks, and you're here insisting with zero substantiation that it is "effective" and "by far the best browser around". A better approach would be to acknowledge the issues that users have had with it and explain how it has improved.
On the other hand, if your definition of "effective" and "best" describes Firefox the last time I checked it out, then our definitions do not match, and I don't need to check it out again.
I'm not sure if you are serious. I mean, look at Chrome and Edge and Safari. They are managed by corporations that control their own platform. I get Chrome, Edge, and Safari because it is actively pushed onto me.
What does Firefox have?
The ugly truth is that browsers like Chrome and Edge and Safari are just as good as Firefox, and a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.
What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
Edge and Safari yes, but Chrome doesn't come pre-installed in both Windows and MacOS. You and every Chrome user actively goes out of their way to download and install it.
> What does Firefox have?
Every single nontrivial Linux distribution out there comes packaged with Firefox as the default browser.
> a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.
Clearly then all Chrome users on laptops/desktops are software militants..
> What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
Firefox had at least half a decade of a headstart against Chrome and did jack shit with it.
This here is a single comment that explains everything. Firefox is kept clueless.
Sorry to all the devs grinding inside the machine - you are doing great work, and while it is not your fault the ship is going in the wrong direction, you are providing the fuel for it to keep going there by keeping your heads down and not revolting.
"If this Court prohibits Google from sharing revenue for search distribution, Apple would have two unacceptable choices. It could still let users in the United States choose Google as a search engine for Safari, but Apple could not receive any share of the resulting revenue, so Google would obtain valuable access to Apple's users at no cost. Or Apple could remove Google Search as a choice on Safari. But because customers prefer Google, removing it as an option would harm both Apple and its customers."
and "... it is unlikely that Apple will decide to create a search engine in the future, regardless of what remedies are ordered in this case."
Apple is sounding like a cellular company pre-iPhone where the carriers demanded a cut of every transaction on the phone. They saw users as their asset and did everything they could to but themselves in the middle of every phone transaction. I'm talking about the time of $3 ringtones.
For Apple today, I can understand the argument for fees in the app store because there are real development and ongoing maintenance costs for that. But why should they get paid for a company to be a search engine option? How are they earning that money?
A example - the current average lifetime earnings for an American (aka total money earned over their lifetime) is $1.8mln USD for men, and $1.1mln USD for women. That provides for everything for them - raising a family (on average), a retirement, expenses of living 60-80 years, supporting all the joy, pain, love and loss of a lifetime. And paying for the total economic work of that average American for at least 40 years - a lifetime of plumbing, welding, repair work, hairdressing, stocking shelves, managing people - you name it.
Apple is receiving (last I checked) $20 billion USD/yr from Google for this.
That is the money required to support an entire lifetime of living for between 11,000 to 18,000 average Americans. Every year.
Alternatively, at the median American salary of $59,634, that is also enough money to employ 333,000+ average Americans for that year.
How much fighting do you think would be appropriate for that? Probably a least a couple of lawyers and lobbyists working full time on it, eh?
Sure maybe, but that depends the DOJ’s actions. Also depends on the buyer, the search engine alternatives, whether DOJ allow Google to pay to be the default, etc.
What's the problem with option 1? Users have a choice on what to pick, they pick Google because they prefer Google. Is users having choice foreign to Apple?
I hope Eddy Cue, SVP of Apple Services, gets to explain that quote in antitrust testimony at some point when he has to explain how Apple’s policy doesn’t assume ownership of users.
Potentially a fair point vis a vis the environment, but it’s not really true of people as far as DeBeers is concerned. I know people that work for them in Botswana and I hear nothing but good things about them as an employer. On the environment, Kimberlites are pretty small and the environmental impact of primary diamond mining isn’t really that great in the grand scheme of things. Take this with a pinch of salt from a guy on the internet sharing some anecdata etc etc.
Maybe the job seeker could offer to work for free for the number of hours they'd be contractually entitled to in severance payments if they were fired their first week on the job. Usually that's zero.
Threema is another app I've liked. They have a decent transparency report which shows the limited user data they collect/possess. Link: https://threema.ch/en/transparencyreport
"[Luigi Zingales] concluded that 'at the current state of knowledge there is no theoretical reason to support the notion that all the growth of the financial sector in the last 40 years has been beneficial to society'"
