And today, I'm seeing history is repeating all over again, only Chrome has taken IE's place but there is no storm coming this time. Unlike our predecessors, we are giving in to convenience, we are acting like its not a botheration at all.
PLEASE DON'T DO IT. Consider the sheer browser market share that Chrome enjoys and Google's data interests for a moment, and it might already be too late for us. If a web service insists only on Chrome for best performance then change that service, not your browser! If Youtube gives issues to you then use Vimeo or Lbry instead. Let's unite in this effort and take it seriously, let's bring more diversity to the browser world.
Using Firefox more will put Mozilla in a stronger position to negotiate a better deal, whether with Google or someone else. Worst that could happen is Firefox turning into some kind of boutique browser for connoisseurs willing to pay. That's uncompetable.
They might be able to raise revenue using other innovative methods eventually, but that won't amount to anything if we aren't using the hell out of their (very good) browser.
Google doesn't even need Mozilla to increase/maintain their search market share. When Firefox's default search engine was changed to Yahoo! in the U.S., many users switched back to Google [1]. Also, people who care about privacy use things such as DuckDuckGo anyway.
[1] https://searchengineland.com/report-yahoo-search-losing-fire...
who else is going to do it? firefox still has the best chance.
the more popular firefox gets the easier it should be to get alternate funding.
a premium browser would not sell. browsers are like operating systems. they only provide value through the content snd applications they enable. browsers are no longer interesting in themselves. noone actually cares. the only thing that matters is, how many websites are not broken.
that's why edge is building on chrome. it's the only way to ensure that they stop breaking websites.
brave has an interesting business model (and i am not saying i like it) by motivating its users to pay for content and taking a cut.
I'm eager to see if Servo will provide substantial performance improvement such that there is incentive to switch other than preventing a monopoly.
Edge probably the others less likely.
Only Firefox has a different engine (Gecko), so it qualifies.
Engines are about as relevant to diversity in the browser market as semiconductors are to diversity in the phone market. It's irrelevant for the end user experience, and arguably a waste of resources and time.
Browsers which can't compete on actual features and services that matter to users and instead try to distiniguish themselves through technical implementation details will probably die out, as the marketshare of Firefox shows.
I'm not completely sure about that:
1. Maintaining a browser engine is no easy task.
2. Where does the copyright reside? For instance, contributing to various open source projects requires signing a CLA so that among other things the license of the project can be changed afterwards.
About licensing I admit I am no expert but somehow brave and edge use the engine right now without going into legal troubles.
Reverting anti-adblocker changes doesn't require that many resources.
This time, though, it was mostly self-inflicted by developers themselves. We just didn't care enough.
I've reported a few, and yes, they tell me, the devs do not test their code for Firefox and yes, since then I started to ask about the devs testing here and there, and more and more dev teams are not testing code for FF compatibility.
I know you can not take my word for this, please consider it an opinion, I think FF has started to be phased out in web development, and its compatibility relays mainly now in highly used - fully compatible with FF - frameworks like Wordpress and similar.
In the past when Firefox has changed default behavior there's almost always a way to revert the changes. They move tabs to the title bar to match Chrome, I change an option that puts them back where I like them. They auto hide the bookmark toolbar, I re-enable it. With the latest Firefox release I've yet to find an easy way to disable the godawful, distracting zoom effect for the URL bar. The about:config options that used to work no longer do. I really hope they reverse course and give us a straightforward way to disable it.
1. Visit about:config
2. Find and change the value of following preferences to false
browser.urlbar.openViewOnFocus
browser.urlbar.update1
browser.urlbar.update1.interventions
browser.urlbar.update1.searchTips
[1] https://techdows.com/2019/10/mozilla-enables-megabar-design-...
The other day a junior teammate requested my help with something he couldn't understand: a file upload feature stopped working in his machine for no apparent reason.
It did not make any sense: the backend was receiving the file but somehow identifying it as zero-length (and hence rejecting it as an invalid file). Chrome said everything was just fine, with the network inspector showing the request but claiming it was CORS-blocked. When I tried copying the request (right-click -> copy -> as curl) and running that, the response was seemingly normal (and included the proper CORS directives).
After some time fiddling with this I decided to try with Firefox. First try, Firefox correctly displayed the request erroring with a "413 Request Entity too Large" code. This immediately prompted me to check nginx's configuration. Of course, the dev had updated his nginx container and it turned out the latest version only allows 1Mb max body size by default.
Tracing back our steps, I realized that for some fucked up reason Chrome was identifying the error properly, but not showing it in the inspector tools. Instead, it showed a made up request with an empty body payload (and that's what it copied for me to run/inspect through curl). I'm guessing it is not intentional that it works this way, but seriously: how hard is it to show the actual request the browser is making instead of a made-up one in the inspector tools? Why on earth would you show something different there?
One of the big arguments for using Firefox is that it encourages diversity because a huge handful of "alternative" browsers (Opera, Brave, etc) use a Chromium backend
Firefox has never used Chromium.
I think the name is appropriate. Because of the different privacy concerns you allude to, I am not Brave enough to use it
So I am more interested in moving away from the web. Things like using terminal programs (youtube-dl, rtv etc.), native GUI apps, or complete alternate protocols like Gemini[1].
I see the web being completely out of my control as it is. I see my usage of it as being more of a virtual machine for the things I need it for (government stuff, communication platforms etc.).
I feel like slowly packing up and leaving.
But I will still try and exert some decision making while I have to use it. And I intend to do this by choosing Firefox-based browsers.
Internet Explorer didn't exist in the early 90s. It was released in 1995.
Now we have this software, open-source Chromium actively mantained, supported by several big entities (think Chrome, Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and maybe thousands of smaller entities, think mobile browsers), it works ashtoningly well, it keeps beind developed at fast pace, continously improving, and then we have Firefox, its open sourced-code almost non-in-current use by third parties at all and supported by a relatively small company. I think Chromium isn't going to be like IE anytime soon.
Moreover, we have the speed of browsing, rendering in Chromium vs. Firefox
I just recently jumped the shark and started to used Chromium as my main browser, previouly Firefox had the lead.
Speed is the reason. Chromium in default setup and with tons of extensions enabled is a lot faster than Firefox.
I didn't do it lightly, I still like a lot the Firefox GUI (and the extensions are far more usable, think Powertabs), but I've been reading the Phoronix benchmarks between FF and Chrome for a year now, and decided to give Chromium a chance.
It went really well, I didn't wanted to go that much well! I wanted to use FF, but after trying Chromium for a couple of weeks I can tell, its speed is fairly user-noticable, it's amazing how much faster than Firefox it is.
I didn't wanted to believe it, but the Phoronix benchmarks were cristal clear at predicting that: Chromium in a bad day is at least 40-50% faster than Firefox in almost any measurable feature.
Yep, Firefox Webrender, hardware-accelaration enabled, even over Intel drivers (in Linux), with no issues at all, feels a LOT slower than Chromium.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome83...
These days I use Chrome for work-related purpose only, i.e. for accessing webapps. For webapps, browser speed is absolutely matters so I stick with Chrome for now. But for personal browsing like social media, news, and browsing random stuff on the web, I stick with Firefox on all my devices. I don't use Chrome for personal browsing anymore for years and haven't notice any issue related to performance so far, because all stuff that requires a fast browser are usually work-related (at least on my case).
On the other hand, Firefox is becoming a Chrom* copycat even under the hood: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/06/a-new-regexp-engine-in-spi...
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6#Market_sha...
Using "not-best" or non-mainstream alternatives often means you enjoy less network effects and the produce/service often has more rough edges. But diversity brings competition and freedom of choice.
Last few weeks, people talk about how the apple app store becomes monopoly. I believe one service can dominate the market only if we are willing to allows it.
I wish others can consider not just the UX and cost when choice a service / product. The best product isn't necessarily being the best choice for you.
