Chrome is able to capture the mass consumer market, due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property.
Edge target enterprise Fortune 500 user, who is required to use Microsoft/Office 365 at work (and its deep security permission ties to SharePoint).
Safari has Mac/iOS audience via being the default on those platform.
Brave (based on Chromium), and LibreWolf (based on Firefox) has even carved out those user who value privacy.
What’s Firefox target user?
Long ago, Firefox was the better IE, and it had great plugins for web developers. But that was before Chrome existed and Google capturing the mass market. And the developers needed to follow its users.
So what target user is left for a Firefox?
Note: not trolling. I loved Firefox. I just don’t genuine understand who it’s for anymore.
This is being abused by advertisers to track you across the web.
If they do care about privacy it would be good for them to copy Safari and make this 7 days.
I'm not sure if that's true. I switched to Chrome because Chrome felt snappier than its competitors. Its multi-process model made Chrome more robust. It's developer tool had better usability than Firefox's. And Chrome's extensions, at least initially, offered better experience and wider selections. Oh, Google's integration of Chrome with Google's identity system was a nicer experience too.
After the Bundeswehr Taurus leak[1] there was a lot of speculation of how the meeting was tapped. One possibility is that they mitm't the guy joining from Singapore with a Certificate from a Chinese CA.
Now Google saw auch a possibility and introduced Certificate Transparenty a few years ago which burns the whole CA if it signs sich a mitm Certificate.
However, Firefox does not check for CT timestamps to this date.
Google, so they can pretend they don't have a monopoly so the antitrust lawsuits are kept at bay. And Mozillas CEO[0] so they can extract millions while fucking us all.
On that same timescale, Mozilla revenue went from:
2009: ~80M
2019: ~$800M
It’s totally expected that a CEO of a company generating ~$1B revenue, would be making $2.5M. Heck, there’s FANNG individual contributors who earn that much.
I’ve clearly never understood the gripe in Mozilla CEO pay. Because how are you going to attract top talent to run an organization that big if you paid any less?
There are technical reasons for this, there are process/political/human reasons why it has stayed this way, and for many people it's not a big enough issue to switch, or other things take priority, but for me it just comes down to jankiness. Alternative browsers all have their own issues, none are perfect, but most feel less janky at their core.
Performance wise?
Appearance wise?
I use it exactly for the reason you state: I do not need 65536 features in a browser, not it makes any sense for it to use 1GB of my memory per tab.
I will say that installing Firefox extensions makes me deeply uncomfortable. Everything requires access to everything.
My hope is an uodate to manifedt v3 that improves things so we can go back to chromium based browsers (not necessary chrome)
you couldnt care less to switch cause were lazy. very funny thing computer people do is have such brand loyalty over a browser.
and we turn around and laugh at coke people, ford people, xbox, how silly is it when you hear people arguing about xbox or ps. this is no doubt even sillier
and as a bonus the only reason we say oh firefox has gone downhill but lol ill never use chrome and let them take my freedom and joy never ever... this is again just brand loyalty lol.... if you dont like firefox just switch, if you dont like that switch, if you dont like any browers... well you just have to choose and live with one then dont you. trust me google has all your info
so does apple depending on your phone. and trust that your phone will be your id, wallet, everything very soon. ask asia, we are always lagging in tech, it will happen (ofc this isnt directed at you. im just talking sht outloud)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZx-W5qC_dc
Generally speaking, I'm sure it's difficult to find a general balance between privacy and usability, and I tend to want a purist viewpoint on blocking all 3rd-party cookies if I set Enhanced Tracking Protection to Strict. The above episodes explains why it's not 100% doing what we expect, which was troubling to hear!
"Thanks F3nd0! There are currently no plans to switch to a less permissive license.
And we're perfectly happy using proprietary services like GitHub and Discord as long as they make our work easier and more enjoyable. We recently evaluated a number of alternatives, and found that they all introduced more friction than we were comfortable with.
Although the task of building a browser is itself challenging, we're a pragmatic project :)"
I.e. making a attempt to appeal to user wants more since the majority of the money they make is at risk
Sure. Those are the people who don't know what a decent browser is. They never saw a browser with customizable UI, never saw Opera 12's notepad, never saw IE 5 Web Accessories (Links list, Image list), etc. etc.
I use Firefox because it’s not chrome, not because it’s good. Mozilla’s reputation is trash, Firefox is riddled with ancient bugs, and the bleeding hasn’t stopped.
I’d like to be wrong but I don’t see how.
Given their strong FOSS, they wouldn’t be doing shady deals like this if their future looked vital.
Mozilla has done it to themselves. New interim ceo wont be different. I can't fathom mozilla has any chance of selecting someone who could dig them out of their activist hole.
"Deep in the browser’s privacy settings, Firefox introduced an experimental “privacy-preserving ad measurement” toggle, enabling it by default without explanation or disclosure."
I stopped hearing when Mozilla talks about privacy or caring about users. Most companies that treat their users like Mozilla just do it, but it actually adds insult to injury that Mozilla tells you they care, tells you you're important while they do the same things. It's gaslighting or manipulation or lying or something but I'm not going to listen to them any more.
If they want me to love Firefox, they need to love Firefox. And show that love in the form of vision, resources, and better open-source, open-internet style governance. No execs saying "deplatforming is nice and all, but we really need to go even further beyond". As soon as a browser company makes it a mission to decide what people see online, they cease to be trustworthy as a browser company. So I may as well just use chromium (or ungoogled-chromium).
I’ve uninstalled them and will only use them on a VM
Here's a cute graph of CEO pay vs Firefox market share: https://calpaterson.com/assets/mozilla-boss-pay.svg
Mozilla is completely fucked. I just hope the company goes bankrupt so its niche of an open source browser can be filled by an organisation that actually cares about its product, and is not just a sham for execs to get millions of dollars from Google for being faux-competition, while fucking over their users.
Firefox tech is dead and not modular. It has no use to anyone else and is a major waste of resources.
One of them ends up falling back on some legacy thing when the other two don’t.
Once, I encountered two identical machines with the same version of debian. Chrome was unusably slow on one, and Firefox was unusably slow on the other. The other browser ran great.
Browsers and modern hardware are complicated.
shrug
There are so many benefits to browsing without JS
