It seems very unlikely:
- Mozilla has been in a far worse uderdog position before during the IE6 era, with way more incompatible sites and less funding.
- Mozilla is not for profit. Fighting for the open Web is one of their goal. It always has been. They are not perfect, but their track record is damn good compared to almost any player of their size and impact in the tech world.
- Mozilla strongly invested in their own tech, including rewritting the browser rendering engine and taking huge risks such as create a bloody hole new language, rust, in the process. To my knowledge, the "oxydation" project has been a success so far, and rust is proving everyday that it's a positive force in the world as well.
- Firefox is the only decent mobile browser. I can't navigate the web without the ublock extension. I just can't.
- Mozilla keeps innovating. Their last brillant idea, the tab container, is worth switching on it's own.
- Mozilla has the hardcore geeks on their side. Even during the V30 to v50 transition period where Firefox was, at the time, clearly an inferior product, we kept using it to support it for the sheer ideal of it. We hoped it would come back from it, and it happened: Firefox is now a fast, lean and fantastic browser again.
- Privacy concerns are (FINALLY !) being taken in consideration from the crowd. And Chrome is terrible at this, so moving to a chromium core, while technically not related at all because you can set it up the way you like, would carry the stigma.
All in all, I'm incredibly optimistic about Mozilla et Firefox's future despite the market share taking a serious hit.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock/review...
I use Firefox. I always have. My experience is totally different to yours. Before FF57 it was a single process and it ran nicely on a 4GB machine with a 2009 Intel Atom processor. Afterwards it became much hungrier for memory and processor. I had to buy a new computer. (I tried Chrome of course but it is hungrier.)
The later is a more complicated matter, as it was 10 years ago, with different expectations, hardware, user base and web.
For me the order of utility is FF pre v57 > FF post v57 > Chromium based browsers.
This is not my experience. On my MacBook Pro it is slow and tends to cause system lockups on a regular basis. Everytime there is a new announcement about how the new Firefox has improved performance and stability I give it a try and each time am disappointed.
On my phone the Firefox browser is almost unusably slow and slow enough that it can't replace Chrome. Mozilla has released other mobile browsers which perform faster but they lack the features I need in my browser.
[1]: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3213031/computers/best-web-b...
Likely some suit just presented a convincing PowerPoint on how MS could save some dosh.
I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’ve never had a lockup in that entire time (and I run Beta), as far as I can tell, it is the fastest of all my options.
The very last thing that I notice any difference on is energy usage, for which Safari is still king. I don’t use Firefox on my iPhone, as there’s not much point (I wish Apple would change their restriction here).
For this it's become my main work browser. At home I mainly use safari and it works great for 15-ish tabs.
Watching youtube in 1080p it struggles and CPU goes up, fans are on.
Scrolling Heavy e-commerce sites (amazon, jumia)... CPU goes up, fans are on.
Yet, run chrome on these same sites, with the same settings and no fan noises/frezes at all.
I don't know how true this is when considering all the calling-home (split over multiple settings in about:config making it difficult to disable) in modern firefox versions.
> Mozilla has the hardcore geeks on their side.
A lot of geeks are moving away from it to forks or to other browsers like qutebrowser, which actually makes senses considering that mozilla keeps trying to sabotage the poweruser demographic.
I agree but between a broken leg and cancer, you choose the broken leg.
> A lot of geeks are moving away from it to forks or to other browsers like qutebrowser, which actually makes senses considering that mozilla keeps trying to sabotage the poweruser demographic.
This has always been the case. We try alternatives, that's what we do. It's sane, and no matter Mozilla's behavior, we would do it.
Although I would have loved even more choice (or MS championing the superb Firefox rendering engine instead), I think we're already well off with two fully featured and completely open source browser engines.
> building a fully featured browser engine from
> scratch that is "just" good enough to render 80%
> of pages correctly is a herculean, almost impossible
> task in 2018.
> I think we're already well off with two fully
> featured and completely open source browser engines.
Which is apparently something developers want, since apparently none of them were working in the industry the last time we had a monoculture.
It doesn't matter if HN uses Firefox. It doesn't matter if web developers like us the world over use Firefox.
Ezra and Taylor just want to manage their personal brands and don't care about all that nerd stuff.
We'll build for where the audience is, and they're not going to switch for any of the reasons in this thread. It works good enough as it is.
Yes, Chrome is open source, but in marketing/critical mass terms this is no different than last time.
Watching Mozilla align Firefox's extension API with Chromium's, I'm a little surprised that they haven't already made the move. If browser evolution continues along the current path, I predict Firefox will switch to Chromium within 3 years.
> Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME).
It's already happening. Until a year or two ago, the only time I ever opened Chrome was when a page using some sort of experimental API ran slowly or not at all on Firefox. Now, the number of mainstream websites I see with serious glitches in Firefox is increasing by the month.
I used to put it down to my plugins, but there are some sites (which of course I cannot name) that don't work, even with noscript / ublock disabled.
It's not Firefox's fault if people aren't testing their websites on both browsers, just like it wasn't Firefox or Chrome's fault whenever people only tested their webpages with Internet Explorer and its mess of exclusive APIs and deviations from standards.
- Firefox Focus is switching from Chromium Engine to Gecko Engine.
- Huge amount of work in WebRender, they're starting to test it. If it lives up its promise Chromium Engine might fall far behind in terms of performance.
So maybe you're right but from what we can tell right now, the current trend for Mozilla is to remove the last pieces of Chromium and bet everything on a new generation engine which is not Chromium.
I feel like Debbie Downer from SNL back in the day, so let's hope you're right.
Let me explain: there is no true open standard (as explained at https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/). You don't realize this until you make HTML5 games or apps, like when Google decided to break tons of HTML5 games with https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...
So basically it is already really hard to support all web browsers out there, since there is no "standard". So what you do is you limit yourself to a few, and display "Best played in browser X", because browser Y has these strange issues, and might introduce others with a new update, and the same for browser Z and F.
So if you make rich web content such as games, the ecosystem will automatically push itself to a limited amount of web browsers.
- Build some webapp and get it working correctly in Chrome
- Test on Firefox. It works 90% of the time. 9% of the time it's relatively easy to support. 1% of the time it isn't worth the hassle.
- Test on Edge. It works 80% of the time. 10% it's an easy enough fix. 10% you have to move heaven and Earth to fix and when you contact Microsoft, they know about the issue but won't do anything to help.
- Test on IE. It works 60% of the time. The other 40% of the time you start looking for a new job so you don't have to write the same code a second time for IE.
Edge guesses for each number on a page if it might be a phone number. The guess depends on your locale. If it is considered phoneable, edge removes all javascript and replaces it with a link to skype. Which is fun if skype is not installed, it just pops up a messagebox complaining you need to install something, and it's not going to tell you what exactly. The error is only half translated and lost any meaning in the process. Can't put a DOM breakpoint on it either, the bloody browser just ignores everything you do to that DOM node.
Fun, now a few rare numbers on one of our sites seem phone number enough for the dutch locale to break the site. Tell the user to switch to the french locale as workaround, or get any other browser. MS wants you to change the html to say: hey edge, this is not a phoneable number.
WTF, microsoft? Way to shoot yourself in the foot. What else did you hide in there that will bite me one day?
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/apps_windo...
We rewrote the app so it didn't use ClickOnce in the end.
That is Firefox. Shuttering that kills the project. It's like, I don't know, Tumblr deciding to ban porn or something.
Much like the debates about other developer tools in fact (text editors et al).
I use Firefox for casual browsing, but all work-y stuff I do in chrome. Sometimes I'll start debugging a site in Firefox and then some behavior is a bit "off" or missing and I just go back to Chrome.
And the only reason I'm using Firefox is because it's not Chrome. I wanted a different browser that looks a bit different to always be aware of the difference between work and personal.
I appreciate a lot of the stuff Firefox has been doing, but Google was very wise to realise that first class developer support was the winning move.
This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it, and starts using Chromium too.
Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME).