Do you consider Firefox to be a less-than-great product?
I use it as my main browser, from Windows 10. No complaints. I don't experience performance issues or UI issues. Chrome and Firefox are both solid browsers, on Windows at least.
Perhaps Firefox for Mac is a weaker product, and loses to Safari 'fair and square' on quality grounds?
The current version of Firefox on macOS is a vast improvement over what Mozilla was shipping 6-12 months ago.
However, it still requires more RAM, doesn’t render as quickly and consumes more power than Safari, so there’s that. Also, Safari implemented anti-tracking features before Firefox did.
This is a gross exaggeration. I've been using firefox on MacOS for 3 years and it's worked fine the entire time.
Older Firefox versions are redrawing the entire window even if only a tiny portion of the window was changing.
With advent of high resolution windows, the amount of work needed to redraw the whole window for every frame became significant.
The last version of Firefox moved to breaking the window into large tiles and only redrawing the tiles that have changed.
This is still less optimized than Safari (which uses Core Animation to only redraw the items on the page that are changing) but it is still a large improvement over prior versions of Firefox if you have a high resolution display.
So clearly it’s not about competition. Disney+ is being heavily promoted on the App Store, which is direct competitor to Apple’s TV+.
We’ve seen 3rd parties like Google and Facebook subvert iOS security before; if Mozilla gets low-level access, then so does Google and they can’t be trusted.
It is astounding that overzealous Apple employees and fan boys will employ circuitous mental gymnastics to substantiate Apple policies, instead of simply allowing an open-market to thrive on iOS. It's as if open markets where consumers are allowed to choose works against Apple
Consumer choice is a red herring. So for that matter is Firefox, which Google has stomped out on Android. Apple's policy is 100% aimed at preventing Google from controlling the future of iOS.
Yes, giving users choice does mean loosening your control of your platform. I don't believe Apple thinks consumer choice would cause Google to control the future of iOS.
Apple is clearly moving towards a more secure set of operating systems and that starts by reducing the attack surface.
On macOS, Apple is deprecating kernel extensions; the boot partition on macOS Catalina is read-only so that it can’t be modified by malicious software: https://wccftech.com/macos-catalina-runs-on-dedicated-read-o...
Even Safari on iOS doesn’t support browser extensions.
>instead of simply allowing an open-market to thrive on iOS.
The App Store paid developers $34 billion in 2018; I would say the market is thriving: https://fortune.com/2019/01/28/apple-app-store-developer-ear...
>Safari/webkit, with a purposefully depleted feature set
Just checked html5test.com from my iPhone 7 running iOS 13.2.2; Safari scores 463 and Firefox 48 mobile scored 468 out of 555 points. And this is without enabling a bunch of experimental work-in-progress features: https://imgur.com/a/Y5NHwct
So there's no meaningful difference in capability of these browsers when it comes to features.
Of course, Safari is faster, requires less RAM and consumes less power, which should count for something on a mobile device.
You go to lengths to defend Apple, but do not have the guts to let the consumer pick a Google/Mozilla alternative engine. What is Apple so scared of, if not a level playing field.
This is the same company that retroactively modified it's store policies to substantiate booting steam off the app store. Courage in the face of competition, not!!
The illogic here is a little scary: Firefox and Safari on iOS basically have the same level of web standards compliance according to html5test.com, yet one is intentionally not implementing features?
No fanboyism; just the facts.
YOUR BROWSER SCORES
491
OUT OF 555 POINTS
You are using Firefox Mobile 68.0 on Android 8.1.0
> The App Store paid developers $34 billion in 2018; I would say the market is thriving: https://fortune.com/2019/01/28/apple-app-store-developer-ear....
They said open market. Apple's closed market is thriving, but the open market doesn't exist on iOS.
As for Safari using less power and ram on mobile there is no evidence that Firefox would uae more of either since Apple doesn't allow it to run. As far as we know if other browsers were allowed to run some might compete on power and ram.
As for security, chrome on desktop has a superior track record. The CVE list proves this, so by denying competition Apple denies users more secure browsers.
Firefox is slower, requires more RAM and uses more power on macOS now; it’s highly unlikely that essentially the same engine running on iOS would run significantly differently.
Of the mainstream browsers on macOS, Firefox has always been the slowest.
The goal is to preserve privacy by default--no extensions required. The vast number of users don't install them or wouldn't know which ones to install.
Brave is secure out of the box and doesn't require extensions to protect your privacy: https://brave.com/features/
Safari also doesn't require extensions to protect your privacy: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy—https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention-policy/
Apple first shipped Intelligent Tracking Prevention in June 2017, long before Firefox or any other browser had anything similar: https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...
Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention stops the cross-site tracking, fingerprinting, etc. by ad companies.
The ability to block content is built-in to macOS and iOS for 3rd parties to use.
- Standard keyboard shortcuts for text editing still don't work. That alone is a dealbreaker for me.
- The toolbar(s) don't look or work like standard toolbars. The standard toolbar editor is missing, too.
- Tabs don't look or act right, either. They're actually styled like Windows XP tabs.
- The scroll bars look good, but scrolling doesn't work the same as any other app. It hits a solid wall at either end.
- The preferences dialog is not a dialog, but a web browser tab (!), and its controls all look strange. They're not like standard OS controls or standard web controls. They're mostly just words floating on empty space, and some of them happen to be clickable. (It doesn't even have the advantage of being a webpage: the back button is enabled, but don't take me back to the last thing I was looking at here.) Some settings open a (custom, of course) dialog-in-a-tab, which is resizable, but if you resize it, the main scrollbar disappears, so you can't see the bottom of the dialog with the Cancel/OK buttons.
- It doesn't use the standard localization setting. It has its own, but half of Firefox doesn't even seem to use that, because even though my System Preferences is English, and my Firefox language preference is English, and even my Firefox content preference is English, it's showing half the UI in Japanese still. The context menu is half English and half Japanese!
- It's got a whole second menu (!) in the toolbar, with no way to hide it (see above: non-standard toolbars). The font, text alignment, highlight color, icons, and animation are all non-standard. Of course, it doesn't obey the system accessibility settings, either.
- Tree controls (e.g., in the History window) are non-standard, and standard keyboard shortcuts don't work here, either.
- It uses a (custom, of course) pop-over as an upgrade notification, which can't be dismissed by clicking outside them. Or dismissed permanently, like normal notifications.
The whole reason I use a Mac is for consistency. That's been its primary benefit since 1984. Instead of learning 10 completely different different programs, I just have to learn the common parts once. (Remember those keyboard overlays for the IBM PC we used so we didn't have to memorize which F-key meant "Save" in each different program?) In Firefox, everything is custom, and works differently than other apps. The keyboard, mouse, display, menus, windows, and controls are all weird. If I were OK with that, I'd switch back to Linux.
The settings page is still non-standard, the same for the scrolling, keybindings don't work in the usual macOS way (CMD+Q for instance quits only if you hold, which is baffling), the app updates itself in a non-obvious way, the top-bar is laggy when in fullscreen mode, and the list can go on and on.
That sounds totally unexpected. Can you open a bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi including the details from your about:support page?
Something sounds broken and I'd expect a fix.
I very badly want to use Firefox as my main browser, and I have it installed and give it a go every now and then, but it’s just not all the way there yet for me.
The default hotkeys for next/prev tab are cmd+option+left/right arrow. I don't know how to change those...
good to know about the density, thanks.
Wich is not much of a surprise. If you educate your customer base to use one browser, many won't switch. See the lawsuits against Microsoft because of IE.
Privacy-compromising systems aren't winning today because people seek out systems that compromise their privacy. They're winning because these companies focused on making the user interface good. Firefox will win big again when they stop talking about privacy and start making a UI that isn't lousy.
True, Apple is talking about privacy a lot these days, but they've been focusing on UX first for decades. You can't start with "here is an abstract principle that's good for you, and you should use our systems because of it". The Free Software Foundation tried that for years. It doesn't work.
Privacy is important, but it's a feature, not a product. You still need to have a great product.