I use Firefox every day. The author tries to make it sound like the old days where a lot of websites simply didn't work without IE (for instance, because they needed ActiveX exposing the internals of your OS). I never run into Chrome-only sites. Heck, it's 2021 and I regularly use Firefox to run Office 365 on Linux.
WebAssembly features post MVP 1.0.
PWAs capabilities.
Web assembly still has a lot of mozilla people involved; so fine as well.
PWAs kind of failed in the market because Apple can't be bothered and the desktop experience was always kind of meh; even on Chrome. Worth noting of course that they pushed hard on this while Firefox OS was still a thing for mobile.
All those places around the globe where PC and Android rule, local companies don't have any issues targeting what 99% of their customers are using.
Seriously large caveat: YMMV.
I'm increasingly hitting weird bugs on sites with Firefox, some sufficiently complicated web "apps" just throw up "Use Chrome" overlays.
The situation is similar on Safari, although, oddly, not quite as bad.
Good example) My bank (Nordea.se) has a nice internet banking portal, it works rather well in Firefox until you need to do a video meeting with your adviser. (which I'm doing for a mortgage). Then, in Firefox, nothing happens, no dialog, no pop-up/under, just... nothing, when I click join meeting.
If I do it in Edge/Chrome- it works. Frustrating.
Superfluous example: Microsoft Teams _always_ has issues and sometimes even throws up warnings about using an unsupported browser. Though this is on Firefox ESR.
Exactly. Also the more people using it means the more sites have to support it.
I wouldn't exactly argue that chrome is any better, but firefox isn't a good browser either. It's neither minimalistic, nor does it have many features and it most certainly isn't easily to customize.
I've been an Opera user from version 12 (the last good opera) up to twenty-something, then switched to vivaldi a few years ago and never looked back.
Even just in the current development version, vivaldi is getting support for calendars, mail and rss right in the browser, adding to the already present notes feature. What does firefox do in terms of UX innovation? Ant they certainly don't seem to be pumping that money into the under-the-hood components either, seeing how they still haven't managed to get @property working.
Firefox is turning into the next internet explorer and it's not even googles fault. It's sad, but completely deserved.
> it most certainly isn't easily to customize.
I can't think of any other browser I ever used which is more easily customizable.
> Even just in the current development version, vivaldi is getting support for calendars, mail and rss right in the browser, adding to the already present notes feature. What does firefox do in terms of UX innovation? Ant they certainly don't seem to be pumping that money into the under-the-hood components either, seeing how they still haven't managed to get @property working.
Multi-tab containers is definitely a super useful UX innovation which I've been using for years and surprised why other browsers are slow to pick it up. I'm not sure I actually want any of the above listed features in my browser but I'll be happy to be convinced.
Reader mode which I use regularly -- other browsers either don't have it or it's a worse implementation.
And it was great! More importantly it was already a more or less finished product. The updates were slow, sparse in time and didn't change much (it took 3 years to get from v. 1 to v. 3).
Then something changed in 2011 and updates started showering almost every week for no apparent reason. It was annoying and I've completly stopped installing updates after v. 13(everything worked perfectly anyway). Then after 4 or 5 years I started to have a problem with playing youtube and twitch videos, so I decided to finally update my FF. It was already v. 57 (Quantum) and it made me absolutely livid. 2/3 of my extensions weren't working (and still aren't) and the ability to change UI theme was completely gone (and so I am now stuck with that bland default theme). And all that for no visible benefit on my part whatsoever.
I've immediately installed Chrome, Opera and Safari to see if they were any better, but ... they all are almost identical to the new Firefox (although I am now using Opera on mobile). There is almost no incentive to change from one browser to another now.
Well, it's year 2021 now, but somehow my user experience is worse than it was fifteen years ago. How is that possible I do not know.
The web is now essentially an operating system under active, nascent development, so the churn is going to be enormous and the whole thing will lack any kind of polish or UX. Expect it to stabilise in a few decades as something else takes over (maybe).
1) chromium is used by several other browsers: Edge, Brave, Opera, and probably a whole range of niche browsers I don't know about. Most of these, probably don't rely on Google provided services (I imagine that would create some funny legal issues). None of these browsers are mentioned in the article.
2) The APIs mentioned aren't exactly rocket science and perfectly good OSS implementations (e.g. provided by Mozilla) exist. Also, you could use extensions. For example, Bitwarden integrates nicely into chrome and largely removes the need for built in password managers. I think browser sync is perhaps the hardest of these. But even that should not be too hard to improvise. Cross browser sync would actually be a nice thing to have.
3) Firefox is there, it's being maintained, and you can use it. Many people do. Blanket stating that that is not an option is kind of weird. It's a fine browser. It doesn't have this problem. Chromium is also still a fine browser; and it supports extensions as mentioned before.
4) Forking/patching chromium is always an option. I think some linux distributions already do this in the same way that they also patch Firefox (Iceweasel).