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Firefox 37 Released
Today Mozilla began rolling out Firefox version 37.0 to release channel users. This update mostly focuses on behind-the-scenes changes. Security improvements include opportunistic encryption where servers support it and improved protection against site impersonation. They also disabled insecure TLS version fallback and added a security panel within the developer tools. One of the things end users will see is the Heartbeat feedback collection system. It will pop up a small rating widget to a random selection of users every day. After a user rates Firefox, an "engagement" page may open in the background, with links to social media pages and a donation page. Here are the release notes and full changelist.
So basically Firefox is going to nag and annoy their users.
Good luck with that.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As a Firefox user, I'm very concerned when I see its market share dropping month after month.
These stats from US gov't websites show Firefox's market share at 11%.
Other global stats paint a very similar picture.
Globally, I suspect that Firefox's share of the market is only about 10%. That's pretty abysmal, especially for a browser that was so popular once. It used to hold well over 30% of the market at one time.
Chrome for Android alone now has a greater share of the market than Firefox on all platforms does. Even IE 11, by itself, has about as many users as Firefox does in total.
Why aren't trends like these scaring the living hell out of Mozilla, as an organization?
Don't they realize that Firefox is the only reason they have any sort of influence over the web? Nobody really cares about any of their other projects, I hate to say.
Why don't we hear more from Mozilla about this market share issue? The number of Firefox users keeps dropping month after month, probably because so many Firefox users are unhappy about the awful UI changes, and about how its memory usage and performance continues to lag Chrome and even IE. I want to see real results, not just unrealistic benchmarks showing mythical improvements that I don't actually get to experience as I browse the web!
Nobody will care what Mozilla thinks if the number of Firefox users continues to drop each month. This trend won't continue forever. At some point there will be a negligible number of Firefox users around, and Mozilla will be powerless at that point. Google already has enough power as it is. In that situation, they'd have almost full control over the web. That scares me a lot, and it should scare Mozilla, too!
How many 10+ year-old bugs in Firefox 36 are fixed in 37? Oh, is that none you say. Yawn!
Have you ever tried to talk sense in a bug report on Bugzilla? Most of the Mozilla crew aren't interested in fixing bugs users want fixed, they're downright hostile. It's all about people's pet projects and inflated egos. Just go to Bugzilla yourself and look at how many of the top vote getting bugs are fixed and how many are over 10 YEARS old. At this point it's become a pissing match between users and Mozilla, with Mozilla thumbing their noses at users and daring them to use another browser if they don't like it. Users are taking them up on that offer.
I wonder how much of that is just perception - I have found that when comparing the latest Chrome and Firefox that Firefox has better performance, at least in terms of CPU usage and memory consumption. I was surprised by this because I generally use it with Firebug which drastically impairs the performance, I just didn't realize how bad it was.
I just did the opposite: switched to Firefox because Chrome was too resource intensive. And Firefox, at least in Linux, follows the system look and feel. For Youtube, I just disabled Flash (at all), so I have the same HTML5 player.
Firefox and Chrome have very similar UIs, Any difference is minor. They have very similar performance from user perspective, and are both much better than IE.
I choose to use Firefox as my main browser, mainly because Google have enough control of the internet they don't need to own the browser too.
absolute power corrupts absolutely
If Google wanted not to be evil (I know that's no longer one of their stated goals), then they wouldn't try to have their sticky fingers in everything.