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Newest Firefox Browser Bashes Crashes (cnet.com)
Nobody likes it when a web browser bombs instead of opening up a website. Mozilla is addressing that in the newly released v53 of its Firefox browser, which it claims crashes 10 percent fewer times. CNET adds: The improvement comes through the first big debut of a part of Project Quantum, an effort launched in 2016 to beef up and speed up Firefox. To improve stability, Firefox 53 on Windows machines isolates software called a compositor that's in charge of painting elements of a website onto your screen. That isolation into a separate computing process cuts down on trouble spots that can occur when Firefox employs computers' graphics chips, Mozilla said.
I can't see how the Firefox 57 release could possibly go down in a good way.
These changes have the potential to be the most disruptive ones to date, probably even worse than the Australis UI changes that drove away so many of Firefox's users earlier.
We aren't just talking about highly annoying UI changes here. We're talking about the risk for broken functionality, and in ways that aren't easily fixed. This is stuff that users can't just ignore or learn to work around.
If Firefox 57 does turn out to be the disaster that it could very easily become, I'm not certain that Firefox could survive it.
Firefox is already down to only about 5% to 6% of the browser market. It has almost no (0.03%) mobile presence.
Firefox really can't afford to lose any more users.
What's really bad about this situation is that it will likely be addon authors who are the most affected. These are the users that Firefox really, really can't afford to lose.
I mean, if I have to write my addons in a way that's compatible with Chrome, why would I even bother using Firefox at that point? Firefox is slower and more bloated that Chrome, in my experience. Firefox can also send a lot of info to Mozilla and others, so it's not like it's really any better when it comes to privacy.
If I'm going to get a Chrome-like UI experience from Firefox, and if I'm going to get a Chrome-like addon development experience from Firefox, and I'm going to get a Chrome-like privacy experience from Firefox, but Firefox's will feel slower than Chrome, then I might as well just use Chrome (or Chromium) directly.
I really don't like making this prediction, but I think that by this time next year we could see Firefox down around 1% or 2% of the browser market. At that point I think we'd have to consider it a lost cause. It's already close enough to being a lost cause as it is, while it's still around 5%.
Once Firefox gets below 5%, it just won't matter to web developers. They won't bother testing their sites in a browser that has so few users. The Firefox web experience will just end up getting worse and worse, until most of its users end up using Chrome.
We've seen this happen with Netscape Navigator, and it's looking like it's happening to Firefox now, too.
We at Moz://a are pleased to announce that Firefox 57 will be the Chromium source code with all the icons changed to the Firefox logo. Now we don't have to actually work on our browser we can make fun of extension developers and see all the hard work they done wasted while we roll in the Yahoo sponsorship money.