Former Mozilla CTO: 'Chrome Won' (andreasgal.com)

Responding to Firefox marketing head Eric Petitt's blog post from earlier this week, Andreas Gal, former chief technology officer of Mozilla (who spent seven years at the company) offers his insights. Citing latest market share figures, Gal says "it's safe to say that Chrome is eating the browser market, and everyone else except Safari is getting obliterated." From his blog post (edited and condensed for length): With a CEO transition about 3 years ago there was a major strategic shift at Mozilla to re-focus efforts on Firefox and thus the Desktop. Prior to 2014 Mozilla heavily invested in building a Mobile OS to compete with Android: Firefox OS. I started the Firefox OS project and brought it to scale. While we made quite a splash and sold several million devices, in the end we were a bit too late and we didn't manage to catch up with Android's explosive growth. Mozilla's strategic rationale for building Firefox OS was often misunderstood. Mozilla's founding mission was to build the Web by building a browser. [...] Browsers are a commodity product. They all pretty much look the same and feel the same. All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users. If even Eric -- who heads Mozilla's marketing team -- uses Chrome every day as he mentioned in the first sentence, it's not surprising that almost 65% of desktop users are doing the same. [...] I don't think there will be a new browser war where Firefox or some other competitor re-captures market share from Chrome. It's like launching a new and improved horse in the year 2017. We all drive cars now. Some people still use horses, and there is value to horses, but technology has moved on when it comes to transportation. Does this mean Google owns the Web if they own Chrome? No. Absolutely not. Browsers are what the Web looked like in the first decades of the Internet. Mobile disrupted the Web, but the Web embraced mobile and at the heart of most apps beats a lot of JavaScript and HTTPS and REST these days. The future Web will look yet again completely different. Much will survive, and some parts of it will get disrupted.

Comments

Chrome is fastest

[Anonymous Coward]

The other big three were slow by comparison. On speed alone, Chrome won.

Mozilla didn't help themselves by firing their employees for not being PC enough.

Re:Chrome is fastest

[Tailhook]

by firing their employees for not being PC enough

Did that actually happen? I know they basically badgered Eich out of the company for his failure to adopt Valley Values(tm) in is political activity, but he voluntarily stepped down. Were any employees actually fired?

Re:Chrome is fastest

[jira]

The relatively new Vivaldi browser (an Opera fork) is even faster. It is still missing couple of features - I'd make it my default browser if it supported settings sync. Once its there I think its a winner.

Re:Chrome is fastest

[Z00L00K]

Until there's a new contender coming up with something that the others don't have.

Personally I would like to see a browser with cross-site data access limitations to a greater extent.

Re:Chrome is fastest

[BronsCon]

Indeed. When I'm using a browser, I don't care whether the CEO of the company that made it shares my political and religious views (if I did, I wouldn't use any browser); I care if the browser works. When Eich was running things, the browser worked.

Same goes for every product and service out there. If political and religious views mattered, I'm not sure who I'd buy land from, who I'd have build a house, who I'd buy a house from and, failing all of those things, who I'd rent from, so I'd be homeless. Of course, I'm not sure which appliance manufacturer's name I'd want on the box I'd be sleeping in, so I'd have to get a sleeping bag and, maybe a tent. Not sure who I'd let make those for me though, let alone which store I'd buy them from... or, for that matter, in which bank I'd keep the money used to buy things in the first place, or where I'd work to earn that money.

People who apply artificial importance to the political and religious leanings of others need to be forced to the logical conclusion of their ill-thought-out decision making skills so they can learn why it's a bad idea to let those things matter.

I have a framed copy of the SF Chronicle "LOVE WON" special edition; clearly I do not agree with Eich on that matter, but I'll be damned if he didn't lead a team that made a hell of a good browser. And that's what matters when selecting a browser vendor.

Re:Chrome is fastest

[rholtzjr]

Or by adding features that the majority did not want.

Re:Chrome is fastest

[SumDog]

I've been a hard core FireFox person until this year, when I gave Vivaldi a try. It's still buggy as hell and there are some annoyances here and there, but it's been way faster and less laggy than FireFox.

I kinda hate that. I Mozilla transition. I remember when it was called Firebird. I really don't want to see it go out this way .. and fuck Google and their dominance over everything.

If you really need Chrome, use Chromium!

Re:Chrome is fastest

[Goaway]

"I'm pro.gay marriage (but let me immediately make sure to tell everyone that it is actually bad (but no I am totally pro-gay marriage (no homo)))"

Re:Chrome is fastest

[cheesybagel]

Well you know what... Firefox was great back then. The only alternative we had was Internet Explorer. If you can call that an alternative.

Eventually the software would need major rewrites. But so what. I think their idea to make a new object oriented language, i.e. Rust, and build on that is a good one. Now the language itself might be shit, I know I don't like the syntax even if some of the concepts seem good, but at least they're trying. A big issue with Firefox is the gargantuan size of the codebase and that's probably the major reason why it's so hard to improve it. I mean have you ever even tried to compile the thing. I know I have and it made compiling the Linux kernel seem fast and simple in comparison.

What happened with Eich was just one more sign that the company has its priority's backwards. They should be worrying about his on the job performance not his personal life. This is supposed to be a democracy and it was put up to a vote wasn't it? It was just a sign the Mozilla leadership has gone totally off its rocker.

Re:Chrome is fastest

[BronsCon]

Firstly, the issue was not Eich's views, it was his actions. He actively tried to stop same sex marriages.

Do you really think executives at pretty much every corporation in the world don't act in support of their views? What's the point of having that power, if not to wield it? Most of them don't do it as openly and publicly as Eich did, but you can rest assured they all do it, and every single one of them holds at least one view you will disagree with.

Secondly, you seem to have a fairly extreme dislike of a wide range of views.

What gives you that impression? That I'm pointing out the folly of avoiding products and services simply because you disagree with the people who provide them? Again, everyone will hold at least one view you disagree with; the end result of applying that logic unilaterally (as logic should be applied) is that you don't buy anything, live anywhere, or work for anyone. It's irrational, and that was the point you missed.

Most people can put up a variety of views, especially if those people holding them don't actively try to enact policies that hurt them, and isn't in a position of power over them (e.g. their boss).

And most of them have no clue about the politics of the people running the companies they do business with; most oppression happens behind closed doors and out of public view. You can't just point at one public incident and say "well he's the only one doing it". They're all doing it, Eich is just the one dumb enough to get caught.

Once you understand the reality of this world, you learn to become tolerant of the actions of others, even when you disagree with them. Just stand taller than the bad actors and they lose any power they might have had.

Really, Eich's actions hurt nobody. They may have hurt a lot of peoples' feelings but, again, everyone is going to do something from time to time that will hurt a given individual or group. This is in no way a defense of Eich or his actions, I believe he was wrong, but his actions were not harmful. They could have been, if enough of society decided to side with him, but that did not happen.

Should he be chosen to head up a gay rights group? Probably not. But he shouldn't have been ousted from his position with Mozilla, either, as it had absolutely nothing to do with his views on gay rights, or his actions along those lines. Free speech is a cornerstone of American society; when your livelihood is at stake for speaking your mind about subjects completely unrelated to your work, you speech is not free. That's a problem.

Put another way (and I really do love saying this): Everyone has the right to be offended; who the hell am I to deny them that?

Re:Chrome is fastest

[Tailhook]

nobody would have given a rat's ass

That's a lot of horse shit right there. You snowflakes have no trouble indulging the notion of a "hostile work environment" when some nancy-boy gets a frown while prancing around in his skirt trying to figure out which bathroom to use. Double standard much?

Re:Chrome is fastest

[afgam28]

When Eich was running things, the browser worked.

He was running things for 11 days. That's not enough time to have any impact, positive or negative.

I don't think Eich's firing made any difference to the fortunes of Mozilla. If you look at the market share graph in TFA, there's no real change in Firefox's downward trend around the time that this happened.

Re:Chrome is fastest

[0123456]

When SJWs take over an organization, it's done. Politics becomes Job #1, and whatever the organization was invented to do gets sidelined.

I'm surprised Mozilla is still around.

Re:Chrome is fastest

[BronsCon]

Damn right, they can stop listening whenever they want. What they don't have the right to do is shut me up.

Re:Chrome is fastest

[MtViewGuy]

Not only is Chrome very fast, but the latest versions (from Version 52 on) are way less bloated in the use of system memory, not to mention close links to widely used Google services and just about the best HTML 5.0 compliance of any web browser out there.

Re:Chrome is fastest

[BronsCon]

Elaborate?

Re:Chrome is fastest

[BronsCon]

Despite hating the atrocity that Firefox has become; it's sadly the best out of the other options; for my personal use case.

This I can't argue with. Let me guess, you use the developer tools? I find Chrome's developer tools lacking; likewise for IE/Edge and Safari, not that they're candidates for my daily-driver browser in the first place.

Subverted from the inside

[TWX]

Maybe Chrome is winning because Mozilla/Firefox is basically chromified now. I use it basically for a combination of historical reasons and because it feels like I have more control more easily over the privacy and security settings, but I am very dissatisfied with a lot of things that have come into Firefox, including this rapid-versioning system that they adopted. It's friggin' stupid that they've been copying Chrome so much, and there's not a lot of reason to continue to using Firefox except that I'm used to it.

Re:Subverted from the inside

[freeze128]

Maybe Chrome is winning because the former CTO of mozilla was using Chrome instead of Firefox. Way to eat your own dog food, Mozilla!

Re:Subverted from the inside

[DivineKnight]

Pretty much. What's happening with Firefox is what has been happening with the rest of the tech industry (albeit with a different 'leaders'). Who has been leading design for hardware for quite some time, to the great annoyance of many? Apple. Apple takes away the 3.5mm audio jack, and everyone else thinks it's a grand idea. Same here with browser design -> Google simplifies their design, and Firefox decides "Yeah, let's pitch {popular feature} overboard."

Someone needs to hold a group session at Mozilla, and ask them why Firefox (the browser) was created. Then take a snapshot of the blank stares, and upload it to their front page.

Re:Subverted from the inside

[iMadeGhostzilla]

I use FireFox with NoScript on everything except gmail as my webmail-only browser, so that an accidental click on a link won't take me to some cesspool of malware. (I also use Chrome for a trusted few work sites, and Chrome in Sandboxie for everything else, including being here. All three with AdBlock of course.)

Re:Subverted from the inside

[ruemere]

I still use Firefox, mostly when I need to work with resources no longer supported by Chrome. Firefox is reliable, open and backward compatible to larger extent than Chrome. That said, Chrome is my activity center, with integrated mail, calendar, social updates, notes - all synced painlessly from platform to platform.

Re: Subverted from the inside

[TWX]

for me most of the stuff you listed doesn't require HTTP or HTTPS, so it doesn't justify using a web browser, and while Google has provided web-based means for mail, calendar, etc, it's not like these functions are browser-dependent. I can access them with basically any modern-ish browser, why should I use any particular one? Arguably I should use one that isn't Google's so there's enough userbase to keep them from going off into proprietary-land.

Re:Subverted from the inside

[coastwalker]

Firefox on several windows pcs and laptops is great. NoScript, PrivacyBadger, HTTPS Everywhere, Ghostery, Self Destructing Cookies, VideoDownloadHelper, Youtube Video and Audio Download Helper, User Agent Switcher, Colorful Tabs, Perspectives, Password Exporter, browser sync. There are 12 reasons why I cannot even be bothered to try Chrome or anything else other than Firefox. And all the anti-malware measures mean that I barely ever see advertising either which cannot be bad. Note that I download lectures from YouTube to watch off-grid and not for music by well known pop combos M'lord. The current version of Firefox seems as fast as any web browser has ever been except back in the day before CSS and all the other shit. Smartphones and tablets are for purchasing things and watching cat videos, not for browsing the internet for information; so who cares what browser they use.

Re:Subverted from the inside

[Darinbob]

Fewer and fewer options too in Firefox. Though Mozilla's defenders of the realm will claim you can do it all from the obscure hidden settings page. I don't want one size to fit all, and yet everything seems to be moving that way.

Re:Subverted from the inside

[Darinbob]

I think it's because Mozilla people are using Chrome that they decided to copy everything from Chrome instead of trying to be better or different.

Re:Subverted from the inside

[mrchaotica]

Same here with browser design -> Google simplifies their design, and Firefox decides "Yeah, let's pitch {popular feature} overboard."

You do realize that was the point of Firefox in the first place, right? Firefox exists as an attempt to pitch all the junk out of Netscape Navigator/Mozilla Seamonkey.

Re:Subverted from the inside

[HatofPig]

Try exporting your bookmarks from Firefox now... it's a nightmare. I wanted to sync my bookmarks without using their web-service and wasted half of an hour trying to figure out how to do it. Because hey, free-software users don't want features that let's them own their own computer! I'd use Seamonkey tomorrow if it supported the TreeStyleTabs plugin.

Re:Subverted from the inside

[DivineKnight]

I disagree. Firefox, built on the ruins of Mozilla Seamonkey, built on the ruins of Netscape Navigator (and, as an aside, most of Mozilla's stuff being built on the ruins of the Netscape Communicator suite), was \ is an attempt to flee the madness that was Internet Explorer (from a security and stability, also feature, standpoint).

Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[EkriirkE]

I used to be all over Chrome a few years ago until its (lack of) resource management prevented me from using several tabs at once. Then I rediscovered Firefox and am still quite happy with it. No plans to go back or have another look anytime soon...

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[aliquis]

Firefox is a complete disaster and waaaaaaaaaaaaay slower than Chrome when using multiple tabs.

I don't see how this comment make any sense. I've seen mentions about Firefox using less RAM and well.. Yeah, it wasn't ABLE to use more RAM. Not really a feature, still slow and disturbing as fuck. Edge isn't good for multiple tabs either.

Chrome or possibly Vivaldi (also based on Chrome.)

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[blahbooboo]

I switched back to Firefox a couple years ago when I decided Google knows enough about me from Gmail. Additionally, I never really believed or got it straight what Chrome is tracking in its users. Firefox is fine, and I dont care anymore which is the fastest browser as they are all roughly the same in real world use.

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[avandesande]

I prefer Firefox too as they still have a traditional menu. It's stable and performance is always good (or good enough) so I don't switch.

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[avandesande]

I am a complete tab junky and never have problems with firefox.

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[Falos]

My FF laughs at chrome, tabs or not, but I deliberately don't run the latest, while I let chrome update to whatever retardation google wishes. I also mod out my FF (because FF lets you do that shit) so it's not rendering extra garbage. I require that Chrome renders it all, natively, because I keep it around for maximum site compatibility. Chrome is my internet explorer.

I keep hearing "chrome faster lol" but I greet it with an expectant gesture in my hands and face, only to get a blank one in return.

If your substantiation is "a friend/some guy said so" then all that says about chrome's strengths is they're like apple's.

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no lazy loading of tabs anymore in Chrome (I think there was at one point). How does opening over 200 tabs session feels like in Chrome? Apparently Vivaldi and Opera do have the lazy loading still. Firefox Nightly has been kind to me since version 11.

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[Darinbob]

Way slower? I see no slowdowns at all, except sometimes when the link is slow. If they link is good and solid there's no need for it to be faster. I also use noscript so maybe that's the reason.

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[Junta]

It depends. On a system with low ram amount, firefox is better and chrome will make the whole system go nuts due to memory pressure.

On a system with plenty of ram, chrome will fly relative to firefox, as firefox will bottleneck itself a lot.

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[aliquis]

I said slow.
I accept Chrome can use more than 4 GB of RAM.

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[aliquis]

There is no lazy loading of tabs anymore in Chrome (I think there was at one point). How does opening over 200 tabs session feels like in Chrome? Apparently Vivaldi and Opera do have the lazy loading still. Firefox Nightly has been kind to me since version 11.

Opening up Chrome with an old session is slow.
For me it fetches all the tabs I'm quite sure of.

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[ChromeAeonium]

I have the same problem. The longer Firefox stays open, the more memory it uses. It uses way more memory than the amount it should be. A handful of pages do not need 2 gigs of memory, yet somehow, Firefox demands it. It used to run so well. Now it's a bloated monstrosity. I only use it for the NoScript. Once Chrome has a whitelist system as nice as the one Firefox has, then I won't see any reason at all to put up with Firefox's bloat.

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[labnet]

I usually have 50 tabs open, so I need the tree tab plugin on Firefox. No other browser properly supports side tabs that I know of. Plus who wants Google spying on them more than necessary.

Re:Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[Waccoon]

This represents a problem that has been around for a decade: Firefox allocates memory as a percentage of total RAM available, and will not release it properly, even after the garbage collector runs. It caches multiple copies of everything (as I can clearly see when using a memory visualization tool) and won't release memory unless at gunpoint. Memory isn't being leaked, just hoarded. If they would just tweak the default memory and cache policy, it would be way faster overnight.

This is the reason I switched to PaleMoon, because version 26 idles around 300MB of memory usage and is nice and fast no matter what I view. Alas, after updating to version 27 it started behaving like Firefox again, gulping up memory. I've been investigating the difference between PaleMoon 26 and Firefox 24 LTS, in the hopes of tracking down what Firefox is doing wrong, but... I'm not really an application developer, so it's been slow work.

It won because you let it.

[thegreatbob]

Culling legitimately useful, unique features and attempting to emulate the user interface design of your competition... great plan. Written using Firefox 45 ESR, which will probably be my last normal-use Firefox version. It was nice while it lasted. Off to PaleMoon land for plugin support, I guess.

Re:It won because you let it.

[TWX]

I didn't know that Eric S. Raymond was involved in the Mozilla Foundation.

Re:It won because you let it.

[thegreatbob]

I should've qualified, that the intended target is more or less Mozilla as a whole, not any specific person.

Re:It won because you let it.

[thegreatbob]

Holy crap Woosh xD I get it now.

Re: It won because you let it.

[TWX]

*grin* sorry, just couldn't help myself.

Re:It won because you let it.

[MtViewGuy]

I think Firefox blew it because they should have "sandboxed" each browser tab a long, long time ago. Because Chrome (and interestingly Internet Explorer 10.0 and 11.0) does that, it means if web browsing starts to have problems, closing the tab would fix the problem.

Did it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still on Firefox. Although, I'm tempted to jump ship because with every new release it gets slower. They're recommendation is to get rid of plugins - like ad block and other things to keep all the crap from loading - like that spy company's link - Facebook.

On the Mac OS X machine, I have to shut down fFF once a day or its starts to hang and performance tanks. Based on the bugs, Mozilla is well aware of this.

If it weren't for the fact that I find googles business practices creepy as all hell, I'd switch to chrome.

Re:Did it?

[thegreatbob]

taskkill /f /im firefox.exe is almost always the last thing written in my Windows "run" box.

Re:Did it?

[Cipheron]

Must be a YMMV thing, I haven't had FF hang in years now.

Re:Did it?

[Cipheron]

(And my PC is fairly old now, an i3 I bought back in 2012)

What users want

[Opportunist]

Simple. A browser that does what they want. And they don't give a fuck if it renders the webpage 0.2 seconds faster or whether it uses more or less ram.

What people want from a browser is rather little. "Render the webpage" sums it up for a sizable portion of the user base already. Some more consider certain ad-blocking plugins crucial.

The handful of people that actually have any kind of requirement above and beyond that simply don't count.

Re:What users want

[Wycliffe]

The handful of people that actually have any kind of requirement above and beyond that simply don't count.

Exactly. I use firefox for firebug and pocket. I use chrome for hangouts because google dropped support for firefox. For general browsing, I have no preference. Generally people will use the stock browser unless there is some plugin or feature they want.

Re:What users want

[Merk42]

Simple. A browser that does what [the users] want.

What if what some users want is the exact opposite of what other users want?

And they don't give a fuck if it renders the webpage 0.2 seconds faster or whether it uses more or less ram.

What people want from a browser is rather little. "Render the webpage" sums it up for a sizable portion of the user base already. Some more consider certain ad-blocking plugins crucial.

The handful of people that actually have any kind of requirement above and beyond that simply don't count.

Oh, so it's not what "users" want, it's what you want.

Re:What users want

[Opportunist]

So how large would you assume to be that market of people who want the opposite?

Do you honestly think that there is a sizable amount of people who want more from their browser than the essentials? Yes, there are special cases of people who want "more", whatever that "more" may be, but I'd take any bet that most people don't care for that but just want their Facebook, their Twitter and their Youtube to work sensibly.

But please elaborate, what do you think "users" want, enlighten me.

Re:What users want

[Merk42]

I know I can't speak for all users, that's the point.
What would "the essentials" be? W3C Standards?

Re:What users want

[Opportunist]

The essentials would probably be defined as "good enough to render the top 100 Alexa pages in a quality that allows sensible use of said pages".

Re: What users want

[Merk42]

Ok aside from letting a constantly changing list of web pages determine a standard be a bad idea... Let's say Firefox does that, and only that. If every other browser does it too, then why should someoneâ use Firefox over Chrome et Al?

Re: What users want

[Opportunist]

Are you really that dense or are you trying to argue for argument's sake?

Re: What users want

[Merk42]

So, not going to answer the question I asked?

I'm just tired of all these smug know-it-all posts every time there is an article about Firefox/Mozilla. I'm illustrating that creating/maintaining a browser and creating/maintaining its popularity, is not so simple.
Sorry if you feel I'm picking on you specifically, I'd love to hear comments from all the other armchair professional CTO/CEOs out there too.

Re: What users want

[Opportunist]

A browser that supports the top-100 Alexa pages by definition supports pretty much any and all pages out there with a mass appeal, for the same reason that until about 5-10 years ago creating your webpage for IE meant that everyone could use it, because everyone has to follow the market leader to stay compatible. If your webpage is using the same technologies that YouTube uses, you can rest assured that every browser will support it, even if it is not a W3C standard, simply because if BrowserA doesn't support a feature that YouTube demands (or it doesn't work), people will instantly switch to BrowserB because the average person out there doesn't give a shit whether their browser says IE, Firefox, Chrome or Huhlahje somewhere in its "about" box that nobody cares about.

This is why supporting the top100 Alexa is enough. Because everyone will follow whatever they put forth as the de facto standard. And those pages are in the Alexa top100 because that's what most people use when it comes to the internet. The whole shit is a huge circle-jerk that is self perpetuating.

And no, to answer that other question, there is no reason to use Firefox over Chrome (or the other way around). And there is exactly nothing you can do to create one. Most people have rather low requirements when it comes to what they expect from their browser, so what you could do, technically, is to go for the niche users that require certain features, and this is where you hit the 80/20 problem, which is more a 99/1 problem here: To get 1% more user, you have to shift 99% of your manpower to attract that user. All the while risking that you fall behind in the far easier to maintain 99%, of which you can only hope to attract (100/$number_browsers) percent of the users, because these users don't give a shit which browser to use - as long as every browser does what they want from it. And all the browsers do that.

Re: What users want

[Merk42]

A browser that supports the top-100 Alexa pages by definition supports pretty much any and all pages out there with a mass appeal, for the same reason that until about 5-10 years ago creating your webpage for IE meant that everyone could use it, because everyone has to follow the market leader to stay compatible. If your webpage is using the same technologies that YouTube uses, you can rest assured that every browser will support it, even if it is not a W3C standard, simply because if BrowserA doesn't support a feature that YouTube demands (or it doesn't work), people will instantly switch to BrowserB because the average person out there doesn't give a shit whether their browser says IE, Firefox, Chrome or Huhlahje somewhere in its "about" box that nobody cares about.

This is why supporting the top100 Alexa is enough. Because everyone will follow whatever they put forth as the de facto standard. And those pages are in the Alexa top100 because that's what most people use when it comes to the internet. The whole shit is a huge circle-jerk that is self perpetuating.

OK you're aware of standards vs de facto standards, fine.

And no, to answer that other question, there is no reason to use Firefox over Chrome (or the other way around). And there is exactly nothing you can do to create one. Most people have rather low requirements when it comes to what they expect from their browser, so what you could do, technically, is to go for the niche users that require certain features, and this is where you hit the 80/20 problem, which is more a 99/1 problem here: To get 1% more user, you have to shift 99% of your manpower to attract that user. All the while risking that you fall behind in the far easier to maintain 99%, of which you can only hope to attract (100/$number_browsers) percent of the users, because these users don't give a shit which browser to use - as long as every browser does what they want from it. And all the browsers do that.

but I thought it was Simple?

I use firefox to browse, chrome only for Hangouts

[Maxo-Texas]

And Chrome slows down my fairly beefy machine when it loads and spawns off a half dozen processes that I have to kill manually at least once a week when performance gets really bad.

Firefox also runs out of control every 2-3 days and starts to thrash disk, cpu and memory but at least it's easy to kill. Lately, it screws up on youtube videos and they get stuttery but keep playing after it dies.

I'd like a browser that didn't impact performance so badly.

I prefer the noscript plugins on firefox. Does chrome have something similar to no-script? I hate intrusive and popup ads.

Genius

[110010001000]

What a genius. Ignore Firefox and focus on Firefox OS. Best CTO ever.

Re:Genius

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. Firefox management is clearly clueless. They have no idea at all why people were using FireFox in the first place, so thay started stripping away the things that attracted people to it.

Here's a hint: if you start making your browser look like your competitor's (which until recently was their main sponsor; no conflict of interest there) then obviously all browsers start to look te same.

Here's what we want in a browser:
- Lean: make it modular, allow the user to install extra plugins at install time
- Mean: i.e. reasonably fast (10% slower than Chrome in some dumb benchmark doesn't mean a thing and is totally OK), and with reasonable memory consumption.
- Safe: make sure your sandbox works. It's 2017 and some sites still manage to hijack my pages and redirect to web shit. Flash is still allowed to popup extra pages.
- Private: don't collect or send out anything without permission.
- Customizable: put the user back in control. We want to be able to put our buttons where we like them, have our tabs above or below, have square tabs our round ones. One UI (Chrome) does not fit all.
- Extensible: decent plugins support is a must. OK if the current plugin system is problematic, overhaul it. But it should be powerful enough, not this watered down crap that has been proposed.
- User in control: we want to control whether videos auto-play when we open a page, or even if the video can start preloading (which is currently decided by the web page, meaning GBs of traffic whenever you open certain sites). Add in a decent script blocker, add blocker from the start.

Task a small core team with a 10M/y budget to make that, and people will come back to FF in droves. Code name Phoenix.

Re:Genius

[knorthern knight]

> Yup, that was intentional. I started using FF when it was
> still called Phoenix 0.3, and each release was like a
> Christmas present full of wonderful new and useful features.

The name was changed because of legal/trademark threats from Phoenix, the BIOS company. Mozilla first used "Firebird" for a while, only to find out that there was already a database called Firebird... oops... https://firebirdsql.org/ They eventually switched the name to Firefox.

Chromium's memory issues...

[Entropius]

I used Chromium for a while on my (Lubuntu) laptop, only to notice that it had what appeared to be memory leaks in it -- gradually escalating RAM usage until it blew up the entire system, if I didn't kill the process once in a while and restart it.

Now I'm using Opera which doesn't do this, but seems just as fast.

Re:Chromium's memory issues...

[thegreatbob]

Similar reasons to why I avoided Firefox 64-bit builds for ages. Nothing like giving an application full of memory leaks the ability to use an effectively arbitrary amount of RAM. Chrome/Chromium sidestepped this issue with their multi-process model, allowing them to flood memory on 32-bit only systems.

Re:Chromium's memory issues...

[geek]

I used Chromium for a while on my (Lubuntu) laptop, only to notice that it had what appeared to be memory leaks in it -- gradually escalating RAM usage until it blew up the entire system, if I didn't kill the process once in a while and restart it.

Now I'm using Opera which doesn't do this, but seems just as fast.

Those aren't memory leaks. That's memory use. Memory is there to be used. If you have 16 gigs of RAM and freak out any time your system goes over 2 gigs then you're doing it wrong.

People bitching that their web browser, one of the heaviest parts of your systems that you probably use as much or more than anything else, uses a couple gigs of cheap as fuck memory really is ridiculous.

Re:Chromium's memory issues...

[djinn6]

I run Chrome on a Mac. Same memory issues.

Re:Chromium's memory issues...

[geek]

2 gigs for text in a window parsed by a browser that's more complex than the kernel of the OS you're using. Look dipshit, I know you can't put 1+1 together and come up with 2 but most people are intelligent enough to realize that a browser which can pull down a multi-megabit web page and parse + display it instantly will have a significant amount of over head. Memory is cheap. Buy some. If you can't afford it, you're a McDonalds burger flipping scrub that should probably get some job skills before posting on slashdot and making a fucking fool of yourself.

Re:Chromium's memory issues...

[r2rknot]

I started started using Oprea recently after finding Firefox more and more unresponsive. Its rather nice, and is not far removed from browsers i am used to.

Stuck using unsupported versions of Chrome

[Kazoo the Clown]

Several of my systems are using Windows versions no longer supported by Chrome. It nags about it, which is annoying but it isn't going to make me update my OS. Firefox doesn't have that problem, you can still run old versions of Firefox that don't nag you about stuff that's not going to change. Try installing an old version of Chrome-- not quite so easy...

Re:Stuck using unsupported versions of Chrome

[yuhong]

They are moving XP and Vista to ESR right now. They eventually will do similar nagging later.

Duh

[ArchieBunker]

It won because you became Chrome Junior with the "australis" interface. That and you cared more about adding video chat than stability or speed.

Re:Duh

[jez9999]

This. I ditched Firefox for SeaMonkey and PM when they fucked up the interface. Chrome didn't win, they shot their users in the face.

uses Chrome

[kwoff]

If even Eric -- who heads Mozilla's marketing team -- uses Chrome every day

How does he still have a job there?

Re:uses Chrome

[myrdos2]

He doesn't use it to browse the web. He uses it for inspiration.

Re:uses Chrome

[ByteSlicer]

He doesn't use it to browse the web. He uses it for inspiration.

Actually, he does use FireFox, but it looks so much like Chrome nowadays that he couldn't tell the difference.

Re:uses Chrome

[Darinbob]

Firefox is just a skin for Chrome. Or is it Chrome is a skin for Firefox? I can't tell.

Didn't Like Eich

[Kunedog]

Mozilla didn't help themselves by firing their employees for not being PC enough.

Maybe it's just me, but every time I see the current Mozilla make a decision, I'm so grateful they immediately ousted Brendan Eich (with his "proven technical and leadership background" bullshit) and appointed the former head of marketing as CEO instead.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[cayenne8]

This is interesting.

I could probably count the number of times I"ve used chrome on one hand.

I don't really know any of my friends that use it either....

Where I work, IE is still the browser of choice for the company....you have to actually get special dispensation for them to allow you to install FF or chrome (usually for testing web apps).

So, in light of my anecdotal experience with it, might I ask those many of you that *do* use chrome as your primary browser.....why?

What benefits does it give over other browsers? I primarily use FF on my windows and Linux boxes...and mostly safari on my OS X boxes.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[Lisandro]

I use mainly Chromium these days. It is a far, far better browsing experience than Firefox ever was.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[MightyYar]

It's almost as customizable as Firefox (though I still miss Tree Style Tabs), but it does not seem to leak memory as badly and the stability is better. I have kids and thus Chromebooks, and the profile syncs well with those as well as my Android phone. It has critical mass and so pretty much every website works with it.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[Maxo-Texas]

It's often the default browser on android phones. And many people no longer own PC's or they own 3 tablets and a chromebook plus a PC.

It's quite possible that Firefox still has more browser installs than it did back in 2010- but a lower percentage of all browsers since everyone's phone now is a browser.

I don't "use" chrome- but it's REQUIRED for hangouts. So it's installed and sitting there.

I use firefox. Everyone I know uses firefox. Except on their phones.

I don't use firefox on my phone.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[SumDog]

You can use Vivaldi and get better tab support with the chrome engine underneath

Re: Didn't Like Eich

[SumDog]

This is kinda odd since FireFox is pretty superior to Chrome on the mobile space.

For the desktop I've slowed moved over to Vivaldi, but on my Android device, it's still Firefox.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[courteaudotbiz]

You realize that all this data "shared" between your devices is stored somewhere on Google servers? I don't trust anyone with my data, except me. I'll sure not trust a company that has been proven to provide all its data to 3-letter agencies.

At least with Firefox, I can disable all the call-home features. On Chrome? Hahaha! Google's core business is your data. You think they provide Chrome for the sake of having an open Internet? Nope. It's for them to retrieve all the data they can about you and sell it to their advertisers.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[gnick]

It's almost as customizable as Firefox (though I still miss Tree Style Tabs), but it does not seem to leak memory as badly and the stability is better.

My experience is different. I use Chrome exclusively at work and am entirely satisfied. Typical use is gmail, slashdot, programming forums, and news sites. I can't remember the last time I restarted it - Probably the last time I had to reboot for patches. Win 7 Pro. At home I use a mix of Chrome, FF, and Opera. Win 10. I tend to leave a YouTube tab open and paused indefinitely. I assumed that Chrome would be ideal for that - It seems like YouTube & Chrome should literally be made for each other. But that's not what I see. After a few days, Chrome bloats to about a gig of RAM before I have to kill it. That sometimes requires the Task Manager. I haven't seen this behavior from FF. YMMV.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[scumdamn]

OH NOES! Google knows what webcomics I like! I don't give a shit if Google has my data. I like my sites syncing between all the different devices I use.

Re: Didn't Like Eich

[Cajun Hell]

Once you are used to chrome on your android device, you try it out and find that it's nice and fast and stick with it on your PC.

It amazes me that anyone possibly can get "used to chrome" on Android.

On the desktop, Chromium (and presumably Chrome) is better than Firefox. I'll admit that.

But on Android, Firefox beats the living shit out of worthless Chrome. Calling Chrome second place is a hateful, mean-spirited insult to the number two. Chrome doesn't let me install extensions like ublock origin and similar things, and without that stuff, the web is nearly unusable.

Trying to use the web without ad blocking is about as shocking as turning on a TV at a hotel, and realizing that TV still has ads. If you aren't used to that shit, it's like a punch in the face. I just don't know how anyone can tolerate Chrome on Android. It's garbage.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[bjdevil66]

If ANY part of your being grateful has to do with Eich's anti-gay-marriage views and his support of Prop 8 in CA, then you're an over-reactionary idiot. Just like Dries Buytaert (founder of Drupal), who recently pushed out a governing board member for his sexual fetish and got punched in the face by the Drupal "community" for being too corporate and concerned about image.

Those kinds of potentially company-altering decisions should never be made over hurt feelings of some random group.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[Darinbob]

I keep all the devices segregated, no sharing, no sync, no cloud, no BS. When I'm at home I don't see anything about work, and people who do want to see their work stuff at home need to learn to cut that umbilical cord.

If there's one reason why Firefox is declining it is because they're pissing off their customers with the update speeds. If there's a second reason, it's because they copy Chrome slavishly, as if they can't start developing any features until they see it somewhere else first. I still use it though because I am still allowed to turn off features and use the very few plugins I want.

Re: Didn't Like Eich

[Darinbob]

The phone browsers look nothing at all like their PC counterparts that have the same name. Completely different look and feel and speed. I don't see why liking Chrome or Firefox on a phone says anything at all about liking them on a PC. They certainly don't share the same code. Right now, there are no good browsers on phones, the display is too small and interface too clumsy for something like a web browser.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[cayenne8]

I use mainly Chromium these days. It is a far, far better browsing experience than Firefox ever was.

Can you please elaborate in what ways it is a better browsing experience.

I mean for a browser, you mainly just need to click a link and it takes you to a page..click another...lather, rinse, repeat.

So, what differentiates chrome from other browsers?

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[cayenne8]

I don't "use" chrome- but it's REQUIRED for hangouts. So it's installed and sitting there.

Hmm...guess I"ll have to try to find out what "hangouts" are....?

Since you mentioned chrome was necessary for it, I"m assuming this is something associated with google?

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[cayenne8]

You realize that all this data "shared" between your devices is stored somewhere on Google servers? I don't trust anyone with my data, except me. I'll sure not trust a company that has been proven to provide all its data to 3-letter agencies.

At least with Firefox, I can disable all the call-home features. On Chrome? Hahaha! Google's core business is your data. You think they provide Chrome for the sake of having an open Internet? Nope. It's for them to retrieve all the data they can about you and sell it to their advertisers.

Interesting....

I"m in the basic same boat. When I saw the sync thing on FF (I've not really used chrome)...I thought "oh no way...I don't want my bookmarks/history/etc on their servers".

So, I promptly shut that shit off.

If I were on chrome associated with google, I'd be very concerned what they were storing about me...

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[Lisandro]

Chrome, for all its failures, it is still much more lightweight than Firefox. I usually keep a large number of tabs open at any given time and Chrome manages these much better than Firefox - even being a memory hog itself.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a shortsighted fool.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[cfalcon]

> OH NOES! Google knows what webcomics I like!

Google knows a fuck lot more than that.

Google is using the data they have to figure out how best to market to you. Data someone else has about you is not used to help you, it is used to hurt you. If nothing else, think about this: if Google knows it, the US government can request it right now (most Americans are ultimately fine with this- after all, we have a good government right now, that uses this information to fight crime and violence)... but many more governments can request it in the future. The laws can change towards tyranny somewhere far away, and that could be used against you in the future. Again, the data isn't going away- you're playing a gambling game where you either break even or lose, and there's no win condition. It's a bad gambling game, right?

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[Maxo-Texas]

It's a multi-platform IM created by google and they've slowly tied it to chrome as a sub-app.

Re: Didn't Like Eich

[Cajun Hell]

Sounds swell, if your Android device happens to be non-portable. Ok, that's .. some .. Android devices, sure.

Alas, many Android devices are carried outside the home, so they'd have to VPN to your network to use the proxy. That's sort of a PITA, but I can see how it might be something that people end up doing anyway, to get access to their own "internal services" and such.

I am having a hilarious vision where everything I just said is wrong, though. In this fantasy, I'm talking to you at a bar about VPNing to a proxy and you interrupt me. "VPN? Why would I do that? I just connect to it directly." I stare at you, my eyes saying "WTF." That's when you pull a battery-powered Pi out of your pocket. "I never leave home without it."

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[cheesybagel]

I still hate Chrome's text scrolling. They never, EVER, fixed it properly and I even bothered writing a bug report for it. They've claimed to have fixed it several times but they never did. The plugins are also much worse than Firefox's, it uses a ton more memory, the major thing it has is speed. Oh and don't get me started on the privacy concerns. I suppose Chromium at least takes care of that.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[AmiMoJo]

Google is actually very clear about what it knows about you via Chrome: https://www.google.com/chrome/...

TL;DR make sure you set a sync password and Google won't be able to read anything the browser syncs, and if you use search suggestions and safe browsing be aware of what that requires being sent to the server.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[MightyYar]

Thanks, I'll give it a shot - though at first glance it does not have the Google integration that makes Chrome so handy.

Re: Didn't Like Eich

[AmiMoJo]

The mobile version of Chrome is a fork of the desktop version, with code changes fed both ways between the two. They share huge amounts of code.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[Gr8Apes]

I don't run chrome except as a test browser in a VM. Chrome phones all shit home all the time. It's google's means of grabbing your browsing habits without you having to go to google and run through search for each page. No thanks.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[iCEBaLM]

See I just don't understand this. I primarily use Firefox. I've never had Firefox not load a ton of tabs, I don't understand what you mean by "manages better"?

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[erice]

This is interesting.

I could probably count the number of times I"ve used chrome on one hand.

So, in light of my anecdotal experience with it, might I ask those many of you that *do* use chrome as your primary browser.....why?

What benefits does it give over other browsers? I primarily use FF on my windows and Linux boxes...and mostly safari on my OS X boxes.

Supported Flash. I started using Chrome when Adobe stopped updating the Firefox plugin for Flash. It was already bad, causing many crashes and corruption but without updates, it was hopeless. Chrome had a plash plugin that was still maintained and was less prone to crash the browser. So I uninstalled the Firefox plugin and went to Chrome for those sites that still demanded flash. I still run two browsers but I'm about 2/3 Chrome now. When I can finally dump Flash, I might drift back.

Re: Didn't Like Eich

[kurkosdr]

Speed. Firefox blocks on JavaScript and runs everything under a single process. And in general it is slow and JavaScript loads make scrolling non-smooth. I knew it was time to switch when my old netbook felt faster with Chrome that my new laptop with Firefox.

Re: Didn't Like Eich

[kurkosdr]

On Android I use brave which is Chrome for Android with an Adblocker.

Re: Didn't Like Eich

[kurkosdr]

Anyway, Firefox is the new IE. Old codebase and slow, but people use it anyways out of habit or some sense of loyalty I don't understand.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[Lisandro]

Firefox eats memory much faster than Chrome/Chromium when tabs pile up. As stated before Chrome is not flawless either; it generates a thread per tab so it hits other limitations when multiple tabs are in place, but at least the browser stays responsive overall.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[volmtech]

For my web surfing FF does exactly what I want. It will open a tab when I switch to it. It has a search bar. I keep a search tab open to lookup words I can't spell and facts I need when replying in forums.

I'm 65. While I got my first computer (Sinclar ZX-81) in 1981 I no longer try to keep on the cutting edge.

Re: Didn't Like Eich

[cthulhu11]

I switched because I was tired of FF saturating my system and beach balling with more than a dozen tabs open.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[ArmoredDragon]

Typically AJAX, WebGL, and other interactive content is much smoother and faster on Chrome.

I just recently switched to chrome because I was tired of Firefox lagging when I used any one of the various mapping sites. My smartphone just shouldn't be faster at rendering them in a web browser than my PC.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[MightyYar]

I do understand, but in practice most of this power is not used for my purposes except for Tree Style Tabs.

In any event, that kind of customization is all going away soon as they go with the more Chrome-like model.

differentiation

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox seems intent on giving up everything that differentiated it from Chrome, so in the end there is little reason to chose it.

It was the browser that gave the most control to the end user. It had the richest set of privacy extensions, to stymie constant data harvesting done by most sites these days.

Mozilla seems intent on destroying this ecosystem of extensions and instead move to "WebExtensions" - aka, the more limited Chrome method.

FF had the chance to be THE browser for people who do not want their every click monetized. That would not leave it with the market share of Chrome, but it could absolutely be an important even if smaller player. However, if it insists on becoming a low-rent knockoff of Chrome, it will lose everything that makes a lot of us still want to use it.

They have to ask themselves: do they want to be a small but beloved fish in a big pond with factors to differentiate it, or do they want to be eaten entirely by the bigger fishes with no reason anyone should care about its fate?

Why I use Firefox

[fred6666]

I use Firefox because I can have it both on PC and phone, with synced passwords and history, and with an ad-blocker (u-block) on both.
Chrome didn't allow ad blockers on phone last time I checked. Has it changed?

Re:Why I use Firefox

[jira]

I'm stuck with FF, because of tree style tabs.

Re:Why I use Firefox

[DarthVain]

One thing I found useful about Firefox, at least at work was established extensions like Firebug. As you mention it is also better with html5 which is a requirement for some of the apps I need to use.

I hate IE at work, period. I use it for certain applications because I have to. Part of the problem is that corporate has it so locked up, and restricted, mostly so it can support some legacy systems we have, that it is useless for much of anything else.

I use Chrome for general browsing. I've recently found that it is starting to also introduce some interesting apps as well. Unfortunately their store is all locked down by corporate so it is useless for that at work, but good for home however.

At home I generally use Chrome. I started out using IE after I upgraded to Windows 10, but had some recurring issues with it, and eventually moved to Chrome. When I had Windows 7, I used both Chrome and Firefox though I am not sure I really had a huge preference of one over the other. Firefox seemed a bit more robust, but also a bit more bloated...

i think we know why Firefox lost

[FudRucker]

I use chromium for most general purpose browsing, and I use Pale Moon for some selected websites, (Pale Moon is a fork of a much older Firefox version before it got bloated and slow. this image sums up what Firefox looks like, a once sleek Firefox just put on way to much weight and useless annoying features, sometimes a browser should just be kept as a simple but effective browser http://i.imgur.com/joooILc.jpg

Re:i think we know why Firefox lost

[Waccoon]

PaleMoon recently got an extensive update to a new fork of Firefox. Alas, this had the unfortunate side effect of making it just as slow as recent versions of Firefox.

I'm using PaleMoon right now and I still like it, but it's not as good as it was last year.

Chrome hasn't "Won"

[mykepredko]

Chrome is number one right now.

There was a point where
- Lynx was the most popular browser
- Then it was Netscape
- IE was the most popular browser for a while
- I believe Mozilla was the most popular browser for a year or so
- Now we have Chrome as the most used browser

What is the most popular browser going forwards hasn't been determined yet. Saying "Chrome has won" means that you've given up trying to compete.

Give us a reason to go to Firefox rather than Chrome and then you'll "win", for a while, at least.

Re:Chrome hasn't "Won"

[tender-matser]

There was a point where
- Lynx was the most popular browser

There never was such a point. Lynx was never very popular. You're probably thinking of mosaic, of which early IE was a fork.

Re:Chrome hasn't "Won"

[mykepredko]

You're right, Lynx was never very popular, but it was the most widely used.

Switched to Vivaldi

[tgetzoya]

I've used Chrome since version 4. At the time it was lightweight, fast and conformant to standards. Now, even on a brand new i7 laptop, it feels sluggish. I don't install many plugins, just adblock and ghostery, so I doubt that has any bearing on performance.

I tried the Vivaldi browser last week and I have to say that I am enjoying it more than Chrome. It's Blink based so it uses the same engine as Chrome as well as the same extensions. What I notice is that it starts faster and pages load faster. I've also wondered if Google spied on my web usage and by using Vivaldi I no longer worry about that.

As for Firefox, I still use it when I want to test my work against many browsers but I don't use it directly for anything more than that. It's a venerable browser but its day as passed.

Re:Switched to Vivaldi

[geek]

Vivaldi is still Chrome.

Re:Switched to Vivaldi

[Danathar]

That's what they said about Mozilla when IE was top browser by percentage, that Mozilla's "day has passed".

Re:Switched to Vivaldi

[SumDog]

It may use the same rendering engine, but the UI and reporting is totally different. Who knows what Chrome is tracking from you.

Re:Switched to Vivaldi

[samwichse]

Replying from Vivaldi.

Nothing more to add that you didn't already say, except "me too."

Re:Switched to Vivaldi

[geek]

That has no barring on the discussion. The point is that Chrome has won. Its rendering engine is used everywhere. Moving to Vivaldi is still using Chrome.

Game Over Man!

[the_skywise]

Maybe we can build a campfire, sing some songs... Why was he even CTO? It's not about choosing a car over a horse (which is a dumbass comparison) - it's comparing a Model T to a Mustang... and yet people still preferred to buy VW Beetles. The war is far from over because I refuse to use Chrome as I can barely block ads, let alone use a tool like NoScript to block specific javascript sites and I try to limit my google tracking as best as I can. Give me a browser that DOES that (Brave comes close) and renders web pages to the standard and I'm there. Y'know... like Opera or Palemoon. Firefox lost because Firefox refused to compete with Google (and they couldn't because they were funded BY Google) and decided they wanted to be an OS and then abandoned their principles by forcing ads on you anyway.

It is a Car Analogy

[mewsenews]

I don't think there will be a new browser war where Firefox or some other competitor re-captures market share from Chrome. It's like launching a new and improved horse in the year 2017. We all drive cars now.

But people still use Chrome???

He's not going to even bother competing with Chrome because he wants to take on Android?!!! Is that what he's saying?!

Any investors in Mozilla should be pulling their money ASAP

Re:It is a Car Analogy

[mewsenews]

I'm dumb, this was a former CTO and moz is a non-profit

Chrome has better under the hood tech

[Eravnrekaree]

Chrome had better under the hood technology, better written code, fewer memory leaks. Chrome had sandboxing long before Firefox did (it does not have it yet really). Firefox was too busy adding crap like Pocket than to care about the quality of the core product.

On the other hand, the chrome user interface is HORRIBLE. What Firefox should have done was keep its old UI and add sandboxing and fix the memory leaks and bugs. This would have differentiated itself in UI but would have matched Chrome in relaibility and security. Instead they ignored the need for sandboxing and copied what is bad about chrome, the UI,.

Some have switched to Firefox clones however these clones copy all of Firefox's underlying technical problems like lack of a sandboxing. Given what a mess the web is today and the danger of bugs in browser code, sandboxing is a MUST in any serious web browser. This means multiprocess so that the kernel attack surface can be reduced and customized for the browser sand box process. Another advantage of multiprocess is it can clear any memory leaks when a tab is closed without having to close other tabs. The memory usage is not really greater because of the use of shared libraries.

Why chrome won.

[Lumpy]

First it plays flash pages without Flash having to be downloaded, same goes for a lot of other crud. the user can download one thing and then surf almost 99% of the intar-woobs.

But it's the ONLY browser that works with youtube perfectly and all other google products (funny that eh?) so it increases adoption even faster.

Lastly, Firefox told a LOT of users "we dont want you" by dropping the 32 bit builds and there are a LOT of 32 bit windows machines out there, hell you can buy brand new 32 bit windows 10 machines right now. almost all the budget low end laptops and win10 tablets are 32bit. I am even seeing $100 tiny desktops that also use thise 32 bit quad core intel processor on a chip setups.

Yes, I agree it's a freaking crime that anything being sold is 32 bit, but it's there and they are popular because of the pricepoints.

Re:Why chrome won.

[Anubis350]

I agree with 90% of what you wrote... but I have to say, while there may be machines being sold with 32bit *windows* on them, I don't think intel *makes* a 32bit only x86 chip anymore. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that died out with the the introduction of the core 2s years ago... so you're not seeing 32bit quads in the store...

Re:Why chrome won.

[Dagger2]

I see official 32-bit builds for the latest version for both Windows and Linux? Mac I'm not sure about; it may be some kind of combined package, or perhaps 32-bit Macs are no longer a thing.

Firefox ignored users, tried to be an tech driver

[BrookHarty]

Love firefox, still use it sometimes. But I switched to google because it fixed issues firefox had, and icing on the cake, android.
I felt firefox spent too much time on everything other than the browser, but then it had the best dev tools built in so I kept using it.
I didnt want firefox os, but I still use Thunderbird.

Firefox memories.

Firefox wasn't multi threaded enough so 1 tab would pause the entire browser.
Browser would crash and you would lose all your work
Each new version broke plugins
Firefox saving passwords was implemented after google, use the javascript trick for a long time.
Firefox uses its own datastore not windows, separate proxy, certs, etc.
Funky theme migration over versions when all I wanted was simple netscape'ish small layout.

Things I love about firefox that chrome still cant do well.

Debug traffic easily to track urls and assets
Source code view
Asset/Media page view is very handy
Right click save images when chrome won't
Great proxy support.

Re:Keep XUL extensions silly.

[TheRaven64]

Want to keep Firefox competitive, allow XUL extensions

Compartmentalised rendering or XUL, pick one. If you pick compartmentalisation, people complain that you've broken their plugins. If you pick XUL, people complain that a bug exploited in a one tab allowed an attacker to compromise your entire browser and get at all of the credentials that the browser can access.

and Windows XP,

So, you want an insecure browser running on an insecure (i.e. known vulnerabilities, being exploited in the wild, no patches available) OS?

Users lose

[HalAtWork]

If Mozilla throws in the towel, all users lose.

Re:Keeping up the fight

[BronsCon]

Port support for current HTML and CSS standards, the current javascript engine, and any security fixes back to FF 3.4, leaving behind all of the added bullshit that has accumulated over the years that nobody wanted. Boom, Chrome market share will shrink.

After that, work on nothing but bugfixes, performance improvement and, most importantly, proper multi-process support and Chrome will soon become that quaint browser that ships with Chromebooks (before Crouton and Firefox are installed) and Android devices (before Firefox is installed).

I'm using Firefox right now.

[pecosdave]

In fact the organization I'm a sysadmin at doesn't allow Chrome on systems without valid reason usually someone has to work with a website that is Google browser only.

I find it disturbing that in this day and age we once again have website that only work with one browser - it reminds me of the bad-old-day of corporate Internet Explorer only websites.

Re:I'm using Firefox right now.

[eliphalet]

My employer prohibits Chrome -- IE is standard and Firefox is available, although they don't permit any extensions.

I suspect it's because of the automatic updates to Chrome, which would not get through our firewalls.

Re:I'm using Firefox right now.

[pecosdave]

We prohibit it because if you've ever installed it, it constantly reports back to Google and we don't know what all it's reporting. EVEN IF you uninstall it the normal ways services remain in startup that keep reporting back to Google. My boss has a video he took of a process monitor on a server (VM, the video was recorded outside the VM) of Chrome not even being launched and pegging the CPU. Combine that with the recent reveal that Chrome leaks active directory login info like a siv and it makes me wonder how any company can allow it. I really don't like allowing it on the systems we've been arm-twisted into allowing it on. Dare I say it - I would prefer our users just use Edge or Safari instead. (still Chrome before IE)

Re:Two things do it for me.

[BronsCon]

So... Your only complaint, then, is that Tweetdeck on FF is ugly? Because you can do those other things (and even share open tabs and history between devices) on FF, right now.

Google is creepy as hell

[scatbomb]

I avoid Google products whenever I can. Give me Firefox/Opera/IE/etc any day over Chrome.

Well, if you capriciously remove useful features..

[k_yarina]

I replaced Netscape with Firefox's first released version, even gave money to the Mozilla foundation back then. Tab Groups became my favorite feature, then after they trashed it switched to the add on. Now they've killed that ability and the developer gave up. Lets see, regular hangs and crashes but with tab groups, or a regularly hanging and crashing Chrome clone without them. Hmm, tough decision. Guess it's bye bye to the fox and move to our Googlian Overlords tool of global domination the day my tabs all become flat again. Just have to get used to all the social engineering warnings, really don't care if the NSA sees what I read on /. or if a major forum uses a cert that isn't exactly perfect per our overlords rules

Speed differences are inconsequential

[sjbe]

The other big three were slow by comparison. On speed alone, Chrome won.

They all keep saying this. I use all the major browsers (Edge, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari) with some regularity and I cannot see any meaningful difference in speed between them. I'm sure there are some measurable differences but as an end user they are inconsequential. I use Firefox as my primary go to browser because it's cross platform (rules out Safari and Edge) and it's work flow and options suit me better than Chrome. I don't dislike Chrome but there is no reason for me to switch to it either for every day browsing because it doesn't offer me anything I need that I don't already have with Firefox.

Mozilla didn't help themselves by firing their employees for not being PC enough.

That has little to do with Chrome's dominance. Heck the only reason Chrome managed to displace Microsoft's offerings is that Microsoft got greedy and stopped improving their product. They had the market share and could have kept it if they hadn't been so short sighted.

a mostly spineless essay

[epine]

When 10% of the population uses a product in a serious way, it is usually viable to support a substantial niche of demanding users.

When 90% of a population uses a product on a daily basis, in a myriad of subtle ways the ecosystem begins to pander to the careless and barely invested.

What needed to be discussed here was the collapse of Firefox's plug-in ecosystem. For one thing, it stopped being cool to start new projects, so it started to become a legacy ecosystem, and many of the original plug-in developers (most of whom started young) were getting older and moving on in life.

Plus there was a financial incentive for the Anarchy Syndicate to treat the entire plug-in ecosystem as a threat vector, the policing of which creates a permanent burden.

As Mozilla began to flee the policing burden, two things happened: it shifted a huge maintenance burden on their already tired plug-in developers to adapt to a succession of ever-more-restrictive APIs (more work, less reward), and its last important differentiation from Chrome starting spiralling down the drain pipe.

So Andreas Gal comes along and wants to put Firefox OS on his resume, and doesn't invest hardly a thought in their dangerously eroding extension ecology.

Or maybe he had a plan for Firefox OS to somehow make experimentation and customization sexy again?

If so, you certainly wouldn't know it from this lame essay.

Luis Miguel bails out of the Firefox WebExtensions scene — 29 January 2017

So let's sum up. My only available path forward is to spend the better part of a year, probably more, on the tedious and stressful task of rewriting one of my add-ons and part of another, both of which will result in only already existing functionality that brings me no gain and in which I have no personal interest, to retain maybe a third of my current user-base, in favor of a system that will exist for reasons with which I don't agree, with further development of novel features being subject to a bottleneck on Mozilla's side rather than on myself.

Luis deserved a better answer from Captain Capsize.

Plugin author here

[rsilvergun]

a lot of those useful features were culled to make way for the multi-process stuff that's required for them to compete with Chrome on performance. Not actual performance (FF is close enough in that it doesn't matter) but perceived. FF's single threaded model means small responsiveness delays in the UI.

Plugins make that worse by occasionally holding up the UI to do their stuff. It's all very minimal, but if you install 2, 3, 5+ plugins it quickly gets to be a problem.

Chrome handles this by preempting your plugin all the time. That means your plugin's written from the ground up to deal with that and it makes plugin development a real pain. FF is doing that now and just about anything more complicated than a theme is gonna need full re-writes to work. I've been putting off that re-write because work life kinda kicked me in the rear for a while but eventually I'll need to do it.

Re:Plugin author here

[Hognoxious]

Plugins make that worse by occasionally holding up the UI to do their stuff. It's all very minimal, but if you install 2, 3, 5+ plugins it quickly gets to be a problem.

I wonder how many plugins are installed to replace stuff that used to be there until some Uxtard removed them?

Re:Plugin author here

[ras]

FF's single threaded model means small responsiveness delays in the UI.

Firefox isn't single threaded. Have a look some time - it's typically running 20 .. 30 threads. Bring up a web page and most of those threads will be active - fetching stuff off the web, rendering pictures, parsing javascript, managing the cache all in parallel. I suspect Firefox has no less parallelism than Chrome.

Chrome giving each web page it's own process has other effects. One is security, another is a crash or fault of some kind only takes out one page - not the entire browser. They are very good reasons for wanting to move to a multi process model. One reason for not wanting to more in that direction it uses more resources. RAM mostly, because you can share memory between threads but you don't with processes (which is were the better security and robustness comes from). This is why Chrome is a resource hog compared to Firefox.

The primary reason Chrome runs fast is it and it's plugins are written in C++. Firefox was more of a javascript program running on top of their rendering engine (Gecko, which of course was written in C) and their generalised UI laper (XUL). As you have observed, Firefox has been moving away from that model toward more native code, so javascript API's are disappearing in favour of native ones. Firefox is also re-writing their rendering engine. The new one, servo, is written in Rust, whch they hope will allow more parallelism. But that's just a hope. The reality is it's already much faster than Geko or anything else on a single thread. This has nothing to do with Rust. It's just what happens when a group of experienced people re-write something they've done before from the ground up.

If Firefox continues on it's current path I expect it will be smaller and faster than Chrome in time. But I don't think that will effect it's popularity. That's driven by more mundane things - like Google suggesting you use their browser when you visit their web page. Firefox has never got, and is unlikely to ever get that sort of marketing push. The other thing is Chrome offers is more and better javascript development tools. Firefox used to be the only game in town with Firebug, but now Chrome is so much better that Firefox for developer tools you would be hard pressed to find a developer who doesn't use it. That has consequences. It's what drives web pages working better with Chrome than anything else. People here paint major sites working better with Chrome as some sort of Google conspiracy, but it isn't. It's just pure pragmatism. Firefox can't do anything about the marketing, but they could try to win the developers back. Currently I don't see that happening.

By the by I don't think Google set out destroy Firefox with Chrome. Firefox was just collateral damage. Their target was IE. Microsoft deliberately crippled IE to hold the web back, so people would use native applications like office and outlook instead of Google Docs and GMail. Chrome was Google's answer to that. They pushed it as hard as they could, to the extent of polluting their treasured search page with nag ware for Chrome. It's the only time I've seen them do that. It worked - they won the battle when Microsoft ditched IE in favour of Edge. The development tools in Chrome are an outgrowth of the same plan. If you want to push people away from applications running on desktop OS's to web based "application as a service", you need lots of web applications. One way to push that along is to provide some great web development tools, for free.

Caught in the middle of this well financed battle, Firefox is suffering. But while the economic imperatives that drive Chrome's rapid development will end (if that hasn't happened already), Firefox will continue to get better one small change at a time for decades to come. That's the way open source wins in the end. It doesn't need money to drive it, whereas the commercial competition withers without it. There is no money in browsers, they are commodities no one pays for. That sounds like open source's favourite habitat to me, so my guess is when the years turn to decades, Firefox will rein supreme.

Re:Plugin author here

[Waccoon]

a lot of those useful features were culled to make way for the multi-process stuff that's required for them to compete with Chrome on performance.

Bullshit. Memory management has been the #1 problem with Firefox for 10 years and the developers refuse to hear any complaints about it. Switching to a multi-process model won't do jack to speed up the browser when it's gulping down several gigs because it was hard-coded to use a certain percentage of RAM... which cannot be overridden in the configuration.

But hey, at least extensions won't be completely eliminated, ensuring that they'll still have 3rd parties to blame when the browser screws up.

Agreed, sort of

[jenningsthecat]

Does this mean Google owns the Web if they own Chrome? No. Absolutely not.

Google already owns the web to a large extent, and that was in the cards before Chrome came on the scene. As for Chrome, it's not designed to "own the web", it's designed as part of a strategy to "own the filters" that stand between Google and their produc... err, I mean their users.

Ads for Chrome everywhere Google

[iampiti]

I'm the only one who thinks that despite Firefox's technical shortcomings Chrome won because Google advertises it everywhere?
We the geeks may discuss which one's better all day but ask to the millions of Joe Users that use Chrome why they use it and then you'll be getting somewhere. Don't forget that the common users vastly outnumber the geeks.

Why I use Firefox

[theendlessnow]

Firefox gets proxying and name resolution right, vs. Chrome which has a security problem in that regard.

Firefox maintains it's own certificate store, which might be considered a "con", until you need it and then you're thankful.

Firefox about:config, uh... can you say VERY customizable unlike Chrome.

Firefox gets a 66% on CSS3, where latest Chrome still below 60%. Not that either is "great", and I disagree with some of Mozilla's direction and interpretation of CSS3 (btw, Edge only tries to handle 42% of CSS3).

When Chome first came out it touted its "security", but in many ways it's a lie. Mozilla was asleep, but woke up a couple of years ago and IMHO, seems to be much more active about making their browser better than Chrome (reminds me of builders that walk away from projects).

If this is a speed race, Edge is a lot faster. So... let's just say this isn't about speed.... ok? I could care less about a browser that is fast vs one that works right and is trying to keep up with new standards.

I mean, maybe we agree with Google Chrome and hates OCSP direct checking. But the answer isn't to pull the feature (what they did). Firefox does both OCSP stapling (configurable folks!!) and old school OCSP direct checking, again, configurable. Much better and more flexible than Chrome.

There are a lot more useful extensions for Firefox than Chrome. More themes, just more everything.

With regards to the original post, sounds like old sour grapes to me. Maybe I'm wrong and Firefox devs don't give a rip (which is sort of what he implies), but seems to me that Firefox is moving forward at a good pace, and Chrome is stuck the mud.

With regards to Safari. Use webkit, so 60% on CSS3, but what I really don't like is how Apple has locked down browsing in IOS devices. Sure you can download Chrome, but ultimately it's a wrapper around the webkit that comes with Safari. Ditto btw for Firefox on IOS (yep, Firefox is really more like Chome on IOS).

I have to use them all. And sometimes Chrome works better than Firefox, but more often, I find Firefox does a better job. The great thing about Chrome is that it eliminated (practically speaking) the bad standards that made people afraid to use Firefox.

To Chome's credit, it does a better job at HTML5 (html5test says 518/555 vs 471 for Firefox, 415 Safari, Safari-or-Chome-or-Firefox-on-IOS). Chrome does slightly better on Acid3 testing vs. Firefox (noting that the evil Safari gets a perfect Acid3 score... so maybe this isn't a great test).

Again, I have to use them all, but Firefox is my main browser, just for its flexibility and better understanding of security in some areas. It would be sad to see it go away.

Versions used: Chrome 58.0.3019.110, Firefox 53.0.3

Here's the problem

[G00F]

FIrst they are missidentifying their target audiance.

1. They are competing with products that people use that don't even know what a web browser is. You can't Win against bundled browers. They need to cater to those who know what browers are and don't want what comes bundled.

2. Also, they are chasing features brought forth by their competators, which causes 2 problems. Some of those features are not wanted by their users. And why would someone leave chrome to have a chrome like experiance?

Yes, they had a lot of users for a while, and they lost a bunch. But what was it that got them users? It was a webbroser that was lean, secure, privacy, and enabled the user to be in control. And of course the Add-ons(which further gave control)

What are some of the most popular addons, or mroe importantly, what do the most popular addons do, that firefox should look to grab hold of? ... Well enablign security and privacy and control of the browser.
Ublock Orgin, Disconnect, and a host of others all blocking malicious content(and some adds), then Noscript, umatrix furthering that control. And of course add block and flash block stuff.

It's all about not letting random sites control their web experiance, browsers and PC.

* The multi threads/procceses, there is a need, but would have liked a see it by say window not per tab, or nearly random groups of tabs. Or how about the ability to see what's consuming the resources and be able to do something about it.
* There's no way I can have my family browse the web like I do(with noscript, etc) but Generic options for not loading untrusted 3rd party scripts(matching the cookies options) with say a choice of community "whitelists". There's still problems of popups/unders and other forms of hijacking a browser and this, or other ideas can go a long way to fix that. Or even intergrate what EFF Privacy Badger does. Not killing online adds, but force them to behave.
* How about options to make the PC look more generic, like Returning a more generic answers to fonts, window/screen, etc.

Re:Here's the problem

[caseih]

Since I don't have mod points today, I'll just say, "well said" instead.

This is a problem with more than just Firefox. Gnome suffers from this also. They keep chasing the mythical new user, rather than working for their existing solid user base. They are not gaining new users and they have alienated a lot of their existing users. I'm not even sure why Gnome would care about new users honestly.. is it ego? Maybe it's the dream of world domination. I don't know. The reality is these "new users" don't really care what OS (and browser) is running and have little reason to switch to Linux period.

I'm not sure what the solution to this widespread problem of change for the sake of change.

Defeatist...

[XSportSeeker]

Well, he's the former CTO, so he's free to say whatever he wants... but I personally feel way less tied to Chrome in comparison to other services like how I feel tied to Facebook, Gmail or YouTube.

I'm willing to give Firefox and Opera another try, and I feel the browser market has always been mostly about inertia... IE stayed in the top for the longest time only because it was already there. From what I heard coming from Mac users, this is basically also the case for Safari.

IE lost it's position because of pure and huge incompetence from Microsoft's part. The incredible ammounts of bugs, vulnerabilities, lack of features and problems that the browser overall had forced people out of inertia. Safari is the standard on Macs and iPhones and it works well enough not to make anyone switch to something else, but it also has nothing special about it.

Opera lately has been having some good ideas, but it still hasn't been enough to make people move, plus the fact that it's owned by a Chinese Consortium does not help it.

As privacy continues to erode, I'll probably be looking into alternatives pretty soon. But I think there's still potential for competition in this market.

Servo

[magical liopleurodon]

If Servo becomes the main engine, I could see firefox reclaiming the throne

Nah. We won.

[trawg]

Nah. I don't think Chrome won. I think we - the users - won, at least for now. I wrote a while back about "Forgetting Firefox", the premise being that Firefox has succeeded in it's objective to 'preserve choice and innovation on the Internet'. I often wonder if the success caught them by surprise and they didn't have a follow up plan :)

The good news is that the web is ruled primarily by open source. Arguably the Chrome ecosystem has its problems (privacy issues, Chrome-specific web features, etc), but at its core it is OSS and I think we have a much more standards-based web now; Microsoft's attempt to dominate with IE were basically stopped in their tracks and we all owe a huge debt to Mozilla for making that happen.

But - as everyone (including me) has pointed out in like every FF story for the last few years - from our perspective Mozilla has done nothing but play catchup with Chrome. Electrolysis is great but pointless interface changes like Australis, etc, has left a lot of people dissatisfied.

I think Firefox could have shifted happily into maintenance mode years ago with efforts focused solely on performance and bugfixes (I've experienced bugs that I've looked up and found they were logged almost a decade ago and are still unfixed).

I'm not sure what is going to happen when they change the extension engine but I do know that if the extensions I use every day in my workflow stop working, I have no more reason to use Firefox. I understand the reasons they want to make these changes, but it's seems like a simple truth that the (small) remaining user base of Firefox is probably there because of momentum from the extension ecosystem, and if that vanishes... well, where will they go?

I love Mozilla & Firefox & it is still my browser. But I'm not sure for how much longer.

Re:Well, if you capriciously remove useful feature

[Megane]

At least try a different Mozilla-based browser. Seamonkey works well for me on both Mac and Win7. It's basically what became of the original Mozilla after Firefox forked away from it and then "forked up" by trying to become a Chrome clone.

Re:No

[Hognoxious]

This. Every release became slower and shittier than the previous one with features that you use removed. But hey, the corners got rounder!

Having said that I still use it because I like Chrome even less.

When I have copious free time I might start investigating the alternatives. It's like intermittent toothache.

Mozilla didn't win, Firefox lost

[onyxruby]

Firefox was once far larger than Chrome, at one point they had a third of the market.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Than Firefox decided to get on a rapid release calendar. Users and businesses asked them to go back to a standard release cycle. People told Mozilla that the rapid release cycle made maintenance too cumbersome. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead! The switch to a rapid release cycle started in May of 2011.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Rapid...

You can actually see the impact this decision had by looking at historical browser trends. The previous slow decline in browser share transitioned into a 1% loss in one month - their quickest loss ever. Within 6 months Chrome overtook Firefox in browser share and never looked back.

The result of the rapid release cycle was a disastrous impact, if you updated it you broke something, if you didn't update other things broke. Packaging, deploying, extensions, patching and testing became a nightmare for the enterprise. Requests for support for the enterprise were blown off by offering extended support release - which completely missed the point. The result was IT departments chose to use browsers that were willing to offer real enterprise support.

The cries of users fell on deaf ears - all that mattered was making developers happy. Chrome didn't win, Firefox committed suicide through hubris.

Re:Keep XUL extensions silly.

[Dagger2]

You don't need to pick one, you can have both just fine. I'll also point out that you don't need XUL for XUL extensions (despite the terribly inaccurate name).

Giving up to non-freedom won't help users.

[jbn-o]

Fastest at delivering its users into the hands of a known spy and needless (from the user's perspective) activity tracker: Google. But this declaration of capitulation to that interest ("Chrome won") highlights a difference between the older free software movement and the younger open source endeavor. That view exhibits the limits of allowable debate of the open source development methodology which is designed to chiefly serve business desires and eschew software freedom (the freedom to run, share, and modify published computer software at the heart of the social movement known as the free software movement). Chrome is said to "win" something valuable when measured by business values, namely short-term popularity or convenience without regard to user's needs, needs that can only be met with software freedom (including increased security, inspectability, and letting users control their own computers). Fortunately most of Firefox's code is free software and can be improved independently of motivations to give into such valuation and endorse non-free software such as Chrome.

Hats Off to the Plug In Devs

[Mkkby]

Why does anyone think the actual browser even matters? The internet is painful/unusable without noscript, u-block and a good cookie blocker. (Or similar which do the same.) I use firefox because of these plug ins. I have stopped updating because they are intentionally breaking them. If another browser allows the same function, I'll consider it. But going "naked" is dangerous and painfully slow. If you are browsing like a pro, all the browsers are fairly similar in perf. If you sit all day watching dozens of scripts load from many domains, you are the lowest of the uninformed newbie users.

Monoculture

[manu0601]

Monocultures are vulnerables and should be avoided. This is true for operating systems, browsers, desktop productivity suites, and banana as well.

Re:Keep XUL extensions silly.

[TheRaven64]

The existing Firefox extensions API gives direct access to things that, in any other modern browser, are in different security domains and completely isolated aside from a set of regularly audited communication channels. You can't retain it with compartmentalisation unless you want all of the extensions to be exploit vectors.

Re:Wait, what?

[fyngyrz]

Troll, eh? Lordy, this place has really fallen to the morons. Facts in, troll out.

It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Plug Ins Matter Most

[Mkkby]

Why does anyone think the actual browser even matters? The internet is painful/unusable without noscript, u-block and a good cookie blocker. (Or similar which do the same.)

I use firefox because of these plug ins. If another browser has the same function, I'll consider using it. But going "naked" is dangerous and painfully slow.

If you are blocking the junk, all the browsers are fairly similar in perf. If you sit all day watching dozens of scripts load from many domains, you are the lowest of the uninformed newbie users.