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Firefox 55 Arrives With WebVR on Windows, Performance Panel, and Click-to-Play Flash (venturebeat.com)
Mozilla today made available a new update to Firefox for Windows to introduce support for WebVR, that the company says, will enable desktop VR users to dive into web-based experiences with ease. Firefox 55 also includes performance panel, faster startup when restoring multiple tabs, a quicker way to search across various search engines, and click-to-play Flash by default. From a report: WebVR is an experimental JavaScript API that provides support for virtual reality devices, such as the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Google Cardboard. As its name implies, the technology is meant for browsers. If you find a web game or app that supports VR, just click the VR goggles icon visible on the web page to experience it using your VR headset. WebVR supports navigating and controlling VR experiences with handset controllers or your movements in physical space. [...] Firefox 55 also allows users to adjust the number of processes and how much resources they want to allocate to any of them. This setting is at the bottom of the General section in Options. In fact, if your computer has more than 8GB of RAM, Mozilla recommends "bumping up the number of content processes that Firefox uses" because it will make Firefox faster, though at the expense of using more memory. In its own tests on Windows 10, the company found that Firefox uses less memory than Chrome, even with eight content processes running.
As a long time Firefox user, I'm scared about the upcoming Firefox 57 release. According to that Mozilla blog post, as of Firefox 57 "Firefox will only run WebExtensions." So that could mean a lot of existing extensions will no longer work.
Firefox's market share has already fallen precipitously. The most-used release, Firefox 54, only has 3.75% of the market. The next most popular release of Firefox, Firefox 52, has only 0.52%. Firefox for Android has only 0.04% of the market. Overall, Firefox has only about 5% of the market.
5% is dangerously low. Chrome, for example, is over 50%. Safari has over 10%. UC Browser for Android has over 9%. Firefox is now in the range of Opera Mini, with its 3% of the market.
I think that Firefox 57, and this switch to WebExtensions, will be what finally eliminates Firefox as a viable web browser. Broken extensions will no doubt anger many of Firefox's few remaining users. I would not be surprised if many of them will move to some other browser. And these are users that Firefox can't afford to lose.
Firefox 57 takes away one of the few remaining strong points of Firefox: its flexible and powerful extension system.
Firefox doesn't even have privacy working in its favor any longer. Firefox's privacy policy shows that it sends a lot of information to Mozilla and others. For example, it indicates that even Firefox's geolocation capabilities can use Google's service, and this involves sending information to Google.
So Firefox will soon become an almost identical clone of Chrome, including its own imitation of Chrome's UI, Chrome's extension model, and Chrome's privacy concerns. Yet Firefox still can't match Chrome's performance, even if some Firefox fanatics claim otherwise. Firefox users have clearly indicated that they find Firefox to be too slow, too bloated, and to use too much memory.
For all intents and purposes, we should probably consider Firefox to be a "dead" browser at this point. Its market share is dropping, and could very well be under 1% by this time next year. It has dropped to such a low range that web developers no longer test with it. This will likely result in more and more web sites that don't work well with Firefox, making the Firefox user experience even worse.
Users won't waste their time with Firefox when they can just use Chrome instead, and get the same UI and privacy experience, but with much better performance and reliability.
The worst part of all of this is that it didn't have to be like this. Firefox's developers didn't need to copy Chrome. They didn't need to ruin the Firefox user experience that Firefox users had come to love. Firefox could have been its own independent browser. Yet all of this potential has been discarded, and the end result is disturbing: Firefox is, or soon will be, an unusable browser for most of its users.
Really now, Mozilla. Who on Earth wants VR support in their browser?
Stop dumbing it down. Stop adding useless garbage bloat. Make the damn browser better.