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'See the Future Firefox Right Now' (cnet.com)
"Mozilla is prepping a new version of Firefox in an effort to rally in the race for browser supremacy," writes CNET's Matt Elliott, who decided to test drive a new nightly build of Firefox 57 which "promises fast speeds and a new look." An anonymous reader quotes their report:
Firefox 57 has added a screenshot button in the top-right corner... It highlights different elements on a page as you mouse over them, or you can just click-and-drag the old-school way to take a screenshot of a portion of a page. Screenshots are saved within Firefox. Click the scissors button and then click the little My Shots window to open a new tab of all of your saved screenshots. From here you can download them or share them... The bookmark and Pocket buttons have been moved from the right of the URL bar to inside it, but the Page Actions button is new. Click it and you'll get a small menu to Copy URL, Email Link and Send to Device. The Page Actions menu also has bookmark and Pocket buttons, which seems redundant at first but then I realized you can remove those items from the URL bar by right-clicking them. You can't remove the new, triple-dot Page Actions button...
As with any prerelease software, Firefox Nightly 57 is meant for developers and will likely exhibit strange and unstable behavior from time to time. Also, there is no guarantee that the final release will look like what you see in the current version of Nightly. For example, I have read reports that the search box next to Firefox's URL bar may be on the chopping block. It's part of the design of the current Nightly build but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets dropped between now and November since most web users have grown accustomed to entering their search queries right in the URL bar. Just as you can with the current version of Firefox, however, you can customize which elements are displayed at the top of Firefox Nightly 57, including the search box.
As with any prerelease software, Firefox Nightly 57 is meant for developers and will likely exhibit strange and unstable behavior from time to time. Also, there is no guarantee that the final release will look like what you see in the current version of Nightly. For example, I have read reports that the search box next to Firefox's URL bar may be on the chopping block. It's part of the design of the current Nightly build but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets dropped between now and November since most web users have grown accustomed to entering their search queries right in the URL bar. Just as you can with the current version of Firefox, however, you can customize which elements are displayed at the top of Firefox Nightly 57, including the search box.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look too bright.
Hopefully I'm not the only one, but I kind of lost faith in 'modern' browsers when they started hiding the menu and status bar by default.
Car analogy: Our engineers have found we can make the windscreen 30% larger if we remove the dashboard and AC controls, brilliant!
making it impossible to have extensions more powerful than Chrome.
Maybe you should read what the maintainer of uBlock Origin thinks of the difference between Chrome and Firefox when it comes to extensions. To quote him: "It baffles me that some people think Firefox is becoming a 'Chrome clone', it’s just not the case, it’s just plain silly to make such statement."
The latest web browser market share stats show that Firefox is in a terrible position right now. The desktop versions of Firefox only have about 5% of the market. Firefox for Android has only 0.04% (yes, that's way less than even just 1%!) of the market.
Chrome is over 50% of the market. Safari is at about 12%. UC Browser for Android is at about 9%. IE/Edge are at about 6%. So even in a best-case scenario, Firefox is now the 5th place browser.
With the Opera family of browsers and Samsung Internet at about 4% each, Firefox could soon find itself as the 7th place browser if it keeps losing users.
Firefox 57 is shaping up to be a disastrous release, due to the planned switch to only supporting WebExtensions extensions. This could very well cause breakage of a lot of existing extensions, some of which there are no WebExtensions-compatible equivalents of. This will likely cause many users to ditch Firefox in favor of some other browser. Some might use Pale Moon, while others will probably move to Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, Brave or some other browser based on Blink or WebKit. So the possibility of Firefox losing a few more percentage points of market share in the near future is, I am afraid, very real.
In any sort of a real company, anything close to this kind of market share loss would result in panic and action. Heads would have rolled long ago. The existing staff would have been shaken up, if not completely removed and replaced. At the very least, a significant and in-depth inquiry would have been performed to figure out exactly what was going on to cause the drop in market share.
Yet I don't think we've seen any of this. It's like Mozilla is perfectly fine with Firefox's dropping market share. This is particularly strange, as Firefox is really the only product of theirs that people use. So many of their other projects have essentially been left to rot (Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Bugzilla), or were soundly rejected by potential users right off the bat (Persona, Firefox OS, Pocket, Firefox for Android), or have been spinning their wheels endlessly accomplishing very little (Servo, Rust). It's even stranger when we realize that Firefox is likely their only source of income. So keeping Firefox's share of the market up should be their biggest concern.
I don't know what the hell is going on at Mozilla, but it's almost as if they have no idea that they're becoming irrelevant at a very rapid pace. Or if they are aware, it's like they're not taking any sort of action to prevent Firefox from losing the rest of its users. In many ways it's like the opposite is happening; they're making changes that will only serve to annoy and drive away the few users who do continue to use Firefox.
It's almost surreal. Given how low Firefox's market share is getting, Mozilla should be in a state of total panic right now.
So why should I use this over Chrome? It sure looks the same to me.
Because Chrome is a way for Google to learn more about you and make money with that data.
-- Cheers!
I'd mod you up but I've already commented.
Google has lots of reasons to want to control the web (and spy users) and thus Chrome was born. Also, they'd rather you use Android apps than websites
Microsoft also wants you to use their platform (Metro/Win32 Windows Store apps) rather than websites.
Apple likewise with iOS and OS X.
Mozilla are the only ones that they'd rather you use websites than their closed platforms.