Firefox just doesn’t have enough advantages yet that would convince someone comfortable with Chrome to switch over. While privacy is an ever growing concern, it isn’t a strong enough feature for most people.
> While privacy is an ever growing concern, it isn’t a strong enough feature for most people.
At the end of the day, this is the end-all-be-all argument to the Facebook and Google duopoly. People just don't give a goddamn (excuse the language) about their data - they simply do.not.care.
I believe my generation (Y), and possibly a few after us (X, etc), will be known as the generation(s) who didn't think privacy/data was that big of a deal - until one day it was.
The Temporary Containers was a nice add-on built on top of that.[0] While it's a pain in the aspect of cookie-use across domains (like logging into Azure), it's other features out-weigh the initial nuissance - like automatic deletion of the container, as soon as the last one for that particular domain is closed. All of this is, of course, configurable.
This wasn't meant to be a plug, just a happenstance of "if you like 'x', have you seen 'y' based on it?". =]
They're a nice feature, although after a long while of trying, I ended up using just the Facebook container. The main container extension felt like too much work in regular browsing, and the tracking protection seems otherwise adequate when combined with uBlock.
Sadly, Mozilla also seem to promote containers as an alternative to user profiles, while they're nowhere near as full-featured - sharing saved logins and bookmarks between my "personal" and "work" containers is almost never desireable. Managing and switching profiles, on the other hand, is virtually unchanged since the Netscape Communicator days.
That's because you weren't properly setup with containers. I have 4 sessions going on right now, without any manual intervention. Facebook, work, Google and default. All interacting as intended with their assigned domains as isolated sessions.
They do have some parts that are Firefox-exclusive. This is an easy advantage to have over your competition practically for free. I hope they see that.
A major problem is also that google websites run like crap in firefox. Gmail takes 20 seconds to load and don't get me started on youtube studio. Even the "feedback" button is broken in firefox so I can't even report the bugs I find.
I'm at the point of installing chromium just to be able to manage my videos, but I refuse to give in.
Plus Chrome just works better for a lot of sites. That might be because the site isn't properly coded, but users don't care. They just want something that works and more often than not, that's Chrome.
My main browser is Firefox, but I have to switch over to Chrome more often than I would like. Electron is also based on Chromium, isn't it? IMHO, the rise of Electron just reinforces Chromium's status and I think Microsoft is going to accelerate that trend (I'm guessing MS adopted Chromium because of Electron).
In a couple of projects I'm currently working on, the CSS for them was causing me problems between the 2 browsers. Willing to admit that I don't have an intimate familiarity with CSS best practices. I look up what I think I'm trying to do, and then implement what I've found. I primarily use Firefox while I'm coding, and then only check with Chrome and Safari periodically. I've had to circle back to fix CSS issues specifically for WebKit not rendering as expected. Eventually, I can get to something that works across all the browsers I have access (no Android devices anywhere).
It's the same for Gmail, but this isn't Firefox at fault. It's Google doing this on purpose by using the old, experimental, non-standard ShadowDOM V0 API, which only Chrome supports, and then using that across its products to break non-Chrome based browsers. Please don't reward them by using Chrome just because of this. That only shows them that such abusive behavior works.
That is very interesting, thanks for sharing that information. I never did use Chrome other than testing it out for less than a day, finding issues with various sites and uninstalling it. Firefox instead since it was in beta (Phoenix) and never left. Never had a real problem with it.
I do use Gmail, and don't have any but have long planned to move to Outlook.com.. perhaps knowing about this ShadowDOM issue will spur me on to make the move.
Google only has one product that's truly best-of-breed (Maps) and I don't mind using it, but don't want to be entirely in any one vendor's ecosystem. I would say Youtube is the best of its kind, but it's really held up by its community, not functionality as Maps is. Outlook may not be the absolute best for privacy either (it's also no-charge), but it at least gets me to a place where I'm well diversified.
Google Maps, Youtube, InoReader, Outlook, DuckDuckGo all on Firefox with containers is a good enough of a spread for me.
Enough people use Gmail and YouTube that maybe it would make sense for Firefox to add support for ShadowDOM V0 API? It might not be a W3C standard, but if Google uses it heavily then it's a defacto standard.
They could, except that would effectively show Google that it can dictate what other browsers implement, alter its products on rapid basis to regularly break them etc. and at that point there's almost no point to an alternative, since we'd we're fully back in the IE era again, which is why I don't think it's a good idea.
If one cannot avoid it, I think it's a better idea to create Chrome desktop shortcuts for Gmail/YouTube and use Chrome exclusively for that, if you cannot use a desktop email client for Gmail and VLC/mpv/youtube-dl for some reason.
> IMHO, the rise of Electron just reinforces Chromium's status
+1. I'm hopeful of Servo. So far it (ServoShell) also a good 50MB smaller than Electron which would be a very good reason for developers to switch. It'll all depend on API compatibility at the time of release I guess.
Interestingly, this is the opposite of my experience. I browse solely on Firefox and don't encounter sites which only work on Chrome at all (at least as far as I can remember right now). I wonder what's different between our browsing habits that's causing this.
I was doing some work with very large data sets in Google Sheets last week. I started hitting row and cell limits. Personally, I think a database is more appropriate for what I was doing, but spreadsheets are more grokable by non-techies.
In Firefox, macOS was showing 4+GB of memory usage and formulas would take hours to run. I switched to Safari where memory usage was closer to 1-2GB, but it had this habit of refreshing the page as soon as you switched away (before a formula would finish running). I finally switched to Chrome and memory usage was about 1-2GB and heavy formulas behaved in a way more predictable manner.
Is that really relevant? I'd be happy if you could point me to a more capable tool. Zoho and Excel Online have never really made it onto my radar, but if they perform better in this situation I'd check them out. A lot of people are tied to the constraints they have.
Using both for years, Chrome has just been faster and more reliable. I don't do web dev professionally, but I use multiple browsers in tandem and often try to use one full time every once in awhile. On my old laptop, I'm pretty sure Chrome was the only one to support webGL for whatever reason. At work we're stuck with Firefox 38.3.0 ESR (Cent6/7) and Prometheus Alert Manager (and I also believe Prometheus graphing interface) has broken widgets, but Chrome works. Chrome has always seemed to better support the very few websites that require crazy performance. This was even the case when we would have an ancient version of Chrome and a new version of Firefox. It sucked when Firefox switched plugin architecture and Google Hangouts never added support. Now Google Meet does not support Safari.
I'm not saying any of these comparisons are "fair" but its what I deal with day-to-day.
Apparently they're WEBP images and my version of Firefox (version 64) doesn't support them, but searching online I read that the upcoming Firefox version 65 is suppose to fix that issue.
Strangely enough, the images were working fine a few weeks ago on the Adidas website, but I had a different Firefox issue. When I clicked the images to see the fullscreen view and zoomed in, they wouldn't pan or drag correctly, so 80% of the image was hidden off the screen. In Chrome, they worked as expected.
That's one example, but as I said, I get these kind of issues almost daily from companies that should know better. I still primarily use Firefox because I have no trust in Google, but I'm forced to open Chrome on a regular basis to resolve random quirks.
> Apparently they're WEBP images and my version of Firefox (version 64) doesn't support them
I loaded the page with Firefox 65 beta and all the images worked for me. The site doesn't seem to be serving WebP images to Firefox. When I checked all the image types via Page Info they were mostly JPEGs with some PNGs and one SVG image.
There's probably some other reason why the site is broken for you. Have you perhaps changed your browser's user agent string and so the site is giving you WebP images because it thinks they will work?
I was working on my taxes last weekend and I hit a bunch of them. ADP, the 401K and FSA provider sites, Aetna, and a 529 saving plan site are all ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Firefox does not stack tabs like Chrome does and does not load all the restored session tabs at once either. Aren't these dumb design decisions enough to switch to a product where people actually think about how it's going to be used?
also, if you use Autodiscard plugin, you will find that FF use less RAM and Ru. more faster. Essentially discard and suspend tabs that you aren't using.
Laying all the trans at one cripples my core i8 system for some time. Firefox's lazy tab loading is a much better user experience. Together with TreeStyle Tabs and the recent multi-container add-on, Firefox is just a better experience.
I used to be a fanatic about tree style tabs, but due to the new api, it's unusable with containers. I recently switched over to vertical tabs for that reason. I miss the tree layout, but at least now my tabs maintain their ordering.
I'm sure you're aware that not every user will have the same experience with a piece of software. There are a couple of bugs referenced in the Github issues for TST relevant to containers. There is a workaround, but I experience the issue again within a half hour. Not worth it to me.
Alright, it's just that the phrasing - blaming it on the new API - made it sound like an inherent flaw that would affect everyone, which definitely isn't right.
At the end of the day, this is the end-all-be-all argument to the Facebook and Google duopoly. People just don't give a goddamn (excuse the language) about their data - they simply do.not.care.
I believe my generation (Y), and possibly a few after us (X, etc), will be known as the generation(s) who didn't think privacy/data was that big of a deal - until one day it was.
We are the guinea pig.