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by 283627283637 2297 days ago
Firefox is like that really ugly flower that blooms once every hundred years, they leapfrog the competition briefly and then eventually degrade back to being crap for regular users. I'm aware of the technical politics around what causes this but that only really matters for people who choose browsers based on cyber politics. Quantum was good for six months, now we're back to the same situation where almost everyone outside the tech bubble is using Chrome.

You'd think that maybe this would cause them to exercise some strategy, like rushing to conquer mobile since Chrome's mobile ui is trash, but nope. Hell, Brave of all things is doing better at mobile than Firefox.

4 comments

I install firefox + ublock origin + https everywhere whenever I can weather it's friends, family or colleagues. After a bit of explanation they usually understand the matter. It's all about user education.

I have had zero "relapses" back to safari or chrome so far, they all seem to like browsing without ads and tracking.

Indeed. It only takes about 45 seconds to remove almost all ads from someone's online experience. Not getting ads on youtube is by itself a game changer for alot of people. Many people happily pay for blessings from monks and priests that take about the same time, except this actually improves lives in a concrete way and is free. Spread the gospel of FOSS
>Firefox is like that really ugly flower that blooms once every hundred years, they leapfrog the competition briefly and then eventually degrade back to being crap for regular users.

Firefox is the AMD of browsers.

>Quantum was good for six months, now we're back to the same situation where almost everyone outside the tech bubble is using Chrome.

Did Quantum became worse or you're basically saying Mozilla is bad at marketing (and having huge vertically integrated ecosystem)?

It's hard to move browsers permanently if you're not prepared. I moved to FF Quantom for a bit, but had to regularly open Chrome to get passwords etc. And the Chrome assholes removed the password export (or at least I could not for the life of me get it to work at the time)

I ended up going back for a bit and added a password manager, and now I can move between browsers easily - but as I said, it's not always straightforward, especially for _most_ non-tech users.

> And the Chrome assholes removed the password export (or at least I could not for the life of me get it to work at the time)

Chrome Settings > Passwords > "Export passwords..." (under the three-dots menu).

Not sure when you last checked but the option has been available since at least Chrome 66, which was released almost two years ago: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/04/18/google-chrome-66-password-...

I distinctly recall the option to manually import passwords being harder to find (solution is to either import them from another browser or enable a flag to import passwords from a CSV file).

Ironically Firefox currently still lacks the native ability to manually export passwords, relying on add-ons or third-party tools: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/technology/personaltech/f...

> It's hard to move browsers permanently if you're not prepared.

I find it rather easy, at least in my case. Passwords are all managed via a password manager, I barely use bookmarks, so most of the work is re-installing and configuring a few plugins, which I also don't use many of

Firefox has a built in import of browser data from other browsers such as Chrome. Does this no longer work?
It doesn't exist on Linux. When I moved from Chrome to Firefox, I used https://github.com/louisabraham/ffpass.
Firefox mobile can't even render pages reliably. That matter more than the UI.