Comment by thesuitonym
3 years ago
Good points have already been raised, but don't neglect the rise of smartphones. When you get a Google phone that already has Google's browser installed, and it works relatively well, why would you change? Add Chromebooks into the mix, and those meet a lot of people's needs, why change?
Then, if you get a laptop, you'll want to have all of your passwords and bookmarks synced, so instead of using Edge, you grab Chrome. never even thinking of Firefox.
Finally, in the early 00's, Firefox users had a reputation for letting you know about it. Forums of the day were full of signatures with a Get Firefox link in them. You don't really see that level of fervor anymore, because the difference between Firefox and Chrome today is nowhere near the difference between Firefox and IE back then.
I am a developer on a team of developers for a large data and interaction-rich website and we've watched the stats morph over the past 8 years from 23% mobile to 23% desktop. It's been a very swift revolution. I do a lot of QA on my phone now. I have been a Firefox proponent for at least ten years and resolved to do most of my QA on FF since I was most familiar with its features. Something that is very irksome about iOS is I can't suppress ads on Firefox on ios but I can on Safari. So Safari has become my main mobile browser. I'd love to keep pushing FF into the future- and still use it as my main desktop browser- but I can't advocate its use at least on iOS because of the ads issue.
Any browser on iOS is just a skin of safari, as all browsers on iOS must use the safari webview in the backend. Apple doesn't allow these browsers to use safari extensions.
I mean, since iOS 11 you can apply a WKContentRuleList to a WKWebView. It's not like some form of ad blocking can't exist on Firefox for iOS.
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your problem is not FF, it's the iphone, replace your phone and you'll have the browser you want with the extensions you want. Don't blame the innocents.
You can't use uBlock Origin on iOS?
Every time I have even the slightest mild thought of trying iOS again, I learn something like this which ensures I will not do it.
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No. But you can block third-party ads on all apps that display them by using the AdGuard DNS plug-in for iOS. Not an app - it’s a system plug-in: https://adguard.com/en/blog/encrypted-dns-ios-14.html. It’s extremely effective across all apps that use third-party supplied ads. The only apps it cannot adblock on are those who serve up ads from the same source as their content, such as Pinterest and YouTube.
Not the extensions but you can use Brave browser that has its own built-in ad blocker.
nextdns.io works very well on iOS.
I use it on desktop/laptop also and have added many rules - on my profile/account at nextdns.io - with no issues.
It is very much worth a look.
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No extensions.
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How could u not know that all ios browsers are just reskins of Safari if u r a developer? So ios devices are not even in the discussion
> When you get a Google phone that already has Google's browser installed, and it works relatively well, why would you change?
I know you're speaking in the context of the general public, but I've found that uBlock on Firefox Mobile does so much to make the web usable again that I'd never go without it.
On the other hand, as someone on an old android device, the performance difference between the two is massive and it isn't getting better. Some sites (usually the ones that are actually important such as restaurant menu) are perfect on Chrome and nearly unusable on Firefox, even with an adblocker.
Performance already matters a lot on desktop browsers, but when battery life is thrown into the mix, it matters even more.
It's a bit perplexing to me that Firefox proponents keep denying performance issues for years.
You can just compare it yourself or look at the some of the zillion benchmarks.
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I know it's just anecdata, but on my 2 year old phone, Firefox+Adblock+NoScript uses about 33% less power than the stock Chrome. I grant that my browsing habits aren't such that I tend to use a lot of media-heavy sites in the first place, so perhaps on those I wouldn't see such savings.
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How old? My S10e isn't very new and FF works great.
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> Finally, in the early 00's, Firefox users had a reputation for letting you know about it. Forums of the day were full of signatures with a Get Firefox link in them. You don't really see that level of fervor anymore, because the difference between Firefox and Chrome today is nowhere near the difference between Firefox and IE back then.
I agree that is probably the main reason - but another is simply that we don't have signatures anymore. So many of those forums were replaced by Reddit and other platforms which don't have signatures. One could argue they were a waste of screen estate but they allowed users to share a bit of their personality (including, in some cases, their choice of browser/OS) with readers in a non-awkward way.
This is something I somewhat miss about the old forums. Between signatures and avatars, it was much easier to keep track of who you're talking to. Reddit-esque forums, this one included, have de-emphasized user identity to the point of homogeneity.
> a waste of screen estate but they allowed users to share a bit of their personality
somewhere there is a powerpoint with a slide that boils down to 'think about all the banner ads we can show in the wasted space where sigs live today!'
FireFox doesn't synch with saved passwords that Chrome has.. Remembering tons of passwords across many sites, and having to do TFA all over again is excruciatingly painful. This is how people get locked in to so many monopolies today, and probably why log-ins are so difficult overall, yet still not working very well to secure accounts.
There is too much hassle in software these days, it used to be about making your life easier, but so many companies put out products contradictory to that, creating entirely new problems.
A web browser is just like a TV pretty much. People don't really care about what the brand is, they care about reliability, picture quality, compatibility, features etc... FireFox is like buying into a whole other TV before your current one is broken.
Firefox could jump ahead if it radically changed how we can view painful web sites, like turning a video blog page into a convenient scroller, by adding tools to categorize and search bookmarks, or possibly by letting us block the display of keywords we don't want to see. They should also perhaps create their own search engine to counter Google's strangle hold... By turning FF into more of an Internet assistant, it would become a far superior web TV than Chrome, and that would likely encourage wider adoption perhaps...
I dont use browser password saving, but I just looked and FF syncs passwords.
Firefox does sync if you sign in. Extensions, history, the works.
And if you don't trust mozilla sync service you can connect your own.
Stealing passwords from browser password vaults is trivial these days for most any malware, which is why password managers like BitWarden have become much more popular. And those can sync across browsers and systems much more reliably.
>When you get a Google phone that already has Google's browser installed, and it works relatively well, why would you change?
I seem to recall Microsoft getting some unfavorable government attention when they did something similar in the 90s...
The key being they had a near monopoly in the operating system market. The smartphone OS market is a duopoly.