Comment by JohnFen

3 years ago

> Anecdotally, everyone I know that used Firefox has stuck with it or deepened there reliance on it

I find this interesting, because I literally don't know a single person who uses FF regularly anymore, even amongst my hacker friends. 10 years ago, 100% of them did.

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JohnFen

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thiht  3 years ago

Sample size = 1

In my life I've always come back to Firefox at some point, for various reasons. But I'm currently NOT using it anymore:

- on my personal laptop I'm using Safari because battery life is my #1 priority, and Safari is the best in this particular category. I'm also using Safari on my iPhone because it works well enough, and I find favorites and tabs sync useful

- on my pro laptop I used to use Firefox Developer Edition because I've always preferred Firefox devtools to Chrome-like devtools. But I've recently switched to Arc and I love it. I've tried vertical tabs in the past on Firefox but the experience sucks, it's half baked and ugly. Arc is not perfect but it solves quite a few pain points I had in the past. I still prefer FF devtools, but Arc's experience is better aligned with my intuitive workflow.

So yeah, for me to switch back to Firefox, they need to improve battery life drastically (they're not even bad at it, but Safari is just so much better), and try major innovations regarding user experience.

  • WorldMaker  3 years ago

    > I'm also using Safari on my iPhone because it works well enough, and I find favorites and tabs sync useful

    I've been very happy with Firefox Sync using the iOS Firefox. (Even if that Firefox is "just" a wrapper around Safari on iOS, it still has all the sync tools I need, which yes are very useful.)

    > But I've recently switched to Arc and I love it. I've tried vertical tabs in the past on Firefox but the experience sucks, it's half baked and ugly.

    Arc does seem interesting. Its current macOS-only focus makes it a non-starter for me, but I'm glad it works well for your workflows. I have been switching back and forth lately between TST and Sideberry in Firefox trying to find which one I like the most for vertical tabs. It is something that I feel the wish that out-of-the-box Firefox had just a tiny bit more polish about, but I do appreciate that extensions can help a lot there and there are multiple options. (However, especially now that Chromium Edge has vertical tabs out of the box that seems like a sign that there is more mainstream interest today and I'd love to see Firefox do some sort of polished design pass.) That's not yet a showstopper for me, but I feel it.

    Battery life has been a lot less of an issue for me than memory usage (Firefox could be better there sometimes in my estimation, they are not bad it, just I've seen others do better), but I can certainly understand that complaint.

    • thiht  3 years ago

      > is something that I feel the wish that out-of-the-box Firefox had just a tiny bit more polish about

      Honestly I'm mad at Firefox for missing this train. They saw the success of vertical tabs extension, so it was a perfect feature to experiment on, UX wise.

      I'm mad that Arc is not a project born from Mozilla's teams, based on Firefox.