If you’re visiting any Yahoo property today, chances are you’ll see an “Upgrade to the new Firefox” link in the top-right corner of your browser window. The prompt also appears if you’re using Internet Explorer, Opera and even the new Yandex browser. However, the prompt is missing from Safari, which will surely prompt a new round of speculation about Apple’s rumored switch to Yahoo as its default search engine.
Given that Firefox now uses Yahoo as its default search engine, this move doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Yahoo clearly wants as many people as possible to use Firefox – and with it its search engine (which is powered by Microsoft Bing).
A good deal for Firefox, but one has to wonder – how many people actually visit Yahoo properties who would also “upgrade” their browser?
I really don’t like Chrome. Primarily because they don’t give you an option to show a menu bar, which I absolutely LOATHE. As I am visually impaired, I run at low resolutions with windows maximized, which sometimes causes usability issues for apps without menu bars, esp when running inside of a remote desktop window. Plus, the adblock extension for Chrome is not as good as the one on Firefox.
On the other hand though, Firefox 34 broke the Flashblock and Youtube Center extensions. So I’m not really sure which one is worse at this point.
Edited 2014-12-12 23:49 UTC
There’s no need for Flashblock any longer. Just set Flash to “Ask to activate” in the plugin page (ctrl+shift+A). You might also want click to play per element [1] and click to play manager [2].
As regards Youtube Center, you can also get the dev version as a Greasemonkey script [3] and no Firefox update has ever broken that (which obviously doesn’t rule out Google breaking it with updates to Youtube, but there’s nothing anyone outside of Google can do about that).
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/click-to-play-per-ele…
[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/click-to-play-manager
[3]: https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter/wiki/Developer-Version
That’s not exactly the same, since you apparently can’t whitelist it on a per-site basis. I don’t want to have to manually enable flash every time I pull up a Youtube video.
n/m, looks like Flashblock is working again
Sure you can. Right-click on page -> View Page Info -> Permissions. At the top you have “Activate Plugins – Adobe Flash” with the options “Use Default”, “Always ask”, “Allow”, “Block”. Simply set this to “Allow” for flash when on youtube. And voila, youtube is whitelisted.
Edited 2014-12-14 21:44 UTC
Went to my.yahoo.com on my Acer Chromebook just to see the show, and sure enough, it suggested I “upgrade” to Firefox. Sure.
So I clicked the link, and it downloaded a Gnu Linux tar.bz2 installer.
Not the most logical action, but then again, it’s Yahoo.
Duh! It also offered a tar.bz2 to me, who I’m using Fedora and there are yumable rpms available.
Personally, I’m always surprised by how many people have downloaded Chrome, even very tech un-savvy folks, so this could be more successful than you think.
Furthermore, lots of people still visit Yahoo, so even though only a small percentage of them are likely to heed Yahoo’s browser advice, that could still represent a non-trivial numbers of users.
Of course, gaining mobile users is what both Yahoo and Firefox need most these days, so this could be one of those “two turkeys” situations.
Jbso,
Chrome was very easy to install unwittingly due to unrelated 3rd party software that bundled it. Here are a couple examples, I’ve seen it in quite a lot of installers. Google must have thrown a lot of cash at developers to bundle chrome, but I don’t know if they are still doing it.
http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10409905-12.html#!
http://www.cnet.com/news/google-chrome-now-bundled-with-realplayer/…
http://techinspireplus.blogspot.com/2012/06/google-chrome-is-now-bu…
As I recall the installers would install chrome by default if the user didn’t carefully unselect the chrome option before clicking next. I wonder how many users did this accidentally. It must have helped chrome get market share far quicker than having un-savvy folks install it explicitly.
Edited 2014-12-13 04:06 UTC
Yep, you could say Chrome is one of the biggest piece of malware out there. It certainly uses malware tactics to get people to install it.
I find that much more surprising than people using Chrome. I haven’t used Yahoo for something like 10 years and I don’t know a single person who does.
It’s nice to see that Yahoo is returning the favor; that’s one thing that always rubbed me the wrong way, was Google prompting Firefox users to switch to Chrome. It’s nice it supported Firefox for as long as it has – but at the same time Google was forcing Firefox to bleed out its own users.
Well, that may have more to do with Yahoo not having their own browser (or users or market share) than goodwill on their part.
That is pretty sleazy, but it couldn’t have happened to a better browser. Google is the one who started advertising Chrome as an upgrade from other browsers.
Upgrade your search engine to Google.
It’s slower, buggier, and uses more system resources. Apparently, Yahoo’s borrowing Apple’s definition of the word.
But at least it doesn’t send everything you do back to mozilla, like chrome does with google. It’s certainly not buggy either. I will give you that it is slower. But not by much.
I’ll take slow and private over fast and snoopy anyday.
I’m not sure about resource usage, but Firefox seems to score better in Sunspider, Kraken and Peacekeeper, and worse in Google’s own Octane and Rightware’s Browsermark. It’s snappy and smooth on any modern system. Also, it has good support for HiDPI screens, whereas Chrome is totally broken.
Firefox uses less memory than Chrome, and has for a while – memory usage (and leaks) has been a major focus of development resources for a while now.
As for buggy, well, YMMV. I can’t remember the last time Firefox crashed on me, but I get enough tab crashes in Chrome that I consider it too unreliable for regular use.
It might not crash, but as a web developer it is by far the browser we have the most problems with except IE8 (which is our oldest supported IE) It doesn’t crash, but it gives rendering quirks and javascript errors not seen in other browsers. Sure we find ways to work around it but it is annoying.
They might have improved the memory usage and it might score well in benchmarks, but to me chrome feel MUCH faster, and more disturbing i also feel IE11 is faster in normal use.
I am kinda sad that firefox appears to fall behind the competition, but it is not really surprising given that webkit has lots of companies backing it and Microsoft seems to have woken up and decided they do care about IE.
The only real argument i can find to recommend firefox today is the wealth of extensions, but personally i only need adblock.
I think the biggest problem for firefox though is that webkit has close to 100% marketshare on smartphones and tablets, and here i don’t see many people changing browsers.
YMMV. Clearly not the experience I’ve seen of late. For me it is Chrome that tends to crash (that sad face icon thing when a page crashes) along with rendering quirks. For example moving around svg elements in the DOM broke in one of the recent Chrome releases.
Not that Firefox doesn’t have its problems either, but I don’t think any of the major browsers got a lead in this area currently. They all suck in each their way.
That dominance ended once Google forked WebKit. Not that it really matters since there are enough quirks and differences between various WebKit browsers that you gain nothing by targeting WebKit directly.
Chrome resource usage is over the roof, try handling more than 30 tabs with 4GB of ram… Firefox stays around 2GB usage with my 150tabs+.
As for buggy, they are equality prone to crashing in my experience but firefox is more prone of the annoying UI freeze.
Maybe they should upgrade their own applications first. The Mac version of Yahoo Messenger doesn’t work on OS X 10.10, while the iOS version hasn’t been updated in ages and crashes all the time.
Of course, maybe they only want to cater to Windows users. Fine by me, most of my contacts are switching away from YM.
Anyway, Yahoo is not an entity I would take software advice from…
I’m surprised people still use YM. Last time I fired it up was about a decade ago and even then, the spam was unbearable.
For some reason, they haven’t got around to making the OS X and iOS clients spammy. On the desktop I use Adium anyway, but on iOS I haven’t found a multi protocol IM client that I trust and works yet. Haven’t looked too hard though…
Why would they bother? It’s not like anyone is using YM anymore.
Which offers to “upgrade” to Chrome to users of other browsers including Firefox.
…You’d have to be really desperate to come to Yahoo for help.
Maybe the assholes that run Yahoo can fix their site so it doesn’t try to send you to a mobile page or a mobile page that has nothing to do with what you clicked on when using a regular browser. You know, what a concept. A website that actually works.
Personally I don’t like Microsoft and do what I can to avoid its products and services. That includes Bing. Thankfully it takes only a few clicks to remove Bing and switch search to Google in Firefox.
Ironically I don’t like Chrome for myriad reasons having to do with the browser itself but also due to the fact that it is bundled with a lot of unrelated software executables and uses drive-by tactics to install itself onto unsuspecting users’ PCs. Once installed, it tries to make itself the default browser the first chance it gets.
This is why I like the Linux approach to package management wherein all system software is handled by a package manager and all packages are maintained by the distribution’s maintainers. Nothing gets onto the system without the user expressly granting permission.
Edited 2014-12-14 18:50 UTC
I’ve just downloaded the Yandex browser. It seems very impressive (Chrome without the cold dead hand of Google as well the best features of Opera.)
So I logged into my Yahoo! mail, and noticed at the top the same kind of banner on up-to-date Kubuntu reading something like:
This version of Firefox no longer supported. Upgrade to the latest.