Supposedly today we have a lot of browsers to choose from – Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. Having choices is a good thing, right? Nobody wants to relive the time of almost complete Internet Explorer domination again. Unfortunately our choices are significantly fewer than they seem to be at first glance, as Chrome and Safari (thanks to the iPhone) totally dominate the browser landscape in terms of usage and almost all browsers these days are built on top of Chromium, Chrome’s open-source version. Funny enough even Edge is built on top of Chromium today, despite the bitter rivalry between Google and Microsoft. What’s also funny is that Chrome and Safari control about 85% of the browser market share today, and Microsoft’s Edge commands only about 4%.
Firefox all the way for me. We need more than one browser engine to succeed, and Firefox is the only viable alternative to Chrome’s dominance. Safari is tied to Apple so far too limiting, but at least it’s not Chromium-based, so that’s a plus.
I’ve been starting to see websites that simply do not work in Firefox, which has me deeply worried about just how long I can keep up using my browser of choice.
Wish FireFox wasn’t so slow on Windows.
And not such a resource hog… You think Electron consume memory ?
Huh What? How is Firefox slow. What the heck do you guys do for a web browser to be slow nowadays on a normal PC.
me : opening a few Atlassian tabs (Jira, Confluence, Xray, Gitlab, …)
Firefox : gfys
I personally use Firefox on desktop and mobile but the truth is not even Firefox is an alternative. Firefox is too much dependent on Google. We aren’t paying for Firefox directly but it still needs substantial amount of money to get developed. Currently Google is paying for Firefox development and paying to maintain status quo. As such Firefox is not in the position to try to move the (internet) society away from surveillance capitalism. Once a real alternative will emerge, capable of achieving that, we will know that.
The only way to wean Firefox off of Google is to pay for it. Google advertises and uses Chrome to funnel users to Google’s advertising hence subsidizing the development of Chrome. Mozilla has Pocket and Mozilla VPN but I think they can do more with Firefox Sync where they allow sharing of links/bookmarks and passwords and have a browser based VPN inside of Firefox and up-sell that as an extra on top of the free browser. This will make more people of one family or community group use Firefox for a specific task and would increase the number of people using Firefox and expand it’s usage online. Password managers already have family password sharing and I think this is an important issue the more we live online The potential for improvement is there but I feel that Mozilla management is rudderless at the moment and will inevitably lead to the demise of Firefox.
I would totally pay for Firefox, but they keep killing off the features/platforms I actually love. They just killed off Lockwise for example. The Lockwise experience on Android is phenomenal. Why are they killing that? They should have expanded to to Windows, macOS and all the rest. I’d happily have paid for it. But they never even asked.
Yes. They could have a good suite of tools by now, but they never take off. People seem to flock to the FAANG stuff regardless of how good Mozilla’s products are, so I’m not sure what the answer is.
I had already settled on Bitwarden for password management, so Lockwise didn’t affect me. I was sad to see a password manager option shutdown though.
On top of everything their stuff isn’t meant to be self-hosted. I’ve heard it can be done, but it’s never easy.
I’ve said it before, but it was a damned shame Microsoft gave up with Trident and old Edge. Sure, the UI needed (quite a bit of) work, but it was at least reassuring to know there was a homegrown rendering engine in the underpinnings of Edge.
However, Safari and Chrome, despite having the same roots, are pretty far apart nowadays. Safari is, sad to say it, the only real competitor to Chrome in real world usage. And i’m sad to say that, because it’s crap as a renderer.
Same when Opera abandoned its own rendering engine.
Opera threw out everything which made them unique at the time they ditched their own rendering engine. At that point I quit using Opera and only used it as a cheap VPN to get around some UK network blocks. I no longer use Opera even for this and don’t have it installed.
Opera was great. I could have dozens of tabs opened in the browser and have a decent experience meanwhile with Firefox it would be unbearable..
I found the same. There were other features I liked as well like the browser history editor, setting auto-refresh and and toggling page features like javascipt being with a right click. All this without three menu deep clicks or needing to load flaky plugins.
Since switching 100% to Linux a few weeks ago I’ve found OS memory use and/or Firefox memory use to be better. The Windows experience is a real memory hog.
> I’ve been starting to see websites that simply do not work in Firefox, which has me deeply worried about just how long I can keep up using my browser of choice.
Where and why? Web standards exists for this, and this behavior shouldn’t happen.
I use Firefox on both mobile and desktop since it exists and I sincerely don’t understand why people still prefer chrome; these are my reasons:
– Firefox is faster (at least on my computer), and uses less RAM (much less indeed)
– Firefox is privacy focused, it has a builtin settings section for avoiding tracking, Facebook sandboxing and more
– Firefox has multi-account containers
>Where and why? Web standards exists for this, and this behavior shouldn’t happen
Yeah… Standards exist. No one forces developers to follow them.
The standard is Chrome according to all the web devs I know.
dakk,
I prefer firefox as well. However I am also seeing more websites crop up where I’m forced to use something else. One particularly infuriating case is the IRS’s bill payment website at login says “access denied” if you don’t use a pre-approved browser and operating system due to user agent blocking. I feel it goes against the spirit of their own user accessibility guidelines and I reported them to themselves for it, but we’ll see if anything changes next year…I’m guessing probably not. I doubt the government takes it’s own accessibility issues seriously when it comes to supporting (and even not blocking) alternative browsers and operating systems.
https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/accessibility/
Aside from being blocked, I find incompatibilities are usually caused by javascript errors that go away in supported browsers. I’ll disable adblocking to confirm it’s not caused by a plugin. My kids’ teachers use a website that doesn’t support FF forcing them to use chrome. While chrome is better than IE was, it’s still disappointing that schools/companies/governments find it acceptable to only support the dominant browser & platforms, solidifying their market power.
The number of websites that don’t work with Firefox has been increasing for me and I do the same thing – start disabling ad & popup blocks to see if thats the culprit. Most of the time it’s not and I wind up dumping Firefox in favor of Ungoogled Chromium. And sometimes that doesn’t work either and I resort to Edge, which always seems to work. I imagine the struggle is only going to get worse and ultimately users will have to bend to the will of what big money dictates reality to be. At the end of the day people are satisfied with the illusion of freedom & choice but they aren’t willing to do what it takes to truly have it.
You can flag websites that don’t work properly with certain browsers at https://webcompat.com/ and it will be seen by the actual browser developers.
FlyingJester,
My first impression is that I don’t like the “moderation queue”…hundreds of entrees are moderated.
But that’s an interesting idea, +1 for mentioning it!
I am also a full time Firefox user, and I do – very very occasionally – get websites that serm to have only been coded against Chrome. All I can say is, that’s a sign of sloppy, rushed development that regardless of browser market share is likely to bite them in the ass sooner or later, because it means they’re not actually coding against web standards but rather they’re getting by on coincidental browser quirks that may or may not continue to work into the future.
Message to web devs: if you’re not testing on Firefox, you’re not doing your job right.
It’s the same nonsense with graphics. Developers getting conned and manipulated or simply being unprofessional and only coding/testing against one IHV. NVidia especially has a nasty habit of trying it on with sly lock-in strategies.
You can easily argue that if you’re trying to use a square key in a round keyhole, it’s your fault. Is it really the responsibility of the lock maker to make the lock work with square _and_ round keys, or is it the users responsibility to use a compatible key? Trying to run your car on diesel when it requires unleaded isn’t going to end well. I’d be great if web devs prioritize and commit resources to ensuring Firefox compatibility. But, they have no obligation to do so, or to you any more than car makers making engines that take both unleaded & diesel, or lock makers making locks that take round and square keys.
I dislike this libertarian “market forces” no obligation “freedom” argument some people peddle. It is a nonsense.If people want to be cynics or lazy slack jawed “gerralife” pseudo-hipsters making life difficult for everyone else because they have abandoned useful consensus and respect for standards and society I’d rather they kept their worldviews and therapy issues to themselves.
You don’t have to like the fact that nobody is obligated to you and your opinions, but that’s reality. I’m not a web dev but if I were I would support whatever I decided or were paid to support. If your demands don’t fall into either of those, be glad “market forces” provide you other options.
I really don’t care for ego and most of your position is ego.
HollyB,
I think pragmatically a lot of devs are in the boat that friedchicken is describing. One way or another we have families to feed and it’s not always easy to stick to principles when you have to chose between being a provider for your family and fighting corporate abuses. Whistle-blowing is rarely rewarded and often punished. Some people make these sacrifices, but not everyone can. Maybe it’s hypocritical, but sometimes we have to pick our battles because if we burn too many bridges we can easily end up on the street.
It tough. I try to to be understanding about other people’s position because I know what it’s like to work at a place where I’m not in control over corporate decisions.
@HollyB
A total of zero of my position is related to ego. I’m not to blame for your struggles with reality so lashing out at me is misplaced. It’s worth noting you haven’t challenged the validity of anything I’ve said, only made an angry-face and complained about it. @Alfman replied in a way that may be more digestible to the emotionally sensitive so that should help get the point across.
Yeah, no. We have webstandards for a reason. It’s to furnish a free market that doesn’t favor one party. The dominance of the Blink HTML renderer is a monoculture that only benefits Google. It might look advantageous to only code against Blink (works almost everywhere), but you are putting all your eggs in Google’s basket. That is fine for now, but Google sets the direction and it might set a direction killing your business.
This is IE6 all over again. That dark period forced everybody to be bug for bug compatible with Microsoft. Blink will force everyone to just add a lick of paint over Google’s browser to give the illusion of different products, but it will be Google driving the web. Google will take care of their objectives and yours might or might not coincide.
Last time I needed to use the IRS website it didn’t work with Firefox. It was slightly inconvenient for me to use a different browser but the sky didn’t fall and civilization didn’t crumble. Also, Google already drives the web and prioritized their interests over yours so it’s not a matter of some ominous future. And, web standards are a good thing when done properly. Do you think they’re perfect as-is or need the ability to evolve? If you think the latter then how do you expect innovation to happen when you put guardrails on everything and force everyone to color inside the lines?
“if you’re not testing on Firefox, you’re not doing your job right”
I’ll give you this. It is a lazy habit to code to just 80% of the market. But it happens when the team is resource-constrained.
” because it means they’re not actually coding against web standards but rather they’re getting by on coincidental browser quirks”
I don’t think this is really true anymore since the death of Internet Explorer. IE had tonnes of things like that. But I could not name one chrome only javascript feature.. doesn’t mean there aren’t any, but I am not familiar with any. In fact, when we have a bug with Firefox or Safari when it does work on other browsers, the culprit has always been the fact that Firefox or Safari had not implemented the standard yet, or in Safari’s case, the implementation is non-standard. There is a good resource for this here: https://caniuse.com/. You will see that not all browsers implement the standard at the same time. Generally, it doesn’t mean developers are not coding to standard, it means that they are not coding to the lowest common denominator.
Developers love new features, and so they get over eager in using the latest language features. Which can leave some browsers behind. Which, is wrong, as you pointed out as long as FF keeps its market share up, devs should be testing against it.
Our team actually gets caught by Safari. A few things where they either haven’t implemented the standard or implemented it in a weird way. (i.e, checkboxes work differently in Safari than any other browser!).
My view is you should work to the standard. I do find it unprofessional and lazy not to make an effort to code conformant code and test against multiple platforms. It’s not that hard and take up a trivial amount of time. As for new features I always used to be wary of them as they almost always led to proprietary lock-in or currently fashionable yet ultimately dead ends. As well as conformancy there is testing but also scaleability and how you integrate extra vendor specific features in a way which fits the design while having fallbacks and how you deal with vendor specific bugs. It’s all part of being a professional developer not somebody winging it for a paycheque.
The peril of not coding to standards and testing across multiple implementations is it tells vendors with bad habits they can get away with it. The ultimate customer (i.e. the general public or some poor employee who has to use the system) pays the price in headaches and inconveniences and costs of one form or another.
Having been there and done that from all ends I have a very hardline and inflexible attitude on standards and professional standards. The reason is when you let things slip you can lose out in many ways. And remember – you may be a developer of one thing but someone else is a developer of something you use.
I think we all have obligations not just as developers or end users but also citizens to counter mediocrity where we see it.
Apple’s business.apple.com which is needed for apple device MDM requires chromium based browsers.
Tracking prevention can break some sites.
Firefox is using lots of RAM on Apple. Especially when you have more then 1 window open. But I thought it uses Gecko on Apple? But I still use it cause Safari is such a strange browser I cant get used to. And ff is much more opensource.
I am disappointed that Firefox is stopping development of Lockwise. It is/was a great replacement for google passwords. And their was no need for complex sharing with my desktop en mobile. Now I have to look for alternative again. Keepass maybe?
It depends whether you mean Apple macOS or Apple iOS. From what I understand Apple won’t allow any other web rendering engines on iOS other than their own (to prevent alternative web rendering engines being used as a back door to introduce a competing app ecosystem), so Firefox on iOS is just a UI wrapper for Apple’s rendering engine.
macOS is different. There Firefox will use its own gecko rendering engine, because Apple allows that.
Gecko was ported to iOS at some point, but we stopped that effort when we realized we could never release it. The code is still in Mozilla’s Firefox repository, maybe one day we’ll finally finish it.
They’re adding Lockwise functionality to Firefox itself so you can switch the password manager on mobile to be Firefox. It works the same way as Lockwise but without the app.
Happy with FIrefox ESR on Win10, works just fine. Also happy with FF on Android, no issue whatsoever!
Firefox? Would that be Firefox made by the same Mozilla who, not so long ago, snuck a Disney Mr. Robot promo study into their browser without user consent? The same Mozilla who decides to, occasionally (and I’m sure it’s just a glitch), turn Firefox studies back on even when you explicitly disable them? That Firefox?
I was a heavy Firefox user. Lots of addons. Then Firefox 56 came and broke almost all addons I used. One that I missed very much was tab-grouping. This feature didn’t show up again for some 3 years, I think, or more and in the end it didn’t work like it used to. I didn’t left Firefox, Firefox left me.
richterlevania3,
This is a valid point. I very much want to support firefox because it is one of the last alternatives. However they are causing some of their own fires. They broke my addons too. I might overlook that in the name of “progress”. But IMHO mozilla turning to walled garden was extremely disappointing and goes against the FOSS philosophy. I feel FOSS companies in particular should be setting examples of owner rights over corporate control, but I’ve learned this is wishful thinking. Mozilla aren’t above using walled gardens to restrict what owners can do.
At least ESR doesn’t have the restrictions for now, but I still get upset with mozilla’s restrictions every time I have to run the latest consumer version.
“But IMHO mozilla turning to walled garden was extremely disappointing”
You mean they check plugins to make sure they work and are not malicious ?
Because the last part has been a huge issue and I can see how that probably forced their hand.
Lennie,
That’s fine by default and I wouldn’t be disappointed if it were only a default just like it is on android, but at the end of the day the owner needs to have their own say. Forcing policy and restrictions is disappointing for a FOSS browser IMHO and it makes me less eager to endorse it.
@Alfman
I don’t go along with the libertarian/laissez-faire approach. There is a difference between freedom and licence. Untrammeled market forces are provably a bad thing where they destroy formal rational building of policy narrative.
A well designed plugin architecture which provides powerful functionality while sandboxing rogue behaviour is a good thing. In fact much of civil society and advanced democracies function in basically this way.
As for the criticism you make about FOSS versus forcing policy you do have a point. Where the project decisions tip past rational well formed fact based and co-operative decision making and begin to peddle middle manager wheeze of the week then things have stepped beyond what is sensible and into the realm of politics. There is an old saw which says if it is not a policy reason or a financial reason it is a political reason. By political I don’t mean high politics or media reports. I mean something which is purely arbitrary and subjective without any supporting rationale or agreement.
Then there is the issue of due diligence and consent. Almost all end-users lack the expertise to understand what plugin API’s do or what risks they may be subject to. Even some alleged experts can be reckless. The point I’m making with this is that a decision is not unipolar but multi-variate. Purity of technical vision has to meet the real world at some point and this involves a range of influencing factors all of which much be considered.
I really miss tab grouping. It would make my life a lot easier and it isn’t a difficult thing to add. The current implementations using extensions bog my computer down and have hiccups when using them like crashing and launching without my previously open browser session.
If you’re referring to the Panorama Tab Group extension that was once integrated into Firefox, the current extension is really good.
The Firefox team has done a lot to return much of the functionality that was lost when they switched to the WebExtensions API.
I agree that it was a pain in the ass when they made the switch, but after reading an extensive article by one of the developers about why they felt it was necessary, I eventually came around, especially when the necessary features were added back to support Panorama.
And, like I said, that extension is fantastic again, perhaps better than it ever was.
Most everything has WebKit, not sure if I’d claim they are all “Chromium”, but understand the point.
Under Apple’s rules, even Firefox on iOS uses Apple’s rendition of WebKit that is used for Safari.
Google forked WebKit to create Blink. So, technically, Google Chromium is now Blink based, but the roots are still there, hasn’t been around long enough.
There’s Gecko (Firefox, where possible) and Goanna (old fork of Gecko, I don’t think I’ve ever used/seen this).
Actually (what can you say, I’m old), I guess you can safely say Blink has been around “long enough”. But while most things are gravitating toward Blink, there’s still stuff based on WebKit.
chriscox,
That’s true. Apple doesn’t permit anything more than wrappers for it’s own browser. Not only can’t owners install competing browsers on IOS, they can’t even install webkit forks.
This has caused problems for HTML5 open web standards as apple would drag it’s feet on supporting open web codecs whereas other browsers added support. Apple is a member of the mpeg-la patent pool and could force streaming services to pay h264 royalties by forcing IOS users to use h264.
I looked it up an it looks like apple may finally be adding support for more open codecs. I don’t know if this has anything to do with most of apple’s 264 patents expiring next year or if it’s coincidental…?
https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/18/apple-adds-webm-video-playback-support-to-safari-with-macos-big-sur-11-3/
https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_patents
Interestingly this osnews article from 2011 came up in my search too.
http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/us-patent-expiration-for-mp3-mpeg-2-h264/
Technically… Chromium is based on Blink, which is based on WebKit… which is based on KHTML.
This is actually one of the sites where I would think they would know this.
came here to comment the same 😀
I realize Brave is Chromium based too, but what is the concern with that? Did I miss something?
Sadly, the sandboxing on Firefox is years behind the Chromium browsers – https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html. I use Firefox a lot because I like its privacy focus, and I want to avoid a browser monoculture. But I just don’t think they can keep up, security-wise, with Chromium. Brave is looking more appealing.
didn’t know about this 🙁
now I feel insecure using firefox
derekmorr,
IMHO the author’s assessment isn’t completely fair.
Nearly all his arguments are that chromium is more secure because of process isolation. However that’s not the end of the story because single process does not imply insecure code and multiple processes does not imply secure code. Think of an asynchronous or multithreaded database running requests from thousands of users in the same process. It could potentially be exploited, but the mere fact that they run in the same process may not be as much of a concern as the quality of code itself.
When we look at software exploits in the wild, the vast majority come down to subtle and notorious memory bugs in C/C++ code. If you are using managed and verified code, this offers a considerable leap in security and Mozilla has been at the forefront of robust code verification with it’s work on rust. And much of the browser is written in javascript, which is easier to contain than native code. Robust language tools can significantly help at reducing the attack surfaces that are all too common with legacy programming languages. I think the best way to compare browsers security objectively is to compare their actual vulnerability stats… when you do it looks like mozilla may be ahead of google on browser security.
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?vendor_id=452
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?vendor_id=1224
This isn’t to say that process isolation doesn’t have merit or that mozilla doesn’t have more work to do, but arguably process isolation is merely a bandaid that doesn’t actually fix the cause of the problem. So I feel mozilla deserves some credit for investing in secure code versus the rest of the software industry sticking to exploit-prone languages with mitigations. For decades we’ve failed to address the root causes, and I think it’s going to continue to plage us.
https://vpnoverview.com/news/google-warns-chrome-users-about-multiple-high-level-exploits/
Waterfox G4 is very noticeably faster than Firefox 94 on Windows, Linux and macOS. I wish that upstream Firefox could adopt their optimizations so I didn’t have to run a fork.
I love Firefox and use it everyday and everywhere I can. I can’t stand Chromium based browser and try to go out of my way to not use them if possible.
Thom, did you delete my comment, and then edit your post so what I commented on is gone?
(Brave // Crypto)
Firefox consistently underperforms in Jetstream2 benchmark. I think they no longer have the audience nor the resources to seriously challenge the Chromium based universe. So sad but I hate to see Firefox being marginalized and eventually phased out of the web.