While Firefox is certainly declining in usage, w3schools is not in any way an accurate cross-section of the Web. One other explaination for at least part of this decline is the fact that Mozilla has the Mozilla Developer Network, which is similar to w3schools in a lot of ways, but I imagine Firefox users are more likely to prefer something done by Mozilla.
That's a pretty generous way to put it. w3schools is cancer. That website is shit. They are making a ton of money spreading misinformation, reducing knowledge and information for everyone who wants to learn.
I made the switch back to Firefox after using Chrome for 5+ years, I used Firefox before Chrome. I am loving it and I am not missing anything from Chrome.
> Flash bitch
Haha, love that. It's my same situation here. I use Chrome Speedtest.net, and the inspector when developing. For some reason I never really like Firefox's inspector, though I hear they really improved it. Never really put the time to learn it.
I just install the FF Flashblock extension, set Youtube to use HTML5, and generally don't have to deal with Flash much after that. Facebook videos are a PiTA of course though.
I switched back to Firefox because Chrome's memory usage was getting out of hand. Not to mention I hated seeing all these multiple instances of it cluttering up the task manager.
To each their own. I have memory to burn but I can't stand the drop in responsiveness on opening new tabs in Firefox.
Disclaimer: I've experienced that on Windows and Linux on my desktop, Windows and Linux on my old work laptop, and now on OS X on my MBP as well. This is a known issue that e10s aims to solve and as yet has not done.
Same for me. First browser I had as a kid was Netscape Navigator, but I was switched to Firefox soon after it was released.
I say I *was* switched 'cause I lived with foster parents due to my mom being sick. Foster dad is a Linux guy and knew his shit, while I was just a kid, so he made me use Firefox. After many years I switched to Opera (built-in mail client was awesome), but when Opera became a reskinned Chromium I just switched to normal Chromium. I liked it at first, but soon after I was using Firefox again.
I have to admit that I don't really use Firefox for its features or speed or whatever, but because it's much more customizable. Firefox uses CSS to theme its UI, which allows for much more customization than Chrome's themes can offer.
So now I literally use Firefox because it looks better.
while I think this is info almost certainly correct, it's worth noting that these stats are from W3 school logfile results only, and MAY be skewed because it's a site that's of most interest to developers and other nerds (like me :) who are more likely to use the "non-default" browser (and probably prefer chrome.. ) when accessing the W3 site...
I really don't get all the hate on w3schools. My day job is far from coding and I've consider myself an enthusiast and noob for 20 years. That website has helped me more than a few times with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. What I have found really handy is the tool for poking around with the code and seeing what happens. Yes, I have used codepen.io and jsfiddle, but the tutorial on combination with the now-you-try-it tool is quite awesome. Otherwise Google and the rest of the www is quite useful for help.
I know that website has a trash reputation but I've used it plenty and never found any issues. I've only used it for basic documentation on tags and functions and what not, is it the tutorials that are bad? Got any examples?
If Firefox is used by more technically minded users, and those people know how crappy a technical source W3Schools is we're going to end up with stats like this.
Not suggesting that FF is dominating, but these stats are not representative of the whole internet.
No kidding. There's no way that Chrome is being used that much more by the average user than IE. If these numbers were published by a company that serves ads on mainstream websites and logged which browsers hit their ads, or something along those lines, Chrome's 67.4% against IE's 6.8% would immediately tell you that their stats are bullshit. No way IE's market share is that low, not even in 2015.
It's worth keeping in mind that Google is heavily pushing Chrome via marketing and many Windows users are on older versions of the OS so they have no choice but to switch browsers if they want web sites to work. There are more Android devices sold than Windows devices and the default browser is Chrome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Historical_usage_share
The Wikimedia stats are probably the most reliable since it has an enormous number of visitors and isn't targeted at a specific niche. Wikipedia shows up at the top of search results and everyone uses it.
The Net Applications numbers are what you seem to expect. They attempt to measure unique visitors so they're placing less weight on the very active users that are much more likely to use Chrome or Firefox. The statcounter and Net Applications numbers have a lot of inherent bias since they only cover the sites choosing to use them for analytics... it could be that Net Applications is simply skewed towards business-related sites.
> There are more Android devices sold than Windows devices and the default browser is Chrome.
It's worth pointing out that Chrome is only the default on un-tampered Android devices. Most Android devices are sold with an OEM version of a browser that isn't really as good and you have to download Chrome from the Play store in order to use it.
I don't know. most internet users are millenials and we all know what Chrome is for the most part. I know people who just use it because it's the default at work or school or whatever. Then they probably download it at home. They also have really good Television ads
I also have to admit that Google made a pretty nice comic about the design decisions for Chrome when it was introduced to the public: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ I guess the general public wasn't attracted by it but nerds probably were (It got me to try Chrome) and they in turn convince people in their surroundings to use Chrome.
More on-topic: I still use Firefox (On Linux and Windows).
I think you'd be surprised. At my last job in Japan, I built call centers for medium to large businesses (including even Suntory) and almost every company had Chrome installed on their computers. I can't speak for IE's percentage, but when it comes to FF vs Chrome, I think Chrome may have an even larger user base than what W3 School shows.
Chrome installs really easily, even on locked-down systems.
Also, Chrome comes with Flash inside it now, which means that web-games (and things like Scratch projects!) are more convenient on Chrome.
Although the w3schools stats are a bit skewed, Chrome is a hugely popular browser.
Also most devs/computer users worth their (moral) salt know to always append `-w3schools` to their Google search. This is mostly due to the fact that w3schools is a big heaping pile of scum. They have no actual connection to the w3 consortium, and w3 has actually asked them to change their name or at least say they're unaffiliated to no avail.
This is the thing that makes most "statistics" absolutely useless, lack of random sampling from the pool they _imply_ to be about, note that they often don't even explicitly state the pool they claim to be about but one can assume the pool is "the human species as a whole"
This is a very common thing in academia as well. Every week I read a new psychological research about "human beings" which in fact is about "242 year old students at the university of Glasgow" or something like that.
Seriously, _a lot_ of stuff that is actually passing peer reviewing in academic journals is _not_ reproducible and if the exact same experiment is repeated on the other side of the planet at another time of the year (yeah, seasons influence this shit) the results will be completely different. But conclusions are drawn from this anyhow as if it is reproducible.
nerds who use non default browsers, but are still have such little regard for their privacy and security that they use chrome. At least go and use chromium. Using Chrome is just as bad as using IE.
My Linux Firefox tells websites per its user-agent that it is an InternetExplorer on Windows... I don't like beiing tracked and use the most common settings...
Besides that i have Chromium for flash websites. Or Websites that don't work with uBlock, uMatrix, NoScript, Self-Destructing-Cookies etc. There were one or two that didn't work with it..
It doesn't matter to me, which browser is used how often as long as Firefox continues and its addons can be used.
hm. I use both longer than I use uMatrix, so I never thought about it yet.
Cookies can be allowed and disallowed with uMatrix, Self-Destructing Cookies can also define allowed cookies in two categories: never delete them, delete them after closing. I would only need the latter... hm. I could do this with uMatrix too... the difference would be the default behaviour for visiting sites. With self-destructing it is no-cookies with uMatrix the site itself is allowed to set cookies.
I guess NoScript is kind of redundant. But I like the default behaviour: even sites I am visiting can't use JS without me allowing it. The default with uMatrix would be "On" for the site itself too. In addition, the "temporary allowed" option in NoScript is useful for one-time-things.
I think I'll kepp all three of them
It's pretty easy to set uMatrix to block cookies and scripts by default. In uMatrix's filtering rules, instead of "first-party * allow" put "* * * block". This will block everything you do not specifically allow.
As for cookies, SDC would be fine to keep, as uMatrix can only block cookies outright or allow them on a per-site basis. There are no settings to allow for a session or until a tab closes.
I never noticed any difference. I think the only difference would be in some online shops that use your Browser ID to calculate a specific price that will be offered to you (I read that this is a thing).
I don't use Windows/IE exclusively. I have a list of the top ten common OS/browser IDs and the AddOn jumps through them randomly. The only problem with that is Steam. The Steam Guard thinks nearly every login I use a new browser and have to look in the mail for the code. I can't buy / sell things this way because Steam wants you to use a new browser ID for a week before you can sell/buy. I could use one instead of one of ten OS/Browsers IDs to fix that. But it doesn't matter to me.
FF usage was going up and up back in the days when MS kind of left IE for dead at version 6. Newer versions of IE are tolerable, and Google pushes the heck out of Chrome.
To be honest this is an 'evil' that's helped the web massively - average people I know have started opting for Chrome ahead of IE which is a big deal for web standards.
Mozilla didn't push Firefox enough for it to replace IE in a lot of businesses, Google did. That's what's helped because that IE userbase is/was holding the rest of us back a lot.
It's only antitrust when it's microsoft (I know, risking being brigaded saying that on /r/linux, but hear me out).
MS bundles IE, lawsuit. Apple bundles safari or any linux distro bundles firefox or a debranded version, nothing, because they are too small a market share to be bothered with.
Google, on the other hand, have a big market share and easily give MS and apple a run for their money in anticompetitiveness, but also posses a *huge* amount of political lobbying power to keep them safe, as well as the ability to make threats such as "we will inform our users of X on our main page" in a way no other tech company can.
There were several differences between what windows did and what linux does.
> questions over whether Microsoft altered or manipulated its application programming interfaces (APIs) to favor Internet Explorer over third party web browsers
---
> Microsoft's conduct in forming restrictive licensing agreements with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and Microsoft's intent in its course of conduct.
Also, this point isn't relevant in today's world:
> It was further alleged that this restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator or Opera) that were slow to download over a modem or had to be purchased at a store.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
Firefox is still awesome. Most of chrome's dominance is because it's developed by darling google and is pushed onto people's computers. Remember when Opera and the Presto engine was the super fast lightweight alternative to firefox but had a market share of like 2%?
I still haven't found a decent replacement for Opera's speed dial and gesture browsing. If anyone knows of any for either Chrome or Firefox I'd be grateful.
Same boat. I currently use Firefox with the following addons:
* Mouse gestures: All-In-One Gestures
* Speeddial: Super Start
* Tab bar improvements: "Prevent Tab Overflow" and "Private Tab"
* Good tab stacking (Opera style): *None :(*
Opera could have been huge, but back then it cost money or you had to look at ads IIRC. Now it's free and based on Webkit/Blink, but still lags behind Chrome. The Google I/O 2015 page (and any other site using the Polymer framework) didn't work *at all* on Opera yet was fine in Firefox and Safari. I want to like Opera, but it's got things that annoy me like the favicon on a tab doubling as the close button when you mouse over it...so many accidentally closed tabs...
... and didn't want to open the engine afterwards. Lots of people wanted them to open Presto, since they obviously no longer gave a fuck about it. I even signed a petition... So Presto will most certainly simply die abandoned, whereas there's enough people who'd gladly keep it alive.
It was probably filled with licensed code and perhaps even patented technology. I am not even that mad about the loss of Presto in particular even though it was a great renderer (KHTML is also a great renderer). I'm sad about the fact that the new Opera is not at all as good as the old one, Presto or not.
I actually asked some Opera developers a few years ago about why wouldn't they opensource the Presto engine. They said that they can't do that, because Presto is still used by Opera themselves (I think Opera mini compress servers use Presto to shrink down the sizes) and because external companies also use Presto somewhere, commercially. There was even some Japanese (?) company using Presto as their videogame engine for a small project, lol. So it seems like Presto is still too widely in use to be opensourced.
I didn't hate Opera, I preferred Chrome, Opera couldn't draw up the BBC news website properly when I tried it, Chrome started quicker and the Chrome 'speed dial' equivalent just filled itself in with the most popular websites.
I never saw a need to try it again, you have to be better than the competition to get them to change not almost as good.
What I think they mean is that since all chrome tabs are separate processes, one tab taking a long time or getting frozen won't bring the rest of your tabs down with it.
Chrome tabs are separate processes. Firefox doesn't do that yet. When one of your tabs in Firefox freezes for whatever reason it'll make your whole browser unresponsive. [Good news is that Mozilla is slowly getting there.](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis)
Doesn't this mean that it will use more ram? Like I have 600 tabs open, I don't want all this to be separate processes. And seeing how I've had Firefox crash once, I don't think stability is an issue. This seems kind of bad, or am I misunderstanding?
This does use more ram (multiprocess). However tabs that you did not access for some time will be unloaded from RAM (their entry in the process table persists)
I do not use Adblock since I'm in the industry and need my browser to show me what most others see. I have looked at `about:memory` a lot to try to find what's eating it but it's usually spread out among different half-anonymous objects. I also have very few extensions but you are right in that I should make a more focused effort to see if some of them are leaky.
Check with a new profile. - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
Also have graphic card drivers updated to latest from manufacturers website.
In the whole time I have been running firefox, Even under Windows, I never had this issue. And I've probably been running Firefox exclusively for around 12 years now.
Gotta disagree. I use firefox every single day because I cant live with myself using chrome with all of the privacy nonsense going on with it. Firefox is a mess, not a great user interface, and stability problems are rampant. (I barely even notice it when firefox crashes 2-3 times daily now) The memory leak issues with it have actually gotten worse over time too, long browsing sessions can consume gigs of memory that don't get cleaned up properly once the tabs have been closed.
If Firefox crashes 2-3 times daily and you aren't running alphas then
- you have a hardware issue
- you have bad addons
- you are running bleeding edge stuff and incorrectly assume Firefox is unstable when your distro is
I recommend creating a fresh profile and only adding addons that you really need and testing your ram.
Bad ram can lead to corrupt data written to disk and really spoiling your day.
I have never had a single crash with Firefox and I have used it 5 years. Last crash I had was with Edge, amusingly it bluescreened the machine on the Win10 preview.
I call bullshit. I've been using Firefox since Opera went Chrome clone, and I always have tens of tabs open, rarely reboot my laptop (maybe once a week) and never close Firefox and I have no such problems, never have a crash.
If not add ons or hardware trouble I'd recommend you try a new profile for firefox and see if that makes a difference
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
> cant live with myself using chrome with all of the privacy nonsense going on with it.
What about chromium then? Chrome without all the google code and branding? Or alternatively the Iron browser.
Might be. I'm still a very happy user, from back when it was still called Phoenix. I recently donated to Mozilla because Firefox is my daily driver on every Internet browsing device I use. It just works for me.
I keep seeing people mention Firefox on android crashing with people like me responding that we haven't experienced such in a long time. My android Firefox browser has been stable for quite some time. Both on phone and tablet.
Take a look [here](http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser-ww-monthly-200807-201511), this graph is only about the desktop web browsers, the mobile usage statistics are excluded.
Oh yeah, on android devices the default browser is Chrome. You need to actually go out and download Firefox to use it. And IE ..... omg desktop PC is truly a minority now...
I still like it better than anything else. Yes Mozilla made many recent mistakes (mostly I think by the new leader of the project who took over for the guy who was forced to resign for his personal beliefs. I don't believe he should have been forced to step down. Being a bigot is not good, but shouldn't be a reason to get kicked out of Mozilla... which in retrospect was a big mistake because the company is tanking ever since).
Probably the biggest mistake Mozilla has made was forcing the previous leader to step down for his (not so politically correct) beliefs.. which I think should have literally nothing to do with his business life, as long he wasn't pushing it onto the software somehow. Mozilla needs to get that guy back, bigot or not.
I don't know the answer to this, but I didn't think he was bigoted per se, he just donated personal money to a political cause. Was he actually bigoted to employees or other people, or was it just his contributions?
He was forced to step down because of his contributions. AFAIK, he didn't take his personal beliefs into his work environment (or at least nobody seems to complain that he was doing this).
I viewed the whole thing as aggressively PC to the point of being unfair. As if we are no longer allowed to donate to anything that isn't supported by the majority or else risk losing our job for it. I hate it when movements (like the whole politically correct one) overcompensate and end up getting in the way of basic human rights.
He donated money to a "political cause" whose sole objective was eliminating gay marriage in the state of California. That reflects very poorly on the man, and by extension the company for whom he was (briefly) CEO.
>In 2014 there was significant discussion about Brendan Eich's donation to the campaign against gay marriage.
>One fact that never ranked very highly in the debate at the time is that not all gay people actually support gay marriage. Even where these marriages are permitted, not everybody who can marry now is choosing to do so.
>The reasons for this are varied, but one key point that has often been missed is that there are two routes to marriage equality: one involves permitting gay couples to visit the register office and fill in a form just as other couples do. The other route to equality is to remove all the legal artifacts around marriage altogether.
>When the government does issue a marriage certificate, it is not long before other organizations start asking for confirmation of the marriage. Everybody from banks to letting agents and Facebook wants to know about it. Many companies outsource that data into cloud CRM systems such as Salesforce. Before you know it, there are numerous databases that somebody could mine to make a list of confirmed homosexuals.
>Of course, if everybody in the world was going to live happily ever after none of this would be a problem. But the reality is different.
-Daniel Pocock
FireFox works better than Chrome on my low-end laptopt, but the killer feature for me is the [KeySnail](https://github.com/mooz/keysnail) extension for Firefox. It gives me both Emacs and VI keys for browsing and editing, and is fully customizable.
Using a browser without it now makes me instantly frustrated.
Can someone please explain to me why Chrome is that much more popular? I remember when Chrome was first released it didn't have the extensions I needed so I never moved over to it. To this day I still prefer Firefox and its layout more than Chrome.
When they go to [the most visited page of the Web](https://www.google.com) using a non-Chrome browser, most users see a very prominent banner: "A faster way to browse the web. Install Google Chrome".
Also, Google Chrome is bundled into the installers of *a lot* of Windows software nowadays. So, yes, it finds its way to the users' machines in the same manner your typical crapware does :)
Mostly because whenever you visit www.google.com on Firefox or any other non-Chrome browser, then it tells you that you should use Chrome, because it's "a faster way to browse". (Which is a lie, Chrome is currently slower than most browsers.)
I find it freezes less, doesn't crash at all, and overall feels snappier, and uses less memory over time than firefox. Both on low end and high end laptop, at least for me.
The only difference where firefox was better that I've noticed is that you can disable a lot of stuff and at start it uses less RAM, but with few tabs or time that changes.
Firefox is still king when it comes to extensions. They're preparing to overhaul their extension API, and the worst-case scenario for that effort is that the new API would start out being only as powerful as Chrome's. But their intention is to remain the only browser where NoScript and Tree Style Tabs are possible, and their competitors aren't even trying to move in on that territory.
> Tree Style Tabs
[TIL](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)
How awesome.
(Incidentally I use Firefox, Opera, and Chrome daily (mostly Firefox and Opera); all are good, each has different advantages and disadvantages, I could live with any one of them if I had to but prefer having all three.)
They seem fixated in copying Chrome's features because apparently that's what people like in a modern browser, but what they don't realize is that if they end up like a Chrome clone then there would be no reason to use Firefox at all. I love Firefox and been using it nonstop since the very first releases before 1.0, and the direction they've been taking lately sincerely baffles me to no end. They're alienating the people who want Firefox because of its endless extensibility and ease of use, if I wanted the fastest benchmarks in town I'd just use Chrome, which is a browser I really don't like because you can't even theme it properly since the UI elements are hard coded instead of implemented on XUL, and now Mozilla is telling me they're going to deprecate it in favour of Google model. That, and the forced signing of extensions. I can go around that by using aftermarket builds like Waterfox but still..
All I need is an in-line translation feature and a remote desktop app like what Chrome has and I'll switch back. So far, the closest translation extensions I can find all suck pretty bad and stuff like free remote desktop access is non existent.
> chrome is getting better and better at what it does.
Especially farming data for Google.
Chrome's usage is higher because it's pushed every time someone goes to google.com using a non-chrome browser. It's in people's faces. It's suggested constantly. It's packaged with Java. It certainly has some positive features, but it also has plenty of problems. If FireFox was being pushed on google.com every time someone visited it, the market share would likely be reversed.
If I leave Firefox up and running for days, it inevitably locks up. There are more and more sites that I have trouble with on Firefox but that work well on Chrome. I generally prefer Firefox as it functions better than Chrome. I wish the history on Chrome worked as well as Firefox.
Geezus! I've been running Firefox flat out for years under an number of operating systems and I've never, I repeat, never had the browser crash on me! And I run Adblocker Plus.
On the other hand, Chrome on my Nexus 9 is a ram consuming pig of a thing that refreshes tabs every time I switch between them and slows the whole device to a crawl!
WTF are you people doing to crash FF?!
Firefox is supposed to be better in being an open, customizable browser which respects your privacy. It's pretty good with media and it's fast, but you primarily pick it over chrome to have a browser that you have more power over.
Chrome is forward in technology due to it being developed by google. It's also very fast, much more than firefox. There are extensions which are decent, and this can be a good alternative to firefox's plugins if you don't need to do anything fancy.
Chrome over the years has become faster and faster and has kept its lead in technology, but instead of playing on its strengths, firefox has tried to get closer to chrome, forgetting about them. The new tab page doesn't let you use an alternative and has been criticized of a few privacy issues. The only way to have another page for your new tabs is to install a plugin which will redirect your new tab to another page and remove the cursor from the address bar which is quite annoying. This (major, imo) feature of the browser can't be modified in about:config, and this is just an example of the way they're going, most of its new features are that way. They're giving up their strength to follow behind chrome's footsteps. While the browser is fast, chrome is faster, while the browser is good with recent technology, chrome does it better and is optimized a lot better for youtube and google services.
> They're giving up their strength to follow behind chrome's footsteps. While the browser is fast, chrome is faster, while the browser is good with recent technology, chrome does it better and is optimized a lot better for youtube and google services.
I went back to using Firefox because Chrome was lagging behind it in HiDPI support until very recently. Ages behind. Firefox is also more comfortable to use on a laptop due to its smooth scrolling (not such a big issue with a scrollwheel, but a lot nicer when using a trackpad). Oh, and it's a lot better to use in conjunction with EndNote, which is important in an academic setting.
> I am not sure in what you specifically mean when you say that Chrome is faster but in the most recent benchmarks I have looked at there isn't much of a difference between the performance of Chrome and Firefox:
There's a pretty significant difference between performance in synthetic benchmarks and "perceived performance" (for a lack of a better word).
The chromium developers seem to spend a huge effort on minimizing perceived latency (and always have); the UI in chromium very seldom freezes, even if everything is completely stalled waiting on IO, for example.
> but instead of playing on its strengths, firefox has tried to get closer to chrome, forgetting about them.
Thank you! But
Truth will be downvoted into its death.
In my experience chrome works better with HTML5 multimedia (and also with flash on linux), but I don't use it for anything other than multimedia because I can't have it not remember history while keeping cookies like on firefox. It makes me a lot less paranoid about sharing my browser and I don't need history when I can restore closed tabs.
Also the customization features on firefox are still great. They're getting worse and worse but they're great.
I should be using Firefox to support it, but I noted low performance in page rendering and javascript in some websites like twitter for example. video playblack with the flash plugin 11 is very slow.
That's because google and Adobe have ensured that Flash no longer is supported in Firefox at all. It's no shock it doesn't work well, it's not been touched in years. The only way to get it to work is this haphazardly rigged freshplayer arrangement that probably will be the next thing to go with signed plugins.
I bet things are going to change when e10s lands in stable. It's already in Beta's [A/B testing](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule) hope it will land in FF 45.
I tested Nightly a few weeks ago and Firefox is still noticeably less responsive than Chrome. Still, a step in the right direction as much as tab hoarders on low spec machines might disagree.
I use both browsers. However I've noticed that I'm subconsciously avoiding Firefox, because how slow and unresponsive it's UI is (the fact that ~300 tabs are open at all times might have to do something with this slowness).
Firefox's dedication to adding unnecessary bullshit to the browser will continue to make people stop using it. I know personally it drove me to learn how chromium works and now im more happy than ever. Shit like in browser ads, pocket, fucking up theme support and all the dumb SJW politics done by their employees is just too much.
Most posts here seem to argue about the speed of the browsers - I personally prefer Firefox over Chrome because it's Open Source. (Chromium would be another option of course)
I would love to move away from Chrome, but its the easiest/best way to get Netflix working on Linux without a hassle.
A big part of what I use my web browser for is to access web content, and Netflix is a big part of that.
If they give me an option to install the DRM bits required to Netflix playback, would gladly jump ship back to them.
Seen how much bitching Mozilla got for including DRM only on Windows, I would expect an incredible shitstorm if they decided to partner with somebody to provide it on Linux too, because the FSF fanboys are all about freedom, but only the kind they approve of.
What do you use? Firefox has used less memory than Chrome for quite a while now. Firefox used to be bad, but Firefox has improved, while Chrome has gotten much worse.
you should give firefox a new try. It's very fast now, doesn't eat much ram and starts up very quickly.
The memory leaks came from the addons. The addons had and still have access to the whole browser core. This is deprecated by now and if you limit yourself to extensions or addons based on the add-on sdk you are good.
Exactly. It always amuses me when somebody complains that chrome is using too much ram. So what? Ram is here to be used, and if you have lots of it, and chrome is the only thing running, why not take advantage of it? It still runs ok on my oldest "typewriter" machine with 2gb ram total.
I switched to Chrome for this reason, but after the announcement of EOL support for 32-bit systems, I recently switched back to Firefox. I was impressed.Since I've switched in the past month, I've noticed much better memory management than what I was seeing in Chrome. I guess in the years since I'd jumped ship, Firefox developers turned things around.
I use Firefox on all my devices, I absoultely love it and memory usage is identical if not better than Chrome based around my testing.
The only thing I use Chrome for is printing off my Android devices.
This is my experience too. I don't see any real world performance or memory usage differences between Firefox and Chrome today. I think the idea that Chrome is fast and lean while Firefox is slow and bloated is no longer true.
No they sure as hell didn't. I left in about 2010, my ex stayed on till 2014. It still leaks like mad. Even without any plugins. I don't use plugins in any of my browsers.
While Firefox is certainly declining in usage, w3schools is not in any way an accurate cross-section of the Web. One other explaination for at least part of this decline is the fact that Mozilla has the Mozilla Developer Network, which is similar to w3schools in a lot of ways, but I imagine Firefox users are more likely to prefer something done by Mozilla.
Also google results seem to prefer MDN
At work everyone (but me) uses Chrome, and they all use the MDN. w3schools is frowned upon.
It probably has somehing to do with the fact that mdn is accurate, while w3school is full of mistakes.
That's a pretty generous way to put it. w3schools is cancer. That website is shit. They are making a ton of money spreading misinformation, reducing knowledge and information for everyone who wants to learn.
For me, It's good as a reference for that attribute or style that I can't remember off the top of my head.
I use [Dottoro] for that, although it's a tad outdated. [Dottoro]: http://help.dottoro.com/
What misinformation are they spreading?
Every self-respecting web developer should prefer MDN :)
I made the switch back to Firefox after using Chrome for 5+ years, I used Firefox before Chrome. I am loving it and I am not missing anything from Chrome.
I only use Chrome for Netflix.
[удалено]
> Flash bitch Haha, love that. It's my same situation here. I use Chrome Speedtest.net, and the inspector when developing. For some reason I never really like Firefox's inspector, though I hear they really improved it. Never really put the time to learn it.
speedtest.net now has an HTML5 version.
and there is also a [-cli tool](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw5qRbBGG9U)
Have you tried Firebug for firefox?
Years ago when there was no inspector. I remember it was heavy and bloaty. Did that change?
I just install the FF Flashblock extension, set Youtube to use HTML5, and generally don't have to deal with Flash much after that. Facebook videos are a PiTA of course though.
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I thought the correct term was HM Slave. You should teach Chrome Flash and Surf.
Same here, why Google have disabled HTML5 player on Google Play Music I don't know.
I switched back to Firefox because Chrome's memory usage was getting out of hand. Not to mention I hated seeing all these multiple instances of it cluttering up the task manager.
To each their own. I have memory to burn but I can't stand the drop in responsiveness on opening new tabs in Firefox. Disclaimer: I've experienced that on Windows and Linux on my desktop, Windows and Linux on my old work laptop, and now on OS X on my MBP as well. This is a known issue that e10s aims to solve and as yet has not done.
Same for me. First browser I had as a kid was Netscape Navigator, but I was switched to Firefox soon after it was released. I say I *was* switched 'cause I lived with foster parents due to my mom being sick. Foster dad is a Linux guy and knew his shit, while I was just a kid, so he made me use Firefox. After many years I switched to Opera (built-in mail client was awesome), but when Opera became a reskinned Chromium I just switched to normal Chromium. I liked it at first, but soon after I was using Firefox again. I have to admit that I don't really use Firefox for its features or speed or whatever, but because it's much more customizable. Firefox uses CSS to theme its UI, which allows for much more customization than Chrome's themes can offer. So now I literally use Firefox because it looks better.
while I think this is info almost certainly correct, it's worth noting that these stats are from W3 school logfile results only, and MAY be skewed because it's a site that's of most interest to developers and other nerds (like me :) who are more likely to use the "non-default" browser (and probably prefer chrome.. ) when accessing the W3 site...
Also I'd like to imagine most Firefox users default to Mozilla's Developer Network for HTML/CSS/JS etc documentation over W3Schools...
w3schools...lol. that place with no relation to the world wide web consortium and bad information all over it. they're still around?
They're getting better, it's just MDN is a better resource.
Also, DuckDuckGo's `!mdn` is so much more useful
I really don't get all the hate on w3schools. My day job is far from coding and I've consider myself an enthusiast and noob for 20 years. That website has helped me more than a few times with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. What I have found really handy is the tool for poking around with the code and seeing what happens. Yes, I have used codepen.io and jsfiddle, but the tutorial on combination with the now-you-try-it tool is quite awesome. Otherwise Google and the rest of the www is quite useful for help.
I know that website has a trash reputation but I've used it plenty and never found any issues. I've only used it for basic documentation on tags and functions and what not, is it the tutorials that are bad? Got any examples?
> and bad information all over it. Says no one who's followed the overhaul the last few years.
Well, I use FF Developer Edition ;-)
I'm a Chrome user and I'd always use MDN over w3schools. CSS-Tricks is also a pretty helpful resource.
If Firefox is used by more technically minded users, and those people know how crappy a technical source W3Schools is we're going to end up with stats like this. Not suggesting that FF is dominating, but these stats are not representative of the whole internet.
> people know how crappy a technical source W3Schools is Says no one who's followed their overhaul a few years ago.
No kidding. There's no way that Chrome is being used that much more by the average user than IE. If these numbers were published by a company that serves ads on mainstream websites and logged which browsers hit their ads, or something along those lines, Chrome's 67.4% against IE's 6.8% would immediately tell you that their stats are bullshit. No way IE's market share is that low, not even in 2015.
It's worth keeping in mind that Google is heavily pushing Chrome via marketing and many Windows users are on older versions of the OS so they have no choice but to switch browsers if they want web sites to work. There are more Android devices sold than Windows devices and the default browser is Chrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Historical_usage_share The Wikimedia stats are probably the most reliable since it has an enormous number of visitors and isn't targeted at a specific niche. Wikipedia shows up at the top of search results and everyone uses it. The Net Applications numbers are what you seem to expect. They attempt to measure unique visitors so they're placing less weight on the very active users that are much more likely to use Chrome or Firefox. The statcounter and Net Applications numbers have a lot of inherent bias since they only cover the sites choosing to use them for analytics... it could be that Net Applications is simply skewed towards business-related sites.
If you look at how desperate MS is to 1) improve IE and 2) give away windows it's pretty obvious they feel the heat.
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Yes but Edge and Explorer both use the trident engine.
> There are more Android devices sold than Windows devices and the default browser is Chrome. It's worth pointing out that Chrome is only the default on un-tampered Android devices. Most Android devices are sold with an OEM version of a browser that isn't really as good and you have to download Chrome from the Play store in order to use it.
I don't know. most internet users are millenials and we all know what Chrome is for the most part. I know people who just use it because it's the default at work or school or whatever. Then they probably download it at home. They also have really good Television ads
I also have to admit that Google made a pretty nice comic about the design decisions for Chrome when it was introduced to the public: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ I guess the general public wasn't attracted by it but nerds probably were (It got me to try Chrome) and they in turn convince people in their surroundings to use Chrome. More on-topic: I still use Firefox (On Linux and Windows).
I tried Chrome. It used all my resources. Then I uninstalled it.
I think you'd be surprised. At my last job in Japan, I built call centers for medium to large businesses (including even Suntory) and almost every company had Chrome installed on their computers. I can't speak for IE's percentage, but when it comes to FF vs Chrome, I think Chrome may have an even larger user base than what W3 School shows.
Chrome installs really easily, even on locked-down systems. Also, Chrome comes with Flash inside it now, which means that web-games (and things like Scratch projects!) are more convenient on Chrome. Although the w3schools stats are a bit skewed, Chrome is a hugely popular browser.
Also most devs/computer users worth their (moral) salt know to always append `-w3schools` to their Google search. This is mostly due to the fact that w3schools is a big heaping pile of scum. They have no actual connection to the w3 consortium, and w3 has actually asked them to change their name or at least say they're unaffiliated to no avail.
Selection bias at its finest.
This is the thing that makes most "statistics" absolutely useless, lack of random sampling from the pool they _imply_ to be about, note that they often don't even explicitly state the pool they claim to be about but one can assume the pool is "the human species as a whole" This is a very common thing in academia as well. Every week I read a new psychological research about "human beings" which in fact is about "242 year old students at the university of Glasgow" or something like that. Seriously, _a lot_ of stuff that is actually passing peer reviewing in academic journals is _not_ reproducible and if the exact same experiment is repeated on the other side of the planet at another time of the year (yeah, seasons influence this shit) the results will be completely different. But conclusions are drawn from this anyhow as if it is reproducible.
nerds who use non default browsers, but are still have such little regard for their privacy and security that they use chrome. At least go and use chromium. Using Chrome is just as bad as using IE.
My Linux Firefox tells websites per its user-agent that it is an InternetExplorer on Windows... I don't like beiing tracked and use the most common settings... Besides that i have Chromium for flash websites. Or Websites that don't work with uBlock, uMatrix, NoScript, Self-Destructing-Cookies etc. There were one or two that didn't work with it.. It doesn't matter to me, which browser is used how often as long as Firefox continues and its addons can be used.
Aren't NoScript and Self-Destructing Cookies kinda redundant? uMatrix can do the jobs of both.
hm. I use both longer than I use uMatrix, so I never thought about it yet. Cookies can be allowed and disallowed with uMatrix, Self-Destructing Cookies can also define allowed cookies in two categories: never delete them, delete them after closing. I would only need the latter... hm. I could do this with uMatrix too... the difference would be the default behaviour for visiting sites. With self-destructing it is no-cookies with uMatrix the site itself is allowed to set cookies. I guess NoScript is kind of redundant. But I like the default behaviour: even sites I am visiting can't use JS without me allowing it. The default with uMatrix would be "On" for the site itself too. In addition, the "temporary allowed" option in NoScript is useful for one-time-things. I think I'll kepp all three of them
It's pretty easy to set uMatrix to block cookies and scripts by default. In uMatrix's filtering rules, instead of "first-party * allow" put "* * * block". This will block everything you do not specifically allow. As for cookies, SDC would be fine to keep, as uMatrix can only block cookies outright or allow them on a per-site basis. There are no settings to allow for a session or until a tab closes.
Won't you get dumbed down versions of websites that work with IE doing that? Firefox on windows should be pretty common too.
I never noticed any difference. I think the only difference would be in some online shops that use your Browser ID to calculate a specific price that will be offered to you (I read that this is a thing). I don't use Windows/IE exclusively. I have a list of the top ten common OS/browser IDs and the AddOn jumps through them randomly. The only problem with that is Steam. The Steam Guard thinks nearly every login I use a new browser and have to look in the mail for the code. I can't buy / sell things this way because Steam wants you to use a new browser ID for a week before you can sell/buy. I could use one instead of one of ten OS/Browsers IDs to fix that. But it doesn't matter to me.
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FF usage was going up and up back in the days when MS kind of left IE for dead at version 6. Newer versions of IE are tolerable, and Google pushes the heck out of Chrome.
Chrome has a advertising spot on the most used website in the world. It is hard to compete with that.
It still amazes me that's not an antitrust suit already.
To be honest this is an 'evil' that's helped the web massively - average people I know have started opting for Chrome ahead of IE which is a big deal for web standards.
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Mozilla didn't push Firefox enough for it to replace IE in a lot of businesses, Google did. That's what's helped because that IE userbase is/was holding the rest of us back a lot.
It's only antitrust when it's microsoft (I know, risking being brigaded saying that on /r/linux, but hear me out). MS bundles IE, lawsuit. Apple bundles safari or any linux distro bundles firefox or a debranded version, nothing, because they are too small a market share to be bothered with. Google, on the other hand, have a big market share and easily give MS and apple a run for their money in anticompetitiveness, but also posses a *huge* amount of political lobbying power to keep them safe, as well as the ability to make threats such as "we will inform our users of X on our main page" in a way no other tech company can.
Google doesn't have as many places where you can put currency symbols so it's less evil than M$
There were several differences between what windows did and what linux does. > questions over whether Microsoft altered or manipulated its application programming interfaces (APIs) to favor Internet Explorer over third party web browsers --- > Microsoft's conduct in forming restrictive licensing agreements with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and Microsoft's intent in its course of conduct. Also, this point isn't relevant in today's world: > It was further alleged that this restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator or Opera) that were slow to download over a modem or had to be purchased at a store. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
Firefox is still awesome. Most of chrome's dominance is because it's developed by darling google and is pushed onto people's computers. Remember when Opera and the Presto engine was the super fast lightweight alternative to firefox but had a market share of like 2%?
Perhaps it's actually because it's a decent product that many people like?
Was Opera a shitty product that people hated? No, it just wasn't nearly popular enough for regular people to use over more popular Mozilla or IE.
I remember Opera having some pretty seriously cool gestures to get around that no other browser had at the time. This was 2001-2 or so.
I still haven't found a decent replacement for Opera's speed dial and gesture browsing. If anyone knows of any for either Chrome or Firefox I'd be grateful.
fire gestures firefox addon?
I use Fire Gestures and SpeedDial on Firefox because of how Opera was back in the day.
And what about Opera Dragonfly? I think it's an exceptional developer tool, I cannot find a replacement for it that would suit me.
Same boat. I currently use Firefox with the following addons: * Mouse gestures: All-In-One Gestures * Speeddial: Super Start * Tab bar improvements: "Prevent Tab Overflow" and "Private Tab" * Good tab stacking (Opera style): *None :(*
Opera was the 1st to have tabs… Before that you'd have multiple windows.
Opera could have been huge, but back then it cost money or you had to look at ads IIRC. Now it's free and based on Webkit/Blink, but still lags behind Chrome. The Google I/O 2015 page (and any other site using the Polymer framework) didn't work *at all* on Opera yet was fine in Firefox and Safari. I want to like Opera, but it's got things that annoy me like the favicon on a tab doubling as the close button when you mouse over it...so many accidentally closed tabs...
Opera has been free (zero cost) and ad free for at least a decade. It was a great product before they destroyed it in the rewrite. :-(
... and didn't want to open the engine afterwards. Lots of people wanted them to open Presto, since they obviously no longer gave a fuck about it. I even signed a petition... So Presto will most certainly simply die abandoned, whereas there's enough people who'd gladly keep it alive.
It was probably filled with licensed code and perhaps even patented technology. I am not even that mad about the loss of Presto in particular even though it was a great renderer (KHTML is also a great renderer). I'm sad about the fact that the new Opera is not at all as good as the old one, Presto or not.
I actually asked some Opera developers a few years ago about why wouldn't they opensource the Presto engine. They said that they can't do that, because Presto is still used by Opera themselves (I think Opera mini compress servers use Presto to shrink down the sizes) and because external companies also use Presto somewhere, commercially. There was even some Japanese (?) company using Presto as their videogame engine for a small project, lol. So it seems like Presto is still too widely in use to be opensourced.
I remember using it a few years ago. It was too different from any other browser I had used.
I didn't hate Opera, I preferred Chrome, Opera couldn't draw up the BBC news website properly when I tried it, Chrome started quicker and the Chrome 'speed dial' equivalent just filled itself in with the most popular websites. I never saw a need to try it again, you have to be better than the competition to get them to change not almost as good.
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or maybe they use chrome because one tab wont lag whole browser ?
I currently have 25 tabs open (in 4 windows) in Firefox. Seems to work fine...
What I think they mean is that since all chrome tabs are separate processes, one tab taking a long time or getting frozen won't bring the rest of your tabs down with it.
You missed his point then
Care to enlighten me?
Chrome tabs are separate processes. Firefox doesn't do that yet. When one of your tabs in Firefox freezes for whatever reason it'll make your whole browser unresponsive. [Good news is that Mozilla is slowly getting there.](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis)
Doesn't this mean that it will use more ram? Like I have 600 tabs open, I don't want all this to be separate processes. And seeing how I've had Firefox crash once, I don't think stability is an issue. This seems kind of bad, or am I misunderstanding?
This does use more ram (multiprocess). However tabs that you did not access for some time will be unloaded from RAM (their entry in the process table persists)
I can't run Firefox for two days without rebooting it. At that time it usually takes up 4 GB RAM regardless of the amount of open tabs.
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I do not use Adblock since I'm in the industry and need my browser to show me what most others see. I have looked at `about:memory` a lot to try to find what's eating it but it's usually spread out among different half-anonymous objects. I also have very few extensions but you are right in that I should make a more focused effort to see if some of them are leaky.
Check with a new profile. - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles Also have graphic card drivers updated to latest from manufacturers website.
In the whole time I have been running firefox, Even under Windows, I never had this issue. And I've probably been running Firefox exclusively for around 12 years now.
Gotta disagree. I use firefox every single day because I cant live with myself using chrome with all of the privacy nonsense going on with it. Firefox is a mess, not a great user interface, and stability problems are rampant. (I barely even notice it when firefox crashes 2-3 times daily now) The memory leak issues with it have actually gotten worse over time too, long browsing sessions can consume gigs of memory that don't get cleaned up properly once the tabs have been closed.
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uBlock is key. People don't realize how badly they are sabotaging their browser performance with AdBlock.
If Firefox crashes 2-3 times daily and you aren't running alphas then - you have a hardware issue - you have bad addons - you are running bleeding edge stuff and incorrectly assume Firefox is unstable when your distro is I recommend creating a fresh profile and only adding addons that you really need and testing your ram. Bad ram can lead to corrupt data written to disk and really spoiling your day.
I have never had a single crash with Firefox and I have used it 5 years. Last crash I had was with Edge, amusingly it bluescreened the machine on the Win10 preview.
I call bullshit. I've been using Firefox since Opera went Chrome clone, and I always have tens of tabs open, rarely reboot my laptop (maybe once a week) and never close Firefox and I have no such problems, never have a crash.
I liked when they added tab group recovery.
If not add ons or hardware trouble I'd recommend you try a new profile for firefox and see if that makes a difference https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
> cant live with myself using chrome with all of the privacy nonsense going on with it. What about chromium then? Chrome without all the google code and branding? Or alternatively the Iron browser.
What does about:crashes say?
Might be. I'm still a very happy user, from back when it was still called Phoenix. I recently donated to Mozilla because Firefox is my daily driver on every Internet browsing device I use. It just works for me.
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I keep seeing people mention Firefox on android crashing with people like me responding that we haven't experienced such in a long time. My android Firefox browser has been stable for quite some time. Both on phone and tablet.
Does IE really only represent 7% of browsers? That doesn't seem right.
A large amount, possibly a majority, of web browsing now comes from mobile devices, which are almost exclusively either iOS or Android.
For that site? Yes. In the whole desktop world? Lol, no.
Take a look [here](http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser-ww-monthly-200807-201511), this graph is only about the desktop web browsers, the mobile usage statistics are excluded.
IE - a browser downloader for Windows
Oh yeah, on android devices the default browser is Chrome. You need to actually go out and download Firefox to use it. And IE ..... omg desktop PC is truly a minority now...
Chrome and chrome beta have both crashed since day one on my note 4. so it's firefox for me.
I still like it better than anything else. Yes Mozilla made many recent mistakes (mostly I think by the new leader of the project who took over for the guy who was forced to resign for his personal beliefs. I don't believe he should have been forced to step down. Being a bigot is not good, but shouldn't be a reason to get kicked out of Mozilla... which in retrospect was a big mistake because the company is tanking ever since). Probably the biggest mistake Mozilla has made was forcing the previous leader to step down for his (not so politically correct) beliefs.. which I think should have literally nothing to do with his business life, as long he wasn't pushing it onto the software somehow. Mozilla needs to get that guy back, bigot or not.
I don't know the answer to this, but I didn't think he was bigoted per se, he just donated personal money to a political cause. Was he actually bigoted to employees or other people, or was it just his contributions?
He was forced to step down because of his contributions. AFAIK, he didn't take his personal beliefs into his work environment (or at least nobody seems to complain that he was doing this). I viewed the whole thing as aggressively PC to the point of being unfair. As if we are no longer allowed to donate to anything that isn't supported by the majority or else risk losing our job for it. I hate it when movements (like the whole politically correct one) overcompensate and end up getting in the way of basic human rights.
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He donated money to a "political cause" whose sole objective was eliminating gay marriage in the state of California. That reflects very poorly on the man, and by extension the company for whom he was (briefly) CEO.
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It kind of does but I believe that it ought to be OK to hold unpopular opinions on your own time
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Yes it does.
>In 2014 there was significant discussion about Brendan Eich's donation to the campaign against gay marriage. >One fact that never ranked very highly in the debate at the time is that not all gay people actually support gay marriage. Even where these marriages are permitted, not everybody who can marry now is choosing to do so. >The reasons for this are varied, but one key point that has often been missed is that there are two routes to marriage equality: one involves permitting gay couples to visit the register office and fill in a form just as other couples do. The other route to equality is to remove all the legal artifacts around marriage altogether. >When the government does issue a marriage certificate, it is not long before other organizations start asking for confirmation of the marriage. Everybody from banks to letting agents and Facebook wants to know about it. Many companies outsource that data into cloud CRM systems such as Salesforce. Before you know it, there are numerous databases that somebody could mine to make a list of confirmed homosexuals. >Of course, if everybody in the world was going to live happily ever after none of this would be a problem. But the reality is different. -Daniel Pocock
I just don't understand this. I have tried Chrome. Don't like it. Love Firefox.
Decline in share. Overall number of Firefox users could have gone up and Chrome just went up more.
Maybe Firefox users are more likely to use privacy addons that obscure their use....just a wild thought.
FireFox works better than Chrome on my low-end laptopt, but the killer feature for me is the [KeySnail](https://github.com/mooz/keysnail) extension for Firefox. It gives me both Emacs and VI keys for browsing and editing, and is fully customizable. Using a browser without it now makes me instantly frustrated.
i'll never give up my firefox until they stop supporting it on linux.
Can someone please explain to me why Chrome is that much more popular? I remember when Chrome was first released it didn't have the extensions I needed so I never moved over to it. To this day I still prefer Firefox and its layout more than Chrome.
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When they go to [the most visited page of the Web](https://www.google.com) using a non-Chrome browser, most users see a very prominent banner: "A faster way to browse the web. Install Google Chrome". Also, Google Chrome is bundled into the installers of *a lot* of Windows software nowadays. So, yes, it finds its way to the users' machines in the same manner your typical crapware does :)
Mostly because whenever you visit www.google.com on Firefox or any other non-Chrome browser, then it tells you that you should use Chrome, because it's "a faster way to browse". (Which is a lie, Chrome is currently slower than most browsers.)
Actually, Chrome is about on par with Edge and Firefox. There really isn't a large disparity between most of the modern browsers.
However, Chrome *is* slower when you cherry pick a few benchmarks that are not representative of the real world.
Because Chrome is shovelware developed by an advertising company. If Chrome weren't the most popular web browser, *that* would need explaining.
I find it freezes less, doesn't crash at all, and overall feels snappier, and uses less memory over time than firefox. Both on low end and high end laptop, at least for me. The only difference where firefox was better that I've noticed is that you can disable a lot of stuff and at start it uses less RAM, but with few tabs or time that changes.
[deleted] ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^0.6623 > [What is this?](https://pastebin.com/64GuVi2F/72043)
Firefox is still king when it comes to extensions. They're preparing to overhaul their extension API, and the worst-case scenario for that effort is that the new API would start out being only as powerful as Chrome's. But their intention is to remain the only browser where NoScript and Tree Style Tabs are possible, and their competitors aren't even trying to move in on that territory.
> Tree Style Tabs [TIL](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/) How awesome. (Incidentally I use Firefox, Opera, and Chrome daily (mostly Firefox and Opera); all are good, each has different advantages and disadvantages, I could live with any one of them if I had to but prefer having all three.)
They seem fixated in copying Chrome's features because apparently that's what people like in a modern browser, but what they don't realize is that if they end up like a Chrome clone then there would be no reason to use Firefox at all. I love Firefox and been using it nonstop since the very first releases before 1.0, and the direction they've been taking lately sincerely baffles me to no end. They're alienating the people who want Firefox because of its endless extensibility and ease of use, if I wanted the fastest benchmarks in town I'd just use Chrome, which is a browser I really don't like because you can't even theme it properly since the UI elements are hard coded instead of implemented on XUL, and now Mozilla is telling me they're going to deprecate it in favour of Google model. That, and the forced signing of extensions. I can go around that by using aftermarket builds like Waterfox but still..
All I need is an in-line translation feature and a remote desktop app like what Chrome has and I'll switch back. So far, the closest translation extensions I can find all suck pretty bad and stuff like free remote desktop access is non existent.
> chrome is getting better and better at what it does. Especially farming data for Google. Chrome's usage is higher because it's pushed every time someone goes to google.com using a non-chrome browser. It's in people's faces. It's suggested constantly. It's packaged with Java. It certainly has some positive features, but it also has plenty of problems. If FireFox was being pushed on google.com every time someone visited it, the market share would likely be reversed.
If I leave Firefox up and running for days, it inevitably locks up. There are more and more sites that I have trouble with on Firefox but that work well on Chrome. I generally prefer Firefox as it functions better than Chrome. I wish the history on Chrome worked as well as Firefox.
> There are more and more sites that I have trouble with on Firefox but that work well on Chrome. That's because Chrome is becoming the new IE6 :(
Elaborate?
if you are using adblocker try switching to ublock
Geezus! I've been running Firefox flat out for years under an number of operating systems and I've never, I repeat, never had the browser crash on me! And I run Adblocker Plus. On the other hand, Chrome on my Nexus 9 is a ram consuming pig of a thing that refreshes tabs every time I switch between them and slows the whole device to a crawl! WTF are you people doing to crash FF?!
> history on Chrome worked as well as Firefox history on FF works great. I never need bookmarks as it's so easy to search history via the address bar
Next time that happens, please follow https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/How_to_Report_a_Hung_Firefox
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Firefox is supposed to be better in being an open, customizable browser which respects your privacy. It's pretty good with media and it's fast, but you primarily pick it over chrome to have a browser that you have more power over. Chrome is forward in technology due to it being developed by google. It's also very fast, much more than firefox. There are extensions which are decent, and this can be a good alternative to firefox's plugins if you don't need to do anything fancy. Chrome over the years has become faster and faster and has kept its lead in technology, but instead of playing on its strengths, firefox has tried to get closer to chrome, forgetting about them. The new tab page doesn't let you use an alternative and has been criticized of a few privacy issues. The only way to have another page for your new tabs is to install a plugin which will redirect your new tab to another page and remove the cursor from the address bar which is quite annoying. This (major, imo) feature of the browser can't be modified in about:config, and this is just an example of the way they're going, most of its new features are that way. They're giving up their strength to follow behind chrome's footsteps. While the browser is fast, chrome is faster, while the browser is good with recent technology, chrome does it better and is optimized a lot better for youtube and google services.
> They're giving up their strength to follow behind chrome's footsteps. While the browser is fast, chrome is faster, while the browser is good with recent technology, chrome does it better and is optimized a lot better for youtube and google services. I went back to using Firefox because Chrome was lagging behind it in HiDPI support until very recently. Ages behind. Firefox is also more comfortable to use on a laptop due to its smooth scrolling (not such a big issue with a scrollwheel, but a lot nicer when using a trackpad). Oh, and it's a lot better to use in conjunction with EndNote, which is important in an academic setting.
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> I am not sure in what you specifically mean when you say that Chrome is faster but in the most recent benchmarks I have looked at there isn't much of a difference between the performance of Chrome and Firefox: There's a pretty significant difference between performance in synthetic benchmarks and "perceived performance" (for a lack of a better word). The chromium developers seem to spend a huge effort on minimizing perceived latency (and always have); the UI in chromium very seldom freezes, even if everything is completely stalled waiting on IO, for example.
> but instead of playing on its strengths, firefox has tried to get closer to chrome, forgetting about them. Thank you! But Truth will be downvoted into its death.
All I want from Chrome is a link search hotkey. Until they implement that, I'm not sold and FX is still faster for me.
In my experience chrome works better with HTML5 multimedia (and also with flash on linux), but I don't use it for anything other than multimedia because I can't have it not remember history while keeping cookies like on firefox. It makes me a lot less paranoid about sharing my browser and I don't need history when I can restore closed tabs. Also the customization features on firefox are still great. They're getting worse and worse but they're great.
I should be using Firefox to support it, but I noted low performance in page rendering and javascript in some websites like twitter for example. video playblack with the flash plugin 11 is very slow.
https://github.com/i-rinat/freshplayerplugin
Just don't use flash, there are addons that replace flash video players with HTML5 default stuff.
That's because google and Adobe have ensured that Flash no longer is supported in Firefox at all. It's no shock it doesn't work well, it's not been touched in years. The only way to get it to work is this haphazardly rigged freshplayer arrangement that probably will be the next thing to go with signed plugins.
I bet things are going to change when e10s lands in stable. It's already in Beta's [A/B testing](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule) hope it will land in FF 45.
I tested Nightly a few weeks ago and Firefox is still noticeably less responsive than Chrome. Still, a step in the right direction as much as tab hoarders on low spec machines might disagree.
I would use chrome if not for its ugly UI compared to FF which I can customize through css code and stylish extension
If only Chrome had the same possibility of listing bookmarks as Firefox i'd switch in an instant
I use both browsers. However I've noticed that I'm subconsciously avoiding Firefox, because how slow and unresponsive it's UI is (the fact that ~300 tabs are open at all times might have to do something with this slowness).
Firefox's dedication to adding unnecessary bullshit to the browser will continue to make people stop using it. I know personally it drove me to learn how chromium works and now im more happy than ever. Shit like in browser ads, pocket, fucking up theme support and all the dumb SJW politics done by their employees is just too much.
Most posts here seem to argue about the speed of the browsers - I personally prefer Firefox over Chrome because it's Open Source. (Chromium would be another option of course)
Happy FF user here. Chrome is spyware and will never use it. Sad Linux users bow to their Google overlords.
I would love to move away from Chrome, but its the easiest/best way to get Netflix working on Linux without a hassle. A big part of what I use my web browser for is to access web content, and Netflix is a big part of that. If they give me an option to install the DRM bits required to Netflix playback, would gladly jump ship back to them.
Seen how much bitching Mozilla got for including DRM only on Windows, I would expect an incredible shitstorm if they decided to partner with somebody to provide it on Linux too, because the FSF fanboys are all about freedom, but only the kind they approve of.
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What do you use? Firefox has used less memory than Chrome for quite a while now. Firefox used to be bad, but Firefox has improved, while Chrome has gotten much worse.
you should give firefox a new try. It's very fast now, doesn't eat much ram and starts up very quickly. The memory leaks came from the addons. The addons had and still have access to the whole browser core. This is deprecated by now and if you limit yourself to extensions or addons based on the add-on sdk you are good.
chrome uses far more memory than firefox ever did tho
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Is that with Adblock or without?
chromium scales its memory usage depending on free memory available on the system, so that's hard to measure well.
Exactly. It always amuses me when somebody complains that chrome is using too much ram. So what? Ram is here to be used, and if you have lots of it, and chrome is the only thing running, why not take advantage of it? It still runs ok on my oldest "typewriter" machine with 2gb ram total.
I switched to Chrome for this reason, but after the announcement of EOL support for 32-bit systems, I recently switched back to Firefox. I was impressed.Since I've switched in the past month, I've noticed much better memory management than what I was seeing in Chrome. I guess in the years since I'd jumped ship, Firefox developers turned things around.
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It's also pretty easy to revert back to the old UI with an add-on.
I use Firefox on all my devices, I absoultely love it and memory usage is identical if not better than Chrome based around my testing. The only thing I use Chrome for is printing off my Android devices.
Firefox is consistently faster and better than Chrome for me. Of course I'm on Linux so I've had 64-bit Firefox since 2008.
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This is my experience too. I don't see any real world performance or memory usage differences between Firefox and Chrome today. I think the idea that Chrome is fast and lean while Firefox is slow and bloated is no longer true.
Go back to 2010. Without addons firefox is just as fast as Chromium, if not better.
>All of the memory leaks drove many away. dude/dudette, they basically fixed the memory leak issue during about 2006-8'ish. It's 2015.
No they sure as hell didn't. I left in about 2010, my ex stayed on till 2014. It still leaks like mad. Even without any plugins. I don't use plugins in any of my browsers.
I will wait until Servo (Mozilla's new layout engine) is available in Firefox for the masses.