11: It's the only browser on the market that is not either apple webkit or google chrome based. And it's in our best interest to keep said market healthy, with as many competing actors as possible.
At some point there were more than 1 relevant browsers using Gecko, though. Somebody at Mozilla decided to gloriously triumph over allies by killing XULRunner and not offering a replacement.
Not sure if WebKit is such a bad choice in that context.
The Tor browser is still Firefox based. Not a large niche, but being THE preferred way to browse with Tor makes it on its own imho
Tor browser is just Firefox with a different default configuration and add-ons though.
It really is telling that even Microsoft don't find it viable to maintain a browser engine.
The "standards" are an absolute fucking nonsense, and boil down to "just do what Chrome does because nobody can stop them".
To be fair to Chrome.
Microsoft had the vast majority with Trident. Mozilla/Firefox slowly gained market share with Gecko. Chrome/Webkit* then took market share from both.
It's not like Chrome just appeared one day and demanded everyone use them, they gained market share by being a good browser.
*(Chrome now uses a fork of Webkit called Blink.)
That being said I do think Firefox provides the best browser experience, and Chrome users should look into switching.
Which is a long way of saying Microsoft fucked up bad. Real bad.
I feel like I'm going crazy since we kept preaching for years that this is the end goal and that this is what will happen with Google's anti-competitive practices. Just get shit on in the comment threads until recently.
It's not even a feel good I told you so because this just sucks.
Posting this on Lemmy is preaching to the choir.
have any instance admins ever shared the browser stats?
Well, me :) right here : https://analytics.kawa.zip/reddeet.com
14% ain't bad i suppose. and some FF users may be masking, and your sample size of 12 may not be very representative
There’s like… no downside: all upside.
Edit: I exaggerated, of course. Below this are some downsides that individuals have experienced. But personally, my experience using Firefox on desktop for Mac has been all upside. If everybody who can just tries it out, you might be surprised at how friction-free the change is.
Not strictly true. Firefox gets inferior support from cloud services, like Microsoft. Newer versions of their Web apps are not available on Firefox.
But there should be no downside. It's all artificial.
The big services purposely degrade their sites when users connect with Firefox. It's well documented.
Unfortunately nothing is being done about it so far.
One thing I miss in Firefox is tab grouping. Yes there are 3rd party extensions that do that. But Chromium based browsers support that natively.
Just need one reason: Google.
I feel like anyone on Lemmy who isnt yet using Firefox is the kind of person who isnt going switch now because an article told them they should
edit: it seems I had a stroke (not seriously) while writing this message, and have since edited it so it makes sense
I wish the password autofill feature was more robust for Firefox on Android. Using it as my default password provider but it regularly does not pick up on password fields.
Dunno if this helps you at all, but I've been using BitWarden to manage my passwords since I made the switch from Chrome to Firefox (both on PC and my Android phone). It doesn't fill passwords automatically in either case, but it's not much extra work to invoke BitWarden to fill those fields as-needed on either device, and it works very consistently. It's also (I'm told) much more secure. Just thought I'd share that here!
TAB GROUPS, FIREFOX, BRING BACK TAB GROUPS.
And no, extensions aren't helping, their UX is so much worse.
That's just a make or break feature for me.
10 reasons:
Does anyone have any experience with Firefox on Android?
It runs great now. Most importantly, it supports extensions like ublock.
Firefox on Android is fine, except they insist upon disabling about:config on the main branch of the browser for some damn stupid reason. You have to use a nightly or beta build to be trusted with your own config that much.
Personally, I ended up switching to the Fennec fork over this.
Yeah, it's alright.
You can install an ad blocker in it, so it's automatically better than Chrome.
With that and a few cookie popup removers, it's almost like the web is usable again.
Anybody else having flaky behavior with youtube videos in Firefox lately? Like, only audio resuming but video freezing after rewinding? I'm wondering if this is intentional on the part of Google.
Given Google and YouTube's history of intentionally and maliciously disrupting other browsers that aren't chrome, it'll be a safe bet that it's intentional.
@L4s
Fully agree, but @howtogeek.com please enhance your privacy with reducing your dependency to third party scripts.
Firefox Multiaccount Containers, the thing that can't be beat by even the best chrome derivatives
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
