this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Unpopular opinion, brace yourselves.
As a web developer, I would love to root for Firefox but they've made some really odd decisions regarding the implementation of web standards (which are published on the Mozilla MDN site, oddly enough), async/defer script loading order for example. Firefox is also often multiple years late with implementing new tech, being surpassed by Chromium and even Safari most of the time.
While I love the non-profit style of Mozilla and think competition in the browser space is a good thing. The reality is just that their browser lags behind the other two. Firefox is a large part of the reason polyfills are still used in this world of evergreen browsers, and requires multi-browser testing/tweaking even though I exclusively follow the standards written on the MDN website...
Yeah it lags behind because Chromium is developed by Google, which is the 4th biggest company in the world. And Safari is obviously from Apple which is the largest company in the world. I don't think the fact that Mozilla lags behind should upset anyone. The fact they can compete at all is impressive I think.
Or maybe, just maybe, it lags behind because Mozilla decided that their priorities are ruining the UI and to remove features.
Yeah, keep downvoting. 50M (and counting) users lost since 2019 are surely a proof of how well Mozilla roadmap for FF is working.
Please, feel free to engange to show me that I'm wrong.
Here's a POV, and it's important to note that in general most users don't care (or even know) what their default browser is. At this point in time there are five "major" operating systems with the following global market shares [0]:
If we can agree that most users (not being technically literate, interested or inclined) will not change their default browser, we can easily see why Firefox is losing market share. Basically 91% of the world is - by default - using a non Firefox browser. If their current one is working well enough, why should they care to change it? Can we blame Mozilla for losing some users? Yeah, maybe a few. But that's not really the whole picture.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share
Edit: I should point out there's a 6.6% group marked as "unknown" in the OS market share data - I left this out to keep things simple.
The statcounter web page uses data coming from trackers blocked by Firefox ETP, radar.cloudflare.com is more accurate.
No, I don't agree. The loss was net, I mean 50M users migrated, the same users that before installed FF over the default browser. Something happened there.
50M (and counting) was 20% of their user base, not "some users". There's nothing wrong in admitting that Mozilla erratic development model has alienated at least some of "us" (by the way, I've been a FF user for almost 20 years before leaving). And, personally, I'll make whatever I can to make more users leave FF. Fuck Mozilla, really. They're just a cash-grab machine right now.
Firefox is behind in some areas, but ahead in others - eg. privacy/tracking.
exactly, and that's what matters more than anything else. modern websites are insanely bloated anyway; i care more about blocking the 50MB of ads, trackers, third-party cookies and other garbage every site shoves down your throat, than shiny new stuff that arguably is often part of that overengineered bloat.
look at this. it's fucking beautiful. as far as i'm concerned, websites like these put the modern web and web developers to shame.
So not the things that benefit website owners
Yeah. Instead, the things that benefit users
I see it the other way around. I have a feeling that FireFox follows the specs while Chromium kind of has its own plan and directly introduce new behavior without much care for standards.
Since Chromium based browsers have the majority of the market share, you have the feeling that FireFox is awkward/lag behind. Now look back at Opera when they still have their own engine and you will see that while they try to introduce new behaviors just like Chromium, their limited market share means that people don't feel the need to make use of these "innovations".
I miss old opera.
You want an even more unpopular opinion? I use WebKit based browsers for web developing because of the clarity of the devtools, performance and Interop.
You can go take a look at the web inspector documentation on WebKit.org to check the features.
So one and only thing I miss from Chrome is Lighthouse.