Is Firefox in danger?

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From Zdnet:  After looking at the numbers, I really don’t know how long Mozilla can make it. Oh, the revenue stream is there for now, but with fewer a
[See the full post at: Is Firefox in danger?]

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Propje, SueW, Pim, lmacri, scoobydoo, Nathan Parker

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I love my Firefox. Would miss it if it weren’t around.

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Bill C., Ascaris, RTEsysadmin, AlphaCharlie, Cijan, Charlie, Pim, GoneToPlaid, scoobydoo, Microfix, Fred, Nathan Parker, NaNoNyMouse

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Me too!! I don’t know what else I would use : (

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IMHO, with all due respect, I think Mozilla are killing the product themselves. Each new release make considerable changes to the UI and to add on support. I’m still using Thunderbird 52.9.1 because they broke all add ons I use, the UI looks terrible,and it’s no faster. With Firefox it’s the same story.

They continually make things more complex. I used to be able to set a preference to specify the location of my cache folder. Easy. Then they moved that to a group policy, and even that doesn’t work. You have to write a bunch of script, withing the group policy to make that work.

I’m not a fan of flat, square and bland, which someone once called “modern”. They must have been born after 2000 because things just look like Windows 95 days now.

Typical developer attitude is “load the system up with as many processes as we can”. All products have done this was. Sure it only used 8 processes and 500MB ram, but if you have 50 products all doing the same thing…. well, it’s no wonder a state of the art PC runs no faster than a 10 year old PC.

 

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FakeNinja, kruess, Bill C., wavy, Kranium, Ascaris, KB6OJS, gkarasik

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Agree with Mozilla killing their products themselves.

Their Fenix update for mobile Firefox a few months ago was shooting themselves in the face. It removed about:config and there were no equivalents for customization.

A Firefox that can’t be customized isn’t Firefox. Mozilla keeps making changes that makes their products more like their competitors, but they don’t seem to realize that just reduces their own user base. If people wanted Chrome, they’d be using Chrome.

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AmbularD, kruess, Bill C., wavy, Ascaris, Cybertooth

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anonymous wrote:

If people wanted Chrome, they’d be using Chrome.

QFT!

This is really so simple. If your idea of a perfect browser is Chrome, you’re in luck– there’s a perfect browser for you! Going after the people who are least likely to leave the Chrome platform (because they like it) is foolish. There are plenty of people who don’t want to use Chrome, and many of us have been on Firefox for some time, but Mozilla has forsaken us in order to go for those people least likely to switch.

The strategy appears to be to make Firefox so much like Chrome that it makes the barrier to migration minimal, but they haven’t really addressed why someone who thinks Chrome is perfect would want to leave it behind, even if the transition was easy. They would never know the transition is easy if they never tried to leave Chrome in the first place! Even if Firefox was indistinguishable in every way from Chrome other than the branding, it would still be seen as the knock-off (and rightly so), and people will prefer the original, all else being equal.

There are lots of Chrome doppelgangers that use the same Chromium base out there that don’t have the spying bits in them, but most people use the “real deal” Chrome anyway. If you’re going to take the industry standard giant on in their own turf, your product has to be substantially better in some way. “Just as good as” isn’t good enough, and people have already shown that they don’t care about privacy, so they can’t hang their hopes on that being the lure.

It seems so obvious, yet they pursue the same failing strategy, year after year…

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AmbularD, AlexEiffel, wavy

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A 3.5% market share does not bode well for FireFox’s future.  It is my browser of choice, but as with WordPerfect vs. Word, I find myself slowly using Chromium [not Chrome!] more and more, and that’s not because I prefer Word.  If FF were to die, I’d mourn it but life would go on, Chrome’d.  If my only choices were Chrome or Credge, I would be more concerned.  But Chromium https://chromium.woolyss.com/ can be as google-free as you wish, or not.  Your choice.  I like choice.

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Propje

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What is “Chromium” vs. Chrome? I don’t want to give up my FF either, but I see the handwriting on the wall.

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Chromium is the open source project that Chrome is based on.  I think most fixes released by Google for Chrome are pushed back into Chromium.  Chromium is the basis for projects like Brave, Opera, and Microsoft Edge.

Firefox has a few of its own flavours too like Pale Moon and Waterfox.

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Propje

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It’s unfortunate that firefox suffers from more performance problems and bugs than Chrom(e,ium). However, I still use it because of the superior privacy features and add-ons.

Yes, even after web-extensions firefox is still superior. Look at ublock origin which only has its full feature set available on Firefox, e.g. CNAME uncloaking.

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Propje, RTEsysadmin

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Marketing-driven, gee-whiz changes that produce no apparent improvement in use are merely annoying, but beyond that, FFox crashes or often just plain won’t open. I frequently have to shut it down and restart it, so despite that fact that I want to support it and keep using it, I find myself more and more opting for Brave just to get my work done. If I’m not alone, then FFox is in a classic death spiral: fewer users, lower revenue, fewer developers, less quality control, more marketing-driven changes, less quality control, fewer users….

GaryK

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“FFox crashes or often just plain won’t open”

For me, Firefox never crashes, or fails to open. User interface changes have been a repeated annoyance for years, extension changes more or less worked around with some loss of function. Ignoring what actual users want and need seems to be a major problem at Mozilla. Performance and reliability of FireFox seem fine though.

I also use Vivaldi though, so loss of FireFox now wouldn’t affect me badly.

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Propje, AmbularD, Charlie, Pim

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I hope Firefox continues around purely for privacy reasons, as it’s good to see other privacy-focused browsers on the market.

With that said, at least there’s Brave which is still privacy-focused and based on Chromium.

Plus Apple devices have Safari.

Nathan Parker

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Microfix, AlexEiffel, Cijan, Fred, Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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The Mozilla Foundation seems to go through this “Urgh, Help, I’m dying,” phase every some years, and then miraculously  bounces back after spending an unspecified time in the IT Washing Machine. I really do hope they can get their act together  (again), as it’s the best privacy-oriented browser out there.

They just released an Android version that had every AOS user howling like crazy, yours truly included. The problem (AOS, Windows users, or what have you) seems to boil down to a tone-deaf outfit that can’t hear it’s users, or doesn’t want to. I mean, when you’re searching the knowledge base, and  click on “not helpful”, you get “Sorry about that,” a response that reeks of corporate arrogance and indifference.

Maybe if they sacked their marketing department, and actually LISTENED to their users, things would improve. Remember: it’s about what your USERS want, not what your marketing department _wants_ them to want. :/

I sure hope they manage to pull the nose up. Otherwise, it’s just more fodder for Douglas Adam’s “B” Ark.*

(*”I mean maybe Firefox should be nasally fitted!”)

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Propje, RTEsysadmin

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[byteme]

I’m no Google fan, and besides that, in general, when there’s a Big Fish and an Underdog in any product category, and all other things are more or less equal, I’ll tend to go with the Underdog. So I wish I could be a Firefox fan, and I used them for quite a while. But Underdogs are supposed to be, if anything, more user-oriented than Big Fish, and I’d say Firefox has failed miserably on that score.

To take just the biggest deal-killer issue for me, my Home page is a portal page of my own creation, and has been for umpteen years. Chrome not only lets me set it as my Home page, but also allows me to use it as my New Tab page (although it requires an extension).

Not Firefox. For several years now, Firefox has refused to allow users to use local files as their New Tab page, even though local files are permitted as the Home page.

Make any sense? Not to me. And yeah, it’s just *one more click* to switch a non-local New Tab page to the Home page, but it’s *one more click* approximately a zillion times a day (on average). And it’s truly odious conduct on Firefox’s part, IMHO. They’re certainly not *protecting* anybody by preventing their New Tab page from being the exact same page that opens when they start Firefox, or click the Home button.

That’s the single biggest reason I’m a Chrome user now, though I dislike the fact that their market share is as large as it is.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by byteme.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by byteme.

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Cybertooth

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Byteme:

Could you please post the name of the Chrome extension that allows a new tab page to open as the “Home page”?

Or a link to it at the Chrome Store where extensions are?

Thanks

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The one I’ve used for a long time (there may be others) is called New Tab Redirect, and here’s the Chrome web store link:

New Tab Redirect

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SkipH

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Got it installed, seems to be going to the web site I want a new tab to open to.

Thanks, didn’t know new tab re-direct extension existed.

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byteme wrote:

To take just the biggest deal-killer issue for me, my Home page is a portal page of my own creation, and has been for umpteen years. Chrome not only lets me set it as my Home page, but also allows me to use it as my New Tab page (although it requires an extension).

Firefox has an addon to do what you propose too:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-override/

I’ve been using it since I moved from Waterfox Classic to Firefox. I also have a local home page, in my case around 20 years old, that I have continuously modified as needed. I just took a look at it, and it still contains this (I hope it comes through as a literal!):

‘<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>’

I believe HTML 4.0 Transitional was superseded in 1999 by 4.01, though it may have taken a while for the HTML editor I initially used to reflect that.

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That’s the same extension I linked to for Chrome. It’s true that Firefox will allow you to go through the motions of installing that extension and having it set a local HTM file as your New Tab page, but if you want that page to link to any other local pages (or to include images or CSS stylesheets or any other local content), you’re out of luck. So it’s useless for my purposes. Chrome requires the extension, but doesn’t cripple it the way Firefox does.

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Ascaris

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This format works just fine in Pale Moon a FF port from pre 50 something FF
file:///H:/PaleMoonProfile%20-%20Copy/bookmarks.html

🍻

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Using Waterfox classic, as I jumped off the Firefox bus before Quantum.  It does seem now that FF is becoming an also-ran.  Then again I was an OS/2 Warp believer until it finally just got too hard.

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AmbularD

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I think they completely screwed up the mobile version release. The main reason to use Firefox over other browsers was its extensions, and they got rid of most of those, to the point that it’s just this one small page of them available. Webrender still has bugs. They act like they intentionally disabled about:config, but the fact that it takes you to a page that doesn’t exist suggests otherwise. The whole thing felt rushed.

And I think it was. It came out not soon after the layoffs. Before that, it was just a special other app. It was also rather odd how they quickly were able to throw in features, like they were already ready to go but they released before hand.

People on the Firefox reddit complained about the inability to get into About:config, and got nonsense about how people don’t want to let them put breaks on their car. But it’s not breaks: it’s not allowing you to open the hood. And the reason is supposedly that some people would change settings that only worked right in desktop firefox. So why not just change the setting names? And why a pressing need to block about:config now? No, I think it was a mistake they’re justifying.

Mozilla never seemed to actually embrace the iterative update model it switched all its products to, like Chrome. They didn’t keep making small changes. It’s kinda like Microsoft and their feature updates, really. Chrome gets it right–it feels like the same browser. Firefox doesn’t. It feel like they went through several different browsers, and lost people along the way.

And all because they were chasing new users and never thinking about the existing ones. They don’t realize that making the power-users upset is the worst thing you can do, since they are the ones who will strongly recommend your product.

Also, they never found a good way to fund themselves that didn’t put them at Google’s mercy.

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AmbularD, GoneToPlaid, Cybertooth

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I’m not quite sure how Firefox can be in danger if Mozilla are getting $400 to $450 million per year from Google. Perhaps I’m being naive, but how much do they really need to produce a browser?

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anonymous wrote:

if Mozilla are getting $400 to $450 million per year from Google.

That will stop now with Google’s antitrust trial looming.

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Nathan Parker

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My immediate thought was, that doesn’t bode well for third party browsers based on firefox should things go awry.

In respect to the mainstream Mozilla Firefox, not listening and trying to emulate google chrome based solely on marketshare usage in a vain, desparate attempt to improve marketshare stats, is their undoing as well as the update cadence/ framework and introduction of junk features, not so much on ESR but, will be inevitable sigh

I’ll still use it primarily for the superior control using about:config to tweak the browser for security and performance YMMV

Note to post 2319093 : CNAME uncloaking can also be done using the Brave browser which is chromium based should you wish to utilize it.

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AmbularD, Cybertooth

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And what proportion of Mozilla’s resources (money/senior management focus/talent) now goes to Firefox?

Although on a vastly smaller scale, there are some similarities to the shift from “Windows is Microsoft” to Windows being a much smaller, and relatively financially unimportant, part of the modern Microsoft group.

There has been a significant evolution in the nature of Mozilla and Firefox within it. Mozilla always was “small p” political in the sense that a group of people developing Firefox and Thunderbird as standard bearers of open source software and end-user control/privacy were always going to have firmly held views on how the web, internet and software should behave/develop… and say so… but modern Mozilla is, and has been for many years, a social and political lobbying group. Yes that deals with web advocacy and internet standard issues but very much wider issues as well. Oh… and it makes a web browser too.

Nowhere in Mozilla’s mission statement, 10-point manifesto or manifesto addendum is there a specific (lots of references to open source etc) reference to Firefox. I am not saying there has to be, it is up to Mozilla to decide what Mozilla wants to be, but I do think that it has significant implications for Firefox development.

For me there are two fundamental contradictions/pressure points ( oh ok then.. flaws) in Mozilla’s business model & philosophy

• if an often repeated message is beware “Google and all things Chrome”, yet your browser looks and acts superficially more and more like Chrome – that is an incredibly nuanced and challenging message to get over to the general user base
• can you ever really be a truly effective “challenger” of Google when principally funded by them

This is not an attack on Mozilla, it is up to Mozilla what role they see Mozilla as fulfilling, and web advocacy, internet usage and control and privacy are all important issues but for me they now seem more equipped as an overall organization to talk about/lobby on these matters than develop a browser that is a blazing gold standard of those things. Is it a lobbyist or a developer of products who naturally has something to say as a byproduct of it’s development philosophy?

Does anybody know, after all the layoffs, what proportion of Mozilla’s headcount now work directly on Firefox? Also, what will Mozilla do to fund itself when the Google money disappears, Firefox now has too little market share to monetize it sufficiently for that surely.

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Propje, Bill C., Nathan Parker, Cybertooth

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I’ve been using Firefox since it first came on the scene and have migrated preference files numerous times as I have brought new workstations on line and retired the old ones.  I’ve encountered some glitches over the years but they are minor and usually cleared up quickly.  I really do not like the mobile version of Firefox and use the built in Android Chrome browsers which work seamlessly.

There’s going to be some major anti-trust activity over the next several years against Google & Facebook and perhaps others.  As to how this effects Mozilla is anyone’s guess.

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Propje, AmbularD

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I’ve been using Firefox for a couple of years.  I set it up for automatic updates, and I’m currently running 83.0.  I haven’t noticed any particular issues with the browser, it has never crashed, and continues to render web pages quite well.

I have a couple of ad blockers installed, as well as the Facebook container extension (Facebook can’t follow me around the internet).  As for extra tabs opening to a blank page, my homepage is set as DuckDuckGo, and it’s also my default search engine.  I don’t often open a new tab out-of-hand, opening a link in a new tab instead (which works just fine), when I do open a new tab I then click on my homepage icon and the new tab becomes a DuckDuckGo tab.

It is my browsing habit to avoid going from one link to another directly (except from within my trusted sites).  Instead I always return to my homepage, DuckDuckGo, then go to another site.  Any trail of bread crumbs (tracking cookies) that might escape my extensions will always return to DuckDuckGo.  Extra mouse clicks are not an issue for me, they are instead a habit.

Is Firefox in danger?  Time will tell, but since it is downloaded and installed, if it happens to lose support due to Mozilla’s business model, I’ll keep using it anyway, until such time that it might pose a security threat.  But should that become the case and I must choose a new browser, I won’t choose anything Google related or Google spawned.

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Propje, Bill C., rexr, Charlie, Cybertooth

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Another privacy tip for Firefox: Since the referral header is a tracking agent that extensions miss it can be disabled.

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Perq

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Firefox will remain my browser of choice until it loses my trust, or goes belly up

I’ve never encountered any serious usability issues with it, and until recently I’d always felt vaguely reassured by Mozilla, as a corporation/collective. It felt like they had a comparatively honourable business ethos

In any event, for the time being I’d rather put my trust in their products over any of the alternatives

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AmbularD, AlexEiffel, rexr, Nathan Parker, Charlie

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Firefox is around because Google wants them to be. Google is their major source of income, and Google does this because it needs “competition” to keep governments from getting too interested in their monopoly. It’s the same reason Microsoft bailed out Apple all those years ago, when Apple was in a lot of trouble financially (hard to imagine now!)

Mozilla isn’t really competition, though, since being dependent on Google for all these years has made them rather servile… if Google proposes a new idea, Mozilla implements it about as fast as Google does. Mozilla is busting their butts to make sure that anything that makes Firefox better than Chrome in any way is removed, since now Chrome defines for them what an ideal browser should be.

Mozilla is really the best kind of “competitor” for Google to have. People talk of the danger of a Google browser monoculture if Firefox were to fail, but we already have that. Mozilla already implements whatever Google wants, and there’s no question that for them Google defines the proper way of doing things, so what difference does it make that it’s not a Chromium base if it is built to do the same Google-serving things as Chromium? Each copy of Firefox out there supports and advances Google’s plans for the web just as surely as if it were itself a Google product.

Mozilla lost its mojo the moment they presumably thought they were going to capture the #1 spot from MSIE, the foe who had so unfairly crushed Mozilla’s not-so-ancient ancestor, Netscape. Mozilla had been battling IE since before it rose to have 95% market share, and it was a hard battle against those kinds of numbers, but the tides changed, and Firefox peaked at 30-something percent market share, pretty much all at the expense of IE. IE was still well ahead, but dropping like a rock, and Firefox was on a rocket’s trajectory. Firefox’s victory seemed certain.

And then Chrome arrived. Like Firefox, it was to be standards compliant, and was mostly open source. That put them on the “good” side against the non-standard, proprietary MSIE (that was a huge deal back then, and it was Firefox that pushed standards compliance into the mainstream), and I guess a lot of people liked it right off the bat. The Mozilla victory was not to be. Instead, Firefox began its long, painful decline.

The Mozilla that dared challenge the corporate giant was no more. It had given its all in the fight against Microsoft’s dominance of the web, and as its erstwhile ally grew quickly into the new corporate threat, they didn’t seem to have it in them to take up the fight again.

In sharp contrast with the way they’d challenged IE and broken its monopoly by offering a product that was unapologetically superior in every way they could manage , Mozilla now began to have Firefox mimic everything about Chrome.

Mozilla certainly knows how to dislodge a corporate giant’s monopolistic product from its nest at the top of the mountain, but they haven’t tried that against Google. They’ve done the exact opposite, choosing to reduce their innovative, superior product to a me-too copy of the original. They’ve ridden that strategy all the way from near their peak market share to where they are now, and they are still committed to it. It seems rather deliberate at this point, though I wonder why they’d want to kill off Mozilla rather than just quit and go elsewhere if they don’t want to be in the browser business.

I can’t see Google not wanting Firefox around anytime soon. If anything, Google would probably prefer Firefox increase in market share a bit to better support the idea that it is a competing product. The government powers that be bought Gates’ line about how IE could not be removed from Windows, so Google knows they don’t have to worry much about any of the government critters being savvy enough to realize that Mozilla is not competing with Google if it’s just following wherever Google leads. Market share, though, is something the government people can understand. But if your “competitor” seems determined to destroy itself, what can the likes of Google do to keep Mozilla afloat?

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Nathan Parker, Cybertooth

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Sad story. Now chrome has monopoly over web standards and wants to introduce “web bundles” for example, that frail mozilla probably wont or cant oppose to make www an Ad paradise.

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Nathan Parker

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I have always used Firefox or a fork of Firefox when they got off course in my opinion. Palemoon for a while and then Waterfox. The main reason is cusomizability. I use 48 extensions and everything is highly tweaked. Look up “power user” in the dictionary for my picture 🙂

Now, Waterfox seems to have sold out from their previous high ideals and moving away from Classic to Current and now G3 which lacks any alternatives for some critical (to me) extensions. I cannot find ways to come close to customizing Edge or Chrome anywhere near how I use a browser. I may take a new look at Palemoon again.

I hate this game. I want a browser I can use my way , not have to modify, tweak and patch weekly.

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AmbularD, Nathan Parker, Kranium, OscarCP, Cybertooth

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Waterfox Classic is still around if that is what you are looking for. They’re not pushing anyone to move to the Current branch.

Even so, and even though I was one of Classic’s biggest fans for a few years, I moved to Firefox proper several months ago. Waterfox Classic is frozen in time, forever based on Firefox 56, and while the security fixes are being backported, the advances in what a modern web browser is expected to do are not. More and more, I found sites not working with Classic, and it wasn’t about the useragent string needing to be spoofed.

I too consider the dropping of the powerful XUL addons for Quantum to be a “Quantum leap backward,” as that has been the defining feature of Firefox since it was still called Phoenix. A lot of the addons I considered essential were classic types (“legacy,” in Mozillaspeak). Even so, Firefox still has enough customizability through less convenient means to do what I need most of the time. It’s mostly the UI customizability that I find lacking in Webextensions, but Firefox still has userchrome.css (for now).

The author (who goes by Aris) of one of my favorite classic addons, Classic Theme Restorer, ported the internal CSS used by the addon to work in Firefox via userchrome.css. I’ve been using these since the Quantum leap backward, and Firefox proper isn’t half bad with them. I still have my status bar and the tab bar under the URL bar, right above the content window. Addons provide the static new tab button and the close tab button on the left and right, respectively (UI designers seem to have forgotten that UI elements that move around are a bad thing. Don’t make the user hunt for what he’s looking for!).X

I do expect that Mozilla will remove userchrome.css and usercontent.css someday, and probably sooner than later. At that point, I will have no further use for Firefox. Given Mozilla’s Captain Nemo-like obsession with being Chrome, it seems a foregone conclusion… Chrome does not have custom UI stylesheets, so that means Firefox doesn’t need them either. It’s the whole “get rid of everything better than your competitor” strategy again.

In preparation for that moment, I’ve been trying out Vivaldi in a bigger way than before, and it certainly will be my go-to when Mozilla’s scuttling of Firefox is complete and it is no longer viable. It’s a browser intended for the market Firefox used to command, which is that of the so-called “power user.” While Mozilla removes valued features that made it better than Chrome, Vivaldi puts them in. It has custom UI stylesheets too, and unlike Mozilla, I don’t expect its developers to remove that bit anytime soon.

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AmbularD, JC Zorkoff, SueW, Cybertooth

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This is pretty much on the bottom of my worry list right now. If it becomes a certainty, I will either continue to use the version I have or change browser brand completely.

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OscarCP

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I switched from Firefox to Palemoon after Mozilla started their rapid release schedule.

I do have FF on my android devices but their last version was a disaster. (Who removes tabs???)  I usually don’t post reviews but on googleplay, I complained. The comments from the developers were “oh, those features will be coming”. So why release a version with the features removed then start fixing what they broke?

I want no parts of Chrome but I have installed Vivaldi in Windows and android. It is based on chromium.

I usually have 3 or more browsers installed so if FF dies, I’ll see if Palemoon or MyPal can continue. If not, I’ll move to Vivaldi as my new default browser.

Since browsing is an integral part of what I do on my devices, I want to be prepared if something happens to a browser.

 

Got coffee?

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Cybertooth

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How does Mozilla’s CEO deserve a 20% salary increase to $3 million per year?

(Following a 400% increase during the period that Firefox lost 85% marketshare.)

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Nathan Parker, Microfix, Ascaris, Charlie, Cybertooth

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I use the portable Firefox ESR as a backup browser. Currently 78.5.0esr (64-bit)

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Nathan Parker

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Firefox is mostly in danger because it hasn’t really been developing anything new or innovative recently. Firefox took the steam away from Internet Explorer back in the day because it offered what IE didn’t. Right now Firefox is mostly playing catch-up and their biggest selling point, aside from privacy, is “It can do what Chrome can already do”, which is not a winning strategy. In order for a product to overtake its competitors, it needs to drive the market forward with something new that users need or never knew they needed. Mozilla is unfortunately not doing that anymore, instead clutching at reeds as they try to reclaim the market share they lost.

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If they had just left the innovative bits that were already in it alone, that would have been better. They can’t beat the established market leader by being “just as good as.” If it is just as good, Chrome users may as well stay with Chrome (and they have). It has to be better in some important way. They used to have lively debates about what would serve their users the best, and their users were part of the conversation.

The pre-Chrome Firefox had an addon infrastructure that IE’s BHOs couldn’t match. It had tabs. It had drag-and-drop customizable toolbars. It had customization options all over the place, from themes (which were much more than the color schemes they now are) to tons of options in the prefs, to custom stylesheets that could even style the UI itself. It could be whatever you wanted it to be, while IE… was IE, take it or leave it. More and more, people left it.

There have been a lot of people who faithfully used Firefox from that time (self included), and who remember how it used to be, and how Mozilla used to be. Mozilla doesn’t much listen to anyone but Google anymore, though, and if you look at the bug tracker where new feature deletions or changes are proposed and discussed, you see over and over that the reason for a given proposal was “Chrome does it like this,” and that was all that was needed.

Once a change was proposed with that phrase as its justification, it was pretty much guaranteed to happen. I can’t think of any other example offhand where a company so steadfastly worked to make sure its product was no better than that of the so-called competition. They’re not just not innovating… they’re actively purging all past innovations too. There was never any discussion about whether the way Chrome did it was the best way, or whether it was the best way for that small set of browser users who still used Firefox.

As it is now, Firefox is still IMO the best browser for desktops, which is why I use it. I’m not even all that afraid because of their low market share (my OS of choice has an even lower market share on the desktop), since Google needs them, but I just know they have custom stylesheets (for the UI) in their crosshairs. I’m ready to move to Vivaldi at a moment’s notice. If Chromium ever cleans up their touchpad scrolling, I’ll probably make it easier and just migrate to Vivaldi even before Firefox renders itself irrelevant to me.

 

 

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While I have Chrome and Edge installed, I use Firefox 99% of the time and have so for many years. An excellent browser that has improved significantly over time. I don’t understand users who haven’t even tried Firefox, citing weak, erroneous rationale based on the experiences of others, most of whom are not objective. Firefox is an excellent, fast, stable browser in which I spend a vast majority of my online time. Try it, you’ll probably like it.

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A long time ago, I used MSFT IE7, IE9, then 10, and then 11.  I really liked IE but gave it up because of all the talk about how dangerous it was to use.  So I switched to Firefox and once I got used to it I got to like it very much too.  I was surprised to find how easy it was to use and especially how customizable it has become.  If you don’t want or like something, most of the time it can be removed or disabled.  I haven’t used any other browsers so I can’t make comparisons.  But Firefox won me over and I’d be very disappointed if they went under.

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Susan Bradley wrote:

From Zdnet:  After looking at the numbers, I really don’t know how long Mozilla can make it. Oh, the revenue stream is there for now, but with fewer a
[See the full post at: Is Firefox in danger?]

It’s interesting how Mozilla can make money by giving everything away.  I suppose it’s ad-based revenue, or something like that, but every copy of Linux goes out with Firefox installed (or at least, every one I’ve tried)… It’s available for free for Android, iOS, Windows and Mac.  Same for Thunderbird.  And I’ve never seen any ads come up as part of either Firefox or Thunderbird when using them.  So where does Mozilla even get money from?

Granted, regarding market-share, Firefox is down there.  It’s super popular with Linux users, probably because Linux and Firefox are both seen as counter-culture compared to Windows and Mac.  But Linux itself is not a huge player in the desktop market.  Chrome is the 800-pound gorilla, and Edge (the new Chromium-based version, that is) is growing because of the push Microsoft is giving it in the Windows arena.  But aside from a few features, Edge and Chrome might as well be the same thing.  Then there are Opera and the rest, but they’re tiny in comparison to the Big Three in browsers.

So my only question remains, how does Mozilla even make money in the first place, much less lose it?

 

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KB6OJS wrote:

It’s interesting how Mozilla can make money by giving everything away. I suppose it’s ad-based revenue, or something like that, but every copy of Linux goes out with Firefox installed (or at least, every one I’ve tried)… It’s available for free for Android, iOS, Windows and Mac. Same for Thunderbird. And I’ve never seen any ads come up as part of either Firefox or Thunderbird when using them. So where does Mozilla even get money from?

As Oscar noted in his post below, a lot of it comes from being paid by Google to make that the default search engine. Google knows that if Firefox disappeared, all of those searches that would have been done through Firefox would happen through something derived from Chromium (or Safari, if the Firefox user had been on an Apple device), and there is a good chance it would be their own Chrome, which of course already has Google as the default search. It would be more advantageous if they just let Firefox die if it was only about the search traffic, but they need Firefox to be there to keep governments off their back for their monopoly status. Having Chromium as open-source no doubt helps, but paying Firefox is cheap insurance for the likes of Google.

As for the rest of the revenue, you’d have to check Mozilla’s financial reports to see where it comes from.

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plodr wrote:

I usually have 3 or more browsers installed so if FF dies, I’ll see if Palemoon or MyPal can continue. If not, I’ll move to Vivaldi as my new default browser.

Wanted to share the following: Just this week, I learned that MyPal was one of the few browsers that still actively supported Vista and XP. (Had never heard of it before.) Downloaded the installation file to a Windows 7 PC and one of my security layers (VoodooShield) warned me off against it even before I did anything with the file. Next I copied it over to a Vista machine and tried to install MyPal–and Norton blocked the installation.

 

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I downloaded the 64bit installer and checked it on VirusTotal. There is no malware, although one non-mainstream AV doesn’t like the file.

What did your AV products report?

cheers, Paul

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Here’s the reaction by VoodooShield when I had it scan the MyPal installer:

And here’s the report by Norton 360 when it quarantined the MyPal installer:

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Neither of those are virus detection. They are both warnings based on low user numbers (they are peddling FUD to make you think they are doing something). See this Symantec post.

Test MyPal and let us know how it performs.

cheers, Paul

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anonymous wrote:

IMHO, with all due respect, I think Mozilla are killing the product themselves. Each new release make considerable changes to the UI and to add on support. I’m still using Thunderbird 52.9.1 because they broke all add ons I use, the UI looks terrible,and it’s no faster. With Firefox it’s the same story.

They continually make things more complex. I used to be able to set a preference to specify the location of my cache folder. Easy. Then they moved that to a group policy, and even that doesn’t work. You have to write a bunch of script, withing the group policy to make that work.

I’m not a fan of flat, square and bland, which someone once called “modern”. They must have been born after 2000 because things just look like Windows 95 days now.

Typical developer attitude is “load the system up with as many processes as we can”. All products have done this was. Sure it only used 8 processes and 500MB ram, but if you have 50 products all doing the same thing…. well, it’s no wonder a state of the art PC runs no faster than a 10 year old PC.

 

My email client of choice is Outlook.  That’s not likely to change in the foreseeable future, because I am so heavily invested in it — I have a few hundred rules set up in there for routing incoming email messages (usually lists) to various folders for dealing with later, and converting those to something else would be horribly time-consuming.  Since I use POP for my email protocol, all my messages are in a PST file so moving those will also be a pain.

I have Thunderbird installed on my Windows laptop, and tinker with it as new updates come out just to be familiar with it, but I only use it in IMAP to look at what’s in my Gmail mailbox at any given time.  I don’t download messages with it or do anything serious with it or any of the other email clients I have installed (BlueMail, etc.).

 

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dmt_3904 wrote:

What is “Chromium” vs. Chrome? I don’t want to give up my FF either, but I see the handwriting on the wall.

Chromium is the open-source product, which is available on multiple platforms.

Chrome is derived from Chromium.  Same for the Microsoft Edge variant and some other browsers.

Firefox is, if memory serves, derived from the original Netscape browser.

 

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Google es el mas interesado en que FF no primible, mientras tenga su motor de búsqueda en este navegador y aunque le cueste un montonazo de dólares al año.

Translation:
Google is the most interested in FF not primary, as long as they have their search engine in this browser and even if it costs them a ton of dollars a year.

Moderator Note: Please post in English

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Firefox probably will survive in some sort of way. It’s Mozilla that probably won’t survive because they have really no income model to pay that size of an organization. I imagine the skeletons of Firefox will eventually continue on as Mozilla fades. But even that might be hard to do when you have so many contributing to Chromium. Firefox may have to join the Chromium development in order to keep up.

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Nathan Parker

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From the Zdnet article linked by Susan:

“Only days after the layoffs, however, news leaked that Mozilla and Google have extended their current search deal for another three years. This new deal will ensure Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 for an estimated $400 million to $450 million per year.

Despite that, though, and a 2019 annual report that looks far too rosy, Mozilla’s 2019 revenue was $826.6 million, an 84% year-over-year increase and its best year ever.

…

Mozilla’s 2019 expenses came to $495.3 million, or almost $5 million more than revenue.”

Well, one hundred million here, one hundred million there, soon we are talking some real money.

Question: What is Mozilla doing with all that money that, apparently, is not enough even after resizing with some serious layoffs?

There are some pretty big NASA missions that are cheaper than running Mozilla for one year.

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OscarCP wrote:

Question: What is Mozilla doing with all that money that, apparently, is not enough even after resizing with some serious layoffs?

Oscar I was wondering the same thing. $400000000 a year can support a whole bunch of coders.
And a few servers, not there is anything really of interest these days on their website but old help files for older FF and those are being phased out.

🍻

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I hope that Firefox survives since managing and organizing bookmarks in Chrome is a nightmare in comparison to Firefox. This my single biggest beef with Chrome.

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As an OS/2 user, when 2.0 first came on scene IBM provided its own browser bundled in, but I guess IBM didn’t want to support it and they switched, maybe with Warp 3.0 to Netscape Navigator.  I was familiar with it as it was an evolution from UICC Mosaic which we used at work on Unix.  So stuck with Netscape which evolved into Communicator and now is Sea Monkey.  But the browser became Firebird around the time IBM dropped OS/2.  Firebird I guess had some sort of trademark issue so was renamed Firefox.  When FF began releasing too many upgrades that seemed to have gratuitous UI changes I switched over to the ESR to get some stability, but when the pre-quantum ESR reached EOL was forced onto a fork.  That’s how I got to Waterfox Classic.  I don’t how much longer the Classic version is going to be around so I guess I will be looking for something else.  I’ve played around some with Chromium Edge, even though I have a number of android devices.

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I started using FF several years ago and, after a year or so, I sopped using it until I tried it again, years later, and have been using it since, but only now and then.

The reason I stopped using it was that a company’s Web page was hijacking my home page; the company was called “Babylon.” One had to manually go and change the settings of the home page to remove it. The FF people kept denying to those complaining at the users’ forums, either that this was happening, or that they, at Mozilla, had anything to do with it. And the replies were supercilious and potted, adding insult to injury and provoking some pretty angry reactions from those getting such replies. But deinstalling FF and reinstalling it did not solve the problem: “Babylon” seemed to come along with the fresh downloads.

Eventually, FF admitted there was a problem:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/remove-toolbar-has-taken-over-your-firefox-search

But, by then, I was done with it. The problem itself was not such a big deal in practical terms, but not a big confidence building experience either. Whether it was Mozilla’s fault or not, at the very least they really mishandled this problem and seriously annoyed users.

I am glad that those that, probably later on, adopted FF as their browser — as this bad experience with “Babylon” does not seem to ring a bell with many now — have been largely happy using it.

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I had never heard of this before. I can’t find any reference to it being bundled with Firefox, but I did find some articles (one example from Ghacks) about a potential PuP being installed via C-Net download (and I would expect other download sites too), which would persist even if Firefox was reinstalled. It doesn’t mean it was in the Firefox download package, only that the PuP was running in the background and installing the toolbar into Firefox whenever it found it.

The link you provided only shows instructions how to get rid of it and other malware-like toolbars, not any admission of having had anything to do with it. They have had other things where it was their doing, like some tie-in with a robot movie or somesuch, but this one seems to be something else.

It is no longer possible for programs to install things into Firefox like this without the user’s consent or knowledge, as far as the above Ghacks article says.

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Ascaris, I also have found difficult to find now a Web site with direct information on the FF/Babylon issue I’ve mentioned, except for some forum discussions where people were asking (as in those discussions I still remember) whether “Babylon” was malware or was sneakily downloaded and installed by Mozilla, for example:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/931275

I still have the vivid impression this issue left on me, resulting in my using FF again only because it was required by a government site I needed to access for a while, and for little else since that was not longer necessary.

I started using Netscape as my default browser in the late 90’s, then briefly, as mentioned above, FF, then IE 11 (which I continued using until two years ago) along with Chrome and then also Waterfox (now “Classic”), which became my default browser after IE 11. As some have mentioned elsewhere and I have noticed directly, WF (Classic) is having problems running well, or it is actually deprecated at some sites, so I am transitioning slowly to Vivaldi. I have not enough knowledge of Chromium to consider using it as a browser. Although I have a Mac, I prefer not to use Safari: some basic instinct tells me not to … I guess one is entitled to one’s superstitions.

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I’m on Linux Mint and had been using FF on Windows 7 before that OS went EOL. So FF came along with the Linux Mint install and I was already using that on so I just kept on using FF as my browser. I do not like that rapid release cadence as much but the most annoying thing was going into the about:config to fix the settings to stop most of what was annoying about the web(Popups and auto-playing videos, etc.) and FF was really removing and depreciating features and that devolved into more cat and mouse with each new FF release to hunt down the proper settings to keep things how I like.

I’d love to see FF get beyond any relationships with the big Ad interests but now I’ll have to accept that the Linux Mint maintainers will have to choose a different shipping browser with their releases if Mozilla/FF goes under. And really I’d rather just have the browser that Ships with Mint currently sans any snaps if possible.

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Ascaris wrote:

If your idea of a perfect browser is Chrome, you’re in luck– there’s a perfect browser for you! Going after the people who are least likely to leave the Chrome platform (because they like it) is foolish. There are plenty of people who don’t want to use Chrome, and many of us have been on Firefox for some time, but Mozilla has forsaken us in order to go for those people least likely to switch.

I, too, much prefer to use Firefox or one of its derivatives to Chrome/Chromium or one of its derivatives. Among other things, the FF family remains much more customizable than anything in the Chrome family (in the latter group, is there any that still allows the user to display a menu bar?).

However, as I read your analysis above, the following thought occurred to me and I’d like to get your view of it: could it be that Mozilla’s decision to Chromize their Firefox browser was motivated by information (customer surveys, user feedback, etc.) suggesting that some vast majority of its then-current base preferred the Chrome UI and intended to abandon Firefox for Chrome?

Suppose, for example, that when FF was still at 20% usage there were indications that 90% of that 20% preferred a simpler (ugh) Chrome-style experience. The decision to make FF more like Chrome could then be interpreted, not so much as an attempt to win Chrome users over to FF, but rather as an attempt to keep FF users.

Not that the strategy (if that’s in fact what they were thinking) has worked out all that well, but I’m wondering if this could have been a factor, maybe even the main factor, in their decision to go the direction they have.

 

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Cybertooth wrote:

I, too, much prefer to use Firefox or one of its derivatives to Chrome/Chromium or one of its derivatives. Among other things, the FF family remains much more customizable than anything in the Chrome family (in the latter group, is there any that still allows the user to display a menu bar?).

Yes. Vivaldi has that, and it’s how mine is configured.

Cybertooth wrote:

Suppose, for example, that when FF was still at 20% usage there were indications that 90% of that 20% preferred a simpler (ugh) Chrome-style experience.

I don’t know how they would go about finding that info. How would they get a representative sample? People who are unhappy are far more likely to complain than happy people are to give compliments, and any way you try to poll people will have that element of self-selection.

My guess is that most people who thought Chrome had a better UI (??) would just move to Chrome and not tell Mozilla anything.  My thought is that once Chrome reached what users considered to be parity with Firefox, the people who preferred the Chrome UI switched over, and those who remained beyond that point would be those who specifically didn’t want what Chrome had to offer. By the time Mozilla had redesigned Firefox’ UI into the Chrome-like “Australis,” which happened three years after Firefox adopted the Chrome update schedule, the only people still using Firefox would have been those who really didn’t want Chrome. Mozilla would have ended up alienating their remaining users (making them more likely to leave) without retaining any of the ones who liked Chrome, since they would have moved to Chrome long before that point.

In addition, it isn’t really clear why Mozilla would feel the need to copy other bits about Chrome that don’t push users who prefer Chrome away, like Chrome’s six week release schedule and version numbering scheme, or to remove options that Chrome didn’t have rather than just settle for having the way Chrome did it simply be the default.

One of the things that Mozilla removed from Firefox, of course, was the ability to use the powerful XUL/XPCOM addons. While Mozilla likes to frame the XUL vs. Webextensions question as an either/or, the two kinds of addons (along with the Jetpack ones) coexisted for some time quite nicely, and still do in Waterfox Classic. All the reasons for adding Webextensions would be just as valid if the choice of using the XUL addons remained. Those who were concerned about the greater harm XUL addons could do if they were malicious (like any other program that a person allows to run on their computer!) could have opted to only use Webextensions, and likewise those addon devs who were sick of constantly updating their addons to keep them current as Firefox evolved could move to Webextensions and mostly say goodbye to that problem.

These are valid reasons to add Webextensions support, but Mozilla didn’t stop there. They removed the classic style addons, getting rid of the most defining feature of Firefox in favor (once again) of a Chrome-centric solution, and that pretty clearly didn’t have anything to do with keeping people from leaving Firefox.

If the idea was to stem the tide of people leaving Chrome, it would have been obvious years ago that it had not worked, but they’ve kept at it for something like nine years now (from the first Firefox version that resulted from Mozilla’s adoption of Chrome’s release schedule and nomenclature). At some point, they’ve got to think that everyone who was gonna leave has done so, but they’re still at it with the Chromification.

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[Kranium]

I left FF behind when they started making a lot of unnecessary changes to the GUI & add-on support. Switched over to Palemoon. I still have PM installed & use it occasionally, but I only use it perhaps 20% of the time now. I’ve mostly been using Brave. Sometimes a portable + sandboxed version of Chrome, and similarly Tor.

 

Firefox took away/ruined the bits that attracted users to it in the first place. So they either left, or they’re still around simply because they’re used to it.

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I use Firefox as my daily browser. I prefer it to other the other Chrome based browsers largely because I’ve been using it for so long and it’s familiar. I’m not a big fan of any of MS browsers, and Google Chrome? Well, Google just sucks up too much data about on-line activities that it makes me uncomfortable about using any of their services consistently. So if Firefox is in it’s final days, I guess the only other option for me would be to move to Brave.

 

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Nothing happened to the  Mozilla  Thunderbird email client when Mozilla cut them loose.  It’s still up and running.  Someone must have took it over.

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Geo wrote:

…Thunderbird email client when Mozilla cut them loose

Sorry, I’m confused. Mozilla cut Thunderbird loose?

Mozilla brought Thunderbird back in-house in an announcement on May 9, 2017, and continued to support its development.[17][18] The Thunderbird development team expanded by adding several new members and overhauled security and the user interface.[19]

On January 28, 2020, the Mozilla Foundation announced that the project would henceforth be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary, MZLA Technologies Corporation, in order to explore offering products and services that were not previously possible and to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations.[20]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird

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Going totally independent had been seriously discussed for 18 months before that though:

Thunderbird’s Future Home

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[Ascaris]

The Thunderbird start screen includes this text:

Why we need donations
Thunderbird is no longer funded by Mozilla. Fortunately there is an active community keeping it running and developing it further. But to survive long term, the project needs funding.

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I preferred when Thunderbird development was more quiet, until very recently with their lousy 78 release. Hey people, if you are going to develop it, at the very least don’t break it.

I will tolerate uglier, but buggy is not acceptable. An email software is a sensitive piece for security so if you add a ton of stupid regressions in, I wonder how you handle the real harder piece of work that coding for security demands.

I love Thunderbird. But calendar integration doesn’t work well. It is a must-have for many. Version 78 fixed that by breaking it more, still offering a broken Caldav and breaking compatibility with the Google provider extension. Mozilla, how about putting that higher on your priority list? Integrating with a Google calendar should work seamlessly, even if you only use the Google Calendar and not a Google email.

Version 78 introduced many annoying bugs, some have been fixed, some not.

If your folders are always compacting many GBs per day, check to see if you have some above 4GB and then split them because maybe there is a variable overflow that breaks compaction.

If you receive some messages that are never getting auto-read when you click on them (if you use that feature), tell the person that sends them to stop using an empty vcard for signature.

I still love Thunderbird. I love the quick search function that works very well even if I have many hundreds of thousands of emails.

I don’t have any issue with Firefox and last time I checked, it was the only main browser offering better color management options for screens that offer more than sRGB (wide gamut). Firefox is great for me despite the changes. I love privacy and privacy friendly defaults. But apparently not enough people care. On a related note, I still wonder why email is required everywhere now but it is still hard for casual users not to use privacy invading email giants’ services.

I started to see more and more “we only support Chrome” in the field, which was expected with the arrival of Chredge and the marginalization of Firefox. This is all very sad. I am not about to move, though.

 

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[Ascaris]

There’s a fork of Thunderbird called Interlink, whose useragent says it uses Goanna, the Pale Moon and Basilisk version of Gecko. It is based on an older version of Thunderbird, and it may work for you. Since Thunderbird never gained multiprocess anyway, the lack of that feature in Goanna is no loss compared to the project from which it originated.

 

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AlexEiffel

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I use Firefox and have the Add-On Extension “uBlock Origin” installed.  I’ve cleared out all the “stuff” I don’t need, and I’m happy with it and haven’t had any recent problems.  There were a couple of updates that caused some problems, but I have the update set on manual, where it lets me know there’s a program update but I decide when I want to download and install it.  Most of the time if I don’t hear any cries of woe in a week’s time, and there are actually some security updates included, I go ahead with the update.  I’m not that trusting to let any program just update itself willy nilly.

On Linux Mint, Firefox comes with DuckDuckGo search engine as default.  You can install Google if you want it but you have to get it and install it yourself.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Switched to Pale Moon once Firefox decided they wanted to be ChromeFox. If a site doesn’t work with Pale Moon, I typically don’t visit it, and in some cases, was an end result in purchasing stuff from a site. Walmart had terrible Pale Moon support, but Best Buy didn’t and thus got my business that day.

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I’ve used Firefox since switching from IE7, it has always worked well for a normal user like myself with an evolution of good security and privacy features.

I uninstalled Brave after trying it for a year. It was fast and proclaims privacy, but gathered and stored much more information from my surfing, and/or system, than Firefox does and that bugged me. Even when i hadn’t used Brave browser between cleanings, Ccleaner found double the cache and files than what FF collected. Legitimate or not, Brave had no reason to.

I’m staying with Firefox until/if it really breaks. Then I would switch to Vivaldi browser, VivaldiMail & Calendar. And V works well in Android from the UpToDown android app store, don’t need to use the google store.

Browser wars never end, even though the 800lb gorilla Chrome has most of the pie.

Win10 Pro 20H2,backups with Macrium Reflect home edition

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Case in point: I upgraded to FFox v84, and there’s no longer any sound.

GaryK

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I read the reviews of FF 84 update and it seems most of it is geared to the new Apple Silicon.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Any specific site?  I also upgraded FF t0 84, and sound is normal, so not necessarily to do with FF.

Windows 10 Pro 64 bit 20H2

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? says:

i just stuck it (ff84) in:

Commit Log for Tue Dec 15 18:46:50 2020
Upgraded the following packages:
firefox (83.0+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.3) to 84.0+build3-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
firefox-locale-en (83.0+build2-0ubuntu0.16.04.3) to 84.0+build3-0ubuntu0.16.04.1

and am on youtube to check sound, plays like always…

you told me to get off my beloved IE and i (finally) did!

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Charlie wrote:

I read the reviews of FF 84 update and it seems most of it is geared to the new Apple Silicon.

WebRender rolls out to MacOS Big Sur, Windows devices with Intel Gen 6 GPUs, and Intel laptops running Windows 7 and 8. Additionally we’ll ship an accelerated rendering pipeline for Linux/GNOME/X11 users for the first time, ever!

Firefox now uses more modern techniques for allocating shared memory on Linux, improving performance and increasing compatibility with Docker.

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From Mozilla’s Release notes – https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/84.0/releasenotes/    I included the first paragraph:

Native support for macOS devices built with Apple Silicon CPUs brings dramatic performance improvements over the non-native build that was shipped in Firefox 83: Firefox launches over 2.5 times faster and web apps are now twice as responsive (per the SpeedoMeter 2.0 test). If you are on a new Apple device, follow these steps to upgrade to the latest Firefox.

WebRender rolls out to MacOS Big Sur, Windows devices with Intel Gen 6 GPUs, and Intel laptops running Windows 7 and 8. Additionally we’ll ship an accelerated rendering pipeline for Linux/GNOME/X11 users for the first time, ever!

Firefox now uses more modern techniques for allocating shared memory on Linux, improving performance and increasing compatibility with Docker.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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To be fair, there appears to be some improvements for Linux users.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Nathan Parker

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My own opinion is that it would be wonderful if Mozilla would put out “Security Only” updates like MS does.  If you want the whole enchilada of new stuff you can get it, but if you don’t you can just get the security updates that are most important.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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they do if you use Firefox ESR if not, tough! you get the junkware too

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Nathan Parker

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ESR is becoming more and more tempting.  Does it do Add-ons and Extensions?

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Nathan Parker

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There were some problems with FF 84 bringing about the release of FF 84.0.1 which provides the following fixes:

Fixed problems loading secure websites and crashes for users with certain third-party PKCS11 modules and smartcards installed (bug 1682881).

Fixed slower than expected performance and flickering on Canvas elements for some Windows users (bug 1683116).

Fixed a bug causing some Unity JS games to not load on Apple Silicon devices due to improper detection of the OS version (bug 1680516).

Fixed crashes caused by various third-party antivirus software.

More detailed information can be seen on this Ghacks webpage:

https://www.ghacks.net/2020/12/22/firefox-84-0-1-update-fixes-crashes-and-other-issues/

I still haven’t installed either one on my Linux or Win 7 machines.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Cybertooth

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I just installed the FF 84.0.2 update which just came out today.  The reason I installed it so soon is because it is a security only update and fixes a critical vulnerability.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Again, FF is doing well, user base increased over the last three months of 2020 to almost 9% on desktop.  Safari has had similar movement to over 10% on desktop.  Meanwhile Chrome dropped 4% in the same period. “But Mr and Ms DOJ, we’re losing market share…”  Strategic drop?  IDK, speculation.

Doom and gloom numbers combining desktop with mobile are silly; they’re completely different markets.  Mobile has been dominated by Chrome and Safari, as expected, they ship with their OS’s, with Samsung Internet stable at 10% almost forever.  All other browsers are buried in the noise far below SI.

Yeah, Google funds most of FF and….they have since a few years after FF launched.  FF desktop ran ahead of Chrome until android launched and shot to number one, taking  Chrome with it. Desktop was dominated by Chrome through bundling.  Of course during those years, IE, the prior leader was declining, leaving even more space for those with the money to take it.

The likelihood of Mozilla tromping a company (Google) with a market cap that puts it above the GDP of countries below the top dozen or so countries on earth is miniscule.

So, yeah, FF is doing well.  It’s all we use on desktop; the only browser that’s extensively modifiable.  We use FF Focus on android, dirt simple and extensively non-modifiable.  Market share of .oooo%.

🙂

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