Mozilla recently hit the reset button on Firefox. About two years ago, six Mozilla employees were huddled around a bonfire one night in Santa Cruz, Calif., when they began discussing the state of web browsers. Eventually, they concluded there was a “crisis of confidence” in the web.
“If they don’t trust the web, they won’t use the web,” Mark Mayo, Mozilla’s chief product officer, said in an interview. “That just felt to us like that actually might be the direction we’re going. And so we started to think about tools and architectures and different approaches.”
Now Firefox is back. Mozilla released a new version late last year, code-named Quantum. It is sleekly designed and fast; Mozilla said the revamped Firefox consumes less memory than the competition, meaning you can fire up lots of tabs and browsing will still feel buttery smooth.
Firefox is in a good place right now, and has gained a lot of momentum since the release of Quantum. With Chrome’s dominance, I’m really glad people are looking at alternatives such as Firefox and even Edge (the latter being my browser of choice for some inexplicable reason).
I have always preferred Firefox over chrome although for a time it was hard to justify. As I split my time over Linux, Android and OSX it was the best multiplatform browser that allowed syncing, plugins and an advertisement free experience.
My favorite was Opera, mostly because it was a full integrated internet experience (web + mail + chat + download manager + mouse gesture + glitters). But since they abandoned all but the web and switched to Webkit, there was no point to continue this path.
The only main advantage of Chrome was it’s webgl and html5 support, but the competition has caught on. I use Firefox and pleased with Quantum, faster to open and react to address being typed into the bar, yet it stills hog memory like no one (Flickr, Imgur, …)
Sometimes I use the new Opera or Vivaldi, but it struggles on some sites and pretend there is no internet connection (when other browsers opened at the same time have no problem opening the same sites). So I guess it’s still quite a mess.
Hence the lack of confidence.
I like Vivaldi for its pure speed, but I agree that it has problems, like the inability to play video on lots of major websites such as Cnet. Vivaldi has been around for quite a long time now, I would think they would have fixed this problem but they haven’t.
Vivaldi / Opera and Chrome are all basically the same browser. There really shouldn’t be any differences between rendering on sites.
Firefox unfortunately just doesn’t concentrate on the important stuff in the browser for web developers like myself.
The debugging tools are miles behind Chrome. So while I prefer the interface of Firefox, I end up using Chrome or Opera.
Opera and Chrome yes, but Vivaldi is totally different. Maybe not from dev’s perspective, but from user’s point of view Vivaldi is very, very different.
Classic Opera is the one piece of obsolete software I really miss. An amazing browser in its day – super fast and lightweight despite being incredibly feature rich.
If it could still access the sites I use, I’d choose a 10 year old version of Opera over any modern browser.
I’ve been following Vivaldi, but I don’t really like it more than Firefox with a couple of choice extensions. It still lacks most of the things that made Opera my favourite.
I’ve been using Firefox since it’s very first 0.6 beta version and back when it was called Phoenix browser. Firefox has always been the best web browser for me.
Likewise. I never stopped using it.
Even when 3.6 came out? That iteration of the browser was genuinely terrible and 4.0 wasn’t much better.
Edited 2018-06-21 17:56 UTC
i’ve sat through so many bad iterations of software. Firefox, Windows, office, ubuntu, itunes has sucked for what seems like generations now. I generally give the devs a healthy bit of leeway on stuff that is free.
You get what you pay, for, always
I use whatever is better at the time.
If you have a product/language/os/whatever you can’t expect your user base to hang on after you break things.
Also if you do give devs too much leeway it makes them think they can do what they like and we end up getting horrifically horrible things as a result.
Mozilla isn’t like the Amiga community or the OpenBSD community where there they small and depend on the community around it. Mozilla has plenty of money.
Edited 2018-06-21 18:30 UTC
BluenoseJake,
I don’t pay for wireshark, yet it’s been a fantastic tool.
I get what you are saying, but your post was begging for a counterexample
Edit: On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve bought expensive products where manufacturers don’t deliver the sort of support you expect from a paid product. So I don’t think “you get what you pay for” is always true. While I’d agree that many open source projects could use financial help, sometimes open source projects are better supported anyways.
Edited 2018-06-21 18:38 UTC
I have been a fan and user of Firefox ever since it came out as Phoenix. The mere ability to have a Bookmark sidebar with faveicons is something Firefox has had from the beginning and is something that precludes me from using any browser (Chrome for one) that does not have this function. I just refuse to go through drop-down/scroll menu hell to find a particular bookmark when I can have all of them right there on the desktop.
Now with the release of the new Firefox Focus app on iOS, I can browse freely on my iPhone knowing I will not be tracked and that my browsing history can be deleted with just one easy click. Mozilla is doing an excellent job with Firefox.
Edited 2018-06-21 10:23 UTC
I use Windows laptops, a MacBook pro and an Android phone. Of course I enjoyed FF since before version 1.0. However I must say Chrome is technically better. Lighter on all OS. FF is good on Windows, but Chrome is (feels?) better, faster. Same on Android. FF is ok and it has add ons (uBlock Origin!!!). But is is MUCH slower than Android Chrome!!!
And on macOS, FF is not only slower but much heavier and sometimes makes the CPU fans go totally crazy!
I always try to go back to FF (FLOSS love), but never manage to stay.
I won’t give up, though. I’ll always give priority to FLOSS (my job requires Windows or macOS)
FF Quantum is really a lot better than the old bloated XUL monster. Unfortunately, this just means FF now is a bit slow compared to Chrome.
Also I really don’t like FF trying to push pocket to me every chance they get.
franksands,
Same here. I recognize that the web is better off for having mozilla around, but sometimes I wish they were less user hostile and listened more to us rather than pushing what they want on us. I’ve disabled pocket only to have mozilla override my preference multiple times.
Hoever, it is really disappointing that it becomes harder and harder to actually build it form source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNipdcUh7ZE
rener,
Oh wow, I had the exact same gripes myself and although I like what rust offers as a language, they’ve really botched the install with poor practices.
Chrome’s developer tools are vastly superior (Firefox’s sometimes even fail to find the line of the breakpoint where execution is paused), so is Chrome’s search function (it highlights all the matches and shows them in the scrollbar), it use my desktop’s native file selectors, and it lets you scroll on tabs, like a good Linux citizen.
But then with active hardware acceleration Chrome frequently crashes my desktop environment and without it has very bad tearing. So I mainly use Firefox and sometimes Chrome without hardware acceleration for debugging.
I hope Firefox eventually fixes the problems that I’ve listed, but at least for the scroll on tabs issue they already said they wont. And without the old add-on API we can’t fix these things via add-ons anymore.
I switched to it with quantum. It^aEURTMs solid and open source so it^aEURTMs a knockout.
The battery impact is also good enough.
I’ve been using Firefox since the days when it was still called Firebird 0.6, (or even Phoenix 0.5). Different times… a stripped down version of Mozilla, stripped to the bone, just a web browser without any bloat.
Edited 2018-06-21 18:33 UTC
The servo engine being built in Rust implements the same CEF API that Chrome uses for embedding…
So in theory it should be easy to drop it into a lightweight browser shell also. Sort of like what Fifth/Netrider do… sadly those haven’t been updated recently. And I think fifth uses some libraries that weren’t prepackaged for any distro and didn’t make it easy to build staticlly… so I personally just never used it though I liked the idea.
Fifth actually has an opera like interface… sure would be nice if it could support both the Servo and Chromium engines. Looks like Fifth is still active just most of the work now goes on in the webkitfltk library.
Edited 2018-06-21 19:27 UTC
Unfortunately Mozilla has gone the same user-hostile path that Google and other browser vendors have gone.
I still use chrome as a daily browser, as it handles insanely large tab counts better than firefox. And I have a slight… problem when it comes to closing tabs and windows
However, I wish I didn’t have to.
Every time I fire up firefox (and I do at least once a day) I find reasons to dislike it. The broken add-in support with Quantum, the attempts to squeeze advertising and “promoted content” into things, the lack of a native UI, the performance brick wall it hits beyond a certain point (which has improved but is still very much there), the removal of features in every build.
My main “second browser” these days is generally Seamonkey, which while having many of the same performance issues as Firefox at least gives me good extension support and a classic, native UI (the email client isn’t bad either). But Seamonkey’s days are somewhat numbered post-Quantum I suspect.
Vivaldi still feels rough and is finding its feet. Opera was never my bag but I respect its approach. Edge annoys the hell out of me with its limitations and metro UI quirks.
If I can’t find a decent browser soon I might just start using twibright links for win32 instead!
When they added studies one of the first things they did was betray user trust and install Looking Glass.
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/
They add one little thing and they’re the most evil company. Google literally has hidden tracking and IP leaking and no one bats an eye.
You must be from USA.
Firefox is my primary browser, I use it maybe 99% of times. With that said, I found the move to Quantum unremarkable… if I didn’t knew about it from news, I would have noticed it, I don’t feel any huge improvement.
It was barely a blimp on the radar compared with the huge disappointment from what they did to extensions.
I never liked Firefox. And I still don’t. Old Opera was by far the best web browser ever created, to this very day. It’s very unfortunate they discontinued it and last version is already too old to be usable.
Bane of my corporate life as the default browser.
The only browser that is slower and worse at rendering a large range of websites properly is IE and that’s not a high bar.
As an example – current annoyance is that if you use a custom protocol
( eg myapp:// ) the dialog that it throws up to ask you if you are sure you want to launch an external app doesn’t have a ‘always remember’ checkbox.
Bizarrely the same alert in IE does and if you check it in IE you then don’t get asked again in Edge.
ie Edge listens to preferences you can’t set via Edge!
For complex javascript/dom manipulation pages it really performances poorly. I’m talking real world apps not artificial benchmarks. All these claims of being really fast – I don’t see in real usage – I see slowness.
Given they have chucked away quite a bit of backwards compatibility so they can have ‘clean’ modern code – it’s a shame it’s slower that those web browsers that have backwards compatibility as well!!!
Slow, quirky, poor compatibility – what’s not to hate!