Since you asked, Firefox is the browser to use if you do not want chrome.
There is video playback on without fan noise (Chromium) or a very audible fan noise on Firefox (Notebook & Steam Deck + Fedora/Pop/Arch/Ubuntu) => More use of power resulting in less time for me.
Switching to Linux resulting in me ditching my forever browser Firefox is something I would not have guessed.
Firefox is not a serious competitor at this point and its tiny 4% of the market has already slipped to 3% in the last year.
That’s inching close to the “can we please drop IE11” sort of numbers from some years ago.
Personally, I bounce between macOS, Windows and Linux (mostly Linux, with Wayland), between Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari (mostly Firefox), and also between laptops/desktops and Firefox on Linux is consistently the fastest one with the least amount of crashes for me. Also the combination that lets me get the most battery life out of my laptop.
- It comes last out of the three major browser engines in feature support. - It has the most number of bugs out of the three engines. - It has the worst support for Web Apps.
Apple has deprived the Safari/Webkit team of funding for the past decade.
Safari places no competitive pressure on chrome, and has deprived Mozilla and thus Firefox of 100's of millions of dollars in search engine revenue. Apple has done untold damage to the web and this needs to be fixed.
Maybe it should be browser's task to do it. As a user I just do not want to waste my time on things like that unless they're vital. In this case I'll just use different browser.
[0]https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti... [1]https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection#trackers-we-block
The "use an inferior tool for philosophical reasons" mindset is already pretty unconvincing for me. A chromium fork maintained by a pro-user, pro-privacy team is the best of both worlds and doesn't expose you to Mozilla's fad-chasing.
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
Safari (WebKit) is the only one competing against the Chrome ecosystem, especially on mobile devices market. The EU Digital Markets Act will just declare Chrome the winner and will increase Chrome's dominance and will make Mozilla even more irrelevant.
Unfortunately you don't really get that luxury if you use Linux.
Maybe they don't see as many Chrome browsers too, in percent. Maybe Firefox users are not the ones who block more tracking, who knows.
These assumptions would be true of a for-profit entity like Google, Apple, Microsoft, but it's not as directly applicable to Mozilla.
If you've managed to get battery life from Linux and Firefox even remotely near default fresh install of MacOS and Safari, you should write that up and post the link to it on HN.
The force keeping Safari afloat is not the one keeping Firefox down, the problem is that Firefox has nothing to drive up its adoption. Telling people that they're "free" to use Firefox and see as the web is swallowed whole by Google with Chrome, like MS did with IE, is missing the point so badly.
Mozilla exists as it does today entirely due to Google's largess.
Sent from my Firefox install.
I have an nvidia card and non free drivers if that matters
Many of those who have not learned from history are so anti-Apple (or possibly subpar webdevs) that they completely ignore the lessons we've previously learned about why browser monoculture is dangerous.
Even more worrisome, these people often ignorantly call Safari "the new IE", meaning they're aware of the history and problems and choose to pursue their own broken interpretation.
If these people will ignore a browser with 50% market share on mobile and 20% overall due to their own shortsightedness, clearly they're going to ignore Firefox or others hanging out in the single digits.
I really wish this weren't true, but the user experience has barely improved in the past 15-20 years. The specific problems may be different, but it's still the same struggle.
If you don't like bleeding edge, warts or sometimes unpolished experiences, might be better to go with Windows or macOS, no one would blame you.
> “Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there's no denying the decline,” says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox
But I'm not certain that this is the case. https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection claims to link to lists that show which trackers are only identified and which are identified and blocked, but those links just go to https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti..., where I do not see such a distinction being made.
not sure it is also possible to compete on battery performance with Safari but that is the only one I see. Drop any other project, any initiative and just focus on this.
Why:
1. Because there is a big chunk of developers who code web on MacOS thus winning them means what they build will run on MacOS
2. Becoming default for this group of technical people means they will recommend it for their families and more important install it for their young kids laptops
3. Can do it with Google money :)
At the same time, Firefox has 200 million users. For perspective, that's just behind the population of Brazil, the world's seventh-most-populous country. It's hardly dead in absolute terms. It's hard to think of any open-source end-user application that's more widespread.
Then again, Windows was even worse. It was constantly waking itself up in a cramped bag, where it would try to forcibly install updates, overheat, drain the entire battery, then shut down and need to charge for 30 minutes just to light up at all. At which point it would boot into the recovery menu since it botched an update and needed to try again.
Did we see a massive drop in Firefox users when tracking protection was introduced?
That said, Apple is doing something worse with Safari, in that not only are they bundling the browser, they are using their tight control over the operating system to prevent other browsers from being installed in the first place. It's slighly murkier than the MS antitrust case because the counter-argument is "but they do allow other browsers! You can see Chrome/Firefox/Brave/etc in the App Store!" and then you have to get into a technical discussion of the difference between a browser application and a browser engine.
Sigh.
My idea was primarily based on my experience is something like this:
I know (meaning I know what they use) around 15-20 devs on MacOS.
Almost all of them have FF installed. Some may open it occasionally but just as an alternative to open in private mode or check some weird behavior to see if it is cross-browser or cache related.
- personal usage: except maybe 2, all the others are using Safari (most of them) and Chrome few
- professional usage: except for the same 2, here I think Chrome is more used and Safari less
Thus in these developers' case, I don't think they will recommend FF to their friends or relatives even if FF is installed on their machine as it is not their daily driver.
I am in the same category regarding usage: I forced myself multiple times to use FF. Still try to do that couple of times per year.
But fallback to Safari because the battery lasts so much longer and because it is integrated with the MacOS keychain.
One might think that with M1, people might afford to lose a bit of battery but it is the reverse. Seeing how long it lasts one barely thinks of cutting those hours short :) Could mean starting to carry again the power adapter or always looking for a table near a power socket.
Here is a browser that I installed not long ago and start to like it more and more: https://browser.kagi.com
You can test behavior on this tracker here: https://www.jefftk.com/test/statcounter
That wikipedia page has a support table saying IOS supports PWAs as YES and Firefox as NO is odd considering Apple requires Mozilla to ship a crippled form of safari on IOS, if Firefox could ship their own true application, I suspect they would have better PWA support as a differentiator with Safari.
[1] https://thenewstack.io/owa-takes-on-apples-browser-ban-for-p...
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
<html><head></head><body><img src="https://statcounter.com/" vt9kpu8nj="">
</body></html>
Which is also what Apple is doing but then going even further and just outright banning other browser engines.
1. Plain install: Not blocked 2. With uBlock Origin: Blocked 3. Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection: Blocked 4. 2+3: Still blocked (unsurprisingly)
I would expect knowledgeable and concerned users (i.e. installing at least uBlock Origin) and people on systems managed by such people (e.g. family members of people in the first group who let that person manage their system) to be a higher percentage of Firefox users than other browsers.
I don't think Firefox has say a 10% share, but I do think that data derived from statcounter.com is going to underrepresent the share of Firefox users. As Google continues to make larger moves to fight ad-blocking, I expect that gap will widen.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
There's a case to be made that they handicap PWA features, but I don't see their team directly implementing features incorrectly.
I'm confused, because to me it seems that the pro-Apple folks are the ones ignoring the lessons from large corporations using their weight to force monocultures.
Firefox is the only meaningful browser that is open and won't be leveraged by its steward to promote their business interests.
This was not at all the case in the 90s during the period of MS antitrust action.
> For the same reason it's not bundling if their operating system contains a scheduler or network drivers
There is a robust market (even today) for web browsers, and the makers of browsers make millions of dollars in revenue from their products. Therefore, I disagree, and I believe the bundling concept could still apply today to browsers. Network drivers and schedulers are not at all the same, because there isn't much of an independent market for them.
This was not that obvious in the 1990s.
> It would be absurd for antitrust regulators to prohibit software vendors from enhancing their products just for the sake of protecting competitors' revenue.
This is absolutely a situation where a bundling case could apply, if a large incumbent uses their monopoly power in one product area to enter another and unfairly compete. IANAL but I don't believe whether or not the product was available separately or not would factor much into such a case.
It's in Google's interest to replace native iOS apps with web apps.
It's in Apple's interest to replace web apps with native iOS apps.
Native apps also tend to be more power efficient and to present a platform-native look and feel.
I don't see any incentive for Apple to support PWAs (or Google's vision for web apps) ever.
"web bluetooth" and many other hardware APIs are Chrome-only non-standards that OWA pretends are standards and core features for PWAs.
wat. Firefox and Safari are more closely aligned on standards support than Chrome which pushes its own non-standards aggressively
--- sart quote ---
Back fifteen years ago IE held back the web because web developers had to cater to its outdated technology stack. “Best viewed with IE” and all that. But do you ever see a “Best viewed with Safari” notice? No, you don’t. Another browser takes that special place in web developers’ hearts and minds.
--- end quote ---
And even without them, we could write a browser and distribute to people so they could install it.
That cannot be said about iOS.
Said nothing about "anti-Apple". I'm just agreeing with the poster above saying that people being vehemently anti-Apple actually haven't learned anything from history. At all.
> Apple's leverage is being used in many of the same ways, just much more aggressively than 'best viewed in IE'
Of course this is bullshit. Again. There's probably not a single site out there that is "best viewed in Safari". And there are numerous sites that are "best viewed in Chrome". Including, especially, the ones that Google themselves (#1 search, #1 mail, #1 video hosting, #1 web ad business in the world) creates.
And to quote again:
--- start quote ---
Regardless of where you feel the web should be on this spectrum between Google and Apple, there is a fundamental difference between the two.
We have the tools and procedures to manage Safari’s disinterest. They’re essentially the same as the ones we deployed against Microsoft back in the day — though a fundamental difference is that Microsoft was willing to talk while Apple remains its old haughty self, and its “devrels” aren’t actually allowed to do devrelly things such as managing relations with web developers. (Don’t blame them, by the way. If something would ever change they’re going to be our most valuable internal allies — just as the IE team was back in the day.)
On the other hand, we have no process for countering Google’s reverse embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy, since a section of web devs will be enthusiastic about whatever the newest API is. Also, Google devrels talk. And talk. And talk. And provide gigs of data that are hard to make sense of. And refer to their proprietary algorithms that “clearly” show X is in the best interest of the web — and don’t ask questions! And make everything so fucking complicated that we eventually give up and give in.
--- end quote ---
Google releases 400 new APIs a year with little to no oversight and with complete disregard of any objections or concerns from the other browser vendors: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
The things that you think Safari is lacking in are largely Chrome-only non-standards.
Second, your use of "open competition" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, suggesting that browser market share is determined by ordinary market forces (it's not) or that Apple isn't competing openly with Google already. Why would allowing the competitor's browser on your hardware be considered "open competition?" Again, it's not clear.
That is why I use Firefox, as the only remaining browser that hasn't shown a long-term pattern of curtailing user freedoms or rights when it suits them. I don't see Safari as a solution here; Apple is not pushing for an open web because it is righteous, they are pushing for a platform they control and to hurt their competitor. They are not to be trusted either. If they can, they will absolutely leverage that control against the user as they have shown time and time again that they are more than willing to do.
> Of course this is bullshit. Again. There's probably not a single site out there that is "best viewed in Safari". And there are numerous sites that are "best viewed in Chrome". Including, especially, the ones that Google themselves (#1 search, #1 mail, #1 video hosting, #1 web ad business in the world) creates.
When I say 'Apple', I mean 'Apple', not 'Safari'. Apple are the ones with a platform that will not run unblessed code. Apple are the ones that don't let developers or users choose how software is distributed. Apple are the ones that tell you which APIs you can and cannot use, and what your app can and cannot do. Apple are the ones that tell you what browser engine you can run, which is much stronger than a website saying 'yeah we tested this against IE, but go nuts', instead it is Apple saying 'if you want a browser engine, you can take Webkit or pound sand'. This is Apple's modus operandi, writ large. At least with Google's level of control you can still do what whatever you want with the website that runs in Chrome.