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posted by mrpg on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the 89?! dept.

Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?:

Mozilla has released Firefox 89, proclaiming it a "fresh new Firefox," though it comes amid a relentless decline in market share.

Firefox matters more than most web browsers, because it uses its own browser engine, called Quantum, and its own JavaScript engine, called SpiderMonkey. By contrast, most other browsers, including Chrome and Chromium, Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi use the Google-sponsored Blink engine, while Apple's Safari uses WebKit (from which Blink was forked). The existence of multiple independent implementations is important for web standards, helping to prevent a single vendor from pushing through changes without consensus, and ensuring that the standards are coherent.

A glance at a statistics site like W3Counter is telling. In April 2008, Microsoft enjoyed a 63 per cent market share with Internet Explorer, and with Firefox performing strongly behind it at 29.3 per cent. By April 2010, IE was down to 48.6 per cent, Firefox up to 32.7 per cent, and Google's newer Chrome was starting to make an impact, at 8.3 per cent.

In April 2012, the three were almost on a par, though Chrome (26.8 per cent) had overtaken Firefox (25 per cent). Today, Chrome is at 65.3 per cent, Safari second at 16.7 per cent, IE and Edge has 5.7 per cent, and Firefox has just 4.1 per cent share. Despite numerous updates, Mozilla's browser has declined from 6.1 per cent share a year ago. Statcounter tells a similar story, reporting a 3.59 per cent share for Firefox, down from 4.21 per cent a year ago.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Booga1 on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:33AM (17 children)

    by Booga1 (6333) on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:33AM (#1142300)

    Despite numerous updates, Mozilla's browser has declined from 6.1 per cent share a year ago.

    Despite? It's BECAUSE of the numerous updates they keep losing market share. Relentless updates and changes that nobody asked for and everyone hated. They're just trying to kill it. I use Firefox myself and this latest update continues the trend of "simplifying" things way beyond simple. It's not limited to Firefox, but all sorts of programs have taken to hiding things you want deeper and deeper under layers of menus. Now instead of having a button up front that lists the most five or six most useful categories of things, it's "Hamburger> Menu> Category> Action. It adds two or three clicks to every single action.

    Of course they justify it with metrics. They collapsed everything to a tiny hamburger window that's a crap interface so things get used less. So they hide even more items and they get used even less and get removed entirely because people start forgetting the features are even there.

    Another thing that got changed is yet another annoyance. My title bar is now the same color whether it's the active window or not. It looks permanently inactive. I've seen this trend in other programs like Discord as well and it's garbage. Let the OS handle the window colors. Ugh...rant over. :(

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:11AM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:11AM (#1142307)

    My favorite are the switches back and forth with dubious reasons or ones they ignored earlier. For example, "rectangular tabs wastes space so we are switching to angled tabs" followed a few years later with "angled tabs have too much dead space so we are switching to rectangular ones." Another is "icon padding and a large extension area (since we killed the status/addon bar) leaves less space for the address bar" to "an address bar that is too big is dead space, added padding to icons aids is a better use of space and shrinking the address bar allows room for more extensions."

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by driverless on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:15AM (1 child)

      by driverless (4770) on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:15AM (#1142309)

      In this one the pointless padding is on bookmarks menus and, in fact, all menus, in order to make things easier for their massive user base on mobile devices and at the expense of their existing user base on laptops/desktops which they've been busy ignoring for years, if not being actively hostile towards. Which means that everything that has a list of anything has exploded off the edges of the screen, requiring that you scroll endlessy to get to things that were previously two clicks way, one to open the menu, the second to select. And since they've deliberately broken userChrome.css you can't even fix it any more like you used to be able to.

      • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday June 07 2021, @05:32PM

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 07 2021, @05:32PM (#1142815) Homepage Journal

        I've taken to maintaining my own bookmarks file, editing it with emacs, and using omd to convert it from markdown to html.
        If you like, and the web page is up (intermittent because of trouble with a new modem) you can have a look [pooq.com].

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:11AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:11AM (#1142320)

      You'll love Firefox 90... the pink-hairs have finally developed the Holy Grail of UX: the tabless browser. Their telemetry found that users only look at one tab at a time, so eliminating tabs not only frees up screen space and reduces memory usage, but it simplifies the user's experience.

      • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:55AM

        by MostCynical (2589) on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:55AM (#1142326) Journal

        and to switch between tabs, do you use the phone's camera button?

        --
        "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:36AM (2 children)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:36AM (#1142335) Journal

        I vaguely recall tabless browsing. Did it last as long as IE4, or was that IE3? Somewhere in that time frame, somebody published an overlay sort of addon for IE that gave you tabs.

        • (Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:30PM (1 child)

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:30PM (#1142354) Journal

          Tabs were introduced in IE7 [wikipedia.org] in 2006.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface) [wikipedia.org]

          The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by a number of others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although a MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on 1 April 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.

          --
          [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
          • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @11:30AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @11:30AM (#1142703)

            Prior to tabs, if you wanted to have multiple websites open at once, you needed to use separate windows.
            And we had to move the mouse fifteen miles down to the start bar to switch between 'em. Well it was either that or use alt-tab.
            Course back in them times, we didn't have touchy-feely interfaces. We had a keyboard, with real keys, that you had to press down forcefully with your own fingers! Great days.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:11AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:11AM (#1142328)

    From what I see dicking around with interface stuff too often is a sign that the team in charge have no real new good ideas on real improvement or are too incompetent as a team to implement them.

    It's a bit similar to bikeshedding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality [wikipedia.org]
    https://exceptionnotfound.net/bikeshedding-the-daily-software-anti-pattern/ [exceptionnotfound.net]

    tldr; they are unable to make real improvements so they spend time dicking around with themes and "rebranding/name changes".

    Don't get me wrong I'm all for UI improvements but in most cases it's a good sign the team as a whole has jumped the shark. Especially when there really aren't other real significant improvements to go along with it. Microsoft with their Metro UI. Desktop Linux with their wobbling windows and Metro UI wannabes. And Mozilla with their endless fuck-ups.

    I'm fine with the LGBTWTFBBQ bunch in Mozilla fucking whoever they want (I barely even care whether it's consensual or not). The problem is lots of us don't actually like the way they keep fucking Firefox up and fucking us over.

    Maybe they think fucking with things in different ways automagically counts as an improvement. It might work that way in their "fuck spaces" but it clearly ain't working for the rest of the world.

    As for privacy: https://www.netmeister.org/blog/browser-startup.html [netmeister.org]
    https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/ [brave.com]

    p.s. that browser market shares have changed so much in ten or so years show that people can and will actually switch browsers. Chrome isn't installed by default on Windows.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:09AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:09AM (#1142532)

      WTF you talkin' about? It's the brand new Proton interface! The! Brand! New! Proton! Interface!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:34AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:34AM (#1142550)

        Just wait until Firefox 90: Brand New Electron Interface!

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @04:06PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @04:06PM (#1142387)

    The only thing they ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS do is kill whatever hacks people use to get tabs on bottom.

    This seems to be to the prime directive of every Firefox update. Second priority is to create ACRES of whitespace. "Compact" made is unsupported, requiring hacks, then it's not even fucking compact. It's about where medium should be. So, I have more lovely lovely vertical whitespace.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @07:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @07:37AM (#1142673)

      The only thing they ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS do is kill whatever hacks people use to get tabs on bottom.

      Because that's the way *Chrome* does it, and they absolutely refuse to allow tabs on bottom, so we have to do it that way too!!

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:32PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:32PM (#1142791)

      I have tabs on the side. Makes more sense to me than top/bottom for a PC since lots of screens are wider than they are tall. And you can even have tab trees (children = indented tabs).

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday June 07 2021, @05:36PM (1 child)

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 07 2021, @05:36PM (#1142816) Homepage Journal

        I suppose in langauges that write vertically, they require the tabs to be on the right side?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14 2021, @08:03AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14 2021, @08:03AM (#1145005)

          I can only think of one script right now that is obligately vertical, and that is Mongolian.

          What is support like for that now in any environment and context?

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @07:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @07:35PM (#1142448)

    Living dangerously, I've chosen to stick with 68.12.0esr for the time being (with the occasional user agent or other about:config update). At some point, things that I need will quit working properly and then I'll go to the next esr version.

    For reference, this version has rectangular tabs with reasonable context, and the menus still seem to be sane on my laptop screen.