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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:11AM (7 children)
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)
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
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)
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
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)
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)
Tabs were introduced in IE7 [wikipedia.org] in 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface) [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @11:30AM
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.