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: 2) by deimtee on Sunday June 06 2021, @03:40PM (10 children)
As a fellow Pale Moon user, have you noticed any recent problem with google/youtube sites?
Videos will load and play, but clicking view replies on a comment will consistently lock the browser up. (It happens randomly on other google sites too.) I have ematrix and ublock origin installed. The status bar text will say "transferring from ***.com" but nothing happens and pale moon responds very slowly, if at all. eg. click the close tab button and it might take a full minute to respond. Once the tab finally closes everything else responds normally. It is only google sites that do this. Started a few weeks ago.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday June 06 2021, @04:08PM (6 children)
Yes, I have similar experiences. It's similar if you open up multiple tabs of say Youtube at once they stall out the entire browser until they slowly start to pop in one after another. But it in essence freezes up the entire browser while that is happening.
I'm not entirely sure tho that it's a issue that is entirely to blame on Palemoon but a matter of Google/Youtube messing about with their site and code. Their constant need to mess with the code and implement new features and stuff that I'm not sure anyone but their advertisement buddies asked for. Since most of those issues are just around their sites, gmail has no issues but a lot of other sites that rely on adsense and the various api-sites they have for fonts and what now seem to be slow as heck. Part of it could also be the blocking addons and that Google to fuck with the blockers are just trying for longer or more before giving up. Some pages work better if or after you abort the loading and just reload again so it can just fetch cached information. Possibly that is all in my head but it seems to work better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:38AM (1 child)
Youtube and Reddit are becoming unusable.
Youtube is the worst. It locks up the whole Pale Moon browser loading all its garbage. The old YT interface used much fewer resources compared to the current bloated version. My guess is that it is related to the ad shoving they are doing.
Reddit gets slower the more you scroll down the main page. All those little videos try to load and freeze. Scroll down to a spot and the video autoplay spins then starts to play and moves the page up or down further on its own.
We need to push that Chrome is not the Internet and get real teeth behind web specifications so they can be implemented in other browsers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:52AM
With reddit, try replacing the www with old, https://gist.github.com/simshaun/eeb342bf8c5130147fa01546d218163a [github.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @03:50AM (3 children)
Yeah, YouTube did something recently that screwed up SeaMonkey too. Now the only way it can see any monetized video is if it's embedded somewhere. On YT.com itself, all it sees is an endless parade of unskippable ads, and the requested video never does play. This happens even if I bug out to Hooktube or some other proxy. (Unmonetized vids play normally.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday June 07 2021, @11:29AM (2 children)
That seems odd. I don't have that problem. I can watch things just fine. It's just once it loads youtube Palemoon just freezes up for about 5-10 seconds (per tab) as it loads in. I assume it's something with or in the code that is utterly borked and loops around and just steals all priority in the program. I can still use other things on the machine so it's not the machine that is locking up, it's just Palemoon that stalls out. It only happens on youtube tho, other video sites doesn't have that issue, or other sites in general. But beyond that things are as before. That said it never used to do this say a year ago or so with the old UI. But they changed things and now it's kind of annoying from a user perspective, or at least from mine. But I can still see all teh videos I want etc.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @01:27PM (1 child)
It might be the same code, handled differently -- PM wheezing until it goes past, SM (and Borealis) getting stuck on it entirely.
Come to mention it, this started about when my YT adblockers stopped working on the linux boxen too, and I had to switch their Chrome installs from dedicated YT adblockers to uBlock Origin.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 09 2021, @05:43AM
I've come to the conclusion it is anti-adblocker code doing it deliberately. If you turn off all the adblocking and hosts files you will get slow piles of shit, but not the lock-ups. Someone at youtube has gone "Well, if you're going to block ads, we'll lock up the browser until they play."
It never times out or triggers an error either, whatever it is doing it is on-purpose.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @04:16PM (2 children)
Simple fix. Never read the comments. Youtube is a cesspool.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Monday June 07 2021, @12:16AM (1 child)
Simply scrolling down to see the related videos on the side can sometimes trigger it.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:25AM
Simple fix. Cut your fingers off, DON'T read the comments.