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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: 2) by Socrastotle on Sunday June 06 2021, @05:47PM (2 children)
Depends on exactly what you mean. Like mentioned above the browser is 100% open source [github.com]. If you mean something like running unsigned extensions or sideloading extensions then yeah - you can. That specific issue was what drove me away from Chrome and on to Firefox onto Pale Moon and eventually on to Brave. Google blocked YouTube downloaders from their store, and then blocked the running unsigned extensions. Yay for monopolies. But all's well, ends well I suppose!
If you're just going vanilla then Brave, out of the box, is substantially more performant than Chrome, comes with a bucket of useful features and tools absent in Chrome, and does not include Google's "special additions" to Chromium.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday June 07 2021, @04:47AM (1 child)
Does Brave has Tree Style Tabs? Or All-in-One sidebar? This is more important to me than a YouTube downloader extension (youtube-dl does that quite fine, without browser help).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Monday June 07 2021, @02:08PM
Interesting stuff on tree style tabs. Does seem like it could be handy! And the answer seems to be nope for now. There is an open issue on it here [github.com] though, but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. It might be worth it to give it a bump if you have a github account. They definitely do get around to issues, and it does seem like this is one that could be pretty neat!
There is a sidebar that can be enabled (also mentioned from that same issue), but I haven't used it so I can't offer too much on that.