The situation with browsers is really a bit dire, ainnit

Arnvidr 2019-06-14 09:00:24 UTC #22

Might be telling of my perspective that I use both Firefox and Linux on my main machine. Even though I use those more, my main complaints in my computer use are against Windows, which I use at work, and for some games that only works there.

How often approx. does it crash for you? I don’t remember having any crash at all, neither in linux nor Windows, for quite a few years. It might be an extension (or addon as they call them now) problem. Even though you complain about few extensions now, so maybe you don’t use that many? If there is something specific you were missing on that front, there are probably alternatives available now either way, the switch to the new extension types were quite a while back.

Excluding some of my needs for work, the only time I fire up chrome at home is when some web page just refuses to work. Most of the time I attribute that to my heavy blocking of all sorts of trackers and scripts and the like.

BillButNotBen 2019-06-14 11:30:01 UTC #23

Well, this morning it crashed 6 times.
I suspect it is an extension. I just haven’t bothered trying to narrow down which one, because I just click ‘restart’ and the browser is back with all the tabs in 1 second. And also because the extensions I have are pretty much all ones I can’t do without.
I suspect it’s a memory leak, as even if I leave the the browser untouched for a while, it’ll crash after 30 minutes to an hour.

As for extensions, there is an ok range, but it’s on the level of Opera extensions, rather than what Firefox used to have, or what Chrome has now.
Which means a lot of them are unofficial, or have 2 reviews, or are in another language, and often the only ones I can find for a particular purpose are ones that look somewhat dodgy.

alms 2019-06-14 12:47:25 UTC #24

Some Linux distributions are carefully pieced together so that as long as you don’t touch absolutely anything, and/or only use Intel drivers, they do present an illusion of working flawlessly.

Underneath there’s a hot, steamy mess that’s just waiting for the right occasion to stage a spaghetti and meatballs explosion in the face of an unsuspecting user.

Years of dealing with Linux on the desktop and its endless annoyances and problems, especially related, but not exclusively limited, to drivers have left me with very little in the way of fondness for that OS.

To that add, the folklore of toxic devs and maintainers, starting of course with “I’m so smart” head clown role model Torvalds, who should be immortalized, and still derided, to this day, for throwing a tantrum after breaking the nVidia drivers himself, and then shouting idiot to absolutely everybody else, after his laptop stopped playing flash videos, all the way down to the userbase, largely insufferable.

Or the madness that is systemd (the crawling, writhing monster still can’t handle fsck failing on headless machines), or, or, or. Though, I must say, Microsoft have been trying hard to piss me off with 1809, with an astounding degree of success.

/OT.

BillButNotBen 2019-06-14 13:13:23 UTC #25

This is a good way to put it. I’ve had lots of fun with Linux until something has gone weird.
On the plus side, if you can find the right command online to fix it you just have to copy and paste.
On the minus side, the settings in Linux are spread across 50 different apps each with different weird names and most of which are just front ends for various commands, half of which do the same thing
/OT

Firefox, on the other hand is looking pretty polished these days, imho. And firefox android is great (having been terrible for many years).

Skalpadda 2019-06-14 13:20:14 UTC #26

I haven’t had any major issues with FF since going back to using it as my main around a year ago. It runs fine for days with dozens of tabs open and hundreds of pages visited, and I’ve had maybe two crashes so far this year. The only wonk I’ve noticed is that it sometimes slows down a little when streaming very large video files (hours of video), but if there’s any general difference in speed between Chrome and FF on my machine it’s not enough that I’ve noticed. The menu UI isn’t great, but that seems to be universal these days.

Then again I only use one extension, so perhaps I’m just not hardcore enough when it comes to browser torture.

Arnvidr 2019-06-18 13:12:04 UTC #27

I’m sure that is true for most distributions. There is a lot of work behind running one, and I expect most people involved to be volunteers.

I’ve been running gentoo for closer to 15 years now, which is quite a different beast to many distros, being source based. I’ve become quite adept at tinkering with various components whenever something fails for me, but for many years those problems have mostly been limited to “update failed” type errors, which are rarely critical. For many people “wait a few days and try again” is a perfectly valid way to fix any problem. And, of course, I don’t run systemd, so I never have to deal with that particular hornets’ nest.

@BillButNotBen Any particular addons you’re missing? Whenever these types of discussions prop up, there are usually someone coming up with alternatives to those missing an extension that was never ported to the new system.

alms 2019-07-04 20:46:19 UTC #28

This goes into a bit of detail on what’s going to change and why with Chrome and ad blocking. There are some bits that I find somewhat questionable, but all in all it’s a decent read if interested in understanding why Raymond Hill said that uBlock Origin cannot exist in its current form within the new model.

BillButNotBen 2019-07-05 08:48:29 UTC #29

That sucks.
As with all these things, I’m sure there’s a partial truth to google’s claims of being focused on security… while they’re also rubbing their hands as the side effect of crippling uBlock etc…

I’m also rather sad about the Chrome 62%, Safari 15% Firefox 5% statistic. Chrome is good… but one browser having a massive market share has never worked out well in the past.

(Side note: I worked out that it was the Leechblock NG extension that was causing FF to crash. Disabling that has made it rock solid.
The problem is, probably due to the small market share, there aren’t many decent alternative extensions… and if i don’t have that kind of extension then I waste massive amounts of time and go to bed too late. )

alms 2019-07-05 12:34:32 UTC #30

TBH Google’s arguments seem sound to me, and the article I shared is biased.

For instance, it omits to mention that the userbase of ad blockers is small (so small I sometimes I marvel at the amount of work that is put towards foiling them, but then again local stats could be different from global), and uBlock Origin’s is smaller still.

It follows, IMO, that Google hasn’t much to lose from this change, unless for some reason the public opinion swings, which doesn’t seem very realistic an option to me, because of how small the numbers are.

Also, they have the sound arguments, and even figures, showing that this will benefit the average user, who doesn’t use an ad blocker, and if they do, they use the despicable AdBlock Plus.

All of that notwithstanding because I am indeed a gorhill fan and whenever the new manifest gets deployed in my beta channel I’ll likely be out of an ad blocker and whenever I look at the Internet without one, I recoil in horror, and that’s without all the tracking, profiling, and so on…

XDA is one the major Android development communities, so those usage stats refer to smartphones only.

On the desktop Firefox is faring less badly, but still under 10%, it would seem.

The problem is Firefox IMO doesn’t have the chops to match Chrome at a functional level, no matter how much we would like it to.

In that I find Firefox similar to Linux in that the happy few who use it are indeed some varieties of hard-cores, who are ready to give up on some comforts in order to avoid Chrome (Windows).

In fact I’m afraid Firefox’s predicament is worse, because you have these other Chromium based browsers that steal different fringes of hard-cores away, reducing its share even further, even though we’re just talking about a few percentage points, every little point matters a lot for Firefox, more than it does for Chrome.

If Firefox is now at 9% or so, and we held at gunpoint everybody using Opera and the other minor browsers and forced them to switch to Firefox, its share would grow to less than 15% anyway, and more likely settle to no more than 10 to 12%.

Firefox needs to steal users away from Chrome, and to achieve that goal, it needs to provide a strong alternative to Chrome. And right now, sadly, it isn’t.

Chrome won the war, because it was faster and sleeker than Firefox, and because it came at the right time when Firefox was in a horrible position owing to the 4.0 trainwreck, and Internet Explorer had already begun to fade.

To make a come-back, Firefox would need strong selling points, a bullet-proof PR campaign and a massive blunder from Google so that the userbase will be activated and have a reason not to be lazy about it.

BillButNotBen 2019-07-05 12:50:39 UTC #31

All true. But I’m still sad.

I think you’re probably underestimating the number of people using adblockers and the amount that google et al care about them, but I may be wrong.

I’ve gotta say that, as of about the last 8 months, I don’t see any real functionality or performance difference between firefox and chrome (on desktop or mobile). Before that, yes. And it may be too late now.
There probably are some feature differences, but they aren’t ones that’ve come up for me.

Oh, actually, I do have one. I do wish FF had the ability to make standalone desktop apps though… which is actually something they did first with the Prism project. Shame they dropped that. It’d be really handy to have a standalone Asana or Gmail app on the desktop.

alms 2019-07-05 13:07:15 UTC #32

IIRC the figure that is usually quoted by those against ad blockers is less than 10% of the total.

If you are a small site operator your effort would be better figuring out how to expand your audience, rather than start a fight with 10% of your userbase.

But, of course, it is possible that a specific site experiences an amount ad blocking that is vastly higher than the global average, which was implied in my ‘local’ remark.

And there may be other valid reasons why people or firms making attempts to reclaim every last penny.

I see less of a gap on mobile than desktop, personally. Although managing extensions used to be almost impossible on Firefox for Android, not sure if the situation has improved now.

Users generally value syncing between desktop and mobile, so as long as a browser has a majority in one of the markets, it will also likely have the other, too.

In that perspective, Firefox for Android protects the desktop browser against losing users.

PS: for clearity; I actually had no complaint with Firefox on Android outside of the one mentioned above, and additionally, Chrome doesn’t support extensions on mobile.

Sarfrin 2019-07-05 16:50:23 UTC #33

I’m very casual, in that I just use browsers to browse with no add ons. I don’t see any difference between Chrome and FF in my day to day use.

alms 2019-07-05 18:31:24 UTC #34

If you’re happy with Firefox, more power to you. I was trying to switch back to Firefox myself, not to get others to stop using it.

Sarfrin 2019-07-05 19:25:00 UTC #35

Oh, I get that. I’m just offering a different perspective, as I can’t get on with Linux but found Firefox easy to switch to.

BillButNotBen 2019-07-06 07:59:20 UTC #36

Color me surprised. Especially given the amount of effort sites put into trying to prevent ad blockers or persuade people to turn them off.
I mean, 10% of your income is nothing to sniff at, but it’s also hardly the apocalypse that some online publishers have claimed.

This is my perspective too.

alms 2019-07-06 12:36:59 UTC #37

That’s just a number off the top of my mind, referring to ‘global Internet population’.

However, the XDA post linked above claims uBlock Origin has over 10 million users. For some back of the envelope fun, let’s say all the ad blockers combined have a total userbase of 200 millions?

If 10% were using ad blockers, then it would mean there are 2 billion people using the Internet.
If 30% were using ad blockers, it’s 670 millions.
50%, 400 millions.

Or, to slice it another way, global Internet usage is reportedly above 50%. There’s almost 8 billion people on this ball of dust. That means there should be no less than 4 billions browsing the Internet.

If all those numbers are in the ballpark, 10+ millions uBlock Origin users would be 0.25% of the total Internet population.

BillButNotBen 2019-08-07 00:28:54 UTC #38

(With the caveats that (a) a lot of these trackers are probably nothing to worry about and (b) this is ‘out of the box’ browsers without stuff like uBlock, and © it’s a bit sensationalist mainstream tech reporting)

I hadn’t realized Chrome had started signing you in automatically when you sign into gmail. Not keen on that idea.

Side note: despite me having most of the google / android privacy options set to the more private options and having google assistant turned off, my phone just gave me a helpful google maps alert that I can download offline maps for the location that I’m going to on vacation next week.
Er… thanks helpful but terrifying Big Brother!

alms 2019-08-07 19:04:39 UTC #39

I can’t seem to read the article as it’s behind a paywall? Assuming this is the same text, then I would agree the claim is misleading, as Chrome, in stock form, is not set to reject any cookies at all, but this also used to be the default for all browsers.

Firefox does better out of the box, and that’s commendable, but it can be locked down further.

As far as I’m concerned, there are no harmless trackers, though. Anything that follows users around the web is bad.

My plan is for my next smartphone to have Lineage OS for MicroG.

Unfortunately, this restricts the choice of phone rather drastically and, for many, it may not be a viable option.

BillButNotBen 2019-08-08 13:03:31 UTC #40

Yep same text.
Didn’t know it was paywalled as I just followed a random link to it. It’s annoying when they do that.

Much to my surprise, I’m actually considering an iphone for my next phone, just because apple seems a bit better on privacy than android.
I’ve never had an apple phone and never really wanted out, and I’m kind of bought into the android ecosystem at this point, but google just keeps being dodgy.

LexW 2019-08-08 17:55:19 UTC #41

I’d be doing the same but then I look at the price and what you get for it, and the possibility that you just drop/break the phone (I have yet to do this, but there’s always a first time, and there’s a reason you see so many people with smashed-up iPhones - they can’t afford to replace them), I can’t justify it.