We live in the era of browser monopoly. Google occupied the whole web by its Chrome. Chrome has more than 50% of users:
Safari is on the second place just because of macOS popularity.
Now, most of the developers choose between Chrome and Firefox. And in 2017 Mozilla released their updated version of Firefox — Firefox Quantum with new customization settings, better extensions support, privacy and what's more important — speed. 2x faster than old Firefox and faster than Chrome.
Firefox using their own new engine with new Quantum CSS and Quantum DOM rendering. A lot of explanations here. And Chrome uses a lot of memory, Firefox — less.
Also, Firefox has a lot of useful features like showing useless CSS rules and supports prefers-color-scheme: dark media rules, that Chrome supports only in beta now.
Do you scare about extensions? Now, most developers write their extensions for both Chrome and Firefox.
And the final reason — stop the monopoly. Give a chance to other companies that smaller and you can see how frontend develops.
Move all your bookmarks in Firefox for one week and try.
Latest comments (100)
A chance? Where Mozilla removed all their unique creations to be mainstream user compatible and removed their massive amount of customization almost fully in the meantime out of the browser?
Also, Mozilla is dominated and controlled by Google and Mozilla jumps if their overlord commands them to do so.
Seeing no reason why i should support sell-outs - both moral wise and concept wise!
A chance? After Mozilla made a pathetic Chrome imitation browser out of it to be mainstream compatible and for this removed their own unique creation and massive customization abilities?
I see no reason why i should support a cheap sell-out company which is the slave of Google and does everything what their overlord demands.
Why Firefox is useless as a development tool? Works good for me: love seeing useless CSS styles and work with fonts
Why go give chance to Firefox instead of using and sync Chrome on all platforms. Because if you like Google Ecosystem, but don't have Chromebook (original, not with installed Linux), your single way to that ecosystem is Chrome with all it sync of accounts, history etc. Firefox just don't do it very well, because they don't have their own OS now(who remember FirefoxOs?)) If you are paranoid, I am sure, that Firefox don't secure enough for you, so you will go with Thor. BUT Firefox and some other browsers must exist and try to overthrought Chrome (despite they obviously don't able to do it) because competition will move industry (browser in our case) forward. Shortly, Firefox and other than Chrome browsers must exist, but they are doomed to fail, because they are not ready to world of tech ecosystems
Yes, Chrome in some aspects is better than most of the browsers, but now Firefox has interesting features for web developers (for example dev.to/gabe/four-firefox-dev-tools...). I also love Chrome and it's very good working with cache, but a lot of developers using ONLY Chrome, that's not good. We need to support other companies and users, who use Firefox and use what is convenient in our case. Using ONLY Chrome is like using a spoon for all of our cases (do you like digging with a spoon?)
Chrome with all it plugins is module swiss knife, while firefox is swiss knife, but some instruments doesn't look or work as good as in chrome
Swiss knife is a bad knife, bad screwdriver, bad corkscrew, bad scissors but all in one. Not so good
You haven't just used good Swiss knifes)
Forgot to mention, Google's site like search, YouTube, gmail etc are undoubtedly popular and just works better with Chrome (it can be just tricks from Google, but they have rights to use them imo,because these services are developed by then)
Great article, i will give a chance to Firefox
Thanks!
they betrayed us by removing extensions in 57 and are not doing anything to get us back
they have to atone for their sins, they have to pay us back in full, and in the meantime we have Waterfox that cares about people, unlike Mozilla
The only reason I don't use
Firefoxbecause of its aesthetics. Chrome just looks good, I have no problem with performance as my laptop's configuration is good enough to handle 100+ tabs in Chrome while running 2-3 instances of VS Code and some other small applications.Show me how to customize its look and feel!!!
Firefox just looks good for me. Don't have problems with it
It's really difficult moving away from chrome for browsing. This is more difficult now that all my passwords are randomly generated and I access them by being 2-Factor authenticated into chrome, not to mention all the other information synchronized via cloud.
Moving away from anything is difficult, but sometimes it's worth
Have almost switched a few times in the last few months and finally did today. Exported my chrome passwords to last pass and away we go.
Good step!
In Firefox on MacOS, I don't know what the problem is, but my 2017 MacBook Pro has TERRIBLE battery life when using Firefox. And I mean terrible. It literally will use 1-2% of battery per minute, and will drain my battery in about an hour to an hour and a half at most.
This is a known bug with screen scaling on MacOS, but oddly when I recently reinstalled MacOS and didn't touch the Display Settings, the bug still happened. Until this is fixed, Safari gives me several times the battery life. I wish I could use Firefox, but it just has a lot of performance problems on my laptop. :(
I am using Windows + Firefox and after realizing this article I hear a lot of bad comments from MBP Firefox users. Strange bug with performance and battery life. Mozilla need to fix this
Here is a suggestion... Mozilla go do what Vivaldi have done to improve the power features of a browser, literately go copy every option Vivaldi has, alot are features from various Firefox addons back when Firefox wasn't just a chrome clone. Do that I might come back.
Until then, Firefox has nothing I care about any longer, it's only dev tool that chromium devtools doesn't have is the css history changes which make it useful to make numerous css changes in a session and then get a list of them all to implement properly in code..... it could still be better, but where are the devtool features that chromium has and Firefox doesn't?
Sad because since Firefox v3.5-> until Quantum garbage... was only browser that was truly customizable with some of the best browser addons, and from v2 - v4 were some of the best progresses Mozilla made for the web browser experience... after v4 it just started becoming stupid, pointless shit changes on the ux side, fluff crap that paled in comparison to the usefulness of addons they often broke, it seemed like they had employed googletards into the company and it became cancer, more useless version upgrades and pointless changes breaking far better addons for what? crap updates.
I had enough after Quantum, final straw, Firefox literately turned into a chrome clone, broke all of it's best addons, and turned out even worse on features than Vivaldi... what a sad joke Mozilla, all of the pointless fluff they did from v3.5 onwards.. finally leading to having a browser less people even care about. Frankly Quantum version of Firefox shouldn't even have the name Firefox, Firefox is dead.
They should have just called it QuantumChrome CrapFox...to be fair.. Google garbage Chrome on it's own is even more complete crap, but yknow for all the normies, good is just whatever seems work at doing basic normie stuff seemingly fast and is marketed infront of them alot...youtube was good for increasing garbage chrome usage.
this, if they don't want to give us APIs to allow us to make extensions then give us native features
but Vivaldi isn't really a role model, they are repeating a lot of mistakes Opera (Software) did: implementing POC level features and never reiterating to bring config to them
I've been using Firefox almost exclusively as a developer for over 3 years now. It's gotten better with Quantum. It can be hard to switch browsers especially given that some extensions you rely on can create silos, and because you sync some stuff on to the browser account, so I pick stuff that is more likely to be cross-platform and less influenced by other business considerations. My reasons:
When on the off-chance I'm developing a front-end app, I can rely on Firefox to support the canonical HTML/CSS/ES standards and I can test cross-browser with Opera.
it got much worse with Quantum, even if we forget about all the performance issues it had (and seems to still have on some systems) it's nowadays just a glorified chromium with no features to make users happy, WE limitations are so bad it's PITA to create proper Pocket client or RSS reader (still a bit less bad than actual Chromium extensions though) but there's so much things you can't do...
I don't have any problem with software that's provided with freely available source code. Along with Google valiant efforts to enhance open web standards, W3C. Making the web better for everybody, and making those improvements not propriety and licenced but part of the open standards.
I hear the arguments about "browser dominance", however we aren't living in the same time as IE.
IE was a horrible tool, it made propriety changes that benefited nobody but Microsoft. It created it's own standards. Dominated the market; Strategized to make its features only work on IE and IE only work on Windows.
Now our issue is that a browser that's open source developed with open standards has become very (too?) popular, and doesn't run non-standard, propriety, ad blocking functions.
I will be sticking with Chrome until they stop providing improvements to the W3C.
Firefox just isn't keeping up with open efforts to improve the W3C along with often times not meeting the W3C standards, this is why CSS doesn't, didn't, work correctly in Firefox sometimes.
The current state seems like Firefox doesn't want the standards to improve because they aren't on top... Or can't keep up...? Either that or some twisted conspiracy from Microsoft to start fueds between fully open source, open standards browsers then package and force Edge, IE under chromium EEE disguise, browser back into all our lives.
I don’t mean you need just to use Firefox. If so, why we talking about monopoly. I think we need to try different solutions in dev world. Chrome is too popular and a lot of people didn’t tried Firefox or tried a long time ago. We need to give a chance. Personally I am using both Chrome and Firefox as developer
Oh definitely! Firefox is definitely my second used browser!
I've been transitioning back over to FF for a month or so, for both personal and work use. However, I'm also slowly breaking my dependence on Google in general. My personal laptop (running Ubuntu 19) only has Firefox and Thunderbird which I use for my ProtonMail account. Google has been shifting far away from their core values for a while and it's starting to show in their products IMO.
I stopped using Firefox on Ubuntu due to a bug that prevents the 1password extension from working.
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