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.
Oldest comments (99)
a picture says thousand words.
When you are a developer you need to test things all of them just to make sure, but as a user it comes down to preference and it lies on details. I use Opera, in my opinion an extremely underrated browser, it is fast, never had any memory problems with it and has features that none of the other browsers have without resorting to plugins, which sometimes are not reliable or well developed.
I tried to use Firefox many times, there was always something that bothered me and stopped using after a few hours and it is the proof that all this lies on details. Unfortunately I cannot take a print screen now, but I can do that later. In any case it is something about the custom scroll that Tweetdeck that it doesn't render at all.
Yes, we have a lot of underrated things that good, but I write this article as developer on a developers resource. I don’t think that Opera is so good for developing
Why do you think that? Opera uses chromium and basically the same tools that Chrome has works on Opera. The DevTools is the same.
Oh. Need to check
I have used both Firefox and Opera quite extensively, and eventually moved to Vivaldi. Best decision ever. I can honestly say it’s the best browser available today, and I have tried them all, not just for a test run. It has about all the features I could think of, and so much more I never knew I needed.
I even made a post all about it. Check it out!
And if we’re talking about not supporting the biggest kid in town, then sure, ditch Chrome, but Firefox is the second biggest (iirc). Don’t get me wrong, Firefox is great, I used it (and Quantum) for years, and I really support Mozilla, BUT it just doesn’t compare to Vivaldi, in my opinion. Try it out, you might just get to love as much as I do 😄
Okay, going to check it out
It's all Blinkopoly, the way buttons are shaped doesn't matter. Maxthon never saved the web from IE, Firefox did.
"the way buttons are shaped" makes a browser, that's the exact reason why Firefox 57+ is unusable: they removed what made it great, their extensions, making everyday web surfing a struggle
Although I definitely agree that we need more competition in the Web to facilitate rapid advancements, I just feel bad for the web developers who would have to consider supporting all the different browsers (not just Chromium-based ones) if the monopoly were to end.
The horrors that is Webpack arose from the horrors that is the Web's philosophy of multi-browser and cross-platform backwards-compatibility. I wouldn't say that the philosophy is bad, but it sure does rile up a lot of web developers to support Internet Explorer.
We need to support most of browsers because if we’ll have one browser or technology, there will not more competition and moving forward. And monopoly is bad because of all our data stored in one company and there’s no privacy
Fair point, but then again, I pray for the poor souls who are on the receiving end of that competition.
Of course, this is not to say that I disagree with the competition. This is just some tough nut that I'm not really sure where to place myself in. It's quite a dilemma.
It is actually not so hard to support different browsers. You can use standard APIs that are managed by W3C and work across (almost) all browsers.
But if one browser or company has monopoly (which Google currently has), they can create their own APIs that works how they want and not how users or developers want. Sadly, developers have to adopt that new API even if it is not good or even throw away good old API because Google didn't like it (like that recent one about ad blocking).
Also, if you leave Chrome and then use another Chromium based browser, this wouldn't stop Google's monopoly. Even if Chromium is open source, it is still managed by Google so they can do whatever they want.
Do you live in a fantasy world? Are you being ironic?
My clients still request IE11 support... I must say that at least IE11 has easy fixes and an official test VM. Safari has none of those and is a hell to deal with. But that doesn't matter.
Monopoly in the browsers world has always been bad and this one might become the worst of all.
Also, Firefox and Chrome mostly agree on the features that they both implement so it's really easy to support both.
In a perfect world, diversity is definitely great! We have a bunch of standards committees that guide the many browsers towards a common interface and API for the Web. If all of these browsers comply with all (or at least most) of the standards at the same pace, then diversity will truly bring the best out of competition. Firefox and Chrome, as you said, are a great example of two competing browsers that implement standards at around the same pace, and thus introducing good competition.
Unfortunately, we don't live in such a world. Google is a monster of a company who has a bunch of resources that can easily stump and outpace the other smaller browser vendors in implementing web standards (in such a world with a diverse ecosystem of browsers).
My point is not to say that a monopoly is entirely good or entirely bad. I'm simply worried for the web developers and teams who might have a harder time to support a diverse ecosystem of (small) browsers that each implement web standards at a different pace.
But again, if pacing is not a problem, then I'm definitely all for diversity. Competition is always a good thing (from a user standpoint at least 😅).
Well I'm saying that unregulated monopoly is all bad and especially if the company holding it is as big as Google is.
Suppose that someone tells you that you can have as many chocolate cakes as you want as long as you keep your balls in their vice. But hey they promise not to squeeze! Would you do it?
Abdicating on competition and letting Chrome win is exactly doing this. No later than last month Google announced that they would make some browser API paid.
Is that worthwhile to give so much power to Google in exchange of glitter down your throat just a few week in advance from the competition?
Ah, I apologize. I misunderstood earlier.
Of course it would not be pleasant to be in such a situation as we are in right now. It just surprises me, given the "free" nature of the Web, Google is considering to add proprietary features and APIs. Something doesn't seem to be adding up.
But that's besides the point. I see now how my initial comment sounded as if I was "letting Google win for the sake of giving developers less work for browser support". I failed to properly communicate the true essence of my point wherein "too much diversity" is bad from a web developer standpoint.
Plus, Firefox Developer Edition has awesome developer tools.
The only thing about Firefox for me is sometimes it just stops loading pages on desktop, I feel like it is a DNS issue but I'm not sure.
Was using Firefox for a while and moved back to chrome cos they have a very poor CS
Well, I am using Firefox from the time it was named "Phoenix". With a little pause, when they started to make their UI like the Chrome one. But I switched to PaleMoon that uses a forked Gecko engine. But with Quantum, they fixed the UI as well and with some hacking I can make it as I like it.
Thanks! Another browser to my list for testing
But Firefox is a good step to start trying other browsers. I have a lot of recommendations about Vivaldi and Brave and want to try them. Thanks!
Antifa is not a shady group. That’s just right wing populism, because Antifa is an organization „fighting“ against Nazis ever coming to any power.
I am from Germany and I am worried about right wing populism getting more and more voices, so I‘d prefer such organizations getting some money instead of for example „Völkische Bruderschaft“
I am almost a Firefox user. Problem is, I get weird scroll behavior when on an infinite scroll site (like Reddit or Facebook.) Things would jump around as the page was loading.
Though I might try again since I'm not having that behavior now.
Everything works good for me. Maybe, I didn’t scroll so long
Yeah I just tried out a few different sites and nothing was up, but a few months ago I tried to switch from Chrome but all the sites with infinite scroll behaved weird. Even went to reddit about it but found no help.
Maybe an update got rid of whatever it was.
Now I want to test Brave. Maybe it’s better
Brave is just a chromium with few flags flipped, exactly unusable as other projects like this and even worse than crippled quantumfox
90 alternatives.
dev.to/vuild/giant-list-of-web-bro...
The majority of dev is using Android & Chrome rn. No good.
Wow, giant list
👍
Discontinued is interesting too.
vuild.com/discontinued-browsers
Disclaimer: they are both lists, not recommendations.
How many browsers I didn't heard about
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