My opinion for the last few years has been that firefox is a total shitshow. There's no innovation in usability whatsoever. All it does is open websites and if you want anything fancy beyond that you'll have to get an extension.
Chrome already does this and markets itself as just doing it better while firefox kinda just passively takes it. Normal users don't read nerdy tech blogs explaining why the latest under-the-hood improvement is cool and improves performance by 0.3% on average.
Just look at vivaldi for a good example of how to do things right: Don't bother convincing people that you're "faster" than chrome and instead spend that time on building actual features.
What does firefox do that chrome doesn't? Vivaldi has tab groups, tiling, full-page screenshots, an option to hibernate background tabs, etc. etc. etc. and even then it struggles to compete with chrome. How the hell would firefox manage without any of those distinguishing features?
I think Gecko doesn't have a chance. I totally believe trying to fight this fact is crying over spilled milk. Microsoft tried. They tried not to lose ground with IE 9. Then again with IE 10. Then with IE 11. Then with Edge.
If Microsoft couldn't win and had to accept Blink, Mozilla can't compete. In its current form, Firefox can’t win. And this critique comes from someone who’s main browser is Firefox. Mozilla can’t compete with Google and Microsoft contributing to Blink (or Apple to WebKit).
From a performance standpoint, Firefox is not better. From a differentiating standpoint, Firefox doesn’t have the extension capabilities it used to. From a user’s perspective, there is very little incentive to recommend Firefox. From a website maintainer’s perspective, every year there is less incentive to support Firefox. This is the same downwards spiral that Microsoft saw.
Gecko will die and Mozilla will have to accept Blink. It’s the hard-cold truth. And all of this is ignoring the fact that Mozilla depends economically on Google.
> From a performance standpoint, Firefox is not better.
Neither is it worse. Firefox is faster at some problems, Chromium is faster at some others. I don't agree that Gecko/SpiderMonkey are doomed, and they certainly aren't doomed on the grounds of performance.
You are correct. But to be fair, that wasn't my point. My point is that Firefox doesn't work properly on as many web pages as Chrome does. This trend will get worse overtime. Why would an end user choose an alternative that breaks their experience with no perceivable benefit?
And yes, there are privacy benefits, but if the end user doesn’t know/doesn’t care then it isn’t a perceivable benefit.
Chrome already does this and markets itself as just doing it better while firefox kinda just passively takes it. Normal users don't read nerdy tech blogs explaining why the latest under-the-hood improvement is cool and improves performance by 0.3% on average.
Just look at vivaldi for a good example of how to do things right: Don't bother convincing people that you're "faster" than chrome and instead spend that time on building actual features.
What does firefox do that chrome doesn't? Vivaldi has tab groups, tiling, full-page screenshots, an option to hibernate background tabs, etc. etc. etc. and even then it struggles to compete with chrome. How the hell would firefox manage without any of those distinguishing features?