I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon.
Either the author doesn’t know about the Manifest v2 deprecation or is saying it’s “unserious” to believe this might improve Firefox’s market share. Either way, goofy.
I would say that pretty much no one cares about the deprecation of Manifest v2 outside our little tech circle. Heck, not even the tech circle cares too much about this given how many use Chrome anyway. I hate to be saying this, but I’m afraid the author is right.
Many of the Chromium forks have small teams, sigificantly smaller and with little actual in-engine experience compared to Firefox for example.
These teams need to have sufficient resources to maintain a reasonably significant fork of a standard, which will likely get harder over time, and which none of them presently deal with, as they ride the standards implemented by Chromium so far.
Additionally they would have to maintain their own extension stores, which many presently don’t.
I hate to break it to you but Firefox is terrible in the UI/UX department. I wish Mozilla was better at actually being a good company and nonprofit but they seem to have fallen to the way side.
With that being said, I will refuse to use anything other than librewolf. My government isn’t going to dictate what browser to use. I do a lot of paper anyway so its not a big deal.
How is it terrible though? Argument it, because in my opinion, the UI is very similar across all browsers, and Firefox UX has always been better for me.
This shouldn’t be a big deal unless they go out of their way to use non-standard Chrome-only features.
It’s not like the early 2000s where you absolutely had to test everything on every browser because they differed so much and everyone was adding random non-standard features. I haven’t ran into something that doesn’t work on Firefox in quite a long time, even when all the development happens on Chrome.
Pretty much everything these days ends up through babel and automatic polyfills and browserlists. Unless they have a whole custom framework that somehow directly uses Chrome-specific APIs it’s unlikely Firefox will be left unusable. They have to deal with Safari regardless, and if Safari works, Firefox probably does. Safari is like the new IE these days in terms of bugs and missing standard features, and because you’re forced to use Safari on iOS, and iPhones are so popular, I seriously doubt they’d drop Safari either.
What gets me is when websites don’t work on Safari. Really? Like a significant portion of traffic is to iOS, it’s a single browser you have to target, on millions of devices. And you couldn’t even make it work there.
Apple makes it basically impossible to do proper testing for compatibility without buying a Mac or paying someone else that has a Mac to run your tests. Their entire app infrastructure is like this.
Another problem is that Safari is not compatible with the web. Like, I’m not going to prevent myself from using aspect ratios on images because some people made the bad decision of getting an inferior phone that locks them out of using good browsers. And many devs couldn’t have known about it until the website was done and published to prod and iOS users started complaining about it because testing with Safari costs thousands of dollars in Apple hardware - and even if it was caught, it’s still Apple’s fault.
But ensuring full compatibility with all three major engines (those being gecko, blink and webkit) is unnecessarily hard, as they have their own subset of features
For example: Webkit does not support extending built-in HTML elements using WebComponent, but Gecko and Blink do support this feature. Or Chrome being the only browser that fully supports the View Transitions API. Or webkit’s CSS vendor prefixes
The list goes on and on.
You could fix most of these issues by providing polyfills, but that increases the amount of files that you have to load in order to make a feature work on other browsers.
If only there was some sort of standard… Oh wait, there is one, W3C. Idk what they are doing tho.
Doubt, it may have less market share now but could still have more total users. Apple needs to be made to allow real alternative browser on the iPhone, and why are chromium browsers counted separately?
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