I'm surprised at the success of Mozilla's PR push for this. It seems the time is right for this. Probably helps that tech sites seem to compete to have an article on every "current" topic.
It's good to see Mozilla's ramped up PR, but given how deeply entrenched Chrome is, I doubt it will be enough. That is why we developers, if we support Firefox's/Mozilla's mission, must make it our goal to spread the word. I'm setting a personal goal to let 5 (non-tech) people (mostly in my family) know about this.
I've only seen tech articles/blog posts for Mozilla's PR, so while that is great, they may need to expand their efforts to include the general public. Chrome did speed-test television ads [0] like, Is Chrome faster than a potato cannon? that were appealing to a general audience. Not suggesting Mozilla do this. Perhaps reaching out to universities and school districts to adopt Firefox as their default browser? At my university if you went on a public computer all it had on the desktop was Chrome, so guess what people are going to use, not only on school computers but on their personal devices? The same is true for my high school.
I commend Mozilla for their giant task at hand, taking on such a technological behemoth that has uncountable benefits when it comes to advertising their browser.
Using the new Firefox, I find myself wishing the phone OS project had succeeded. I want something to Android what Quantum is to Chrome. Timing is everything, I wonder if it could have succeeded now.
We'd finally have been free from the shit Google and Apple keep pulling. I'm afraid the mobile train is so long gone that it's impossible to get on board now. Even Microsoft, armed with a solid polished product could not make a dent.
I don't think you necessarily need a large market share. You just need your alternative to be viable for individuals to choose to use. Then if it's better, you'll gain users.
Firefox itself needs large market share, as a bulkhead against sites that work only in {IE6|Chrome}.
Mobile OSes need large enough market share because you have to persuade the proprietors of important services to make their services available on the OS — if those services aren't available, your OS won't have enough utility for most users.
But it is possible to get a large number of services working on an unpopular mobile OS — if there's a common standard that unpopular platforms can make use of, which is good enough for most users — such as web apps.
(For example, DuckDuckGo can succeed or fail on merit, because it's a viable alternative. In the Linux bubble, most apps don't specifically target unpopular distros, but they can make use of the same source code or the same packaging formats.)
So if we want better mobile OSes, we should support interoperability of apps.
Ah yes. The fight for smartphone OS dominance is unfortunately over, but I do hope a company like Mozilla could secure a leading spot in the next big consumer technology platform (my bet would be AR), so we can have the option to choose an open platform that respects user freedom, backed by a team that truly has the users' best interests in mind.
>an open platform that respects user freedom, backed by a team that truly has the users' best interests in mind.
Until they begin introducing useless features no one has asked for, redesigning the interface - I'm sorry - "user experience" to be more "modern" (cough... chrome-like... cough) and then change the API without full backward compatibility rendering about a decade of extensions - cough... addons - cough... I think they back to calling them extensions - useless.
Not to mention the users, who had about a decade worth of muscle memory and their extensions configured just the way they like, who now have to start over.
It would be fascinating to know if Mozilla's financing model makes advertising a no-brainer, i.e. the cost of switching 1,000 users is more/less than the search bar revenue from 1,000 users.
'DOM' panel in FF DevTools unfortunately still doesn't distinguished between inbuilt native DOM nodes and custom DOM nodes from JS code - making the DOM panel still completely useless. Firebug grouped non-native DOM nodes (the interesting ones for devs) and sorted them on top, and marked them in bold font - non of these is in the new FF. Until DOM panel still a work-in-progress, I cannot switch.
I still keep a Firebug 48 with old Firebug addon around, because of the awesome DOM panel (that also Chrome doesn't have).
Yes, thanks! It's hard to describe, but this page nails it including the screenshots!
Love your own
There are two kinds of objects and functions - those that
are part of the standard DOM, and those that are from your
own JavaScript code. Firebug can tell the difference, and
shows you your own script-created objects and functions in
bold at the top of the list.
To be even more discriminating, use the options menu to
completely hide different kinds of objects. For instance:
Show Own Properties Only hides derived properties from the
prototype chain, Show Enumerable Properties Only hides non-
enumerable properties and Show Inline Event Handler shows
inline event handlers that are not associated with functions.
With "your own JS code" it means the JS libraries, the JS code of your website. Also any changes to DOM made by JS code is also highlighted in bold and different colors like green and red. Try it out yourself, you will see it's very useful undo you will ask yourself, why haven't I used it in the past.
I fear as it's now hard to impossible to try out Firebug with current Firefox, and the WebDevTools have long forgotten the past functionality of Firebug, we may never again get this valuable features back. :(
But to try it out yourself, either download FF48 portable and install an older Firebug revision (the last two Firebug revisions are "fake" meaning the basically remove Firebug, so use an older Firebug from 2015, you have to install it manually, or downgrade it)
Despite the downvotes by people who don't got it, it's a very valuable feature that made a Firebug so special and useful.
Please Mozilla devs, try it out, and you will get it in 1min how useful it is, and please add it to DevTools. (@Chrome devs: please also add it)
