Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?
- Reference: 1622587894
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/06/01/firefox_89_redesign/
- Source link:
Firefox matters more than most web browsers, because it uses its own browser engine, called Quantum, and its own JavaScript engine, called SpiderMonkey. By contrast, most other browsers, including Chrome and Chromium, Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi use the Google-sponsored Blink engine, while Apple's Safari uses WebKit (from which Blink was forked). The existence of multiple independent implementations is important for web standards, helping to prevent a single vendor from pushing through changes without consensus, and ensuring that the standards are coherent.
A glance at a statistics site like [1]W3Counter is telling. In April 2008, Microsoft enjoyed a 63 per cent market share with Internet Explorer, and with Firefox performing strongly behind it at 29.3 per cent. By April 2010, IE was down to 48.6 per cent, Firefox up to 32.7 per cent, and Google's newer Chrome was starting to make an impact, at 8.3 per cent.
[2]
[3]
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In April 2012, the three were almost on a par, though Chrome (26.8 per cent) had overtaken Firefox (25 per cent). Today, Chrome is at 65.3 per cent, Safari second at 16.7 per cent, IE and Edge has 5.7 per cent, and Firefox has just 4.1 per cent share. Despite numerous updates, Mozilla's browser has declined from 6.1 per cent share a year ago. [5]Statcounter tells a similar story, reporting a 3.59 per cent share for Firefox, down from 4.21 per cent a year ago.
[6]Firefox to adopt Chrome's new approach to extensions – sans the part that threatens ad blockers
[7]Big changes for devs: Chrome 91 lands with WebAssembly SIMD, JSON modules, clipboard file support
[8]Icarus moment: Mozilla Thunderbird was saving OpenPGP keys in plaintext after encryption snafu
[9]Tor users, beware: 'Scheme flooding' technique may be used to deanonymize you
The decline is a concern, then, not only for Mozilla but also for standards advocates. In this overall context it is no surprise that Mozilla hopes has embarked on a redesign, which is now available in [10]Firefox 89 . Mozilla has posted not one, not two, but four articles and videos on the new look Firefox, as well as the [11]release notes for developers.
The vid below summarizes the design refresh on desktop and mobile:
[12]Youtube Video
At a glance, there are no huge changes under the covers though [13]top level await is a useful new feature for JavaScript modules. Another new feature that is not part of the redesign is that [14]Total Cookie Protection , which confines most cookies to the site where they were created, is on by default in private browsing.
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The redesign, on the other hand, includes a new icon set, new typography, and simplified menus. There are now just two menu buttons, the hamburger menu top right, and a right-click menu; the three-dots menu in the address bar has gone.
Tabs are visually more distinct from the rest of the browser window and feature controls when multimedia is active that can be used to mute sounds; they are easier to float and dock than before. Mozilla said that it optimized permission dialog boxes specifically for Google Meet to reduce the number of prompts. Notifications and alerts have been reduced, and the team [16]claimed there are more cohesive and calmer visuals with "more consistent styling, lighter iconography, a refined color palette, and a more modern aesthetic for screens of all sizes."
Mozilla [17]said that its redesign is based on telemetry showing that 43 per cent of clicks go to the tab bar, 33 per cent to the navigation bar below it, and 5 per cent to the bookmark bar.
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Regarding standards compliance, Firefox 89 scored 513 on [19]HTML5 Test versus 528 for both the latest Edge and Chrome on our Windows 10 box. Regarding performance, Edge 91 and Chrome 91 both scored 116 on [20]JetStream2 whereas Firefox 89 could only manage 74 on our particular PC. In both respects, Firefox is good enough though the performance gap looks significant.
Perhaps more interesting is the matter of privacy and business model. Mozilla is pitched as a privacy-preserving browser though not to the same extent as Brave; it has a ton of strong features for blocking trackers yet it is compromised by the importance of Google to its business model. In 2019, a [21]financial report [PDF] showed that royalties, paid for setting Firefox's default search engine and understood to be largely from Google, make up the bulk of Moz's regular revenue.
Mozilla CTO Eric Rescorla [22]posted a few days ago on the matter of "the future of ads and privacy" but with few conclusions; similarly a [23]Mozilla post the same day on "a more privacy preserving ads-based ecosystem," states that "the advertising ecosystem is fundamentally broken" but only introduces the topic. Rescorla promises thoughts on Google's [24]controversial FLoC are "coming soon." These issues are important since it will likely take more than a user-interface refresh, pleasing though it is, to recover market share for Firefox. Maybe a firm stand on privacy and web standards would help. ®
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[1] https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YLcCYhbPSiQINRReSbqyswAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YLcCYhbPSiQINRReSbqyswAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YLcCYhbPSiQINRReSbqyswAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://gs.statcounter.com/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/28/mozilla_chrome_mozilla/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/26/chrome_91_release/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/24/mozilla_thunderbird_openpgp_plaintext_keys/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/14/browser_fingerprinting_flaw/
[10] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/fresh-new-look-for-firefox/
[11] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/89
[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czEGwcZSYyo
[13] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/await#top-level-await
[14] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/02/23/total-cookie-protection/
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YLcCYhbPSiQINRReSbqyswAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/new-firefox-coming-june-1/
[17] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/modern-clean-new-firefox-clears-the-way-to-all-you-need-online/
[18] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YLcCYhbPSiQINRReSbqyswAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[19] https://html5test.com/
[20] https://browserbench.org/JetStream2.0/
[21] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-2019-short-form-0926.pdf
[22] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/the-future-of-ads-and-privacy/
[23] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/building-a-more-privacy-preserving-ads-based-ecosystem/
[24] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/14/browser_makers_reject_google_floc/
[25] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: What does it take...
Already had the coffee. I need something stronger.
We need Firefox to keep going
I use Brave on Android and Firefox on Windows/Linux, and see no reason to change. What with Google's casual attitude to ad-blocking (i.e. not much) I'm avoiding Chrome and recommending others to do the same.
Re: We need Firefox to keep going
Indeed. Firefox + Adblocker + No script.
Not invincible -- but getting there.
NO CHROME!!!
If Firefox want more privacy-savvy users, they have to get out of Google's bed.
Until they do, they'll keep losing share.
It never ceases to amaze me how many IT professionals that know about GDPR, IT privacy and all that, still insist on using Chrome and Google and often decry Microsoft Edge like they some data stealing demon, unlike those nice Google people......
Just why would you?
Most likely here on TheReg I've read that the only 2 browsers that send a machine ID (doesn't change if you reinstall browser, perhaps OS) are chrome-based Edge and Yandex browser, also chrome-based.
If that's the case both Edge and Chrome are equally bad, for different reasons
Can't recall exactly how to find that article so don;t take my word for it.
This the original study: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf
Quote from the conclusions:
"From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex are qualitatively different from the other browsers studied. Both send persistent identifiers than can be used to link requests(and associated IP address/location) to back end servers. Edge also sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft and Yandex similarly transmits a hashed hardware identifier to back end servers. As far as we can tell this behaviour cannot be disabled by users. In addition to the search autocomplete functionality that shares details of web pages visited, both transmit web page information to servers that appear unrelated to search autocomplete."
A lot of people complaining about the UI changes on other forums. As my daily browser is Firefox Nightly (since long before Nightly was a thing, and long before Minefield) I saw these introduced incrementally, which lessened the ‘jarring’ effect.
And - apart from the new ‘update’ UI, which of course I see all the time - I hadn’t really noticed the other UI changes until I read about them in the 89 release notes. And I do like the tab focus.
Is this enough to save Firefox? Probably not.
Will I ever use a Chromium based browser? No.
(cringe)
"new icon set" ! "new typography" !
Don't you just cringe inside when some group enthusiastically yells "new icons!" Icons do not make a UI. The interactions with the program - the flow of work getting done - are the UI.
It sounds like all they've accomplished is moving tabs around? And squeezing menus through a kitchen strainer?
Moving beach umbrellas around while a tidal wave looms seems less than apt.
Not another UI redesign please!
I hope those floating tabs are not mandatory, looks like they are going towards the whitespace-experience™, like many MS products.
Not a fan of flat UI, but I am ok to keep UI minimal on browsers (still, borderless windows sucks).
My daily browsers are FF since when it was called Firebird and Vivaldi, both at home and at work, but I do not show up in the stats (like many other FF users I guess) because of script/ad blocking and definitely because of user agent spoofing.
I wonder why do they even bother considering those stats especially for FF which is more geek-friendly. IIRC Vivaldi self identifies as Chrome, so it's out of the stats.
This whole user-agent thing is obsolete. The site might need some info about device capabilities (screen size and little more), not what flavour of HTML parser I'm running.
I know that politics, marketing and other BS are involved, but FF should do as Vivaldi does. Call itself chrome and be done with it
Re: Not another UI redesign please!
Isn't Vivaldi using the Chrome engine?
New tab design
I'm liking the new tabs
Privacy is an acquired taste it would seem
People seem to misunderstand the Internet at a fundamental level.
Please, Firefox, just go away already!
The existent of Firefox doesn't help the web standards at all, as shown in its worse standards compliance which can be seen at HTML5 Test for years. Any sane person wouldn't believe that the browser that doesn't follow the standards itself will actually advocate the standards.
Moreover, the performance which has been its issue for so many years is still in place. It's not even close to the competitors. While Chrome/Chromium-based browsers enjoy the newly updated V8 JavaScript compiler, which is 23% faster and saves over 17 years of CPU time daily, Firefox 89 is making a headline with UI redesign (for the better or worse) instead of fixing the very major issue it has been facing for so many years.
Firefox's selling point regarding privacy seems dated to me also. Currently, Chromium is as open and pure if not more. Brave's business model is also more transparent than Firefox. Firefox, on the other hand, is not following the standards all that good, performance-wise is subpar, and most of the money they get to run the project came directly from ads company. What's their mission again?
This article is very well made. Thanks.
What does it take...
...to actually get the concept of privacy into people's heads? Anyone?
Or is it bad marketing that makes Mozilla fail to drive this home better?
I simply don't get it. I'd use Lynx and XMosaic before I use Chrome or Edge. Even my Firefox is loaded with addons to block everything the browser isn't now kindly blocking by itself.
Now for some coffee...