> Why bother using FF at this point?
Because the alternative is that Blink becomes the new IE6.
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at the moment I plan on continuing using firefox so I'm not leaving but you can't keep using a browser with a worse experience because of some futile moral cause. Firefox has to earn their place and be a browser people to use. I think firefox going after the general public makes sense but when it comes at an expense to generally more advanced users they've probably gone a step too far though to be fair they don't have nearly as many devs as other browsers like chrome and edge.
"Worse" = very highly subjective
"Moral cause" = many people will walk right away from even expensive software over these kinds of things.
Just saying.
If it weren't for those 'using a browser with a worse experience because of some futile moral cause', IE would still be king.
Characterizing early Firefox as only gaining traction because people had more warm fuzzy feelings for it seems off to me, although I wasn't around at the time personally.
I started using Firefox in the late 2000s mostly because I switched to Linux, and Chrome wasn't a thing yet. The web dev tools were better (firebug, anyone?), there were extensions like pentydactyl and whichever predecessor it had back in the day, and overall I just preferred the UI.
Pretty much every reason I originally used Firefox is gone now. I used it out of habit now and because it's less memory intensive still, but that's it. There's just not much going for Firefox except being backed by "the good guys" in a fight against the Empire. Even the cross platform support has withered with all the Chrome components like Skia and dependencies on tools like node.js (ironic that Firefox needs chrome's javascript engine to compile) limiting it to mainstream target triplets.
Firefox is trying to stay usable and I applaud that, but now they're just perpetually stuck trying to play catch up with Chrome's features and performance, always lagging behind, either a little or a lot. Chrome sets the web standards -- I think Firefox has simply lost.
Actually not Firefox, but Konqueror. From conqueror came KHTML which was later the base for webkit which evolved in chrome and the rest is history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
Uh, no? That argument would only make sense if IE were better than every alternative but died because people merely chose to not use it... in fact, it wasn't until the big lawsuits against Microsoft caused IE to stagnate and then better browsers existed that people switched to--first Firefox targeting developers / power users and then (later) Chrome laying waste to the entire field on performance--that IE was dethroned. We thereby need the same thing today: an arrow in the leg of Chrome (though I sadly don't know if we could even pull off an anti-competition suit against them with the current landscape... I am bullish always on such and I am not even seeing the argument :/) and some game-changing competition (which is hard to predict, but doesn't seem to be coming from Firefox the more they try to just emulate Chrome).
Konqueror was worse than most popular browsers of the era but users and developers did not gave up on it. It was enough for KHTML eventually evolve in webkit which eventually powered most popular browsers these days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML .
People sticking to their principles and willing to use a less advanced browser just to guarantee its improvement is what gave us the fast browsers we have today.
Man, I remember the Mozilla days, and then Phoenix and Firebird... so many issues, so many problems. But there was a sense of belonging to "the good web" which would have inevitably triumphed. And then Google showed us that anything can be corrupted.