Mozilla Firefox is a feature-rich and highly customizable web browser that’s user-friendly enough for beginners and sophisticated enough for advanced users. Firefox has managed to retain significant market share despite stiff competition from Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer and Edge. We have this problem on a Mac running Mavericks. FF crashed last Thursday and on Friday, I trashed Firefox and tried to download a new one. We are still getting the same message about FF already being open (even though there is no sign of FF nor a profile anywhere on the computer, as far as I can tell).Mozilla Firefox 4 is now finally out for regular. This new version of Mozilla Firefox has a number of amazing enhancements and consumes less RAM than it's older counterparts.He admits that Firefox has fallen behind Chrome, Microsoft’s Edge, and Apple’s Safari technically, but says the company is executing with total focus on a plan to reverse that. Thinking of changing your Mac's browser We pick our top 6 including Safari, Edge Chromium, Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi and more. Apple's Safari browser comes as standard on. If you are on a Mac computer with Apple Silicon and update from an older version to Firefox 84 or higher, you will need to fully exit and restart Firefox after the update (as explained here).
Firefox 2010 Download A New![]() It claims — without revealing the exact figures — that its daily and monthly active users metric grew in 2016 for the first time in four years, by “high single-digits.”And it has been paying more attention to mobile browsing. “We build one because we love browsers.” A little good newsThe company brags that Firefox is finally showing signs of growth. But, he says, Firefox does.“Everyone else builds a browser for defensive reasons,” says Mayo. For instance, one add-on places the tabs down the side instead of across the top. Whatever you think of Firefox, if you’re an iOS user, Focus is worth a try.The company has also relaunched something called Test Pilot, a home for experimental add-ons that change the desktop browser experience. I find Focus snappy and dead simple to use. It grew out of a tracker-blocker the company had built for Safari. It’s a stripped-down app that automatically blocks all trackers as you move around the web. The reason, Mayo said, was that Mozilla realized that iOS users surf the web much more than their more numerous Android-using counterparts.If you’re an iOS user, Firefox Focus is worth a tryIn November, Mozilla introduced a second iOS browser — Firefox Focus. It was almost entirely focused on trying to sell a new, web-based mobile operating system (Firefox OS) for cheap phones in developing countries, taking on the Android juggernaut. What happened?So how did Mozilla get into the weak position from which it must now rebuild? Essentially, the company spent three years, from 2013 through 2015, wandering down a blind trail and taking Firefox for granted. And it has a lucrative search deal with Yahoo that will pay it handsomely even if Verizon completes its takeover of Yahoo. The “aspirational” goal, he says, would be around 20 percent on the desktop.Mozilla reports that it’s in the black, although its financials are different from those of a normal company because of the nonprofit foundation to which it is tied. He says the minimal viable position would be a solid 15 percent share, at least on the desktop, and an unspecified uptick on mobile. Competing browsers already had this technology.In my experience, Firefox today is still only a meh product. In fact, in a 2013 onstage interview about the new direction with Mozilla’s then-CEO, my very first question was simply: “What the f**k”?)On top of that, the company endured turmoil in its management ranks.When Mozilla returned its focus to Firefox, it had to devote all of 2016 to just catching up on things like running each tab in its own process, so a crash in one wouldn't crash the whole browser. “It was close to a bet-the-farm effort,” he says.(Side note: this plan never made much sense to me. For instance, Chrome too often taxes the resources of my laptops, slowing things down. Still, at least for me, its competitors have their own flaws, so there’s an opportunity. But often, it lags a bit and has trouble with heavy, ad-laden sites. Make google your homepage for macThe idea is to use differential privacy — the same kind of privacy-respecting machine learning that Apple uses — to suggest places on the web to go for particular needs, rather than getting navigational answers from search.Mayo calls this “navigation by browser, not Google” and declares: “Navigation in the browser has been stagnant for a decade and we’re not going to stand for that.”Both of these projects are aimed squarely at mobile versions of Firefox as well as the desktop version, Mayo says. And the content most important to you will automatically get the highest priority, focusing processing power where you need it the most.”Mayo calls this “navigation by browser, not Google.”Another cornerstone for the new Firefox is a project called the Context Graph that aims to use an enhanced browser history to replace navigational search. Animations and interactive apps will respond instantly, and be able to handle more intensive content while holding consistent frame rates. Pages will load faster, and scrolling will be silky smooth. In an October blog post by David Bryant, head of platform engineering, the company claimed this:“We are striving for performance gains from Quantum that will be so noticeable that your entire web experience will feel different. Still, Mozilla claims that it “aims to pass Chrome on key performance measures that matter by end of year.”To do that, the company is betting on something called Project Quantum, a new under-the-hood browsing engine that will replace big chunks of Mozilla’s ancient Gecko engine. And I think a healthy, widely used web matters. But I’m rooting for Firefox, because I think the big platform companies, for whom the browser isn’t a central product anymore, need competition. And I’m not a foe of apps and search, or of Google and Apple. Bottom LineI have no idea if Mozilla can rescue Firefox, and make it into something special again.
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