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lol, no one complains when apple shoves webkit down your throat or google does the same with mobile chrome. the battle has already been lost mostly-who uses mobile firefox really?

on play store, by installs firefox - 100million+,chrome - 1billion+. firefox is great but it's awkward focus on freedom over usability has led to it's downfall imo




It's obviously a matter of money, politics, and things beyond my imagination but I can't understand why Firefox didn't double down on Servo (and friends) for mobiles.

At one point there was talk about Samsung being a partner and Firefox/Servo becoming the default browser on the Samsung phones. Which would make a perfect sense, since every non-Apple phone gets its performance from multi-core SoC, and Firefox would be the only browser taking advantage of that. Now, after Google getting their hands slapped by the UE regulators, this Samsung/Firefox marriage could be even more fruitful. And yet, the Servo team got assigned to some pointless VR experiments, and it turned out Android was never a priority. Again: I can't understand why, oh, why.


Servo was a test bed, a place to experiment with new technologies on a minimalist browser. The successful underlying technology was/is being moved into Firefox (desktop and mobile).

There's also a new (I think?) mobile browser in progress. I'm not sure how it fits into the larger picture and information is a bit scarce, they just started releasing beta builds.


Yes, Apple gives its 1.3 billion iOS device users zero choice in browser engine and gets a pass.

Google lets any browser engine on Android but they're evil because their browser, Chrome, is #1

If you want a choice in browser the first place you should be pushing is to allow them on iOS. Every other platform, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, you get to choose. I for one would actually like to be able to run real Chromium on iOS to get access to the 100s of standards that Apple has yet to implement. I'm sure lots of Firefox lovers would also like to run real Firefox on iOS as well.


You are missing the part where nobody forces users to choose iOS.


No one is forcing users to choose chrome either. Except all the advocates who suddenly realized that firefox is fighting a losing game


Lots of people complain about your two examples. Google is even changing their Android licensing, making it easier to not ship Chrome by default, because the EU told them off for it.


100 million is actually pretty good. Isn't Chrome the default for many vendors, not to mention what people are most familiar with in the first place?

(I use mobile Firefox myself, it's fine.)


> firefox - 100million

Actually, that's more than I thought. I've always thought that Firefox on mobile is virtually nonexistent but it seems to have more users than any european country (except russia). In any other instance an install base of 100 mil would be wonderful.


installs != active users




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