[HN Gopher] Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
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Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
Author : sildur
Score : 182 points
Date : 2021-09-11 11:21 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.itsfoss.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.itsfoss.com)
| clement_b wrote:
| I use both Chrome (for work) and Firefox (personal) on Windows.
| Beyond a few specifics, I often can't remember which I am using.
| There might be many differences under the hood, but in a regular
| usage Firefox is really damn good. Even on Google's properties. I
| also use Firefox exclusively on mobile, and same. At the end of
| the day, they are two very mature, slightly different executions
| of the same concept. I get the frustrations that may exist on the
| power user / dev side, but I think our crowd is generally not
| fair enough in recognizing the tremendous efforts it take to
| compete with Google with a fraction of its resources.
|
| Note: I use Chrome for work to 1/ isolate my work from personal
| sessions without the hassle of containers or profiles, and 2/
| because I work for a web app targeting Chrome (per the market
| share).
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| In desktop, there is barely any difference now (Chrome's save
| as pdf feature is more accurate with tables). In mobile
| however, Chrome seems noticeably faster.
| alserio wrote:
| Counter point: install ublock origin on firefox mobile (which
| you cannot do on chrome) and the web is very noticeably
| faster on firefox.
| jeffomatic wrote:
| This is my experience as well. I use both Chrome and Firefox
| across Mac and Windows, and I find the experiences to be pretty
| much interchangeable. I'm usually someone who gets annoyed at
| minor differences, but this really is one area where I'm not
| bothered at all.
|
| I use Firefox most of the time, out of a desire to support
| Mozilla and promote a non-Google browser. Admittedly, this is a
| political motivation, but it comes at pretty much zero
| practical cost. If you are interested in trying out Firefox, I
| think the only significant inconvenience is disabling Pocket.
|
| Like the parent, I'll occasionally switch to Chrome for
| separate profiles, or if I need something specific in DevTools.
| Chrome has much better multi-profile support, in the sense that
| it has it at all, but again, the differences between the two
| are so minor that I don't have any qualms switching back and
| forth.
| playpause wrote:
| I agree it's important for Chrome to have a competitor, but
| Firefox has proven itself not to be a successful one. I've
| lost faith in Mozilla's ability to make decisions that win
| back users from Chrome. I wonder if Firefox shut down, the
| dispersal of its users to other non-Google browsers might
| create enough momentum that one of them could start to become
| competitive with Chrome.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Same here but with Edge. Microsoft lobbied us extremely to make
| it our standard browser.
|
| But both are just fine. Never have issues with Firefox. But I
| do have issues with its UI. Too much wasted space, it's only
| useable in compact mode which they want to get rid of. And I
| hate that there's no clear visual separation between tabs
| anymore. Even Chrome and edge have this.
| c0npr wrote:
| Similar experience here, except I used brave cuz I don't really
| like the Google service stuff. I am pretty okay with most of
| the existing browsers on the market (but not edge, again the
| force you to use ms service, and useless default news etc.) And
| I don't care about the gui that much cuz I am not storing
| bookmarks in the browsers, it's quite hard to search through
| and sync
| freediver wrote:
| Firefox simply lost touch with its community.
|
| Golden era was around 2005-2010 when Mozilla was running product
| innovation experiments such as Ubiquity or Tab Candy, "Design
| competitions", sending "Thank you" cards to beta testers, people
| like Aza Raskin having regular blog posts about development... My
| oh my, looking at those in archive.org and seeing treasure throve
| of comments, 100+ on each post, the excitement in the air with
| each new announcement feels just magical.
|
| Roll forward 15 years and Mozilla Labs is about AR/VR(?),
| interaction with Firefox is through 3rd party sites like HN and
| real product innovation stagnates for years.
|
| The real reason Firefox is losing market share is a simple fact
| that it is inferior to its competitors as a product, which is the
| direct result of this loss of connection with its userbase that
| it had and the passion for creating the world's best, most
| innovative, browser.
| damagednoob wrote:
| Well, when your competition was IE 6-8, it's easy too look
| good. The process-per-tab architecture of Chrome was a
| revelation when it was released in 2008.
| Someone wrote:
| FTA: _"The argument that it was "too hard to maintain" a single
| setting enacted by 2 lines of code in a 4 Million line codebase
| is just insulting to the intelligence of users."_
|
| I don't grok that logic. Hard to maintain is about developers,
| not users.
|
| _"Code isn't a lawn. It doesn't change if you leave it alone for
| a few weeks."_
|
| I disagree with that. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot
|
| As to the main reason Firefox is losing users, I would say a)
| increased competition from (mostly) Google and Microsoft and b)
| lack of (short-term) incentives for Mozilla to listen to its
| users.
|
| As to b), take a look at
| https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201....
|
| If I interpret that correctly, contributions and subscriptions
| bring in less than $20M a year (probably closer to $10M, as $14M
| of that is labeled "Subscription and advertising revenue")
|
| Royalties bring in $450M. That's money they get from search
| engines. "Other revenue" is $338M (can't find where that comes
| from)
|
| => To me, it appears they have more income from advertising than
| the $3M they get from user contributions. They certainly get way
| more memory from search engines.
|
| If you were CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, wouldn't keeping the
| royalties flowing in be more important than raising user
| contributions?
| MrDresden wrote:
| I'm along time Firefox user, and frankly I couldn't be happier.
|
| Use it on Android as well as my Linux machines.
| wopwops wrote:
| I nearly stopped using it with the terrible color changes to the
| tabs (no contrast) in v92. I mean, I thought, this is finally the
| last straw. But I found that I could customize some colors,
| especially the active tab, with an add on called Firefox Color.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-color...
|
| Maybe it will help someone who has the same problem.
|
| I really miss the old and customizable Firefox.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I really miss the old and customizable Firefox.
|
| This is really the largest beef I have with Firefox. Firefox
| had been making poor (IMHO) UI decisions for a very long time
| -- but it didn't matter, because it was customizable enough
| that you could fix them.
|
| Now that it's much less customizable, though, there is so much
| that can no longer be fixed.
| 8eye wrote:
| they should look into making an AI browser, that helps users
| cross reference sources to articles, that would help curb
| misinformation campaigns, have site details listed, age of
| domain, score, possible sources, reddit and other sites opinions
| of that site, also they should create a decentralized app store
| that is like a mixture of the app store with the github app, it
| can be used like tor but harness the open source community.
| there's a lot of things they could do
| greatgib wrote:
| Really great piece this article.
|
| Very good idea to have mapped the rants that have accumulated
| over time to the historical evolution of Firefox.
|
| It is often that you hear that a minority of complainers are just
| adverse to change and that the majority agree with the stupid
| changes. But, in fact, the majority of person will disagree in
| silence and just switch to alternative solutions without a vocal
| complaint.
|
| So, it is important to listen to vocal complainers, even in
| minority, because most of the time they are your canaries in coal
| mines. The one in front of new problems, ready to give some of
| their time and energy to save you.
|
| An additional point not mentioned in the article is the general
| lost confidence with the Mozilla organisation that more and more
| looks like to use the Firefox cash cow to fund useless random
| activities and insipid Management.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > But, in fact, the majority of person will disagree in silence
| and just switch to alternative solutions without a vocal
| complaint.
|
| That's an interesting point. The #1 Linux distribution on
| distrowatch for the last 12 month is now MX Linux, a non-
| systemd distro. Of course, the next 15 distros use systemd, so
| maybe that says nothing after all.
| nakovet wrote:
| Due to the shrinking user base another thing becoming more common
| these days is broken websites on Firefox. Sometimes something
| small like WebRTC processing, other times the site simply won't
| load. 1x/week I open a website in Chrome incognito to use it due
| to not working on Firefox, last week was a restaurant reservation
| website.
| Rijek33 wrote:
| Less ideology more technology
| dralley wrote:
| Mozilla / Firefox isn't lacking in new technology. Firefox has
| made far more aggressive under-the-hood improvements than
| Chrome over the past 5 years.
|
| Rust, WebRender, Stylo, Pathfinder, wgpu, Dav1d, asm.js (which
| resulted in WebAssembly) etc.
|
| And they helped bootstrap a lot of efforts that benefited
| everyone massively. Take the list above and add: LetsEncrypt,
| Cranelift, AV1, Opus, WebGPU, Wasmtime
|
| Plus tooling like the reverse debugger (https://rr-
| project.org/) and sccache and Bors
| eska wrote:
| Less promises, more keeping them.
| BoumTAC wrote:
| Because they are always super late. It's 2021 and we still don't
| have form and CB auto completion.
|
| It's been in chrome for more than 10 years already. It's such a
| basic feature, you earn a lot of time at not filling your address
| every time and even more with your card number you always forgot
| the number.
|
| A few month ago they finally add the tab feature for directly
| researching in a site except it still a lot worse user friendly
| than chrome and it worked on a few website only
| thefr0g wrote:
| > we still don't have form and CB auto completion
|
| Yes please save all of your personal and payment information in
| your browser, I don't see how that could be a bad idea.
| shartacct wrote:
| Savvier users would prefer this isn't saved at all. It's
| extremely easy for malicious software to datamine browser files
| for cookies/saved password/form data.
| bryan0 wrote:
| Tree style tabs have been the best web browser innovation for me
| in the past several years.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
| nerdponx wrote:
| Tree Style Tabs, uBlock Origin, and Tab Session Manager.
| Together these extensions make the browser feel like an actual
| useful tool. As long as Firefox supports plugins like this (and
| hopefully we have already seen the end of major breaking
| changes to the plugin APIs), I will use it. Not to mention
| container tabs.
| pwdisswordfish8 wrote:
| > Then Google decided to make the tabs on top standard for its
| Chrome browser, which was designed for mobile devices not
| desktops. On a smartphone it may make sense, as there isn't room
| for a full desktop style menu layout. On a desktop it is
| counterintuitive and breaks workflow with all other programs.
|
| Funnily enough, moving tabs to the top is actually one of the few
| UI changes I actually agree with and find more logical. Since the
| address bar and navigation buttons only control the active tab,
| they logically belong 'inside' the tab: switching to a different
| tab should also switch to a 'different' address bar and buttons.
| (Internally they may be the same object, but that's just an
| implementation detail.)
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| The most logical tab position is on the left or right, on
| desktop, because most of the space on a wide screen display is
| on the horrizontal axis, and you want to reserve as much
| vertical space as possible for scrolling websites (which
| happens vertically, and pretty much cannot be changed at this
| point, as it is baked into the web).
|
| There's an addon for that, but you _no longer can hide the
| default tab bar!_ So now it just wastes space up there for me.
| Mozilla... just one day removed the option to hide it. First
| from the GUI, then from about:config. And also addons can no
| longer hide it either.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| > The most logical tab position is on the left or right, on
| desktop, because most of the space on a wide screen display
| is on the horrizontal axis, and you want to reserve as much
| vertical space as possible for scrolling websites (which
| happens vertically, and pretty much cannot be changed at this
| point, as it is baked into the web).
|
| This assumes a landscape-oriented monitor.
|
| I would suggest trying this out on a portait oriented
| monitor. Tabs on top make the most sense there.
|
| Also, I would generally suggest trying out a portrait
| oriented monitor. It's quite useful for coding, reading, etc.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or website should use most of the space sideways on my
| screen... Not removing content and making usability
| infinitely worse. How many years until everything is designed
| for mobile and if it even shows 80 character column it is
| good for desktop...
| cco wrote:
| So now my tab names are...? Written vertically? I don't think
| that's the best UI choice.
| jwond wrote:
| Take a look at Tree Style Tabs [1] or Sidebery [2].
|
| After using tree style tabs it's very frustrating for me to
| go back to using other tab styles in other browsers.
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-
| style-ta...
|
| [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
| ivanche wrote:
| Of course not, they're written horizontally as usual. Where
| did you even get the idea they would be written vertically?
| BTW, even on a laptop screen with vertical tabs I see 31
| tab names with ~20 characters in each name. With horizontal
| tabs, I see 15 tabs with ~5 characters in each name. 9x
| more information, now that's UI/UX!
| sorenjan wrote:
| I agree. Having tabs on top also makes sense from a Fitts's law
| perspective. I change tabs much more often than I use the title
| bar, so making it easier to click the tabs is good UI.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
| antimaekrej wrote:
| Mozilla is kept alive by the money from Google, which is happy to
| keep Firefox on life support as a shield against anti-trust
| investigations and as an excuse for developers that there is not
| a browser monopoly now.
| fulafel wrote:
| Isn't FF the only major browser that allows good adblocking
| extensions (uBlock origin etc) on mobile? I can't see how most
| people would live without that (or maybe i'm wrong about other
| browsers adblocking)
| knob wrote:
| One year ago they launched their new Android version, which is
| godawful. Just read the reviews on the android store.
|
| Why Firefox, why?!
| dunefox wrote:
| > Just read the reviews on the android store.
|
| 4 1/2 stars with over 4 million reviews. I use it regularly and
| have no real problems with it.
| [deleted]
| kunagi7 wrote:
| Well, it did drop to 3.9 stars.
|
| Initially, Google Play reviews got filled with 1 star reviews
| from users complaining that a lot of their workflows were
| broken, things that they liked were removed, extensions not
| working (unless you used the initial nine excluded
| extensions).
|
| The rating dropped from 4.7 to 3.9 in less than a month.
| After that, some one star reviews were removed (maybe google
| thought it was review bombing or Mozilla used some kind of
| third party service for that). Ratings started to go up a bit
| after that.
|
| And suddenly a lot of 5 stars reviews with little to no
| content (thumbs up emojis, Nice/Great/Good, or just dots)
| started to appear and the rating almost returned to the
| previous normal.
|
| Nowadays is just a mix of good and bad reviews, most of them
| quite lengthy.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Firefox on Android is pretty fantastic. I feel like it's the
| one thing Mozilla did really right. As someone who has their
| laundry list of issues with regular Firefox, I have no serious
| complaint against their Android port.
| blendergeek wrote:
| I believe most of the complaints stem from the fact that a
| year or two ago, Mozilla removed most of the features
| (including the ability to install almost all addons).
|
| This mass feature removal is just one more data point in line
| with what is discussed on the article.
| anonymousab wrote:
| Most importantly, they did so as a plain update to the
| existing app sku rather than as a new app (despite it being
| trialed as a new sky).
|
| Thus if you had auto updates, which developers and security
| folks were so keen on recommending, you suddenly lost a
| massive amount of functionality and possibly could not do
| many of the things you need to do on your phone.
|
| With no recommended way back. Oh, and many users lost their
| history, passwords and bookmarks with that as well. It's
| hard for users to see that approach from a software company
| as anything other than a statement of "We're smarter than
| you, we know better than you, get f**ed"; a big thumb in
| the eye from some product manager somewhere.
|
| Get that experience enough times with Mozilla updates and
| you start to view all of their design decisions through
| that lens.
| bantunes wrote:
| What makes you say that? I use it as a daily driver since it
| launched.
| tomrod wrote:
| Completely agree. Poorer UI, removed extensions, and made it so
| text at old.reddit.com is microscopic despite all attempts.
| Iirc about:config access was removed too, but I can't remember
| for sure.
|
| It was a great browser! I still install it once a month to see
| if they bring back the critical usability features. No dice
| yet.
| Arech wrote:
| What? FF for Android works great (but Mozilla as usual for them
| pisses off users with weird and stupid UI changes)
| leto_ii wrote:
| Writing this on Android Firefox right now, I don't have too
| many complaints. I have up on Chrome a decade ago and never
| looked back. I used Opera for some years and then switched to
| Ff.
|
| What are your main pain points?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Not the person you responded to, but I normally use Firefox
| on Android and I've definitely seen features disappear with
| the new release.
|
| I like the new look, I even like the bottom URL bar placement
| that many reviewers seem to be negative about, and I like the
| concept of collections that the user base is protesting so
| much. Those are fine for me.
|
| However, I'm regularly running into bugs ever since I updated
| from that latest "old" mobile Firefox. It took them months to
| support the certificate authority installed on my phone, and
| even now that's a hidden setting somewhere in a debug menu.
| Using said certificate with a HTTP proxy is still broken.
|
| There's no setting to control DOH, even though there's no
| reason the browser might not support it. In fact, there's no
| way to use about:config AND use a stable version of the
| browser on Android; you need to run Beta or Nightly or the
| folks at Mozilla don't trust you to touch the settings. The
| addon library is abysmal, even after all this time, and the
| hack to get around that requires a Mozilla account and
| messing with custom addon lists.
|
| I can't view the source of the current page anymore. It's
| been too long since I last had the option, so I'm not sure if
| this was an addon or a part of the core browser, but I used
| to be able to hit the menu button and click "view source". I
| think the view-source: URI scheme is still supported, but I
| can't figure out how to make the app respect it anymore.
|
| For the past weeks, I've been running into a bug where using
| Swiftkey in combination with Firefox sometimes clears the
| entire text field. On websites that use native text boxes
| like HN I can correct that by opening another keyboard with a
| control key (Hacker's Keyboard) and hitting CTRL+Z, but on
| websites that provide their own rich editing that's
| impossible. This bug has eaten tens of posts of mine, some
| not at all short, and from what I can tell from Github the
| bug should already be fixed (it isn't) or will be fixed in
| Firefox 94 (which hits Beta in about 20 days, and then stable
| in November). All other browsers work fine with this
| keyboard, and it seems like everyone using Swiftkey and
| Firefox together should be running into this. I'm a little
| annoyed that this fix wasn't backported to current versions
| of the browser.
|
| I would've been fine with all of this if this was the first
| release of Firefox on Android. However, it's simply not;
| there was a competent version of Firefox before the rewrite
| and the modern version still hasn't reached feature parity
| after dropping that version more than a year ago. Being able
| to hit install on any Firefox addon and being reasonably sure
| that it'll work was very liberating. Of course, some of the
| addons simply couldn't work because they relied on UI not
| present in the mobile apps, but I never saw that as a
| problem. Those addons got purged with the switch to
| WebExtensions anyway.
|
| Perhaps people who switched from Chrome to Firefox after the
| release of the rewrite won't have as many issues because they
| never used the advanced features Firefox used to support.
|
| All in all, it's a decent mobile browser, but the reasons I
| started using it in the first place have slowly been eroded
| away.
| MrPatan wrote:
| I use firefox as my daily. For several reasons I've started to
| also use Brave and Edge. And I am quite happy with them, I have
| to report!
|
| And I use Chrome to keep it logged in to my gmail only there, I'm
| logged out of Google (with blocked cookies) everywhere else.
|
| Firefox only on mobile, and I'm quite happy. I haven't tried the
| others yet.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Firefox is great and all, but its consistently buggy with its
| clipboard on Gnome/Wayland for the past year.
| thefr0g wrote:
| > its consistently buggy
|
| At least it's consistent :D
|
| For me it is: I can't copy from the URL-bar to other apps.
| Inside of firefox works, copying from everywhere else works.
|
| I didn't care to investigate though as I rarely need to do that
| and I was pretty sure it's my fault for locking it into it's
| own user namespaces.
| eptcyka wrote:
| For me, copying into Firefox can lock it up, and trying to
| paste from Firefox into non-Firefox can also lock it up. I
| tried looking into this, and it might be related to running X
| apps side-by-side, but it feels like a weird interaction
| between Firefox and gnome-shell. Regardless, it seems like
| other applications are working fine, so I think this is an
| issue with Firefox.
| thayne wrote:
| > We have hundreds of millions of users. 5000 people complaining
| doesn't represent the majority of users"
|
| That's incredibly naive. Only a tiny fraction of people who don't
| like it will complain. Others will just switch to another
| browser. And most will probably put up with it. And if that
| happens once, it might not hurt you too much. But when you do
| something like that over and over, you are going to bleed users,
| including the ones who initially put up with it as the list of
| things they don't like piles up.
|
| > People don't use Firefox because of add-ons. Our telemetry
| shows 80% of users never install any add-ons
|
| Uh huh. You know why I started using Firefox over a decade ago?
| _Because of addons_. And as has been mentioned before, a lot of
| users disable telemetry, especially power users who are likely to
| install addons. So how reliable is that telemetry? And how many
| Firefox users are only using it on the recommendation of a friend
| relative or IT specialist that does use plugins.
|
| I'm not optimistic for the future of browsers. I still prefer
| Firefox to chrome, but I'm not happy with the direction things
| are headed.
|
| One final thought. Here's an idea for getting some funding
| independent of search engines: a Kickstarter like program for
| users to pay to get some of these features back. Though on second
| thought, maybe that would give Mozilla even more incentives to
| rip stuff out...
| bm3719 wrote:
| There's a theory in the Free Software community that BigTech
| sponsorship of Mozilla was intended to bring about the current
| state of affairs.
|
| The idea is that MS, Google, and others really have no reason to
| donate to a direct competitor. Perhaps they did so because they
| knew it would give them control. That control was exercised over
| the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy
| organization than a foundation that develops a web browser. The
| sorry state of FF was the inevitable result.
|
| Whether you buy this narrative or not, the fact is there remains
| no effective threat whatsoever to the massive data collection
| that occurs whenever you use Chrome or Edge. 10 years ago,
| MS/Google had no ability to spy on the web surfing of the vast
| majority of computer users. Now they do.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| > The sorry state of FF was the inevitable result.
|
| What sorry state?
|
| The thing I don't get about this narrative is that Firefox
| works and works very well for me and so when I see people
| saying things like this it doesn't jive with reality.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I've used Firefox since it replaced Netscape. I agree, I
| think "sorry state" is an exaggeration. They've made some
| choices I don't love, but my browser isn't part of me, I open
| a tab, I get some info, I get back to work. My job isn't to
| play Firefox. I don't get the "UI sucks, they made it like
| Chrome... so instead I use Chrome".
|
| However...
|
| > That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla
| is more a social justice advocacy organization than a
| foundation that develops a web browser.
|
| I do think they're happy to spend too much time/money on
| their pet projects. Given the layoffs and poor market
| performance, this has come at the cost of their product. I'm
| allowed to dislike that despite still using it.
|
| Sorry state of Firefox, I disagree. Sorry state of Mozilla,
| yes. So I look at M and do expect FF to get worse.
| Tagbert wrote:
| i think it is less about the state of the browser itself and
| more about it's continuing drop in user base.
| krylon wrote:
| Well, once upon a time, Microsoft invested quite a bit of money
| in Apple to keep them alive. Allegedly, they did this so they
| could tell the DoJ with a straight face that they were not a
| monopolist, after all they had a competitor.
|
| I would not be surprised if Google's support for Mozilla is
| based on similar reasoning.
| JohnFen wrote:
| But Apple and Microsoft weren't competitors then. Apple was a
| hardware manufacturer. Microsoft was a software manufacturer.
| While there was some overlap in their product offerings, they
| were in different businesses and so weren't really
| competitors.
| nerdponx wrote:
| This theory is frequently stated as fact here on HN, so
| clearly you're not the only one to feel that way.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I don't think that was the only thing. There was also also
| the friendship between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
|
| Monopoly laws care about marketshare and Apple's was tiny at
| that point, especially in the business market
| webmobdev wrote:
| I completely buy that argument - BigTech (in particular Google)
| have a huge influence today on Firefox development.
|
| Moreover, Mozilla's Firefox is deliberately hostile to the open
| source movement too - _their code is a convulated mess by
| design_ , to discourage others from developing competing
| products with it. (Remember, that Firefox has provided Mozilla
| with 100's of millions of dollars - so the excuse of legacy
| code and all is just bullshit). It's no wonder that both Webkit
| (Safari) and Blink (Chrome / Opera) are more popular than Gecko
| (the browser engine of Firefox), with developers. (All that
| money is just wasted on them ... ).
| dralley wrote:
| >Moreover, Mozilla's Firefox is deliberately hostile to the
| open source movement too - their code is a convulated mess by
| design, to discourage others from developing competing
| products with it.
|
| This is total nonsense.
|
| It's a mess because it has 25 years of legacy behind it, and
| because until a few years ago all of that legacy was
| considered a "feature" by half of the userbase, who was
| screaming at them not to remove the "mess" because it would
| break their addons. Even in this very thread you see people
| whining about removing XUL addon support. And ironically,
| most of the "competing projects" are based around
| _preserving_ that mess.
|
| It's only since 2017 that they've really been able to clean
| up the architecture at all. And saying that they're "hostile
| to open source" is practically defamatory. Mozilla has
| contributed more to open source across a broad swath of
| organizations than 99.9% of companies that are 100x their
| size.
| jollybean wrote:
| The reason they do it is a strategy called 'commoditize your
| complement'. [1]
|
| If browsers were all private, and they had power and control,
| it'd be harder for G and MS to poke through.
|
| So the 'erase' a layer of the value chain by making it all
| open-source.
|
| One less barrier between them and the customer.
|
| Chrome is as important to Google as many other things, it's
| just not where the revenue is captured.
|
| [1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement
| fbhabbed wrote:
| Blog posts like those feel more and more like some sort of weird
| propaganda, to be honest
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Go to the dev tools and then to console. You need to approve
| pasting by typing out the words. This is one of the examples. The
| browser itself is not bad, better than Safari, but Chrome does
| everything better, bookmarks, history, the list never ends.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| Why can't Chrom(e/ium) drag tabs to bookmarks or toolbars in
| 2021?
| kiryin wrote:
| I use Firefox exclusively on all of my devices, but my opinions
| on both the browser and Mozilla are pretty grim. Apart from the
| advancements in first-party isolation and containerization I can
| name very few "features" intorduced in the past 5~ years that I
| view in a positive light. Firefox has become less configurable,
| in other words more hostile to the user, chasing after chrome
| with every new pants-on-head UI decision, while abandoning
| important technical research like Servo that could've brought
| them to the bleeding edge of browser development. I've come to
| terms with my position as being held hostage, simply because the
| only other option is Google and thus infinitely worse, but I am
| not happy. Change is needed.
| ianbicking wrote:
| I think in each step the choices Firefox made usually made sense.
| As Firefox removed or changed features at each juncture they
| really tried to choose what would work for the most people. A
| kind of utilitarian product design. And yet it declined, and the
| critique here isn't entirely wrong (but I think it's mostly
| wrong).
|
| Neither the path Firefox took, nor the path described here, would
| be enough to stop that decline. A bunch of hidden and obscure
| features that don't make sense in totality is not a great
| approach.
|
| I personally felt strongly, when I was with Mozilla, that
| differentiated products would help get out of that quagmire. I
| never had any influence at a meaningful level - probably my own
| fault - so the idea never went anywhere. But with multiple
| products you can provide niche features that are meaningful and
| attractive. If there are ways to use interacting features to
| achieve some end that is not a marketable approach: there's no
| story, there's nothing to attract the user to return after
| installation. By saying "here's a browser for research" (or
| studying, watching videos, managing an online store, programming,
| etc) you come up with an understanding between the user and
| product maker about purpose.
|
| Chrome had, and still has, a lock on the kind-of-good-enough-for-
| everyone market. A niche approach like Vivaldi is still less
| successful than Firefox is today. Firefox needs to find entirely
| different approaches.
| JohnFen wrote:
| My problem with what happened to Firefox is really simple --
| the changes that they've made have made the browser
| dramatically less usable for me.
|
| I've been using an older version of Waterfox for years now
| because it kept the things that made Firefox great for me.
| However, as more and more websites are unusable with an old
| browser, I finally reached a tipping point that forced me to
| switch to something more recent.
|
| I investigated every (as near as I can tell) offering on the
| market today. Sadly, the modern Firefox was the least bad
| option after all, so I'm now using that.
|
| I despair for the state of web browsers these days.
| FinanceAnon wrote:
| After a year of using Firefox on Macbook, I've switched back to
| Chrome. The laptop was running really hot just from having a few
| tabs opened and Youtube playing in the background. It's been much
| better after I've made the switch to Chrome. For privacy reasons,
| I would rather stick to Firefox, but I feel like the performance
| is worse.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| In general I think there is no way to heavily use Google
| properties (in particular drive, docs and meet) without Chrome.
|
| I tried through the years, and always ended up with a main
| browser (Safari or now Firefox) and Chrome as a Google
| dedicated browser, because the experience would be miserable
| otherwise. At this point I stopped blaming the other browsers.
| basilgohar wrote:
| While Google apps definitely perform less than ideally for me
| on Firefox, I think that falls far short of unusable. I use
| Google Docs, Drive, YouTube, and other Google properties in
| 4K on my old (5+ year old AMD Ryzen 2400G) system. I
| definitely don't _relish_ using their apps, but I definitely
| can and don 't feel hindered.
| Allypost wrote:
| The 2400G came out in February 2018 so your system is 3.5
| years old at max?
| capableweb wrote:
| Yup, the performance of browsers are highly dependent on their
| host. Firefox performs best on Linux (and beats the other
| browsers for Linux too), so the default on my Linux machine is
| Firefox. For Windows, it's Chrome and for Mac is Safari. Wish
| there was some syncing utility between the three of them, as
| switching between them has always been a bit of a hassle.
| alex_smart wrote:
| > Firefox performs best on Linux
|
| I find that hard to believe considering no hardware
| accelerated video playback (although other linux browsers
| also have the same problem). At the very least, I think that
| statement needs to be qualified with a "under certain use
| cases".
| mands wrote:
| Firefox has had HW-accelerated video playback under Wayland
| for a few months now. Along with per-monitor mixed-/high-
| dpi support it is by far the best browser on Linux atm.
| alex_smart wrote:
| With NVIDIA gpu support?
| maccolgan wrote:
| Yes.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Apple has an extension for syncing bookmarks between devices
| and browsers with iCloud.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/icloud-
| bookma...
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icloud-
| bookmarks/f...
|
| I think it does tabs, too, but I'm not sure.
| Arech wrote:
| I strongly disagree regarding Windows. I use Firefox on
| Windows as a primary browser and occasionally Chrome, -
| Firefox offers much better performance even having some
| extensions installed while Chrome is in vanilla state. The
| only issue with FF for me is exactly as the other commenter
| said - Mozilla likes to piss off its core userbase.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I strongly disagree. I have it installed on Windows 7,
| Windows 10 and the performance has gone so far down in the
| last few years I've had to switch to chrome.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| What kind of performance are you talking about? I've been
| using it as my only browser at home (Win10) for years and
| I haven't noticed much.
|
| edit: Really just curious, I'm assuming I'm using it
| differently.
| helij wrote:
| Disagree here. Thinkpad P52 (16GB Ram and i7-8750H)
| running Windows 10 Pro. Absolutely no issues with
| Firefox. I always find it strange when people talk about
| FF issues. I never had any on Linux, MacOS or Windows.
| Always worked for me. Rarely do I run Chrome. I do use
| Edge a lot though as all my 'work' stuff resides there -
| Mail, Slack. It works pretty well.
|
| I run Steam on the same machine (AoE III) with Firefox,
| LibreOffice Calc open as well and it's just smooth. No
| overheating or anything.
| ksec wrote:
| As someone who started using Firefox before it was even called
| Firefox, this put a smile on my face. I was there, and I remember
| every single quote and Mozilla's response. :)
|
| The memory issue the post mentioned was a really long time ago, I
| remember they did Generational GC, Compact GC and the most
| important project from Mozilla, MemShrink from Nick. That was
| before e10s and all of that was what made Firefox memory
| efficient today. ( I think Nick is working at Apple now )
|
| The failure of FirefoxOS, was mostly because of two opposing goal
| or ideal. They want the OS to be web based and everything to be
| made with JS or Web Technology. The believe of JS will be good
| enough and that JS VM will be fast enough runs deep inside
| Mozilla at the time to be point I remember FirefoxOS engineers
| were even afraid to speak out on why dont they just code this in
| C++. The other goal was they want Firefox OS to be running on low
| cost $50 Smartphone and somehow thinks the Smartphone hardware
| price will drop while performance continue to improve. I was
| surprised, and it was only many years later I realise most
| software developers have absolutely zero understanding of
| hardware, BOM cost, supply chain, and long term component cost
| development. And I still think, FirefoxOS was a distraction for
| Mozilla. Spreading themselves too thin while battling Chrome on
| PC. They really should have fought Chrome first before their move
| on Smartphone. And 10 years later we really do need a third OS
| option in the Smartphone market. Although arguably Firefox OS
| still lives on as KaiOS.
|
| But again, I say this a lot on HN, and as someone who pushed
| through hundreds of installation of Firefox in different places,
| nearly every single response of switching away to Chrome was
| because Chrome was faster. _Way_ faster.
|
| And I thought it is a good time to remind ourselves, good faith
| and ideals only last so long. Ultimately you need to have a
| better product to retain your users.
|
| Edit: And there was another point missing from the article.
| Mozilla refuse to support DRM and H.264 codec, a lot of users
| simply wanted their browser to work just left.
| emerged wrote:
| Good faith and ideals also stop working when your company
| repeatedly demonstrates that it no longer has either.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Firefix has been my choice of browser for years. I've never had
| an issue with it. I've not noticed any broken websites, but I'm
| not a webdev.
| widea wrote:
| I agree.
| alexruf wrote:
| Also using Firefox for years as my main browser. Can't
| complain. Never really considered switching, since there is no
| real alternative for me in today's browser market (especially
| in terms of privacy).
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I use FF for all financial/banks website stuff as I don't run any
| sort of blocker with it. Everything else is done in Vivaldi. Got
| to isolate the former.
| brador wrote:
| Sabotage with the dangling carrot of a job at Chrome + red letter
| for privacy obfuscation.
| throwaway210911 wrote:
| Firefox has been in decline for 12 years because it only exists
| for the FAANG companies to throw money at so they can dodge
| claims of being a monopoly. It is not there to be useful nor to
| make a profit.
|
| Their core business is taking money from large companies and
| performatively acting like a company to look like 'competition.'
| altgans wrote:
| I just want to say that Firefox doesn't yet appear to have a way
| to
|
| a) change the hotkeys (!)
|
| b) export the browser history*
|
| *except by manually getting the needed records from the
| places.sql file
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| I agree with this opinion piece. Firefox is a product strangely
| hostile to its core userbase. It's almost like they've been
| deliberately trying to sabotage themselves for years. I don't use
| it because I approve of all their stupid pigheaded UI choices, I
| use it because it has been the least bad option despite those
| choices. That might not go on for much longer, though.
| temphnaccount wrote:
| I'd say other way around is true. HN crowd won't like this but
| it's very hard to continuously update a product for the core
| userbase that Firefox has. (small sample size but I maintain a
| small privacy focused app and from my experience, most of the
| reviews I get are how it's missing features which competitors
| have or how it's unusable because it can't handle stuff without
| jeopardizing privacy focused nature of the app.)
|
| Judging by the HN and Reddit comments with each
| Firefox/Signal/Matrix releases, it seems most of the customers
| of privacy focused products want all the other features of
| competitors; most of the times without paying any money (or
| they think donations should cover for everything because they
| once donated, so all hundreds of thousand users would). And
| they dislike/have negative sentiments towards any UI changes or
| breaking functionality for new features. So core userbase for
| these products becomes hostile towards the product growth by
| definition. In this environment, either the product stops
| growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of
| users or it dies.
| elcritch wrote:
| > So core userbase for these products becomes hostile towards
| the product growth by definition. In this environment, either
| the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product
| for those set of users or it dies.
|
| Except FF market percentage has been _decreasing_ not
| growing. The technical foundation has gotten better, but it's
| like Mozilla execs are completely out of sync with the market
| share they could have. They want a "shiny" app that in theory
| people should want, not the app people actually want.
|
| I just hope some group of geeks decides to fork it and change
| it up.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > The technical foundation has gotten better, but it's like
| Mozilla execs are completely out of sync with the market
| share they could have.
|
| Execs may have less to do with the decline than a changing
| market. Google poured resources and new ideas into a mostly
| greenfield effort, and leveraged its market position to
| push its browser. Edge and Safari also benefit from their
| makers' platforms and marketing.
|
| It's a hostile world for an independent browser. And IMO
| Firefox is still the least worst option.
| notpushkin wrote:
| https://waterfox.net/ is what you're looking for, I
| believe.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| FWIW, Waterfox is now owned by System1, an ad company.
| eesmith wrote:
| > it seems most of the customers of privacy focused products
|
| Do most people use Firefox because it's "privacy focused"? I
| don't - I think people use it because it does the things they
| want ... and "privacy" is far down that list.
|
| I know I'm an odd-ball, but I haven't upgrading my FF because
| I want ftp support in my browser. I upgraded the desktop my
| kids use, and the tabs went all wonky. The only reason I
| haven't switched is I trust Google less than I do FF, and I
| want to stave off a technology monoculture.
|
| Yes, my clear desire for ftp support means I don't want
| technologically perfect security or privacy.
|
| Concerning "privacy" as the article points out in the section
| "Invading your privacy at the same time as telling us "we
| value your privacy"
|
| ] Telemetry. Hidden telemetry that isn't disabled when you
| click "disable telemetry". Firstrun pings. Forced signing of
| add-ons. Auto-updates you can't switch off, pinging every 10
| minutes. "Experiments" which require a separate opt out. Now
| the latest offence is enforcing app based 2FA to login to a
| Firefox Add-on account just to make a custom theme, which you
| wouldn't need in the first place if not for forced add-on
| signing.
|
| > either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche
| product for those set of users or it dies.
|
| FF has dropped a lot of users, so I assume you mean it's
| decided to be a niche product in the "privacy" space, and not
| a generally useful tool?
|
| Its marketing doesn't seem that successful, as my first
| thoughts are to switch to a tool based on FOSS Chromium.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| Like you, I don't choose Firefox because of some privacy
| features. I use it because it doesn't have completely
| bonkers "history" feature like Chromium does, and because
| it seems fast and I'm used to it.
|
| Also, I must be blind but I didn't notice any diff with the
| tabs in that recent update where everyone freaked out
| because the tabs were slightly different. The tabs are
| still fine!
|
| Come to think of it I don't have any complaints about
| Firefox, so I'm not sure why I'm bothering to contribute my
| thoughts here.
| thayne wrote:
| Privacy isn't even the main reason I use Firefox, if that was
| all I cared about, I'd use brave or ungoogled chromium with
| privacy extensions and settings.
|
| I use it because I like it a little bit more than chrome. And
| because I don't want google to completely control the browser
| market. But the more firefox becomes like chrome, the less
| reason I have to continue using it.
|
| And despite what Mozilla thinks and wants, I don't think most
| Firefox users care that much about privacy. I suspect most
| Firefox users use it because their tech saavy friend,
| relative, or IT administrator installed it for them and/or
| told them to use it. So losing core users also means using
| many other users in their sphere of influence.
| wellthisishn wrote:
| But reviews about missing feature, or reviews in general...
| that might not give you a good idea of why people _are_ using
| it, if they don 't leave a review at all
| floatingatoll wrote:
| I have never written a review of anything in twenty years,
| I think. Consider that reviews are inherently biased
| towards people who are accustomed to speaking up, either
| because they like reviewing things (not many people) or
| because they're upset and have a problem (many people). It
| becomes evident in practice that reviews generally aren't
| productive to consider.
| peakaboo wrote:
| People are dumb, specially the tech community. I've been
| watching for at least 10 years how everyone switched to
| chrome because it's faster. Now we have one mega corporation
| in charge of both most of the search and most of the browser
| usage. That's literally controlling the internet.
|
| And you made it happen by your choices.
| iknowSFR wrote:
| People are dumb or certain companies are smart?
| desiderantes wrote:
| Both.
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| How can anyone call firefox privacy focused when they use
| telemetry so fucking heavily? Per default telemetry is
| active, disable it and you still got telemetry/pings
| whatever. You have to opt out of everything. It's not even
| limited to the user side look at this
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460678#c20
| freediver wrote:
| Correct. An easy win for Firefox is to become a zero
| telemetry browser by default. All that telemetry is giving
| them wrong data anyway as users they should be most
| interested in disable telemetry and are not represented in
| usage data.
| freediver wrote:
| > it seems most of the customers of privacy focused products
| want all the other features of competitors; most of the times
| without paying any money
|
| This is a business model question, right? Nothing prevents
| someone from making a great privacy focused browser and
| actually charging for it vs being directly (Brave?) or
| indirectly (Chrome, Firefox?) ad-monetized.
|
| Also in this context, referring to "customers of privacy
| focus products" is technically incorrect, they are actually
| users. Definition of a customer is "someone who pays for
| goods or services" thus Mozilla's main customer is Google
| (accounting for close to 90% of its revenue). Maybe looking
| through this lens, relation of Firefox product direction and
| what its "customers" want becomes more clear.
|
| edit: simplified for clarity
| dralley wrote:
| > This is a business model question, right? Mozilla has
| chosen to be indirectly ad-supported vs making a premium
| (as in paid-for) or a freemium browser as a business model.
| Nothing prevents someone from making a great privacy
| focused browser and actually charging for it?
|
| Except the fact that nobody (relative to even their current
| userbase) would use it, and maintaining a browser is
| incredibly difficult and expensive.
|
| It would be the death blow to their market share, which
| would destroy Gecko as a viable browser engine (not enough
| users to get websites to care about the bugs, or even
| necessarily get the bugs reported).
|
| The only way that would work out is if they gave up on
| Gecko and switched to WebKit or Blink.
|
| Their choice of business model isn't really much of a
| choice, it's the only viable option that gives them any
| influence whatsoever.
| freediver wrote:
| But then we are in conflict as we want Mozilla to create
| a superior product but we are not ready pay for it? One
| of these expectations has to give in then.
| thayne wrote:
| A big part of the problem, is that for Mozilla, Firefox
| is a tool for their other initiatives. They use money
| they make from Firefox to fund their other projects. And
| they use the influence they get from controlling a
| browser to push their agenda on web standards. Not that I
| disagree with their agenda in most cases. But I don't
| think Mozilla's primary objective is to make a great
| browser, unfortunately.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I'm very happy to pay money for it tbh. But don't forget
| Mozilla doesn't even take donations for Firefox. Only for
| their Foundation.
| dralley wrote:
| Yes, I completely agree that HN has a massive cognitive
| dissonance about this. They're so used to venture
| capitalists and FAANG companies lighting billions of
| dollars on fire to subsidize money-losing but moat-
| building projects that they have completely unrealistic
| expectations about what is reasonable for the other
| 99.99% of the universe (without magic money fountains
| propping them up) to do sustainably.
|
| But the reality is that because of this, browsers are
| commoditized, and the average user will never pay for a
| browser if they can get Chrome or Safari for free. That's
| probably true of the average HN user, too, for that
| matter.
| freediver wrote:
| > maintaining a browser is incredibly difficult and
| expensive. It would be the death blow to their market
| share, which would destroy Gecko as a viable browser
| engine
|
| Assuming 100 people needed for Gecko, and $150k/year
| annual, world-wide, average developer expense, we come to
| $15M/year. Mozilla already has about ~$50M/year non-
| Google revenue from its products (coming from "true"
| users/customers).
| dralley wrote:
| 150k / person doesn't account for benefits or office
| expenses. And they have closer to 750 employees.
| freediver wrote:
| It does if your team is world-wide.
|
| Does Gecko really need more than 100 people?
| dralley wrote:
| Firefox is 20 million lines of code. What do you think?
| thayne wrote:
| How many of those 750 are actually developers?
| freediver wrote:
| Firefox != Gecko and I maintain a 200,000 lines of code
| product alone no problem, so I think possible.
| crawsome wrote:
| this is my bit, too. they dropped an update that arbitrarily
| spaced out the area in between your bookmarks folders. You can
| you fit less on your screen now because of the stupid spacers
| elpocko wrote:
| I'm more and more wary of Firefox updates because they keep
| pulling shit like that. Why are they doing this? How many
| users are there saying "I wish my bookmarks would suddenly
| take up double the space as before, so I have to scroll
| more?" I don't get it.
|
| At least there's a workaround for the bookmark issue. There's
| no workaround for renamed menu items and changed shortcut
| keys.
| dralley wrote:
| You can remove the spacers with 3 clicks.
| was8309 wrote:
| can i ask how? thank you
| dralley wrote:
| Right click the toolbar. Click "customize toolbar".
|
| Drag the spacers from the toolbar into the element menu.
|
| Click "Done"
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Until you can't, because Mozilla deems that only X% of
| users use that feature and maintaining its configurability
| consumes too much organizational resources.
|
| First the GUI to edit the GUI disappears, then the
| about:config option follows later.
|
| That's what's been steadily happening. Less and less
| customizability for power users, more and more streamlining
| for new users.
| arglebarglegar wrote:
| more like "low skilled" users rather than new, and most
| people (by a large margin) are low skilled users...
|
| power users were _the_ market early on, and that's just
| not the case anymore... power users have been spoiled for
| a long time online, most things outside of tech have
| never been built for us
| lavabiopsy wrote:
| I don't see how that's a problem, you can just modify the
| CSS. If you too decide that's too much work and consumes
| too much of your resources for not enough gain, well then
| now you know why Mozilla made the decision.
| wilkystyle wrote:
| I think you just answered _exactly_ how that 's a
| problem...
| lavabiopsy wrote:
| I'm sorry I don't understand. Is the problem that
| modifying computer code takes effort? If so then sure,
| that's true, but Firefox (or any other browser) can't be
| blamed for that.
| wilkystyle wrote:
| No problem, let me clarify: You suggested that the answer
| to a constant stream of changes was to either "just
| modify the CSS" or (if it's too much work for too little
| gain) then you essentially just accept Mozilla's
| decision.
|
| If those are indeed the only other options besides users
| finding another product, I'd say you answered _exactly_
| why Firefox is in decline.
| lavabiopsy wrote:
| I'm sorry, I still don't understand. This is exactly the
| way it is with any other browser. If you don't like
| changes in Chrome for example, you can either modify
| them, accept their decision, or find another product. And
| Chrome is not in decline.
| wilkystyle wrote:
| > _If you don 't like changes in Chrome for example, you
| can either modify them, accept their decision, or find
| another product. And Chrome is not in decline._
|
| Yes, my point exactly. You can answer _" just modify the
| CSS"_ every time someone complains about a change in
| Firefox, but in reality users will find another product
| instead.
| lavabiopsy wrote:
| I'm still not sure what that has to do with Firefox
| specifically? Those "other products" could very easily be
| modified versions of Firefox or Chrome, of which there
| are many. Some of them might even take the time to modify
| the CSS for you. So it's still unclear what your specific
| complaint is. Also if you're going to switch products
| constantly because of a few lines of CSS, that seems like
| you would always be switching constantly, and would never
| find one to settle on anyway.
| wilkystyle wrote:
| Try looking at it from the other direction: If other
| products have the same playing field (modify, live with
| it, or change products), and Firefox is in decline while
| their primary competitor is not, doesn't it stand to
| reason that Firefox is making decisions that lose them
| users while their competitor is making decisions that
| gain them users?
|
| (edit to fix typos on mobile)
| lavabiopsy wrote:
| I don't really have any comments on that, sorry. I was
| mentioning a fix for that specific issue, or other
| specific issues you might have with other browsers. Most
| complaints I see about Firefox tend to be about specific
| issues rather than about overall decisions made versus
| their competitors.
| thayne wrote:
| The problem isn't any single one decision. It is a
| pattern of making changes that cause users don't like and
| ignoring negative feedback.
| lavabiopsy wrote:
| I don't understand what that has to do with Firefox
| specifically, if you do a search you can find various
| amounts of negative feedback about any product in
| existence. It's impossible to make a product that will
| please everyone, so you'll have to be more specific about
| which changes and which users you mean if we want to
| discuss this meaningfully.
| Arech wrote:
| Yes, you can. But once you think about it, you'll see
| that you actually can't. Because once you're making
| changes to components instead of formalized settings, you
| are doomed to re-apply them each software update. Not a
| smart way to customize.
| lavabiopsy wrote:
| But that's exactly what you're asking Mozilla to do when
| you ask them to keep that as a formalized setting, it's
| exactly the same work just it's done by a Mozilla
| employee and not you. So it really sounds like you're
| asking them to do something which you acknowledge
| yourself is not a smart or efficient thing to do.
| thayne wrote:
| The ability to change that css is another one of those
| things that has been moved to enabling options in
| about:config that will probably get removed int the
| future.
|
| And any firefox update could potentially break your css
| fix.
| [deleted]
| lavabiopsy wrote:
| I don't mean about:config, I mean editing the CSS
| directly.
|
| Yes an update could break your CSS fix, but if you follow
| the beta releases then this isn't a problem. You usually
| have at least a few weeks to update your patches before
| the release goes out.
| thayne wrote:
| You have to change a setting in about:config to enable
| custom css. Unless you mean making a custom build of
| Firefox, which is even more difficult to do.
| lavabiopsy wrote:
| I don't see what difference it makes for somebody else
| implementing it as about:config setting versus you doing
| that yourself in a custom build. Firefox is not really
| any more difficult to build than any other large open
| source project.
| dralley wrote:
| > First the GUI to edit the GUI disappears, then the
| about:config option follows later.
|
| > That's what's been steadily happening.
|
| You wrote this in a way that is (probably deliberately)
| misleading. Neither of those things have happened nor is
| there any indication that they will.
|
| Especially about:config which (probably) provides an
| enormous amount of benefit for early testing of features.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| I mean, isn't this a bit like saying, "I left Windows for
| Ubuntu because of the invasive privacy concerns I had... But
| man Unity is terrible, I'm going back to Windows!"
|
| If privacy is the ultimate concern, I can suffer usability.
|
| I think the real issue is we've stopped advocating for privacy
| loudly and publicly. All the users know is convenience.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's how everybody is here. Nobody takes a principled stand
| when it involves even the slightest sacrifice.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Most people don't have the time or energy at the end of the
| day to take principled stands on every issue.
| bombcar wrote:
| But they're sure to let you know that all things being
| equal they'd certainly take the principled option.
| eitland wrote:
| Sample size of 1, but I have been choosing mostly open
| source/free for years and I don't think I am alone.
|
| That said, these days Linux is just more convenient than
| the alternatives for me personally. Same goes for Firefox
| (still).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| But the privacy _isn 't_ the ultimate concern for everyone,
| so perhaps it isn't one for GP. It isn't for me. I stick to
| Firefox because of combination of being best at privacy and
| least shitty overall, but I'm by no means happy. I'm very
| much unhappy about the mobile version - their recent (~year
| ago?) UI revamp turned a perfectly good browser into a
| bloated piece of garbage, that gets slower and more annoying
| to use over time. The only reason I use it instead of Chrome
| is because I can install an ad blocker in it.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| I care about privacy, that's why I didn't move away from
| Firefox years ago (or as of yet). But ideally I would prefer
| not to suffer from privacy _or_ usability issues...
| corty wrote:
| The thing is, if you do not like the UI of unity, maybe
| you'll like Gnome, KDE, LXDE, fluxbox, i3 or ratpoison or
| .... With most Linux distros, you can have both privacy and
| your favourite UI paradigm. You usually do not need to suffer
| in the usability department (or at least not too much).
|
| But with Firefox, all the UI choices are gone now,
| intentionally sacrificed on the altair of rewrites, UI
| changes, branding and some dubious security claims. You used
| to get the choice of vertical tabs (better on todays
| widescreen laptops), tree-style tabs, Buttons where you liked
| them, user-provided CSS customization for pages and the UI.
| Not anymore, all gone (they paid some lip service to some of
| the above concerns, but nothing relevant, and overall a
| massive downturn).
|
| Now you only get the take-it-or-leave-it of one crappy and
| worsening Chrome clone UI.
| dTal wrote:
| Huh? Happy Tree Style Tabs user here, and another addon
| (Sidebery) seems to be growing in popularity as well. You
| can disable the built-in tabs with userChrome.css. What am
| I missing?
| eitland wrote:
| How do you disable the top tabs these days?
|
| I activated browser debugging, pressed ctrl + alt + shift
| + i and then hunted down the offending tab bar and put in
| "display: none" for it.
|
| It gets harder and harder year by year though and on the
| tabstrip issue in Bugzilla there's at least one person
| who was annoyed and told me to not question peoples
| motives after I asked a simple question about it.
|
| Anyone here working for Mozilla, I ask the same question
| here: are you overcomplicating it? I managed to get rid
| of that tab bar using a CSS hack, why can't we just get a
| function to apply that css, at least in developer
| edition?
| dTal wrote:
| The CSS "hack" _is_ the official way. That 's sort of the
| point of using CSS to display the UI. It's editable.
| mook wrote:
| Pretty sure the point of using the rendering engine to
| display the UI was to make it easier to write cross-
| platform UI; granted, though, the point of then having
| the feature to use CSS to modify the UI was to do that
| (and it was relatively easy once the UI was already
| written in the rendering engine).
| eitland wrote:
| Except I don't think it is even documented anymore?
| Arech wrote:
| I actually had changed some about:newtab styles. They
| even outlived one or two updates after that, until full
| reset.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| If you're happy with the current tree style tabs, I'll
| wager you never used the original. The current one is a
| bad rip off, with 90% of the actual features missing.
| rastafang wrote:
| Exact same thought here... Otter browser seems promising.
| oliwarner wrote:
| This would be funnier if Chrome for Android wasn't trying to
| shove tab groups down my throat for the ninth time. This time
| without an obscure flag to disable it.
|
| Looking at why established users complain about Firefox isn't
| why billions of people moved to Chrome, from many sources. It
| was the default on our phone and that makes it an obvious
| desktop choice.
|
| (Not to mention it does do some things nicely, I just much
| prefer FF for webdev)
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'll be understanding with mozilla, their challenge is
| difficult, and they've been going hard surprisingly long. I
| think they folded under the many new trends in the space, UI
| being one.
|
| I wish they could find a stronger inner core to work on,
| something more utilitarian than user-drafting.
|
| There's a lot of people saying chrome wins because websites are
| better with it, sites with high requirements like zoom IIRC,
| but in my experience it's not common nor impactful enough
| (these sites work fine enough on my old laptop)
|
| whoever has the solution i hope it comes fast
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Firefox is a product strangely hostile to its core userbase.
| It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage
| themselves for years.
|
| Easily explainable
|
| Mozilla been captured by "aspirational" MBA types who think
| they don't really need that userbase, instead they want to
| chase "what big boys do", and copy lame features in hopes that
| monkeying Apple will score them iDevices users -- the type of
| people they psychologically want to associate themselves with.
| hypothesis wrote:
| People were commenting about acquisitions in other thread:
| some wouod be unexplainable ones, until you realize that
| management just wanted to hang out with hip/stylish/trendy
| people...
| Torwald wrote:
| > I don't use it because I approve of all their stupid
| pigheaded UI choices
|
| I don't use Ff because I can't approve with exactly one of
| their UI choices: tab closing button on the wrong side. I am on
| Mac and this just messes with my muscle memory too much. (It
| used to be that the buttons where on the right side, which is
| to say the left side.)
|
| However, other than that I see a lot of UI love in both the
| macOs and iOS Ff interfaces. One can feel the team works from
| their hearts.
|
| I wish they would use their brains more. Painful irony.
|
| EDIT: Anybody an idea why this got downvoted?
| Tagbert wrote:
| Perhaps people think that basing your choice of browser on a
| minor point like the arbitrary location of tab close buttons
| is questionable. On second thought, that is a very HN type of
| reasoning so... I can't explain it.
| greypowerOz wrote:
| i use ffox on android because (for some reason) it's the only
| one I'm aware of that has ublock origin addon...( happy to be
| proven wrong :)
|
| I also used to use reader mode once in a while...
| znpy wrote:
| Firefox on Android used to just freeze for me.
|
| I'm happily on brave mobile, which does block ads.
| junon wrote:
| ... and replaces them with more ads directly in the user
| interface (e.g. the new tab screen).
| fistynuts wrote:
| It replaces the millions of ads and trackers on the web
| with exactly one ad, which is as you say on the new tab
| screen, that you can turn off in the settings.
|
| There is also Brave Rewards, something that pays you for
| viewing ads but is disabled by default and can be totally
| hidden through another setting.
|
| This straightforward set-up isn't something I feel
| deserves the number of negative comments I see on here.
| The benefits far outweigh the minor inconvenience of
| changing two settings.
| junon wrote:
| Because it took lots of fights to get the Brave team to
| 1) allow disabling ads and 2) allow disabling Brave
| Rewards, neither of which anyone wanted and went against
| the whole concept of "Brave, the ad-free browser" to
| begin with.
| anotherhue wrote:
| a) can be disabled b) not in any way like the ads you
| would encounter on businessinsider or similar.
| junon wrote:
| a) not when I last used it, there was an ongoing issue on
| GitHub, b) so?
| lostmsu wrote:
| Firefox just started doing that on desktop too :(
| caoilte wrote:
| Me too. Bit I also haven't updated it in over a year in order
| to avoid the awful rewrite.
| adtac wrote:
| not updating browsers is a huge security risk
| libeclipse wrote:
| The new updated Firefox on Android is better than the old
| one
| Koshkin wrote:
| I don't know about that, it feels weird now. I don't
| appreciate gratuitous changes to the UI.
| wellthisishn wrote:
| Totally agree. It's not intrusive, gives lots of options
| organized well, it's fast... great browser. I assume it's
| still safer than Chrome as well, seems like the best
| option for now
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Kiwi Browser is a chromium based mobile browser with support
| for extensions. It is FOSS.
| [deleted]
| Xevi wrote:
| I switched from Firefox on Android to Brave. Not because I
| like Brave, but because I disliked the new UI in Firefox.
| Brave also had much better performance for JavaScript and CSS
| animations.
| mithusingh32 wrote:
| I tried brave. But I constantly had ads on it. It would
| block trackers and ads on websites but if I was to open a
| few tab it would have crypto ads or some other nonsense.
| Xevi wrote:
| I don't see any ads when using Brave. What kind of crypto
| ads are you talking about?
| christophilus wrote:
| He's talking about the empty tab screen. You can control
| what's on it, but by default it does show ads.
| Xevi wrote:
| Okey, maybe I changed that a long time ago and forgot
| about it. Mine just shows my most visited sites.
| [deleted]
| wellthisishn wrote:
| I think the UI on FF mobile is more than fine.. what did
| you not like about it?
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I copied the following from one of my other comments
| since it's a lot of text, but these are the reasons I
| moved off Firefox for Android (Fenix) to Brave. Also,
| Chromium-based browsers for Android have _none_ of the
| following issues.
|
| ---
|
| - Scrolling up on Google search's results page and some
| other pages is not registered half the time, and
| sometimes triggers pull-to-refresh instead
|
| - Scrolling up inside an input box while the page is at
| the top of the screen causes unintentional pull-to-
| refresh
|
| - Bitwarden autofill is not registered unless you kill
| and restart the app after logging in
|
| - You can't save images that require cookies to be passed
| to the request, such as under DDoS protected pages
|
| - Links will sometimes redirect to about:blank unless you
| go back and click them again
|
| - Most recently visited page is not restored when closing
| and reopening the app, even though it's saved to the
| history (closed as wontfix)
|
| - Uses large amounts of memory, causing Android share
| actions to be silently killed due to OOM unless you
| quickly kill the app right after sending them
|
| - Closing a tab and clicking "Undo" in the popup sends
| the tab all the way to the top of the list, instead of
| its original position (inconvenient if you have a large
| number of tabs open)
|
| - Frequently loses open tabs in memory, even within ten
| seconds of navigating to another tab
|
| - Startup time is noticably slower than Brave, taking at
| least a few seconds to show the UI and begin loading the
| page. It isn't much, but it impacts the user experience
| every time you start the app again.
| gbil wrote:
| UI is fine but 1. Battery consumption is at least twice
| the one of Brave 2. There is no option to always get the
| desktop site which makes it useless for tablets
|
| Main reasons I also moved to Brave on all my devices. If
| these are fixed and Mac battery consumption is fixed I'd
| go back asap
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Brave is a decent browser but I won't use anything from
| Brendan Eich. I also don't really agree with their BAT
| token stuff. I just want adtech to die at this stage, not
| to find an alternative model. Direct payments to sites I do
| support however and I'm a member of several.
|
| I guess both opinions aren't popular :) But that's my
| reasons to use Firefox despite not being fully happy with
| it.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I'm trying to use brave search as an alternative to
| google, since it is an actual search engine that does
| indexing as opposed to DDG, and I don't want to use bing
| either.
|
| What upsets me is that there's no way to add it as
| default search in a browser, on purpose, because they
| want you to have to install brave browser to do that.
| Nothing upsets me more than when someone deliberately
| makes their product less useful. I do not like Brave, but
| I will use the search engine for now.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| no, kiwi broser is chromium based and supports ublock origin
| webmobdev wrote:
| > _It 's almost like they've been deliberately trying to
| sabotage themselves for years._
|
| I believe it to be corporate sabotage by Google ... due to the
| 100's of millions of dollars that Google gives to the Mozilla
| Foundation, they have a lot of influence over Firefox.
| s17n wrote:
| Firefox was/is trying to be a top browser in global market
| share. The "core userbase" is irrelevant to this mission. You
| wouldn't really even talk about Chrome's "core userbase"
| because they aren't trying to make a niche community happy,
| they are trying to best serve their billions of users,
| something that the author of this piece clearly knows nothing
| about - eg, when your userbase is this large, the only
| meaningful form of feedback is statistical analysis. Telemetry
| is of course the best option but if you wanted to know what
| "people were saying" you wouldn't be operating at the level of
| reading individual posts, you'd be looking for trends on social
| media platforms.
| thayne wrote:
| Well, they are doing a terrible job. The more they become
| like chrome, the less people have a reason to use it instead
| of chrome.
|
| And most people probably don't make a conscious decision
| about which browser to use. A lot of Firefox's momentum comes
| from tech saavy users who recommend it to friends, family,
| coworkers, etc. So losing "core" users cause a chain effect
| of losing non "core" users.
| yosamino wrote:
| I use Firefox exclusively, but the only thing I can think of to
| write in this box are all the unneccessary frustrations they are
| putting me through. The list is _long_. Item one: Why does
| Mozilla have _so_ many ways to file bugs* ?
|
| Which is a pity, because, besides the fact that Chrome has almost
| all of the marketshare, they also basically own Mozilla
| financially (is this still correct ?) and technologically Firefox
| uses Skia and Harfbuzz for rendering, both heavily dependent on
| Google.
|
| So there is basically no competition for Google in the browser
| market.
|
| This can't be good.
| guerrilla wrote:
| How is HarfBuzz heavily dependent on Google? It's been around
| forever, spawn of FreeType.
| junon wrote:
| It is owned and maintained by Google and Facebook.
|
| https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/blob/main/COPYING
| payamb wrote:
| HarfBuzz is maintained by Behdad Eafahbod who _used_ to
| work in Google and Facebook.
| junon wrote:
| Doesn't matter who maintains it. It matters who owns
| copyrights.
| dvdkon wrote:
| That doesn't matter, since it's FLOSS with an irrevocable
| licence. That's the great thing about free software.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _...technologically Firefox uses Skia and Harfbuzz for
| rendering, both heavily dependent on Google._
|
| IIRC, Google Chrome (for Windows) was essentially built by
| engineers hired from Mozilla back in 2005/6? How tables turn.
| roca wrote:
| Skia and Harfbuzz are relatively small components compared to
| the rest of the engine.
|
| Also there's really only one way to file bugs:
| bugzilla.mozilla.org.
| anonymousab wrote:
| There are various GitHub repos, such as for the mobile
| browsers, and they also spun off some functionality like
| container tabs into their own repos as well. You'll also get
| bounced around these repos, bugzilla, the blog and community
| forum posts whenever one source really doesn't want to bother
| with the issue you're trying to bring up regardless of
| relevancy.
| invalidname wrote:
| Tabs on top correlates to Chrome coming out and dominating the
| market then Firefox playing catch up. That's why usage is down.
| Chrome. It was actually a better browser for a long time and
| Firefox made the effort of aping the good ideas the Chrome team
| had.
|
| It's finally pretty close and surpasses Chrome on many fronts but
| turning the tides is pretty hard.
|
| I agree that listening to users is important but some users hold
| you back in a competitive market. Firefox takes cpu in the
| background because websites have JavaScript code and so do
| plugins. Chrome does the same thing.
| Yoric wrote:
| I have an alternative set of explanations regarding why Firefox
| is seeing a continuous decline for the last 12 years.
|
| 1. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are not public
| but I would be surprised if Google didn't have 10x more people
| working on Chrome vs. the number of people working on Firefox.
|
| 2. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are again not
| public but I remember reading estimates that the equivalent _ad
| budget_ for promoting Chrome during year 1 was about 6x the
| entire budget of Mozilla for that period (writing "equivalent"
| because webside, Google is its own ad agency).
|
| 3. Mozilla is competing against Google. Google owns countless
| properties besides Chrome, from Google Docs to Google Translate
| to Android, and leverages all of these (great products) to lead
| users towards Chrome. Case in point: many properties that
| don't/didn't work or work correctly with Firefox could be made to
| magically work if you changed your user agent to Chrome.
|
| 4. Mozilla is competing against Google. While Mozilla was front
| and center on many things open-source, relying on volunteers,
| Google employs countless (talented) Tech Evangelists and managed
| to attract considerable goodwill, much of it at the expense of
| the army of volunteers who used to help Mozilla.
|
| 5. Replace "Google" with "Apple" in the above points, adapt
| product names and repeat.
|
| 6. In 2011, predicting that the only way out of this was to
| outmaneuver Google and Apple on mobile devices/silos, Mozilla bet
| the farm on Firefox OS and lost. Mozilla never recovered.
|
| 7. During the Brendan Eichgate, Mozilla became a hapless victim
| of the US culture wars, mostly acccidentally. Mozilla never
| recovered.
|
| Now, I'm not claiming that Mozilla never made any other mistake
| wrt technology or UX or PR. We've all seen a number of them. What
| I'm claiming is that these mistakes have next to no influence in
| comparison to the points above.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Of course Eich becoming a Mozilla higher-up (even before
| becoming CEO) is why browsers became so complicated and
| expensive to develop. We would have been better off staying
| with HTML3 and no javascript.
| phillipseamore wrote:
| To points 1-4, where would FF be without $400m a year from
| Google?
| ndiddy wrote:
| I suspect Google thinks the $400m/year is worth not having to
| deal with antitrust proceedings due to having a competing
| desktop browser.
| Yoric wrote:
| Your point is also true.
| Klinky wrote:
| Is this what peak competition looks like? 3 browsers, 2 from
| companies with histories of anti-trust behavior who use the
| same browser engine, and the alternative is heavily funded by
| 1 of those 2 companies.
| dTal wrote:
| >many properties that don't/didn't work or work correctly with
| Firefox could be made to magically work if you changed your
| user agent to Chrome.
|
| Pretty damning that Google was never slammed with a huge fine
| for anti-competitive behavior for that.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Chrome is just the new IE.
|
| I've been saying this for over a decade, and facts like just
| continue to make this clear.
| recursive wrote:
| I've been hearing this for the last decade also. I wonder
| if those saying it were around for the dominance of IE.
| Chrome is like the opposite of IE. IE didn't ship an update
| for like 6 years. Chrome ships updates every ~6 weeks.
| treis wrote:
| Except that chromium is open source. Plenty of alternate
| browsers exist and at least one has big backing (Edge).
|
| It's not a bad thing for there to be only one HTML &
| JavaScript engine that you have to deal with. In fact it's
| the opposite. The dominance of Chrome has made development
| much easier.
| will4274 wrote:
| Um. A "hapless victim" of the US culture wars? Mozilla quite
| deliberately committed suicide - they bought a fucking
| fireworks show to announce to the world that if you had views
| as conservative or more conservative that the average American,
| you had a permanent glass ceiling for your employment at
| Mozilla. Now they struggle to hire developers over the age of
| 25 - who would have guessed?
|
| Describing the prosecutors of a culture wars as the victims of
| that same culture war is a bizarre doublespeak.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Dude literally spent money trying to fuck over the right for
| gay people to get married.
|
| He's a predator, not a victim. Using your influence to fuck
| over people who have NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU is absolutely
| disgusting and unforgivable.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| More importantly when confronted with a serious piece of
| leadership challenge the guy screwed up badly. He needed to
| navigate that a lot better and didn't.
|
| That was worth his resignation.
| dralley wrote:
| If I were an LGBT employee at Mozilla, I would be pretty
| pissed and demoralized that my "leader" was actively trying
| to _remove_ my rights.
|
| Because that's what Proposition 8 was, an attempt to
| constitutionally _remove_ marriage rights from gay people
| after the California courts ruled that it was allowed.
|
| I think I'd be pretty uncomfortable making money for a person
| who would turn around and it to take away my / my family's
| rights.
| mbg721 wrote:
| What did "marriage rights" actually change? I know taxes
| changed, and I assume there were some property implications
| beyond just sticking it to bigoted Christians, but that
| last part seemed to be the major feature.
| dralley wrote:
| >What did "marriage rights" actually change? I know taxes
| changed, and I assume there were some property
| implications beyond just sticking it to bigoted
| Christians, but that last part seemed to be the major
| feature.
|
| If your "partner" is dying in the hospital, you don't
| have a legal right to be allowed to see them.
|
| If your "spouse" is dying in the hospital, you do.
|
| That's one example.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Okay, that's a good concrete example.
| kergonath wrote:
| This is weird. Why would one class of people need to
| justify having the same rights as another class of
| people? You've got it wrong: there needs to be a reason
| for them _not_ to have that right.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Societies for millennia have had intuition about what men
| and women are, and have always defined marriage to
| reflect that. If we're suddenly enlightened because we've
| unshackled reproduction from sex and anyone can have a
| married relationship with anyone else, that _is_ new,
| that 's not some ancient natural right.
| krapp wrote:
| Sex has been unshackled from reproduction for far, far
| longer than marriage has even been a concept, and in many
| ancient cultures same sex relationships were perfectly
| normal[0].
|
| The axis of "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" itself
| is no older than the 20th century, and even the concept
| of monogamy is relatively new as far as Abrahamic
| religious tradition goes.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_same-
| sex_unions
| mbg721 wrote:
| Non-conventional sex isn't new, but making sure marriage
| is defined in such a way to include it _is_ new, or at
| least wasn 't universal.
| will4274 wrote:
| And the result is that Mozilla is a zombie company, filled
| with LGBT employees who would rather work for a company
| that is useless than one that has a leader who opposes gay
| marriage. That's fine for the U25s, but as people get
| older, they usually want to work for a company that is
| accomplishing something.
|
| I understand the folks who wanted that and why they wanted
| that. But it still turned Mozilla and Firefox into walking
| corpses.
| dralley wrote:
| You're making a stupendously massive, unjustified
| assumption that Brendan Eich would somehow have prevented
| Mozilla from being in this position.
|
| They're competing against Apple, Google, and Microsoft
| simultaneously. It is entirely possible that could have
| been the best CEO in the world and Firefox could still be
| in the same exact position right now, or one that is only
| marginally better.
| will4274 wrote:
| You've misread me. Eich wouldn't have saved Mozilla.
| Having many fewer ideological employees who insisted on
| conformity would have saved Mozilla.
|
| Conformity is not just a problem for politics. Read TFA -
| these are all conformity problems - Mozilla gets angry at
| people who disagree with their point of view - whether it
| is that tabs belong on top or that Eich is an evil
| abusive person or that Proton is surely better than XUL.
| A company that better tolerated diversity in their
| employees would be better set up to tolerate diversity in
| their users.
| dralley wrote:
| > Proton is surely better than XUL
|
| Proton has literally nothing to do with XUL, so if this
| is something you believe they think, then they'd be right
| to be annoyed about people with no clue what they're
| talking about spreading FUD.
|
| That is like complaining that KDE is better than QML
| files or that GNOME is better than .glade files. Or that
| Chrome is better than HTML and JavaScript. Utterly
| nonsensical.
| Infinitesimus wrote:
| You're making a lot of assumptions about Mozilla's
| employee base here...
| will4274 wrote:
| As TFA says, it's about Mozilla's employees. "Thinking
| you know best" is an attitude that leads you to fire
| people for out-of-work disagreements, and also remove
| features that "no one uses", and also divert money from
| useful products (Firefox) to products that they are "just
| sure" will be a huge hit (Firefox OS) but then turn out
| to be total flops.
|
| Mozilla's problem is that its organization (the
| collective outcome of its employees) is extremely
| arrogant. Arrogant about technical choices, arrogant
| about product design choices, arrogant about the way they
| do PR (including shaming a developer after he died), and
| arrogant about political/ethical choices as well. That's
| not to say they aren't ever right, but an organization
| that approached political topics where Americans are
| evenly divided with a bit of humility might have an
| easier time hiring just as an organization that
| approached product design topic where it's users are
| evenly divided with a bit of humility might have an
| easier time finding a good design. Humility helps, and
| Mozilla has none of it.
| shartacct wrote:
| Eich wasn't a good leader even if you ignore his
| political views. Brave isn't exactly successful, it's a
| sham to inject their own ads into pages and to sell a
| worthless scamcoin.
| patrick451 wrote:
| Homosexuality is immoral, so it is logical to ask the state
| not to condone it.
| roca wrote:
| This is certainly much closer to the mark than an article that
| leads with "tabs on top".
|
| It's easy and fun to point to half a dozen of your favourite
| Mozilla missteps over more than a decade and say "those are why
| Mozilla is losing". Maybe if Mozilla had done none of them,
| they wouldn't be losing. But in reality every vendor makes
| missteps. It's the unrelenting competition from Google that
| really made the difference, via the avenues you mention and
| others.
| shartacct wrote:
| > 7. During the Brendan Eichgate, Mozilla became a hapless
| victim of the US culture wars, mostly acccidentally. Mozilla
| never recovered.
|
| Defending Eich is a hot take that you only see here on HN. He
| is a worthless individual who champions the cause of taking
| away personal freedoms of groups of people he doesn't like,
| pushes anti-mask conspiracy and smears public workers like
| Fauci, and his only technical 'achievement' since leaving
| Mozilla has been to create a fork of chrome that bakes in his
| companies ads and pushes a scamcoin on the user.
|
| The fact you even have the gall to defend such a person is
| laughable. It wasn't that long ago the population would
| summarily execute such people when they revealed their status
| as societal bad actors.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I switched because FF was painfully slow, and chrome was
| blazing fast when it came out in comparison. Not only that, but
| the dev tools (specifically for JS) were far better than
| anything else out there.
|
| Fast forward 12 years, and little has changed. I dont keep 1000
| tabs open, so chrome has never felt slow. I tried installing
| the developer edition of FF about 6 years ago on macOS and it
| refused to open.
|
| Why bother changing?
| SSLy wrote:
| Because since FF57 it feels faster than Chrome.
| zdragnar wrote:
| And yet, chrome doesnt feel slow to me. The difference
| isn't nearly as stark as it once was between the two. FF
| lost because _they lost the plot_.
|
| If I were a tab hoarder (I.e. didn't know how to use
| bookmarks) or thought that Mozilla were any more
| trustworthy than Google (why is it that the for profit puts
| out FF but the not-for-profit collects donations that go to
| anything but?) then I would switch.
|
| I'm waiting to see how manifest v3 shakes out- Chromes plan
| is still better than safari has been (she admittedly low
| bar) but until thr browsing experience is affected, I have
| no problem sticking with chrome / chromium.
| rwmj wrote:
| _> Google owns countless properties besides Chrome, from Google
| Docs to Google Translate to Android, and leverages all of these
| (great products) to lead users towards Chrome_
|
| I always wonder why Google do this. Sure, they could always
| have more Chrome users, but at the same time they're going to
| have to support Firefox forever whatever happens, and Firefox
| is a nice hedge for Google against being accused of having a
| browser monopoly.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > but at the same time they're going to have to support
| Firefox forever whatever happens, and Firefox is a nice hedge
| for Google against being accused of having a browser monopoly
|
| They merely need to wait for a time when the regulatory
| environment is more favorable. It's just a roll of the dice
| every 4 years, sooner or later their number will come up and
| they can cut all support then and there.
|
| But it's not really necessary. By making Chrome the preferred
| and optimal way to use any site, and making chrome intrinsics
| the expected behavior of a web browser, they are creating an
| environment where all the incentives are towards making your
| browser more like chrome. Eventually there won't be much
| difference in the surface between Firefox and Chrome and
| Mozilla will finally make the decision we all eventually
| expect, and just change Firefox into a true chromium fork.
|
| Though that may happen sooner anyways. It feels pretty clear
| that there are parts of the greater Mozilla org that don't
| benefit at all from all the effort going into Gecko (or a web
| browser in general) and wouldn't be disappointed in the money
| going towards other initiatives instead.
| eplanit wrote:
| As a US citizen, I really wish I lived in a country with
| effective (i.e. actually used/enforced) antitrust laws, that
| would see the dominance in browsers (chrome and android),
| combined with dominance in search -- which promotes its ads
| (another industry it dominates), the alteration of how the web
| is experienced to favor itself (hiding site identity the
| browser and in search results, combined with showing scraped
| content instead of directing traffic to actual site), combined
| with ... as being monopolistic and anti-competitive practices.
| It's beyond ridiculous anymore.
| tucosan wrote:
| FF corrupted my profile twice during the update process.
|
| It's a known issue for years. After I lost all tabs and bookmarks
| for a second time, I decided to bite the bullet and go back to
| Chrome.
| trm42 wrote:
| My personal pet peeve is that the Chrome's different User
| Profiles is so easy to use. I'm aware of the different plugins
| that can offer similar functionality but the setup Chrome is
| offering is so simple and intuitive that switching feels
| annoyingly too complicated.
|
| Otherwise I've been really surprised how much better Firefox has
| gotten in the last two years. Good to see old giant still alive.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Have you tried firefox containers? They basically do the same
| thing as chrome but you can run tabs from different contains
| right next to each other.
| [deleted]
| herf wrote:
| Before Chrome launched in late 2008, Google promoted Firefox as
| the browser to get. That changed when Chrome launched. It's
| amazing to read about things Firefox did "wrong" right after that
| in 2009 - correlation just isn't causation here.
| dgan wrote:
| I always use FF sync feature between laptops The only regular
| pain for me is bad webrtc support, which makes me use Chromium
| for meetings.. otherwise it just doesn't work
| lousken wrote:
| Idk about 12 years but I know about last two years - many
| companies and workers had to switch to WFH. So that means using
| some sort of chat&video&audio software/website.
|
| What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams?
| That should've been the highest priority. Instead, it took them
| years to get at least the GPOs right, autoupdate is the same
| story... so many things in corprote env were or still are PITA to
| set up in Firefox. So unfortunately no wonder it's Chrom(ium) for
| every single big company out there.
|
| And don't get me wrong, I try to use exclusively Firefox whenver
| I can, but this is really frustrating to me as sysadmin.
| Yoric wrote:
| That's the vicious circle:
|
| 1. Google basically controls the web.
|
| 2. Whenever a new Web API shows up, browser vendors have to
| decide between implementing the standard and copying the bugs,
| exotic behaviors and extensions that are implemented in
| Chromium.
|
| 3. Websites are tested on Chromium, so they start to rely on
| Chromium's bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions.
|
| 4. When a website breaks in Firefox (or Safari), people claim
| that it's the fault of Firefox devs and switch to Chromium.
|
| The early web got tired of this when it was Microsoft at the
| wheels, but it feels that few people are particularly
| interested in fighting the good fight these days. Much easier
| to blame Mozilla.
| lousken wrote:
| I can blame whoever I want, but at the end of the day, the
| problem that I have to deal with is the user saying - Teams
| doesn't work. What am I supposed to do with it?
| mchusma wrote:
| Honestly (you may not like the answer) I tell users "try a
| different browser".
| lousken wrote:
| exactly, and that's how firefox loses marketshare
| 0xCMP wrote:
| On the other hand, how many of these browsers are actually
| building or inventing any of these new apis to support things
| like screensharing, video, audio, and etc so they're not
| hacks except for chrome?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams?
|
| I think that's the wrong way around. Why would Firefox need to
| change their browser for a specific web application?
|
| Microsoft chose not to support Firefox, not the other way
| around. It's still choosing not to support smaller platforms
| (the Linux application is simply garbage, lacking basic
| features that have been available on other platforms for
| months).
|
| When I ran into this problem, Teams didn't work because Firefox
| didn't allow the application to enumerate the audio devices
| hooked up to my computer, only exposing a "default" one. I
| don't even understand why that would be a problem, my browser
| already asked which input and output to use, why would Teams
| need to care?
|
| Jitsi and Google Meet worked fine, so the problem was clearly
| with Microsoft's developers. They managed to fix the problem
| eventually, so Microsoft should take 100% of the blame here in
| my opinion.
|
| I don't know about the sysadmin stuff. Honestly, with modern
| Chrome-clone Edge, I'd expect most business that roll out a
| browser to now simply stick to the built-in browser.
| ryandrake wrote:
| When you're a platform trying to gain market share, and a big
| application doesn't work because of the developer's bug, you
| don't throw your hands up and say "well it's the developer's
| fault." You work around that bug in your platform. Reminds me
| of the stories[1] about early days Microsoft putting all
| sorts of hacks in their OS to work around 3rd party app bugs,
| just to keep backward compatibility going. When you're
| focused on growth, you can't adhere to some sense of purity
| and demand 3p apps fix themselves to work on your platform.
| You need to make the platform work with their app.
|
| 1: (original Raymond Chen link busted, but quoted here:)
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-
| lost...
| corty wrote:
| I would strongly disagree on the sysadmin stuff. Firefox has
| always had a very powerful settings system. All the stuff you
| could set in about:config can also be set via a set of
| configuration files provided by the sysadmin, the user and
| the distro, each of which can provide defaults, presets or
| locked non-changeable settings which are hierarchically
| enforced. Exactly what you need as a sysadmin, cross-
| platform, could do everything and the kitchen sink,
| distributable either via your usual config management or
| LDAP/HTTP/whatever you can script in a few lines of
| Javascript if you need. GPOs are just a poor windows admin's
| substitute, they cannot do half of that, even in IE and Edge.
| Not to mention Chrome, which lags miles behind there.
| lousken wrote:
| I am not denying that firefox has options to customize
| itself, but if you don't wanna take my word for it - here's
| the comments on /r/sysadmin when they started supporting
| GPOs https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/82naw1/mozi
| lla_fi... .
|
| Same thing with MS login https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/
| comments/p1ral4/firefox_91...
| 0xCMP wrote:
| I'm not aware of the APIs in question and it sounds like this
| probably to prevent fingerprinting of a device... but why not
| simply return only the default device when enumerated?
|
| It inherently makes sense that all those apps would try to
| understand what devices were available and even allow
| switching between them. It's often required because that
| entire stack between the browser, os, and device is very
| unreliable even on something like macOS.
|
| Yea it's on MS to test and fix their stuff, but FF is the one
| losing market share and honestly part it sounds like they
| make their apis more prone to misuse. At least in this case.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I don't know why this broke in the first place, all I know
| is that I had no sound and that the device selection menu
| was borked where other video calling webapps worked just
| fine. The enumerateDevices API has been in Firefox for
| years [1].
|
| To be fair(ish) to Microsoft, I did spoof Chrome's user
| agent because Microsoft forced a "this website doesn't work
| with your browser" screen in Firefox. Perhaps the failing
| API was an unstable Chrome-only API that they assumed works
| because of the UA. The browser compatibility screen
| communicates that they definitely tested it, that they
| definitely knew about the problem, and that they just
| didn't want to fix it.
|
| I just dropped Teams as an option and sent everyone who
| wanted to video chat Jitsi links. That worked fine while I
| needed it. If a company chooses not to support me, then I
| will choose not to use that company if I can.
|
| [1] https://caniuse.com/?search=enumerateDevices
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Why would Firefox need to change their browser for a
| specific web application?
|
| Because Firefox has more to lose by not doing so. The blame
| game is pointless because in the end it helps Firefox in no
| way.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams?
| That should've been the highest priority.
|
| Why use a browser for Teams at all?
| lousken wrote:
| If you wanna join a meeting from another company and you dont
| have teams licence, you can only use browser or mobile app
| (not sure if this was changed later or not, because by winter
| every company I manage had bought ms 365 business. Though
| teams licence is still an extra item in MS365 admin so I'd
| assume it hasn't changed)
| deadalus wrote:
| I knew Mozilla was going downhill when they started purging words
| from the project. When your inclusion efforts start alienating
| moderate users it might be time to rethink them.
|
| * Removing "meritocracy" from the governance docs -
| https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-
|
| * Changing "master password" to "primary password" -
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replac
|
| * Removing "crazy" from the codebase -
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675987
|
| * Removing words deemed as reference to mental illness -
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675986
|
| The difference in the project from 15 years ago is stark.
|
| The Mozilla mission 2005:
|
| "Established in July, 2003, with start-up support from America
| Online's Netscape division, the Mozilla Foundation exists to
| provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the
| Mozilla open-source software project."
|
| The Mozilla mission 2021:
|
| "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public
| resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts
| people first, where individuals can shape their own experience
| and are empowered, safe and independent."
|
| Where they once were just supporting a software project they're
| now a political movement. They spout "equity", "justice", and
| "advocacy" all over mozilla.org. No thanks, I just want a decent
| software.
| [deleted]
| noasaservice wrote:
| ^^ How to say you're a white male in tech, without specifically
| saying you're a white male in tech.
|
| meritocracy - To whom? Who decides? That's right: the
| kingmaker. And the kingmaker decides on those who share
| significant amount of the same traits. And most of these
| "kingmakers" in tech are 20-30 something white male.
|
| master to primary - Again, "master" in US culture has a very
| very bad connotation that <drumroll> equates with US slavery of
| black peoples. ""find . -type f -exec sed -i
| 's/master/primary/g' {} \; "" takes seconds to run, and only
| infringes on alt-right sensitivities.
|
| crazy - Is a garbage word. Has no real definition, and just
| really shouldn't be used. If there's a problem with a person
| and their choices, the issue with that should be stated, not by
| calling them "Crazy". Same goes for the rest of the words in
| your mental illness link. Enumerate the problem at hand, not by
| labeling the problem with a garbage word that equates to crazy.
|
| > Where they once were just supporting a software project
| they're now a political movement.
|
| FLOSS has always been political. The predominant license (GPL)
| is a anti-capitalist license that seeks freedoms from creators
| to make everyone owners. The AGPL was made to challenge cloud
| operators in using and not sharing their changes. Again,
| political.
|
| And the whole FLOSS ecosystem itself is and isn't about
| computers. It's about how humans interact with computers and
| other humans using computers - and guaranteeing individual
| rights when using computers. FLOSS is a human rights issue. So
| yes, it's completely understandable that high profile projects
| would seek to include everyone.
| simion314 wrote:
| >the predominant license (GPL) is a anti-capitalist license
|
| GPL and RMS is not anti-capitalist, Linus Torvalds and Red
| Hat for example made lots of money.
|
| So you can have Proprietary license <GPL <BSD and you have
| dudes that love both proprietary and BSD and hate GPL, my
| only conclusion that this dudes would like to grab others BSD
| work and make it proprietary and make tons of money, this is
| not capitalism ; this is the toxic "How to make XXX$ in 1
| month(10 steps) people.
|
| let me explain, I see people selling this idea of you buy
| this cheap crap from China then do a small change , sell the
| shit and make tons of money with almost no work(I seen other
| get rich schems too, with books or other stuff). I think some
| GPL haters would love to grab GPL stuff, put their cheap shit
| on top and sell it and make tons of money. GPL allows you to
| make money though, you have to share code though so others
| could make money too.
|
| P.S. I would really like to understand why GPL is anti
| capitalist or communist in some people mind, is it some FUD
| or some wrong usage of the notions.
| jfax wrote:
| "Communism" or "capitalism" just means "bad thing"
| according to different people.
| bertman wrote:
| HN hug of death? Google Cache version:
| https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1Pr-MH...
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| I just couldn't get over the PROFILE UI.
|
| Switching profiles was unpleasant and confusing.
|
| They already have them implemented, why not give it a good UI
| like Chrome?
|
| if they got that sorted I would be a Firefox user for life.
| maverick74 wrote:
| Sooo true!!!
| johnklos wrote:
| This piece highlights the underlying problem, about which the
| specifics are just symptoms: the attitudes of Mozilla people.
|
| They have been outright dismissive, almost hostile - they think
| they know what's right, they think they "know better", they may
| even really believe they're doing pro-"privacy" stuff - but in
| the end, they're wearing blinders.
|
| For example, there's no reason in the world to change things in a
| way that's actively hostile to those who don't want those
| changes, yet version after version requires non-trivial amounts
| of work to figure out how to simply not change.
|
| Then they do things like aggregating all DNS for people in the US
| to one monopolistic company WITHOUT ASKING, because, they say,
| people don't know what's good for them. They only relented after
| lots of negative publicity, not after sitting and considering
| that not everyone trusts Cloudflare just because they say they're
| not evil.
|
| So it's the attitude that comes from design-by-fiat that has
| turned me off completely, and I see no evidence that anything is
| changing in any way that's good. To the contrary - I see more
| examples of making decisions without the slightest concern for
| technical discussion.
|
| I fear that declining market share will only strengthen their
| resolve to force things on their user base.
| sleepless wrote:
| Longtime Firefox user here. Oddly I have no problem with Tabs on
| top (I prefer that UI design), low contrast between tabs (there
| are favicons and text which clearly indicate the tabs, I am not
| lacking anything to make out where a tab is), removing XUL (only
| using few add-ons and those transitioned), performance (is fine
| for me on a macbook pro). Sometimes it feels to me as if there is
| a trend to bash on weaker projects like fediverse, encryption
| projects, open source browsers, ...
|
| For me the main argument to use Firefox is not living in the
| Google universe which is quite a huge value in itself and the
| fact that it is open source.
|
| Oh and they finally added proper dark mode on macOS and did quite
| some work for Firefox to look and feel more at home on macOS in
| the last versions. This is really nice to see and appreciated.
|
| Btw Firefox has seen a bottom in 2021 June and user numbers have
| been going up slightly since then:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
| pasc1878 wrote:
| The last version messed up macos dark mode completely. It
| ignores much css including including add-ons like tree style
| tabs which is the main reason I use firefox. So I am stuck on
| v90
|
| The bug says fixed but the nightlies show it hasn't
| sleepless wrote:
| What do you mean by "it ignores much css"? I am using tree
| style tab add-on and it shows fine for me.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| If you use high contrast it breaks css
| pasc1878 wrote:
| The last version messed up macos dark mode completely. It
| ignores much css including including add-ons like tree style
| tabs which is the main reason I use firefox. So I am stuck on
| v90
|
| The bug says fixed but the nightlies show it hasn't
|
| Oh and I had to switch to Safari to edit this comment.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Something seems off. I use current FF on HN all the time
| and never had a problem editing comments. Perhaps your
| session is messed up?
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| I'm with you. Applications change. I have no objections with
| what they've been doing and I'm always surprised by the
| vitriol. Then I remember the people taking the time to comment
| about Firefox are predominantly the ones complaining. Squeaky
| wheels and all that...
| indymike wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: Personally, I'd love to see Mozilla take on
| Apple in court. Firefox, Gecko rendering engine and all, should
| be on iOS. Not allowing competing browsers is more anti-
| competitive than not allowing third party payments for in-app
| purchases, and would lead to incredible amounts of innovation.
| tgv wrote:
| That would then lead to Chrome being allowed on iOS too,
| undoing any potential gain in a day.
|
| There's (IMO) nothing anti-competitive about not allowing other
| browsers. They all serve the same web pages.
|
| Cynical take: if Mozilla were to start such a law suit, it
| would be to avoid Google having to disclose how much money they
| make from Chrome users.
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| Not unpopular at all around here, except that Mozilla going to
| court against a behemoth is a sure way to drain all their
| funding for little to no gain (there's no evidence that firefox
| would gain more users with their engine on iOS).
|
| Mozilla should use their money to improve their browser on
| desktop and mobile.
|
| Firefox on iOS shows how little Mozilla cares about the
| platform.
|
| For instance, no real adblock, they only have a tracker blocker
| which blocks most ads but misses a LOT of web annoyances like
| cookie banners and YouTube ads.
|
| Example of third party browsers with full featured adblockers:
| - edge have adblock plus - brave have a built in adblock - iCab
|
| Their reader mode is extremely amateurish compared to safari.
| Increasing font size makes the title of the article absolutely
| huge.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > Firefox on iOS shows how little Mozilla cares about the
| platform.
|
| I agree, but also aren't alternative browsers on IOS still
| just window dressing? Since the backend is always Safari?
| egberts1 wrote:
| and just NOW, YouTube (also owned by Google) has turned off
| captioning support in Firefox for Apple iPhone.
|
| Only Safari and Chrome will support captioning.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Since the original source is down and I couldn't find any other
| mirror, here's an AMP mirror:
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.itsfoss.com/firefox-contin...
|
| If someone has a better one that's not AMP, please post it. :)
| laurent92 wrote:
| My Firefox has become adware. Adware for Mozilla, but still:
| Every new tab I open, there is a "WE CARE FOR YOUR PRIVACY"
| message awaiting for me. Every restart, "LOOK AT HOW WE HAVE
| FEWER ADS, MORE PRIVACY". And from time to time, if I don't open
| a tab by myself, it will install Pocket and/or open two tabs at
| startup, one for the release notes and one for browsing, but
| still with the little mention "Firefox has been awarded the
| Firefox of the year by Firefox, thanks to how we don't let the
| bad guys follow you with ads. Also please create an online
| profile so we upload all your passwords to the cloud. Because
| you'll be safer."
|
| Honestly, Mozilla has lost the big picture. The whole point of it
| was to have fewer messages that occupy the mind and disrupt
| tasks, and Chrome does it better, as long as I'm logged in.
| corty wrote:
| Also, in my mind, exchanging Chrome's insistence on Google
| logins is just the same as Firefox's insistence on their
| proprietary sync and pocket. I'll say no to every one of those
| things, because I do value my privacy and none of them provide
| proper self-hosted options.
| the_duke wrote:
| Sync is optional, and you can use a custom server and self
| host it.
| charles-m-knox wrote:
| Last I checked, self-hosted Firefox sync uses Python 2.7,
| with dead GitHub activity. Not quite the best state for
| Firefox sync.
| the_duke wrote:
| I believe they have shifted to a Rust implementation.
|
| https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
| charles-m-knox wrote:
| Ok, I'm relieved to see that this exists. Thank you.
| ragesh wrote:
| I thought it was possible to host your own sync server for
| Firefox. Is this no longer true?
| yoasif_ wrote:
| Firefox Sync is open source: https://github.com/mozilla-
| services/syncserver
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Wait, what? I use Firefox exclusively and there's definitely
| not a Mozilla ad every new tab or every restart. There is one
| once a major release (including a couple of days ago), and
| those always annoy me, but it's only once a month or two.
|
| Are you exaggerating or does yours work differently?
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Actually I think there is... I distinctly remember being
| extremely annoyed at the text ad on the new tab page. Turned
| it off a long time ago. It's called "Snippets" in
| settings/home. It's like a Twitter feed from Mozilla.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Oh huh you're right, I must have turned it off and
| forgotten. I turned it back on again and don't see anything
| new but maybe it's not all the time.
| cryptos wrote:
| I see parallels to the Gnome desktop. Users are patronized in the
| same way and features are crippled, because the developers know
| best what users actually want! I stopped using Gnome and although
| I like Firefox for being the last free browser, I fear that
| sooner or later I'll have to switch to chrome or one of its
| descendants.
| JohnFen wrote:
| That's another good point -- Mozilla was (maybe still is, I
| don't know -- I pretty much stopped listening to Mozillians)
| very condescending and dismissive of any opinion that they
| didn't already agree with. I'd rarely seen a company put so
| much effort into alienating their fan base.
| [deleted]
| drunkpotato wrote:
| Not a direct response to this piece, but the two things keeping
| me on Firefox these days, besides it being a decent browser
| generally, are container tabs and tree style tabs. They're both
| very convenient for my workflow. I think all the browsers are
| pretty good, but those two features are great.
| avh02 wrote:
| I'm always amazed at people's resistance to the concept of tree
| style tabs (or even just tabbing vertically instead)... The
| horizontal space is far less valuable on widescreens (most
| websites are just a column down the middle anyway) and
| top/horizontal tabbing systems are worthless when you have a
| non-trivial number of tabs.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It's just a matter of taste, is all. I personally hate
| vertical tabs (or vertical tasks bars, etc). They're just a
| pain the butt for me. But clearly there are others who love
| them. Vive la difference!
|
| But, with tabs specifically, I very rarely have more than two
| going at a time. That probably matters.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Chrome spread like malware. Bundled with Freeware on PCs and
| being the de facto browser on most mobile phones on this planet.
|
| Firefox never had a true chance to compete on the same level and
| I'm happy they didn't and still exist.
| terracatta wrote:
| > You succeed by giving users what they want, not telling them
| what they should want
|
| This closing statement is missing so much context that it's
| misleading.
|
| When you have more than a handful of users, their wants will
| eventually conflict, often directly. (Ex: Tabs on top vs Tabs on
| Bottom). Other times a majority of users will ask for things that
| provide fleeting short-term benefit but in the long-term could
| kill your product (ex: We need Flash support on Firefox Mobile).
| Telemetry and research helps you consider the needs of a silent
| majority, but it can alienate the vocal minority that proselytize
| your product. To appease both, you need to come up with a clear
| vision, validate it's right, and then ruthlessly steer your
| product toward it.
|
| If there is a vision for Firefox, I don't know what it is. So
| why, as a user, should accept Firefox's many faults today when
| Mozilla has failed to paint a clear picture of tomorrow?
| morpheos137 wrote:
| I wish somebody would make a light weight web browser that was
| compatible with modern standards. I like Opera but I don't think
| it is available for my operating system (OpenBSD) any more.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I would pay money for a browser that was more like the first
| Firefox. Not insanely bloated and slow, virtually no features to
| speak of, simple, small, functional. Even if it only works on 80%
| of the web, fine with me. I want to browse text and pictures, not
| run an entire second operating system just to browse text and
| pictures. And add back the options and user functionality they
| removed over the years so it's less of a pain in the ass to use.
| tiahura wrote:
| Look at Mozilla's leadership page. Why would you expect a tech
| company run by HR and D&I to be successful?
|
| It would appear that Mozilla has become captive to a single
| person as their personal hustle to enrich themself and a few
| others to the organization's detriment.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I got as far as what looks to my apparently naive analysis like
| a qualified CEO who's been there from the start and realized I
| have no idea what you're talking about. A random sampling shows
| people who've been there since the 2000s, or come with what
| passes for solid engineering credentials in tech.
|
| Maybe you could expand this out a little for people who aren't
| In The Know. Specifics on why each person on the page isn't
| qualified to lead a browser company will help a ton. Thanks in
| advance.
| jollybean wrote:
| Can someone help me understand the Tabs issue?
|
| Did they do 'Tabs on Top' before or after Chrome, and how could
| that be a problem, given that it seems this is the way everyone
| does it now?
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