[HN Gopher] Where's Firefox going next?
___________________________________________________________________
Where's Firefox going next?
Author : ReadCarlBarks
Score : 310 points
Date : 2025-07-15 21:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (connect.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (connect.mozilla.org)
| Animats wrote:
| Not going compute-bound for two minutes after launch, while not
| displaying pages?
| blahaj wrote:
| Android?
| Animats wrote:
| No, Linux. I don't know what it's doing in there. Lots of
| disk I/O. Clearing the "startup cache" can help.
| quesera wrote:
| My guess: something is seriously borked in your profile.
| Easy to test.
|
| I have run Firefox on Linux for decades (and a few
| extensions, and metric gobs of tabs), with zero cases of
| the behaviour you describe.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Same here, vanilla Firefox snap on Ubuntu. If anything,
| Firefox with hundreds (literally) of tabs starts way
| faster than Chrome with 10, thanks to lazy its loading.
| RAM usage has always been stellar in Firefox, in my
| experience.
|
| Maybe their distro has a broken Firefox package, they
| messed with the default installation, have too many
| extensions, or malware? A slow mechanical disk?
| arp242 wrote:
| Maybe try creating a new profile? I've had cases where a
| profile can cause _Weird Shit(tm)_ to happen. Kind of
| annoying though. Probably something in a SQLite database or
| some such, but I didn 't have the interest to track it
| down.
| hcs wrote:
| Not sure if it will help but about:processes might give
| some more info about what is causing the activity.
| dralley wrote:
| Dude, I have literally 4,000 tabs (not a joke), and my
| Firefox is fully loaded on boot after only a couple of
| seconds.
|
| Something is wrong with your system.
| lelanthran wrote:
| I've experienced this since 2018 across all versions of
| linux mint since 2018.
|
| The problem appeared to be a lot of unnecessary disk io
| coupled with DNA lookup that only get done after _every
| single read request_ is complete. This means that when tab
| #10 is taking long to read whatever from disk it blocks
| every other tab.
|
| Noticeable only when using spinning rust disks.
| morsch wrote:
| I'm noticing it on a fast SSD, though it's more like
| 5-10s after launching. No issues once it's running. I'd
| guess it's related to my very old and large profile.
| jjordan wrote:
| It would be great if they restored the `Smart Bookmarks` feature
| they removed a number of years ago. Smart Bookmarks were
| fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark
| toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your
| favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one
| that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created
| Livemarks (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly
| replicated its functionality, but it's not quite the same as
| having native support for them.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| I'd forgotten about this. What a banging feature that was.
| deanc wrote:
| I want nothing more now from Firefox than iterative performance
| improvements across all platforms and adherence to web standards.
| That's it. Let extensions handle all the other crap.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| Agreed! I stuck with Firefox for a long time, but within the
| last year moved to Brave because too many sites were breaking.
| To your list I'd add "adblock," though, because it seems like
| extension standards are converging on a point where that's more
| effectively scaffolded inside the browser.
| rtpg wrote:
| Tbh I disagree, the official vertical tab support is so nice
| and less janky than any of the extensions I used that had this
| functionality
|
| After opening FF while previously using Arc for a while I was
| super happy with the usability improvements (that don't seem to
| have impacted older workflows fortunately... big fan of how FF
| makes it easy to customize the toolbar etc)
| dns_snek wrote:
| I've tried the new vertical tabs and I'm not a fan, it's very
| primitive compared to my favorite vertical tab extension
| Sideberry.
| asadotzler wrote:
| I'll wager most users are happy with primitive over
| advanced.
|
| For example, I sometimes run with hundreds of tabs and my
| wife has many thousands, at all times. My needs and hers
| are very different from typical users who have single
| digits numbers of tabs open, heavily biased toward the low
| end.
|
| Of course I would prefer TST or Sideberry, but I'm not like
| most users. For most users, the Firefox experience is
| _superior_ to Sideberry for its ease of use and fewer
| failure modes.
| Centigonal wrote:
| I tried Tree-style tabs and Sidebery, and I bounced off of
| both. The new native vertical tabs feature works for me, and
| it is the most impactful feature they've shipped in years for
| my particular firefox experience.
| csmantle wrote:
| I kind of prefer TST since it's tree style. The native
| vertical tabs is flat, but I would like to organize my tabs
| more hierarchically.
| johnny22 wrote:
| yeah i'm hoping it can be enhanced with nesting.
| c0nducktr wrote:
| What do you like about the native vertical tabs which was
| not present in tree style tabs or Sidebery?
|
| To me, what they shipped seemed lacking in features to
| both, with no real improvements.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Back when I tried sidebery, there was some weird issue
| where either shift-click or right clicking didn't work on
| mac, and that turned me off. I just tried it again, and
| both work fine now.
|
| One other feature that is nice for me is the ability to
| collapse the sidebar to just the tab icons. It's a nice
| middle ground between being able to see what I have open
| and getting a full screen experience.
|
| TST and Sidebery are both fantastic extensions, I don't
| think they do anything wrong. For whatever reason though,
| the FF native implementation worked for me where they
| didn't
| weberer wrote:
| The biggest benefit I've seen is that it automatically
| hides the old tab bar at the top. Before that, you had to
| dig into some hidden profile directory and modify some
| userchrome CSS file and modify the CSS directly hoping it
| would work.
| dns_snek wrote:
| I use this method personally and it works great on GNOME
| and KDE. First set
| `toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets` to
| true in `about:config` then find your profile directory
| in `about:profiles`. cd
| $FIREFOX_PROFILE_DIR cd chrome git clone
| https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks
| touch userChrome.css
|
| The contents of userChrome.css should be:
| @import url('firefox-
| csshacks/chrome/hide_tabs_toolbar.css'); @import
| url('firefox-
| csshacks/chrome/window_control_placeholder_support.css');
|
| Then restart the browser. If anything breaks the
| repository will likely be updated soon and you just have
| to pull the changes.
| Macha wrote:
| Collapsed icon view is a major improvement over Sidebery
| and the reason I've switched for now.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I really have to emphasize that browser extensions are a
| terrible security nightmare and generally speaking, should be
| avoided _at all costs_. I understand they 're fun and
| convenient, but it's one of those things that really doesn't
| age well into our modern cybersecurity issues.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| I only stick with the "recommended" extensions that are
| reviewed by Firefox.
| labster wrote:
| Running a browser without an adblock extension is an even
| worse cybersecurity issue, since tracking online is so
| extensive. I live in a country where the government routinely
| buys surveillance data from data collection companies to spy
| on us. But even if you don't live in the US, it's still a
| good thing to protect your privacy.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This sort of used to be true and mostly isn't today.
| Firefox and Edge both have reasonably good tracking
| prevention features. They rival Privacy Badger in
| effectiveness (it's largely moot these days), and the only
| thing between tracking prevention and ad blocking is that
| the latter _also_ focuses on protecting your poor innocent
| eyes from advertising, which I mostly couldn 't care less
| about if the tracking is being defeated.
|
| I think if you are extremely narrowly scoping well-trusted
| ad blockers, you may be okay, as long as you understand
| _you are trusting the ad blocker with your banking info_.
| But it would be far better for a browser to include
| capabilities in first-party and eradicate extensions
| altogether.
|
| A Pihole is also far safer than an adblock extension,
| because it can't see your decrypted your web traffic the
| way a browser extension can.
| ghostwords wrote:
| PB is another layer of protection on top of Firefox and
| Edge. Totally different list generation approach, widget
| replacement, etc.
|
| Installing PB is easier (and more powerful) than
| configuring the browser for better protection. For
| example, Firefox doesn't block much by default.
|
| https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-
| with...
| molticrystal wrote:
| Yes, Firefox should focus on being a lean mean machine, with
| the caveat that it returns to exposing its API and making it
| easily accessible for anyone who wants to go beyond that
| principle of leanness at the expense of speed or memory.
|
| I'd even go so far as to say that extensions should have full
| control over Firefox again. They shouldn't have to wait 20
| years for a tray icon on minimize feature to be added or
| require external apps to add that feature on certain operating
| systems. Min2Tray existed. They should have the ability to
| completely alter the UI to make it function however you want.
| For example, the old search was great for keyboard users. A
| couple of strokes and you could switch search engines to site
| specific ones. Now it takes dozens. And when they all have the
| same icon, it is a painful experience. There was even at one
| point an add-on to restore that functionality. All this should
| be exposed.
|
| The extension and plugin infrastructure didn't die. It was
| killed! If security is a concern, just add more warning cones
| and blood red messages.
| mccr8 wrote:
| In my personal opinion, while the flexibility of the old XUL
| addons was amazing, the two big issues are compatibility and
| performance.
|
| Compatibility: these addons could be broken very easily
| because they could depend on almost anything, and with the
| monthly release cycle, it is very difficult for mod authors
| to keep up. For instance, some addons would work by taking a
| core browser function written in JS, convert it to a string,
| run a regular expression to edit the string, then use eval to
| create a new function to replace the old one. In some
| release, the syntax of the "convert a function to a string"
| output changed slightly and it broke these addons, because it
| broke the regexp they were using.
|
| Performance: XUL addons could do all sorts of things that are
| horrible for performance, and there was no real way for a
| user to tell what was causing it, because the addon wasn't
| isolated in any way. I ran into somebody who was having
| severe performance issues because the browser was generating
| colossal amounts of garbage for no reason. It eventually
| turned out that on a whim they'd installed a "LaTeX the
| World" addon, which would look for LaTeX typesetting
| instructions on pages and replace it with the nice looking
| output. The problem was, the way it worked was that every 10
| seconds or so it would convert the entire contents of every
| single tab you had open into a zillion strings, search those
| strings, then throw them out.
| ameliaquining wrote:
| The problem isn't security per se, it's compatibility.
| Exposing all the browser internals to extensions means that
| all the internals are part of the platform's public API and
| it's almost impossible to change anything. A lot of HN users
| will be like "that's fine, software should be finished, I
| don't want any more features", but things like performance
| and especially security require ongoing maintenance. The
| particular thing that killed off Firefox's old extension
| model was that it blocked migration to a multi-process
| architecture, which was clearly necessary even at the time
| and became even moreso when Spectre showed up a couple years
| later. "Warning cones and blood red messages" do not solve
| this because a vulnerable architecture exposes _all_ users to
| exploitation, not just those who choose to use sketchy
| extensions.
|
| (Also we know from long experience that "warning cones and
| blood red messages" don't in practice suffice to prevent end
| users from being exploited, but that's a separate issue.)
| arp242 wrote:
| It should also be pointed out that the Firefox devs spent
| _years_ and countless dev hours trying to keep the old
| extension system and solve the problems wrt. multi-process,
| security, performance, and compatibility. They removed the
| extension system only after they tried everything else, and
| mostly failed.
|
| They also spent tons of effort explaining the background of
| these choices and why they felt they had no choice and this
| was the only path forward. It's disappointing people are
| still coming up with this "oh, why don't they just [..]?!"
| type stuff.
| halJordan wrote:
| You don't want that though. Nobody wants that. Browsers have
| been nothing but edge-case handlers since servers figured out
| they could segment by user-agent, and users realized they could
| lie about their agent.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Then they should improve the ground for addons too. Add more
| API, more abilities. I'm still waiting for Firefox improving
| the shortcut-handling, gaining back the level we once had with
| extensions like vimperator. How long is this now? 8 years of
| broken promises?
| qiqitori wrote:
| The concept of "web standards" is odd because new "standards"
| keep getting added. And what's more, they're being added rather
| promiscuously by an entity with almost unlimited resources, who
| is also the primary competitor. ;)
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Mozilla is a founder of WHATWG and they have, historically,
| had opinionated takes on standards.
|
| https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions
| zdragnar wrote:
| That's literally the process. TC39 in particular requires two
| real world implementations to exist before some new feature
| becomes a formalized part of the standards.
|
| Several proposals backed by "the primary competitor" failed
| to get through the process, or were radically changed to make
| other implementors happy.
| m-schuetz wrote:
| I abandoned Firefox because it was dragging its feet on some
| vital web standards such as WebGPU and import maps. The
| former is obvious. The latter is such a massive quality of
| life improvement for devs (makes build systems obsolete) that
| I simply could no longer care for Firefox which ignored it
| for the longest time.
| v5v3 wrote:
| Made a comment, it then asked me to sign up and couldn't be
| bothered.
|
| The comment was: make the Firefox containers work in private
| mode.
|
| In Safari private mode. Each tab has no knowledge of another
| (e.g. log into Gmail and then open a new tab and go to Gmail and
| you won't be signed in).
|
| Firefox doesn't have this tab level isolation.
|
| Also offer equivalent of safari's lockdown mode. So images and
| site features capable of loading malware etc are blocked by
| default.
| acheong08 wrote:
| > The comment was: make the Firefox containers work in private
| mode.
|
| My solution to this is having multiple Firefox profiles where
| the default one clears all history/cache/etc automatically upon
| closing (default in Librewolf). It's not technically private
| mode so containers work.
| weikju wrote:
| temporary containers [0]
|
| > disposable containers which isolate the data websites store
| (cookies, storage, and more) from each other
|
| Granted, they're not in private broswing mode just normal mode,
| but same effect
|
| [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-
| con...
| v5v3 wrote:
| Yes, that's the one I want fixing, and possibly moving from
| extension to feature.
|
| Why would you create a privacy tool, and then not offer it in
| private mode. Makes no sense.
|
| (You can setup Firefox so it's permanently in Private Mode
| and clears history and data on exit - as per Libre comment
| above -,which is how I have it set)
| CjHuber wrote:
| I might be the only one but I'm quite annoyed that Safari's
| incognito mode works like this. I WANT it to have knowledge of
| all the other incognito tabs of the same window. Only when I
| make a new incognito window, it should be a new container.
|
| Pretty interesting how preferences can vary, because this
| bothers me everytime I use incognito mode on safari and think,
| can this not just work like in Firefox.
| v5v3 wrote:
| In the old days logging in twice would bother me as is have
| to type in a password, but now with password manager and
| fingerprint/face scan it's low effort.
|
| It's very handy for sites where you may have more than
| account
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > It's very handy for sites where you may have more than
| account
|
| For that Firefox's container tabs are a much handier option
| as you can stay logged in and also open new tabs that are
| already logged in. It has colours to tell apart which tab
| is part of which container
| lxgr wrote:
| On desktop OSes, I definitely also prefer that behavior. I
| wonder if Safari behaves like that for consistency with iOS,
| where there isn't any hierarchy above tabs, so it would be a
| choice between no separation at all or sandboxing each tab
| individually?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I actually prefer it the way it is now. For me, private mode is
| effectively an extra temporary profile that is full featured,
| but wiped once the last window is closed. I usually don't need
| more than one.
|
| But I understand that other people have other needs. It can be
| very useful for developers for instance. Make it an option,
| maybe.
| kevincox wrote:
| I see both. I wouldn't want every tab to be separate but I
| occasionally want to have more than one independent private
| profile at a time. It would be nice if I could do this. Any
| sort of ephemeral container tabs option would probably
| satisfy this option and could maybe even remove most of my
| use of private browsing if I could just open ephemeral
| containers in an otherwise regular window.
| xeonmc wrote:
| How about per-window private sessions?
| kevincox wrote:
| That would be limiting if I can't have multiple windows
| of one private session. (Although admittedly this is
| something I do quite rarely)
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| firefox --profile $(mktemp -d) --private-window
|
| or wrap it to delete the temp dir after firefor process
| exits.
| joshuaturner wrote:
| A "private tab" feature in addition to "private window" could
| be a useful, if potentially confusing
| Macha wrote:
| If you're on desktop, the "temporary containers" extension
| does this.
| account42 wrote:
| Unfortunately it doesn't work like a separate profile for
| extensions so you can either enable them and trust that the
| extension doesn't leak data from private windows into your
| main profile or you can disable the extension - there is no
| option to enable the extension but enforce that the extension
| sticks to the private profile (with possible exceptions for
| extension settings which should persist).
| wslh wrote:
| Shameless, deprecated plug: I built a very hackish Firefox
| extension to do that about 17 years ago [1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EBkB-Yp-zM
| dietr1ch wrote:
| I still feel that the isolation is backwards. Instead of having
| me to split containers, ask me to merge things like google.com
| and youtube.com, but by default keep every domain isolated.
| sneilan1 wrote:
| How about fix copy and paste on Linux?
| quesera wrote:
| Hm. Are you referring to the bracketed paste weirdness? This is
| fixable.
|
| https://superuser.com/questions/1532688/pasting-required-tex...
| nicman23 wrote:
| no sometimes paste does not work for discord and
| messenger.com especially when the clipboard is a picture
| ac29 wrote:
| I cant think of a single time ctrl-v or middle click didnt work
| charcircuit wrote:
| Firefox has search based discover of content on the web, but it
| has failed to keep up with the trend of discovery using
| recommendation feeds. Firefox should be able to recommend new web
| pages I would be interested in.
| csmantle wrote:
| No, thanks. After I finish my task on my browser, I would take
| a break offline rather than indulging into an endless stream of
| "You May Also Like". Actually, I would thank FF for not filling
| their homepage with these noises.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Getting people to use Firefox less and take more breaks from
| it is not how you gain market share. You need to make it easy
| for people to find content they are interested in.
| jksflkjl3jk3 wrote:
| Please tell me this is sarcasm. That is exactly the kind of
| terrible idea that Mozilla would come up with and force on
| users.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's not sarcasm. Firefox used to have a built in RSS feed,
| but instead of modernizing this by not requiring sites to
| setup a RSS feed and using algorithmic rating to find the
| best article they got rid of it altogether.
| danudey wrote:
| The last thing Mozilla should be spending time and money on
| is some kind of hosted algorithmic discovery feed. There
| are a ton of those out there, so if you want that you can
| get it anywhere you like.
|
| RSS feeds were great because you could choose what you
| wanted and opt in to them; using algorithmic analysis would
| require not only a lot of infrastructure and dev time but
| also a lot of data collection and all the privacy concerns
| that comes with it.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Firefox does have recommended and promotional websites in the
| default new tab/startview, what is missing for you?
| RandomBacon wrote:
| They should fix bugs.
|
| Computer A:
|
| Sometimes I cannot close tabs by clicking the X, or refresh/go-
| forward/go-back using the buttons next to the address bar.
|
| Computer B:
|
| Sometimes I get downloads that have "Unknown time left" (0
| bytes/sec) when the X of X KB/MB is 100% and you can't remove it
| from the downloads dropdown.
|
| I just discovered a new bug on Computer B, clicking the hamburger
| menu doesn't do anything.
|
| Both are Ubuntu.
|
| (I'm not a fan of the new menu in Firefox Beta for Android. I
| guess it looks nicer due to the greater whitespace, it just break
| muscle memory and has less options/selections.)
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Does computer B ever finish?
|
| Do you see any disk i/o spikes when this is happening?
| RandomBacon wrote:
| > Does computer B ever finish?
|
| No, it stays there until I close the browser at which point I
| get the option to cancel the download or not to exit.
|
| > disk i/o spikes
|
| Unknown, I don't monitor that, and the bug doesn't happen all
| the time, not sure how to recreate it.
| arp242 wrote:
| At the end of the day, if you want to see these types of bugs
| fixed then by far the fastest way is to report them, which will
| probably mean you'll have to spend some time to track down
| what's causing that on your system. I have generally found
| reporting bugs to Firefox to be a reasonably positive
| experience.
| TrueSlacker0 wrote:
| I just made the switch to ubuntu as my main os from windows.
| Firefox on windows never seemed to have any problems. Now I
| keep getting the same problem as your computer a. It doesnt
| happen every time, and i havent figured out the pattern. But
| clicking the x to close a tab does nothing, middle clicking the
| tab still closes it. Any time this problem starts I also have
| issues using the mouse middle button to scroll (on all apps,
| not just ff) Very, very annoying. Since these issues seem
| linked it seems bigger than just ff.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I use Firefox as my main browser on both Linux and Windows and
| have no problems.
|
| I suspect you have an Ubuntu problem.
| nicman23 wrote:
| yeah the download thing was a corrupted profile when i had it.
| denzil wrote:
| I wonder, if these problems aren't Ubuntu fault, since it
| forces snap version of Firefox on you. I had Firefox crashing
| repeatedly on me with the snap version. Maybe switching to
| Firefox apt repo would help? (I tried the repo, but before I
| had chance to test it properly, I found I could use Debian
| instead of Ubuntu and reinstalled immediately.)
| dordoka wrote:
| Never experienced those with Firefox on Windows, macOS or a
| myriad of Linux distros along the years. Not using Ubuntu
| anymore, but when I did, I did not use flatpaks. That might be
| the origin of your issues.
| shmerl wrote:
| What I want to see:
|
| * Use Vulkan for rendering instead of OpenGL
|
| * Drop dependency on GTK (it's a source of many problems) and
| just implement their own full fledged Wayland handling like Wine
| is doing.
|
| * Back Servo again as the future engine.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > Use Vulkan for rendering instead of OpenGL
|
| How much of a difference does it make?
|
| > just implement their own full fledged Wayland handling
|
| As long as they still support X11... (I often do ssh -X ...
| firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine)
|
| > Back Servo again as the future engine
|
| 100% yes, if they still can that is
| shmerl wrote:
| Vulkan is the modern option, the difference is not being
| stuck with legacy paths and using something that allows
| explicit sync.
|
| Wayland is also the modern option, so I don't really worry
| about X11 use cases. For remote desktops, better to use
| something like FreeRDP anyway. X11 forwarding is much worse
| in every sense.
|
| I think KDE are working on integrating FreeRDP server into
| Plasma for seamless usage.
|
| Another thing to add for Firefox would be may be switching to
| Vulkan video from VAAPI (or at least having it as an option
| since ffmpeg already supports it) and using hardware
| acceleration for video encoding too, not just for video
| decoding.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| X11 can also do remote window forwarding, not just desktops
| which is super handy. Your windows appear in the remote
| computer with its own window manager just like you run them
| locally. One of the reasons I still use X.
| shmerl wrote:
| For barebones window forwarding (no input) I use
| something like gpu-screen-recorder with SRT streaming
| output and play the result on the other end with mpv /
| ffplay.
|
| Haven't looked into it, but FreeRDP might support
| specific window forwarding too rather than the whole
| desktop.
|
| If you need something fancier there is Sunshine /
| Moonlight, but they still have an issue with not using
| Pipewire for window / screen capturing (and kmsgrab is
| not really the proper way to do it).
|
| Anyway, X11 is a complete dead end in general so it's not
| really a viable option for anything serious.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| These look like kludges more than anything.
|
| X11 may be a dead end but Wayland sucks as a replacement,
| so for now, I see no other option than supporting them
| both.
|
| It may be technically possible to do the equivalent do
| X11 forwarding with Wayland, that is connecting to a
| server with a ssh terminal (no remote desktop, headless
| server), run a GUI app, and have it display its windows
| on my own desktop as if it was running locally. The
| problem is that Wayland is 17 years old and I still
| can't.
| shmerl wrote:
| FreeRDP is pretty feature rich, so I wouldn't call it a
| kludge.
|
| For any kind decent remote desktop access you need good
| performance, specifically low latency. X11 just isn't
| there.
|
| Headless server is headless server - you can't have
| anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want
| to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's
| already not headless.
|
| Instead of X server you can have any Wayland compositor
| (Wayland server) and whatever part that provides
| streaming (FreeRDP or what not).
|
| So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse
| due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed
| for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to
| have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge
| for such scenario if anything.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Look into NX. I used some kind of free NX package with
| Ubuntu about 10 years ago and it was about as fast as
| RDP.
| shmerl wrote:
| Yeah, I've seen it in action (nomachine/nx) It's not bad.
| But problem is that it's not open source, so it's sort of
| DOA, unlike all the open options. They should have opened
| it from the start for it to be relevant.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| FreeNX is open source.
| shmerl wrote:
| Interesting, hasn't heard of it. Is it the same in
| features?
|
| It doesn't seem to support Wayland though.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yes it is a direct clone from the earlier NoMachine NX.
| That was open source, and later they moved to a new
| closed-source protocol. FreeNX took the earlier one over.
|
| And no it doesn't support Wayland of course. It's an X11
| accelerator, the design is heavily connected to the X11
| design. It doesn't replace X11's remote display support,
| it just augments it. Wayland doesn't have that at all so
| there is no point there.
|
| It basically removes the many round-trips in the protocol
| that increase latency, by caching values locally. And it
| can also keep the session alive when disconnected,
| similar to what termux or screen do for SSH.
| _flux wrote:
| > Headless server is headless server - you can't have
| anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want
| to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's
| already not headless.
|
| To me this reads a bit confused, but perhaps I'm
| misreading it? In X11 terminology the server is sitting
| in front of you (the one that draws to the screen), so
| no, you don't need need the remote host to be running X11
| server.
|
| You do need the program that draws to the screen, but I
| think it's fair to say the remote host is headless if it
| doesn't have a GPU nor a program to interface with the
| GPU at all. All the remote host needs is code to interact
| with such a server over TCP or Unix domain sockets. And
| that code is tiny, even small computers without memory
| for frame buffer can do it.
|
| > So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse
| due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed
| for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to
| have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge
| for such scenario if anything.
|
| I think X11 was actually pretty great at the time it was
| created, i.e. clients can create ids and use them in
| their requests (no round-trip to the server) and server
| can contain large client bitmaps that the client can
| operate on, but sometimes poor client coding can kill the
| performance over the network. As worst offender I once
| noticed VirtualBox did a looooot of synchronous property
| requests during its startup instead of doing them in
| concurrently, stretching the startup time from seconds to
| minute or more. (Whether it truly needed those properties
| in the first place is another question.)
|
| Sending the complete interaction as a video stream?
| That's what I'd call a hack--though X11 should be
| modernized in various aspects, for example to support
| more advanced encodings for media, controlled by the
| client.
|
| In some sense the web is the direction where I would have
| liked to see X11 going: still controlled by the client,
| but some light server-side code could be used to render
| and interact with the widgets. This way clicks would
| react immediately, but you would still be interacting
| with the actual service running on the remote host, not
| just a local program.
|
| (Another reason why I consider X11 better is the
| separation of the server and the compositor.)
| shmerl wrote:
| _> but I think it 's fair to say the remote host is
| headless if it doesn't have a GPU nor a program to
| interface with the GPU at all_
|
| You can use software rendering for Wayland cases too.
| There are even OpenGL / Vulkan software implementations.
|
| _> All the remote host needs is code to interact with
| such a server over TCP or Unix domain sockets. And that
| code is tiny, even small computers without memory for
| frame buffer can do it_
|
| I don't really see much value in such use case. Thin
| client (the reverse) makes more sense (i.e. where your
| side is a weak computer and remote server is something
| more powerful).
|
| But either way, running a compositor even with software
| rendering should be doable even on low end hardware.
|
| _> Sending the complete interaction as a video stream?
| That 's what I'd call a hack_
|
| Why not? Video by the mere nature or modern codecs is
| already very optimized on focusing only on changes to the
| encoded image, so it's the best option. You render things
| were they run, then send the video.
|
| It works even for such intense (changes wise) cases as
| gaming and actual video media. Surely it works for GUIs
| too.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _As long as they still support X11... (I often do ssh -X
| ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote
| machine)_
|
| Look into xpra
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage
| from a remote machine
|
| Isn't https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe supposed to cover
| that?
| aorth wrote:
| > _Isn 't https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe supposed to
| cover that?_
|
| The correct repository for Waypipe is
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe, but yes it
| does what you said and works well.
| danudey wrote:
| Would love if FF could support VA-API decoding + Wayland + GPU
| acceleration on Ubuntu by default, rather than having to follow
| a possibly outdated Arch linux guide to hack it into working at
| least some of the time.
| shmerl wrote:
| I'm not using Ubuntu, but any recent version of Firefox
| supports VAAPI by default for quite some time already.
|
| So may be check your version or check what Ubuntu is doing
| wrong / use something else.
|
| What I want to see is VAAPI encoding used, not just decoding.
| Better even Vulkan video both for decoding and encoding.
| bigiain wrote:
| Sadly "I'd like Firefox to not be owned by an
| advertising/surveillance company" is unlikely to be considered in
| that forum (even if I were prepared to sign up to comment).
|
| Everything else is minor details compared to that.
|
| (Yes, this was posted using LibreWolf, but I often wonder if I
| can even trust that, having the vast majority of it's code
| written and managed by Mozilla.)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| This is the key differentiator Mozilla seems to deliberately
| avoid understanding. Chrome is a perfectly okay browser from
| almost every perspective: standards, functionality,
| performance, etc. What Chrome is not good at and can never be
| good at while it's owned by an advertising company is
| respecting user choice to disable advertising and choose
| privacy models that exclude the browser company.
|
| Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table stakes
| for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell it.
| vpShane wrote:
| > Chrome is a perfectly okay browser from almost every
| perspective
|
| No, it isn't. They killed adblock, and have a business model
| of throttling other browsers to force people to Chrome
| (Youtube throttling) and doing digital fingerprinting with
| exclusive-only Chrome finger prints as seen here on HN the
| other day.
|
| Firefox has anonym, where it sells your 'anonymous data'
|
| https://lifehacker.com/tech/why-you-should-disable-
| firefox-p...
|
| I just looked, go to Settings -> type advert and you'll see
|
| Website Advertising Preferences Allow websites to perform
| privacy-preserving ad measurement This helps sites understand
| how their ads perform without collecting data about you.
| Learn more
|
| It comes pre-checked for you.
|
| I use Chromium for dev stuff, but now; there's no ublock
| origin.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I tried to be clear about how Chrome is fine in most
| respects _except_ for the incentives conflict, and you 've
| simply pointed out symptoms stemming from that fundamental
| issue. Are we actually disagreeing or do you just dislike
| how I phrased it?
| musicale wrote:
| You were very clear. PP seems to be in agreement with you
| in spite of objecting to the first line and ignoring the
| rest.
| Snelius wrote:
| "ublock origin lite" works well
| snvzz wrote:
| Not on Google's own websites such as Youtube.
| lucumo wrote:
| It blocks Youtube's ads just fine.
|
| You might've tried it during an arms race moment. YT is
| constantly changing it's anti-blocking measures, and uBO
| and uBO Lite are constantly responding. uBO had the same
| issue.
|
| uBO Lite does lack custom filters and custom filter
| lists. It also doesn't have sync, but uBO didn't do sync
| well anyway. Also sync is far less useful without custom
| filters.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Now that Google blocked uBlock origin, that's a good reason
| to keep using Firefox. It amazes me how much worse the web is
| on Chrome.
| EbNar wrote:
| There are quite a few browser that don't ever need
| extensions to block ads. There's thus no reason for me to
| use Firefox (and I don't want to, until it's managed by
| Mozilla).
| EbNar wrote:
| Thank you for the downvotes. I forgot to mention that the
| toxic community is an additional reason to avoid FF and
| anything related with it.
| fsflover wrote:
| I didn't downvote you, but your vague mentioning of some
| browsers "that don't ever need extensions to block ads"
| is not helpful at all and sounds wrong to me. There are
| only three major browser engines in the world, and only
| Firefox's one blocks ads reliably.
| EbNar wrote:
| Well, I dont see ads in my non-FF browser. Don't know
| what else I could say. And, to be precise, FF doesn't
| block anything by itself. It just relies on an the job of
| unpaid volunteers to block ads.
| fsflover wrote:
| Which "non-FF" browser? Ladybird? Lynx?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41871873
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43240477
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43240845
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43241306
| EbNar wrote:
| There are quite a few Chromium browsers with an inbuilt
| adblocker. Mine is one of these. My world isn't going to
| end with UBo.
| fsflover wrote:
| Which ones?
| EbNar wrote:
| Ok, now I'm pretty sure you're trolling. Bye.
| fsflover wrote:
| Your're just not giving enough details for a refute, so I
| had to dig links about _all_ browsers I could find. You
| 're trolling, since you only give vague, general
| statements, which don't move the discussion.
| flkenosad wrote:
| Brave ships with an ad blocker built in i believe.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43240477
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43349506
| EbNar wrote:
| I don't need any MV2 extension, so I don't really care.
| fsflover wrote:
| So, you're fine with the ads and tracking.
| EbNar wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=EbNar#44578751
|
| Besides, using that together with a DNS blocker does a
| wonderful job, whether you believe it or not.
| fsflover wrote:
| The discontinued support of MV2 means that all ads will
| eventually adapt and your anti-ad measures stop working.
| EbNar wrote:
| I think you don't understand the difference between an
| extension (for which manifest version matters) and an
| intrinsic feature (for which the manifest means nothing).
| It's either that, or you want to convince people that FF
| the only way. No, it isn't. Deal with it.
| ImJamal wrote:
| Brave has built in ad / tracking blocking without using
| MV2. If MV2 vanished in Brave you could still have
| blocking without using uBlock Origin
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43349506
| ImJamal wrote:
| Almost nobody cares about anything other than ad blocking
| and to top it off the reply to the comment you linked is
| even mentioning that they were only talking about ad
| block...
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Chrome has uBlock Origin Lite. It blocks ads even on
| YouTube.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| > Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table
| stakes for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell
| it.
|
| One of the reasons I've moved to Chrome is because of the
| memory problems with Mozilla that I've been experiencing for
| years. Every so often I look up other people who've been
| having the same issues. They seem to have been reported for
| years, but there's often a surprising amount of hostility
| from Firefox fans whenever they get mentioned.
|
| As an aside, both Firefox and Chrome made their browsers
| significantly worse when they changed the order of windows in
| the windows menu from chronological to alphabetical.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Floorp is basically Firefox without the memory issues.
|
| You might want to check it out.
| f-ffox wrote:
| I'd also ask them how they plan to build a time machine to undo
| selling their users' data when they said they wouldn't.
|
| Also- what kind of animal are you?!
| eth0up wrote:
| I use FF as a primary browser on Desktop and Nightly in Android.
| There's much I could say about FF, but I think it would be
| futile.
|
| In Debian, I'd use FF-LTS and regular FF. Since moving to Void,
| xbps allows only one version, so I use FF and Vivaldi.
|
| I'd appreciate any opinions on Vivaldi. It's the only functional
| alternative browser I've found in the repos. But I have to start
| it with: LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1
|
| Which sucks, and applies to OpenShot and a lot of other software
| that gets fussy with intel chips in some versions of Linux.
| Chromium I prefer to avoid, and it wants a password to initiate,
| which I understand but refuse to comply with. But that's all
| aside the point. Opinions, please...
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Can you run a different Firefox via flatpak? (Or x11docker or
| plain docker, or nix, or I guess Snap)
| eth0up wrote:
| Yes. Thanks for the reminder.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Chromium ... it wants a password to initiate, which I
| understand but refuse to comply with._
|
| That sounds like the the keyring issue that pops up if you have
| your user account auto-login on machine start. If you don't let
| Chromium store passwords01 this can be safely disabled: see
| https://archive.is/G6pPH#ID15 2
|
| I ran into the issue when setting up a simple temporary public
| kiosk a short while back.
|
| --------
|
| [0] I don't, I prefer to keep my internet facing UAs and my
| credential stores a bit more separated than that. It also
| removes some friction from moving between browsers, when one
| annoys me enough to (re)try another.
|
| [1] If you _do_ let Chromium store passwords, then you can
| still do this, but not _safely_ as per the warnings in that
| article.
|
| [2] Or
| https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/tips-1.html#ID15
| for the original, if you enjoy consent dialogues or want to be
| commercially internet stalked
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Firefox should ship with a local AI agent that can browse,
| summarize, and act on the web -- entirely on-device.
|
| I don't want to send my searches through Google or OpenAI just to
| get basic tasks done. Give me a sandboxed local model that can:
|
| * Read pages and data that's loaded through it
|
| * Summarize content
|
| * Act on rule-based prompts I define (e.g. auto-reply in Slack,
| triage emails, autofill forms, upvote followed author's posts...)
|
| Let me load a Slack tab and have the AI draft replies for me.
| Same for Gmail. Basically, let Firefox interact with the web on
| my behalf and train the AI to be my assistant.
|
| Beyond that, extensions already do most of what I need -- but a
| built-in, private AI agent would actually move the needle.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I very much do _not_ want AI slop added to the browser. That
| would be such a negative feature.
| nicman23 wrote:
| think it as an adblock to the slop
| scubadude wrote:
| Straight to under 0.5% usage no doubt. Making a mockery of all
| the unpaid people who have committed code over the years. The
| Mozilla foundation have shirked their responsibility as a bastion
| against commercial interests.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Their job was to rake in millions while keeping the benefactor
| happy with no real competition. Mission accomplished.
| dralley wrote:
| The kneejerk Mozilla hate on HN gets so fucking tedious.
|
| Google's marketing budget for Chrome is greater than
| Mozilla's _entire_ budget. They sponsor a Formula 1 team FFS.
| They spent a decade paying off Adobe, Java, AVG, Avast and
| all the other shitty free AV softwares to auto-install
| Chrome. They targeted Firefox users with Chrome ads on the
| homepages of Google and YouTube. That 's literally billions
| of dollars worth of marketing alone that they don't even have
| to pay for.
|
| Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are
| collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents
| combined (Africa, South America, Australia) with a couple
| trillion USD to spare. Each controls an operating system (or
| two) with more than a billion users each on which their
| browsers are pre-installed.
|
| No shit they struggle to compete on brand and marketshare.
| They're basically forced by the economics of the market to do
| search deals with Google, and whenever they try to develop
| independent sources of revenue people shit on them for that
| too. People shit on them for making deals with Google and
| make insinuations about them being "controlled opposition"
| because of that dependency, but also shit on them for
| pursuing any other independent sources of revenue, like the
| branded VPN service or the innocuous cross-promotion of that
| Disney movie with the Red Panda.
|
| People shat on them for trying to compete with Android via
| FirefoxOS because the bet didn't work out, even though it was
| probably the only way they could have avoided this outcome
| and gained real independence, had it worked out.
|
| "Just focus on Firefox", they say - unless that means laying
| off people that work on Rust, or AV1, or Opus, or
| WebAssembly, or Let's Encrypt, or experimental browser
| engines that wouldn't have been production-ready for a
| decade. According to HN, Mozilla should focus but also keep
| churning out and spinning off research projects, but only
| successful research projects, not ones that fail. Anything
| Mozilla does is always retroactively terrible if it fails but
| if it works out great they never get credit for it anyway.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| The idea behind the parent comment is not that they can't
| compete, but they are specifically made not to.
|
| Sort of a puppet browser made only for proving the court
| that the giants are not technically a monopoly, while
| ranking a bare minimum number of users for them to count.
|
| While that's not entirely unreasonable, I don't think
| that's the doom of Mozilla. Puppet or not, their tangled
| codebase makes it a pita to contribute anything if you're
| not being paid a salary for it.
|
| Despite having a high expectation for the "free browser",
| deep down we know that it's the same "Free in theory"
| software, not unlike Java or Vscode. Software that's made
| by a company and once they stop pouring money on corporate
| development and support the project will become a zombie in
| no time.
| dralley wrote:
| It is completely unreasonable and (willfully) ignores the
| long, long list of places where Mozilla has fought
| against the other vendors including (especially) Google
| on privacy grounds.
|
| It's the sort of thing people say mostly for their own
| self-satisfaction, without actually thinking about it or
| trying to figure out the answer. Like: "both parties are
| the same" or "what have the Romans ever done for us"
| const_cast wrote:
| Yes, I agree completely. You cannot even compare Chrome
| and Firefox because the sheer privacy violations of
| Chrome make it not a worthy competitor. The difference
| is, nobody cares.
|
| Google develops Chrome and Chrome relies entirely on
| Google's money. Google is the default search engine. They
| are _much, much, MUCH_ more tightly coupled to Google
| than Firefox could ever be.
|
| But nobody says anything. And yet, Firefox makes Google
| the default search engine, and everyone has a think piece
| on it. Firefox is dead, they say, they're just Google's
| puppet. Then what is Chrome?
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Chrome is Darth Vader. Firefox is Lando Calrissian. I'll
| let you guess who Palpatine is.
| II2II wrote:
| Mozilla can do a lot more to fight on privacy grounds. I
| realize it isn't going to happen since even enabling a
| lot of the existing privacy features by default is going
| to break many websites (which, in the minds of most
| people, would reflect a broken web browser), so they are
| stuck talking about it while end users have to jump
| through a bunch of hoops if they want to get the browser
| as it is advertised.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| It is not so clear cut now, is it? The often silly wannabe
| social justice stuff does cost money, and their management
| does get record high payments, even though they don't do a
| particularly good job, and even though important
| engineering projects were cut. Mozilla's behavior is not a
| culture of engineering, that fosters trust in the browser
| product.
| jksflkjl3jk3 wrote:
| They don't need alternative revenue streams. Just take the
| millions they receive from Google and spend it on tech. Cut
| out all the warm and fuzzy political marketing bullshit and
| all the management that have promoted it.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| This is such a nonsense argument. Nobody is upset that that
| more people use Chrome than Firefox. That has never been
| the case. In fact, historically, Firefox users tend to
| _like_ being on the outside.
|
| The "kneejerk Mozilla hate" isn't about marketshare, it's
| about ineffective leadership bringing features nobody wants
| while ignoring problems users currently have.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| idk, get more people to use it? Release a standalone password
| manager that integrates nicely? Buy some ads on instagram or
| something?
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| How you would benefit from FF having more users?
| nixpulvis wrote:
| More developers would test for Firefox again.
| werdnapk wrote:
| I do all my dev in Firefox and rarely test in Chrome. I've
| been made aware of maybe a handful of issues over many many
| years doing it this way. If it works in Firefox, 99.9% of
| the time, it's also working in Chrome.
| paradox460 wrote:
| That's because, with a few exceptions, everything Firefox
| implements is a subset of what Chrome, and increasingly
| Safari support
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Sites would not mark my session as suspicious so much which
| causes me so many evil captchas
| wvenable wrote:
| Lockwise? They killed it.
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...
| xeonmc wrote:
| If I get a nickel every time an advertising company in
| possession of a mainstream web browser gains a reputation for
| an accumulated history of product graveyards, I'd have two
| nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened
| twice.
| floundy wrote:
| We might be able to get you up to a whole dollar, just
| listing off the various chat/messaging apps Google has
| killed off over the years. I take it as an opportunity to
| move to FOSS/self-hosted substitutes when that happens.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Are Mozilla's donations still roughly equal to their CEO's
| compensation [1][2]?
|
| [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-
| US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... _"$7.8M in donations from
| the public, grants from foundations, and government funding" in
| 2023_
|
| [2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-
| fdn-990... _$6.9mm in 2022, page 7_
| saurik wrote:
| That's insane :/. But, maybe, "on the bright side", The Mozilla
| Foundation is unrelated in some sense to Firefox? AFAIK, they
| don't spend any of their money on it anyway.
|
| The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the
| Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for
| Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which
| spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does
| run Wikipedia! lol :/.
|
| There is another interesting detail from your reference that
| makes it seem even worse to me: it says the CEO's salary is
| "paid only by a related for-profit"; at first, I was thinking
| "ok, at least the Foundation in fact is spending the money it
| is being donated (though, not on Firefox)"... but then I
| realized that means the Corporation is, in fact, spending $7m
| that it could have spent on Firefox.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway
|
| The glass-half-full take I heard a while back was: at least
| every dollar they take from the foundation donations for
| these causes is a dollar that they could have found a way to
| take from Firefox development instead.
| hoseja wrote:
| Every dollar they take from the foundation donations for
| these causes is a dollar that enables them to better
| sabotage Firefox development actually. If they were starved
| like cancerous tumour the body might heal and survive.
| margalabargala wrote:
| "If we destroy the organization responsible for this
| thing I like, then only the bad parts of the organization
| will die and the thing I prefer will become better!"
|
| No, if you destroy the flawed-but-sometimes-okay
| organization you just wind up with something worse. There
| is no magic save-the-thing-you-like fairy.
|
| Large bureaucracies don't "learn their lesson" from being
| torn down.
|
| Vote against increased taxes because the road department
| already has "such a large budget" and "maybe this will
| teach them to cut the administrative fat"? No, you'll
| just wind up with more potholes.
|
| Vote for Donald Trump because you think the Federal
| Government is wasteful and the Democrats need to be
| taught a lesson? No, you'll just get billionaire tax
| cuts, erosion of civil liberties, and absolutely no
| behavior change from the people you wanted to "punish".
| Everything just gets worse.
| hoseja wrote:
| And eventually, out of the blue sky, Kali will reach with
| her crimson palms.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how
| the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for
| Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which
| spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does
| run Wikipedia! lol :/.
|
| I don't think these are comparable at all or how it's a scam.
| The CEO of the entire wikimedia foundation makes half a
| million a year. The foundation is considered a GREAT charity
| to donate to by Charity Navigator.
| https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
| knome wrote:
| wikipedia still being around after all this time and still
| maintaining links to just download the entire thing and
| having no ads makes whatever they're doing good to me, ha.
| NewJazz wrote:
| I love other wikimedia projects like Wiktionary and wiki
| commons too.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| And they do experiment and i think the passion for the
| society upholding project that is the encyclopedia is
| still there. Its the same wirh web archive.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Wikimedia is run transparently which is great but I dont
| really believe they need the money when you see their
| financial statement (link below) and think about what they
| need to run. Plenty of really deserving charities running
| on the sniff of an oily rag not paying 100m in salaries
| plus travel, conferences etc.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f6/Wiki
| m...
| _def wrote:
| Keep in mind that the community aka the editors etc are
| all volunteers so the foundation organizes conferences,
| hackathons, grants etc for them (not as a compensation,
| but to help strengthen the community). Keeping "servers
| running" is only a small aspect of the whole. There's a
| lot of maintenance work necessary and there are also
| sister projects as well, like commons, wikidata, etc.
| Eostan wrote:
| They have 82 million dollars in cash and 116 million in
| short term investment, why do they need to run giant
| screen sized popup banners a few times every year begging
| for money and making it seem like everything will be gone
| tomorrow unless you donate now? They don't even run these
| adverts by the wiki editors themselves, just impose them
| from on top. They are very controversial in the wiki
| community and always cause pages of arguing every year.
| _def wrote:
| Because you don't have to pay and most people don't, +
| the reasons from my previous comment.
|
| On the other point: Discussions are at the core the
| movement, and how to do fundraising "right" and how to
| use funds is worth discussing and gets discussed. But
| that it is needed in general is obvious I think. What
| else should be done? Let all the projects run out of
| funds and call it a day? That would mean the end - and
| today Wikipedia is more needed than ever.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| As a liberal I've always had to fight the tendency we
| have to not see legitimacy sinks in the name of
| politeness. Lately I think people are willing to listen
| and I'm working on ways to explain this to people who
| don't bellyfeel them already.
|
| Since I was a kid I thought that the endless fundraising
| drives destroy the legitimacy of public television. At
| the bellyfeel level it is visible moneygrubbing, but at a
| political science level these run side by side with ads
| promoting the sponsorship of the Archer Daniel Midlands
| corporation. ADM is notably the prime beneficiary of
| ethanol subsidies in the U.S. that wreck the environment
| and make farmers go broke spending money on nitrogen
| fertilizers that kill off life in the ocean off the mouth
| of the Mississippi River.
|
| The trouble is that small donations _don 't give voice_,
| but large donations do.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
|
| I can logically justify how I feel about fundraising
| drives on PBS, but I feel a resonance that causes me to
| feel the same way for Wikipedia -- I don't know what the
| Archer Daniel Midlands corporation of Wikipedia is, but
| it probably exists. Finding out that they don't really
| the money confirms this feeling.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| a lot of engineering positions at WMF don't pay
| particularly competitively - you do take a pay cut
| working there to run/manage k8s clusters than you would
| elsewhere (even some public sector gigs pay better in big
| cities).
| BeetleB wrote:
| I don't really understand the angst against the Wikimedia
| Foundation.
|
| They are transparent. No one's being conned into donating. As
| long as Wikipedia is running fine, and is not degrading, and
| they're not actively harming it, I don't care. People
| _routinely_ spend money on _much worse_ things. Is donating
| $3 to Wikimedia once a year really worse than giving 50-100x
| more to Starbucks?
| LtWorf wrote:
| > No one's being conned into donating
|
| You've never seen the banners asking for money to cover the
| costs of the servers?
| aydyn wrote:
| They're saying its not a con because they agree with it
| and its a good thing. It's doublespeak, maybe even to
| themself.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Sophists railing against Socrates seems about right.
| Eostan wrote:
| People get annoyed at them for their massive banners
| begging for money making it seem like wikipedia is on the
| verge of being closed down unless you donate despite the
| fact they have a ton of money they have saved away which
| could keep wikipedia running for decades. Even long running
| wiki editors and donators get pissed off with the behavior
| of the wikimedia foundation as not enough of this money
| actually seems to get spent on Wikipedia. Kinda similar to
| the whole Firefox situation now I come to think about it.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > No one's being conned into donating
|
| They are. The banners are dishonest every year, making it
| seem like they can barely keep the lights on.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| If the donation is given on the false belief that the
| donations are necessary to keep Wikipedia running, I'd
| argue donors _are_ being conned into donating. And that is
| exactly the message the donation banners convey.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > I don't really understand the angst against the Wikimedia
| Foundation.
|
| > No one's being conned into donating.
|
| These statements are consistent but they are what's getting
| in your way of understanding.
|
| For a lot of people, what the Wikimedia does to raise
| donations _does_ constitute conning people into donating.
| Hence the angst.
| KurSix wrote:
| Mozilla's setup feels more like a shell game
| nick0garvey wrote:
| It says "PAID ONLY BY A RELATED FOR-PROFIT", which looks to be
| the Mozilla Corporation. Donations are not directly paying the
| CEO, although I agree more of the profits from the Corporation
| could flow into the non-profit.
| setopt wrote:
| The reasonable assumption here is that without any donations,
| most of that money from Mozilla Corp would have had to cover
| what the donations paid for instead. So in practice, every
| dollar donated might have increased the CEO bonus by say 90
| cents, which feels like donating to the CEO.
|
| I currently still use Firefox but stopped donating to Mozilla
| after that.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I mean if you reduce something enough you can say "x pays for
| y" in almost any case for anything since it's all technically
| one big pot for one group. Even earmarked money.
|
| If I give you $500 to help pay for your medical bills and a few
| months later (bills have been paid by then) I see you bought a
| PS5, can I say, "not cool you used my money to buy a PS5"?
|
| Don't get me wrong I think Mozilla/FF has been very poorly
| managed. But I have just never liked these kinds of "transitive
| property" arguments or whatever we want to call it. Unless
| they're straight up funneling donations into the CEO's bank
| account I just don't see it that way.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| You could say "you bought a ps5 with my money" though.
|
| If that person had the money, they should have spent on
| medical bills. If they got it after, they should have paid
| you back before buying a ps5 maybe.
|
| Or if you just gave them the money and don't expect any
| accountability, it is ok.
| sothatsit wrote:
| But that's the whole point: they _did_ pay their medical
| bills. It 's not like they didn't pay their medical bills
| and instead bought a ps5. They did both.
|
| Mozilla develops Firefox, and they also pay their CEO a
| lot. Their CEO may be overpaid, the company may be
| mismanaged, but at least they are still upholding their
| commitment to maintaining Firefox. Picking out one expense
| that you don't like and saying "all the donations go to
| this, see!" is just disingenuous.
|
| Whether donating is worthwhile is another question, and it
| seems like the answer would be no. But it is a very
| different thing to say "All the donations just go to the
| CEO" instead of "I think the CEO is paid too much".
|
| We could also cherry-pick in the other direction and say
| the CEO is negotiating deals to bring in the 90% of non-
| donation revenue of Mozilla, in which case you could easily
| say that his pay is a result of that revenue creation.
| rishav_sharan wrote:
| I think the key here is that they didn't have money to do
| both.
|
| If they had money enough for medicine, then why beg for
| donation?
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| You gift me $100 on Venmo or cashapp or whatever to go
| dinner with my partner. I transfer it to my bank. It's in
| the same bank account as all my other liquid cash. How
| can either of us ever say whether or not I spent _that
| specific_ $100 on dinner?
|
| Mozilla/FF has a pot of money that donations go in to,
| which is the same pot they use to operate as well as pay
| people, which includes their CEO.
| chii wrote:
| > How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent
| that specific $100 on dinner?
|
| there's no such thing as a specific $100.
|
| The donation of the $100 was contingent on you not having
| $100 for dinner. If it turns out you _did_ have $100 for
| dinner, but now that you received $100 in donations, you
| can choose to also spend the extra $100 on something else
| (which the donor may or may not like).
|
| It is on the donor to figure out whether donating the
| $100 is worth it - at least the recipient needs to
| declare all their financials, so they'd have the info to
| make a judgement on future donations.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| You're making this a very strict, binary situation.
| Either you're broke and every single dollar you are
| gifted or requesting is specifically earmarked for a
| specific thing, or you have all the money you need and
| you can't ever receive a gift or request a donation.
| Nothing is that simplistic. Charities doing well and able
| to meet all their goals/payroll still keep asking for
| money because they need it to be sustained for more than
| months or a year.
|
| Also at the end of the day, they are requesting donations
| to keep things operating. And that means paying people to
| run things, including CEOs. Every charity has somebody at
| the top, so your donations are also paying for those
| people as well. Unless you're willing to say that all
| charities are therefore fraudulent because you are paying
| executive personnel, I just don't see how this argument
| can really be put forth in earnest.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| It isn't binary in general but in this case it is. The
| money from mozilla corporation is close enough in
| quantity to the donations to make it so. Someone used the
| example of a medical bill and a ps5, but a better example
| is that you gave someone enough money to live on
| entirely, and the spent it on that as they said, but then
| took their income which could have paid for it and
| purchased something unnecessary. That wouldn't be ok.
| Furthermore one of the key pieces of research before
| donating to a charity is executive compensation. This
| level of compensation is a red flag in any non profit and
| means it won't be getting good ratings from the watchdog
| groups. That in turn hurts future donations.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I gave the PS5 example fyi. Not that it changes anything
| it just felt weird to not clarify that haha
|
| >but a better example is that you gave someone enough
| money to live on entirely, and the spent it on that as
| they said, but then took their income which could have
| paid for it and purchased something unnecessary.
|
| But that doesn't really apply here, it's not parallel to
| the Mozilla/Firefox situation. And if we want to
| arbitrarily decide that all donations go to the CEO
| strictly because the numbers are kind of similar, why
| can't I just say "no all that money goes towards staff
| and operating"? Why is my assertion any less valid? The
| numbers being similar doesn't tell us anything about how
| it's being spent. It's just a coincidence.
|
| I mean that's what this all hinges on right? That the two
| numbers are kind of close? I can't really think of how
| that tells us where the money is going. I don't
| understand how that follows.
|
| If donations 10x tomorrow can we no longer claim the
| donations are going into the CEO's pocket? Or if they cut
| to 1/10th? Would we be having this conversation if either
| was currently the case?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| If it was the head of the foundation making that much no
| one would donate. It would be a matter of opportunity
| cost. A non profit that size would normally have a leader
| compensated on the level of a software developer. I'd
| argue the ceo of the corporation is also wildly
| overcompensated too, but that normally wouldn't be
| relevant to the decision to donate. The issue arises
| because of the close financial ties between the
| corporation and the foundation, which is enough to
| prevent my donations by itself, those ties though create
| the perception that fewer donations would increase
| transfers from the corporation. If that is in fact true,
| then the question of opportunity cost does extend to all
| of the corporations expenses and someone considering
| donating sgould absolutely consider all of those expenses
| and decide if they are doing good with their donation or
| not.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| > A non profit that size would normally have a leader
| compensated on the level of a software developer.
|
| I hate doing the "source?" thing but this is not
| obviously the case to me so can you explain your
| reasoning here or show me a source?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Charitynavigator and guidestar have datasets. Most
| websites have you pick a charity and then give you
| metrics to judge by rather than picking a metric. But
| they indicate for a non profit with revenue between
| 10-50M (mozilla foundation is 30M I think?) usually has
| compensation for the leader between 180k and 350k.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Their annual revenue is over 10x that. It usually is
| around 500mill annually, currently down to around
| 400mill.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| That is the corporation, not the foundation right? Over
| 100M it should be less than 1% so as much as 4M if it is
| 400M.
| sothatsit wrote:
| I'm not trying to defend Mozilla begging for donations
| when they really don't need them. My point is that
| cherry-picking one expense that you don't like, and then
| saying all the donations go to that, is cherry-picking
| the financials, and is misleading.
| closewith wrote:
| You're arguing that money isn't fungible. It's absurd.
| sothatsit wrote:
| This is absolute nonsense. I am arguing that cherry-
| picking one expense is ridiculous. A much more reasonable
| approach would be to say that your donation is spread out
| over the entirety of the spend of Mozilla. That would
| suggest 1% of your donation is going to the CEO, not 100%
| of it like earlier commenters suggest.
|
| It is dishonest to pick out one expense you don't like
| and equate that to all of the donation money being spent
| on just that. That's all. I don't know how you got from
| that to "this guy thinks money isn't fungible."
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _much more reasonable approach would be to say that
| your donation is spread out over the entirety of the
| spend of Mozilla_
|
| Transactions happen at the margin. If a junkie spends
| every dollar of a bonus on dope, it's fair to say the
| bonus is being burned on dope. Even if they also pay rent
| with their base salary.
| tete wrote:
| > I'm not trying to defend Mozilla begging for donations
| when they really don't need them.
|
| They essentially do. The problem is they have a greedy,
| self-obsessed CEO taking it.
| ta1243 wrote:
| If donations doubled, would CEO pay double?
|
| If donations halved, would CEO pay halve?
|
| I suspect the answer is "no" to both of those.
| sothatsit wrote:
| Exactly, so the donations are not being funneled to the
| CEO, and suggesting that they are would be silly.
|
| If you split up your donation by how Mozilla actually
| spends its money, then most goes to operating Mozilla,
| and a small amount (~1%) goes to paying the CEO.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I agree but your tone suggests you're disagreeing with
| me? That's the point I am driving at. Directly linking
| every donated dollar to the CEO's pay simply because
| they're close in number does not make sense.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _whatever we want to call it_
|
| Fungibility [1].
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Thanks that's the word I was fishing for
| ccppurcell wrote:
| > straight up funneling
|
| Money is fungible. There's no such thing as funneling. There
| is ring fencing though - that's when a certain budget cannot
| exceed a certain source of revenue, some countries do this
| with road tax I think. Afaik Mozilla is not doing any ring
| fencing. It is perfectly appropriate to compare the fraction
| of their income as donations to the fraction of their costs
| as CEO salary.
| c0nducktr wrote:
| Wow, I could run a brand into the ground for far less than
| $6.9mm.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| But could you do it while convincing yourself and everyone
| you're beholden to that you're not?
| theteapot wrote:
| Isn't that most software devs?
| KurSix wrote:
| $6.9M just seems like overkill
| redeeman wrote:
| i dont know, the way they have managed to consistently roll
| down a hill that seemingly is the wrong one, despite how
| obviously it could have been done better, is frankly quite
| impressive
| thesuitonym wrote:
| And that's why you're unqualified to be a CEO: Never offer to
| do something for less money.
| ramsj wrote:
| Meredith Whittaker at Signal made < $800K [1]. I can't fathom
| how $6.9M is even remotely acceptable.
|
| [1]
| https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
| echelon wrote:
| A plant from Google.
|
| Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge, but you have to
| keep it rudderless and ineffective.
| eecc wrote:
| How on point.
|
| In my limited career I have been in several projects whose
| plight didn't make any sense -- with all the smart people
| and the effort poured over them, how could the disaster
| continue to unfold! -- until I realized failure rather than
| success was the goal.
| shmeeed wrote:
| IMO that's basically all there is to say about FF, sadly.
| Any other speculation and commentary seem moot to me.
|
| I'll still keep using it for as long as I can, though.
| novaRom wrote:
| Who else? I wonder what other companies play such role?
| motorest wrote:
| > Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge, but you have
| to keep it rudderless and ineffective.
|
| I don't know what makes you believe Firefox is ineffective.
| It's by far the best browser around. What do you think is
| missing?
| sickofparadox wrote:
| The people using it.
| motorest wrote:
| > The people using it.
|
| I'm not sure if you are serious. I mean, look at Chrome
| and Edge and Safari. They are managed by corporations
| that control their own platform. I get Chrome, Edge, and
| Safari because it is actively pushed onto me.
|
| What does Firefox have?
|
| The ugly truth is that browsers like Chrome and Edge and
| Safari are just as good as Firefox, and a user who is not
| a software militant doesn't really care _or know_ what
| browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and
| browse away.
|
| What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
| dartharva wrote:
| Edge and Safari yes, but Chrome doesn't come pre-
| installed in both Windows and MacOS. You and every Chrome
| user actively goes out of their way to download and
| install it.
|
| > What does Firefox have?
|
| Every single nontrivial Linux distribution out there
| comes packaged with Firefox as the default browser.
|
| > a user who is not a software militant doesn't really
| care or know what browser they are using. They open the
| "internet" app and browse away.
|
| Clearly then all Chrome users on laptops/desktops are
| software militants..
|
| > What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
|
| Firefox had at least half a decade of a headstart against
| Chrome and did jack shit with it.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| I'm trying to use it right on mac right now. It's still
| slow with many tabs (even with autosleep enabled),
| visibly slower than both Safari or any Chromium based
| browser.
|
| Also they killed visual tab expose, and any extensions
| that could replace it, so all I have for managing the
| tabs is a vertical list.
| amiga386 wrote:
| 1. A marketing department that can get it more than 2%
| market share
|
| 2. A legal and advocacy department that can work with
| governments to stop monopolists like Google and Apple
| privileging their own browsers on platforms they control
|
| 3. To use its seat on standards boards to stop abhorrent
| practises like the W3C endorsing DRM, or Google dropping
| effective web-blocking APIs from extensions.
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| I wish mozilla would focus on developing
| decentralized/p2p features, from messaging to maybe tor-
| browsing.
|
| I think this independence is much needed in the future to
| come.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| Firefox should focus on not hemorrhaging users, they're
| about to reach the cutoff (1%) where the US government
| will no longer even support their browser.
|
| No normal person will switch to Firefox for tor, despite
| us nerds thinking it's cool. And if they can't get actual
| users to switch, the browser has no future.
| bombcar wrote:
| And if you want a browser that can do Tor, Brave has you
| covered.
|
| All Firefox needs to do is make adblocking an integral
| part of the browser, but that would cut the Google money
| off.
| albedoa wrote:
| In addition to what everyone else said, comments like
| yours confirm that it would be a waste for me to check
| out Firefox for the hundredth time. You are among a sea
| of comments enumerating the specific reasons why it
| sucks, and you're here insisting with zero substantiation
| that it is "effective" and "by far the best browser
| around". A better approach would be to acknowledge the
| issues that users have had with it and explain how it has
| improved.
|
| On the other hand, if your definition of "effective" and
| "best" describes Firefox the last time I checked it out,
| then our definitions do not match, and I don't need to
| check it out again.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| This here is a single comment that explains everything.
| Firefox is kept clueless.
|
| Sorry to all the devs grinding inside the machine - you are
| doing great work, and while it is not your fault the ship
| is going in the wrong direction, you are providing the fuel
| for it to keep going there by keeping your heads down and
| not revolting.
|
| VGR's "Gervais principle" is a great series about
| recognizing the psychopaths at the helm and their power
| games. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I can't understand how this keeps coming up when Google
| just lost an antitrust case largely because they pay
| Firefox and Safari for their default search. Chrome only
| exists to funnel people into Google, they wouldn't risk
| their search monopoly so there's browser competition.
| thisislife2 wrote:
| Different anti-trust cases - you are talking about search
| engine monopoly, the others are talking about browser
| monopoly.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I'm talking about how the search engine monopoly is far
| more important than the browser one.
| guelo wrote:
| She's not the ceo anymore.
| KurSix wrote:
| Makes it hard to justify chipping in as a user. Transparency is
| great, but alignment with mission matters more.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| If you cut that compensation in half you could have funded a
| small team of devs to have finished Oxidation of Firefox and
| have a really interesting browser, and potentially a really
| rich GUI stack, JavaScript Engine and who knows what else for
| Rust itself as a result, on top of it all being production
| ready and proven because of the nature of Firefox's reach.
|
| There were major noticeable speed differences in Firefox when
| they implemented key component in Rust. I say this having used
| Firefox since 2004.
| ekr____ wrote:
| > If you cut that compensation in half you could have funded
| a small team of devs to have finished Oxidation of Firefox
| and have a really interesting browser, and potentially a
| really rich GUI stack, JavaScript Engine and who knows what
| else for Rust itself as a result, on top of it all being
| production ready and proven because of the nature of
| Firefox's reach.
|
| I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind here but this
| really isn't true for basically any plausible value of
| "finished Oxidation of Firefox".
|
| As context for scale, during the Quantum Project, Mozilla
| imported two major pieces of Servo: Stylo and WebRender. Each
| of these involved sizable teams and took years of effort, and
| yet these components (1) started from pre-existing work that
| had been done for Servo and (2) represent only relatively
| small fractions of Gecko. Replacing most of the browser -- or
| even a significant fraction of it -- with Rust code would be
| a far bigger undertaking.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I mean it could take longer sure, but the funding would
| still be there ;)
| ekr____ wrote:
| No, not really. It's just not even in the same order of
| magnitude in terms of level of effort.
| deepspace wrote:
| I interact with physical devices frequently. Mozilla's adamant
| refusal to implement WebSerial and WebUsb in Firefox forces me to
| install Chrome on every platform i use. That is just an asinine
| hill to die on.
| Neywiny wrote:
| At least edge supports it so I have something users can use
| without needing to install even chrome. So disappointing
| Firefox is too high and mighty
| accelbred wrote:
| If firefox implemented WebSerial and WebUsb, I'd lose a lot of
| trust in it. I say this as an embedded developer.
| deepspace wrote:
| Care to elaborate?
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Plenty of takes on this
|
| https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webusb
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34564119
|
| https://nullrequest.com/posts/thecaseagainstwebusb
|
| and on and on...
| xxpor wrote:
| What arrogance. Why it is their job to gatekeep this?
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Well, the reason is in the links I provided, and the
| reasoning doesn't scream arrogance to me.
|
| Personally, I think choice is great. Why be upset when
| you can download chromium (it is supported by pretty much
| any platform FF is) and use it to do all sorts of stuff
| with WebUSB, if you are into that?
|
| Still, I would like to see FF disable these features by
| default and allow opt-in. I don't see a great reason to
| avoid implementing them behind some "wall" (other than to
| avoid an increase in a concealed attack surface).
| citizenpaul wrote:
| You are completely missing the point just like Mozilla.
|
| This is the same a surgeon saying they refused to perform
| life-saving surgery on you because they don't believe you
| understand the consequences of the possibility of dying
| in surgery.
|
| The average person cannot be an expert on surgery or on
| browser security it's up to the people that have the
| education and work experience in there to make those
| decisions and handle them. Mozilla as another poster said
| has taken their toys home because they didn't get what
| they want.
| Spivak wrote:
| It literally is their job. One of Mozilla's roles is to
| give their opinion on proposed web standards. It's one of
| the factors that determines what actually becomes a
| standard. WebUSB is Chrome (and derivatives) only at the
| moment. You can not like where they landed, perfectly
| valid, but they were asked.
| deepspace wrote:
| Yes, but instead of saying "this spec is shit and full of
| vulnerabilities. Let's work on improving it", they just
| refused to participate in the discussion. What a childish
| POV.
| nic547 wrote:
| I don't think that's a fair summary of Mozillas Position
| on the WebBluetooth/WebSerial/WebUSB specs. Interacting
| with arbitary devices has arbitrary consequences, mozilla
| seems to assume users are not able to understand these
| consequences and therefore cannot consent to it.
|
| No improvment to the spec can fix users.
| deepspace wrote:
| So, basically, they noticed some potential insecurities
| in the implementation proposed by Google. Instead of
| negotiating modifications to the spec like adults, they
| threw their toys out of the stroller and refused to
| participate.
|
| What a bunch of idiots. They seem to have a completely
| misguided concept of what a browser is. They still have a
| 1990s mindset of the browser being a window into the
| Internet, instead of the universal UI that it has become
| today.
| oneshtein wrote:
| WebSerial and WebUsb can be implemented as separate plugins
| in the same way as support for H264 and DRM was added.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >asinine hill to die on
|
| Agreed. Also pointless hill to die on. It just forces users to
| another browser. This supposed average user only sees one side
| of this argument. Firefox doesn't work so I don't use it.
|
| If only there was some nonprofit with the funds to hire full
| time devs to work on this issue.....
| robswc wrote:
| Mozilla is the problem, not FireFox.
|
| I just don't really feel like using FireFox while Mozilla has a
| hand in it.
| const_cast wrote:
| These luke-warm takes become even more luke-warm when you look
| at the competition.
|
| You have Chrome, which disrespects it's users as a principle.
| And then you have chromium forks, which rely on Google for...
| let's see here... 99.99% of their application's code.
|
| Mozilla might make mistakes, but next to Google, they are
| angel.
| blibble wrote:
| straight into the history books unless they drop the AI, ads and
| telemetry
|
| mozilla are now an advertising company, so other than ublock
| origin there's no reason to use it over chrome
|
| and I'm pretty certain they'll get rid of manifest v2 soon too
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Genuinely curious, what history book would talk about a browser
| with 10 years of commercial success?
|
| I'd say it made some mark on FOSS, but in any book not
| dedicated to that it's nothing more than a footnote.
| radley wrote:
| It would be great if they figured out that _about:config_ and
| command-line to do anything is not actually good UX for most
| humans.
| musicale wrote:
| How else would they hide the useful settings that they don't
| want you to mess with because you might change the bad default
| behavior?
| msgodel wrote:
| It really seems to me like they've been intentionally adding
| friction to the configuration.
| krackers wrote:
| inb4 "We've simplified and streamlined the firefox experience
| by removing confusing control knobs and options."
| musicale wrote:
| TL;DR: nowhere good.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| Keeping up with web standards, and dropping the advertising
| rubbish that's making them somehow atrophy users faster than they
| were before.
|
| Otherwise, they'll be gone. Thunderbird has proven people are
| willing to donate millions if they know their money will go
| directly to the software. In 2022, Thunderbird collected ~6
| million in donations (~20 million users) compared to Mozilla's ~9
| million (from >200 million users)
| kennywinker wrote:
| Mozilla made $826.6M in 2024. If they got thunderbird levels of
| support $6/20 firefox would bring in $60 million. Aka 7% of
| current revenue. Idk all their revenue sources so idk what the
| overall picture would be, but my gut says $60mil wouldn't cut
| it and firefox will never get the support thunderbird gets
| because of different user bases.
| chrishare wrote:
| Most would be search engine agreements I presume, which is
| still proportional to the user counts.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| A single Google antitrust case can lose $500,000,000 of
| annual revenue.
| tristan957 wrote:
| You can't donate to the Mozilla Corporation. The Foundation is
| where donations go.
| Squeeeez wrote:
| Eh... I'm not too sure about Thunderbird. For example on
| Android, they bought a very good product (K-9 Mail), rebranded
| it to Thunderbird and then proceeded to break every feature
| which made it stand apart.
|
| Otherwise I 100% agree.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Firefox should focus on privacy, keeping extensions viable, and
| implementing standards, so they don't get swamped by competition.
|
| No one really cares about a majority of the UX sugar, IMO.
|
| I personally find the LLM context menu useful and reading mode
| awesome, but these are not features that by themselves would
| drive me to use the browser.
| aorth wrote:
| Reading mode is awesome! Especially on mobile. Yes to
| everything else you said too.
| danelski wrote:
| I feel like the addition of LLMs is an introduction to finding
| another source of revenue. That Perplexity pop-up we've been
| shown lately seems like an experiment in that.
| anon7000 wrote:
| Agreed -- I'm using the hell out of Zen browser on Linux and
| Windows. It's missing a couple things, but it works pretty
| great as a Firefox wrapper.
|
| The reality is that with so many different users, there will be
| lots of opinions about the best way to do things, and
| especially in OSS communities, it's literally impossible to
| keep everyone happy.
|
| Mozilla should let others do UX experimentation (like Zen,
| which is an Arc copy), and focus on the core performance and
| compatibility of the engine itself. Keep FF itself more
| streamlined as a core browser, and empower others to build
| fancy stuff on top.
|
| And ditch literally anything related to ads & sponsorships,
| which have no place in a piece of tech so foundational to the
| open web.
| lucius_verus wrote:
| Honestly, the Firefox feature-set it what prompted me to pick
| it up again after years of not using it.
|
| - I wanted ad-blocking on Android, so I tried out Firefox on
| mobile.
|
| - Then there were times I wanted to sync browser history/tabs
| between mobile and desktop, so I picked up Firefox on desktop
| again.
|
| - I fell in love with reader mode (and using the narrate
| feature to listen to articles when my eyes get tired)
|
| - I flirted with Zen browser, but now that Firefox has vertical
| tabs and tab grouping, I'm having trouble finding a reason to
| use Zen
|
| Firefox basically does everything I want it to do, and it's
| incredibly rare that I need to open a chromium-based browser to
| handle something Firefox can't do.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Uh yeah, rip nearly every feature out of Firefox and move it to
| "official extensions" that you can install optionally.
|
| Go on a hardcore crusade on performance and battery life. Safari
| currently uses half the amount of energy compared to Firefox
| (according to macOS measurements), so I switched from Firefox to
| Safari and noticed hours of difference in battery life when I'm
| out and about.
| lxgr wrote:
| I don't think Firefox uses meaningfully more energy due to
| "optional features", but rather due to simply not optimizing
| for battery efficiency at the same level that Apple does for
| Safari.
|
| That type of optimization requires tons of profiling and is
| less glamorous than implementing new features, so I could see
| how it's hard to prioritize for Mozilla, especially if
| optimizations might look very different across OSes.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > rip nearly every feature out of Firefox and move it to
| "official extensions" that you can install optionally.
|
| Only if they properly maintain those APIs. I'm still salty that
| they had tab groups, then broke that feature out to an
| extension, then killed the extension. (Then, much later,
| recreated the feature over again)
|
| But yes, if done well modularity is probably good from a
| development perspective too.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I was wrong, Brendan Eich would have been better.
| ai_critic wrote:
| This was obvious to anybody with half a brain at the time of
| the pitchfork mob. At least a lot of folks got to feel like
| they were on the right side of history, one supposes. That was
| surely worth the free and open browser.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| This is the Great Man Theory. It's a child's view of history.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
| a-french-anon wrote:
| Nah, that's the "less worse man" in this case, nothing as
| grand.
| ai_critic wrote:
| As of 2024Q1, Brave had a market share of 1.27% vs
| Firefox's 3.97% (via Cloudflare, here:
| https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-
| share-20... ). As of 2025, 1.05% vs 4.10% (
| https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-
| share-20... ).
|
| Interestingly enough, right, we can see that the same CEO
| left Mozilla and then started Brave, and we can see the
| growth of Brave and the decline of Mozilla.
|
| You can argue, sure, that market conditions are responsible
| for Mozilla's plight--the decreasing value as antitrust
| insurance for GOOG and so forth. But, Brave managed to do
| well in spite of that, and to my knowledge if you look at
| the pay, at his peak at Mozilla Eich was making in the
| 800-900K range while Baker made over 6M a year from 2022 to
| 2023 (and just a bit under 6M in 2021). So, for around 8x
| the price, you had worse leadership.
|
| To restate _again_ : the dude started a new browser company
| and grew it to a quarter the size of Firefox--and this
| without having GOOG as a sugardaddy.
|
| It's an incredibly mid take to assume that individual
| competence in business is somehow not actually relevant.
| bitlax wrote:
| Eich should be installed as a change agent, with absolute power
| to hire and fire. Until then Mozilla will continue to circle
| the drain.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| Change your name to Rust Foundation and give up on browser market
| nektro wrote:
| i like where firefox is going but stop paying the executives so
| much, get leaner
| Spivak wrote:
| Mozilla brings in _a lot_ of money and they 're sitting on a
| pile of cash. There's nothing even remotely close to pressure
| to become lean. They could double the CEO compensation and it
| wouldn't even be noticed. They have the opposite problem, a lot
| of money but not enough worthwhile ventures to invest it in.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Could they hire more people to ask Firefox users what they
| want Mozilla to work on? They'd probably say Firefox features
| and bug fixes. There are people who could do the work in
| exchange for some of that money. I don't think this is a case
| of too much money chasing too little profits, which seems to
| be what you're suggesting.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Everyone I know who works on Firefox says their team is
| understaffed and people are not always being replaced when
| they leave. They could stand to invest a lot more (or more
| efficiently) into their core product.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| /dev/null
| EbNar wrote:
| Pretty much.
| rappatic wrote:
| When are we getting Mac biometric support for extensions? I want
| to be able to use my Touch ID with my password manager on my Mac!
| Do any HNers have solutions for this (Dashlane)?
| Reason077 wrote:
| What I'd like to see is a setting that prevents websites from
| opening links in new tabs. eBay and AliExpress, specifically, but
| I'm sure others do it too.
|
| I haven't found a way to block this very annoying behaviour in
| any browser, short of installing "new tab blocker" browser
| extensions, but they are unreliable.
| tsoukase wrote:
| I am pretty sure Google donates a great share of Mozilla's
| revenue but demands the following with this money:
|
| - Firefox is alive, so that they are a theoretical competitor to
| avoid anti-trust measures
|
| - Firefox has the lowest market share that remains that said
| competitor without distracting many users from G engagement
|
| - Firefox emains of few steps behind in features and perforfance
| so that it remains in this pesky market share
|
| - of course Firefox keeps Google search the default
|
| - may be other under the table agreements? (Request for comments)
|
| I cannot foresay what will happen next with the state of MV3.
| mparramon wrote:
| I've yet to have one single problem after running Firefox as my
| main driver for ~3 months. Only 2 webpages have made me quickly
| open Chrome instead to check them out, and the content wasn't
| worth engaging for long.
|
| It puzzles me how more programmers don't switch to a real open
| source browser not controlled by an advertising giant which
| will use their overwhelming monopolistic force to steer the way
| browsers work so that it benefits its bottom line.
|
| Vote with your feet, use Firefox.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| I used it for many years but ultimately abandoned it because
| its memory use was just unacceptably high. A couple of
| windows with 30-40 tabs in each would eat all my laptop's
| memory - Chromium in a similar setup will sit around 40%
| used. I don't know what Firefox is doing but it's crazy far
| off the pace there.
|
| Mozilla should be focusing on fixing things like that and
| making the browser be good before the barely related
| campaigning, let alone the whole "we're going to be an
| advertising business as well" thing.
| rswail wrote:
| Running latest Firefox on latest MacOS on Intel.
|
| Hundreds of tabs open, memory usage is ~3GB for main
| process, 2-3GB for isolated content (ie the tabs).
|
| Really not sure what the problem is.
| ksec wrote:
| Are you on Linux, Windows or macOS ?
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| Linux
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Sounds like an extension issue. Firefox by itself uses way
| way less memory than Chromium-base browsers.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| I had a few extensions, I don't think anything especially
| unusual. Regardless, Chromium with a few similar
| extensions (ublock is the most notable) performs far
| better.
| account42 wrote:
| > It puzzles me how more programmers don't switch to a real
| open source browser not controlled by an advertising giant
|
| Let us know when you find one.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| I think clearly Google want Firefox alive as a 'competitor',
| and they explicitly are buying that Google search is the
| default. I highly doubt they have any agreements limiting
| Firefox's market share or features though - that would undo the
| benefit of it being a competitor if it ever came out, but more
| significantly they don't have to. Mozilla have managed to
| achieve all that on their own. I actually think Google would
| probably rather that Firefox was at say 10% market share so
| they had a more legit argument that it was a competitor.
| M95D wrote:
| > - may be other under the table agreements? (Request for
| comments)
|
| Google access to Firefox telemetry data?
| t1234s wrote:
| The only feature a browser needs is speed. Anything else should
| be an extension.
| captainepoch wrote:
| So... Here's an idea: stop wasting time and money on things like
| that, listen to the community, hire engineers, and make a browser
| that can be at the same level as Chrome. We already told you what
| we want and need, no need to keep asking.
|
| Mozilla and the story on "How to waste money and resources" is
| getting tiresome at this point.
| lblume wrote:
| > stop wasting time and money on things like that
|
| What do you mean? The AMA?
|
| > listen to the community
|
| Huh? Isn't that exactly what they are doing with this?
| skywal_l wrote:
| I think your parent poster has a point. What is needed from
| firefox is fairly clear to any person of good faith:
|
| Better web compatibility and speed, be more lean (higher dev
| to admin ratio) and no more shenanigans / distractions.
|
| To keep asking the question when you know the answer is at
| best incompetence according to Hanlon.
| Lio wrote:
| > > stop wasting time and money on things like that
|
| > What do you mean? The AMA?
|
| I'm not the parent but it's not the AMA, it's paying multi-
| million dollar salaries to CEOs that layoff engineers and
| divert money to political campaigning.
|
| We could have had a Servo based Firefox by now if the team
| hadn't been canned in 2020 instead of Mitchell Baker giving
| herself a $3 million pay increase _every year_.
|
| It's shameful to then come cap in hand for donations after
| that.
|
| I had an email from Mozilla last week on how to prepare my
| phone for participation in violent political demonstrations.
|
| I have to ask myself, what does this have to do with web
| browsers?
| captainepoch wrote:
| Read the comments from Lio and skywal_l, both replies to your
| comment <- that's what I mean.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Asking the same questions, and getting the same answers over
| and over again doesn't really seem like listening to me.
| const_cast wrote:
| Mozilla develops a better browser than Chrome in a lot of ways,
| and they do it with a tiny fraction of their budget. I would
| not describe that as "money wasting".
| uncircle wrote:
| To be fair, most of Chrome's budget is spent on developing
| ever more complex web standards to stay ahead of the
| competition, and to make sure no one will ever catch up to
| them.
| NackerHughes wrote:
| So just think how much greater the browser could be if
| Mozilla put more of the money they get into improving Firefox
| instead of into pointless UI redesigns that only slow things
| down, or breaking existing functionality - not to mention all
| the other frivolous nonsense they seem preoccupied with
| instead of being a credible competitor to Google.
|
| With how they've been in recent years it's almost as if
| they're _trying_ to be inept competition, as if they 're
| being paid by Google to suck - in fact, that is all but
| established by now.
| idoubtit wrote:
| Just two personal experiences of why the quality of Firefox
| is far from Chromium's: downloads, and creating an extension.
|
| A few years ago, they changed their interface for
| downloading. This introduced more than a dozen of bugs. Some
| were cosmetic, e.g. hover was the same color as foreground.
| Some were rare but caused a file loss. Some were performance
| related, e.g. deleting the history of downloads could take a
| minute with no visible change until the end. Most of these
| regressions are now fixed, but that made me lose confidence
| in the quality of Firefox.
|
| This year, I had to develop a cross-platform extension for
| Chrome and Firefox. I started using Mozilla Documentation
| Network, but many pages seemed unmaintained. The relationship
| with extensionworkshop.com is unclear. The status of manifest
| v3 is poorly documented (most pages are for v2 only). The
| page about the compatibility with Chrome is incomplete. After
| a few struggles, I switched to Google's documentation. Then I
| lost time and energy on a severe bug with the Firefox tool
| that publishes web-extensions:
| https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/webexterror-unsupported-
| file...
| captainepoch wrote:
| The only thing Mozilla has right now better than Chrome is
| that the APIs needed for uBlock Origin to work as intented
| exist.
| prmoustache wrote:
| chrome doesn't have container and having to manage tens or
| hundreds of profiles would be impossible.
| KurSix wrote:
| It's wild how often Mozilla asks for feedback, gets clear
| answers (less bloat, better performance, fix regressions), and
| then drops something like another random experiment no one
| asked for
| novaRom wrote:
| Maybe because as from another comment: "Firefox is an
| antitrust litigation sponge". They also absorb some useful
| users feedback. But do they have a real intention to increase
| market share (which could be done easily)? They are well paid
| - see in other comments how much its CEO is earning. So,
| "antitrust litigation sponge" sounds plausible?
| supertrope wrote:
| The market often rewards bloat (more features) not technical
| excellence. I think a big marketing push or pre-install
| partnership would help them a lot. Their marketshare is now
| so low that web developers unironically state "Best viewed in
| Google Chrome" like it's 2003 when IE6 had 95% marketshare.
| account42 wrote:
| The "market" doesn't care about Firefox at all. It has
| already chosen Chrome and making a second Chrome won't
| change that.
| sabjut wrote:
| "The market has already chosen Internet Explorer and
| making a second Internet Explorer won't change that."
|
| - This was probably said by someone in a meeting at
| Google in 2006
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Sure, but Google _didn 't_ make a second Internet
| Explorer, they made a new thing.
| toast0 wrote:
| Chrome is an obvious win for Google.
|
| Rather than paying browser makers for every search, they
| can make one time payments to convert users to Chrome,
| and then get the searches for free.
| supertrope wrote:
| And now with their dominant position they can choke off
| competing ad networks by removing 3rd party cookies.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Maybe the one where they decided not to make a second
| Internet Explorer and create a different browser? But I
| doubt they even considered it.
| captainepoch wrote:
| I think exactly the same. It's always the same play.
|
| I guess they don't want to listen to things they need to pour
| money into.
| hyruo wrote:
| Firefox only supports a limited number of alphabetic text
| translations, and other third-party plugins are not as convenient
| as Chrome & Edge.That's why I gave up on using it.
| KnuthIsGod wrote:
| Firefox on android has a weird interface and is irritating.
|
| I am looking forward to the day I can discard Firefox.
|
| I am currently semi-forced to use it on one website ( ankiweb's
| desktop view does not seem to work well in Brave or Chrome ).
| sebtron wrote:
| What's wrong with Firefox on Android? I have been using it for
| ages and I have no issue with it.
| gfdjghd wrote:
| Firefox Android: The address bar has become
| cluttered with buttons THAT SHOULDN'T BE THERE: "home" (useless),
| "translate" (won't go away no matter the setting), and now
| "share" (for real!?), "reading mode"; remove them from there, I
| can barely see the first few letters of the address! Also way too
| much spacing around them I always have to manually close
| the previous tab when tapping on a link, let us reuse them
| instead, you may call us owls or wharever, but we don't like
| having zillions of tabs open to be closed automatically after x
| time Improve speed, it's currently the slowest browser
| out there Allow more customization (like about:config)
| and extensions, and for ex. to be able to remove the useless
| buttons from the address bar
| nicman23 wrote:
| this honestly sounds unhinged. except the part about
| abou:config
| SushiHippie wrote:
| FWIW about:config is available in beta and nightly on android,
| my main browser was nightly for a while but it sometimes was
| too unstable, so I switched to beta as my daily, which seems to
| be stable.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| It is also available on stable though you have to enter the
| more verbose `chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml` to get
| there.
| neRok wrote:
| There's another way to get to about:config, see the following
| link.
|
| https://www.askvg.com/how-to-access-about-config-page-in-fir...
| II2II wrote:
| I was going to say that different people have different needs,
| but many of the things you bring up simply aren't true or are
| context dependent. For example: translate and share are not on
| the address bar (they are accessed via a menu, along with many
| other things, that is on the address bar). For the most part,
| tabs are reused. The main exception is when sites tell the
| browser to open a link in a new window.
|
| Firefox may be far from perfect, but I've found it must more
| malleable than Chrome.
| charcircuit wrote:
| See the first picture.
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/android-translation
| cpeterso wrote:
| The reader view and translation buttons aren't shown on all
| pages, just pages for which they are relevant.
| II2II wrote:
| I've tried German and French pages, languages for which
| translation is supported, but haven't seen the translate
| icon in the toolbar. I had to go through the menu each
| time.
| danelski wrote:
| They move things in mobile UI a lot, so the docs might not
| reflect that. I know it used to look like on this
| screenshot, but I haven't had it in my Nightly for a while.
| test1235 wrote:
| if there's one surprising thing I've learnt from HN users, it's
| that there're loads of people out there who run browsers with
| zillions of tabs open all the time
| barrenko wrote:
| People approach browsers in the same way they approach sex or
| basically anything else - whatever can be done will be done.
| flkenosad wrote:
| Lmao most people don't approach sex like that.
| neRok wrote:
| Meanwhile I do 50% of my internet-ing in private mode and get
| annoyed when I change between apps the wrong way and loose my
| 4 tabs lol. I think this particular issue happens because
| firefox-android must get told by android-OS to free up RAM as
| it's now a background-app.
|
| But there's another private-tab-killer, and it happens when
| the screen times-out automatically or manually (eg, when you
| push the power button). I don't have a passcode or anything,
| so when I push the power button to power the screen on, it
| shows the simple "swipe to unlock" screen. The problem is
| that FF leaves a "private browsing" notification -- _and FYI,
| if you click on any notification on my lock screen, it will
| unlock and go to straight to that app_ -- so of course I see
| that notification and think "shit yer, here's a shortcut"
| and click it, to which it unlocks the phone and opens FF, but
| it wipes all my private browsing tabs in the process!!! But
| if you unlock it by swiping, then your tabs will survive...
|
| _Actually, as I 'm typing this, I think it might wipe ALL
| tabs, but that's not so bad for regular tabs (as you have
| history, cookies, etc), but it can still ruin your "state" of
| a search/scroll/etc._
|
| Edit2: I'm also just realising that the way it wipes tabs
| when I click the notification sounds just like the first
| issue I mentioned (which I presume is android-OS garbage
| collecting the memory held by "background" apps). I have a
| POCO phone that runs Xiaomi HyperOS, and if it's running a
| non-standard lock-screen "app" by default (because I'm using
| the default whatever with settings that suit me), then
| perhaps that's why clicking a notification counts as
| "changing apps"?! (or perhaps even the default android lock
| screen counts as its own app?) But this idea seems strange
| because it would imply that the "swipe to unlock" feature is
| not part of the "lock screen app"...?
| ngruhn wrote:
| Honestly, "reading mode" is the one reason I switched to
| firefox on mobile. When I open a page with tons of ads and
| popups, it gets rid of all of that.
| sarthaksoni wrote:
| I've used Firefox for years and really wanted to stick with it,
| but too many sites keep breaking. I originally ditched Chrome
| because it chewed through my RAM, but on the new M4 MacBook I've
| got headroom, so I've reluctantly gone back to Chrome. Painful
| switch, but I don't have much choice right now.
| fooker wrote:
| I have the same experience.
|
| It's somewhat of a taboo around here, and every time I have
| mentioned this there has been a bunch of responses certifying
| that Firerox works perfectly for them.
| NamTaf wrote:
| I genuinely can't think of any sites I come across that are
| broken, at least visibly enough for me to notice. I think
| that speaks more to the variety in browsing habits than
| anything else. I'm sure they exist and I don't think it's a
| taboo. People who don't share that impression probably just
| don't visit any of those broken sites, e.g. me.
| ksec wrote:
| Which site don't work on Firefox ?
| sarthaksoni wrote:
| Some forms just break in Firefox for me. I've been applying
| to a lot of tech companies, and roughly 10% of their
| application forms fail in Firefox but work fine in Chrome. I
| can't figure out why it's inconsistent. Even some CAPTCHA and
| payment pop-ups won't load.
| jerhewet wrote:
| Home Depot. They never test against Firefox, so most of their
| pages are a dumpster fire.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Firefox has this really unsolved issue for me where firefox and
| firefox based forks basically first load through all of my cache
| which after months of using will take literal minutes and then
| and only then would my search queries / network requests by
| browser take place.
|
| That means, to use my browser I have to wait literally minutes
| and yesterday, it was so long somehow on Zen (I created an issue
| there but they linked me to the firefox (downstream?) issue which
| wasn't solved in like sooo many years)
|
| I basically just use a password manager and just create a new
| profile and start afresh most of the times but still its a little
| inconvenient I guess.
| SnowProblem wrote:
| All I want today is Chrome-style profiles in Firefox. None of
| this about:profiles nonsense.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| As a non Chrome user, can you explain the features of Google
| Chrome's profiles, that Mozilla Firefox doesn't have?
| kevinlinxc wrote:
| Ive used firefox for a decade, theres only two features I want:
| uBlock origin on iOS (hard?) and PWA support on Desktop
| chii wrote:
| > uBlock origin on iOS
|
| that is the fault of apple. Firefox on iOS is not really
| firefox.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Yeah somehow Apple is allowed to get away with this for years
| despite Microsoft being forced to give users options like
| browser back in the day.
| chii wrote:
| it is true that iphones itself isn't a monopoly (yet), but
| i reckon consumer protection should extend to the ability
| to install arbitrary software on a device they purchased,
| regardless of the intent of the company selling the device.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| This argument doesn't hold now that Firefox's smaller and
| less funded competition manages to deliver. Being forced to
| use a webview does not leave you as helpless to implement
| features as Mozilla stans claim.
|
| https://kagi.com/orion/
| chii wrote:
| being able to block ads, vs being able to install
| extensions, are two separate requirements with different
| difficulties. In the past, apple was anti-extensions - your
| app weren't allowed to be able to load remote (and thus
| unreviewed) extensions that executed code and changed app
| behaviour.
| mijoharas wrote:
| There's a third party PWA support now, that is maybe semi
| official? I think the Mozilla docs link to it.
|
| Other than it being an extension, I've had no complaints.
| KurSix wrote:
| The animal thing's cute, but maybe focus less on branding
| exercises
| krackers wrote:
| >Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style?
|
| Ironic that "fox" isn't even an option. And the fact that they
| even ask this tells that they probably don't want serious
| feedback.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| I know there are plenty of more serious issues people have with
| Mozilla's direction and focus, but patronizing stuff like this
| really grinds my gears.
|
| > Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style? [List
| of emoji animals]
|
| The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though
| they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting. This is
| the most egregious part but the whole post has a similar tone.
|
| I'll note that I'm not saying outreach should necessarily be
| professional or devoid of fun/humor. There's just a sterile,
| saccharine way about Mozilla's community engagement that evokes
| artificiality.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| Thank you for loving Firefox -
| https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/m/m-p/16863/highl...
| ralfd wrote:
| This is an amazing rant! Too bad it was only had 4 comments
| here at the time:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892
| rendaw wrote:
| > Ah, but does anyone from Mozilla take any notice of our
| grumbling and complaining here?
|
| Apparently, no. Bodes well for this Q&A with someone
| thoroughly air-gapped from development and management.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd love a Q&A with the Mozilla exec team...
| https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/
|
| Considering, you know, Firefox is their most important
| product.
| transcriptase wrote:
| No, Firefox is the conduit through which the funding
| provided by Google to stave off claims of monopoly are
| used for pet projects and padding CVs by people wholly
| uninterested in Firefox.
| vintagedave wrote:
| I just resubmitted. It deserves attention IMO.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44580702
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >This is an amazing rant!
|
| Is it? The guy is "highly offended" (???) by playful
| language and color themes and does the performatively
| enraged internet guy thing of being shocked that Mozilla
| has a political agenda, despite the fact that Mozilla, a
| purpose driven non-profit has had a manifesto written by
| Mitchell Baker since 2007?
|
| If you're enraged by an emoji or by someone saying thank
| you for loving our browser it's probably time to turn the
| computer off or something
| tojaprice wrote:
| Agreed, also:
|
| >> The article began:
|
| >>"Last year we upleveled our Private Browsing mode."
|
| >> Sorry, "upleveled" is not a verb I've ever heard of,
| in decades of using the Web. Why are you beginning
| articles with made-up verbs that you know people aren't
| going to understand? Why not use standard, plain, clear
| English?
|
| Just because the person ranting had never heard of it
| doesn't mean that uplevel isn't a verb; and I am not sure
| how their amount of time spent using the web would
| correlate to their grasp on the English language.
| mrob wrote:
| I checked for "upleveled" in Google Ngram Viewer (
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/ )
|
| Although the word alone is found, there are zero matches
| for it combined with various articles and determiners:
|
| >Ngrams not found: upleveled a, upleveled the, upleveled
| fewer, upleveled less, upleveled more, upleveled fewest,
| upleveled least
|
| >Ngrams not found: upleveled most, upleveled this,
| upleveled that, upleveled these, upleveled those,
| upleveled each, upleveled every
|
| >Ngrams not found: upleveled any, upleveled some,
| upleveled either, upleveled neither, upleveled enough,
| upleveled sufficient
|
| >Ngrams not found: upleveled what, upleveled which,
| upleveled you, upleveled all, upleveled both, upleveled
| certain, upleveled several
|
| >Ngrams not found: upleveled various, upleveled few,
| upleveled little, upleveled many, upleveled much
|
| >Ngrams not found: upleveled my, upleveled his, upleveled
| her, upleveled its, upleveled our, upleveled their,
| upleveled your
|
| This suggests all the supposed matches for the word alone
| could be OCR errors or typos. If "upleveled" is a real
| word it's so rare that it has no place in any writing
| that you expect to be broadly understood.
| darkwater wrote:
| Just checked for "footgun" and... surprise surprise,
| doesn't appear either. Should we stop inventing new words
| then?
| mrob wrote:
| We should stop inventing useless words. "Footgun" has
| some use because it's shorter than the alternatives.
| "Upleveled" is just a worse version of "improved".
| aydyn wrote:
| Or even just "leveled up".
| 010101010101 wrote:
| quick, do startup and upstart next
| idle_zealot wrote:
| I find it concerning that my top-level comment is
| garnering a lot of support and agreement from people who
| see my complaints and this ranting guy's performative
| indignation as aligned. He pretends to not understand
| vague, virtue-signally marketing speak rather than be
| honest about the fact that it just bugs him. Maybe for
| reasons he doesn't understand, or maybe for reasons he's
| uncomfortable with sharing.
|
| I want to make it as clear as possible that my primary
| issue is Mozilla's insincerity. I'm also put off by the
| particular tone they're using, but that's just a matter
| of aesthetic preference.
| adamrezich wrote:
| You really don't think the tone contributes to the
| insincerity?
| rpdillon wrote:
| The rant makes a great point that professional writers
| should be able to write substantially better than we're
| seeing from Mozilla.
|
| It's easy to take pot-shots at complaints about usage of
| "upleveling" (which is not a word, for the record), but
| his point is well-taken. Take a look at the Mozilla's
| blog post that has that sentence:
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/privacy-online-
| just...
|
| The writing is just weak, pretty much across the board.
|
| > October is one of our favorite months of the year with
| autumn and Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
|
| "favorite months", "with autumn"? I feel like a 5th
| grader wrote this from the get-go.
|
| Second paragraph is almost incoherent:
|
| > Earlier this year we celebrated our 100th Firefox
| release and reaffirmed our commitment to put people
| first. For today's release, we're rolling out new
| features that deliver on our user promise to provide web
| experiences that prioritizes people's privacy and needs
| whenever they go online.
|
| The writer is somehow trying to tie the idea of the 100th
| release to "people first", but the 100th release has
| nothing to do with what this paragraph is about, and
| neither does "people first". This paragraph is actually
| about Firefox's privacy features. If that's "people
| first", any user feature is "people first", right? The
| writing is a bunch of fluff around "We've improved the
| usability of Firefox's privacy features". My summary is
| just a better way to say that than the original post.
|
| It's a slog to reading writing critique, but let's do one
| more: Firefox View
|
| > We created Firefox View to help users navigate today's
| internet. For today's launch of Firefox View you will see
| up to 25 of your recently closed tabs within each window
| of your desktop device. Once you've synced your mobile
| devices, you'll see the last three active tabs you had
| open on your other devices. You'll also get to refresh
| your Firefox with a new Colorway inspired by the
| Independent Voices collection. Firefox View will continue
| to be a place where you can quickly get to the
| information that matters most to you.
|
| I can do a lot of critique of useless words here, but
| let's put that aside. They seem to be explaining that
| there's a new feature that shows recently closed tabs.
| Cool. And then the second to last sentence is just jammed
| in there, unrelated to anything else in the paragraph,
| and introducing terms I'm not really sure about.
|
| > You'll also get to refresh your Firefox with a new
| Colorway inspired by the Independent Voices collection.
|
| No clue what that's doing there. I'm an engineer, so I
| thought Colorway was a Firefox feature or something, but
| I looked it up and it seems to be a term-of-art:
|
| > The scheme of two or more colors in which a design is
| available. It is often used to describe variegated or
| ombre (shades of one color) print yarns, fabric, or
| thread. It can also be applied to apparel, to wallpaper
| and other interior design motifs, and to specifications
| for printed materials such as magazines or newspapers.
|
| But they capitalized it, so it must be a product? So I go
| and do more research and discover it's an add-on I've
| never heard of: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/collections/4757633...
|
| And then I realize all the links to Colorways that should
| have been in the post, are in the post! They are just at
| the end. So all the mentions of Colorways are unlinked
| until the end of the post, where they finally explain
| what they are referring to. This is just basic editing
| feedback that any decent editor would provide. The fact
| is Mozilla is just not paying people to write well for
| them.
|
| It's a short post that's mediocre end-to-end, not because
| of playful language, but because it's bad writing.
|
| The reason this kind of critique seems so lame is that I
| don't think people think very much about what they're
| reading (when reading stuff like this, at least), so they
| just don't care that the writing is sophomoric. But that
| doesn't mean the rant isn't fundamentally correct that
| Mozilla is doing a poor job in their writing.
| dartharva wrote:
| If you are just a freeloader sure, but someone who's been
| involved and supporting the project for years would
| certainly be right to be offended at the blatant abuse
| and wastage of his efforts.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Sending a clear message that the lights are on and nobody
| is home is always a bad idea and should be resisted.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> This is an amazing rant!
|
| It's not. People who take issue with every little thing
| like this are extremely unpleasant to be around, and
| extremely unpleasant to have as users.
| meristohm wrote:
| "Surely, you have one job and that is to deliver tech that
| works--not to waste users' time by giving them irrelevant
| copy to read which has no functional value."
|
| Microsoft has been doing this for years, with its messages
| during Windows setup, along the lines of "sit back and
| relax while we work our magic" which is at best annoying.
| accrual wrote:
| 95, 98, Me, and XP all at least provided screenshots of
| some new features in the release. 10 and later just have
| the fuzzy "getting things ready" flavor text.
| bombcar wrote:
| Those were informative and at least not boring and
| changed often enough to keep you interested and tell you
| that set up is still working.
| merb wrote:
| Tbf most os's including windows install extremely fast.
| It's the shit show you need to do after the installation
| that is annoying. Even starting edge after you did the
| worlds slowest after installation wizard. You need to
| fucking await it's fullscreen feature announcement until
| you can download another browser.
| aydyn wrote:
| At least Windows is giving that to you at a time when you
| cant be doing anything else. The nonsense mozilla gets up
| to is truly on another level.
| tim333 wrote:
| I know everyone says you should use Firefox not Chrome but
| one of the nice things with Chrome is for the most part it
| just works without that kind of thing. Just looking at
| switching over after they scrapped Manifest V2 and I ads
| popping up on youtube!
| 93po wrote:
| while i agree that mozilla is silly for thinking they're
| bring about positive social impact, it's also concerning for
| the author to call DEI (as a sentiment, not as a flawed
| implementation) "divisive politics" when it's just basic
| recognition of being a decent human. It makes me think the
| author is an "all lives matter" person.
| MollyRealized wrote:
| "Welcome to Costco, I love you." That movie was so damn
| eerily prescient.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| "Last year we upleveled our Private Browsing mode."
|
| Hah, perfect. I recently got a contract to "upskill" a team.
| I mean, I kinda get it: training, right? But I was not
| confident that I really did understand it, specifically. I
| asked what the hell that meant and was met with a lot
| contorted phrases to describe it. Sure enough, training.
|
| We're inventing work...
| Y_Y wrote:
| Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be
| force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the
| color theme already could, and that the limited time and ebergy
| available were being spent on things like compatibility and
| escaping from Google.
| account42 wrote:
| Wasn't that added around the same time where they removed
| compact mode from the UI because supposedly it was too much
| of a burden to maintain?
| dao- wrote:
| No, that had happened about two years earlier I think
| (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1678742 goes
| back to 2020). Alas, the bottleneck there was UX staffing
| rather than engineering.
| dao- wrote:
| > Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed
| to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change
| the color theme already could
|
| Most average users don't ever change settings or otherwise
| customize stuff, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy a
| different theme. Colorways saw good adoption according to our
| internal Telemetry. In fact, three years later colorway
| themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light,
| or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised
| directly in Firefox anymore.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Not surprising, since I believe Firefox gave everyone the
| Colorways screen when that feature showed up, but nothing
| equivalent happened whenever it went away.
|
| My current desktop has been Fedora since Fedora 16, and I
| just upgraded from one release to the next continuously. So
| yes, whatever choice I made back in 2013 is just going to
| stick around on my current machine unless it goes away
| entirely or I manually change it. Colors are just not that
| important, if I like it well enough, it's going to stick
| around forever.
|
| The only one that caused intense feelings in me was the
| "Dreamer - Bold" theme that caused a fair amount of
| confusion about why the heck couldn't I tell which tab was
| active, and what could be possibly broken. Because it never
| occurred to me that the theme could be designed that way
| intentionally.
| dao- wrote:
| > Not surprising, since I believe Firefox gave everyone
| the Colorways screen when that feature showed up,
|
| Right, I assume that's what the parent comment meant by
| "force-fed to us." That screen was indeed the whole
| point: It made the theming feature visible and accessible
| to the average users.
| albedoa wrote:
| Okay? The thing that you force-fed users saw good
| adoption. Imagine that.
| dao- wrote:
| Drop the hyperbole for a second. It was a choice screen,
| a far cry from force-feeding. I'll grant you, somewhat
| wide adoption is almost a given when putting this kind of
| UI in front of all users, but that still doesn't mean
| that it was a mistake or a net loss to give folks who
| wouldn't normally customize Firefox a chance to do so.
| So, what's your point?
| Y_Y wrote:
| It was something I didn't want, put between me and my
| browser, because someone at Mozilla decided they wanted
| wveryone to stop what they were doing and pay attention
| to this new method of self expression. If it wasn't a big
| deal them why do I still care about it? Maybe I should
| just change my desktop theme until I feel better.
| albedoa wrote:
| > So, what's your point?
|
| What? It's the one you conceded:
|
| > I'll grant you, somewhat wide adoption is almost a
| given when putting this kind of UI in front of all users
|
| I see now that "force-fed" is hyperbole. It was merely
| "put in front of all users". And then the thing that
| happens when you put this kind of UI in front of all
| users happened.
|
| Thanks!
| Y_Y wrote:
| Does your internal telemetry tell you that "average" users
| don't know what Firefox is, and that proficient users who
| might recommend it to them are sick of the mismanagement of
| the browser?
| margalabargala wrote:
| > In fact, three years later colorway themes combined
| remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow,
| despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox
| anymore.
|
| People using colorways after the feature was removed? Well,
| that sounds like a failure of the feature then.
|
| The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing rested,
| was they were temporary! You get to change your theme for a
| few months, and then later on at some random point, it
| changes again as it's taken away from you.
|
| If users have managed to continue using those themes, well,
| that's in spite of what Mozilla did with them, not because
| of them.
|
| The criticism of colorways wasn't because people hate
| browser themes, it's because making features that self-
| destruct after indeterminate amounts of time is user-
| hostile. "Limited time features" is alone enough to make
| someone want to swap to a fork.
| dao- wrote:
| > People using colorways after the feature was removed?
| Well, that sounds like a failure of the feature then.
|
| > The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing
| rested, was they were temporary! You get to change your
| theme for a few months, and then later on at some random
| point, it changes again as it's taken away from you.
|
| It was sort of a marketing gimmick, one I wasn't
| particularly fond of. (I was the lead engineer for
| colorways.) What it really meant is that we'd offer the
| onboarding screen and colorways built into about:addons
| for a limited time. The intent was never to remove them
| once users installed them. We have since migrated them to
| AMO where they can still be installed:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/collections/4757633...
| margalabargala wrote:
| Yes, and when people complain about colorways, the
| marketing gimmick is what they are complaining about. No
| one objects to colored themes, and adding a UI "hey this
| is a feature" isn't a thing people really dislike either
| beyond a few.
|
| People know when they are being sold to and emotionally
| manipulated, and they don't like it, even if it's
| effective.
|
| That's why colorways was a failure, complained about
| years later, even if "the metrics look good". People
| don't remember what you did, they remember how you made
| them feel.
| dao- wrote:
| There's for sure a lesson to be learned in here. The
| product owner who had decided and pushed for making it
| seem like colorways were ephemeral has long left Mozilla,
| so you're preaching to the choir at this point.
|
| I still don't consider colorways a failure, all things
| considered. To me, the fact that colorways are still some
| of the most used themes outweighs you remembering that
| you were angry three or so years ago, but thanks for the
| feedback.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I think perhaps we are using the same words to talk about
| different things.
|
| It may well be that colorways are used and loved by many
| users and that's a success. You made something people
| like; well done!
|
| That we are having this conversation at all I think could
| be considered evidence, though, that it was a _strategic_
| failure for Mozilla. How much public opinion is worth
| burning for how much increased usage of a new theme
| feature? In my opinion, very little.
|
| That colorways work well, that the people who use them
| continue to do so, that they were technically well
| designed and well engineered, is one yardstick by which
| to measure success/failure. By that measure they are
| certainly a success. But another yardstick is "did they
| have a net-positive or net-negative effect on the
| organization", which is where I think it came up short.
|
| Based on the things you've said it sounds like you and I
| are more or less on the same page.
| dao- wrote:
| > How much public opinion is worth burning for how much
| increased usage of a new theme feature? In my opinion,
| very little.
|
| I think we're squarely in the "very little" range here in
| terms of how much public backlash we saw. You might be
| overestimating how widely folks got angry the same way
| you got angry, or perhaps we weren't monitoring the right
| forums and channels when releasing the feature, who
| knows.
| traverseda wrote:
| Most of the Firefox adoption I've seen has been driven by
| tech evangelists pushing it. It's a vocal minority that
| is upset but it's also a vocal minority that was
| responsible for a lot of growth.
|
| Firefox Mobile is great, it has uBlock Origin. I'm not
| recommending it to people though.
| bufio wrote:
| Telemetry Brain and "Most average users don't..." may
| explain why Firefox has been getting consistently worse for
| a long time.
| jlokier wrote:
| Oh... I'd completely forgotten that I picked a theme when
| those were offered.
|
| So it hadn't occurred to me since then that I could change
| it.
|
| I guess I count among the users who are still using a
| colorways theme. But after getting used to it, I ended up
| thinking of it as being what current Firefox looks like by
| default.
| RunSet wrote:
| > Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal
| Telemetry.
|
| The users who regard colorways as frivolous likely also
| disabled the telemetry.
|
| Rather like how the "psychological profile of a serial
| killer" is merely the psychological profile of a serial
| killer the police are capable of catching.
| Izkata wrote:
| And on the other end of the spectrum, Colorways was
| extremely bland compared to user themes.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| What do you mean non-feature? What do you mean force-fed?
| It's literally just themes my dude, they just had a first run
| dialog for users to select one.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Well, they were available for "a limited time only!!!!!"
| which is definitely somewhere between "non-feature" and
| "anti-feature".
| OldfieldFund wrote:
| 100%.
|
| Also, I think we can sense where Firefox is going. Mozilla is a
| mismanaged company. A victim of itself and Google's
| monopoly/life support.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Agreed, this just looks really tone deaf and amateurish. And
| it's avoiding the bigger issues. There are plenty and they
| actually need dealing with. Even just acknowledging some of
| those issues would be progress.
|
| There must be internal discussion on this. I imagine more than
| a few shouty meetings might have happened. This indicates to me
| that management doesn't know how to deal with that and clearly
| isn't dealing with anything effectively. If anything this makes
| me more worried, not less worried about how things are going at
| Mozilla.
|
| More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Firefox
| needs more people that work on the product and are allowed to
| work on the product not people that do busywork like this and
| just get in the way.
|
| I'm an actual user BTW. The product is fine for me. Performance
| is great and steadily improving. My main concern is that the
| developers are allowed to stay on mission and empowered to do
| that. Which means doubling down on making sure I never get
| confronted with shitty ads, popups, and other advertising
| abuse. And that it keeps up technically with Chromium and
| Webkit in terms of standards support.
| motorest wrote:
| > More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please.
|
| Playing devil's advocate: how does that help your average Joe
| adopt Firefox?
| Doxin wrote:
| By improving the product
| janfoeh wrote:
| It does not, and that is fine. That ship sailed a decade
| ago.
|
| What they could do is something the other guys are
| institutionally unable or unwilling to do: build a proper
| user agent for power users. Radically transparent,
| trustworthy and extendable up the wazoo. With footguns and
| everything.
|
| That gives you a comfortable moat, a raison d'etre and a
| stock of rabid, technically inclined fans which spread the
| word for you to their friends, family and coworkers the
| next time Google tightens the thumbscrews again.
|
| Basically: repeat what happened the last time when it was
| Firefox vs. IE, twenty years ago.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| uBlock Origin is a selling point for everyone now that
| it's been kicked out of Chrome.
|
| I recently got an M4 Mac Mini to replace a failing
| Windows laptop that my wife was using to access the
| network. Previously she was using Firefox with uBlock
| Origin, but she was absolutely livid after browsing the
| web with Safari and being harassed by horrible ads which
| got me to install Firefox right away.
| bombcar wrote:
| Safari adblockers that are at least passable exist. And
| work on iphone, too!
| miki_oomiri wrote:
| This all started with the "Engagement Team" like ... 15+ years
| ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with mascots,
| being cute, having this infantilizing attitude towards users.
|
| They killed the dino logo:
|
| - https://imghost.online/GBswvjTZ38PtAnf
|
| - https://imghost.online/0HTX7YVnImu49qc
|
| We were hackers, we became "cute and inclusive" (nothing wrong
| about inclusive... it just became the brand).
|
| Fuck this.
|
| Edit: I said 10+ years... but actually, it was more like 15
| years ago.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| Kinda hard to be inclusive if no one uses your browser. The
| greatest thing Mozilla could do for inclusiveness is to have
| more users. Not treat your users like children.
| motorest wrote:
| > This all started with the "Engagement Team" like ... 15+
| years ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with
| mascots, being cute, having this infantilizing attitude
| towards users.
|
| Having mascots is fine. It's like having a logo. Having
| multiple mascots is not good. What does a dinosaur have to do
| with a Firefox? The dinosaur was supposedly Mozilla's logo,
| as in Mosaic and Godzilla. Firefox is one of the many
| projects under the Mozilla umbrella. Keep the fox theme in
| Firefox communications, leave dinosaurs for Mozilla's one.
| basisword wrote:
| >> The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though
| they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting.
|
| I think this is just changing with the times. Go back a bit
| further and the idea of communities around products is the new
| cool thing. Personally I find that a bit weird. We have a whole
| generation of people who find social media managers talking to
| each other hilarious.
| account42 wrote:
| I think the root problem here is that the communication isn't
| genuine. It's marketing trying to craft a certain brand image
| instead of actual stakeholders being open about the what is
| going on with the project.
| motorest wrote:
| > I think the root problem here is that the communication
| isn't genuine.
|
| More than not being genuine, it's condescending and
| patronizing.
| raffael_de wrote:
| I suggest we democratically rename Firefox to FireFoxy
| MacFireFace.
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| Because the entire post reeks of LLM writing. It even got the
| long dashes.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Well screw all of us that like using em dashes, I guess.
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| The people I know that were using special dashes since
| before AI were all technical and precise writers (which is
| probably why they paid attention to it in the first place).
|
| I've never seen this unique mix of listicle-like light-
| hearted fluff with emojis AND special dashes written by
| humans. LLMs seem to love it, though.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Keep using the em-dash with pride! Don't let the AIs steal
| such a beautiful thing from us!
| gjm11 wrote:
| I agree that it feels LLMish (though the LLMs learned it from
| humans and it's always possible that whoever wrote it just
| has that sort of style) but the dashes there are _en-dashes_
| rather than the longer _em-dashes_ that LLMs seem
| particularly fond of.
|
| I will be sad if en-dashes come to be seen as LLM
| fingerprints, because I rather like them.
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| When I'm writing, I've always used en-dashes, but only
| because it's on my keyboard. Until people recently started
| talking about this, I didn't realize there was such a thing
| as en and en-dashes.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| FWIW I think the - character on qwerty keyboards is a
| hyphen, which is a smidge shorter than an en dash
|
| - - --
| bombcar wrote:
| On a Mac it's easy to type n and m dashes using option
| and the hyphen key.
| mrob wrote:
| It's common knowledge that em-dashes are a sign of LLM
| writing. This incentivizes anybody who generates slop to
| manually search and replace with a different dash or hyphen
| in an attempt to hide what they did.
| ziml77 wrote:
| It doesn't have em-dashes and although a list where each line
| starts with an emoji is very LLM-coded, the lack of
| capitalization after the dashes does not feel like LLM
| output. And if something isn't plainly LLM generated, I do
| not want to accuse it of such. That's incredibly insulting to
| the author if they didn't actually use an LLM.
| mrob wrote:
| >the lack of capitalization after the dashes does not feel
| like LLM output
|
| Em-dashes do not start a new sentence. Lack of
| capitalization is correct, and LLMs generally get
| spelling/punctuation/grammar right.
| Izkata wrote:
| There are two types of "long" dashes, and it is using the
| other one (en-dash).
| sings wrote:
| Not to mention the two-em-dash (U+2E3A) and three-em-dash
| (U+2E3B).
| brycewray wrote:
| As I wrote recently on my own blog site:
|
| > This is for those who insist they can easily spot AI-
| generated text. Many of us old farts were using bulleted
| lists and em dashes and en dashes long before artificial
| intelligence was no more than a (usually) reliable plot
| device for sci-fi, much less the fever dream of tech bros.
| So, for God's sake, stop using those as "proofs" that some
| text is AI-generated. As for my own writing, I reiterate what
| I said over two years ago: "... although the stuff on this
| site ... may not be any good, it always has been and will be
| written by a human, namely me."
| Szpadel wrote:
| that's might also be false positive, I use languagetool for
| grammar/spelling correction and one of the corrections it to
| replace dashes with em-dashes
| fortyseven wrote:
| Stop this. I use em-dashes all the time. Em dashes are cool
| and I don't want some knob to eventually accuse me of being
| "an AI" because of this kind of thing. :{
| t0lo wrote:
| Too tired to cover my tracks tonight
| imglorp wrote:
| Go on...
| dmix wrote:
| This is an AMA with product managers, not the engineering team,
| so it tracks
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _The marketing /PR trend of speaking to communities as though
| they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting_
|
| It's because those entire departments are daycare for the
| people working in them.
|
| 8-9, snacks. 9-10, tweeting. 10-11, snacks and socializing.
| 11-12, nap time. 12-2, lunch. 2-3, tweeting. 3-4, socializing.
| another_twist wrote:
| Built in fact checker would be nice.
|
| I guess another one would be a political news filter given so
| much polarization online.
| signa11 wrote:
| i am kind of surprised that no one has mentioned ladybird
| (https://ladybird.org/) here. it seems to be progressing quite
| nicely along.
| bambax wrote:
| > _Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style?_
|
| I'm not an infant so I don't need pretty pictures of animals to
| express myself. This is offensive and ridiculous. Please fuck
| off.
|
| I use Firefox as a fucking browser, to, you know, browse the web.
| Open web pages. _Read stuff_. Avoid ads at all costs. And that 's
| pretty much it.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Mozilla should drop this BS, and instead deliver on feature
| parity of web extension API with the old XUL plugin system. Yes;
| I'm still salty about that.
| icar wrote:
| I had to move to Brave/Vanadium on Android because Firefox is
| slow as hell. It happens when you log in, which for me is the
| whole point, as that's what I use on my computer (Linux).
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Let's be honest, the only advantage Firefox has over other
| browser and especially chrome is its extension support. And it's
| not even Mozilla merit, it's Google who removed MV2 support.
|
| Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension
| support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support
| to Android chromium even though such support was already done by
| an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.
|
| They hang on by a thread.
|
| The web need Firefox to be thriving but it's been a sinking ship
| since a while.
|
| They know perfectly what users want, what makes a good browser :
| speed, good user interface, low on energy, block ads,.. These are
| universal things.
|
| Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It's
| horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now
| there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it.
| I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.
|
| And it's not even that I want to see the url every second, but it
| just looks and feel bad.
|
| On computer, there are 4 different browser history. The
| traditional one that opens in an outdated window, the << recent
| one >> that shows only the 10 or something last links , a better
| looking browser history when you go in the top left button where
| there are synced browser tabs, synced history ,.. and an history
| in the sidebar.
|
| Seriously ? 4 different history.
|
| There need to be one clear, working history.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Strong disagree. Firefox gives you more options to configure
| things, and I am using the Containers Extensions (sandboxed
| tabs based on domains).
| rendaw wrote:
| I'm not using the containers extension, since it only goes
| about 20% of the way and then they lost focus and stopped
| developing it. I think most people don't use it. It _could_
| have been a differentiator.
| andersonklando wrote:
| I use it every single day. It helps open the same website
| in "Cognito" instead of opening it in Cognito mode. Plus,
| as a developer, it makes it easy to run tests using
| multiple accounts.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| I use them every day to separate my SSO sessions and keep
| cookie hungry websites in check. I could not imagine not
| having them anymore.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| how are you doing that btw? apparently I'm incapable. I tried
| different container extensions, some of which crash zen
| completely. I just want some domains to be automatically
| opened in a specific container.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I am using the official one. Works fine.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| The UX is horrible but works once you got your head around
| it. I also use temporary account container extension so
| ever new tab is a throw away (and i use ms copilot for AI
| search in those throwaway as they don't require a login to
| use their AI)
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| > Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ?
| It's horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but
| now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top
| of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.
|
| At least on my phone, an Poco X3, Firefox for Android url box
| it's BIGGER that Chrome for Android. Chrome shows 4 buttons on
| my phone.
| tgv wrote:
| > the only advantage
|
| Have you seen how much data Chrome collects for Google?
| Especially on Android. That's another massive advantage of
| Firefox.
| hu3 wrote:
| Firefox could improve here too. They have telemetry on by
| default.
|
| I get it, it's very useful to understand what and how
| features are used. But it's a fine line to walk for a browser
| playing market share catch-up.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Firefox ships with google analytics built in. And you can't
| use extensions like uBlock Origin to block them.
| abtinf wrote:
| Firefox recently changed their privacy policy. This is no
| longer the advantage it used to be.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Does people care ?
|
| Most people happily give away their privacy to these
| companies for very little or no benefit, on the other hand
| being able to block ads is a big thing. Everyone is annoyed
| when a pop up on how to enlarge your penis show up.
| Macha wrote:
| > Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface
|
| So I opened the same page on both, my comments page on HN.
|
| Firefox Android UI:
|
| Home button, SSL padlock, URL, reader mode, tabs, hamburger
| menu. URL displays extends from 20% of the screen to 70% of the
| screen. I see news.ycombinator.com/thre(a) [the a is partially
| faded].
|
| Chrome Android UI:
|
| Home button, settings icon (shows cert details), URL, new tab
| button, tab list, hamburger menu. Icons have like 50% more
| padding that firefox icons, so URL extends from 20% to 60% of
| the screen. I see "news.ycombinator.com/t"
|
| The only difference in icon count is firefox gives reader mode
| a dedicated button while Chrome gives new tab a dedicated
| button. Given how often I use reader mode (as a paywall bypass,
| or poorly formatted sites) that's... fine?
|
| There is a stylistic difference where the coloured area for the
| address bar encompasses the reader mode icon so it looks like
| it's deducting space for the URL but it appears that Firefox
| actually has more URL space. By like... 3 characters, so it's
| not a huge difference.
|
| ---
|
| As for the desktop history example:
|
| Firefox history views:
|
| - Firefox View: Full page view of your account including
| history, synced tabs, etc.
|
| - Sidebar history: Useful to see with less disruption to
| browser
|
| - Overflow menu recent items
|
| - Legacy "Manage history" popup
|
| Chrome history views:
|
| - chrome://history as a full page modal (with sync and other
| stuff, so closest to Firefox view)
|
| - recent history in the overflow menu
|
| - "grouped history" which is a sidebar history with way too
| much padding.
|
| So the only extra view of history that Firefox has is the
| legacy one, which is buried in the UI for power users who don't
| want to let it go (or more likely the bookmark manager that it
| lives with).
| motorest wrote:
| > Let's be honest, the only advantage Firefox has over other
| browser and especially chrome is its extension support. And
| it's not even Mozilla merit, it's Google who removed MV2
| support.
|
| What are you talking about? Firefox pioneered the whole concept
| of browser extensions. Can you try to explain to me your train
| of thought?
|
| > Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension
| support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension
| support to Android chromium even though such support was
| already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open
| sourced.
|
| What point do you think you're making? Firefox works perfectly
| well on Android, as well as Firefox Focus might I add.
|
| Your comment reads like you're trying to grasp at straws.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| They have legacy extensions. Mozilla is very hostile to new
| extensions. When Gorhil - creator of the most popular Firefox
| extension uBlock Origin (honestly the main reason Firefox still
| has users) wanted to add his manifest 3 extension uBlock Origin
| Lite to firefox Mozilla told him to get bent. Same with
| "Enhancer to Youtube" (number 11 extension by user count) it is
| stuck on old version because of Mozilla
| ncr100 wrote:
| No.
|
| Google Is An Advertising Company. Honestly, this is more
| significant.
|
| You are the product, for Google Chrome.
|
| Google's MV3 replacement for MV2 means you are their product
| and will be served Ads regardless of your preferences.
| dartharva wrote:
| I honestly believe Firefox is better off just ripping off
| Chrome's minimalist design. This overengineered bloat is just
| putting me off.
| appointment wrote:
| People have been raging about Mozilla copying Chrome's
| minimalist design for many, many years.
| acephal wrote:
| Firefox's WebExtensions implementation still has service
| workers disabled and no File System API. MV3 requires service
| workers, so Firefox extension ecosystem is on a countdown.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I was reading a couple of days ago the Frank Miller's Robocop
| comic series. I laughed so hard at the comment/response of "Dr.
| Love" when asked "have you sold out?" and the response was "I'm
| reposisioned Lilac to where I can more efficaciously relate
| values of cooperation and participation to our children. Where I
| can infuse a spirit of caring and sharing to marketing and
| media."
|
| Then she (Dr. Love) continues to say... "I welcome this change to
| dialogue. To relate to you OCP's commitment...."
|
| So when I read the FF's post, Dr. Love and the beginning of a big
| spin came to mind!
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > weren't just ideas - they were direct responses to what you
| told us you wanted.
|
| This is AI-generated text. It's also insanely dense with
| suffocating coddlespeak.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Apparently it's getting dumbed down since the url bar on iOS* no
| longer shows anything but the domain. What subreddit am I in
| again? Hell if I know, apparently "Reddit.com" should be the only
| thing I see about my current site.
|
| *(yes I know on iOS it's fake Firefox but this is still a
| profoundly stupid change that shows they think their users are
| idiots)
| anon7000 wrote:
| While we're piling on Firefox, here's my current least favorite
| thing: it's not possible to share a bookmark hierarchy between
| desktop and mobile.
|
| I want a basic tree style bookmark/tab combo like Arc. This
| approach works extremely well for me.
|
| But in Firefox, you have:
|
| - All bookmarks - Bookmarks toolbar - Bookmarks Menu - Other
| Bookmarks - Mobile bookmarks
|
| I don't give a shit about toolbars and menus and others. I want
| to organize it by my own categories. I can get close by putting
| all my folders in "menu" -- then I can have a button to access my
| tree of bookmarks. but then on mobile, I have to click "desktop
| bookmarks > bookmarks menu" just to see those.
|
| Plus whenever you install fixefox, new bookmark entries are
| created in random spots. Not a fan.
| spwa4 wrote:
| Before reading, I'm going to say "AI". I'll ad-fundum a beer if
| I'm right.
| mijoharas wrote:
| I've got two on my wishlist:
|
| WebUSB. The only time I open chrome nowadays is to flash an
| ESPHome device. I'd like to drop that dependency.
|
| I wish the extension API supported favicons in a better way. I
| use vimium and due to a recent change it's nice and easy to have
| a key binding to select bookmarks. It can't have the visual
| favicon which would it easier to distinguish things at a glance.
| M95D wrote:
| One of the most horrible things ever invented.
|
| But then, maybe I'm too old. Why do you need chrome when
| there's a stand-alone python program to build and flash
| esphome?
| ciberado wrote:
| It allows using the browser as a very convenient and
| accessible programming platform for many types of
| applications, not only web-based. That's specially important
| for beginners, I think, as they can run (and create) all kind
| of projects just by opening a web page. But it is also very
| handy for more advanced users, as the wled project [1] shows.
|
| And yes, there are security implications. But that's true for
| any other platform and as long as the users are asked for the
| proper permissions, I'm good with it.
|
| [1] https://kno.wled.ge/
| account42 wrote:
| Python is also easy and accessible. In fact that's its
| whole thing.
|
| We should not poke holes into the browser sandbox to
| satisfy the needs of amateur programmers.
| mijoharas wrote:
| I only use ESPHome with home assistant and the web usb device
| flashing is well integrated.
|
| I did look into the standalone version, but decided it was
| fewer hoops to jump through to just use chrome.
|
| The user experience _is_ good there, and I'd like it in my
| preferred browser.
| mherkender wrote:
| It's nice to be able to flash something without having to
| give some random software access to your computer, or having
| to build three different versions of a device flasher for
| each major OS. It's boosted adoption of ESPHome devices.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Except that you are giving some random software access to
| your computer, and it's not even software you can decided
| when to install and update.
| mherkender wrote:
| I use Linux so I do have a great deal of control over the
| version of Chrome I occasionally use.
| account42 wrote:
| My wishlist is the opposite.
|
| I want the browser to have less interfaces that aren't strictly
| needed to display self-contained websites. Using a separate
| program for potentially dangerous stuff like programming
| external devices is absolutely how things SHOULD work.
| zx8080 wrote:
| > Where's Firefox going next?
|
| Spending donations on C-levels bonuses?
|
| /s
|
| Would you please __try__ paying attention to the top 10+ years
| old issues in the FF bug tracker?
| sub7 wrote:
| Firefox might as well rebrand to Mozilla365 Spyware Edition
|
| Absolute disgrace the amount of telemetry and home phoneing bloat
| in the official releases
|
| They are absolutely yesterday's browser and tomorrow's browsers
| are trying to be better/faster while they just keep pouring
| cement on the grave they're already in.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| People have said (including me) that I'd pay for Firefox if I
| could...
|
| Maybe we should collectively put our money where our mouth is!
|
| Would there be any interest in starting a fork or even a new
| browser that was supported by the community via donations?
|
| What would people actually want in such a thing? IMHO I would
| like something like that to be the best damn standards adhering
| browser, minimalistic but configurable, secure and fast.
|
| ... to be hones, thinking about how everyone wants something
| different and you can't please everyone, the most ideal situation
| would be something like an Emacs for browsers (yes I know Emacs
| has browser functionality).
|
| Imagine a JavaScript console that could call functions that ran
| browser functionality! You could script your own browser, use
| someone else's config, build your own plugins, etc!
| M95D wrote:
| Ask Me Anything with Firefox product managers! Oh boy, oh boy, oh
| boy! Is it going to be live? I can hardly wait to ask them how
| long until they remove Manifest v2!
| graycat wrote:
| (1) "Tab Pickup". I've never used it, don't want to use it, doubt
| if I will ever use it, but when I'm in the middle of my work,
| moving fast, lots of windows open, then bring a window to the top
| of the Z-order and get "Tab Pickup" and an INTERRUPTION of my
| work. If I had a gun and if it would do any good, I'd SHOOT the
| computer. I HATE "Tab Pickup". PLEASE, in _Settings_ , make "Tab
| Pickup" =====>>> Optional <<<=====
|
| hopefully with default OFF.
|
| (2) Again, in the middle of busy work, I move the mouse and,
| presto, bingo, again, if a gun would do any good, another
| INTERRUPTION in my work as Firefox has a POPUP that covers what
| I'm trying to look at. Sometimes the popup is of a URL, a LONG
| URL with ~10 lines of text, and covers a LOT of the screen.
| Sometimes so, ASAP I have to get rid of the popup. I hate
| interruptions, "Tab Pickup", popups, changes I didn't ask for.
| allthedatas wrote:
| The same place the author should go.
| allthedatas wrote:
| As an original firefox backer I knew the daily version updates
| were the beginning of the end.
|
| I knew people at mozilla at that time and complained loudly to
| them about breaking my extensions with their constant releases.
|
| And then there's all the dark pattern default config values which
| are totally unethical
|
| The list of user hating behavior is long.
|
| There is no saving anything there now. The good people have left
| and been replaced by the author of that awful article.
| kuschkufan wrote:
| hn would seriously benefit from a system to display user
| "contributions" like this as the ai rage bait and lies that
| they are.
| graphememes wrote:
| The further we go, the more I want old web back
| MollyRealized wrote:
| I'm not saying that removing it was a bad decision, but I will
| say that Firefox became infinitely less useful to me when they
| wiped out so much extension capability. There were so many 'power
| user' things you could do. I miss my extensive Keyconfig, for
| example.
| trefoiled wrote:
| > Features like tab groups, vertical tabs, profiles, new tab
| wallpapers, PWAs, and taskbar pinning weren't just ideas - they
| were direct responses to what you told us you wanted
|
| Yeah, that's ChatGPT. And not a particularly high quality ChatGPT
| style sentence. They weren't just ideas, they were direct
| responses? Ok.
| 9021007 wrote:
| This is just so sad. It's like they don't even use their own
| product.
|
| I want to like Firefox. I try so hard to like Firefox. Why is it
| so hard for them to like their users back?
| 6thbit wrote:
| I guess OpenAI's browser does have a real chance to get a big
| bite of the browser market?
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