Mozilla / Firefox isn't lacking in new technology. Firefox has made far more aggressive under-the-hood improvements than Chrome over the past 5 years.
Rust, WebRender, Stylo, Pathfinder, wgpu, Dav1d, asm.js (which resulted in WebAssembly) etc.
And they helped bootstrap a lot of efforts that benefited everyone massively. Take the list above and add: LetsEncrypt, Cranelift, AV1, Opus, WebGPU, Wasmtime
Initially, Google Play reviews got filled with 1 star reviews from users complaining that a lot of their workflows were broken, things that they liked were removed, extensions not working (unless you used the initial nine excluded extensions).
The rating dropped from 4.7 to 3.9 in less than a month. After that, some one star reviews were removed (maybe google thought it was review bombing or Mozilla used some kind of third party service for that). Ratings started to go up a bit after that.
And suddenly a lot of 5 stars reviews with little to no content (thumbs up emojis, Nice/Great/Good, or just dots) started to appear and the rating almost returned to the previous normal.
Nowadays is just a mix of good and bad reviews, most of them quite lengthy.
Firefox on Android is pretty fantastic. I feel like it's the one thing Mozilla did really right. As someone who has their laundry list of issues with regular Firefox, I have no serious complaint against their Android port.
I believe most of the complaints stem from the fact that a year or two ago, Mozilla removed most of the features (including the ability to install almost all addons).
This mass feature removal is just one more data point in line with what is discussed on the article.
Most importantly, they did so as a plain update to the existing app sku rather than as a new app (despite it being trialed as a new sky).
Thus if you had auto updates, which developers and security folks were so keen on recommending, you suddenly lost a massive amount of functionality and possibly could not do many of the things you need to do on your phone.
With no recommended way back. Oh, and many users lost their history, passwords and bookmarks with that as well. It's hard for users to see that approach from a software company as anything other than a statement of "We're smarter than you, we know better than you, get f**ed"; a big thumb in the eye from some product manager somewhere.
Get that experience enough times with Mozilla updates and you start to view all of their design decisions through that lens.
Completely agree. Poorer UI, removed extensions, and made it so text at old.reddit.com is microscopic despite all attempts. Iirc about:config access was removed too, but I can't remember for sure.
It was a great browser! I still install it once a month to see if they bring back the critical usability features. No dice yet.
Writing this on Android Firefox right now, I don't have too many complaints. I have up on Chrome a decade ago and never looked back. I used Opera for some years and then switched to Ff.
Not the person you responded to, but I normally use Firefox on Android and I've definitely seen features disappear with the new release.
I like the new look, I even like the bottom URL bar placement that many reviewers seem to be negative about, and I like the concept of collections that the user base is protesting so much. Those are fine for me.
However, I'm regularly running into bugs ever since I updated from that latest "old" mobile Firefox. It took them months to support the certificate authority installed on my phone, and even now that's a hidden setting somewhere in a debug menu. Using said certificate with a HTTP proxy is still broken.
There's no setting to control DOH, even though there's no reason the browser might not support it. In fact, there's no way to use about:config AND use a stable version of the browser on Android; you need to run Beta or Nightly or the folks at Mozilla don't trust you to touch the settings. The addon library is abysmal, even after all this time, and the hack to get around that requires a Mozilla account and messing with custom addon lists.
I can't view the source of the current page anymore. It's been too long since I last had the option, so I'm not sure if this was an addon or a part of the core browser, but I used to be able to hit the menu button and click "view source". I think the view-source: URI scheme is still supported, but I can't figure out how to make the app respect it anymore.
For the past weeks, I've been running into a bug where using Swiftkey in combination with Firefox sometimes clears the entire text field. On websites that use native text boxes like HN I can correct that by opening another keyboard with a control key (Hacker's Keyboard) and hitting CTRL+Z, but on websites that provide their own rich editing that's impossible. This bug has eaten tens of posts of mine, some not at all short, and from what I can tell from Github the bug should already be fixed (it isn't) or will be fixed in Firefox 94 (which hits Beta in about 20 days, and then stable in November). All other browsers work fine with this keyboard, and it seems like everyone using Swiftkey and Firefox together should be running into this. I'm a little annoyed that this fix wasn't backported to current versions of the browser.
I would've been fine with all of this if this was the first release of Firefox on Android. However, it's simply not; there was a competent version of Firefox before the rewrite and the modern version still hasn't reached feature parity after dropping that version more than a year ago. Being able to hit install on any Firefox addon and being reasonably sure that it'll work was very liberating. Of course, some of the addons simply couldn't work because they relied on UI not present in the mobile apps, but I never saw that as a problem. Those addons got purged with the switch to WebExtensions anyway.
Perhaps people who switched from Chrome to Firefox after the release of the rewrite won't have as many issues because they never used the advanced features Firefox used to support.
All in all, it's a decent mobile browser, but the reasons I started using it in the first place have slowly been eroded away.
After a year of using Firefox on Macbook, I've switched back to Chrome. The laptop was running really hot just from having a few tabs opened and Youtube playing in the background. It's been much better after I've made the switch to Chrome. For privacy reasons, I would rather stick to Firefox, but I feel like the performance is worse.
Yup, the performance of browsers are highly dependent on their host. Firefox performs best on Linux (and beats the other browsers for Linux too), so the default on my Linux machine is Firefox. For Windows, it's Chrome and for Mac is Safari. Wish there was some syncing utility between the three of them, as switching between them has always been a bit of a hassle.
I strongly disagree regarding Windows. I use Firefox on Windows as a primary browser and occasionally Chrome, - Firefox offers much better performance even having some extensions installed while Chrome is in vanilla state.
The only issue with FF for me is exactly as the other commenter said - Mozilla likes to piss off its core userbase.
I strongly disagree. I have it installed on Windows 7, Windows 10 and the performance has gone so far down in the last few years I've had to switch to chrome.
Disagree here. Thinkpad P52 (16GB Ram and i7-8750H) running Windows 10 Pro. Absolutely no issues with Firefox. I always find it strange when people talk about FF issues. I never had any on Linux, MacOS or Windows. Always worked for me. Rarely do I run Chrome. I do use Edge a lot though as all my 'work' stuff resides there - Mail, Slack. It works pretty well.
I run Steam on the same machine (AoE III) with Firefox, LibreOffice Calc open as well and it's just smooth. No overheating or anything.
I find that hard to believe considering no hardware accelerated video playback (although other linux browsers also have the same problem). At the very least, I think that statement needs to be qualified with a "under certain use cases".
Firefox has had HW-accelerated video playback under Wayland for a few months now. Along with per-monitor mixed-/high-dpi support it is by far the best browser on Linux atm.
In general I think there is no way to heavily use Google properties (in particular drive, docs and meet) without Chrome.
I tried through the years, and always ended up with a main browser (Safari or now Firefox) and Chrome as a Google dedicated browser, because the experience would be miserable otherwise. At this point I stopped blaming the other browsers.
While Google apps definitely perform less than ideally for me on Firefox, I think that falls far short of unusable. I use Google Docs, Drive, YouTube, and other Google properties in 4K on my old (5+ year old AMD Ryzen 2400G) system. I definitely don't relish using their apps, but I definitely can and don't feel hindered.
I always use somewhat recent laptops, but with middle range specs (e.g. the current 13” M1), so the effect is more visible than on your system I think.
I can/could use any of the properties in a pinch, but something would give after a while. The worst offender for me was Meet, a few hours of here and there meetings would trigger weird interface scaling effects, or it just wouldn’t join any new meeting with the screen staying stale. On firefox Bluejeans or Zoom wouldn’t do it, just Meet.
I agree with this opinion piece. Firefox is a product strangely hostile to its core userbase. It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage themselves for years. I don't use it because I approve of all their stupid pigheaded UI choices, I use it because it has been the least bad option despite those choices. That might not go on for much longer, though.
> I don't use it because I approve of all their stupid pigheaded UI choices
I don't use Ff because I can't approve with exactly one of their UI choices: tab closing button on the wrong side. I am on Mac and this just messes with my muscle memory too much. (It used to be that the buttons where on the right side, which is to say the left side.)
However, other than that I see a lot of UI love in both the macOs and iOS Ff interfaces. One can feel the team works from their hearts.
I wish they would use their brains more. Painful irony.
Perhaps people think that basing your choice of browser on a minor point like the arbitrary location of tab close buttons is questionable. On second thought, that is a very HN type of reasoning so… I can’t explain it.
It replaces the millions of ads and trackers on the web with exactly one ad, which is as you say on the new tab screen, that you can turn off in the settings.
There is also Brave Rewards, something that pays you for viewing ads but is disabled by default and can be totally hidden through another setting.
This straightforward set-up isn't something I feel deserves the number of negative comments I see on here. The benefits far outweigh the minor inconvenience of changing two settings.
Because it took lots of fights to get the Brave team to 1) allow disabling ads and 2) allow disabling Brave Rewards, neither of which anyone wanted and went against the whole concept of "Brave, the ad-free browser" to begin with.
There was no fighting—Brave's Ads were (and are) off by default. The New Tab Page's Sponsored Images (a later addition) is on by default, but only appears on every 4th new tab, and can be turned off with 2 clicks.
This type of advertising doesn't go against any of Brave's principles. The user is in control. Trackers and their ads are blocked by default as these harvest user data and more.
Brave's alternative, privacy-preserving advertising model is based on user-control and consent. The user decides whether or not they will participate, and to what degree. And, the user's data is never sent off-device; users are rewarded (with 70% of the associated ad revenue) for their attention rather than their data or actions.
I'm talking about the new tab ads. Those shouldn't exist. Period.
> This type of advertising doesn't go against any of Brave's principles
No but it goes against the notion of "ad free browsing" that Brave kind of marketed. Perhaps they toed the line with exactly what they consider "ads" but at the end of the day users installed brave wanting ZERO ads.
Replacing someone else's ad for your own is not what I'd call "ad free" nor "ethical", regardless of the use (or lack thereof) of trackers.
> Brave's alternative, privacy-preserving advertising model is based on user-control and consent.
I never consented to ads. Period.
> The user decides whether or not they will participate, and to what degree
And I never decided that I wanted ads in my browser, yet here we are.
> And, the user's data is never sent off-device; users are rewarded (with 70% of the associated ad revenue) for their attention rather than their data or actions.
And what if I don't want a browser that has all of this fancy mining crap in it? Braves stance is "it's okay to add bloat as long as we preserve privacy". Nobody seems to see the problem with this.
It's such a middle finger to users, in my opinion.
Totally agree. It's not intrusive, gives lots of options organized well, it's fast... great browser. I assume it's still safer than Chrome as well, seems like the best option for now
Exactly, unless you turn off javascript and limit yourself to a very limited subset of sites you are a sitting duck. I would have thought HN general consensus would be that this is a very very bad idea.
I switched from Firefox on Android to Brave. Not because I like Brave, but because I disliked the new UI in Firefox. Brave also had much better performance for JavaScript and CSS animations.
I tried brave. But I constantly had ads on it. It would block trackers and ads on websites but if I was to open a few tab it would have crypto ads or some other nonsense.
UI is fine but
1. Battery consumption is at least twice the one of Brave
2. There is no option to always get the desktop site which makes it useless for tablets
Main reasons I also moved to Brave on all my devices. If these are fixed and Mac battery consumption is fixed I'd go back asap
I copied the following from one of my other comments since it's a lot of text, but these are the reasons I moved off Firefox for Android (Fenix) to Brave. Also, Chromium-based browsers for Android have none of the following issues.
---
- Scrolling up on Google search's results page and some other pages is not registered half the time, and sometimes triggers pull-to-refresh instead
- Scrolling up inside an input box while the page is at the top of the screen causes unintentional pull-to-refresh
- Bitwarden autofill is not registered unless you kill and restart the app after logging in
- You can't save images that require cookies to be passed to the request, such as under DDoS protected pages
- Links will sometimes redirect to about:blank unless you go back and click them again
- Most recently visited page is not restored when closing and reopening the app, even though it's saved to the history (closed as wontfix)
- Uses large amounts of memory, causing Android share actions to be silently killed due to OOM unless you quickly kill the app right after sending them
- Closing a tab and clicking "Undo" in the popup sends the tab all the way to the top of the list, instead of its original position (inconvenient if you have a large number of tabs open)
- Frequently loses open tabs in memory, even within ten seconds of navigating to another tab
- Startup time is noticably slower than Brave, taking at least a few seconds to show the UI and begin loading the page. It isn't much, but it impacts the user experience every time you start the app again.
Are you sure you're talking about Firefox? For example it doesn't even have pull to refresh so you can't trigger it unintentionally :)
I use it all the time now because it supports uBlock Origin and Dark Reader and I think it's good. And I have all my bookmarks on Firefox sync. I have some minor issues with it like the tab list that doesn't always scroll right but they're not deal-breakers.
Brave is a decent browser but I won't use anything from Brendan Eich. I also don't really agree with their BAT token stuff. I just want adtech to die at this stage, not to find an alternative model. Direct payments to sites I do support however and I'm a member of several.
I guess both opinions aren't popular :) But that's my reasons to use Firefox despite not being fully happy with it.
I'm trying to use brave search as an alternative to google, since it is an actual search engine that does indexing as opposed to DDG, and I don't want to use bing either.
What upsets me is that there's no way to add it as default search in a browser, on purpose, because they want you to have to install brave browser to do that. Nothing upsets me more than when someone deliberately makes their product less useful. I do not like Brave, but I will use the search engine for now.
We do not prevent you from adding Brave as default search to other browsers. I'm not sure why you think we would, so please tell me more. Thanks.
To make Brave Search default in another browser, please load https://search.brave.com/help/default. In Safari, there's no way we know of to add an alternative default. Apple controls the dropdown list's contents. But try this link in Firefox or Chrome.
When brave search was first released there was no way to add it, I haven't tried since, and there was some material saying get brave browser to make it your default search engine.
So I tried. The link you give just gives you a link that says "read instructions specific to your browser" and when I click that link I just get "instructions not available for such and such browser." The instructions do not have to be specific to the browser. Why doesn't brave just implement OpenSearch?
Fair enough. The whole gay marriage thing just really annoyed me. I have some close friends who are struggling with such prejudice every day. And that's in a country where marriage isn't a problem for them.
It's one thing for an employee to have private views but another for a CEO to actively try and influence the law. Especially for something that's in my opinion totally a private matter between people. I don't want to support the brand because of that.
But I'm not doubting his skills as an engineer. It's more about the brand and its values. For a public figure like a CEO these things are hard to separate, I understand that. But we live in a world where a brand is more than just a name on a sticker. If I'm using it I'm also supporting the associated values.
> It's one thing for an employee to have private views but another for a CEO to actively try and influence the law.
Which he did not. He wasn't CEO at that time. He made "small" donations from his own money under his own name years before his appointment. And at no point did he abused Mozilla for any personal political goal of him AFAIK. He just was an employee supporting his own private views. Just that he is a bit more famous than your average employee.
For me it's exactly that Firefox is actively activist in more than a web standards and privacy type sense that made me drop them. I don't need a browser maker to be interested in telling me what I should see.
You can also switch in built in adblocker in Vivaldi. There's no reason to use Firefox.
In AdGuard, you can add "extensions" that extend the functionality of the browser. Its simple. For example, playing youtube in background or bypassing paywalls. Extensions are little javascripts.
this is my bit, too. they dropped an update that arbitrarily spaced out the area in between your bookmarks folders. You can you fit less on your screen now because of the stupid spacers
I'm more and more wary of Firefox updates because they keep pulling shit like that. Why are they doing this? How many users are there saying "I wish my bookmarks would suddenly take up double the space as before, so I have to scroll more?" I don't get it.
At least there's a workaround for the bookmark issue. There's no workaround for renamed menu items and changed shortcut keys.
Until you can't, because Mozilla deems that only X% of users use that feature and maintaining its configurability consumes too much organizational resources.
First the GUI to edit the GUI disappears, then the about:config option follows later.
That's what's been steadily happening. Less and less customizability for power users, more and more streamlining for new users.
more like “low skilled” users rather than new, and most people (by a large margin) are low skilled users…
power users were the market early on, and that’s just not the case anymore… power users have been spoiled for a long time online, most things outside of tech have never been built for us
I don't see how that's a problem, you can just modify the CSS. If you too decide that's too much work and consumes too much of your resources for not enough gain, well then now you know why Mozilla made the decision.
I'm sorry I don't understand. Is the problem that modifying computer code takes effort? If so then sure, that's true, but Firefox (or any other browser) can't be blamed for that.
No problem, let me clarify: You suggested that the answer to a constant stream of changes was to either "just modify the CSS" or (if it's too much work for too little gain) then you essentially just accept Mozilla's decision.
If those are indeed the only other options besides users finding another product, I'd say you answered exactly why Firefox is in decline.
I'm sorry, I still don't understand. This is exactly the way it is with any other browser. If you don't like changes in Chrome for example, you can either modify them, accept their decision, or find another product. And Chrome is not in decline.
> If you don't like changes in Chrome for example, you can either modify them, accept their decision, or find another product. And Chrome is not in decline.
Yes, my point exactly. You can answer "just modify the CSS" every time someone complains about a change in Firefox, but in reality users will find another product instead.
I'm still not sure what that has to do with Firefox specifically? Those "other products" could very easily be modified versions of Firefox or Chrome, of which there are many. Some of them might even take the time to modify the CSS for you. So it's still unclear what your specific complaint is. Also if you're going to switch products constantly because of a few lines of CSS, that seems like you would always be switching constantly, and would never find one to settle on anyway.
Try looking at it from the other direction: If other products have the same playing field (modify, live with it, or change products), and Firefox is in decline while their primary competitor is not, doesn't it stand to reason that Firefox is making decisions that lose them users while their competitor is making decisions that gain them users?
I don't really have any comments on that, sorry. I was mentioning a fix for that specific issue, or other specific issues you might have with other browsers. Most complaints I see about Firefox tend to be about specific issues rather than about overall decisions made versus their competitors.
I don't understand what that has to do with Firefox specifically, if you do a search you can find various amounts of negative feedback about any product in existence. It's impossible to make a product that will please everyone, so you'll have to be more specific about which changes and which users you mean if we want to discuss this meaningfully.
For me at least, it seems like ways of customizing the browser are being systematically removed without being replaced with new ways to customize it.
User css and js, which were once first class are now very hidden and require messing with about:config. There's no way to prevent tabs from being on top. Many extensions are no longer possible Post-Quantum. And I do think switching to WevExtensions was the right move, but they've been slow in adding capabilities to make some extensions work as well as they did before. Removing compact mode (they added it back but behind an about:config flag). They removed SSB with no plans to ever add it back. True SSB didn't fully work, but I had high hopes that it could let me run web apps in a way that felt more native.
And part of my frustration is with the response. The reason for removing things is often "no one is using it." But then when people who show up saying they use it, and it is important to them, Mozilla generally either outright ignores them, or dismisses those opinions as invalid.
I don't mean to be disappointing, but usually out-of-context internet commenters saying that they use something doesn't carry much weight. The reason why they have telemetry data is so they can so say for certain what people are using, with actual numbers. If the telemetry shows that a feature isn't being used, and another feature is being used, then the one being used is what they will put resources towards. Think of this from an organizational perspective -- employees have to use this information in meetings with their boss to justify what they are working on to earn the paycheck, so with that considered they will always go with what the numbers show. Some disappointed comments on internet forums from a small vocal minority are expected, but dealing with that is just a cost of doing business.
Now after this you may want to refer back to the article. I have seen various pieces and rants like this article that complain about this but none of them offer any more reliable sources of information. The article makes an unverifiable claim of "Almost everyone hated the changes" and unfortunately those type of claims seem to be extremely common instead of presenting some data. That's not enough to change anyone's course.
But in the end, I don't know what you mean by "systematically removed" in that way, frequent addition and removal of various features is completely normal for a large project. And technically only the setting was removed -- you can still customize all that but you'll have to modify the browser itself. No they probably won't add back in the setting but as I explained above, those have a cost, and when the cost-benefit analysis doesn't play out the right way, it doesn't make sense to blame an organization for cutting it.
> And technically only the setting was removed -- you can still customize all that but you'll have to modify the browser itself
You are suggesting that I replace a simple configuration change with familiarizing myself with a very complicated code base, creating a patch, and running a build that on my machine takes multiple hours, then repeat the process for every update? Yeah, I have no idea why more people don't do that.
> I don't know what you mean by "systematically removed" in that way, frequent addition and removal of various features is completely normal for a large project.
Sure. But from my perspective at least, the customisability is decreasing, more features are being removed than added. It used to be that Firefox was a browser built for power users, but it is becoming less so. That was one of it's major advantages over chrome.
I understand the cost of maintaining features, and the tradeoffs involved. The Firefox teams priorities are different than mine, and I understand that. For example, there are many features I would have rather seen worked on rather than redesigning the UI (and I do actually like a lot of the proton design). But I can accept that they have different priorities. But they are also bleeding users, so something is clearly not working for them. And maybe, as the OP suggests it is because of changes
that anger a minority of their users. At some point, the union of many minorities becomes a majority.
If you cared about this change a lot, to the point where if you didn't have it then it was going to lose you a lot of money, then yes, I would expect you to do all that. Am I wrong? It just seems in a lot of ways to be a sad case where no one wants to shelter the cost for this, it's either a money losing proposition for Mozilla, or it's a money losing proposition for the users, and nobody wants to be the first to pay it.
I'll also mention that only one person needs to create the build, once you do that then anyone else can run that build. That's usually how development works, and in fact this is already the gist of how Mozilla tests their unstable builds.
>the customisability is decreasing, more features are being removed than added
I can't agree with this, maybe the amount of visible settings in the preferences has been reduced, but currently there are a few thousand about:config options, and the number seems to keep growing.
>But they are also bleeding users, so something is clearly not working for them. And maybe, as the OP suggests it is because of changes that anger a minority of their users.
For many years I asked people why they were switching to Chrome and I got various answers, very few of them were because of something negative about another browser, and most of them were about what they liked about Chrome. That's just my personal anecdote. It also just seems to me that Mozilla is in a bad place where people say they drop Firefox because they like Chrome, so Mozilla switches gears to make it more like Chrome, and then people complain it's not unique enough anymore and it's missing some old non-Chrome feature. How could they possibly win here?
Well I don't think it is possible to beat chrome by becoming chrome. They need something that chrome doesn't have. They seem to be focusing on privacy, but I don't think that is compelling enough for the general population, though I'll grant you customizability probably isn't either.
> but currently there are a few thousand about:config options, and the number seems to keep growing.
But those configurations are not very discoverable, not well documented, are in constant flux, and if you set them incorrectly can really mess up your browser (I speak from experience).
> I'll also mention that only one person needs to create the build, once you do that then anyone else can run that build
From my understanding, if I were to distribute my custom build I would also need to change all the firefox branding, since Mozilla has trademarks on it, which increases the effort even more.
The problem with saying they need something Chrome doesn't have is that a lot of others seem to expect them to have feature parity with Chrome, both in the GUI, and in the backend rendering engine. I don't think it's economically feasible, it seems you can have one or the other but not both. Unless of course you're willing to outspend Google, which not even the very wealthy Microsoft wants to try to do (they dropped their own browsing engine and switched to Blink). To be clear what is on the table here: not keeping pace with Chrome means that some websites will just stop working in Firefox because some new web API is missing. So that's what you would be trading.
I think the huge number of about:config options is actually a major problem for Firefox, there is no possible way to test all those options and ensure they stay working forever and have zero regressions. You won't like this, but a lot of them probably need to be removed.
You would need to change the branding but I think some of the other Firefox modifications have systems in place to deal with that. If you ever need to do it, maybe it would be worth asking them.
Look at the ultimate feedback: Users switching to or away from the product. It is apparently possible -- for other browser makers -- to make products that more users switch to than from. For Mozilla, it's been the opposite the last dozen years.
But, I bet you'll refuse to understand this too, and continue your bot-like repetition of non-answers. (Hint: Don't bother; nobody is buying.)
Yes, you can. But once you think about it, you'll see that you actually can't. Because once you're making changes to components instead of formalized settings, you are doomed to re-apply them each software update. Not a smart way to customize.
But that's exactly what you're asking Mozilla to do when you ask them to keep that as a formalized setting, it's exactly the same work just it's done by a Mozilla employee and not you. So it really sounds like you're asking them to do something which you acknowledge yourself is not a smart or efficient thing to do.
Yeah, because it's so much more efficient if every user who liked the old interface gets to write and maintain a bunch of CSS for themselves, in stead of a Mozilla employee not doing the work of removing already-present settings...
Sheesh, don't you even notice how you're coming off here?
The ability to change that css is another one of those things that has been moved to enabling options in about:config that will probably get removed int the future.
And any firefox update could potentially break your css fix.
I don't mean about:config, I mean editing the CSS directly.
Yes an update could break your CSS fix, but if you follow the beta releases then this isn't a problem. You usually have at least a few weeks to update your patches before the release goes out.
You have to change a setting in about:config to enable custom css. Unless you mean making a custom build of Firefox, which is even more difficult to do.
I don't see what difference it makes for somebody else implementing it as about:config setting versus you doing that yourself in a custom build. Firefox is not really any more difficult to build than any other large open source project.
Is that something you would expect a typical user to do? Especially users that aren't developers?
> Firefox is not really any more difficult to build than any other large open source project.
That has not been my experience. Granted, chromium also has a very difficult and slow build, and browsers are big complicated things. But my point is it isn't easy.
In my personal experience, typical users (i.e. non-developers) don't really spend time tweaking their browser. The defaults are good enough for most, and the job of the developer is usually to just find good defaults to optimize for that. For the power user who knows XML/CSS/JS/C++/Rust/etc and wants to have total control, then yes, I would expect them to either create extensions or edit the source directly. Same thing goes for Chrome users of that type. Am I off base here?
It's true the build process is slow, but that's different from being difficult. I don't know what you mean by difficult. Maybe it was difficult in the past but it's entirely automated at this point. You can just start the build and come back some hours later, and that's only if you're starting from a clean repo and modifying the C++/Rust. For the CSS and Javascript, that doesn't need a rebuild at all.
Yes, why wouldn't it be? Editing that is exactly what you would be asking Mozilla to do. If you think it's hard to work on, well, maybe you can sympathize with Mozilla for trying to cut down on the number of settings that complicate it further.
I don't know the details of this specific change, but in my experience its removal probably means it couldn't be left alone. If another piece of code that touches it gets refactored, the developer has to choose between trying to spend time fixing it, or just removing it. If it's an unpopular feature then removing it can be seen as the most reasonable option.
And I know I've said this already but taking those "way too many steps" is exactly what you'd be asking them to do, so it's unclear why it's not worth it for you but it would be for them.
> > First the GUI to edit the GUI disappears, then the about:config option follows later.
> > That's what's been steadily happening.
> You wrote this in a way that is (probably deliberately) misleading. Neither of those things have happened nor is there any indication that they will.
You're not so much misleading as outright lying. That is exactly what has been happening, over and over again.
Yes the same now with the compact mode which is even more needed now than ever with the new UI. The compact mode now has the same density as the regular mode had before.
And the whole thing is now something like 3px higher.. definitely a reason to go back to google, and make the only remaining libre browser fighting for an independent web crumble.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not going back but I would hate it if they remove the compact mode. It would be just another drop in the bucket but not the final one for me.
I mean, isn't this a bit like saying, "I left Windows for Ubuntu because of the invasive privacy concerns I had... But man Unity is terrible, I'm going back to Windows!"
If privacy is the ultimate concern, I can suffer usability.
I think the real issue is we've stopped advocating for privacy loudly and publicly. All the users know is convenience.
But the privacy isn't the ultimate concern for everyone, so perhaps it isn't one for GP. It isn't for me. I stick to Firefox because of combination of being best at privacy and least shitty overall, but I'm by no means happy. I'm very much unhappy about the mobile version - their recent (~year ago?) UI revamp turned a perfectly good browser into a bloated piece of garbage, that gets slower and more annoying to use over time. The only reason I use it instead of Chrome is because I can install an ad blocker in it.
The thing is, if you do not like the UI of unity, maybe you'll like Gnome, KDE, LXDE, fluxbox, i3 or ratpoison or .... With most Linux distros, you can have both privacy and your favourite UI paradigm. You usually do not need to suffer in the usability department (or at least not too much).
But with Firefox, all the UI choices are gone now, intentionally sacrificed on the altair of rewrites, UI changes, branding and some dubious security claims. You used to get the choice of vertical tabs (better on todays widescreen laptops), tree-style tabs, Buttons where you liked them, user-provided CSS customization for pages and the UI. Not anymore, all gone (they paid some lip service to some of the above concerns, but nothing relevant, and overall a massive downturn).
Now you only get the take-it-or-leave-it of one crappy and worsening Chrome clone UI.
Huh? Happy Tree Style Tabs user here, and another addon (Sidebery) seems to be growing in popularity as well. You can disable the built-in tabs with userChrome.css. What am I missing?
I activated browser debugging, pressed ctrl + alt + shift + i and then hunted down the offending tab bar and put in "display: none" for it.
It gets harder and harder year by year though and on the tabstrip issue in Bugzilla there's at least one person who was annoyed and told me to not question peoples motives after I asked a simple question about it.
Anyone here working for Mozilla, I ask the same question here: are you overcomplicating it? I managed to get rid of that tab bar using a CSS hack, why can't we just get a function to apply that css, at least in developer edition?
Pretty sure the point of using the rendering engine to display the UI was to make it easier to write cross-platform UI; granted, though, the point of then having the feature to use CSS to modify the UI was to do that (and it was relatively easy once the UI was already written in the rendering engine).
If you're happy with the current tree style tabs, I'll wager you never used the original. The current one is a bad rip off, with 90% of the actual features missing.
None of that matters to most people. People want a robust, fast, and secure browser that evolves rather than tries to be revolutionary. I think the large GUI changes did bug a lot of people.
I care about privacy, that's why I didn't move away from Firefox years ago (or as of yet). But ideally I would prefer not to suffer from privacy or usability issues...
I'll be understanding with mozilla, their challenge is difficult, and they've been going hard surprisingly long. I think they folded under the many new trends in the space, UI being one.
I wish they could find a stronger inner core to work on, something more utilitarian than user-drafting.
There's a lot of people saying chrome wins because websites are better with it, sites with high requirements like zoom IIRC, but in my experience it's not common nor impactful enough (these sites work fine enough on my old laptop)
I'd say other way around is true. HN crowd won't like this but it's very hard to continuously update a product for the core userbase that Firefox has. (small sample size but I maintain a small privacy focused app and from my experience, most of the reviews I get are how it's missing features which competitors have or how it's unusable because it can't handle stuff without jeopardizing privacy focused nature of the app.)
Judging by the HN and Reddit comments with each Firefox/Signal/Matrix releases, it seems most of the customers of privacy focused products want all the other features of competitors; most of the times without paying any money (or they think donations should cover for everything because they once donated, so all hundreds of thousand users would). And they dislike/have negative sentiments towards any UI changes or breaking functionality for new features. So core userbase for these products becomes hostile towards the product growth by definition. In this environment, either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
But reviews about missing feature, or reviews in general... that might not give you a good idea of why people are using it, if they don't leave a review at all
I have never written a review of anything in twenty years, I think. Consider that reviews are inherently biased towards people who are accustomed to speaking up, either because they like reviewing things (not many people) or because they’re upset and have a problem (many people). It becomes evident in practice that reviews generally aren’t productive to consider.
> it seems most of the customers of privacy focused products want all the other features of competitors; most of the times without paying any money
This is a business model question, right? Nothing prevents someone from making a great privacy focused browser and actually charging for it vs being directly (Brave?) or indirectly (Chrome, Firefox?) ad-monetized.
Also in this context, referring to "customers of privacy focus products" is technically incorrect, they are actually users. Definition of a customer is "someone who pays for goods or services" thus Mozilla's main customer is Google (accounting for close to 90% of its revenue). Maybe looking through this lens, relation of Firefox product direction and what its "customers" want becomes more clear.
> This is a business model question, right? Mozilla has chosen to be indirectly ad-supported vs making a premium (as in paid-for) or a freemium browser as a business model. Nothing prevents someone from making a great privacy focused browser and actually charging for it?
Except the fact that nobody (relative to even their current userbase) would use it, and maintaining a browser is incredibly difficult and expensive.
It would be the death blow to their market share, which would destroy Gecko as a viable browser engine (not enough users to get websites to care about the bugs, or even necessarily get the bugs reported).
The only way that would work out is if they gave up on Gecko and switched to WebKit or Blink.
Their choice of business model isn't really much of a choice, it's the only viable option that gives them any influence whatsoever.
But then we are in conflict as we want Mozilla to create a superior product but we are not ready pay for it? One of these expectations has to give in then.
Yes, I completely agree that HN has a massive cognitive dissonance about this. They're so used to venture capitalists and FAANG companies lighting billions of dollars on fire to subsidize money-losing but moat-building projects that they have completely unrealistic expectations about what is reasonable for the other 99.99% of the universe (without magic money fountains propping them up) to do sustainably.
But the reality is that because of this, browsers are commoditized, and the average user will never pay for a browser if they can get Chrome or Safari for free. That's probably true of the average HN user, too, for that matter.
A big part of the problem, is that for Mozilla, Firefox is a tool for their other initiatives. They use money they make from Firefox to fund their other projects. And they use the influence they get from controlling a browser to push their agenda on web standards. Not that I disagree with their agenda in most cases. But I don't think Mozilla's primary objective is to make a great browser, unfortunately.
> maintaining a browser is incredibly difficult and expensive. It would be the death blow to their market share, which would destroy Gecko as a viable browser engine
Assuming 100 people needed for Gecko, and $150k/year annual, world-wide, average developer expense, we come to $15M/year. Mozilla already has about ~$50M/year non-Google revenue from its products (coming from "true" users/customers).
Google needs firefox just as much as firefox needing google. Don’t see conteo in everything. Firefox is the only thing stopping google from some insane monopoly/anti-comp lawsuits. It is in their best interest for firefox to continue to exist.
> it seems most of the customers of privacy focused products
Do most people use Firefox because it's "privacy focused"? I don't - I think people use it because it does the things they want ... and "privacy" is far down that list.
I know I'm an odd-ball, but I haven't upgrading my FF because I want ftp support in my browser. I upgraded the desktop my kids use, and the tabs went all wonky. The only reason I haven't switched is I trust Google less than I do FF, and I want to stave off a technology monoculture.
Yes, my clear desire for ftp support means I don't want technologically perfect security or privacy.
Concerning "privacy" as the article points out in the section "Invading your privacy at the same time as telling us “we value your privacy”
] Telemetry. Hidden telemetry that isn’t disabled when you click “disable telemetry”. Firstrun pings. Forced signing of add-ons. Auto-updates you can’t switch off, pinging every 10 minutes. “Experiments” which require a separate opt out. Now the latest offence is enforcing app based 2FA to login to a Firefox Add-on account just to make a custom theme, which you wouldn’t need in the first place if not for forced add-on signing.
> either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
FF has dropped a lot of users, so I assume you mean it's decided to be a niche product in the "privacy" space, and not a generally useful tool?
Its marketing doesn't seem that successful, as my first thoughts are to switch to a tool based on FOSS Chromium.
Like you, I don’t choose Firefox because of some privacy features. I use it because it doesn’t have completely bonkers “history” feature like Chromium does, and because it seems fast and I’m used to it.
Also, I must be blind but I didn’t notice any diff with the tabs in that recent update where everyone freaked out because the tabs were slightly different. The tabs are still fine!
Come to think of it I don’t have any complaints about Firefox, so I’m not sure why I’m bothering to contribute my thoughts here.
> So core userbase for these products becomes hostile towards the product growth by definition. In this environment, either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
Except FF market percentage has been decreasing not growing. The technical foundation has gotten better, but it’s like Mozilla execs are completely out of sync with the market share they could have. They want a “shiny” app that in theory people should want, not the app people actually want.
I just hope some group of geeks decides to fork it and change it up.
It does bother me a bit, too, but the Waterfox founder, Alex Kontos, was fairly transparent about the acquisition [1] and how it would affect the project. Still, that's a fair point.
> The technical foundation has gotten better, but it’s like Mozilla execs are completely out of sync with the market share they could have.
Execs may have less to do with the decline than a changing market. Google poured resources and new ideas into a mostly greenfield effort, and leveraged its market position to push its browser. Edge and Safari also benefit from their makers' platforms and marketing.
It's a hostile world for an independent browser. And IMO Firefox is still the least worst option.
> It's a hostile world for an independent browser.
Sure, bit it would have been a little less hostile if they hadn't brought quite a lot of that on themselves with their long history of hostile-to-tech-savvy-users decisions.
Privacy isn't even the main reason I use Firefox, if that was all I cared about, I'd use brave or ungoogled chromium with privacy extensions and settings.
I use it because I like it a little bit more than chrome. And because I don't want google to completely control the browser market. But the more firefox becomes like chrome, the less reason I have to continue using it.
And despite what Mozilla thinks and wants, I don't think most Firefox users care that much about privacy. I suspect most Firefox users use it because their tech saavy friend, relative, or IT administrator installed it for them and/or told them to use it. So losing core users also means using many other users in their sphere of influence.
How can anyone call firefox privacy focused when they use telemetry so fucking heavily?
Per default telemetry is active, disable it and you still got telemetry/pings whatever. You have to opt out of everything. It's not even limited to the user side look at this https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460678#c20
Correct. An easy win for Firefox is to become a zero telemetry browser by default. All that telemetry is giving them wrong data anyway as users they should be most interested in disable telemetry and are not represented in usage data.
I'm very confused by this comment. If you think of telemetry like a vote, disabling it is essentially forfeiting your vote, so it doesn't really make sense to me to complain that you are then not represented. If you've ever been to a big catered event, this is like a person who refuses to speak up when asked if they want the vegetarian option and then gets mad when only meat is served. You can't expect the organizers to order two of every meal and then throw out the ones people didn't want.
Turning off telemetry by default is also not an option, because then they would have no data, and would just be making decisions at random -- I really doubt that would please you either.
Telemetry is not a vote (for which you are asked to cast). Telemetry is extracting information from you and transmitting it together with private information like IP address without asking you ( as it is opt out by default). Telemetry also costs you in resources (bandwidth, cpu..) which is problematic when resources are scarce. This is a good enough reason for many to want a zero telemetry browser and do whatever they can to disable it in browsers like Firefox.
And now because Mozilla lacks data from its most coveted “tech” users, it does make decisions based on data that it has, which is usually totally opposite (like in your example) which in turns pisses off these users even more and they jump ship, taking all their friends and family with them (because they are the “tech” person in their circle). That is how you lose users.
You can of course make a zero telemetry browser, relying 100% on your own research and what the users volunteer to tell you directly. And those most passionate about it with tell you the most, a wonderful positive feedback loop. But this would require a change of product development mindset to a completely user centric one.
From the developer point of view, this is incorrect, the developers are using it to decide which features to prioritize. If you are aware that it's happening and you leave it on, then I don't see what the problem is. Resource and bandwidth usage should be very minimal, if it's not then I would urge you to actually measure it and report bugs. It should be possible to compress it so that it doesn't eat up your bandwidth. Remember that it also takes bandwidth and CPU to post on Hacker News, so you will have to compare it to that to have any kind of meaningful data.
My point is, it if lacks the data from those users, it would make sense to start sending them that data. It doesn't make sense to me to complain about them having incorrect data on you when you intentionally don't send them the right data and then threaten to jump ship because of what seems to be your own actions. I personally also disable telemetry but I know full well that I'm opting out of an important system for them so I don't expect to get attention in return for doing that. If you wanted to help, I think they would very much welcome attempts to fix the telemetry and make it more bandwidth-respecting and privacy-respecting, rather than finding ways to just throw it out.
>You can of course make a zero telemetry browser, relying 100% on your own research and what the users volunteer to tell you directly. And those most passionate about it with tell you the most, a wonderful positive feedback loop.
In my experience, this is an unreliable way to make products, the type of user who is passionate and volunteers this information is not the average user. You will end up with a very niche product that way, and the cost would be very high since you would be expecting the same quality of features but for a smaller number of users. If you're interested to do this I would suggest you to fork Firefox and attempt to get funding, and try that out just to see how much work it actually is compared to how little those users are actually willing to pay. Take a look at Waterfox if you want to see an example of how this would be done.
> If you are aware that it's happening and you leave it on, then I don't see what the problem is.
Most people are not aware of telemetry. Most of those that are, disable it. So you end up getting what you call 'votes' from the people who are not aware they are 'voting'. That is not voting (for which a person need to be consciously doing it) but rather extraction of information.
Imagine in an election, the votes of those who didn't explicitly vote get automatically extracted and cast based on a biased algorithm produced by the government. If you do not like the idea of that, you should not like the idea of opt-out telemetry. What you want is opt-in telemetry (aka. voting).
> Resource and bandwidth usage should be very minimal
I fully agree, that is the other reason zero telemetry is a way to go and should be default. You can not beat that.
> In my experience, this is an unreliable way to make products
Not sure what your experience is but I already built one company like that and I am doing another one right now (incidentally a web browser) based on this same principle which is called user-centric product development. Btw. Mozilla practiced that too ~15 years ago (the "golden age" of Firefox, reference here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28493855).
>Most people are not aware of telemetry. Most of those that are, disable it.
Do you have some numbers to back this up? I would suggest getting that before making any major product decisions. Also if you read the privacy policy, the telemetry is spelled out in detail, or at least it should be, so the people who are voting should be well aware of what is going on. If nobody reads it, then the solution there would then be to make it obvious and easy to read, not to throw it out completely.
>I fully agree, that is the other reason zero telemetry is a way to go and should be default. You can not beat that.
I don't understand. That isn't a meaningful comparison because you're comparing it with nothing, you would need to present an alternate data source. This to me is kind of like saying "not having a stomach beats having a stomach because you won't need to worry about eating anymore" or something like that.
>Imagine in an election, the votes of those who didn't explicitly vote get automatically extracted and cast based on a biased algorithm produced by the government.
I'm sorry but this is exactly what various governments already do in a lot of cases. Not for general elections but for services or programs that they run or for appointed positions. They will do a study with passive data gathering and determine who is actually using what services, and if the results are good they will increase funding to the service, otherwise they will cut funding, fire people, etc. This is generally how any organization functions at scale, so I really don't understand what you're getting at here or what alternative you're proposing. If you want to apply this to product development, it would simply be infeasible for users to vote on every single ticket that a developer handles, so you need to find some other data-driven way to make decisions. That's what telemetry is put in place to do. I think there is a misunderstanding here of how this works, but it's not your fault.
I wish you luck with your company, but I suspect you will have difficulty getting funding on the level of Firefox or Chrome, especially if you have no hard data from some kind of telemetry or similar source. The privacy-conscious user is known to be a fickle market. I also would advise against making misleading and/or unsourced statements about other browsers if you intend to develop a competing product, this makes your company look bad.
This isn't true, Mozilla is making it very clear the first time you are launching Firefox and you have a button just next to the message to disable it easily without having to go to the settings. I don't know how they could be better about it.
And again, you throw out the baby with the bathwater and go back to Big Google that does worse on every privacy-related issue by a mile.
Like, no matter what, telemetry is useful to the product, and defaults matter. Like the infamous “the opt-ot organ donor vs opt-in countries have a staggering difference of 90% difference”. Should firefox throw away 90% of its userbase’s useful telemetry, most of who would have no problem with providing it?
Oh no I still use firefox and like everyone I make bug reports or follow the existing once. But it's hard to recommend it to friends/family if you have to say "you only need to change these settings and install these addons" and I get responses like "I would rather use brave. It just works" or something like that.
I want firefox to be good. I don't even need to have the newest features I just wamt a stable browser I can use. Don't we all? Removing features I actually use and adding things I don't need is counterproductive and I don't know which part of their telemetry helped them make those choices, but many I didn't like.
> Should firefox throw away 90% of its userbase’s useful telemetry, most of who would have no problem with providing it?
Telemetry should always be opt-in.
Firefox throws enough messages your way if they would ask (like many other programs) "Help make firefox better" and then offer different level of reporting it would be fine.
They ask me to change my theme at the start, but they don't ask me if I want to send them my data?
>Removing features I actually use and adding things I don't need is counterproductive and I don't know which part of their telemetry helped them make those choices, but many I didn't like.
Well, this is exactly the point. If you disable telemetry, how do you expect them to know that you are using that feature and they shouldn't remove it?
I tell them directly.
I actually took a look at what they send about:telemetry and as far as I can tell NONE of the features they removed that I used was captures through this. It's good to collect not too much, but removing features based on imagined data is bad.
Maybe I overlooked something, but the only data that could interest them is my addon selection...
Anyway for the longest time I send detailed information with all my crash reports and similar, but not only could I never find out where they collected the crashes I send in no no error (even the reproducible once) got fixed. The only times my problems got fixed where when I actively filed a bug report myself or fixed the cause of the issue manually.
After a few years I began to wonder if anybody even reads those crash reports and added a request for a quick pingback something like "empty message is fine. I just want to know if anybody is actually reading this". Did this _multiple_ times, never got any response. Either they don't read or they don't care.
Anyway I'm over giving my data for aggregations that probably never get used.
If someone from mozilla could tell me that they actually matter maybe I would change my mind, but for now I'll drive my privacy is important for me train, because it really is and if the people that collect my data don't or misuse it I don't see the point in sending it.
Maybe I was expecting too much, but if this is too much of a response then I don't want to contribute anything (at least like this).
Maybe some people can but I question their commitment to privacy. Mozilla is heavily conflicted, being almost 100% supported by Google in exchange for sending searches to the Chocoloate Factory by default, yet they refuse to openly acknowledge or address the issue. What really gets me is they constantly use privacy as a selling point. Then they try to convince the public that web advertising is a necessity. Its like robbing Peter to pay Paul. You cant borrow your way out of debt.
People are dumb, specially the tech community. I've been watching for at least 10 years how everyone switched to chrome because it's faster. Now we have one mega corporation in charge of both most of the search and most of the browser usage. That's literally controlling the internet.
Google's "success" with FLoC shows they don't really have that control, not because of the browser for sure. They affected the standard a lot, of course, but hard to see why it wasn't for everyone's benefit considering the apps like Figma we can have now.
Stuff like AMP was mostly brought throughs search alone.
Firefox's user base is made up of customization enthusiasts, privacy advocates, and people who remember when "web standards" meant "doesn't work in IE6."
If they pivot towards "mainstream appeal", it usually comes to the expense of that user community. Their alternative is to be the best Firefox they can possibly be, and wait for users to join their audience organically.
It feels like Vivaldi has done a better job of sticking to a clear user persona model. They are clearly targeting power users and Opera 12 refugees, and it feels like that still informs what they do. Unfortunately, the one thing they can't do is make a browser that doesn't run like cold treacle.
I don't get it. I surf on the couch while my wife binges netflix shows laptop has no issue with vivaldi and surfing with tons of tabs open. Am I doing something wrong? This laptop was made in 2014 and the only upgrade was an SSD drive and an extra 8 gigs of ram for a total of 12
> Judging by the HN and Reddit comments with each Firefox/Signal/Matrix releases
There are always comments and complaints. One need to evaluate the quality of this complains to understand their worth.
> either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
Successful products prove this wrong. The most successful ones barely change at all, they usually evolve for a decade or two and then adapt to a new generation. Stability is a viable road to success.
Heck, even chrome didn't really change that much since it's first version. Firefox is really absurdly extraordinary in how unstable it is.
Agreed. Firefox's userbase is moronically hostile to anything that might give the company legs and a non-Google revenue stream. They want a pristine, moral FOSS project that just makes amazing software and subsists on donations.
> Firefox is a product strangely hostile to its core userbase. It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage themselves for years.
Easily explainable
Mozilla been captured by "aspirational" MBA types who think they don't really need that userbase, instead they want to chase "what big boys do", and copy lame features in hopes that monkeying Apple will score them iDevices users — the type of people they psychologically want to associate themselves with.
People were commenting about acquisitions in other thread: some wouod be unexplainable ones, until you realize that management just wanted to hang out with hip/stylish/trendy people…
Judging from management's increased comp, while disappearing 25% of their staff, they can hang out with the Big Tech hispters without batting an eyelid.
> It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage themselves for years.
I believe it to be corporate sabotage by Google ... due to the 100's of millions of dollars that Google gives to the Mozilla Foundation, they have a lot of influence over Firefox.
Firefox was/is trying to be a top browser in global market share. The "core userbase" is irrelevant to this mission. You wouldn't really even talk about Chrome's "core userbase" because they aren't trying to make a niche community happy, they are trying to best serve their billions of users, something that the author of this piece clearly knows nothing about - eg, when your userbase is this large, the only meaningful form of feedback is statistical analysis. Telemetry is of course the best option but if you wanted to know what "people were saying" you wouldn't be operating at the level of reading individual posts, you'd be looking for trends on social media platforms.
Well, they are doing a terrible job. The more they become like chrome, the less people have a reason to use it instead of chrome.
And most people probably don't make a conscious decision about which browser to use. A lot of Firefox's momentum comes from tech saavy users who recommend it to friends, family, coworkers, etc. So losing "core" users cause a chain effect of losing non "core" users.
Yes. How on the earth should I recommend Firefox to other?
By saying firefox will `constantly remove functions you use and change the UI in random way that make it less useful`? I am a firefox user since firefox 3. But If a non tech user ask me about it today, I will probably recommend `edge` instead. At least it don't do so many offending changes and cause so many frustrations.
This would be funnier if Chrome for Android wasn't trying to shove tab groups down my throat for the ninth time. This time without an obscure flag to disable it.
Looking at why established users complain about Firefox isn't why billions of people moved to Chrome, from many sources. It was the default on our phone and that makes it an obvious desktop choice.
(Not to mention it does do some things nicely, I just much prefer FF for webdev)
> It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage themselves for years.
I just hope it's not Nokia level deliberate sabotage.
> That might not go on for much longer, though.
I will use it till the end and will use what ever the FOSS community forks from it or existing forks. Because, I'm guilty that me not using FF and FOSS alternatives for Operating Systems, Browsers, Software has led to rise of the Mono/Duo/Oligopolies in-spite of possessing the skills to understand the outcome, In-spite of having access to the warnings for smart people who said exactly this would happen.
Have been using Firefox since the day Marc as Netscape and Mosaic. I think Firefox has a mole or a couple like the movie The Departed (or original trilogy Infernal Affairs). Think about it, Google pay Firefox a lot. It makes sense to put in moles to sabotage FF not to grow as big as Chrome. Over the years you can see Firefox goin down while so many other browsers growing. Now, FF seems to be very antiquated when compared to Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, etc. Heck even Yandex browser perform better than FF with built in ocr. FF is so badly in need of a shake up of their lead developers.
I use Firefox exclusively, but the only thing I can think of to write in this box are all the unneccessary frustrations they are putting me through. The list is long. Item one: Why does Mozilla have so many ways to file bugs* ?
Which is a pity, because, besides the fact that Chrome has almost all of the marketshare, they also basically own Mozilla financially (is this still correct ?) and technologically Firefox uses Skia and Harfbuzz for rendering, both heavily dependent on Google.
So there is basically no competition for Google in the browser market.
If you read that license, you'll see it's free software. Anyone can fork or maintain it just like was done for over a decade before Google and Facebook were involved.
There are various GitHub repos, such as for the mobile browsers, and they also spun off some functionality like container tabs into their own repos as well. You'll also get bounced around these repos, bugzilla, the blog and community forum posts whenever one source really doesn't want to bother with the issue you're trying to bring up regardless of relevancy.
My personal pet peeve is that the Chrome's different User Profiles is so easy to use. I'm aware of the different plugins that can offer similar functionality but the setup Chrome is offering is so simple and intuitive that switching feels annoyingly too complicated.
Otherwise I've been really surprised how much better Firefox has gotten in the last two years. Good to see old giant still alive.
Idk about 12 years but I know about last two years - many companies and workers had to switch to WFH. So that means using some sort of chat&video&audio software/website.
What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams? That should've been the highest priority. Instead, it took them years to get at least the GPOs right, autoupdate is the same story... so many things in corprote env were or still are PITA to set up in Firefox. So unfortunately no wonder it's Chrom(ium) for every single big company out there.
And don't get me wrong, I try to use exclusively Firefox whenver I can, but this is really frustrating to me as sysadmin.
2. Whenever a new Web API shows up, browser vendors have to decide between implementing the standard and copying the bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions that are implemented in Chromium.
3. Websites are tested on Chromium, so they start to rely on Chromium's bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions.
4. When a website breaks in Firefox (or Safari), people claim that it's the fault of Firefox devs and switch to Chromium.
The early web got tired of this when it was Microsoft at the wheels, but it feels that few people are particularly interested in fighting the good fight these days. Much easier to blame Mozilla.
On the other hand, how many of these browsers are actually building or inventing any of these new apis to support things like screensharing, video, audio, and etc so they're not hacks except for chrome?
I can blame whoever I want, but at the end of the day, the problem that I have to deal with is the user saying - Teams doesn't work. What am I supposed to do with it?
> What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams?
I think that's the wrong way around. Why would Firefox need to change their browser for a specific web application?
Microsoft chose not to support Firefox, not the other way around. It's still choosing not to support smaller platforms (the Linux application is simply garbage, lacking basic features that have been available on other platforms for months).
When I ran into this problem, Teams didn't work because Firefox didn't allow the application to enumerate the audio devices hooked up to my computer, only exposing a "default" one. I don't even understand why that would be a problem, my browser already asked which input and output to use, why would Teams need to care?
Jitsi and Google Meet worked fine, so the problem was clearly with Microsoft's developers. They managed to fix the problem eventually, so Microsoft should take 100% of the blame here in my opinion.
I don't know about the sysadmin stuff. Honestly, with modern Chrome-clone Edge, I'd expect most business that roll out a browser to now simply stick to the built-in browser.
I would strongly disagree on the sysadmin stuff. Firefox has always had a very powerful settings system. All the stuff you could set in about:config can also be set via a set of configuration files provided by the sysadmin, the user and the distro, each of which can provide defaults, presets or locked non-changeable settings which are hierarchically enforced. Exactly what you need as a sysadmin, cross-platform, could do everything and the kitchen sink, distributable either via your usual config management or LDAP/HTTP/whatever you can script in a few lines of Javascript if you need. GPOs are just a poor windows admin's substitute, they cannot do half of that, even in IE and Edge. Not to mention Chrome, which lags miles behind there.
I'm not aware of the APIs in question and it sounds like this probably to prevent fingerprinting of a device... but why not simply return only the default device when enumerated?
It inherently makes sense that all those apps would try to understand what devices were available and even allow switching between them. It's often required because that entire stack between the browser, os, and device is very unreliable even on something like macOS.
Yea it's on MS to test and fix their stuff, but FF is the one losing market share and honestly part it sounds like they make their apis more prone to misuse. At least in this case.
I don't know why this broke in the first place, all I know is that I had no sound and that the device selection menu was borked where other video calling webapps worked just fine. The enumerateDevices API has been in Firefox for years [1].
To be fair(ish) to Microsoft, I did spoof Chrome's user agent because Microsoft forced a "this website doesn't work with your browser" screen in Firefox. Perhaps the failing API was an unstable Chrome-only API that they assumed works because of the UA. The browser compatibility screen communicates that they definitely tested it, that they definitely knew about the problem, and that they just didn't want to fix it.
I just dropped Teams as an option and sent everyone who wanted to video chat Jitsi links. That worked fine while I needed it. If a company chooses not to support me, then I will choose not to use that company if I can.
When you're a platform trying to gain market share, and a big application doesn't work because of the developer's bug, you don't throw your hands up and say "well it's the developer's fault." You work around that bug in your platform. Reminds me of the stories[1] about early days Microsoft putting all sorts of hacks in their OS to work around 3rd party app bugs, just to keep backward compatibility going. When you're focused on growth, you can't adhere to some sense of purity and demand 3p apps fix themselves to work on your platform. You need to make the platform work with their app.
If you wanna join a meeting from another company and you dont have teams licence, you can only use browser or mobile app (not sure if this was changed later or not, because by winter every company I manage had bought ms 365 business. Though teams licence is still an extra item in MS365 admin so I'd assume it hasn't changed)
My Firefox has become adware. Adware for Mozilla, but still: Every new tab I open, there is a “WE CARE FOR YOUR PRIVACY” message awaiting for me. Every restart, “LOOK AT HOW WE HAVE FEWER ADS, MORE PRIVACY”. And from time to time, if I don’t open a tab by myself, it will install Pocket and/or open two tabs at startup, one for the release notes and one for browsing, but still with the little mention “Firefox has been awarded the Firefox of the year by Firefox, thanks to how we don’t let the bad guys follow you with ads. Also please create an online profile so we upload all your passwords to the cloud. Because you’ll be safer.”
Honestly, Mozilla has lost the big picture. The whole point of it was to have fewer messages that occupy the mind and disrupt tasks, and Chrome does it better, as long as I’m logged in.
Also, in my mind, exchanging Chrome's insistence on Google logins is just the same as Firefox's insistence on their proprietary sync and pocket. I'll say no to every one of those things, because I do value my privacy and none of them provide proper self-hosted options.
It is theoretically true. They have changed the protocol at least three times, there are no user-accessible settings (just about:config) to point at your own sync server, there is no documentation. And at their rate of breaking stuff, your sync server will be obsolete as soon as you get it running. Happened to me, will never waste time on it again.
And the open-source version of the sync server is bad software, age-old python, tons of code smells. I'd wager it is not what they are using themselves.
Wait, what? I use Firefox exclusively and there's definitely not a Mozilla ad every new tab or every restart. There is one once a major release (including a couple of days ago), and those always annoy me, but it's only once a month or two.
Are you exaggerating or does yours work differently?
Actually I think there is... I distinctly remember being extremely annoyed at the text ad on the new tab page. Turned it off a long time ago. It's called "Snippets" in settings/home. It's like a Twitter feed from Mozilla.
If you had to turn off features from your browser, that’s a pretty good demonstration that the browser was getting in your way, in a sufficient occurrence that you jumped on Google to ask “How to disable Firefox’s new annoyance”.
Not everyone wants to spend time disabling features of their browser to be able to use it.
Especially if Firefox pretends to not get in your way!
Not a direct response to this piece, but the two things keeping me on Firefox these days, besides it being a decent browser generally, are container tabs and tree style tabs. They’re both very convenient for my workflow. I think all the browsers are pretty good, but those two features are great.
I'm always amazed at people's resistance to the concept of tree style tabs (or even just tabbing vertically instead)... The horizontal space is far less valuable on widescreens (most websites are just a column down the middle anyway) and top/horizontal tabbing systems are worthless when you have a non-trivial number of tabs.
It's just a matter of taste, is all. I personally hate vertical tabs (or vertical tasks bars, etc). They're just a pain the butt for me. But clearly there are others who love them. Vive la différence!
But, with tabs specifically, I very rarely have more than two going at a time. That probably matters.
Chrome's tab groups are pretty good. Not quite as useful to me as tree style tabs, but better than nothing. I use Firefox as my primary browser, Chrome for some things, and Safari for others. It's good to have the variety, I think.
Look at Mozilla’s leadership page. Why would you expect a tech company run by HR and D&I to be successful?
It would appear that Mozilla has become captive to a single person as their personal hustle to enrich themself and a few others to the organization’s detriment.
I got as far as what looks to my apparently naïve analysis like a qualified CEO who's been there from the start and realized I have no idea what you're talking about. A random sampling shows people who've been there since the 2000s, or come with what passes for solid engineering credentials in tech.
Maybe you could expand this out a little for people who aren't In The Know. Specifics on why each person on the page isn't qualified to lead a browser company will help a ton. Thanks in advance.
I use both Chrome (for work) and Firefox (personal) on Windows. Beyond a few specifics, I often can't remember which I am using. There might be many differences under the hood, but in a regular usage Firefox is really damn good. Even on Google's properties. I also use Firefox exclusively on mobile, and same. At the end of the day, they are two very mature, slightly different executions of the same concept. I get the frustrations that may exist on the power user / dev side, but I think our crowd is generally not fair enough in recognizing the tremendous efforts it take to compete with Google with a fraction of its resources.
Note: I use Chrome for work to 1/ isolate my work from personal sessions without the hassle of containers or profiles, and 2/ because I work for a web app targeting Chrome (per the market share).
In desktop, there is barely any difference now (Chrome's save as pdf feature is more accurate with tables).
In mobile however, Chrome seems noticeably faster.
this and "Video on background fix" which allows you to "listen" to youtube and multitask. I don't use the youtube app to avoid all the addictive features and tracking, and even it doesn't play in the background.
I know about this and New Pipe, but having tons of apps for every little thing I do on the phone is exactly what I avoid. All these apps do is supporting downloading and subscriptions, something I would care about if I submitted to the youtube time sink, which I do not.
Besides, isn't this app a violation of Youtube's policies?
Similar experience here, except I used brave cuz I don't really like the Google service stuff.
I am pretty okay with most of the existing browsers on the market (but not edge, again the force you to use ms service, and useless default news etc.)
And I don't care about the gui that much cuz I am not storing bookmarks in the browsers, it's quite hard to search through and sync
This is my experience as well. I use both Chrome and Firefox across Mac and Windows, and I find the experiences to be pretty much interchangeable. I'm usually someone who gets annoyed at minor differences, but this really is one area where I'm not bothered at all.
I use Firefox most of the time, out of a desire to support Mozilla and promote a non-Google browser. Admittedly, this is a political motivation, but it comes at pretty much zero practical cost. If you are interested in trying out Firefox, I think the only significant inconvenience is disabling Pocket.
Like the parent, I'll occasionally switch to Chrome for separate profiles, or if I need something specific in DevTools. Chrome has much better multi-profile support, in the sense that it has it at all, but again, the differences between the two are so minor that I don't have any qualms switching back and forth.
I agree it’s important for Chrome to have a competitor, but Firefox has proven itself not to be a successful one. I’ve lost faith in Mozilla’s ability to make decisions that win back users from Chrome. I wonder if Firefox shut down, the dispersal of its users to other non-Google browsers might create enough momentum that one of them could start to become competitive with Chrome.
Same here but with Edge. Microsoft lobbied us extremely to make it our standard browser.
But both are just fine. Never have issues with Firefox. But I do have issues with its UI. Too much wasted space, it's only useable in compact mode which they want to get rid of. And I hate that there's no clear visual separation between tabs anymore. Even Chrome and edge have this.
I nearly stopped using it with the terrible color changes to the tabs (no contrast) in v92. I mean, I thought, this is finally the last straw. But I found that I could customize some colors, especially the active tab, with an add on called Firefox Color.
This is really the largest beef I have with Firefox. Firefox had been making poor (IMHO) UI decisions for a very long time -- but it didn't matter, because it was customizable enough that you could fix them.
Now that it's much less customizable, though, there is so much that can no longer be fixed.
Very good idea to have mapped the rants that have accumulated over time to the historical evolution of Firefox.
It is often that you hear that a minority of complainers are just adverse to change and that the majority agree with the stupid changes. But, in fact, the majority of person will disagree in silence and just switch to alternative solutions without a vocal complaint.
So, it is important to listen to vocal complainers, even in minority, because most of the time they are your canaries in coal mines. The one in front of new problems, ready to give some of their time and energy to save you.
An additional point not mentioned in the article is the general lost confidence with the Mozilla organisation that more and more looks like to use the Firefox cash cow to fund useless random activities and insipid Management.
> But, in fact, the majority of person will disagree in silence and just switch to alternative solutions without a vocal complaint.
That's an interesting point. The #1 Linux distribution on distrowatch for the last 12 month is now MX Linux, a non-systemd distro. Of course, the next 15 distros use systemd, so maybe that says nothing after all.
>So, it is important to listen to vocal complainers, even in minority,
Maybe in some cases this is true, but I can't agree with that in terms of taking product direction from social media. In my (anecdotal) experience with areas where I have expertise, the loud and vocal complainers are almost always completely wrong about something or missing some key piece of information. In fact the angrier and more emotional the complaining, the more likely it seems to me that the complaint is based on false information. Maybe I'll have to do a comprehensive study on this at some point.
If you meant "listen" only in terms of hear what they have to say in order to educate them then sure, that can be important for marketing to explain product changes, but it's not a way to drive product changes.
Because they are always super late.
It's 2021 and we still don't have form and CB auto completion.
It's been in chrome for more than 10 years already. It's such a basic feature, you earn a lot of time at not filling your address every time and even more with your card number you always forgot the number.
A few month ago they finally add the tab feature for directly researching in a site except it still a lot worse user friendly than chrome and it worked on a few website only
Savvier users would prefer this isn't saved at all. It's extremely easy for malicious software to datamine browser files for cookies/saved password/form data.
> Then Google decided to make the tabs on top standard for its Chrome browser, which was designed for mobile devices not desktops. On a smartphone it may make sense, as there isn’t room for a full desktop style menu layout. On a desktop it is counterintuitive and breaks workflow with all other programs.
Funnily enough, moving tabs to the top is actually one of the few UI changes I actually agree with and find more logical. Since the address bar and navigation buttons only control the active tab, they logically belong ‘inside’ the tab: switching to a different tab should also switch to a ‘different’ address bar and buttons. (Internally they may be the same object, but that’s just an implementation detail.)
I agree. Having tabs on top also makes sense from a Fitts's law perspective. I change tabs much more often than I use the title bar, so making it easier to click the tabs is good UI.
The most logical tab position is on the left or right, on desktop, because most of the space on a wide screen display is on the horrizontal axis, and you want to reserve as much vertical space as possible for scrolling websites (which happens vertically, and pretty much cannot be changed at this point, as it is baked into the web).
There's an addon for that, but you no longer can hide the default tab bar! So now it just wastes space up there for me. Mozilla... just one day removed the option to hide it. First from the GUI, then from about:config. And also addons can no longer hide it either.
> The most logical tab position is on the left or right, on desktop, because most of the space on a wide screen display is on the horrizontal axis, and you want to reserve as much vertical space as possible for scrolling websites (which happens vertically, and pretty much cannot be changed at this point, as it is baked into the web).
This assumes a landscape-oriented monitor.
I would suggest trying this out on a portait oriented monitor. Tabs on top make the most sense there.
Also, I would generally suggest trying out a portrait oriented monitor. It's quite useful for coding, reading, etc.
> portrait oriented monitor. It's quite useful for coding, reading, etc.
Tried, didn't work, chances are you need a browser or a terminal running test/grep or another code file/document side by side. There are very few intances when you only look at one file and whether you see 150 lines or 100 lines doesn't really matter much, when the file is longer than that anyway and a function is often shorter.
Or website should use most of the space sideways on my screen... Not removing content and making usability infinitely worse. How many years until everything is designed for mobile and if it even shows 80 character column it is good for desktop...
Of course not, they're written horizontally as usual. Where did you even get the idea they would be written vertically? BTW, even on a laptop screen with vertical tabs I see 31 tab names with ~20 characters in each name. With horizontal tabs, I see 15 tabs with ~5 characters in each name. 9x more information, now that's UI/UX!
I used them back in my student days but then I realized I needed to stop opening so many tabs and focus on my productivity.
These days you have chromium based choices too: Edge and Vivaldi, which has just become Cinamon's default browser. On Edge you can turn off title bar, for Vivaldi it's the address bar. They look quite neat that way.
They're both simple vertical tabs and not automatically organized as a tree, but to me that trikes the right ballance because I don't want to feel too confortable opening tons of tabs.
Mozilla is kept alive by the money from Google, which is happy to keep Firefox on life support as a shield against anti-trust investigations and as an excuse for developers that there is not a browser monopoly now.
Isn't FF the only major browser that allows good adblocking extensions (uBlock origin etc) on mobile? I can't see how most people would live without that (or maybe i'm wrong about other browsers adblocking)
For me, copying into Firefox can lock it up, and trying to paste from Firefox into non-Firefox can also lock it up. I tried looking into this, and it might be related to running X apps side-by-side, but it feels like a weird interaction between Firefox and gnome-shell. Regardless, it seems like other applications are working fine, so I think this is an issue with Firefox.
There's a theory in the Free Software community that BigTech sponsorship of Mozilla was intended to bring about the current state of affairs.
The idea is that MS, Google, and others really have no reason to donate to a direct competitor. Perhaps they did so because they knew it would give them control. That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy organization than a foundation that develops a web browser. The sorry state of FF was the inevitable result.
Whether you buy this narrative or not, the fact is there remains no effective threat whatsoever to the massive data collection that occurs whenever you use Chrome or Edge. 10 years ago, MS/Google had no ability to spy on the web surfing of the vast majority of computer users. Now they do.
Well, once upon a time, Microsoft invested quite a bit of money in Apple to keep them alive. Allegedly, they did this so they could tell the DoJ with a straight face that they were not a monopolist, after all they had a competitor.
I would not be surprised if Google's support for Mozilla is based on similar reasoning.
But Apple and Microsoft weren't competitors then. Apple was a hardware manufacturer. Microsoft was a software manufacturer. While there was some overlap in their product offerings, they were in different businesses and so weren't really competitors.
>Well, once upon a time, Microsoft invested quite a bit of money in Apple to keep them alive.
This is not what happened. Microsoft was involved in a lawsuit after paying one of Apple contractors to steal QuickTime code. "investing" in Apple was part of the settlement.
> The sorry state of FF was the inevitable result.
What sorry state?
The thing I don't get about this narrative is that Firefox works and works very well for me and so when I see people saying things like this it doesn't jive with reality.
I’ve used Firefox since it replaced Netscape. I agree, I think “sorry state” is an exaggeration. They’ve made some choices I don’t love, but my browser isn’t part of me, I open a tab, I get some info, I get back to work. My job isn’t to play Firefox. I don’t get the “UI sucks, they made it like Chrome… so instead I use Chrome”.
However…
> That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy organization than a foundation that develops a web browser.
I do think they’re happy to spend too much time/money on their pet projects. Given the layoffs and poor market performance, this has come at the cost of their product. I’m allowed to dislike that despite still using it.
Sorry state of Firefox, I disagree. Sorry state of Mozilla, yes. So I look at M and do expect FF to get worse.
3.54% of market share is a pretty sorry state for once a major browser. At this point it's reasonable to suggest users to try a different browser if Firefox has issues with your website.
Every single time Firefox updates, it pops up a page telling me how great Firefox is, how great it would be if I donated. Updates happen weekly. It's effectively shareware at this point.
I completely buy that argument - BigTech (in particular Google) have a huge influence today on Firefox development.
Moreover, Mozilla's Firefox is deliberately hostile to the open source movement too - their code is a convulated mess by design, to discourage others from developing competing products with it. (Remember, that Firefox has provided Mozilla with 100's of millions of dollars - so the excuse of legacy code and all is just bullshit). It's no wonder that both Webkit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome / Opera) are more popular than Gecko (the browser engine of Firefox), with developers. (All that money is just wasted on them ... ).
>Moreover, Mozilla's Firefox is deliberately hostile to the open source movement too - their code is a convulated mess by design, to discourage others from developing competing products with it.
This is total nonsense.
It's a mess because it has 25 years of legacy behind it, and because until a few years ago all of that legacy was considered a "feature" by half of the userbase, who was screaming at them not to remove the "mess" because it would break their addons. Even in this very thread you see people whining about removing XUL addon support. And ironically, most of the "competing projects" are based around preserving that mess.
It's only since 2017 that they've really been able to clean up the architecture at all. And saying that they're "hostile to open source" is practically defamatory. Mozilla has contributed more to open source across a broad swath of organizations than 99.9% of companies that are 100x their size.
I stand by what I said - their code is a convulated mess by design. It's 25 years and they still haven't modularised their code that anyone can use the Gecko engine on the desktop and creating competing browsers. All anyone can do is create a clone of Firefox, which ofcourse, cannot really compete with Firefox or other desktop browser as it will still have all the flaws of Firefox. And this is what Mozilla wants.
They may have started with altruistic reasons, but after tasting Google's money, their greed corrupted them.
Mobile is a good example. Mozilla realised it was in a precarious position on the mobile platform, which is dominated by Chrome, Opera and Safari. And so they have now been forced to release the Gecko rendering engine for mobile ( https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview ) and are encouraging others to create mobile browsers, in the hopes that this may provide a fillip to Mobile Firefox. Desperation drove them to this move as the money is now in mobile platform (Google paying 15 billion dollars to Apple / Safari highlights this).
If they can do this for the mobile platform, why can't they do it for the Desktop platform too?
This kind of deliberate convulated code mess is like a "dark pattern" where in you know the developer isn't really interested in supporting the open source movement. Yes, there are many other open source projects that have poor code or lack documentation, but unlike the Firefox project, none of them has 100's of millions of dollars at their disposal - it's a travesty how they have wasted all that money!
I use Firefox exclusively on all of my devices, but my opinions on both the browser and Mozilla are pretty grim. Apart from the advancements in first-party isolation and containerization I can name very few "features" intorduced in the past 5~ years that I view in a positive light. Firefox has become less configurable, in other words more hostile to the user, chasing after chrome with every new pants-on-head UI decision, while abandoning important technical research like Servo that could've brought them to the bleeding edge of browser development. I've come to terms with my position as being held hostage, simply because the only other option is Google and thus infinitely worse, but I am not happy. Change is needed.
Also using Firefox for years as my main browser. Can't complain. Never really considered switching, since there is no real alternative for me in today's browser market (especially in terms of privacy).
I have an alternative set of explanations regarding why Firefox is seeing a continuous decline for the last 12 years.
1. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are not public but I would be surprised if Google didn't have 10x more people working on Chrome vs. the number of people working on Firefox.
2. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are again not public but I remember reading estimates that the equivalent ad budget for promoting Chrome during year 1 was about 6x the entire budget of Mozilla for that period (writing "equivalent" because webside, Google is its own ad agency).
3. Mozilla is competing against Google. Google owns countless properties besides Chrome, from Google Docs to Google Translate to Android, and leverages all of these (great products) to lead users towards Chrome. Case in point: many properties that don't/didn't work or work correctly with Firefox could be made to magically work if you changed your user agent to Chrome.
4. Mozilla is competing against Google. While Mozilla was front and center on many things open-source, relying on volunteers, Google employs countless (talented) Tech Evangelists and managed to attract considerable goodwill, much of it at the expense of the army of volunteers who used to help Mozilla.
5. Replace "Google" with "Apple" in the above points, adapt product names and repeat.
6. In 2011, predicting that the only way out of this was to outmaneuver Google and Apple on mobile devices/silos, Mozilla bet the farm on Firefox OS and lost. Mozilla never recovered.
7. During the Brendan Eichgate, Mozilla became a hapless victim of the US culture wars, mostly acccidentally. Mozilla never recovered.
Now, I'm not claiming that Mozilla never made any other mistake wrt technology or UX or PR. We've all seen a number of them. What I'm claiming is that these mistakes have next to no influence in comparison to the points above.
I think so too. But in that case its declining userbase is also a concern. A tiny competitor isn't going to stave off antitrust action. For that there must be substantial competition.
I wonder if they'll continue bothering with the deal when Edge continues to grow. Sure, Edge is just a reskin of chromium but it's run by a different company so that'll be most likely enough for market regulators.
And it's not as if they are just giving the 400 million dollars away - they earn billions of dollars from Firefox users and they give a percentage of that to Firefox.
Is this what peak competition looks like? 3 browsers, 2 from companies with histories of anti-trust behavior who use the same browser engine, and the alternative is heavily funded by 1 of those 2 companies.
Except that chromium is open source. Plenty of alternate browsers exist and at least one has big backing (Edge).
It's not a bad thing for there to be only one HTML & JavaScript engine that you have to deal with. In fact it's the opposite. The dominance of Chrome has made development much easier.
I've been hearing this for the last decade also. I wonder if those saying it were around for the dominance of IE. Chrome is like the opposite of IE. IE didn't ship an update for like 6 years. Chrome ships updates every ~6 weeks.
Um. A "hapless victim" of the US culture wars? Mozilla quite deliberately committed suicide - they bought a fucking fireworks show to announce to the world that if you had views as conservative or more conservative that the average American, you had a permanent glass ceiling for your employment at Mozilla. Now they struggle to hire developers over the age of 25 - who would have guessed?
Describing the prosecutors of a culture wars as the victims of that same culture war is a bizarre doublespeak.
More importantly when confronted with a serious piece of leadership challenge the guy screwed up badly. He needed to navigate that a lot better and didn’t.
If I were an LGBT employee at Mozilla, I would be pretty pissed and demoralized that my "leader" was actively trying to remove my rights.
Because that's what Proposition 8 was, an attempt to constitutionally remove marriage rights from gay people after the California courts ruled that it was allowed.
I think I'd be pretty uncomfortable making money for a person who would turn around and it to take away my / my family's rights.
And the result is that Mozilla is a zombie company, filled with LGBT employees who would rather work for a company that is useless than one that has a leader who opposes gay marriage. That's fine for the U25s, but as people get older, they usually want to work for a company that is accomplishing something.
I understand the folks who wanted that and why they wanted that. But it still turned Mozilla and Firefox into walking corpses.
As TFA says, it's about Mozilla's employees. "Thinking you know best" is an attitude that leads you to fire people for out-of-work disagreements, and also remove features that "no one uses", and also divert money from useful products (Firefox) to products that they are "just sure" will be a huge hit (Firefox OS) but then turn out to be total flops.
Mozilla's problem is that its organization (the collective outcome of its employees) is extremely arrogant. Arrogant about technical choices, arrogant about product design choices, arrogant about the way they do PR (including shaming a developer after he died), and arrogant about political/ethical choices as well. That's not to say they aren't ever right, but an organization that approached political topics where Americans are evenly divided with a bit of humility might have an easier time hiring just as an organization that approached product design topic where it's users are evenly divided with a bit of humility might have an easier time finding a good design. Humility helps, and Mozilla has none of it.
Not sure that's especially true. Eich has admitted he had trouble hiring for Brave when he started the company, in large part because of the culture war nonsense.
There's actively woke techies (of which there are quite a few), but then there are also techies who just have a huge distaste for cultural conservatism, and of those there are many.
You're making a stupendously massive, unjustified assumption that Brendan Eich would somehow have prevented Mozilla from being in this position.
They're competing against Apple, Google, and Microsoft simultaneously. It is entirely possible that could have been the best CEO in the world and Firefox could still be in the same exact position right now, or one that is only marginally better.
You've misread me. Eich wouldn't have saved Mozilla. Having many fewer ideological employees who insisted on conformity would have saved Mozilla.
Conformity is not just a problem for politics. Read TFA - these are all conformity problems - Mozilla gets angry at people who disagree with their point of view - whether it is that tabs belong on top or that Eich is an evil abusive person or that Proton is surely better than XUL. A company that better tolerated diversity in their employees would be better set up to tolerate diversity in their users.
Proton has literally nothing to do with XUL, so if this is something you believe they think, then they'd be right to be annoyed about people with no clue what they're talking about spreading FUD.
That is like complaining that KDE is better than QML files or that GNOME is better than .glade files. Or that Chrome is better than HTML and JavaScript. Utterly nonsensical.
I probably couldn't have saved Mozilla given all their constraints and baggage. But on market share, I am confident I did something right since Mozilla. Brave is heading toward 38M MAU this month while Firefox has lost 50M users since 2018. Brave was small in 2018, and we've shown consistent monthly, steady low-exponential growth since, so much of our growth may have come from Firefox (but we aim to pull from Chrome).
I hope you can get over your anger at me and comment on market share. Excusing Mozilla's woes with "no CEO could have done better" hypotheticals is weak. Such CEO performance should in any event not be rewarded with >$3M/year.
Eich wasn't a good leader even if you ignore his political views. Brave isn't exactly successful, it's a sham to inject their own ads into pages and to sell a worthless scamcoin.
What did "marriage rights" actually change? I know taxes changed, and I assume there were some property implications beyond just sticking it to bigoted Christians, but that last part seemed to be the major feature.
>What did "marriage rights" actually change? I know taxes changed, and I assume there were some property implications beyond just sticking it to bigoted Christians, but that last part seemed to be the major feature.
If your "partner" is dying in the hospital, you don't have a legal right to be allowed to see them.
If your "spouse" is dying in the hospital, you do.
It's also false. California had Domestic Partnership law that, as amended by 2008, afforded domestic partnerships the same rights and responsibilities as marriages under state law.
This is weird. Why would one class of people need to justify having the same rights as another class of people? You’ve got it wrong: there needs to be a reason for them not to have that right.
Societies for millennia have had intuition about what men and women are, and have always defined marriage to reflect that. If we're suddenly enlightened because we've unshackled reproduction from sex and anyone can have a married relationship with anyone else, that is new, that's not some ancient natural right.
Sex has been unshackled from reproduction for far, far longer than marriage has even been a concept, and in many ancient cultures same sex relationships were perfectly normal[0].
The axis of "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" itself is no older than the 20th century, and even the concept of monogamy is relatively new as far as Abrahamic religious tradition goes.
There was also a case in Ireland where the biological mother in a gay couple died and her partner wasn't allowed to keep their child. It was very sad. Not sure if this applied to the US too though.
It was in the discussion around the referendum on gay marriage which passed.
And what does "be conservative, if anyone finds out you don't have a job anymore" amount to? That seems to be pretty much okay nowadays.
The fundamental thing with politics is that there will be disagreement, and things will be voted on, and positions on those will be campaigned on.
As far as I know Eich didn't publicize those stances, someone dug them up. That is, there was a job, and there was personal politics, as is professional.
This is certainly much closer to the mark than an article that leads with "tabs on top".
It's easy and fun to point to half a dozen of your favourite Mozilla missteps over more than a decade and say "those are why Mozilla is losing". Maybe if Mozilla had done none of them, they wouldn't be losing. But in reality every vendor makes missteps. It's the unrelenting competition from Google that really made the difference, via the avenues you mention and others.
As a US citizen, I really wish I lived in a country with effective (i.e. actually used/enforced) antitrust laws, that would see the dominance in browsers (chrome and android), combined with dominance in search -- which promotes its ads (another industry it dominates), the alteration of how the web is experienced to favor itself (hiding site identity the browser and in search results, combined with showing scraped content instead of directing traffic to actual site), combined with ... as being monopolistic and anti-competitive practices. It's beyond ridiculous anymore.
How do you wish the outcomes of these legal enforcements to be like?
An authority with the effective power to cripple the finances and business practices of Google for the purpose of reducing its market share to an arbitrarily lower percentage would be immediately detrimental to furthering the development of Google's products, and consequently detrimental to the utility of its users, while in the longer term it wouldn't be obvious that conceding the lesser competitors to scramble for this stolen market slice would yield better alternative products, nor that users would ultimately benefit from having more lesser competitors.
...and prohibit these newly-formed entities to cooperate too much with each other toward holistic objectives, therefore reducing the efficiency of capital allocation to their detriment. If this new arrangement wouldn't be less efficient, less productive or crippling in any way, it would rationally be attained voluntarily without political imposition. Unless the intervention manifests in a hindrance so expensive to cause the market share to shrink in one or more service segments, and give smaller competitors the opportunity to collect unsatisfied customers who seek alternatives to the reduced quality of services offered by the former monopoly, what would the alleged benefit be for society?
I switched because FF was painfully slow, and chrome was blazing fast when it came out in comparison. Not only that, but the dev tools (specifically for JS) were far better than anything else out there.
Fast forward 12 years, and little has changed. I dont keep 1000 tabs open, so chrome has never felt slow. I tried installing the developer edition of FF about 6 years ago on macOS and it refused to open.
And yet, chrome doesnt feel slow to me. The difference isn't nearly as stark as it once was between the two. FF lost because they lost the plot.
If I were a tab hoarder (I.e. didn't know how to use bookmarks) or thought that Mozilla were any more trustworthy than Google (why is it that the for profit puts out FF but the not-for-profit collects donations that go to anything but?) then I would switch.
I'm waiting to see how manifest v3 shakes out- Chromes plan is still better than safari has been (she admittedly low bar) but until thr browsing experience is affected, I have no problem sticking with chrome / chromium.
> Google owns countless properties besides Chrome, from Google Docs to Google Translate to Android, and leverages all of these (great products) to lead users towards Chrome
I always wonder why Google do this. Sure, they could always have more Chrome users, but at the same time they're going to have to support Firefox forever whatever happens, and Firefox is a nice hedge for Google against being accused of having a browser monopoly.
> but at the same time they're going to have to support Firefox forever whatever happens, and Firefox is a nice hedge for Google against being accused of having a browser monopoly
They merely need to wait for a time when the regulatory environment is more favorable. It's just a roll of the dice every 4 years, sooner or later their number will come up and they can cut all support then and there.
But it's not really necessary. By making Chrome the preferred and optimal way to use any site, and making chrome intrinsics the expected behavior of a web browser, they are creating an environment where all the incentives are towards making your browser more like chrome. Eventually there won't be much difference in the surface between Firefox and Chrome and Mozilla will finally make the decision we all eventually expect, and just change Firefox into a true chromium fork.
Though that may happen sooner anyways. It feels pretty clear that there are parts of the greater Mozilla org that don't benefit at all from all the effort going into Gecko (or a web browser in general) and wouldn't be disappointed in the money going towards other initiatives instead.
> 7. During the Brendan Eichgate, Mozilla became a hapless victim of the US culture wars, mostly acccidentally. Mozilla never recovered.
Defending Eich is a hot take that you only see here on HN. He is a worthless individual who champions the cause of taking away personal freedoms of groups of people he doesn't like, pushes anti-mask conspiracy and smears public workers like Fauci, and his only technical 'achievement' since leaving Mozilla has been to create a fork of chrome that bakes in his companies ads and pushes a scamcoin on the user.
The fact you even have the gall to defend such a person is laughable. It wasn't that long ago the population would summarily execute such people when they revealed their status as societal bad actors.
Of course Eich becoming a Mozilla higher-up (even before becoming CEO) is why browsers became so complicated and expensive to develop. We would have been better off staying with HTML3 and no javascript.
Check your chronology: I wasn't a Mozilla higher-up when HTML 4.0 replaced 3.2. IE won the first browser war and MS was instrumental along with Dave Raggett in finalizing HTML 4. MS also was all-in on "JScript" by that point, having contributed to the ECMA-262 standard as I describe here:
I was not a "Mozilla higher-up" during this period, I was not in management. From engineer role doing JS in 1995, I was promoted to Principal Engineer at Netscape by 1997. So your chronology there is bogus.
Also, mozilla.org did not exist until late 1997, and was not launched until April 1, 1998. Once again you are out to lunch on history, out of some bizarre desire to blame me personally for the web standards in full, and consequently browsers that implement them, being so complicated.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadRust, WebRender, Stylo, Pathfinder, wgpu, Dav1d, asm.js (which resulted in WebAssembly) etc.
And they helped bootstrap a lot of efforts that benefited everyone massively. Take the list above and add: LetsEncrypt, Cranelift, AV1, Opus, WebGPU, Wasmtime
Plus tooling like the reverse debugger (https://rr-project.org/) and sccache and Bors
Why Firefox, why?!
4 1/2 stars with over 4 million reviews. I use it regularly and have no real problems with it.
Initially, Google Play reviews got filled with 1 star reviews from users complaining that a lot of their workflows were broken, things that they liked were removed, extensions not working (unless you used the initial nine excluded extensions).
The rating dropped from 4.7 to 3.9 in less than a month. After that, some one star reviews were removed (maybe google thought it was review bombing or Mozilla used some kind of third party service for that). Ratings started to go up a bit after that.
And suddenly a lot of 5 stars reviews with little to no content (thumbs up emojis, Nice/Great/Good, or just dots) started to appear and the rating almost returned to the previous normal.
Nowadays is just a mix of good and bad reviews, most of them quite lengthy.
This mass feature removal is just one more data point in line with what is discussed on the article.
Thus if you had auto updates, which developers and security folks were so keen on recommending, you suddenly lost a massive amount of functionality and possibly could not do many of the things you need to do on your phone.
With no recommended way back. Oh, and many users lost their history, passwords and bookmarks with that as well. It's hard for users to see that approach from a software company as anything other than a statement of "We're smarter than you, we know better than you, get f**ed"; a big thumb in the eye from some product manager somewhere.
Get that experience enough times with Mozilla updates and you start to view all of their design decisions through that lens.
It was a great browser! I still install it once a month to see if they bring back the critical usability features. No dice yet.
What are your main pain points?
I like the new look, I even like the bottom URL bar placement that many reviewers seem to be negative about, and I like the concept of collections that the user base is protesting so much. Those are fine for me.
However, I'm regularly running into bugs ever since I updated from that latest "old" mobile Firefox. It took them months to support the certificate authority installed on my phone, and even now that's a hidden setting somewhere in a debug menu. Using said certificate with a HTTP proxy is still broken.
There's no setting to control DOH, even though there's no reason the browser might not support it. In fact, there's no way to use about:config AND use a stable version of the browser on Android; you need to run Beta or Nightly or the folks at Mozilla don't trust you to touch the settings. The addon library is abysmal, even after all this time, and the hack to get around that requires a Mozilla account and messing with custom addon lists.
I can't view the source of the current page anymore. It's been too long since I last had the option, so I'm not sure if this was an addon or a part of the core browser, but I used to be able to hit the menu button and click "view source". I think the view-source: URI scheme is still supported, but I can't figure out how to make the app respect it anymore.
For the past weeks, I've been running into a bug where using Swiftkey in combination with Firefox sometimes clears the entire text field. On websites that use native text boxes like HN I can correct that by opening another keyboard with a control key (Hacker's Keyboard) and hitting CTRL+Z, but on websites that provide their own rich editing that's impossible. This bug has eaten tens of posts of mine, some not at all short, and from what I can tell from Github the bug should already be fixed (it isn't) or will be fixed in Firefox 94 (which hits Beta in about 20 days, and then stable in November). All other browsers work fine with this keyboard, and it seems like everyone using Swiftkey and Firefox together should be running into this. I'm a little annoyed that this fix wasn't backported to current versions of the browser.
I would've been fine with all of this if this was the first release of Firefox on Android. However, it's simply not; there was a competent version of Firefox before the rewrite and the modern version still hasn't reached feature parity after dropping that version more than a year ago. Being able to hit install on any Firefox addon and being reasonably sure that it'll work was very liberating. Of course, some of the addons simply couldn't work because they relied on UI not present in the mobile apps, but I never saw that as a problem. Those addons got purged with the switch to WebExtensions anyway.
Perhaps people who switched from Chrome to Firefox after the release of the rewrite won't have as many issues because they never used the advanced features Firefox used to support.
All in all, it's a decent mobile browser, but the reasons I started using it in the first place have slowly been eroded away.
edit: Really just curious, I'm assuming I'm using it differently.
I run Steam on the same machine (AoE III) with Firefox, LibreOffice Calc open as well and it's just smooth. No overheating or anything.
I find that hard to believe considering no hardware accelerated video playback (although other linux browsers also have the same problem). At the very least, I think that statement needs to be qualified with a "under certain use cases".
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/icloud-bookma...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icloud-bookmarks/f...
I think it does tabs, too, but I'm not sure.
I tried through the years, and always ended up with a main browser (Safari or now Firefox) and Chrome as a Google dedicated browser, because the experience would be miserable otherwise. At this point I stopped blaming the other browsers.
I can/could use any of the properties in a pinch, but something would give after a while. The worst offender for me was Meet, a few hours of here and there meetings would trigger weird interface scaling effects, or it just wouldn’t join any new meeting with the screen staying stale. On firefox Bluejeans or Zoom wouldn’t do it, just Meet.
I don't use Ff because I can't approve with exactly one of their UI choices: tab closing button on the wrong side. I am on Mac and this just messes with my muscle memory too much. (It used to be that the buttons where on the right side, which is to say the left side.)
However, other than that I see a lot of UI love in both the macOs and iOS Ff interfaces. One can feel the team works from their hearts.
I wish they would use their brains more. Painful irony.
EDIT: Anybody an idea why this got downvoted?
I also used to use reader mode once in a while...
I'm happily on brave mobile, which does block ads.
There is also Brave Rewards, something that pays you for viewing ads but is disabled by default and can be totally hidden through another setting.
This straightforward set-up isn't something I feel deserves the number of negative comments I see on here. The benefits far outweigh the minor inconvenience of changing two settings.
This type of advertising doesn't go against any of Brave's principles. The user is in control. Trackers and their ads are blocked by default as these harvest user data and more.
Brave's alternative, privacy-preserving advertising model is based on user-control and consent. The user decides whether or not they will participate, and to what degree. And, the user's data is never sent off-device; users are rewarded (with 70% of the associated ad revenue) for their attention rather than their data or actions.
I was never referring to ads that Brave blocks.
I'm talking about the new tab ads. Those shouldn't exist. Period.
> This type of advertising doesn't go against any of Brave's principles
No but it goes against the notion of "ad free browsing" that Brave kind of marketed. Perhaps they toed the line with exactly what they consider "ads" but at the end of the day users installed brave wanting ZERO ads.
Replacing someone else's ad for your own is not what I'd call "ad free" nor "ethical", regardless of the use (or lack thereof) of trackers.
> Brave's alternative, privacy-preserving advertising model is based on user-control and consent.
I never consented to ads. Period.
> The user decides whether or not they will participate, and to what degree
And I never decided that I wanted ads in my browser, yet here we are.
> And, the user's data is never sent off-device; users are rewarded (with 70% of the associated ad revenue) for their attention rather than their data or actions.
And what if I don't want a browser that has all of this fancy mining crap in it? Braves stance is "it's okay to add bloat as long as we preserve privacy". Nobody seems to see the problem with this.
It's such a middle finger to users, in my opinion.
I notice such advertisement from time to time, but it's so unobstructive that I almost like them.
Yes, they put advertising where it doesn't bother me and where it doesn't slow down page loading.
That's brilliant.
Thank you for pointing that out!
Main reasons I also moved to Brave on all my devices. If these are fixed and Mac battery consumption is fixed I'd go back asap
---
- Scrolling up on Google search's results page and some other pages is not registered half the time, and sometimes triggers pull-to-refresh instead
- Scrolling up inside an input box while the page is at the top of the screen causes unintentional pull-to-refresh
- Bitwarden autofill is not registered unless you kill and restart the app after logging in
- You can't save images that require cookies to be passed to the request, such as under DDoS protected pages
- Links will sometimes redirect to about:blank unless you go back and click them again
- Most recently visited page is not restored when closing and reopening the app, even though it's saved to the history (closed as wontfix)
- Uses large amounts of memory, causing Android share actions to be silently killed due to OOM unless you quickly kill the app right after sending them
- Closing a tab and clicking "Undo" in the popup sends the tab all the way to the top of the list, instead of its original position (inconvenient if you have a large number of tabs open)
- Frequently loses open tabs in memory, even within ten seconds of navigating to another tab
- Startup time is noticably slower than Brave, taking at least a few seconds to show the UI and begin loading the page. It isn't much, but it impacts the user experience every time you start the app again.
I use it all the time now because it supports uBlock Origin and Dark Reader and I think it's good. And I have all my bookmarks on Firefox sync. I have some minor issues with it like the tab list that doesn't always scroll right but they're not deal-breakers.
I guess both opinions aren't popular :) But that's my reasons to use Firefox despite not being fully happy with it.
What upsets me is that there's no way to add it as default search in a browser, on purpose, because they want you to have to install brave browser to do that. Nothing upsets me more than when someone deliberately makes their product less useful. I do not like Brave, but I will use the search engine for now.
To make Brave Search default in another browser, please load https://search.brave.com/help/default. In Safari, there's no way we know of to add an alternative default. Apple controls the dropdown list's contents. But try this link in Firefox or Chrome.
I will try to do it again, thanks.
Very arguable that Eich's single handedly more responsible for javascript than Brave, engineering wise.
I'm not a crypto fan, or of adtech, but BAT is atleast a functional solution to directly supporting sites.
It's one thing for an employee to have private views but another for a CEO to actively try and influence the law. Especially for something that's in my opinion totally a private matter between people. I don't want to support the brand because of that.
But I'm not doubting his skills as an engineer. It's more about the brand and its values. For a public figure like a CEO these things are hard to separate, I understand that. But we live in a world where a brand is more than just a name on a sticker. If I'm using it I'm also supporting the associated values.
But I agree the way I said it was hyperbolic.
Which he did not. He wasn't CEO at that time. He made "small" donations from his own money under his own name years before his appointment. And at no point did he abused Mozilla for any personal political goal of him AFAIK. He just was an employee supporting his own private views. Just that he is a bit more famous than your average employee.
You can also switch in built in adblocker in Vivaldi. There's no reason to use Firefox.
In AdGuard, you can add "extensions" that extend the functionality of the browser. Its simple. For example, playing youtube in background or bypassing paywalls. Extensions are little javascripts.
At least there's a workaround for the bookmark issue. There's no workaround for renamed menu items and changed shortcut keys.
First the GUI to edit the GUI disappears, then the about:config option follows later.
That's what's been steadily happening. Less and less customizability for power users, more and more streamlining for new users.
power users were the market early on, and that’s just not the case anymore… power users have been spoiled for a long time online, most things outside of tech have never been built for us
If those are indeed the only other options besides users finding another product, I'd say you answered exactly why Firefox is in decline.
Yes, my point exactly. You can answer "just modify the CSS" every time someone complains about a change in Firefox, but in reality users will find another product instead.
(edit to fix typos on mobile)
User css and js, which were once first class are now very hidden and require messing with about:config. There's no way to prevent tabs from being on top. Many extensions are no longer possible Post-Quantum. And I do think switching to WevExtensions was the right move, but they've been slow in adding capabilities to make some extensions work as well as they did before. Removing compact mode (they added it back but behind an about:config flag). They removed SSB with no plans to ever add it back. True SSB didn't fully work, but I had high hopes that it could let me run web apps in a way that felt more native.
And part of my frustration is with the response. The reason for removing things is often "no one is using it." But then when people who show up saying they use it, and it is important to them, Mozilla generally either outright ignores them, or dismisses those opinions as invalid.
Now after this you may want to refer back to the article. I have seen various pieces and rants like this article that complain about this but none of them offer any more reliable sources of information. The article makes an unverifiable claim of "Almost everyone hated the changes" and unfortunately those type of claims seem to be extremely common instead of presenting some data. That's not enough to change anyone's course.
But in the end, I don't know what you mean by "systematically removed" in that way, frequent addition and removal of various features is completely normal for a large project. And technically only the setting was removed -- you can still customize all that but you'll have to modify the browser itself. No they probably won't add back in the setting but as I explained above, those have a cost, and when the cost-benefit analysis doesn't play out the right way, it doesn't make sense to blame an organization for cutting it.
You are suggesting that I replace a simple configuration change with familiarizing myself with a very complicated code base, creating a patch, and running a build that on my machine takes multiple hours, then repeat the process for every update? Yeah, I have no idea why more people don't do that.
> I don't know what you mean by "systematically removed" in that way, frequent addition and removal of various features is completely normal for a large project.
Sure. But from my perspective at least, the customisability is decreasing, more features are being removed than added. It used to be that Firefox was a browser built for power users, but it is becoming less so. That was one of it's major advantages over chrome.
I understand the cost of maintaining features, and the tradeoffs involved. The Firefox teams priorities are different than mine, and I understand that. For example, there are many features I would have rather seen worked on rather than redesigning the UI (and I do actually like a lot of the proton design). But I can accept that they have different priorities. But they are also bleeding users, so something is clearly not working for them. And maybe, as the OP suggests it is because of changes that anger a minority of their users. At some point, the union of many minorities becomes a majority.
I'll also mention that only one person needs to create the build, once you do that then anyone else can run that build. That's usually how development works, and in fact this is already the gist of how Mozilla tests their unstable builds.
>the customisability is decreasing, more features are being removed than added
I can't agree with this, maybe the amount of visible settings in the preferences has been reduced, but currently there are a few thousand about:config options, and the number seems to keep growing.
>But they are also bleeding users, so something is clearly not working for them. And maybe, as the OP suggests it is because of changes that anger a minority of their users.
For many years I asked people why they were switching to Chrome and I got various answers, very few of them were because of something negative about another browser, and most of them were about what they liked about Chrome. That's just my personal anecdote. It also just seems to me that Mozilla is in a bad place where people say they drop Firefox because they like Chrome, so Mozilla switches gears to make it more like Chrome, and then people complain it's not unique enough anymore and it's missing some old non-Chrome feature. How could they possibly win here?
> but currently there are a few thousand about:config options, and the number seems to keep growing.
But those configurations are not very discoverable, not well documented, are in constant flux, and if you set them incorrectly can really mess up your browser (I speak from experience).
> I'll also mention that only one person needs to create the build, once you do that then anyone else can run that build
From my understanding, if I were to distribute my custom build I would also need to change all the firefox branding, since Mozilla has trademarks on it, which increases the effort even more.
I think the huge number of about:config options is actually a major problem for Firefox, there is no possible way to test all those options and ensure they stay working forever and have zero regressions. You won't like this, but a lot of them probably need to be removed.
You would need to change the branding but I think some of the other Firefox modifications have systems in place to deal with that. If you ever need to do it, maybe it would be worth asking them.
Then why do you keep being so?
But, I bet you'll refuse to understand this too, and continue your bot-like repetition of non-answers. (Hint: Don't bother; nobody is buying.)
Sheesh, don't you even notice how you're coming off here?
And any firefox update could potentially break your css fix.
Yes an update could break your CSS fix, but if you follow the beta releases then this isn't a problem. You usually have at least a few weeks to update your patches before the release goes out.
> Firefox is not really any more difficult to build than any other large open source project.
That has not been my experience. Granted, chromium also has a very difficult and slow build, and browsers are big complicated things. But my point is it isn't easy.
It's true the build process is slow, but that's different from being difficult. I don't know what you mean by difficult. Maybe it was difficult in the past but it's entirely automated at this point. You can just start the build and come back some hours later, and that's only if you're starting from a clean repo and modifying the C++/Rust. For the CSS and Javascript, that doesn't need a rebuild at all.
[1] view-source:chrome://browser/content/browser.xhtml
And I know I've said this already but taking those "way too many steps" is exactly what you'd be asking them to do, so it's unclear why it's not worth it for you but it would be for them.
> That's what's been steadily happening.
You wrote this in a way that is (probably deliberately) misleading. Neither of those things have happened nor is there any indication that they will.
Especially about:config which (probably) provides an enormous amount of benefit for early testing of features.
> > That's what's been steadily happening.
> You wrote this in a way that is (probably deliberately) misleading. Neither of those things have happened nor is there any indication that they will.
You're not so much misleading as outright lying. That is exactly what has been happening, over and over again.
Drag the spacers from the toolbar into the element menu.
Click "Done"
If privacy is the ultimate concern, I can suffer usability.
I think the real issue is we've stopped advocating for privacy loudly and publicly. All the users know is convenience.
But with Firefox, all the UI choices are gone now, intentionally sacrificed on the altair of rewrites, UI changes, branding and some dubious security claims. You used to get the choice of vertical tabs (better on todays widescreen laptops), tree-style tabs, Buttons where you liked them, user-provided CSS customization for pages and the UI. Not anymore, all gone (they paid some lip service to some of the above concerns, but nothing relevant, and overall a massive downturn).
Now you only get the take-it-or-leave-it of one crappy and worsening Chrome clone UI.
I activated browser debugging, pressed ctrl + alt + shift + i and then hunted down the offending tab bar and put in "display: none" for it.
It gets harder and harder year by year though and on the tabstrip issue in Bugzilla there's at least one person who was annoyed and told me to not question peoples motives after I asked a simple question about it.
Anyone here working for Mozilla, I ask the same question here: are you overcomplicating it? I managed to get rid of that tab bar using a CSS hack, why can't we just get a function to apply that css, at least in developer edition?
That said, these days Linux is just more convenient than the alternatives for me personally. Same goes for Firefox (still).
I wish they could find a stronger inner core to work on, something more utilitarian than user-drafting.
There's a lot of people saying chrome wins because websites are better with it, sites with high requirements like zoom IIRC, but in my experience it's not common nor impactful enough (these sites work fine enough on my old laptop)
whoever has the solution i hope it comes fast
Judging by the HN and Reddit comments with each Firefox/Signal/Matrix releases, it seems most of the customers of privacy focused products want all the other features of competitors; most of the times without paying any money (or they think donations should cover for everything because they once donated, so all hundreds of thousand users would). And they dislike/have negative sentiments towards any UI changes or breaking functionality for new features. So core userbase for these products becomes hostile towards the product growth by definition. In this environment, either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
This is a business model question, right? Nothing prevents someone from making a great privacy focused browser and actually charging for it vs being directly (Brave?) or indirectly (Chrome, Firefox?) ad-monetized.
Also in this context, referring to "customers of privacy focus products" is technically incorrect, they are actually users. Definition of a customer is "someone who pays for goods or services" thus Mozilla's main customer is Google (accounting for close to 90% of its revenue). Maybe looking through this lens, relation of Firefox product direction and what its "customers" want becomes more clear.
edit: simplified for clarity
Except the fact that nobody (relative to even their current userbase) would use it, and maintaining a browser is incredibly difficult and expensive.
It would be the death blow to their market share, which would destroy Gecko as a viable browser engine (not enough users to get websites to care about the bugs, or even necessarily get the bugs reported).
The only way that would work out is if they gave up on Gecko and switched to WebKit or Blink.
Their choice of business model isn't really much of a choice, it's the only viable option that gives them any influence whatsoever.
But the reality is that because of this, browsers are commoditized, and the average user will never pay for a browser if they can get Chrome or Safari for free. That's probably true of the average HN user, too, for that matter.
Assuming 100 people needed for Gecko, and $150k/year annual, world-wide, average developer expense, we come to $15M/year. Mozilla already has about ~$50M/year non-Google revenue from its products (coming from "true" users/customers).
Does Gecko really need more than 100 people?
Do most people use Firefox because it's "privacy focused"? I don't - I think people use it because it does the things they want ... and "privacy" is far down that list.
I know I'm an odd-ball, but I haven't upgrading my FF because I want ftp support in my browser. I upgraded the desktop my kids use, and the tabs went all wonky. The only reason I haven't switched is I trust Google less than I do FF, and I want to stave off a technology monoculture.
Yes, my clear desire for ftp support means I don't want technologically perfect security or privacy.
Concerning "privacy" as the article points out in the section "Invading your privacy at the same time as telling us “we value your privacy”
] Telemetry. Hidden telemetry that isn’t disabled when you click “disable telemetry”. Firstrun pings. Forced signing of add-ons. Auto-updates you can’t switch off, pinging every 10 minutes. “Experiments” which require a separate opt out. Now the latest offence is enforcing app based 2FA to login to a Firefox Add-on account just to make a custom theme, which you wouldn’t need in the first place if not for forced add-on signing.
> either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
FF has dropped a lot of users, so I assume you mean it's decided to be a niche product in the "privacy" space, and not a generally useful tool?
Its marketing doesn't seem that successful, as my first thoughts are to switch to a tool based on FOSS Chromium.
Also, I must be blind but I didn’t notice any diff with the tabs in that recent update where everyone freaked out because the tabs were slightly different. The tabs are still fine!
Come to think of it I don’t have any complaints about Firefox, so I’m not sure why I’m bothering to contribute my thoughts here.
Except FF market percentage has been decreasing not growing. The technical foundation has gotten better, but it’s like Mozilla execs are completely out of sync with the market share they could have. They want a “shiny” app that in theory people should want, not the app people actually want.
I just hope some group of geeks decides to fork it and change it up.
[1]: https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/
Execs may have less to do with the decline than a changing market. Google poured resources and new ideas into a mostly greenfield effort, and leveraged its market position to push its browser. Edge and Safari also benefit from their makers' platforms and marketing.
It's a hostile world for an independent browser. And IMO Firefox is still the least worst option.
Sure, bit it would have been a little less hostile if they hadn't brought quite a lot of that on themselves with their long history of hostile-to-tech-savvy-users decisions.
I use it because I like it a little bit more than chrome. And because I don't want google to completely control the browser market. But the more firefox becomes like chrome, the less reason I have to continue using it.
And despite what Mozilla thinks and wants, I don't think most Firefox users care that much about privacy. I suspect most Firefox users use it because their tech saavy friend, relative, or IT administrator installed it for them and/or told them to use it. So losing core users also means using many other users in their sphere of influence.
Turning off telemetry by default is also not an option, because then they would have no data, and would just be making decisions at random -- I really doubt that would please you either.
And now because Mozilla lacks data from its most coveted “tech” users, it does make decisions based on data that it has, which is usually totally opposite (like in your example) which in turns pisses off these users even more and they jump ship, taking all their friends and family with them (because they are the “tech” person in their circle). That is how you lose users.
You can of course make a zero telemetry browser, relying 100% on your own research and what the users volunteer to tell you directly. And those most passionate about it with tell you the most, a wonderful positive feedback loop. But this would require a change of product development mindset to a completely user centric one.
From the developer point of view, this is incorrect, the developers are using it to decide which features to prioritize. If you are aware that it's happening and you leave it on, then I don't see what the problem is. Resource and bandwidth usage should be very minimal, if it's not then I would urge you to actually measure it and report bugs. It should be possible to compress it so that it doesn't eat up your bandwidth. Remember that it also takes bandwidth and CPU to post on Hacker News, so you will have to compare it to that to have any kind of meaningful data.
My point is, it if lacks the data from those users, it would make sense to start sending them that data. It doesn't make sense to me to complain about them having incorrect data on you when you intentionally don't send them the right data and then threaten to jump ship because of what seems to be your own actions. I personally also disable telemetry but I know full well that I'm opting out of an important system for them so I don't expect to get attention in return for doing that. If you wanted to help, I think they would very much welcome attempts to fix the telemetry and make it more bandwidth-respecting and privacy-respecting, rather than finding ways to just throw it out.
>You can of course make a zero telemetry browser, relying 100% on your own research and what the users volunteer to tell you directly. And those most passionate about it with tell you the most, a wonderful positive feedback loop.
In my experience, this is an unreliable way to make products, the type of user who is passionate and volunteers this information is not the average user. You will end up with a very niche product that way, and the cost would be very high since you would be expecting the same quality of features but for a smaller number of users. If you're interested to do this I would suggest you to fork Firefox and attempt to get funding, and try that out just to see how much work it actually is compared to how little those users are actually willing to pay. Take a look at Waterfox if you want to see an example of how this would be done.
Most people are not aware of telemetry. Most of those that are, disable it. So you end up getting what you call 'votes' from the people who are not aware they are 'voting'. That is not voting (for which a person need to be consciously doing it) but rather extraction of information.
Imagine in an election, the votes of those who didn't explicitly vote get automatically extracted and cast based on a biased algorithm produced by the government. If you do not like the idea of that, you should not like the idea of opt-out telemetry. What you want is opt-in telemetry (aka. voting).
> Resource and bandwidth usage should be very minimal
I fully agree, that is the other reason zero telemetry is a way to go and should be default. You can not beat that.
> In my experience, this is an unreliable way to make products
Not sure what your experience is but I already built one company like that and I am doing another one right now (incidentally a web browser) based on this same principle which is called user-centric product development. Btw. Mozilla practiced that too ~15 years ago (the "golden age" of Firefox, reference here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28493855).
Do you have some numbers to back this up? I would suggest getting that before making any major product decisions. Also if you read the privacy policy, the telemetry is spelled out in detail, or at least it should be, so the people who are voting should be well aware of what is going on. If nobody reads it, then the solution there would then be to make it obvious and easy to read, not to throw it out completely.
>I fully agree, that is the other reason zero telemetry is a way to go and should be default. You can not beat that.
I don't understand. That isn't a meaningful comparison because you're comparing it with nothing, you would need to present an alternate data source. This to me is kind of like saying "not having a stomach beats having a stomach because you won't need to worry about eating anymore" or something like that.
>Imagine in an election, the votes of those who didn't explicitly vote get automatically extracted and cast based on a biased algorithm produced by the government.
I'm sorry but this is exactly what various governments already do in a lot of cases. Not for general elections but for services or programs that they run or for appointed positions. They will do a study with passive data gathering and determine who is actually using what services, and if the results are good they will increase funding to the service, otherwise they will cut funding, fire people, etc. This is generally how any organization functions at scale, so I really don't understand what you're getting at here or what alternative you're proposing. If you want to apply this to product development, it would simply be infeasible for users to vote on every single ticket that a developer handles, so you need to find some other data-driven way to make decisions. That's what telemetry is put in place to do. I think there is a misunderstanding here of how this works, but it's not your fault.
I wish you luck with your company, but I suspect you will have difficulty getting funding on the level of Firefox or Chrome, especially if you have no hard data from some kind of telemetry or similar source. The privacy-conscious user is known to be a fickle market. I also would advise against making misleading and/or unsourced statements about other browsers if you intend to develop a competing product, this makes your company look bad.
This isn't true, Mozilla is making it very clear the first time you are launching Firefox and you have a button just next to the message to disable it easily without having to go to the settings. I don't know how they could be better about it.
Like, no matter what, telemetry is useful to the product, and defaults matter. Like the infamous “the opt-ot organ donor vs opt-in countries have a staggering difference of 90% difference”. Should firefox throw away 90% of its userbase’s useful telemetry, most of who would have no problem with providing it?
I want firefox to be good. I don't even need to have the newest features I just wamt a stable browser I can use. Don't we all? Removing features I actually use and adding things I don't need is counterproductive and I don't know which part of their telemetry helped them make those choices, but many I didn't like.
> Should firefox throw away 90% of its userbase’s useful telemetry, most of who would have no problem with providing it?
Telemetry should always be opt-in. Firefox throws enough messages your way if they would ask (like many other programs) "Help make firefox better" and then offer different level of reporting it would be fine. They ask me to change my theme at the start, but they don't ask me if I want to send them my data?
Well, this is exactly the point. If you disable telemetry, how do you expect them to know that you are using that feature and they shouldn't remove it?
Anyway for the longest time I send detailed information with all my crash reports and similar, but not only could I never find out where they collected the crashes I send in no no error (even the reproducible once) got fixed. The only times my problems got fixed where when I actively filed a bug report myself or fixed the cause of the issue manually.
After a few years I began to wonder if anybody even reads those crash reports and added a request for a quick pingback something like "empty message is fine. I just want to know if anybody is actually reading this". Did this _multiple_ times, never got any response. Either they don't read or they don't care. Anyway I'm over giving my data for aggregations that probably never get used.
If someone from mozilla could tell me that they actually matter maybe I would change my mind, but for now I'll drive my privacy is important for me train, because it really is and if the people that collect my data don't or misuse it I don't see the point in sending it.
Maybe I was expecting too much, but if this is too much of a response then I don't want to contribute anything (at least like this).
And you made it happen by your choices.
Stuff like AMP was mostly brought throughs search alone.
If they pivot towards "mainstream appeal", it usually comes to the expense of that user community. Their alternative is to be the best Firefox they can possibly be, and wait for users to join their audience organically.
It feels like Vivaldi has done a better job of sticking to a clear user persona model. They are clearly targeting power users and Opera 12 refugees, and it feels like that still informs what they do. Unfortunately, the one thing they can't do is make a browser that doesn't run like cold treacle.
There are always comments and complaints. One need to evaluate the quality of this complains to understand their worth.
> either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
Successful products prove this wrong. The most successful ones barely change at all, they usually evolve for a decade or two and then adapt to a new generation. Stability is a viable road to success.
Heck, even chrome didn't really change that much since it's first version. Firefox is really absurdly extraordinary in how unstable it is.
Easily explainable
Mozilla been captured by "aspirational" MBA types who think they don't really need that userbase, instead they want to chase "what big boys do", and copy lame features in hopes that monkeying Apple will score them iDevices users — the type of people they psychologically want to associate themselves with.
I believe it to be corporate sabotage by Google ... due to the 100's of millions of dollars that Google gives to the Mozilla Foundation, they have a lot of influence over Firefox.
And most people probably don't make a conscious decision about which browser to use. A lot of Firefox's momentum comes from tech saavy users who recommend it to friends, family, coworkers, etc. So losing "core" users cause a chain effect of losing non "core" users.
Looking at why established users complain about Firefox isn't why billions of people moved to Chrome, from many sources. It was the default on our phone and that makes it an obvious desktop choice.
(Not to mention it does do some things nicely, I just much prefer FF for webdev)
I just hope it's not Nokia level deliberate sabotage.
> That might not go on for much longer, though.
I will use it till the end and will use what ever the FOSS community forks from it or existing forks. Because, I'm guilty that me not using FF and FOSS alternatives for Operating Systems, Browsers, Software has led to rise of the Mono/Duo/Oligopolies in-spite of possessing the skills to understand the outcome, In-spite of having access to the warnings for smart people who said exactly this would happen.
Which is a pity, because, besides the fact that Chrome has almost all of the marketshare, they also basically own Mozilla financially (is this still correct ?) and technologically Firefox uses Skia and Harfbuzz for rendering, both heavily dependent on Google.
So there is basically no competition for Google in the browser market.
This can't be good.
https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/blob/main/COPYING
IIRC, Google Chrome (for Windows) was essentially built by engineers hired from Mozilla back in 2005/6? How tables turn.
Also there's really only one way to file bugs: bugzilla.mozilla.org.
Otherwise I've been really surprised how much better Firefox has gotten in the last two years. Good to see old giant still alive.
What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams? That should've been the highest priority. Instead, it took them years to get at least the GPOs right, autoupdate is the same story... so many things in corprote env were or still are PITA to set up in Firefox. So unfortunately no wonder it's Chrom(ium) for every single big company out there.
And don't get me wrong, I try to use exclusively Firefox whenver I can, but this is really frustrating to me as sysadmin.
1. Google basically controls the web.
2. Whenever a new Web API shows up, browser vendors have to decide between implementing the standard and copying the bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions that are implemented in Chromium.
3. Websites are tested on Chromium, so they start to rely on Chromium's bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions.
4. When a website breaks in Firefox (or Safari), people claim that it's the fault of Firefox devs and switch to Chromium.
The early web got tired of this when it was Microsoft at the wheels, but it feels that few people are particularly interested in fighting the good fight these days. Much easier to blame Mozilla.
I think that's the wrong way around. Why would Firefox need to change their browser for a specific web application?
Microsoft chose not to support Firefox, not the other way around. It's still choosing not to support smaller platforms (the Linux application is simply garbage, lacking basic features that have been available on other platforms for months).
When I ran into this problem, Teams didn't work because Firefox didn't allow the application to enumerate the audio devices hooked up to my computer, only exposing a "default" one. I don't even understand why that would be a problem, my browser already asked which input and output to use, why would Teams need to care?
Jitsi and Google Meet worked fine, so the problem was clearly with Microsoft's developers. They managed to fix the problem eventually, so Microsoft should take 100% of the blame here in my opinion.
I don't know about the sysadmin stuff. Honestly, with modern Chrome-clone Edge, I'd expect most business that roll out a browser to now simply stick to the built-in browser.
Same thing with MS login https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p1ral4/firefox_91...
It inherently makes sense that all those apps would try to understand what devices were available and even allow switching between them. It's often required because that entire stack between the browser, os, and device is very unreliable even on something like macOS.
Yea it's on MS to test and fix their stuff, but FF is the one losing market share and honestly part it sounds like they make their apis more prone to misuse. At least in this case.
To be fair(ish) to Microsoft, I did spoof Chrome's user agent because Microsoft forced a "this website doesn't work with your browser" screen in Firefox. Perhaps the failing API was an unstable Chrome-only API that they assumed works because of the UA. The browser compatibility screen communicates that they definitely tested it, that they definitely knew about the problem, and that they just didn't want to fix it.
I just dropped Teams as an option and sent everyone who wanted to video chat Jitsi links. That worked fine while I needed it. If a company chooses not to support me, then I will choose not to use that company if I can.
[1] https://caniuse.com/?search=enumerateDevices
Because Firefox has more to lose by not doing so. The blame game is pointless because in the end it helps Firefox in no way.
1: (original Raymond Chen link busted, but quoted here:) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
Why use a browser for Teams at all?
Also this way you can use add-ons with it.
Honestly, Mozilla has lost the big picture. The whole point of it was to have fewer messages that occupy the mind and disrupt tasks, and Chrome does it better, as long as I’m logged in.
And the open-source version of the sync server is bad software, age-old python, tons of code smells. I'd wager it is not what they are using themselves.
Proprietary software is often way worse than any of the OSS projects.
https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
Are you exaggerating or does yours work differently?
Not everyone wants to spend time disabling features of their browser to be able to use it.
Especially if Firefox pretends to not get in your way!
But, with tabs specifically, I very rarely have more than two going at a time. That probably matters.
It would appear that Mozilla has become captive to a single person as their personal hustle to enrich themself and a few others to the organization’s detriment.
Maybe you could expand this out a little for people who aren't In The Know. Specifics on why each person on the page isn't qualified to lead a browser company will help a ton. Thanks in advance.
Note: I use Chrome for work to 1/ isolate my work from personal sessions without the hassle of containers or profiles, and 2/ because I work for a web app targeting Chrome (per the market share).
Besides, isn't this app a violation of Youtube's policies?
This is "hacker" news :)
I use Firefox most of the time, out of a desire to support Mozilla and promote a non-Google browser. Admittedly, this is a political motivation, but it comes at pretty much zero practical cost. If you are interested in trying out Firefox, I think the only significant inconvenience is disabling Pocket.
Like the parent, I'll occasionally switch to Chrome for separate profiles, or if I need something specific in DevTools. Chrome has much better multi-profile support, in the sense that it has it at all, but again, the differences between the two are so minor that I don't have any qualms switching back and forth.
But both are just fine. Never have issues with Firefox. But I do have issues with its UI. Too much wasted space, it's only useable in compact mode which they want to get rid of. And I hate that there's no clear visual separation between tabs anymore. Even Chrome and edge have this.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-color...
Maybe it will help someone who has the same problem.
I really miss the old and customizable Firefox.
This is really the largest beef I have with Firefox. Firefox had been making poor (IMHO) UI decisions for a very long time -- but it didn't matter, because it was customizable enough that you could fix them.
Now that it's much less customizable, though, there is so much that can no longer be fixed.
Very good idea to have mapped the rants that have accumulated over time to the historical evolution of Firefox.
It is often that you hear that a minority of complainers are just adverse to change and that the majority agree with the stupid changes. But, in fact, the majority of person will disagree in silence and just switch to alternative solutions without a vocal complaint.
So, it is important to listen to vocal complainers, even in minority, because most of the time they are your canaries in coal mines. The one in front of new problems, ready to give some of their time and energy to save you.
An additional point not mentioned in the article is the general lost confidence with the Mozilla organisation that more and more looks like to use the Firefox cash cow to fund useless random activities and insipid Management.
That's an interesting point. The #1 Linux distribution on distrowatch for the last 12 month is now MX Linux, a non-systemd distro. Of course, the next 15 distros use systemd, so maybe that says nothing after all.
Maybe in some cases this is true, but I can't agree with that in terms of taking product direction from social media. In my (anecdotal) experience with areas where I have expertise, the loud and vocal complainers are almost always completely wrong about something or missing some key piece of information. In fact the angrier and more emotional the complaining, the more likely it seems to me that the complaint is based on false information. Maybe I'll have to do a comprehensive study on this at some point.
If you meant "listen" only in terms of hear what they have to say in order to educate them then sure, that can be important for marketing to explain product changes, but it's not a way to drive product changes.
It's been in chrome for more than 10 years already. It's such a basic feature, you earn a lot of time at not filling your address every time and even more with your card number you always forgot the number.
A few month ago they finally add the tab feature for directly researching in a site except it still a lot worse user friendly than chrome and it worked on a few website only
Yes please save all of your personal and payment information in your browser, I don't see how that could be a bad idea.
Funnily enough, moving tabs to the top is actually one of the few UI changes I actually agree with and find more logical. Since the address bar and navigation buttons only control the active tab, they logically belong ‘inside’ the tab: switching to a different tab should also switch to a ‘different’ address bar and buttons. (Internally they may be the same object, but that’s just an implementation detail.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
There's an addon for that, but you no longer can hide the default tab bar! So now it just wastes space up there for me. Mozilla... just one day removed the option to hide it. First from the GUI, then from about:config. And also addons can no longer hide it either.
This assumes a landscape-oriented monitor.
I would suggest trying this out on a portait oriented monitor. Tabs on top make the most sense there.
Also, I would generally suggest trying out a portrait oriented monitor. It's quite useful for coding, reading, etc.
Tried, didn't work, chances are you need a browser or a terminal running test/grep or another code file/document side by side. There are very few intances when you only look at one file and whether you see 150 lines or 100 lines doesn't really matter much, when the file is longer than that anyway and a function is often shorter.
This is exactly how I'm using Firefox right now: https://framagit.org/ariasuni/tabcenter-reborn/-/wikis/theme...
After using tree style tabs it’s very frustrating for me to go back to using other tab styles in other browsers.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
These days you have chromium based choices too: Edge and Vivaldi, which has just become Cinamon's default browser. On Edge you can turn off title bar, for Vivaldi it's the address bar. They look quite neat that way.
They're both simple vertical tabs and not automatically organized as a tree, but to me that trikes the right ballance because I don't want to feel too confortable opening tons of tabs.
And I use Chrome to keep it logged in to my gmail only there, I'm logged out of Google (with blocked cookies) everywhere else.
Firefox only on mobile, and I'm quite happy. I haven't tried the others yet.
At least it's consistent :D
For me it is: I can't copy from the URL-bar to other apps. Inside of firefox works, copying from everywhere else works.
I didn't care to investigate though as I rarely need to do that and I was pretty sure it's my fault for locking it into it's own user namespaces.
The idea is that MS, Google, and others really have no reason to donate to a direct competitor. Perhaps they did so because they knew it would give them control. That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy organization than a foundation that develops a web browser. The sorry state of FF was the inevitable result.
Whether you buy this narrative or not, the fact is there remains no effective threat whatsoever to the massive data collection that occurs whenever you use Chrome or Edge. 10 years ago, MS/Google had no ability to spy on the web surfing of the vast majority of computer users. Now they do.
I would not be surprised if Google's support for Mozilla is based on similar reasoning.
Monopoly laws care about marketshare and Apple's was tiny at that point, especially in the business market
This is not what happened. Microsoft was involved in a lawsuit after paying one of Apple contractors to steal QuickTime code. "investing" in Apple was part of the settlement.
https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5TdqfNE1QU
What sorry state?
The thing I don't get about this narrative is that Firefox works and works very well for me and so when I see people saying things like this it doesn't jive with reality.
However…
> That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy organization than a foundation that develops a web browser.
I do think they’re happy to spend too much time/money on their pet projects. Given the layoffs and poor market performance, this has come at the cost of their product. I’m allowed to dislike that despite still using it.
Sorry state of Firefox, I disagree. Sorry state of Mozilla, yes. So I look at M and do expect FF to get worse.
Moreover, Mozilla's Firefox is deliberately hostile to the open source movement too - their code is a convulated mess by design, to discourage others from developing competing products with it. (Remember, that Firefox has provided Mozilla with 100's of millions of dollars - so the excuse of legacy code and all is just bullshit). It's no wonder that both Webkit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome / Opera) are more popular than Gecko (the browser engine of Firefox), with developers. (All that money is just wasted on them ... ).
This is total nonsense.
It's a mess because it has 25 years of legacy behind it, and because until a few years ago all of that legacy was considered a "feature" by half of the userbase, who was screaming at them not to remove the "mess" because it would break their addons. Even in this very thread you see people whining about removing XUL addon support. And ironically, most of the "competing projects" are based around preserving that mess.
It's only since 2017 that they've really been able to clean up the architecture at all. And saying that they're "hostile to open source" is practically defamatory. Mozilla has contributed more to open source across a broad swath of organizations than 99.9% of companies that are 100x their size.
They may have started with altruistic reasons, but after tasting Google's money, their greed corrupted them.
Mobile is a good example. Mozilla realised it was in a precarious position on the mobile platform, which is dominated by Chrome, Opera and Safari. And so they have now been forced to release the Gecko rendering engine for mobile ( https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview ) and are encouraging others to create mobile browsers, in the hopes that this may provide a fillip to Mobile Firefox. Desperation drove them to this move as the money is now in mobile platform (Google paying 15 billion dollars to Apple / Safari highlights this).
If they can do this for the mobile platform, why can't they do it for the Desktop platform too?
This kind of deliberate convulated code mess is like a "dark pattern" where in you know the developer isn't really interested in supporting the open source movement. Yes, there are many other open source projects that have poor code or lack documentation, but unlike the Firefox project, none of them has 100's of millions of dollars at their disposal - it's a travesty how they have wasted all that money!
If browsers were all private, and they had power and control, it'd be harder for G and MS to poke through.
So the 'erase' a layer of the value chain by making it all open-source.
One less barrier between them and the customer.
Chrome is as important to Google as many other things, it's just not where the revenue is captured.
[1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement
The fact Mozilla squandered those "free" money is their management's fault.
1. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are not public but I would be surprised if Google didn't have 10x more people working on Chrome vs. the number of people working on Firefox.
2. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are again not public but I remember reading estimates that the equivalent ad budget for promoting Chrome during year 1 was about 6x the entire budget of Mozilla for that period (writing "equivalent" because webside, Google is its own ad agency).
3. Mozilla is competing against Google. Google owns countless properties besides Chrome, from Google Docs to Google Translate to Android, and leverages all of these (great products) to lead users towards Chrome. Case in point: many properties that don't/didn't work or work correctly with Firefox could be made to magically work if you changed your user agent to Chrome.
4. Mozilla is competing against Google. While Mozilla was front and center on many things open-source, relying on volunteers, Google employs countless (talented) Tech Evangelists and managed to attract considerable goodwill, much of it at the expense of the army of volunteers who used to help Mozilla.
5. Replace "Google" with "Apple" in the above points, adapt product names and repeat.
6. In 2011, predicting that the only way out of this was to outmaneuver Google and Apple on mobile devices/silos, Mozilla bet the farm on Firefox OS and lost. Mozilla never recovered.
7. During the Brendan Eichgate, Mozilla became a hapless victim of the US culture wars, mostly acccidentally. Mozilla never recovered.
Now, I'm not claiming that Mozilla never made any other mistake wrt technology or UX or PR. We've all seen a number of them. What I'm claiming is that these mistakes have next to no influence in comparison to the points above.
I wonder if they'll continue bothering with the deal when Edge continues to grow. Sure, Edge is just a reskin of chromium but it's run by a different company so that'll be most likely enough for market regulators.
Pretty damning that Google was never slammed with a huge fine for anti-competitive behavior for that.
I've been saying this for over a decade, and facts like just continue to make this clear.
It's not a bad thing for there to be only one HTML & JavaScript engine that you have to deal with. In fact it's the opposite. The dominance of Chrome has made development much easier.
Describing the prosecutors of a culture wars as the victims of that same culture war is a bizarre doublespeak.
He's a predator, not a victim. Using your influence to fuck over people who have NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU is absolutely disgusting and unforgivable.
That was worth his resignation.
Because that's what Proposition 8 was, an attempt to constitutionally remove marriage rights from gay people after the California courts ruled that it was allowed.
I think I'd be pretty uncomfortable making money for a person who would turn around and it to take away my / my family's rights.
I understand the folks who wanted that and why they wanted that. But it still turned Mozilla and Firefox into walking corpses.
Mozilla's problem is that its organization (the collective outcome of its employees) is extremely arrogant. Arrogant about technical choices, arrogant about product design choices, arrogant about the way they do PR (including shaming a developer after he died), and arrogant about political/ethical choices as well. That's not to say they aren't ever right, but an organization that approached political topics where Americans are evenly divided with a bit of humility might have an easier time hiring just as an organization that approached product design topic where it's users are evenly divided with a bit of humility might have an easier time finding a good design. Humility helps, and Mozilla has none of it.
There's actively woke techies (of which there are quite a few), but then there are also techies who just have a huge distaste for cultural conservatism, and of those there are many.
They're competing against Apple, Google, and Microsoft simultaneously. It is entirely possible that could have been the best CEO in the world and Firefox could still be in the same exact position right now, or one that is only marginally better.
Conformity is not just a problem for politics. Read TFA - these are all conformity problems - Mozilla gets angry at people who disagree with their point of view - whether it is that tabs belong on top or that Eich is an evil abusive person or that Proton is surely better than XUL. A company that better tolerated diversity in their employees would be better set up to tolerate diversity in their users.
Proton has literally nothing to do with XUL, so if this is something you believe they think, then they'd be right to be annoyed about people with no clue what they're talking about spreading FUD.
That is like complaining that KDE is better than QML files or that GNOME is better than .glade files. Or that Chrome is better than HTML and JavaScript. Utterly nonsensical.
I hope you can get over your anger at me and comment on market share. Excusing Mozilla's woes with "no CEO could have done better" hypotheticals is weak. Such CEO performance should in any event not be rewarded with >$3M/year.
If your "partner" is dying in the hospital, you don't have a legal right to be allowed to see them.
If your "spouse" is dying in the hospital, you do.
That's one example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo...
I'm assuming dralley didn't know (is not lying), so my advice is to check incendiary claims and avoid parroting sources you have not checked. HTH!
Comes off as nothing more than jealous spite. Certainly not what one would call a very Christian attitude.
The axis of "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" itself is no older than the 20th century, and even the concept of monogamy is relatively new as far as Abrahamic religious tradition goes.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_same-sex_unions
Sure, sex is an integral part of marriage but it's not the most important one, by far. It's much more about love and sharing life IMO.
I don't understand why what happens in a private bedroom between consenting adults is such a problem.
Besides, marriage is now entirely decoupled from making babies. Some people might wish it weren’t the case, but it is.
It was in the discussion around the referendum on gay marriage which passed.
The fundamental thing with politics is that there will be disagreement, and things will be voted on, and positions on those will be campaigned on.
As far as I know Eich didn't publicize those stances, someone dug them up. That is, there was a job, and there was personal politics, as is professional.
It's easy and fun to point to half a dozen of your favourite Mozilla missteps over more than a decade and say "those are why Mozilla is losing". Maybe if Mozilla had done none of them, they wouldn't be losing. But in reality every vendor makes missteps. It's the unrelenting competition from Google that really made the difference, via the avenues you mention and others.
An authority with the effective power to cripple the finances and business practices of Google for the purpose of reducing its market share to an arbitrarily lower percentage would be immediately detrimental to furthering the development of Google's products, and consequently detrimental to the utility of its users, while in the longer term it wouldn't be obvious that conceding the lesser competitors to scramble for this stolen market slice would yield better alternative products, nor that users would ultimately benefit from having more lesser competitors.
One approach is to split up the company in to separate entities. Search, YouTube, advertising, technology products and OSs, etc...
Nothing ever is, a priori, so this is a non-argument.
> lesser competitors to scramble for this stolen market slice
Wow, "stolen". That certainly tanked your credibility at least in my eyes.
Fast forward 12 years, and little has changed. I dont keep 1000 tabs open, so chrome has never felt slow. I tried installing the developer edition of FF about 6 years ago on macOS and it refused to open.
Why bother changing?
If I were a tab hoarder (I.e. didn't know how to use bookmarks) or thought that Mozilla were any more trustworthy than Google (why is it that the for profit puts out FF but the not-for-profit collects donations that go to anything but?) then I would switch.
I'm waiting to see how manifest v3 shakes out- Chromes plan is still better than safari has been (she admittedly low bar) but until thr browsing experience is affected, I have no problem sticking with chrome / chromium.
I always wonder why Google do this. Sure, they could always have more Chrome users, but at the same time they're going to have to support Firefox forever whatever happens, and Firefox is a nice hedge for Google against being accused of having a browser monopoly.
They merely need to wait for a time when the regulatory environment is more favorable. It's just a roll of the dice every 4 years, sooner or later their number will come up and they can cut all support then and there.
But it's not really necessary. By making Chrome the preferred and optimal way to use any site, and making chrome intrinsics the expected behavior of a web browser, they are creating an environment where all the incentives are towards making your browser more like chrome. Eventually there won't be much difference in the surface between Firefox and Chrome and Mozilla will finally make the decision we all eventually expect, and just change Firefox into a true chromium fork.
Though that may happen sooner anyways. It feels pretty clear that there are parts of the greater Mozilla org that don't benefit at all from all the effort going into Gecko (or a web browser in general) and wouldn't be disappointed in the money going towards other initiatives instead.
Defending Eich is a hot take that you only see here on HN. He is a worthless individual who champions the cause of taking away personal freedoms of groups of people he doesn't like, pushes anti-mask conspiracy and smears public workers like Fauci, and his only technical 'achievement' since leaving Mozilla has been to create a fork of chrome that bakes in his companies ads and pushes a scamcoin on the user.
The fact you even have the gall to defend such a person is laughable. It wasn't that long ago the population would summarily execute such people when they revealed their status as societal bad actors.
Check your chronology: I wasn't a Mozilla higher-up when HTML 4.0 replaced 3.2. IE won the first browser war and MS was instrumental along with Dave Raggett in finalizing HTML 4. MS also was all-in on "JScript" by that point, having contributed to the ECMA-262 standard as I describe here:
https://www.pldi21.org/prerecorded_hopl.12.html
I was not a "Mozilla higher-up" during this period, I was not in management. From engineer role doing JS in 1995, I was promoted to Principal Engineer at Netscape by 1997. So your chronology there is bogus.
Also, mozilla.org did not exist until late 1997, and was not launched until April 1, 1998. Once again you are out to lunch on history, out of some bizarre desire to blame me personally for the web standards in full, and consequently browsers that implement them, being so complicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#HTML_4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
It's a known issue for years. After I lost all tabs and bookmarks for a second time, I decided to bite the bullet and go back to Chrome.