Does it matter to the average person that the society is marching further and further down the road of digital monopolies and surveillance capitalism? My impression certainly is that the percentage of people who care about this is so small that it might as well be a rounding error, while on the other side I see tremendous momentum, effort, and cunning.
I feel like we are nitpicking here. Would you say that Google actually cares about those 3%?
When you have 97% of the market, you own the market, right? It's actually problematic to own 100% because then it's strictly a monopoly. Whereas with 97% you can pretend it's not a monopoly.
Why do i care about google’s opinion on the 7% desktop users. I just care that I have firefox. I continue to say that having 7% on desktop is an incredible large userbase when you convert it to people and not a percentage. Ive only pushed back on the minimizing all these people to ‘a rounding error’.
> They are happy with monopolies and surveillance capitalism.
Actually I believe for most normal people it is a feature of other platforms that they don't have to appear to be associated with weirdos who use terms like "surveillance capitalism".
Not sure if you're trying to offend me or not. But it seems like you agree with me: people don't care. You just somehow wanted to call me a weirdo on the way.
I don’t know you, but most people I work with for some reason keep so many tabs open, the tab bar is squeezed so you can barely see a favicon
Probably due to my age, I religiously close every tab after I read it. If that gets more than a dozen, I literally quit the browser and declare bankruptcy because it’s not worth it to sort through the mess of tabs I clearly am not using.
Firefox is old too. I’m sure it could manage memory better, but couldn’t we all? If you have tabs in GC and using CPU when you aren’t using them, kill them maybe?
I wish I had that level of executive functioning. I open tabs at a high branching rate, and faster than I have the impulse control to (for lack of a better word) run a garbage-collection pass over what I'd just done.
When it balloons into the low thousands and starts hurting performance, I dump Firefox's open-tabs store (file called recovery.jsonlz4) into a different file and start over. At some point I'll point an LLM at that junk pile and see if I missed anything important. (Probably not).
You could probably just use an extension that unloads inactive tabs from RAM, and maybe another that closes tabs that haven't been touched in over a week. Between those and an extension that closes duplicate tabs, it's pretty easy to get down to a sane number, no LLM required.
If a tab is important, you'll be using it more often than once a week. I have a similar rule with impulse purchases: anything I want needs to sit in the cart for 24-48 hours before purchasing. If I still need it, I buy it. Probably cut the crap I buy down by 75%. Steam? It goes on the wishlist (personally capped at ~50) until I can commit to playing and finishing it right then and there.
I'm around middle age and keep tons of tabs open simply because I have a number of projects/tasks or soon-to-be projects/tasks going at any given point and managing associated websites is easier with tabs than it is with bookmarks. In other words, bookmark management UI/UX is inadequate and tab hoarding is the band-aid.
There's also a higher chance that things will slip through the cracks and be forgotten if I bookmark them, whereas with tabs they're staring me in the face any time I'm using my computer.
tab groups, a very recent feature, help a lot at keeping tabs organized. you can even archive whole groups if you no longer need them but don't want to throw them away
I have maintained Tab Wrangler for both Chrome and for Firefox for years: it auto-closes tabs based on a configurable timeout and when they were last active. I'm not sure how people keep dozens or hundreds of tabs open either. It's FOSS, no ads, no tracking, no monetization:
I also discovered the joy of shift-selecting a big range of tabs and pressing ^W only once. It also feels pretty good, but in a slightly different way...
I don't know why but I have a different experience. My daily driver is a 13 year old Thinkpad with 16Gb memory, I use Firefox all the time, I routinely have 50+ tabs open, I really have no complaints.
I also use Firefox on Android, I have less experience of using other browsers on mobile but what I've got is fine for me.
I'm not questioning your experience but I would like others, who might be considering using Firefox, to know that different people have different experiences.
For what it's worth, I've been known to have 300+ tabs open all in separate windows (I just forget about them and they tend to accumulate), and for the most part it handled it just fine (it did use quite a lot of RAM, of course.) That was on an i7 7700k with 32GB of RAM.
Yeah, that's it probably, I also notice that when I have certain pages open in tabs on the background, my Framework laptop fans start spinning faster, probably because of JS running on those sites. I don't know whether that wouldn't happen with Chrome, but yeah, if that's the case, then Chrome would have to reload / restore those pages and on Firefox they're still in memory. I rather just close those resource heavy pages, fortunately they're usally not the kinds of pages I need to use too often.
>Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not.
I'm using Fennec from F-Droid, but I have a little document symbol on the URL bar I tap for reader mode. I guess the issue is it doesn't show on all sites then?
> Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not.
This is false. I am seeing that button right now in Firefox, on the right side of the address bar.
Also: Substack posts don't seem to show the reader symbol immediately, often only after switching tabs or page refresh, e.g. here: https://dynomight.substack.com/
This is a very good example what I meant when I said "it's designed for a different person"!
For me, it's pretty clear that a much better idea is not to fix the broken concept, but do what the Chrome does, and show the button on every single page. Then users won't have to report the pages where button is missing, and
Firefox devs won't have to keep updating that functionality all the time as the new types of pages appear.
Yes, this means that sometimes reader mode might miss some relevant text, but that's OK, reader mode does this occasionally already. And Firefox is supposed to be for power users, right?
From my experience it's inconsistent and that's incredibly frustrating. Overall the whole mobile interface needs to be overhauled imo. These guys need to simply copy Safari and call it a day. I still have never used a mobile browser that's as thoughtfully designed as Safari, and I've used basically all the major ones.
Yeah similar. When I leave firefox running on the macbook, after a couple of days I get an out of memory, 32GB used type error (8GB macbook). Maybe it's the sites I have open keep requesting stuff? Not sure.
Firefox used to be amazing, but they squandered their market share with bad decisions and stagnation. Maybe one day they'll see the light, but not likely, given their recent ai additions...
I am under the impression that Firefox is the only web browser which has access to quality ad blocker. Am I incorrect in this? How is this not enough of a selling point for everyone to switch to it?
Agree, and not just that, it allows to escape the hijack of your right click (something google does not tolerate), but they also degraded a lot the experience the last year or two. Number of modal dialog boxes every time it updates (and of course repeat for how many machines you use), also every time there is a pending update, the performance seems to degrade until you close and update, and those updates are very frequent. I don't know if it is my machine but it seems to be struggling when there is more than 2 or 3 video streams on different tabs (increasingly common now that every news websites seems compelled to live stream video on their front page whether you want it or not).
File should be located in $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR/distribution/
$FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR is the installation directory for firefox, which (for default setup) probably will be printed by this (and it's probably /usr/lib/firefox):
sed -nE 's/^\s*exec (.*\/)firefox .*/\1/p' $(which firefox)
When you decide to update you could just install new version, or you may temporarily replace policy for permissive one.
Even better, I switched to the esr release. It gets updates every week or two, but only for security issues. Otherwise the browser has a stable feature set and no new features.
I got very annoyed by the pending update pop-ups and the "Restart to keep using Firefox" messages when I opened new tabs, so I switched over to Librewolf and now I get no distracting modals at all and can update it precisely when I feel like it.
Those tabs telling you to restart are because the OS upgraded Firefox in the background and Firefox detected that its files changed under it. It tells you to restart so you don't get buggy broken behavior if anything was incompatible between the two versions. Firefox's built-in update system waits for a natural browser restart so it doesn't do that.
Some people seem to enjoy ads, maybe they feel like they'll be first to know about the next hot thing.
Just look at how many people pump positive comments into influencer's posts that are nothing more then ads (sorry, collaborations). While some are bots, plenty seem real.
Or the new local takeaway that's just opened and all the reviews saying "I keep seeing this place appear so I had to check it out"
Occasionally see someone go to yt without ad blocking and I'm blown away, feels like I'm from the 1800's sitting with someone in rush hour traffic - what is going on?
Few month after I started using bare Chromium instead of Brave, and consequently started to see ads, they often felt like a cool joke. I even had an occasional urge to share it with colleagues, like "Look, what they are showing me, haha" But novelty faded, and they became nuisance again.
i try to use it as my second browser (just to see whether it could be the first one). and the only thing that keeps me off - not all extensions are supported _at full fledge_. e.g. surfingkeys (for vim-mode) which i've been using pre-dominantly for many-many years in FF. apart from that i love the experience. it's a great browser and i'm looking forward for it to keep up with the counterparts.
I’ve never been enough of a uBO power user to say conclusively - but I am extremely satisfied with Brave - in particular its ad blocking on YouTube. I also think Brave is by far the best ad block available on iOS.
From my POV, an adblocker's perceived quality is primarily weighted on whether it can block visible ads without impacting performance. While uBO on firefox is a more capable blocker, I honestly don't browse enough sites to know one where uBOL provides a worse experience in this metric than uBO.
I prefer vivaldi's UX to firefox enough that i am willing to settle for technically-worse adblocking. If I notice this becoming practically-worse, I will consider switching.
Firefox probably has the best support of the best ad blocker (uBO), which is really nice in a lot of ways, but whether or not that means it can be the only "quality" one is completely subjective. Keep in mind the typical user doesn't care enough to go install any ad blocker, let alone debate the differences between the top implementations.
> Keep in mind the typical user doesn't care enough to go install any ad blocker
I hate that you are right about this :-)
It really hit home for me today. My project manager was sharing her screen so we could see the free planning poker webapp our team uses. I had it open locally on my machine. She had ads, I did not.
She's not a programmer, but she _is_ technical. She's worked adjacent to programmers for many years, and she's very adapt at writing SQL to query our DB. But she didn't think to install an ad blocker.
I guess I really do live in a bubble where I think _most_ people run ad blockers.
People say this, but seeing ads is very rare for me with AdGuard on Safari. I’ve no doubt that it’s technically less comprehensive than the best Firefox ad blockers, but in practice it feels more than “good enough” for me.
I wonder how true this is now. I believe the functionality in MV3 has increased since it was released.
There's still filters that can't be supported, but it seems like most are.
From "ublock-filters" only 1 filter was unsupported and 90 had unsupported domains dropped out of 10436. From "easylist" 18 out of 56109 filters are unsupported, no unsupported domains.
I'm sticking with uBlock-Origin, but not sure how much of a difference it makes these days.
Yes, you're incorrect. The mentioned Vivaldi has one (and ublock still works). Brave has one. And even with ublock light you get high enough quality that other bad design decisions of Firefox kill the selling point of a better ad blocker
Firefox is great, and I use and recommend it as daily driver, but the actions of Mozilla leadership are really hard to differentiate from deliberately managed decline. It will be interesting to see what happens as Ladybird matures.
Related: There's also Ladybird that is developing quickly and is aiming for an alpha release this year. It's a truly independent browser engine built from scratch.
This is mentioned under every Firefox discussion despite being possibly years away from being generally useful if the will ever progress to that point.
What’s the real selling point? Yeah non profit but is it gonna be faster and better than WebKit? The reason I switched to chrome a long time ago was tab isolation, how much faster it was than Firefox, and built it better developer tools. What’s ladybug got going for it?
Most people don't care about that though. My wife doesn't care about browser independence. If Ladybird wants to more than just a pet project for some tech companies it needs a sell. Something that makes it better than Chrome.
ladybird is way to early in development to sell itself to anyone except developers who might want to contribute to it. they need to get it working first before they can think about interesting features that might make it attractive. it's not the time for that yet
Can barely keep my eyes socketed from all this involuntary rolling that's overtaken them ...
I'm personally here for the non-bullshit stuff that isn't about getting clicks with hot ledes grounded on warmed over, barely modified well worn takes on well-understood stats so miss me with _that_ shit ...
Firefox is the best of a bunch of bad options, but isn't above critique. It does suck when they do anticonsumer stuff and shove weird stuff like pocket in, but you can't leave which makes it similar to the democratic party where you can't really do anything, but they keep making really poor decisions.
I gave Firefox a chance as my PDF reader as it has a pretty efficient engine. But that didn't work out as I don't need to read PDFs so often so every time it launched, it ran an update that added 10s to reading the PDF... :/
If you're going to use a Chromium based browser, why pick one that's filled with crypto ads? I use Firefox on mobile because it supports extensions. One of the main benefits of the web is that, unlike proprietary native apps, I get to experience it the way I want. The web is nearly intolerable without extensions.
> Meanwhile, the over thinkers on Hacker News come up with convoluted reasons to hate on Firefox every time the subject arises...Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition.
It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push ads or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings about:config and make edits to userChrome.css
It isn't bots complaining about Firefox, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into and what Mozilla is prioritizing and who are worried about what we have to lose.
Please never stop bitching about Firefox. Refusing to talk about Firefox's problems wont help make them go away. Keep discussing what you'd like to see in Firefox and what things you hope they'll focus on. There are Firefox devs and mozilla employees around here. If we're lucky, a few of them might see and listen to some of what we say.
Ever screenshot I've seen of ladybird makes me not want to use it. It's too "modern". I need functional software where the text and background aren't the same color.
i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain. my opinion doesn't matter more then the next guys.
but when you see where this is headed because you've seen it countless times, there is always the "it works fine for me" guy and that is the most infuriating thing ever. a great example is microsoft teams, which is by every metric the shittiest application on my computer and there is always a "i don't have a problem with it" guy somewhere.
the frustration i have with that is the "i don't have a problem with it" crowd is the poster child for lower standards and shittier software experiences. there seems to be no meaningful way to convey "hey, you should care about this".
firefox fumbled super hard earlier this year trying to push their on-by-default AI. it took entirely too long to get them to backtrack a little. you could feel the insulation between customer feedback and their teams working it, they already have the operating models in place to try and force an enshittified offering and you can tell their new MO means they are hungry to do it and i expect more bullshit from firefox up ahead. hopefully we have other options locked and loaded before we get there because they're playing with fire considering how much user share they don't have. mozilla has completely shifted its priorities and structure, i do not expect them to move independently in a direction that benefits us anymore. no one should be surprised if/when they resume shipping some real bullshit up ahead
> i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain.
That's fair. In this case though, the divide is pretty massive and also important. A lot of people couldn't tell you what a browser is. They just know what button to hit to make Facebook appear on their screen. A few would know what a browser is, but couldn't tell you what engine it used or why that would even matter. Many of the folks around here know about browsers in a way that goes far beyond what is typical. We've sought out and experimented with several. We've written websites, extensions, and applications for them. We understand how browsers work, and the standards and protocols involved in what they do.
The result is that we tend to hold stronger opinions about web browsers than many others would. Our knowledge matters especially to Mozilla because the user who couldn't tell you what a browser is isn't going to bother going to their app store and searching for a new one. We are the ones who go to our friends and family and tell them about Firefox. We encourage them to install a new program on their devices and to learn to recognize and use an unfamiliar icon whenever they want to search "The Google". The more user like us Firefox pushes away, the more they'll miss out on the benefits of that kind of evangelism.
It used to be a whole lot easier to recommend Firefox. I could tell a moderately skilled person to download it and install it. If someone weren't comfortable with downloading and installing software I could install it for them plus an extension or two in just a few minutes. I knew firefox would work for them, and not try to exploit them. That's no longer the case.
Now firefox provides an enshittified product out of the box, and every update threatens more harm. While I might be willing and able to keep an eye on whatever new bullshit Mozilla pushes and make a bunch of config changes and customizations to work around it, I can't expect my less technical or passionate friends and family to do that.
I’m sorry, but this is not my experience at all. The process of installing and using Firefox for a non-technical user is no different from Chrome: both give you immediate access to search, both offer to sign you in for cross-computer sync, and… that’s pretty much it.
I have gotten most of my family and friends to switch to Firefox, and I have never gotten a Firefox-specific complaint or question that I can remember.
> The process of installing and using Firefox for a non-technical user is no different from Chrome
Most non-technical users are exclusively using android devices and chrome is pre-installed. Today you can still install firefox for others and it will probably work fine for them, but it will be exploiting them too. It will collect their personal data and use it to push personalized ads. It will use updates to force anti-features onto them.
Firefox has gone from something we could recommend unreservedly to something we can only suggest while cautioning about it's increasingly user-hostile practices.
> i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain.
It could be a generational thing, but I've always associated "power user" with the DOS/Windows crowd and it isn't so much about knowing more as, well, treating a computer like a computer. That is to say that the person who uses scripting in Excel is as much of a power user as the gamer who tweaks power profiles or overclocks their processor. On the flip side, someone who uses the basics of Excel or the gamer who buys the fastest GPU is a consumer of products, rather than a power user.
Funny thing is, I never hear that term being used on the macOS or *ix side of the fence -- even though there are certainly people who who would qualify.
As for the AI thing: AI is something that nobody wants but "everybody" expects. I don't blame them for pursuing it, even if it's a type of integration that I really don't want.
> Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads
oh ok I'll change to Chrome then surely they would never do stuff like this
Firefox has indeed done things that are worse than anything Chrome has done, such as abusing a privileged update channel to push content advertising a TV show to user’s browsers without their knowledge or consent.
That was nowhere near what chrome does. This is why I have trouble taking Firefox haters seriously. A 1 time thing that they the haven't done again. Installed an add on that was never enabled or did anything at all unless you went through the trouble of enabling it. Needed you to have the Firefox studies checkbox enabled which all of us who would even care turn off first thing.
Chrome: no blocking ads on websites whatsoever. The comparison isn't even close.
I will go further and say that people hate on Firefox because they care.
We don't see many people here hating on Edge for instance, they may hate the fact that it always wants to force itself in, but not the browser itself. And that's simply because they don't use it, they don't even bother trying, they don't know what to hate about it and they don't care. Occasionally, some people say it is actually good, they get ignored.
I'm not sure about that. I think there's plenty of people who shit on Firefox to justify to their own ethical standards their preference for some Chromium-based browser.
I'm failing to parse the "own ethical standards" as it relates to chromium-based browsers and this conversation about firefox..can you maybe explain, does removing the ability for users to block adds seem more ethical than not?
People often will tell lies to themselves and other to support their personal ideology. Product A is bad and so is product B. So why should I move from A to B? They are try to rationalize their belief system versus looking at realty.
Reality is that non-tech people to know what surfing the web is like with Ad-Block vs non-Ad-Block browsing. Once you teach some one it becomes night and day.
Without teaching someone very few people will step out of their comfort-zone to self educate.
Is this being done for the benefit of the users? The question applies to many decisions in Chrome. It's the ethical side of the maker.
Is letting Firefox slip into irrelevance (by not using it) in the interest of the users, writ large? What developments should we expect if this happens? This is the ethical side of the user.
Using Chromium-based browsers means you give Google, the surveillance company that works with ICE and the military, more power over the web to do stuff like push Manifest V2.
Everyone has their own ethical standards around this but I think Firefox is clearly seen as the browser to use if you care about the open-web. A lot of people therefore feel the need to defend their preference for a Chromium-based browser.
IMO that obfuscates the fact that even non-Chrome Chromium based browsers still affords Google massive influence over the future of the web.
I've seen people complain about Firefox in terms of performance and compatibility to justify using Chrome, but there aren't many chromium-based browsers appealing to those with ethical standards to choose from. Ecosia maybe? Ultimately is seems to come down to choosing your moral compromises more than anything.
Firefox performances have been good for so many years that I can't remember when it was the last time that I felt it to be slow. I only remember that Chrome used to be faster than FF (mainly the JS engine) and then it wasn't. Maybe it loses every single benchmark, I didn't check, but it is fast enough to be my primary browser, the one I use when I work as web developer and also when I'm not working. I run FF on a 2014 Debian laptop. Windows and Mac, who knows.
About compatibility, there is some odd site that uses a Chrome only API or something that FF didn't implement. They are really rare but people that must use one of them to do their job don't have a choice.
Then I intentionally break every single site by using privacy add-ons like uBO, uMatrix, PrivacyBadger etc so sometimes I have to play with them and find a configuration that let's me use a site. In the case of uMatrix it usually means finding the minimum set of scripts that enables enough functionality leaving out all the 3rd party tracking and then saving it. When it's too complicated and I will not use that site again but I must use it, I either disable every add-on on that site or I run Chrome.
Finally, I run integration tests with a headless Chrome, but I develop with FF. If it works with FF it works with Chrome and Safari too.
BTW, I use FF on Android as my primary browser too.
> when it was the last time that I felt it to be slow
I only have an issue because I set a big disk cache (because data cap). 8gb is fine IIRC, but 24gb causes slowdowns on startups and new tabs. Doesn't outweigh anything tho.
No one in their right mind would use Edge, unless the employer's IT forces them to - and in that case they've given up on the tools the employer gives them already and wouldn't care enough to hate.
Nothing worse then silence quitting.
Your disappointed users quit in silence because of their insatisfaction but they don't care enough or anymore enough to even telling you that they are quitting or why.
In that case you can be satisfied of yourself while your user base and promoters is plummeting.
It is a great thing that you still have a large user base that will still complain of issues they have so you can improve or ever on that if it is your wish.
And nothing as strong in the end that the fidelity of an user that was complaining about an issue and now feel that his voice was heard!
Normally I'd agree but at this point it's basically "Firefox is mismanaged, updoots to the left my 1337zors" behavior. It's basically a meme. It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted. Yes they make mistakes. Yes they can be frustrating. But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged.
People whine about the features every time. Guess what? I like sync. I like having a dedicated container for the rare times I must log in to google. I like some of these "useless" things they "tack on." Not every change must be met with "nobody asked for it." I actually don't want a super basic, boring browser - that's what I have mullvad browser for! FF is my daily driver, sometimes they roll out stuff I legitimately want and expect.
> It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted.
That’s because this mismanagement has been going on for nearly 10 years now, nothing is being done to address it, and if anything, it seems to be getting progressively worse.
> But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged.
As much as Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of Good, the existence of Worse shouldn't make anyone stop demanding Better.
Generally, while I know it can take time away from working on other things, I don't mind if firefox adds optional features like Sync, FlyWeb, Pocket, or Hello as long as they can be easily and permanently disabled.
Ideally they wouldn't be installed by default and users would be informed about what the features are, told what the risks of installing/using them are, and given an option to enable them or not first.
There are half a dozen quality Firefox forks that can (not) do that for you. That’s the beauty of Firefox if you ask me. Just use a stripped down version like Mullvad. Thank god Firefox exists so we can have it.
Who complains about sync thought? What tilts me is Pocket, AI features, integrated ads, and a plethora of other random acquisitions and side projects that constitute outsized expenses yet do zilch to drive adoption.
I also used to be a Thunderbird lover, but I was forced to ditch it due to crippling freezes, crashes, and slowdown when you have a lot of emails. Mozilla just feels like an awful steward of their projects at times.
EDIT: I also subscribed to Mozilla VPN for almost two years and was forced to ditch that too, due to... solvable technical issues, again. Mullvad was just a greatly superior product for the same price. I still use Firefox for all my browsing on desktop and Android at least.
It's always there because it remains unaddressed. You may be used to people just folding then corporations move forward with enshittification but that's not going to happen with all enthusiasts, which is the only kind of user FF has left.
At this point I will gladly take an announcement where CloudFlare buys them out and frees the Fox from annoying corporate interests, they just give everyone a decent free browser, bring back the oxidation effort and overhaul Firefox to be all our Rust as Quantum was aiming towards.
Someone needs to take Firefox from Mozilla itself and provide it better funding under the understanding no more shennanigans.
> At this point I will gladly take an announcement where CloudFlare buys them out and frees the Fox from annoying corporate interests
I don't see how cloudflare buying firefox would keep it from being a victim of corporate interests. That'd just make them subject to the corporate interests of cloudflare instead.
They could basically re-form Firefox as a non-profit where they provide funding, but control the non-profit org enough to sway it from wasting funds, not to mention Mozilla's war chest is insane, its no wonder they have bought up some startups before.
Cloudflare is corporate interests. What makes you think they or any other big corp is above messing with products they acquired? Remember when google used to be the good guys?
It is also very bad if the company that gets to decide which user agents get to see a webpage owns a browser. I could easily see some kind of fingerprinting mechanisms built into the browser if cloudflare is in charge. For your safety, of course.
Cloudflare is a vile company, who has destroyed large parts of the web and is almost certainly involved with intelligence agencies. Buying Firefox would push away what users they have left (many of which are due to Torbrowser)
This rant reminds me why Linux has limited penetration. Its user base is made up of opinionated users who view compromise along the way to something larger as a moral failure.
Not like Chrome, Chrome feels like it LOVES hanging out with me, looking over my shoulder, telling all it's friends about what I'm working on, what I buy, and how much money I make.
I use Firefox and I like it (especially being able to use uBlock Origin), but I really dislike what Mozilla has become over the last ten years or so. I think that's the key distinction, I can mostly manage Mozilla's crap by turning off a bunch of stuff in my Firefox settings, but I think it's really important for the web to not use a Chromium based browser.
>It isn't bots complaining about Firefox here, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into
The problem isn't that they're frustrated it's that they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about.
They don't just complain for themselves, they think this is the causal explanation for Firefox declining market share. Which it isn't because what they complain about 99% of people have never heard of. Nobody out there cares about who the CEO of Mozilla is or what detail of their Term of Service for telemetry they've changed. Power users is the only thing Firefox doesn't lack.
> they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about.
The average user doesn't really understand what a browser is, or how it works, and will never bother to look for an alternative to whatever default browser shipped with their OS. If Firefox plans on surviving by appealing to that audience they're doomed to fail.
Firefox got what success it's had by appealing to the people who care about browsers. They installed Firefox and then convinced the other people in their lives who couldn't care less about what a web browser is to install and use Firefox. It was easy for power users to recommend Firefox because it was a good product that offered clear advantages and didn't exploit its userbase. Alienating the people who know and care about browsers by enshittifying is probably not going to work out for Mozilla, and that means we all lose.
This is complete revisionist history. Mozilla actually did the dang thing with project Quantum which was a massive overhaul of performance and stability when the browser was arguably at its lowest point in terms of a performance gap with Google Chrome
They completely revitalized the browser and... kept losing market share. Because it's 99% about distribution and Chrome was distributed by the world's most visited website and the pre installed default on over a billion devices.
In fact, we have a perfect natural experiment for what it looks like to execute on features perfectly, listen to core user concerns, getting first to market on mobile devices, and outcompeting on customizability and features as well as experiment with every imaginable fundraising model you could imagine. Opera was that company, and to this day I maintain that nobody has a better browser engine than Presto at its peak, I still think even now, in terms of features, innovation, customizability. Opera was the best browser company that ever existed. If being a perfect browser company was rewarded with market share we would all be using Presto right now. But browser economics just don't work that way.
Also, there's a history of curbing browser monopoly dominance by giving users choice (antitrust case against Microsoft in the '90s), and Mozilla's market share issues would be solved overnight if Android users had to choose from a list of browsers. The narrative that market share change has anything to do with feature development is a hallucination born in the backwaters of internet comment sections and completely ignores the actual drivers, which are the flexing of monopoly power and pre-installed defaults.
And killed its add-on ecosystem. If the choice is between (as it was then) a slower browser missing the add-ons you were used to, and a faster browser missing the add-ons you were used to, then you're going to need some other motivation to stick with (as I did, to be clear) the slower browser.
> Power users is the only thing Firefox doesn't lack.
Which is exactly why the first thing Mozilla needs to to is to stop driving them away. They are never going to win the popularity contest for the average user without the word of mouth from enthusiasts.
> when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company
What would you have them do? Somehow they have to make some money somehow.
Alternatively they have to live purely from donations, which means that people like you and I have to part with of our money. Or they could be purely open source, in which case people like and I donate our time.
It's not an either/or situation. For many years now people have been begging Mozilla to allow them to give money to help fund firefox (and only firefox) but Mozilla has refused. I can't promise that allowing it would provide all the funds they need, but certainly every little bit helps. People could continue to contribute code to the project, but that requires a lot more time, effort, and no small amount of skill compared to the time it takes to enter your credit card number and submit and an online form. Contributing code to Firefox is still a good thing, but it's a process (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contrib...) that won't be for everyone.
There is no precedent for donations on the scale of what Mozilla gets from search licensing. The best online fundraising drive on the planet is Wikipedia with orders of magnitude more users and they don't raise half of what Mozilla spends on keeping up with Google.
It's not the panacea people keep assuming it is, it's just one of many accusations that gets flung at the wall.
Except Thunderbird now does run on donations (though is looking a relevant additional funding sources, e.g. providing hosted email: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/). This is not to say Mozilla can't seek out other sources of money, or develop appropriate ancillary services, but the absence of an option to just give money for Firefox (and Firefox only) is noticeable.
How is it that we can have a plethora of different Linux distributions, the Linux kernel, the FreeBSD kernel, the OpenBSD kernel, GIMP, LibreOffice and several other large projects that are run and maintained by donations and volunteers.
Yet somehow Firefox is different? It needs to make money! It needs to make money so much that they keep spinning up all sorts of new projects so that they can make more money, or at least that was the argument for some of what they were doing.
At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.
And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.
We've got a live one. Most of their expenses are developing the core browser, the side bets (with a few exceptions, notably FirefoxOS, which I think was a GOOD side bet and worth the effort) were not that expensive. They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat.
>At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.
They already do that, they have a huge endowment set aside. It's obvious that people don't actually care about it because they don't know, and they only mention the possibility to make the accusation, never to give them credit once they discover Mozilla already does this and has been doing it for about 2 decades.
>And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.
Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users. And that's the best pure online fundraising program on planet Earth. Again, people only think this through to the point of being able to make the accusation not to the point of figuring out if it would actually work or not.
>They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat.
To get pedantic about it, they aren't developing that much code, they are maintaining that much code.
Not that I think LOC is the best metric but here are the figures for 2 of the project I brought up.
Linux kernel is ~40M LOC
FreeBSD kernel 7.8~9M LOC
I would argue that the OS's that run the internet are much more cutthroat than a browser, not just in terms of attack risk but in business terms as well.
>Microsoft aggressively tried to destroy Linux in the late 1990s and 2000s. This era included the internal "Halloween Documents" mapping out strategies to fight open source, former CEO Steve Ballmer calling Linux "a cancer," and Microsoft covertly funding SCO Group's proxy lawsuits against Linux users.
The larger your codebase is, the greater the attack surface. One of the arguments about the way that Firefox is progressing is that they keep adding more stuff into the codebase. If it's getting too complex, maybe they shouldn't be adding those features...
>Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users.
Mozilla received 16.9 million from contributions in 2024.
Wikipedia took in ~170 million in the same time period.
Not sure where you got that Mozilla was bringing in more than Wikipedia through donations?
In going through the Mozilla Financials, I don't see where they have a huge endowment set aside, 73% of their revenue is royalties. I did however see that they spent 31 million to buy Acronym(an ad company) and 21 million to buy Fakespot. So that's neat.
> if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.
Mozilla Corporation already has funds totaling about $1 billion today. They're simply choosing not to develop Firefox actively.
I would have them fully shed the silicon valley tech corporation mindset and instead act like a charity working for the benefit of the public, as is appropriate for a non-profit foundation. Funding should mean seeking donations and government grants, not trying to fleece users, sell their privacy/attention and/or resell mediocre services - which are not serving the mission of building the best browser possible.
I worked at Mozilla for quite a long time. I can tell you that MANY employees will be reading every comment in this thread. Hello mozillians! Don't forget to do something good for the web tomorrow!
> MANY employees will be reading every comment in this thread
That's interesting - why? Why torture yourself with abuse and ignorance?
It's somewhat like athletes who are told not to read social media. I'm sure many do, but what is the point? The people commenting know nothing of value about what you do - you're a professional working with professionals.
At least athletes are in entertainment so some aspects of public reaction are significant (not their advice on how to shoot the ball).
That said, if they're reading - hello! You guys do some of the best, most important work. The world without Mozilla and Firefox would be much less.
I mean, there are plenty of reasonable takes (some of which are criticism) too. Generally, working at Mozilla doesn't make it much more torturous than before, when I was merely an unpaid open web advocate :)
Hate that they recently implemented PWAs, but didn't bother making sure the icon for the site worked, so all PWAs have the genetic Firefox icon. The most valuable feature of PWAs is to identify a tab as a standalone app and there's no fix for this in sight.
I just tried it out with this page, and it gets the HN icon for me. I am on Nightly and on Linux, so possibly this is an actual bug you're running into, but no fix in sight might be too pessimistic. But definitely worth reporting otherewise.
Keep in mind that just because it works for me, that doesn't mean that you're not running into a bug that I'm not, so I can't make any promises about it actually being fixed for you :)
> It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings in about:config and make edits to userChrome.css
On the one hand, you're totally right. Pushback should exist.
On the other hand, I have seen some seriously lazy and wild justifications for sticking in the chrome universe because tech users aren't immune to justifying a bad product through inertia (and, honestly, are probably champions at it).
I have seen and heard plenty of firefox "can't handle all the sites they need" and I have always been curious as to what these people are doing because I've been on FF for decades and the ONLY time I switch to a chrome browser is for VIA (and that's a whole google did a standard no one else wants to do situation).
To be fair, I suspect some of that has to do with major web dev stuff that I don't have to do, so it is very possible I'm actually just missing the mark here and the tooling/use case is really that much better in chrome (although I know that's its own issue since that's kinda the problem), and there are those who've found some major feature on a chrome spinoff that they just love and FF doesn't do well.
Still accounting from those, I'd safely bet money a lot of people who claim firefox just cannot work for them haven't really bothered to try to adopt. It's functionally identical to me outside of the whole "better adblock" and "arguably better bookmarks i forget to use".
For what it's worth, I use Firefox for 10+ years now for web development, and in my opinion their tooling is actually superior to Chrome. Small example: if I just want to test visual responsiveness of a page at different breakpoints, Firefox lets me close the bottom toolbar and just play around with the top window. In Chrome I need to keep the bottom toolbar open the whole time, cluttering my screen, because if I close it the whole devtools closes too.
How does Mozilla fund Firefox right now? I'm genuinely curious for a free product, how can they generate revenue without doing shady ad and data collection stuff?
All of those are non profit organizations that receive donations. It seems Firefox is owned by Mozilla Corporation which is the for profit branch of the Mozilla Foundation. So again, how do they fund Firefox as a for profit company?
It's one thing to criticize clearly malicious or incompetent actions Mozilla makes, the majority of the complaints are when Firefox release a new version and people on HN bring up their personal pet peeves every single time instead of anything positive about said release or news.
I'm very sick in general of "the criticism will continue until moral improve" attitude that has become more and more common.
And we are very sick of the enshittification will continue no matter what attitude from Mozilla. Sorry not sorry that you feel bad about people keep telling Mozilla off for the things where they keep being bad actors.
You'd want this browser for free, wouldn't you?
Have you donated to Mozilla Foundation?
So you're bitching because the free product that you don't support finds ways to sustain economically the hordes of developers that are trying to improve it for you.
And no, Chrome never "bought an ad-tech company, collected data on users, and used chrome to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force users to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings". NEVER IN THE WORLD. That's why you use it.
It seems like the Browser Wars are going to converge on a singular point:
"Do I need to access Big Tech services?"
As long as the business world is going to continue centrallizing on the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, any existing or future alternative browsers will either have to kowtow on the alter of compatibility or make the deliberate decision not to support "advanced features" that enable the next generation of proprietary webmail, social media, banking webpages, etc - tending towards a total revocation of privacy in exchange for KYC via a glut of metadata.
This will get even crappier as mechanisms used to filter out "suspicious" traffic (read: competing products) become standard. I imagine using Firefox in 2030 will be akin to using Tor in 2019 - web requests will be blocked, denied, or deemed "insecure".
Honest ask, no shaming, how many who read this comment either:
A) Don't know what an rc file is
B) Haven't manually configured one in the last few years
I'm sure there are plenty on HN who are eager to say how much they love rc files, I mean to point out how many, even here, really have no attachment to these kinds of things. Of course it's very possible they don't care enough to read this far or respond either... but it's worth a shot :D
Technically rc files tend to be a list of commands (usually to set config options) that are executed on startup, not actually configuration files per se.
I'm an avid Firefox user, but it seems that Firefox keeps getting worse. Pages forever load, when the issue does not happen in Chrome. History gets corrupted. Claude wouldn't load consistently if I had more than one tab of claude opened internal tools that used to work fine and we haven't updated struggle. I don't know if it's me but it's certainly maddening, especially when I go to Chrome on the same laptop and it just loads.
> Pages forever load, when the issue does not happen in Chrome.
A bit tangential, but that's not a meaningful analysis (depending on how you tested):
FF CHR
Site 1 n Y
Site 2 Y n
Imagine a Firefox user: They try site 1, see Firefox fail, and so they try Chrome and it succeeds. Then they try site 2, see Firefox succeed, and stop there. They never see Chrome's problem.
It's like what I've seen some DuckDuckGo users say about search engines: 'Google is better because when I can't find something on DDG I do find it on Google'. (I think there's also some confirmation bias with Chrome and Google.)
It's like the old sales technique of comparing your product's features with the other product:
MyProduct YourProduct
Feature A X X
Feature B X
Feature C X X
Feature D X X
Feature E X
Feature F X
Feature G X X
Feature H X X
It doesn't show:
Feature I X
Feature J X
Feature K X
Feature L X
Feature M X
Feature N X
Feature O
> Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition.
This isn't really true, and hasn't been for some time. It's just the only other browser engine with meaningful production users. Servo and Ladybird are both making great strides.
firefox is the only mainstream browser with an rcfile, that alone gives you incredible powers. I hope one day it also grows something like chrome's CDP. What is everyone so upset about?
There’s an old mantra from organizing: “no permanent enemies, no permanent allies.” You will never align with another group or person 100% on all things; the secret to making change is to build a coalition of those with whom you agree on an issue without holding it against them that you disagree on a different one.
I disagree with Mozilla about many things, but I agree with this article - I use Firefox because it’s the only browser out there that isn’t Chrome or WebKit, and that’s worth enough to me that I’m willing to disagree with them on other issues.
What's different about that from Chrome? IIRC Chrome had the unified search/URL bar before Firefox did, and I don't remember it being very different from Firefox's implementation. If anything, I remember it being easier to add search engines in Chrome (unless it's gotten worse in the past few years since I switched to Firefox).
Am I missing out on cool features of the URL bar in Firefox?
This is what bugs me every time I have to use Chrome. I know why Chrome does it, it has every incentive to put people through search at every opportunity.
There is no way to put results from the history on top.
I'm sure it varies from person to person, but I find it very frustrating to use Chrome's equivalent of the "Awesome Bar" when I'm forced to (eg work computer); Firefox just seems to do a much better job of surfacing open tabs (yes, I'm a tab hoarder), bookmarks, history, etc while Chrome seems like it'll surface some dubiously relevant options and try to railroad you into search. Even when I know I have a tab open and I know the domain name or a substantial chunk of the title it is legitimately rare for Chrome to offer to switch me to that tab, and often times it will surface one or two tabs that seem utterly unrelated. Bafflingly bad performance from what used to be a search company.
Not sure if chrome has an equivalent but FF bar allows limiting results, e.g. adding a single % in the bar will search tabs, ^ history, * bookmarks, (+ searchs tagged bookmarks? there's no shiny icon)...
You can start typing words that were in either the title or the URL of some thing you vaguely remember visiting last month, or last year, and the Awesome Bar will reliably surface it for you. I hardly even use bookmarks; I just count on the Awesome Bar finding everything for me. If I had to choose between it and uBlock Origin, I wouldn't even have to think twice. Ads I can deal with, if I have to. I've been outsourcing my memory for the web to the Awesome Bar for decades. It's part of my brain.
I know Chrome's address bar also does searches, but somehow I find it much worse at actually finding what I want. It's perhaps unfair since I use Firefox much more, but I visit some pages regularly in Chrome and I'm 90% sure suddenly it doesn't find these - or they are just ranked way off.
Firefox also find open tabs (so you can jump to the open tab instead of opening a new tab) and allow you to explicitly search for bookmarks, open-tabs etc. The open tab thing is also nicely integrated with Firefox sync (not sure if Chrome has something similar)
I might be the odd one out but I hate the awesome bar. What I do like about Firefox is I can make the awesome bar just a boring address bar and have a separate search bar.
Firefox still works fine for me. Sometimes it gets greedy with some activities. I smack it around and it seems to respond. I worry that Mozilla is starving it compared to other activities.
If you hate on Firefox because they're on X for outreach and marketing — like every other browser — you are certifiable. Your opinion is extreme and summarily discarded as noise.
FWIW, if you're reading this article your opinion is extreme and summarily discarded as noise by pretty much everyone else too.
I don't say that because I personally mind if they are on X one way or the other, I've just given up on the idea anyone but an extreme few, usually tech nerds, seem to give a damn about this topic as a whole.
Part of the blame for what's wrong with the web right now is on web developers:
- We "need" firefox or else everything's just chrome
- Forks of chrome don't count as different browsers because they all use the same engine
- Using the same engine makes you basically just chrome because you can't diverge from upstream
- You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it
- You need to keep merging with upstream because upstream is implementing new web platform features
- You need those web platform features because if you don't add them then websites will stop working in your fork
- Websites will stop working in your fork because web developers don't support older browser versions
- Web developers don't support older browser versions because... they don't care?
If web developers had a culture of supporting, say, 10 years of previous browser versions, then chromium would lose a lot of the power it has to drag the forks (and firefox) behind it. I don't really see this happening without some sort of major culture shift, though. Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.
There are more layers, if you'd like to look into it.
- Web developers don't support older browsers because they lack the skill and economic motivation for it.
- The managers of web developers will not support them, because there is no money to be made in supporting older browsers. Nor are there career benefits in maintenance projects. No developer or manager will get promotions for it.
- The actual management of the companies will not promote or compensate engineering managers or developers for maintenance projects since it doesn't contribute to "line goes up"-economics.
There’s a reason why this culture doesn’t exist: Internet Explorer 6
As recently as 2012, web developers had to make sure their websites ran on IE6, a browser from 2001, and were very frustrated that had to support this 11-year-old browser instead of being able to implement new features available with Chrome/Firefox/Opera and even newer versions of Internet Explorer.
There was a lot of resentment caused by this situation, resulting in web developers just not wanting to hold back their website so that it will render correctly in some random ancient browser.
> Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.
There have been a few attempts at this already and I have something like this myself for websites I design. Ultimately they fail to gain widespread traction since everyone has very different ideas on what of the various Web standards should be included at each version level. Someone else’s standard will likely not include that one feature you cannot go without so you simply do not follow it.
The big problem for Firefox/Mozilla is that the browser is currently primarily sponsored by Google, but due to an extremely stupid antitrust ruling, Google will no longer be allowed to do this after 2026. Then Mozilla could run out of money, which would imply layoffs and Firefox likely shelving its rendering engine, with the browser becoming just another Chrome reskin. The situation is quite dire I fear.
And it was all the fault of a judge seeing an alleged Google search monopoly despite the fact that countless users were already using ChatGPT rather than Google.
I hate to change the subject to something so trivial -- because I have been an exclusive Firefox user for many, many years -- but the awful moving background of this website is literally nauseating.
I'm no designer, but I can't understand why someone would make a graphical choice like this. It absolutely detracts from the content, and in my case, will prevent me from reading it.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 32.1 ms ] threadOnce in a while someone talks about digital sovereignty, but much like climate change, nothing will be done (successfully) about it.
That's how it is, I've come to terms with it.
Do people care? What signs of this are there?
Does it matter to the average person that the society is marching further and further down the road of digital monopolies and surveillance capitalism? My impression certainly is that the percentage of people who care about this is so small that it might as well be a rounding error, while on the other side I see tremendous momentum, effort, and cunning.
And that's pretty much a rounding error, getting smaller every year, right?
Or would you say that "most people don't care" does not apply when it's only 99% of people that don't care?
When you have 97% of the market, you own the market, right? It's actually problematic to own 100% because then it's strictly a monopoly. Whereas with 97% you can pretend it's not a monopoly.
Can we agree on "the vast majority of people don't care", then? Does 97% or even 93% qualify for me to say "the vast majority"?
Actually I believe for most normal people it is a feature of other platforms that they don't have to appear to be associated with weirdos who use terms like "surveillance capitalism".
Probably due to my age, I religiously close every tab after I read it. If that gets more than a dozen, I literally quit the browser and declare bankruptcy because it’s not worth it to sort through the mess of tabs I clearly am not using.
Firefox is old too. I’m sure it could manage memory better, but couldn’t we all? If you have tabs in GC and using CPU when you aren’t using them, kill them maybe?
When it balloons into the low thousands and starts hurting performance, I dump Firefox's open-tabs store (file called recovery.jsonlz4) into a different file and start over. At some point I'll point an LLM at that junk pile and see if I missed anything important. (Probably not).
If a tab is important, you'll be using it more often than once a week. I have a similar rule with impulse purchases: anything I want needs to sit in the cart for 24-48 hours before purchasing. If I still need it, I buy it. Probably cut the crap I buy down by 75%. Steam? It goes on the wishlist (personally capped at ~50) until I can commit to playing and finishing it right then and there.
Doesn't Firefox already do this? (Or at least have an option for it?)
There's also a higher chance that things will slip through the cracks and be forgotten if I bookmark them, whereas with tabs they're staring me in the face any time I'm using my computer.
https://github.com/tabwrangler/tabwrangler
I also use Firefox on Android, I have less experience of using other browsers on mobile but what I've got is fine for me.
I'm not questioning your experience but I would like others, who might be considering using Firefox, to know that different people have different experiences.
For what it's worth, I've been known to have 300+ tabs open all in separate windows (I just forget about them and they tend to accumulate), and for the most part it handled it just fine (it did use quite a lot of RAM, of course.) That was on an i7 7700k with 32GB of RAM.
I remember being quite impressed indeed.
I'm using Fennec from F-Droid, but I have a little document symbol on the URL bar I tap for reader mode. I guess the issue is it doesn't show on all sites then?
This is false. I am seeing that button right now in Firefox, on the right side of the address bar.
Also: Substack posts don't seem to show the reader symbol immediately, often only after switching tabs or page refresh, e.g. here: https://dynomight.substack.com/
For me, it's pretty clear that a much better idea is not to fix the broken concept, but do what the Chrome does, and show the button on every single page. Then users won't have to report the pages where button is missing, and Firefox devs won't have to keep updating that functionality all the time as the new types of pages appear.
Yes, this means that sometimes reader mode might miss some relevant text, but that's OK, reader mode does this occasionally already. And Firefox is supposed to be for power users, right?
File should be located in $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR/distribution/
$FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR is the installation directory for firefox, which (for default setup) probably will be printed by this (and it's probably /usr/lib/firefox):
When you decide to update you could just install new version, or you may temporarily replace policy for permissive one.[1] https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/guides/policies-confi...
[2] https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/reference/policies/
Just look at how many people pump positive comments into influencer's posts that are nothing more then ads (sorry, collaborations). While some are bots, plenty seem real.
Or the new local takeaway that's just opened and all the reviews saying "I keep seeing this place appear so I had to check it out"
I got the Chrome extension that adds the "Open in Firefox" option to the hyperlink right-click menu. That's how I view all YouTube videos.
I'd switch completely to Firefox except for all my data being on Google. It's clear that eventually I will switch to Firefox completely.
Google is pure evil.
2. My employer requires Chrome or Edge to access all resources.
I prefer vivaldi's UX to firefox enough that i am willing to settle for technically-worse adblocking. If I notice this becoming practically-worse, I will consider switching.
I hate that you are right about this :-)
It really hit home for me today. My project manager was sharing her screen so we could see the free planning poker webapp our team uses. I had it open locally on my machine. She had ads, I did not.
She's not a programmer, but she _is_ technical. She's worked adjacent to programmers for many years, and she's very adapt at writing SQL to query our DB. But she didn't think to install an ad blocker.
I guess I really do live in a bubble where I think _most_ people run ad blockers.
I love this. Many ADs are blockable because they don't care adblocker.
If everybody use an Adblocker, they will come up with something even harder to block. This is engineering time arm race.
I imagine others feel the same?
Only downside is I keep getting Google Recaptcha so I have to switch to DDG.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/blob/main/chromium...
From "ublock-filters" only 1 filter was unsupported and 90 had unsupported domains dropped out of 10436. From "easylist" 18 out of 56109 filters are unsupported, no unsupported domains.
I'm sticking with uBlock-Origin, but not sure how much of a difference it makes these days.
https://ladybird.org/
It’s not really a feasible alternative.
Can barely keep my eyes socketed from all this involuntary rolling that's overtaken them ...
I'm personally here for the non-bullshit stuff that isn't about getting clicks with hot ledes grounded on warmed over, barely modified well worn takes on well-understood stats so miss me with _that_ shit ...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-background-updat...
It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push ads or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings about:config and make edits to userChrome.css
It isn't bots complaining about Firefox, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into and what Mozilla is prioritizing and who are worried about what we have to lose.
Please never stop bitching about Firefox. Refusing to talk about Firefox's problems wont help make them go away. Keep discussing what you'd like to see in Firefox and what things you hope they'll focus on. There are Firefox devs and mozilla employees around here. If we're lucky, a few of them might see and listen to some of what we say.
Its getting harder and harder, at some point they'll deprecate their last sane ESR, and we'll all get stuck with all their junk.
Konqueror could be an option.
the frustration i have with that is the "i don't have a problem with it" crowd is the poster child for lower standards and shittier software experiences. there seems to be no meaningful way to convey "hey, you should care about this".
firefox fumbled super hard earlier this year trying to push their on-by-default AI. it took entirely too long to get them to backtrack a little. you could feel the insulation between customer feedback and their teams working it, they already have the operating models in place to try and force an enshittified offering and you can tell their new MO means they are hungry to do it and i expect more bullshit from firefox up ahead. hopefully we have other options locked and loaded before we get there because they're playing with fire considering how much user share they don't have. mozilla has completely shifted its priorities and structure, i do not expect them to move independently in a direction that benefits us anymore. no one should be surprised if/when they resume shipping some real bullshit up ahead
That's fair. In this case though, the divide is pretty massive and also important. A lot of people couldn't tell you what a browser is. They just know what button to hit to make Facebook appear on their screen. A few would know what a browser is, but couldn't tell you what engine it used or why that would even matter. Many of the folks around here know about browsers in a way that goes far beyond what is typical. We've sought out and experimented with several. We've written websites, extensions, and applications for them. We understand how browsers work, and the standards and protocols involved in what they do.
The result is that we tend to hold stronger opinions about web browsers than many others would. Our knowledge matters especially to Mozilla because the user who couldn't tell you what a browser is isn't going to bother going to their app store and searching for a new one. We are the ones who go to our friends and family and tell them about Firefox. We encourage them to install a new program on their devices and to learn to recognize and use an unfamiliar icon whenever they want to search "The Google". The more user like us Firefox pushes away, the more they'll miss out on the benefits of that kind of evangelism.
It used to be a whole lot easier to recommend Firefox. I could tell a moderately skilled person to download it and install it. If someone weren't comfortable with downloading and installing software I could install it for them plus an extension or two in just a few minutes. I knew firefox would work for them, and not try to exploit them. That's no longer the case.
Now firefox provides an enshittified product out of the box, and every update threatens more harm. While I might be willing and able to keep an eye on whatever new bullshit Mozilla pushes and make a bunch of config changes and customizations to work around it, I can't expect my less technical or passionate friends and family to do that.
I have gotten most of my family and friends to switch to Firefox, and I have never gotten a Firefox-specific complaint or question that I can remember.
Most non-technical users are exclusively using android devices and chrome is pre-installed. Today you can still install firefox for others and it will probably work fine for them, but it will be exploiting them too. It will collect their personal data and use it to push personalized ads. It will use updates to force anti-features onto them.
Firefox has gone from something we could recommend unreservedly to something we can only suggest while cautioning about it's increasingly user-hostile practices.
It could be a generational thing, but I've always associated "power user" with the DOS/Windows crowd and it isn't so much about knowing more as, well, treating a computer like a computer. That is to say that the person who uses scripting in Excel is as much of a power user as the gamer who tweaks power profiles or overclocks their processor. On the flip side, someone who uses the basics of Excel or the gamer who buys the fastest GPU is a consumer of products, rather than a power user.
Funny thing is, I never hear that term being used on the macOS or *ix side of the fence -- even though there are certainly people who who would qualify.
As for the AI thing: AI is something that nobody wants but "everybody" expects. I don't blame them for pursuing it, even if it's a type of integration that I really don't want.
oh ok I'll change to Chrome then surely they would never do stuff like this
Chrome: no blocking ads on websites whatsoever. The comparison isn't even close.
We don't see many people here hating on Edge for instance, they may hate the fact that it always wants to force itself in, but not the browser itself. And that's simply because they don't use it, they don't even bother trying, they don't know what to hate about it and they don't care. Occasionally, some people say it is actually good, they get ignored.
Compared to this, hate is a good thing.
Hate more if you care.
The more you hate, the more you care.
Support hate.
Reality is that non-tech people to know what surfing the web is like with Ad-Block vs non-Ad-Block browsing. Once you teach some one it becomes night and day.
Without teaching someone very few people will step out of their comfort-zone to self educate.
Is letting Firefox slip into irrelevance (by not using it) in the interest of the users, writ large? What developments should we expect if this happens? This is the ethical side of the user.
Everyone has their own ethical standards around this but I think Firefox is clearly seen as the browser to use if you care about the open-web. A lot of people therefore feel the need to defend their preference for a Chromium-based browser.
IMO that obfuscates the fact that even non-Chrome Chromium based browsers still affords Google massive influence over the future of the web.
About compatibility, there is some odd site that uses a Chrome only API or something that FF didn't implement. They are really rare but people that must use one of them to do their job don't have a choice.
Then I intentionally break every single site by using privacy add-ons like uBO, uMatrix, PrivacyBadger etc so sometimes I have to play with them and find a configuration that let's me use a site. In the case of uMatrix it usually means finding the minimum set of scripts that enables enough functionality leaving out all the 3rd party tracking and then saving it. When it's too complicated and I will not use that site again but I must use it, I either disable every add-on on that site or I run Chrome.
Finally, I run integration tests with a headless Chrome, but I develop with FF. If it works with FF it works with Chrome and Safari too.
BTW, I use FF on Android as my primary browser too.
I only have an issue because I set a big disk cache (because data cap). 8gb is fine IIRC, but 24gb causes slowdowns on startups and new tabs. Doesn't outweigh anything tho.
In that case you can be satisfied of yourself while your user base and promoters is plummeting.
It is a great thing that you still have a large user base that will still complain of issues they have so you can improve or ever on that if it is your wish.
And nothing as strong in the end that the fidelity of an user that was complaining about an issue and now feel that his voice was heard!
Obviously, I hate edge. I dont mention it because useless garbage is what I expect out of microsoft.
But it just laugh at it because it's so incompetent and mediocre like everything from Microsoft.
Firefox on the other hand I use privately and I deeply care about it. That's what makes me pipe up more.
People whine about the features every time. Guess what? I like sync. I like having a dedicated container for the rare times I must log in to google. I like some of these "useless" things they "tack on." Not every change must be met with "nobody asked for it." I actually don't want a super basic, boring browser - that's what I have mullvad browser for! FF is my daily driver, sometimes they roll out stuff I legitimately want and expect.
That’s because this mismanagement has been going on for nearly 10 years now, nothing is being done to address it, and if anything, it seems to be getting progressively worse.
As much as Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of Good, the existence of Worse shouldn't make anyone stop demanding Better.
Generally, while I know it can take time away from working on other things, I don't mind if firefox adds optional features like Sync, FlyWeb, Pocket, or Hello as long as they can be easily and permanently disabled.
Ideally they wouldn't be installed by default and users would be informed about what the features are, told what the risks of installing/using them are, and given an option to enable them or not first.
I also used to be a Thunderbird lover, but I was forced to ditch it due to crippling freezes, crashes, and slowdown when you have a lot of emails. Mozilla just feels like an awful steward of their projects at times.
EDIT: I also subscribed to Mozilla VPN for almost two years and was forced to ditch that too, due to... solvable technical issues, again. Mullvad was just a greatly superior product for the same price. I still use Firefox for all my browsing on desktop and Android at least.
Often it goes unacknowledged, leaving the reader to read the criticism as a tacit endorsement of switching off of Firefox to something else.
I just wish they would fix the memory leaks and stuttering.
Someone needs to take Firefox from Mozilla itself and provide it better funding under the understanding no more shennanigans.
I don't see how cloudflare buying firefox would keep it from being a victim of corporate interests. That'd just make them subject to the corporate interests of cloudflare instead.
That's even worse.
It is also very bad if the company that gets to decide which user agents get to see a webpage owns a browser. I could easily see some kind of fingerprinting mechanisms built into the browser if cloudflare is in charge. For your safety, of course.
That was not in fact the purpose of project Quantum
The problem isn't that they're frustrated it's that they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about.
They don't just complain for themselves, they think this is the causal explanation for Firefox declining market share. Which it isn't because what they complain about 99% of people have never heard of. Nobody out there cares about who the CEO of Mozilla is or what detail of their Term of Service for telemetry they've changed. Power users is the only thing Firefox doesn't lack.
The average user doesn't really understand what a browser is, or how it works, and will never bother to look for an alternative to whatever default browser shipped with their OS. If Firefox plans on surviving by appealing to that audience they're doomed to fail.
Firefox got what success it's had by appealing to the people who care about browsers. They installed Firefox and then convinced the other people in their lives who couldn't care less about what a web browser is to install and use Firefox. It was easy for power users to recommend Firefox because it was a good product that offered clear advantages and didn't exploit its userbase. Alienating the people who know and care about browsers by enshittifying is probably not going to work out for Mozilla, and that means we all lose.
They completely revitalized the browser and... kept losing market share. Because it's 99% about distribution and Chrome was distributed by the world's most visited website and the pre installed default on over a billion devices.
In fact, we have a perfect natural experiment for what it looks like to execute on features perfectly, listen to core user concerns, getting first to market on mobile devices, and outcompeting on customizability and features as well as experiment with every imaginable fundraising model you could imagine. Opera was that company, and to this day I maintain that nobody has a better browser engine than Presto at its peak, I still think even now, in terms of features, innovation, customizability. Opera was the best browser company that ever existed. If being a perfect browser company was rewarded with market share we would all be using Presto right now. But browser economics just don't work that way.
Also, there's a history of curbing browser monopoly dominance by giving users choice (antitrust case against Microsoft in the '90s), and Mozilla's market share issues would be solved overnight if Android users had to choose from a list of browsers. The narrative that market share change has anything to do with feature development is a hallucination born in the backwaters of internet comment sections and completely ignores the actual drivers, which are the flexing of monopoly power and pre-installed defaults.
Which is exactly why the first thing Mozilla needs to to is to stop driving them away. They are never going to win the popularity contest for the average user without the word of mouth from enthusiasts.
What would you have them do? Somehow they have to make some money somehow.
Alternatively they have to live purely from donations, which means that people like you and I have to part with of our money. Or they could be purely open source, in which case people like and I donate our time.
It's not the panacea people keep assuming it is, it's just one of many accusations that gets flung at the wall.
Yet somehow Firefox is different? It needs to make money! It needs to make money so much that they keep spinning up all sorts of new projects so that they can make more money, or at least that was the argument for some of what they were doing.
At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.
And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.
>At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.
They already do that, they have a huge endowment set aside. It's obvious that people don't actually care about it because they don't know, and they only mention the possibility to make the accusation, never to give them credit once they discover Mozilla already does this and has been doing it for about 2 decades.
>And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.
Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users. And that's the best pure online fundraising program on planet Earth. Again, people only think this through to the point of being able to make the accusation not to the point of figuring out if it would actually work or not.
Isn't half a billion dollars per year enough to maintain that? Over $10 per LoC annually?
To get pedantic about it, they aren't developing that much code, they are maintaining that much code.
Not that I think LOC is the best metric but here are the figures for 2 of the project I brought up. Linux kernel is ~40M LOC FreeBSD kernel 7.8~9M LOC
I would argue that the OS's that run the internet are much more cutthroat than a browser, not just in terms of attack risk but in business terms as well.
>Microsoft aggressively tried to destroy Linux in the late 1990s and 2000s. This era included the internal "Halloween Documents" mapping out strategies to fight open source, former CEO Steve Ballmer calling Linux "a cancer," and Microsoft covertly funding SCO Group's proxy lawsuits against Linux users.
The larger your codebase is, the greater the attack surface. One of the arguments about the way that Firefox is progressing is that they keep adding more stuff into the codebase. If it's getting too complex, maybe they shouldn't be adding those features...
>Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users.
Mozilla received 16.9 million from contributions in 2024.
Wikipedia took in ~170 million in the same time period.
Not sure where you got that Mozilla was bringing in more than Wikipedia through donations?
In going through the Mozilla Financials, I don't see where they have a huge endowment set aside, 73% of their revenue is royalties. I did however see that they spent 31 million to buy Acronym(an ad company) and 21 million to buy Fakespot. So that's neat.
https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
Mozilla Corporation already has funds totaling about $1 billion today. They're simply choosing not to develop Firefox actively.
Just fork it and have the agents maintain security patches moving forward.
That's interesting - why? Why torture yourself with abuse and ignorance?
It's somewhat like athletes who are told not to read social media. I'm sure many do, but what is the point? The people commenting know nothing of value about what you do - you're a professional working with professionals.
At least athletes are in entertainment so some aspects of public reaction are significant (not their advice on how to shoot the ball).
That said, if they're reading - hello! You guys do some of the best, most important work. The world without Mozilla and Firefox would be much less.
I’ve been exclusively using Firefox for many years. I don’t even have a Chromium browser installed! (I just nix-shell it if I need to test anything.)
I love the raft of new features that have been coming through recently! I heavily use tab groups, profiles, split view, and the baked in VPN.
The loud ones are always the complainers, which is a problem for adoption, which is exactly what TFA is getting at.
Toxic positivity is what's abusive and ignorant.
(Reading every comment is a bit much though.)
I do not hate Firefox but I hate it when Mozilla uses my donation money in not Firefox.
On the one hand, you're totally right. Pushback should exist.
On the other hand, I have seen some seriously lazy and wild justifications for sticking in the chrome universe because tech users aren't immune to justifying a bad product through inertia (and, honestly, are probably champions at it).
I have seen and heard plenty of firefox "can't handle all the sites they need" and I have always been curious as to what these people are doing because I've been on FF for decades and the ONLY time I switch to a chrome browser is for VIA (and that's a whole google did a standard no one else wants to do situation).
To be fair, I suspect some of that has to do with major web dev stuff that I don't have to do, so it is very possible I'm actually just missing the mark here and the tooling/use case is really that much better in chrome (although I know that's its own issue since that's kinda the problem), and there are those who've found some major feature on a chrome spinoff that they just love and FF doesn't do well.
Still accounting from those, I'd safely bet money a lot of people who claim firefox just cannot work for them haven't really bothered to try to adopt. It's functionally identical to me outside of the whole "better adblock" and "arguably better bookmarks i forget to use".
I'm very sick in general of "the criticism will continue until moral improve" attitude that has become more and more common.
And no, Chrome never "bought an ad-tech company, collected data on users, and used chrome to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force users to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings". NEVER IN THE WORLD. That's why you use it.
Mozilla Corporation does not get to do whatever they want to get funds for something that should be a project run for the public benefit.
Google/Chrome being worse is irrelevant to criticism of Mozilla/Firefox.
And I hate them trying to push the ethical ads angle. For my there is zero ethics in advertising anymore.
As long as the business world is going to continue centrallizing on the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, any existing or future alternative browsers will either have to kowtow on the alter of compatibility or make the deliberate decision not to support "advanced features" that enable the next generation of proprietary webmail, social media, banking webpages, etc - tending towards a total revocation of privacy in exchange for KYC via a glut of metadata.
This will get even crappier as mechanisms used to filter out "suspicious" traffic (read: competing products) become standard. I imagine using Firefox in 2030 will be akin to using Tor in 2019 - web requests will be blocked, denied, or deemed "insecure".
Lynx revolution when?
Why do people hate firefox? It's the only mainstream browser with an rcfile?
A) Don't know what an rc file is
B) Haven't manually configured one in the last few years
I'm sure there are plenty on HN who are eager to say how much they love rc files, I mean to point out how many, even here, really have no attachment to these kinds of things. Of course it's very possible they don't care enough to read this far or respond either... but it's worth a shot :D
For example, some distros add an alias for rm to bashrc to make it ask for confirmation (the -i switch iirc).
I didnt know Firefox has one. I can't find any documentation on it either...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RUNCOM
</pedantry>
A bit tangential, but that's not a meaningful analysis (depending on how you tested):
Imagine a Firefox user: They try site 1, see Firefox fail, and so they try Chrome and it succeeds. Then they try site 2, see Firefox succeed, and stop there. They never see Chrome's problem.It's like what I've seen some DuckDuckGo users say about search engines: 'Google is better because when I can't find something on DDG I do find it on Google'. (I think there's also some confirmation bias with Chrome and Google.)
It's like the old sales technique of comparing your product's features with the other product:
It doesn't show:This isn't really true, and hasn't been for some time. It's just the only other browser engine with meaningful production users. Servo and Ladybird are both making great strides.
firefox is the only mainstream browser with an rcfile, that alone gives you incredible powers. I hope one day it also grows something like chrome's CDP. What is everyone so upset about?
I disagree with Mozilla about many things, but I agree with this article - I use Firefox because it’s the only browser out there that isn’t Chrome or WebKit, and that’s worth enough to me that I’m willing to disagree with them on other issues.
Am I missing out on cool features of the URL bar in Firefox?
But you can do that in Firefox.
Firefox also find open tabs (so you can jump to the open tab instead of opening a new tab) and allow you to explicitly search for bookmarks, open-tabs etc. The open tab thing is also nicely integrated with Firefox sync (not sure if Chrome has something similar)
I don't say that because I personally mind if they are on X one way or the other, I've just given up on the idea anyone but an extreme few, usually tech nerds, seem to give a damn about this topic as a whole.
- We "need" firefox or else everything's just chrome
- Forks of chrome don't count as different browsers because they all use the same engine
- Using the same engine makes you basically just chrome because you can't diverge from upstream
- You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it
- You need to keep merging with upstream because upstream is implementing new web platform features
- You need those web platform features because if you don't add them then websites will stop working in your fork
- Websites will stop working in your fork because web developers don't support older browser versions
- Web developers don't support older browser versions because... they don't care?
If web developers had a culture of supporting, say, 10 years of previous browser versions, then chromium would lose a lot of the power it has to drag the forks (and firefox) behind it. I don't really see this happening without some sort of major culture shift, though. Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.
- Web developers don't support older browsers because they lack the skill and economic motivation for it.
- The managers of web developers will not support them, because there is no money to be made in supporting older browsers. Nor are there career benefits in maintenance projects. No developer or manager will get promotions for it.
- The actual management of the companies will not promote or compensate engineering managers or developers for maintenance projects since it doesn't contribute to "line goes up"-economics.
Blink is very modular. Merging your changes is easier than you think. Exponentially easier than creating a whole other browser engine.
As recently as 2012, web developers had to make sure their websites ran on IE6, a browser from 2001, and were very frustrated that had to support this 11-year-old browser instead of being able to implement new features available with Chrome/Firefox/Opera and even newer versions of Internet Explorer.
There was a lot of resentment caused by this situation, resulting in web developers just not wanting to hold back their website so that it will render correctly in some random ancient browser.
There have been a few attempts at this already and I have something like this myself for websites I design. Ultimately they fail to gain widespread traction since everyone has very different ideas on what of the various Web standards should be included at each version level. Someone else’s standard will likely not include that one feature you cannot go without so you simply do not follow it.
And it was all the fault of a judge seeing an alleged Google search monopoly despite the fact that countless users were already using ChatGPT rather than Google.
Microsoft killed off all competition. Then the only improvements were Microsoft proprietary.
I'm no designer, but I can't understand why someone would make a graphical choice like this. It absolutely detracts from the content, and in my case, will prevent me from reading it.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...