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Comment by Fej | Hacker News Reader

This would be a miracle for privacy advocates. However, I'm worried that Mozilla could become irrelevant in the meantime. I say this as a die-hard Firefox user (I even refuse to use any of the forks that remove the branding).

Mozilla needs to be making moves that keep them relevant. This move is great for some privacy-minded folks who don't know that the Tor Browser Bundle exists, but unfortunately... most people don't care about their privacy online.

Does Mozilla even have a path they can take that keeps Firefox from dying a slow death? I say this because I love what they do - they're the only major browser developer that is interested in protecting their users instead of their profits. They need to start acting like the situation is getting dire.

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> They need to start acting like the situation is getting dire.

We might start by start offering free mandatory history lessons everytime anyone uncritically evangelizes for Chrome or create anything that "works best in IE^h^hChrome".

Or continue to remind those poor souls that their browser still doesn't support real extensions after all these years ;-)

> their browser still doesn't support real extensions after all these years

I'm confused. What is a "real extension"? Given the rich extension library for chrome I'm not sure of the difference.

Rather than remind the poor souls, it may be time to acknowledge and accept the fact that "real extensions" aren't an actual benefit of Firefox over Chrome? If it is a reference to IE. I think the only reason IE has market share now is the fact that it is the default on Windows.

For me, and I guess many hardcore FF users, the extensions on Chrome is a dealbreaker. I honestly tried and it was beyond my patience.

A number of the best extensions just doesn't exist on Chrome, most notably all good tab-tree extensions.

I guess this makes me a spoiled brat, but hey it is free so anyone can be a spoiled brat.

The extensions are one of the reasons I remain on Firefox as well.

Also, many of my favorite tabs have no equivalent in Chrome that I can find. One of these is "Tree Style Tab" which is important to my workflow.

IE is not the default on the current version of Windows, though it is on older and still supported versions.

Honestly, the biggest thing that hurts Mozilla's market share right now is the pre-loading of Chrome on Android devices. Mozilla should hope that the EU takes some kind of action against Google over this, so at least Google shouldn't consider it a "hostile action" when a random OEM wants to put Firefox on its devices rather than Chrome.

I would say the same applies to iOS, but to a smaller degree. Also, I'm not sure if Microsoft still respects the browser option thing in Europe with Windows 10 anymore.

That said, the pre-loading of Chrome may be the biggest problem right now, but Firefox's reputation has also degraded in many users' eyes, so they need to keep doing stuff that truly sets them apart compared to Chrome, and it's also not easy for Chrome to replicate because it would be counter to Google's incentives (like the privacy stuff).

> Honestly, the biggest thing that hurts Mozilla's market share right now is the pre-loading of Chrome on Android devices. Mozilla should hope that the EU takes some kind of action against Google over this, so at least Google shouldn't consider it a "hostile action" when a random OEM wants to put Firefox on its devices rather than Chrome.

Why? What has Google done monopolistically here? They don't stop OEMs from shipping other browsers, as far as I'm aware, even as the default. Samsung, noticeably, ship Samsung Internet (still Chromium-based) as the default browser on their devices.

The fact that OEMs basically always decide not to ship other browsers isn't something that's Google's fault.

> Also, I'm not sure if Microsoft still respects the browser option thing in Europe with Windows 10 anymore.

They don't. The five year term of the EC and Microsoft agreement ended at the end of 2014, and they've had no obligation to ever since. The website itself has been gone since mid-2015.

There are lots of great web browsers now, which is a huge improvement on the state of the world when Firefox 1.0 was released.

All major browsers today do share a huge problem - the web browser needs to be fast (performance and responsiveness are a Really Big Deal to people), and it also needs to be secure (people getting ransomware via the browser is Not OK with them). Privacy is a more nebulous topic, I agree.

One place where Mozilla has invested that can make a real difference there is with Rust and Servo.

A lot of the investments in Firefox that Mozilla makes are intended to help the web as a whole. Trying to standardize and expand on cross-browser extensions with WebExtensions is an example of this.

Coming back to the topic, while I agree that most people don't care about privacy online but there are some who do and Tor users almost certainly do. Bringing Tor's security and privacy improvements to Firefox is good for everyone, and some improvements help both performance/responsiveness and security (the recently-released and ongoing work from Mozilla on multiprocess and sandboxing is an example of this.)

It still concerns me that privacy is never taken seriously by most users. Sigh

We see that % share is going down for Firefox, but is there any indication that total number of users is dropping for Firefox? I suspect that as more people have been getting on the internet, the absolute number of FF users is actually going up. It stands to reason that Firefox isn't dieing at all.

I broke my Chrome instance and decided to give Firefox a try, and I must say it has A LOT of usability problems compared to Google's. I'd say Mozilla has a lot to work on to avoid losing users, if they aren't already.

What usability problems did you experience vs Chrome?

Most notably, for me, I'm stuck using Yahoo as the default search engine. I can change the default to Google, but the preference resets when the window closes.

Edit: It appears only browser instances launched with Selenium are affected. Instances launched the usual way default to Google as expected.

This was a once only change for me. If this is actually the case (setting not staying...set) you should open a bug report as it's surely not intended.

To change the default search engine you can click the magnifying glass and then click Change Search Settings from there you can set the default search engine.

I know how to change the default search engine, but the settings don't persist from session to session (at least not when the browser is launched from Selenium).

Perhaps Selenium doesn't use an existing profile when it loads because that could subtly change its behavior every time it is run (for example, which links are visited).

This makes perfect sense. Thanks for the explanation.

I'm pretty sure you can configure which profile Selenium launches with, and change that profile to use Google as the search engine.

That really should not be happening.

Are you clicking "Change Search Settings" in the search drop-down, and changing the "Default Search Engine" in the preferences (about:preferences#search) ?

not gp, but

1 - crashes, approximately bimonthly. Chrome just doesn't crash for me any more.

2 - very high cpu usage if ff runs long enough. Eventually it will creep up towards consuming 50%+ of a cpu

3 - similar problems with memory usage. Chrome is a pig, but if you close windows, the system gets memory back. FF just doesn't seem to return memory to the system w/o a full restart.

4 - intermittent freezes when loading new tabs. The entire app becomes unresponsive, long enough to notice / feel jerky.

fwiw, I leave chrome up for weeks on end and don't have these issues. osx 10.9

I also get window rendering issues in FF on Windows 10 after waking my laptop from sleep. The browser can still be used but the frame goes totally white. Very weird.

I get rendering issues after waking the notebook from sleep in Win7 as well. Also I get rendering issues in a Remote Desktop session.

If the PC is running for days Firefox crashes automatically after some days.

Firefox crashes (whole browser) more often than other browsers. It's annoying that the multi process implementation that so many years to implement and will still break plugin compatibility.

1. Know the problem but for me it is infrequent enough and the bandaid (restore last session) is good enough that I don't care.

2. Painful for me as well until I I blocked js in google search and search results. (I often have quite a number of tab trees open and the roots are often google search results and they eat CPU if not restrained. I don't know if this is intentional on googles part but it leadt it shows poor attention to QA.)

Just recently learned about about:performance and it is really nice.

The burning of CPU cycles whilst idling on Google's result page is the most infuriating bug in Firefox but doesn't seem to have been accorded any priority. It has persisted for at least three years.

https://support.mozilla.org/fr/questions/965360

Unfortunately I usually only remember to close the results tabs when my fan spins-up.

Is it a Firefox thing or a Google thing?

Well, you could always just use startpage.com (uses Google) or duckduckgo.com. It's not like Google is still ages ahead of the competition as it once was. I am not sure where the bug comes from but it would be much easier for Google to fix it, given that their JS is heavily obfuscated. But then again, that's not really in their interest, is it?

But then again, that's not really in their interest, is it?

That thought struck me as well. Lets ask :-)

Googlers at HN: is this a lack of QA, a deliberate stab at Firefox or something else?

Hopefully, Electrolysis will fix 3 and 4. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

Granted, this is non-default config. When blocking third-party cookies, Chrome shows a little icon which you can click to whitelist blocked cookies. There is no such Firefox option that I've found yet.

It's also a lot easier to toggle javascript for individual sites in Chrome without extensions.

This is arguable in my opinion. Someone who wants to block third-party Cookies or JavaScript shouldn't have any trouble with installing extensions.

Now you've forced me to make at at least two more decisions: to open up addons.mozilla to find a cookie-management extension, and to open up addons.mozilla to find a javascript-permissions-management extension.

At each of these interactions, I would be confronted with the worst possible next-actionable-step: a large, seemingly unbounded number of options. Picking any of them then requires an additional interaction to confirm, possibly whilst (realistically speaking) disregarding scary-looking security warnings about what the extension will be able to do with my first-born child.

Of course, IRL, users respond as you'd expect when given such immediate negative feedback. They will make it through at most one forced-decision interaction. By the time they hit #2, the user's goal will become "install Chrome", not "figure out which extension to install next".

It's really important to recognize here that the extension search/installation/configuration user flow is more-or-less indistinguishable from actively punishing the user for using firefox. Oh, so you want to use firefox, and actually do something? Kindly direct this barrage of STOP NO DONT feedback to your decision-making apparatus until it comes around to it's senses and installs something, anything else.

What a great summary of extension installation process! I wonder why they never streamlined it and made at least a list of featured (curated / reviewed for security) extensions.

That said, I still prefer Firefox to anything produced by MS, sorry, I mean Google... :)

Back in the day the idea of Firefox was to provide a simple browser that is easily extended. So I'd say that it's by design that you can't do those things easily without extensions. I use NoScript and Cookie Monster to selectively block scripts and cokkies and it works really well.

I agree, that's a great feature, and one that I wish Firefox had.

I ended up switching back to allowing all cookies because my whitelist kept getting deleted (probably a bug) but when it works, it's wonderful.

I can't live without Cookie Monster[1]. It's always at my bottom layer of privacy protection (installed earliest.) I wish one of the other things that I use that also regulates cookies would steal its UI (or FF itself), because once every year or two some interaction problem comes up between it and something else, though not nearly enough for me to give it up. Firefox seems to have adopted the Gnomeish philosophy to intentionally make it more difficult to selectively disable parts of the web as a way of guiding user behavior, so I don't see it happening.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-monste...

It stutters when resizing, at times.

Good news is that this should be fixed with Electrolysis, which is currently being rolled out and will make it to your local Firefox installation somewhen in the next few months.

Also you can opt in now and see if it fixes your problems. I've run it now for a week or so and seems to work well.

i'm reading the thread is in the ctx of merging tor vs disabling mathml, which (mathml) isn't implemented in chrome according to mdn.

I haven't tried it recently (as in the past month), but I like to fire up the browser, press Ctrl+L, type an address and press Enter in a few seconds. That seems to take forever on Firefox compared to Chrome.

AFAIK Chrome starts up a background process after your computer has booted up, which then helps it start faster. So, if you just told your OS to start up Firefox on boot and then didn't close it afterwards, that should have pretty much the same effect.

I agree, though, that having an option for this in Firefox would be good.

This is awful, how do I turn this off?

    > most people don't care about
    > their privacy online

Apple are betting they will do, and I think that's prescient. Only need a few more Ashley Madisons to see a sea change in this area, and a browser that's been ahead of the curve for a long time has a lot to gain.

I'm not sure Ashley Madison is the best example. When that leak happened, a lot of the public's reaction was along the lines of "they were doing something wrong, so they deserved it."

It would be more accurate to say "a lot of the public reaction" rather than "a lot of the public's reaction." A lot of the private reaction was completely freaking out and considering the web completely unsafe.

No, Apple isn't betting average users care about privacy. They're thinking average users will not mind it, and they can reach a new audience this way.

The people who want open platforms will want usability like everyone else, but they're willing to sacrifice that if they get an open platform. Open platforms can be studied, understood and verified to be secure. Now that Apple products are apparently also safe and private (they're making a big point of it), the remaining reason is fairly abstract and purely ideological. The hackers and professionals no longer have a justifiable reason for their friends not to get an Apple device, and they themselves might think twice too.

It's another step in the erosion of our values that I'm afraid is taking place. Is it really bad or just the next step in what humanity values and cares about? I'm not sure, but I'm also not sure we can tell until it's too late and power over many devices (and thereby people's lives) is in the hands of a very few, so I'm on the "let's not go that path" side.

> > most people don't care about their privacy online

> Apple are betting they will do

No they're not. iCloud is still not end-to-end encrypted; iMessage users still trust Apple to verify identity; macOS and iOS users still cannot verify the source of the OSes they run.

Apple may be betting that people care about online-privacy snake oil.

> Apple may be betting that people care about online-privacy snake oil.

You can't blame people for not fully understanding how their data is protected. Even the average geek gets confused pretty quickly (I know I do).

People also chose their battles. Between facial recognition, revenge porn, online harassment, IMSI catchers, video surveillance, police overreach, and many other issues, they may not think of end-to-end encryption as a priority, but people do care about their privacy.

As techs, we have to do our part in explaining these things correctly, and also making sure we push forward legislation that helps protect people. This isn't something that will self-regulate.

I think the clear path is launching a new browser (eg Firefox NT) based on Servo engine (coded in Rust) with an HTML UI and an compatibility layer to support legacy plugins from Firefox era (at least the simpler newer API). With great multi process support and rendering done on the GPU.

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