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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

That's the boat I'm in.

Firefox's literal only advantage over Chrome is its extensibility, and that baby is being thrown out with the XUL bathwater. It's slower than Chrome, it's less secure than Chrome, and since Mozilla seems hellbent on turning Firefox into Chrome, I might as well just bite the bullet, use Chrome and save myself the headache.

The only other advantages I can see are philosophical, rather than practical, but given their history of shoving irrelevant shit into the default install and ignoring any and all user pushback to their decisions (the "we're forcing addon signing" comment section was unanimously negative), I'm not sure that's worth much either. If I want to use a browser where my input on features and so forth is discarded, again, I might as well use Chrome and gain some speed and security while I'm at it.

I ask this question in complete sincerity: Why would I want to use Firefox?

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We're not breaking legacy add-ons for shits and giggles, or in some misguided attempt at "turning Firefox into Chrome." We're breaking them so we can finally land the architectural changes necessary to make Firefox competitive on speed and security, and we're committed to remaining more extensible than other mainstream browsers. The Containers API that landed in Firefox 53 this week is a great example of that.

I'm not going to shed a tear over Classic Theme Restorer or DownThemAll if their loss means a faster, more secure, and still more extensible browser than Chrome.

Mozilla has been committed to a lot of things. "The only browser built for people". "Freedom is personal".

Apparently, "people first" and "freedom" means "You can only install what we okay" (signing crap).

It also means "we will load the browser with utterly irrelevant add-ons whether or not you want them".

Apparently, "individuals can shape their own experience" means "we will outright prevent you from visiting sites configured a certain way" (see the dupe SSL cert handling bug that's been languishing for nearly a decade)

It also means "all that stuff you spent a decade getting used to gets thrown out, so sorry".

Mozilla, for all their talk of high-minded user-first ideals, sure doesn't treat their users like their time is valuable or their tasks are important. Perhaps I'd find this merely odious, rather than outright offensive if your company didn't continually talk like they wanted to be different and then behave in literally the opposite way.

Call this post gratuitously negative if you want to, but every time I give Firefox another try, I find another slap in the face. At least I know where I stand with Chrome.

I don't think it's logically possible to make Firefox as extensible as it is, and also "secure" as Chrome.

Chrome is crippled in many ways. Extensions are second class citizens, merely along for the ride. They can be removed remotely at Google's whim, and you can't rely on them to run reliably. They also don't have full access to the browser the way Firefox add-ons do.

Among my different profiles, I have profiles to slice and dice the web. I can do a ton of web scraping without having to write any scripts. I can do a ton of cool stuff, and customize Firefox the way I want. Firefox gives me cheatcodes to the web.

Who the hell said extensions had to be sandboxed? That's an overly cautious decision that makes sense for Google. It's a WEAKNESS. It's a COMPROMISE that Google had to make with Chrome. It is not a strength.

The iOS app store makes money for Apple. So does that mean we must copy the weaknesses of the iOS app store? That's cargo cult thinking.

Who exactly are you "competing" against? This isn't a competition. Linux is not inferior because it isn't Windows.

The early days of Firebird were not spent trying to match the features of Internet Explorer! Internet Explorer offered some superior features that Mozilla could never match. It even had awful custom CSS rules, that let websites do things like change the color of scrollbars.

Firebird focused on making a fully standards compliant browser, and then success found it, when the public got sick of Microsoft. And maybe that won't happen this time around, but so what?? This is just hubris on the part of Mozilla, at this point.

I'm horrified at what would have happened, if in 2006, everyone had rolled up their sleeves to bring ActiveX support to Firebird on par with IE6. Is that what you think would have worked?? Microsoft would always be several steps ahead of you.

This is tilting at windmills.

They toss out one advantage to gain flexibility to try to improve in other areas.

For a site that has people who go on and on and on about the innovators dilemma this argument seems pretty shortsighted.

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