I hope that your manager doesn't think that way. :)
Some people will base their decisions on which software to try/use, based on the general sentiment of discussions on Hacker News. For example, suppose you suddenly had the need for Email As A Service. Which of the plethora of services will you choose to use? I believe a lot of Hacker News users will weight their decisions at least in part on HN comments discussing those services.
The same goes for Firefox. If all people ever see is criticism, that is likely to drive people away from Firefox. That means less revenue for Mozilla, which means a worse browser for us.
Basically I'm saying that compliments, positive comments, are not useless. Quite the opposite.
(Don't get me wrong. I completely agree with you that criticism is necessary. I'm not saying those comments are bad. I'm saying positive comments serve an important function too.)
And besides, suppose you were a Firefox developer reading these comment threads. Don't you think the positive comments can provide a bit of encouragement?
Mozilla should know not only what it is doing wrong, but also what it is doing right. And that goes for any software and any company.
By that measure, they will completely turn off their computer because every single product is primarily criticism here. I also think substanceless praise is mostly useless in this forum (not in life) and I appreciate everyone here that points to specific points and issues instead of needless bloviation. I think encouragement, praise, etc can/should occur elsewhere and we can get to the meat of the product. It's like complaining that your QA team never opens JIRA issues saying you did a good job...that's not the best use of that communication platform.
What is different about "life" that makes substanceless praise useful?
You'd probably be right, too: the current browsers are marvels of technology that keep getting better, whilst the Websites are getting worse.
My only real complaint is that `about:config` preferences have no descriptions, despite their names not always being descriptive. Chrome's `about:flags` is much better in this regard.
Still, it doesn't force report megabytes worth of data per day to the mothership, unlike Chrome...
But I've quit suggesting it to others. They can use Chrome all they want.
When majority of power users stop suggesting it to users around them, Firefox has no future anymore.
So it might seem to you that no power user could possibly be totally happy, I am happy to prove you wrong.
The problem is that Firefox makes these promises and builds a platform (in this case, old-school XUL-powered extensions), builds a profitable user-base from said platform, and then yanks features at a whim. It is almost like a classic bait-and-switch but played in slow motion. In the case of Firefox there simply aren't suitable replacements available for many add-ons because the APIs and underlying features they relied on are being pulled. And they are being pulled because of managerial decisions, made to metrics that only highlight majority use-cases, in the name of "saving programmer bandwidth". As a result, a popular, powerful, useful program more and becomes more like a disposable appliance and less like an extension of the mind.
"Who cares about nice ideals like mind extensions blah blah blah" you think? Well, a lot of users do (especially us old nerds), many of us who have stuck by Mozilla and will willingly dance to their beat in exchange for the company's historical sense of economy in its asks and respect for its userbase.
If Mozilla were making Firefox out of the kindness of their hearts, maybe you would have an argument. But Mozilla is a million-dollar business and much of what has become of their flagship browser lately is a result of business decisions to bring in more money, so I have a hard time understanding how legitimate user complaints could be considered "entitled".
Increasingly, that means having a Web browser that is secure and fast, even at the expense of taking out features that some users really wanted. I've been using Firefox since the start (you can find my name on the famous NYT advert), and they have not removed a single feature that I care about.
On the contrary, I am now happier with Firefox that I have been for many years.
It really makes me sick. Tyranny of the majority writ large. (And while I write this from within Firefox, I am definitely not a very happy user of it any more.)
You're right about Mozilla's nonprofit status -- but it is easy to forget about with all the various business partnerships they seem to enter. It makes me wonder just how much of this nonprofit is really spent funding development/advocacy...
Firefox is fast, modern, feature rich, and, free browser. Your grievance is about missing some feature that you use.
The right analogy would be that the church is providing perfectly nutritious food that majority of the people eat, but a homeless guy is griping about not having wine with the meal. After all the homeless guy is old now and he is used to having wine with meals.
I'm not happy with the changes they've been making but it's still the best browser by a longshot. If you're just taking defaults, Chrome is acceptable but it's not flexible enough for me.
Even with the bad decisions (removing native RSS support was a huge blow for me), Firefox is still better than it's ever been. They need to be careful though as paradoxically as it is, they're also on a knife's edge of ruining it with the face of that being this Pocket thing.
We had to blacklist google in the devices' firewalls to make all the transmissions stop
Edge/Safari- designed for the best interests of the machine.
Chrome- designed to operate in the best interests of Google.
Firefox- designed for the best interests of the user.
I can see an argument for Firefox, and Edge/Safari until we have better battery technology. I can't explain why anyone informed would willingly choose a browser designed to further the interests of a publicly traded, vulture capitalist corporation. Marketing is powerful on mediocre minds.
Here you are: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
But yes once in a while I still have to restart it when its memory usage and responsiveness become a problem (used to have an extension to have a restart entry in the menu, killed as many others by the new system, yeah for progress).
In fact I use Chrome more since Quantum, ironically.
- don’t use browser navigation
- need a specific login to have any use
- they are pinned,and I never close them, ever
With that in mind, I stopped thinking about them as web sites, and use chrome windows as application containers, while doing all my browsing and search in firefox.
I wish there was a simple way to have dedicated chrome windows acting as independant applications, like Gears was. For now it’s just too much friction to my taste to have each site in an electron style wrapping.
What should be its "own independent program"? Where do we draw that line? Why should we be constrained to our own offline system, when the web enables millions of (more) user-friendly use-cases?
I'm an edge case, but nearly everything. I prefer to not only "own" the program so that I may use it beyond the lifespan of the creator or hosting company supports it but I also prefer to own my files (cloud storage is prohibitively expensive for me). At $0.02 per GB per month I would be spending in excess of >$4,000/yr - and that's just my photos. It would be in excess of $10,000/yr if I also wanted to store videos.
For me to move into an "online, cloud-based software" world online storage would have to be price competitive with purchasing my own local storage for the TB's of data I have and the software would have to be fast enough to work on the files and work with whichever cloud storage I was using. (Let's also pretend that internet is always-present and always-fast-enough.)
On the note of expensive cloud storage... non-affiliated shout-out to Backblaze. I'm probably a borderline "abusive user", $5/mo is an absolute steal to backup the huge amount of data I backup with them.
I want to be able to remove my network card and still have programs which work. I want to own everything about my own PC and all the data that enters or leaves it. When everything's in the browser, that's not possible, because you're essentially turning a PC back into a network terminal. I want my computer to be mine. I want my data to be mine. I do not want anyone or any program to have the authority to edit data on my PC over a network without my clear consent. And if you say that installing and/or activating the browser executable means I'm giving consent to it to edit data freely on my machine, then I think I'm going to need to go a different way than the Web.
We need the freedom to have our own computers, our own thoughts, our own data. We need to be able to say at a user level that we wish to interact with this data in our way, rather than "the Web way". Not every piece of data needs to be viewed or manipulated in a way that works in a Web browser. And the processor load should absolutely be a concern. A well-written and optimized program written in asm will always run faster and better when compared to a "program" written in a web-deployed JavaScript on top of a browser.
Why should we be constrained by the lowest common denominator of the Web, when having the ability to use our own offline system enables the use of millions of more user-focused use-cases?
In my experience Firefox handles a large amount of tabs very well, while Chrome tends to eat a lot more RAM in the same situation (while doing its best to hide that fact).
On the other hand there are some websites that will easily demand a gigabyte of RAM on their own, or that use excessive amounts of CPU time. Chrome handles those cases much better than Firefox. But those are outliers, and if I have to visit them I just open them in Chrome.
don't really think a bloated spa is ff's fault..
my standalone slack on macos takes ~500M
Every single performance complaint I've seen post Quantum release has been from a Mac user.
For comparison, I currently have two browser windows open and zero tabs. One is this comment box, the other is a GitHub page. Firefox is using a grand total of 3GB RAM, about 700MB of which is for the WebExtensions process so figure about 2.3GB for a grand total of two pages.
This is actually an improvement on the way things used to be, but if I quit the browser now (as I probably will soon regardless), these same two pages would take up only about 200MB, which is still a lot for what it is displaying and running, and the WebExtensions process would reset to about 200-300MB. I have Waterfox running in the background too, basically Firefox 56, which I use for a single website with exactly one extension taking up over a gig by itself with a single page open.
I'm not complaining, again, it's a fact of life that I've accepted and it doesn't hurt me any, but if I changed my habits I have doubts about how much I would actually use Firefox. Maybe I still would after considering my other options, but the web isn't as interesting as it used to be and I have other means of getting what I want off it now so I don't really require a web browser I can throw a million tabs at since tabs themselves are pretty harmful.
That said, if there are browsers that do a better job nowadays, and I stopped looking a long time ago, I'm not convinced they would do much better than Firefox currently does.
Second, it sounds like you have quite a few addons running that each hold quite a bit of data in memory (like ad blockers). Try safe mode and see if behavior changes (though ads may now swallow quite a bit of memory now).
But the changes Mozilla did in recent years convinced me to come back and it has been great!
The only reason that I have Chrome installed is for the occasional website that absolutely requires something in Flash, and that's usually some online training thing.