Did Google Sabotage Firefox? | Hacker News Reader

Did Google Sabotage Firefox?

twitter.com

49 pointsdoener28 comments

I always find it curious in the Chrome vs. Firefox discussion, that while people bash chrome and think of Firefox as the truly free alternative, in the end, even in this very technical community here, many people still choose Chrome. Now, I got the theory that this has to do with many techies here being US based, there are probably lots of you using Macs and from what I understand, Firefox on Mac is even worse than Chrome on Mac? But really, I never understood it at all, because I never experienced Firefox as "unusable slow" as I hear people often complain about and thus I never switched to Chrome, because I felt it offered far more annoyances than the slightly lower speed of Firefox in comparison.

But what I am getting at, even now, that many people are starting to get really critical about Chrome and when Firefox seems to have redeemed itself regarding speed, many here still seem to think, Chrome is the end-all-be-all. And with that attitude, you have to wonder, is it really google holding Firefox back or is it us, the experts, who in large parts seem not to use it, while still preaching how bad chrome/google is becoming. If there is no easily pointed to technical superiority to Chrome, why are we not all using Firefox and installing it on our families and friends computers?

And a bit unrelated: Reading this rant on twitter is just ridiculous. Get a blog, dude!

The devtools are just better (tm).

Except they aren't. I'd bet most people saying this haven't used Firefox dev tools in a long time.

I had one of my juniors who uses Firefox install Chrome to use those dev tools 4 months ago, because Firefox was just throwing garbage in the stack traces, while Chrome had transparent React code.

Not that it'd be a deal breaker for me, but he now debugs in Chrome when necessary, and still uses Firefox as his daily driver.

I'm sure there's something we could've changed for Firefox to work too, but for what it's worth we didn't do anything in particular for it to work in Chrome.

FWIW ff is my primary browser, I still turn to Chrome for debugging complicated js stuff.

> there are probably lots of you using Macs and from what I understand, Firefox on Mac is even worse than Chrome on Mac?

From what I've read (I use Firefox on Ubuntu), there's a longstanding bug with Firefox on Macs using a scaled resolution that causes it to become unusably slow.

Is that what it is? I can testify that, under equal load (hundreds/thousands of open tabs), Firefox on Mac is indeed unbearably slow at everything in a way that Chrome isn't.

Chrome was faster than Firefox and Internet explorer. And rarely took the whole pc down after a crash unlike the other 2 so people moved of them to Chrome unless something like that happens where some major websites become completely unusable on Chrome few people are going to move of it now. And as Google owns many of the most used websites on the web that is unlikely to happen now. People complain about Google a lot but majority of the web tech has improved because of Google research directly or indirectly being open sourced

You have to be crazy to think that Google has nothing to do with the degraded experience of their services using the Firefox browser.

One example is Recaptcha, if you use Firefox, you will be asked to confirm the Recaptcha almost all the time. Switch to Chrome and your problems disappear.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238593

It is only one of the several different things they did against Firefox. YouTube would be another one.

The reality is that Google created those problems for Firefox to brag about how Chrome was such a better browser etc ..

I wish Chrome had won the browser battle based on merit and innovation and not shaddy tactics and shenanigans.

I think ReCaptcha uses browser thumbprinting for remembering you are not a robot. I will sometimes use incognito mode to browse websites as a non user, and the ReCaptchas always make me find the chimneys or the stop signs.

>One example is Recaptcha, if you use Firefox, you will be asked to confirm the Recaptcha almost all the time. Switch to Chrome and your problems disappear.

I got the Recaptcha confirmation on Chrome all the time. I get it every time regardless if I use Chrome on my Macbook Pro, my iMac or my Windows PC.

For me Firefox wins hands down because of containers.

I have a very old gmail account that my book, music/YouTube Red, and movie purchases are on. Otherwise I use my G Suite account. Firefox makes it possible to live with this inconvenience. If Firefox went away then I would cancel G Suite.

Firefox containers make web browsing tidy and somewhat private.

I believe that Google tries to hinder Firefox.

No, Mozilla sabotaged Firefox.

^ This. Mediocre performance. Slow startup. Poor UI. Crap like Pocket.

I'd be more inclined to use Firefox if it didn't feel so clunky, didn't keep trying to push Pocket on me, and took a more aggressive stance fighting against web annoyances and adtech.

Heck I might consider switching to Firefox if it could actually, reliably block autoplaying video - something that Safari and Chrome seem incapable of doing.

If you're already using Chrome you likely don't care much about free software, but to address your specific complaints I would recommend GNU Icecat! It strips out some things like pocket, has some about:config tweaks out of the box with privacy in mind, etc. I will give the unfortunate tip that you should probably disable librejs which comes with it out of the box. I am not against its goal, but it breaks so much stuff. I also use umatrix and ublock origin so I already am often clicking around to unbreak a page. I didn't deal well with adding librejs on top of that. That said, if I made my own website, I'd strive for librejs compatibility for sure.

Far from true. Chromium on Arch is entirely open source and includes hardware acceleration, unlike Firefox which doesn't think Linux is relevant.

Pocket is a deal, search providers are a deal. All to put some money in Mozillas pocket to allow continued development of Firefox. They can't rely on donations and Google funding alone.

Whatever happened to being community-based and developers working on it because they wanted to help build a great application? Why do they even need a corporation giving them money to implement tracking and other features to compromise user privacy and security?

> Whatever happened to being community-based and developers working on it because they wanted to help build a great application? Why do they even need a corporation giving them money to implement tracking and other features to compromise user privacy and security?

Browsers being:

1. massively complicated,

2. requiring massive feature support for compatibility with the ecosystem,

3. the biggest attack surface on anyone's computer, and

4. made by people doing huge amounts of work who want to eat.

I don't think we can have a secure, feature-complete, fully community-developed browser unless there's a massive refactor and simplification of HTML and related technologies.

Pocket isn't a deal, it's a service owned by Mozilla itself.

I saw Pocket on there once or twice when they initially included it, and have not seen it since. I don’t see that they are “keep trying to push” it in any way. Just say no/disable it and move on.

I'll consider switching when they care enough about Linux to enable proper hardware acceleration.

I'd agree in the early days of rapid release, and the previous interface redesign. Extension broke every update, the interface change made the toolbars less customizable, and there was more focus on new features than performance.

Extensions had to be reworked. There was no way to make such implementation-dependent code stable for each release. The current API is much more limited in scope as well, but the performance and security concerns were and still are very valid.

I'm not a fan of the new tab page, and I have generally disliked how the settings have been reworked, but I still think then end product is better than Chrome.

(On the other hand, Opera 12 was the king of resource usage...and I miss it)