Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome | Hacker News Reader

Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

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504 pointsadele11380 comments

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites.

As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to figure out what happened: The developer wrote his code, tested it on chrome alone, and then called it a day. No one booted it up in another browser and even smoke-tested to see if basic use-cases work as intended.

If developers are genuinely concerned with browser diversity and not handing the Web over to Google and whatever they deem to be the next IE6, it starts with having a test plan for other browsers. Testing on only one platform is tantamount to having official support for one platform because you only guarantee your product to work on that platform in so many words. Officially supporting one platform is pressuring your users into a vendor-lock.

They - even the tech savvy ones - can't even begin to make vendor choices when the products they use accidentally lock them out left and right.

If developers are genuinely concerned with browser diversity and not handing the Web over to Google and whatever they deem to be the next IE6, it starts with having a test plan for other browsers.

I'd say it starts with dialing back the "new feature/change fetish" that a lot of web developers have. Yes, I know some things simply can't be done without a JS webapp, but not all and probably not even a majority, so if HTML and CSS will do the job fine, then so be it; and even if it needs to use JS, it likely doesn't need to be latest-browser-only JS either.

The constant "X is bad, use Y; no, Y is bad, use Z; no, Z is bad, use..." churn and that "push the web forward" trendchasing seems to be so entrenched in "modern" (there's another buzzword) web dev culture that I wonder if Google/Chrome is responsible for cultivating and propagating it, because it's not quite as endemic in other areas of software and also helps Chrome keep its monopoly, since it keeps the target moving and beckons at others to "catch up".

I think web developers need to adopt a more "do what you can with what you have"/demoscene-ish (for lack of a better term) attitude and not the silly "I could do it with just X, but I'll use Y because it's newer/better-but-I-can't-explain-why-and-everyone-else-is" that really just assists Google's monopoly. In other words: Writing a webapp that could work over 20 years of browsers may not be as hard as it sounds (I've done it --- and I'm not even a web developer --- which might be the reason why...), and you will definitely help browser diversity that way.

The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps. A vanilla HTML site might be good enough in some cases but often you really need to push the envelope of what’s possible the web and that’s hard to do and also support niche browsers on a tight development budget.

You can install a “progressive web app” as a native Android app now. There’s been a big push to develop PWAs on the heels of react and single page apps for a couple years now - google is doing a good job trying to support the web as users move so aggressively to mobile. Facebook basically has its own browser in-app(iOS and Android), i bet that browser has more traffic than Firefox.

Google is a bit schizophrenic though.

You can watch IO talks from Android, Chrome, Flutter where the presenter eventually throws some jabs at other competing stacks as if they aren't from the same employer.

All large companies are schizophrenic to some extent.

Where I work, departments bill each other. Sometimes, two departments develop competing tools that are third department could make use of. Instead the third department use an off the shelf tool because the "license" for the internal tools is too expensive.

At these scales, companies are almost like states. A group of entities with shared services but otherwise working independently.

The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps.

Only for certain things. A lot of web browsing is still pure information-consumption. The "native apps" are also turning into effective webapps, thanks to Electron and the like.

Even this site, which is interactive, doesn't require JS to use (it provides some enhancements, but the site is still quite usable without.)

Google's practices pushing web non-standards haphazardly are so heinous that even Electron can't usually handle general web apps, like WhatsApp (especially) because it depends on Chrome-specific, not even Chromium, features. Many others are the same way.

Can you cite this? I'm collecting a laundry list of reasons Google has degraded the web, and this is certainly evidence.

If you go back in time far enough, Google has improved the web exponentially more than it has harmed it.

This is a bit hard to say, right? Google is also responsible for the normalization of aggressive user tracking and the creation of the ad-ridden tire fire that is the modern internet.

I wrote up one example that was particularly frustrating when I realized it [0].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ar1qj1/_/egl52...

> The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps.

No it isn't. Competition with native apps is the completely wrong way to think of it. The web should complement native apps.

> Yes, I know some things simply can't be done without a JS webapp, but not all and probably not even a majority, so if HTML and CSS will do the job fine, then so be it; and even if it needs to use JS, it likely doesn't need to be latest-browser-only JS either.

Sticking to HTML and CSS won't necessarily get rid of this - new stuff is being added to CSS all the time, in particular. And browser support is just as patchy.

How much new css do you actually use though w/ patchy browser support?

There are many essential css properties that Firefox doesn't support, e.g fit-content

https://caniuse.com/#search=fit-content

All browsers seem to have bugs with it. I also don't understand how it's essential.

But when a browser doesn't fully support a CSS feature most of the time is your site just looks a little wrong. Unless it's a major feature, the site will probably still be functional to the user.

The flip side of this is that many new JavaScript features can be either transpiled to ES5 syntax, or polyfilled. It will be great when we don’t need to anymore, but I’m always pleasantly surprised by just how much modern JS can be used in, say, IE11, just by having Babel be part of the build step.

CSS unfortunately doesn’t work that way, so apart from graceful degradation you’re out of luck.

Webdevs don’t seem to have much of a user-centric view of the sites they develop. The vast majority of use cases on the web are “I want to see a list of options then fill in a form”. All the tech needed to shop online or bank or pay bills or book travel or whatever existed 20 years ago (SSL being the last piece of the puzzle, all the rest is just plain HTML).

Fully agree, plain old cached SSR with a little sprinkle of JavaScript when it really matters.

The thing is too, anyone can do that. HTML forms are easy, generating HTML is easy. There just doesn’t need to be any webdevs, the dedicated role doesn’t need to exist. No amount of trying to rebrand themselves as “full stack engineers” will save them when that realisation dawns on the people paying their over-inflated salaries!

As long as the web is a viable software distribution platform, the world will need "webdevs". 2019 is still a chaotic time for the platform, and winners and losers still haven't really shaken out, not even at a basic architectural level. There are profound questions about what computation gets done where, what side-effects happen where, which in turn influences everything about how software is built, tested, distributed, and run, and yet they aren't really answered so much as philosophized about.

If form controls like select lists and checkboxes were style-able and compose-able I think it would reduce the need for JS in many cases.

Multi select in particular feels like it's stuck in the 90's.

Also select's lack of consistent search capabilities is painful.

Sorry, I'm not convinced that UI elements need to be "style-able" by the site. Every site ends up being slightly different from others as a result, because it feels the need to reinvent its own custom UI controls with their own behaviour inconsistent from the OS or even the browser's UI. (I have the same gripe about "native" Electron apps.)

Yeah, good luck with that. Every company wants to stand out. There's no money to be made from conformity.

Searchable select is now a thing (for 90% of users at least).

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/da...

Select elements are pretty decently style-able nowadays [0], though the options in the dropdown don't seem to be supported (at least in Firefox).

https://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/select-css.html

I'm certainly no CSS guru. And as you said, CSS doesn't cover everything. However, you can do quite a bit with CSS that most developers don't bother with:

https://bradleytaunt.com/dynamic-checkboxes/

https://bradleytaunt.com/easy-custom-radio-inputs/

https://normform.netlify.com/

> I'd say it starts with dialing back the "new feature/change fetish" that a lot of web developers have

I wonder whether this phenomenon is driven by HTML, CSS, and JavaScript being such lacklustre tools for building applications?

Many things that are completely reasonable to deal with in any “native” stack (animations, local storage, offline access, hardware access, accessibility just to name a few), while usually possible with a web stack, are often unnecessarily difficult or awkward.

Things are improving fairly rapidly because of the insistence that everything should be web based these days, and I could totally see that driving people to the bleeding edge.

I mean hell, I do it myself. I’m a web developer, and when reading about shiny new features I’m often eager to start using them ASAP — especially when it would replace a bunch of kludgy JavaScript I’d been relying on previously.

As a web developer, I love using new features. 90% of the time though, the new features can easily be covered by a polyfill, and there is no excuse not to use poly fills.

From my experience, JS is relatively portable, at least if you stay away from some corners. CSS (and some aspects of HTML) are a much more likely reason for strange differences between browsers. Another common culprit for browser-specific bugs is simply using browser-specific CSS extensions, because sometimes it is simpler than fiddling with standard CSS until it looks right.

Yes, I think that they should do back all of that "new feature/change fetish" as you say. It also would improve compatibility, to not do such messy stuff, too.

Most web pages will not need any JavaScripts, although some might need it. And in some other cases, optional JavaScript might help, such as to auto-fill or validate a form, in which case the form will still work with JavaScript disabled. (Also note that, for example, Lynx does not implement JavaScript.)

For some of that, my idea of a <widget> element might help a bit. It would improve performance, allow better user customizations, allow enabling some functions that would previously require JavaScript even though JavaScript is disabled, and is compatible even with browsers that do not implement <widget>.

CSS is also overused, although even if you use it, you should try to also allow working without CSS in cases where such a thing makes sense (which it often does, although not always). (CSS styles often just make stuff worse in my opinion anyways; that is why I put in my own CSS codes for stuff.)

I think, the end user need to have enough ropes to hang yourself and also a few more just in case. The entire control of the interface should be controlled by the end user.

Also, these web pages and HTTP(S) are rather overused anyways. There are other protocols, such as Gopher and Telnet and SSH and NNTP and IRC, which are better for some things (and worse for some things, too, I suppose). (But multiple protocols and multiple interfaces can be offered if wanted, anyways, I suppose.)

"As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest."

And guess what? Sites that appear to have bugs in FireFox, when I switch the user agent, suddenly render just fine.

Example: Before FB rolled out the FB Live feature to everyone, it was "Chrome only" until I figured out that a simple UA switch made it work.

No, I won't trust you to say "It doesn't work in FireFox" because one of the biggest companies on this planet said the same thing and it was an outright LIE. If you're actually coding to real standards, and not the crap Google dictates, your shit will work right down to Lynx (because you'll also be following best practice for the disabled.)

Good job demonstrating that you don't really know how to make a web page.

Mozilla does have some way of dealing with bugs in sites. They're maintaining a site/database which Firefox consults for workarounds. More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/cd1lob/how_firefox_...

thanks for the heads-up - `about:compat` and its enabling "Go Faster Addon" was news to me: giving a channel for concrete action following an opinion piece. Feels like a vendor distributed greasemonkey. It is called user-agent after all.

Interesting. I'm a full time Firefox user as well and honestly can't think of an example where this happened to me. There have been a couple times where I was warned my browser wasn't supported, which is stupid, but it usually works fine anyway.

I've definitely had sites where FF doesn't work properly with LastPass. I've already had sites that plainly don't work at all with FF. I've never blamed the browser for that though. It's the developer responsibility to make sure I can access their site or I go elsewhere.

To me, if the site doesn't work on Firefox, the site is broken. End of story.

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest.

Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working.

What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site that I usually avoid.

For example's sake, try opening payment/billing setting pages of Google products. For example, pay.google.com doesn't load on FF latest on MacOsX latest.

Thanks, though it works for me on Linux and Firefox 68.0.2.

Loads for me - latest Safari, latest macOS. Maybe it's a specific page?

I know for example I can use FF everywhere but specific Google apps (new sites) don't work well in FF, though that's improved lately as well.

Skype Web is an example from the top of my head, but I don't run into them a lot either (or don't notice that they are only broken in Firefox, because I rarely care enough to try another browser).

I do see quite a few sites that apparently never have been tested with ublock or privacy badger, but they break on all browsers where those are enabled.

Skype web works if you switch user agent

I had trouble with imgur on firefox mobile. it doesn't allow uploads until you request the desktop version (which fakes another useragent string).

Maybe it’s the combination with ad blockers, but there are a lot of times I get stucked in the payment part.

And then I have to redo all the ordering process on Chromium.

It for long failed on Visa 3D secure (so not website dependant) until I found why with Badger blocking it.

But often when the payment system is included in the website it fails (and that’s really annoying)

Blocking fingerprinting can cause anti-fraud to think you’re a bot.

As it turns out in recent news, credit card companies sell weakly anonymized information about cardholder purchases so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I solve this problem by having a clean profile with only uBlock that I can open up when I want to make sure a purchase is going to work. uMatrix has a glitch where even when you enable something it sometimes won't work / load even when you refresh the page multiple times, but I don't think I've encountered problems on many pages with just uBlock.

I have never had payment fail in Firefox.

Sounds like tracking protection blocks some elements.

For instance, my bank (Lloyds) has a login screen where you have to select letters from three long drop down lists containing all letters and numbers.

With Safari or Chrome, I can select the dropdown (by clicking it or navigating there using the keyboard) and then enter the letter or number on the keyboard.

With Firefox, I have to click on the dropdown, scroll down looking for the right letter/number and then select it with the mouse. It takes at least 10 times as long as with other browsers. So I'm not using Firefox for that site.

Of all the interactive sites I use regularly about 10% have some sort of bug when visited with Firefox. And this is getting worse at an alarming rate.

I think many mainstream sites not created by actual tech companies have simply stopped testing with Firefox.

(I don't use ad blockers, just browser default settings)

This used to work on Firefox as well with Lloyds, I don't know what changed but it stopped working about a year ago.

I think it's some sort of anti-keylogger pattern that Lloyds are using. The select options all look like this:

  <option value="&amp;nbsp;c">&nbsp;c</option>

I suspect the nbsp is what blocks the usual keyboard behaviour on Firefox but not on Chrome.

This is quite strange, because it could mean that the anti-keylogger feature only works as intended with Firefox but not with Chrome.

Interesting, that could be something not too complicated to change on Firefox, I'll try to contribute when I'll have a bit more time. At least that's the first time I see something I could realistically improve.

I'm not sure whether Firefox should actually be changed. It looks like Firefox may be conforming to the standard and Lloyds devs may have intended to use that standardised behaviour to thwart keyloggers.

Only they seem to have forgotten to test whether it actually does block keyloggers, and it only does so in Firefox.

So my grand example for a website not working well in Firefox may be just the opposite - Firefox saving my money from getting siphoned off by thiefs. Very bad choice of example on my part! :-)

Here's what the HTML 5 spec says on the <option> element's text content:

The text IDL attribute, on getting, must return the result of stripping and collapsing ASCII whitespace from the concatenation of data of all the Text node descendants of the option element, in tree order, excluding any that are descendants of descendants of the option element that are themselves script or SVG script elements.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-elements.html#th...

nbsp is not ASCII whitespace and so it should not be stripped. I can't seem to find anything specific on the autocomplete behaviour in this case, but arguably autocomplete should use the text content without further normalisation. Perhaps this is where Chrome and Safari devs would disagree.

In any event, this raises a bigger question. What if a site is actually broken in Firefox, but it's not Firefox's fault? Should Firefox then be changed to non-conforming behaviour, aping any Chrome bugs? That would put a huge question mark on all the work they put into making their own rendering engine instead of just using Blink.

> In any event, this raises a bigger question. What if a site is actually broken in Firefox, but it's not Firefox's fault? Should Firefox then be changed to non-conforming behaviour, aping any Chrome bugs?

I can remember one case of such a thing happening before: css box-sizing.

Before the attribute existed, the spec said content-box was correct, and all browsers except IE implemented it that way. IE implemented border-box, going against spec, but it turned out to make so much more sense it was eventually added to CSS, and nowadays is the recommended way to go (but still not the default value).

As inconvenient as powering through this bug might be, switching to Chrome to use this site just reinforces their choice. Perhaps emailing them to report the issue might also be beneficial for all?

As it’s a bank I suspect their devs have to use IE6 and have recently upgraded to IE8 and thus change in behaviour.

I changed bank - I had an account with a bank (RBS?) in the late 90s / early 00s, couldn't access it from linux, yet I could access HSBC, so RBS lost my custom.

My current bank (Smile) works in Firefox on linux, so that's fine. If it didn't, they'll be losing my custom.

Sometimes I am astonished by the life other people apparently lead. For example when they'd invest the energy to switch their bank (and all that is attached to that) over using a different browser to access a singular website.

I do not understand. It boggles my mind, in the most curious way.

Sometimes the way it fails gives the impression of a less-than-comfortable level of competence with technology. I also almost switched banks when my first was acquired by another, its webui was so much worse.

Please see the sibling thread (to your comment) for why I'm not going to do that. This "glitch" is probably intentional.

Also, I have actually tried to communicate with that bank about a far more important issue. It was frustrating and pointless, starting with the fact that they don't have a customer support email address.

Also full time Firefox user. Most of my issues are either blocking related so that is on me or apparently sites bugs. At work I use chrome for beyondtrust because I cannot get ff to automatically download and launch rdp sessions. Apparently the content type is wrong in downloaded file so ff will not associate an application with the file so adds several steps to launching rdp sessions. Easier to keep chrome off to the side around for that task.

The other issue is that it does not use Windows ca store for certificates. When company uses internal certificate authority for internal websites this requires users to manually update the browser cert store. Chrome and Edge will use windows ca store on windows. My it dept will not automate this but will manage the windows ca store.

>The other issue is that it does not use Windows ca store for certificates

By default. But can be configured to use the cert store [0].

> Apparently the content type is wrong in downloaded file so ff will not associate an application with the file

If it is consistent that shouldn't be a real problem.

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/AddRootToFirefox

Just now I came across an info table [0] for some game that should allow sorting by columns, but doesn't work on my Firefox, only Chrome. Yeah, its just some fan site for a game and thankfully doesn't happen that often to me, yet. But I feel like those many smaller sites, that I'd prefer to exist over all content centralized on a few giant platforms, are especially susceptible to not testing on many clients. And yes, I'll try to contact the author, but probably hadn't if not for this discussion today.

[0] https://oni-assistant.com/database/elements

Interesting, this is the only example given that I was able to confirm does not work. I'm glad this discussion is making you consider contacting the author. I feel like we've dug ourselves into an IE-shaped hole all over again and this kind of grassroots action is very important for getting out.

As an aside, immediately upon seeing the website, I had a split-second thought of the content reminding me of Don't Starve. Amusingly, the website turns out to be about Oxygen Not Included, another Klei game. :-)

As a (mostly) full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs and some are unusable in FF. What I find fascinating is that every time I mention this on HN or elsewhere, somebody also chimes in with this "doesn't happen to me" message and demands to know which sites.

Every damn time.

You mentioned your anecdote multiple times, but expect others to only mention theirs once? Not to mention it was likely a different person responding to you each time. It seems like a very natural pattern, not surprising.

It seems like this is a good thing since at least one other user said this thread prompted him to contact the site developer.

One of the two bike registry websites only worked in Chrome, with some JS error in Firefox. Some function was always defined in Chrome but never in Firefox by the time somescript tried to use it. Wasn't addon-related. Seems fixed now.

Was going to say much the same thing. I've been a full-time Firefox user for 10+ years. I've also worked on web apps and tested against Firefox, Chrome, IE (and later Edge), for 10+ years.

In all that time, I don't think I've ever seen a Firefox-specific bug or layout issue.

I saw them on IE all the time (obviously), sometimes in Edge, rarely in Chrome, and never in Firefox.

Me either. When something doesn't work it's almost always because of Privacy Badger. If I'm really curious I'll whitelist it to see if that does the trick. Otherwise I might report the bug to the site, but typically there's just not enough time in my life to waste on broken web sites.

People hold on to this belief that Google is infallible because they're rich and they put together a marketing campaign some years back to convince people that only smart people work there. I believe the truth is exactly the opposite.

Also a full time Firefox user.

Another bug that I believe is actually Firefox doing the right thing: if you make an event handler function but give it no parameters, Firefox will have no local named event. Chrome will create an event variable for you. Caused several "Firefox bugs" in our app.

The behaviour you're referring to is actually a global property `window.event` [0]. Although it's part of the DOM spec, it's only there for historical reasons and should definitely be avoided.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/even...

How about a chrome plugin for developers which somehow on a press of a button replaces the chrome rendered website with the firefox rendered one within chrome? Or like every second reload or something it uses firefox rendeder instead of chrome's. Or uses headless firefox and somehow in the background compares the current chrome website state with the firefox one. This could work for multiple browsers at the same time and would be a must have for web devs.

Could also be down to extra testing costing more $$$ to test and fix within a tight deadline to get the product shipped. I don't think the dev would have agreed to test on just a single browser - more likely a management decision.

But Mozilla cannot enforce idealism on the developers.

They do already a great job with documentation, but they could and should improve on the dev-tools.

Chrome dev tools are now in a state, that I only use them for developing and debugging. Built in code editor with autocomplete. And I can debug ... and change code while debugging. And it works great (mostly).

Firefox dev tools on the other hand barely work for me to do some debugging and it is no joy. So no wonder more and more developers skip it alltogether, given the low market share of firefox.

I personally prefer firefox's dev tools to chrome's ones.

Boy, I am with you on this one. Full-time FF user too. The whole CSS grid thing is very well done and useful.

Well, I don't really work with CSS much, but js. Are you consider the debugging tools well done as well? And do you know chrome dev tools? With its elaborate performance tools etc?

I currently work more with CSS so I find the debugging tools on both good enough for my purposes. I do know the chrome dev tools and find them to be good, just happen to prefer the FF dev editions ease with layout.

Yeah but it's somewhat laggy compared to chrome's.

To write and debug code?

I mostly use Console, Network and Inspector tabs and I rarely debug (in general.) Especially Network tab in Firefox's dev tools is much superior to Chrome's one, IMHO.

It’s likely that we visit vastly different corners of the internet. As a full time Safari user I can’t remember the last time I had such an issue.

Any site that uses WebGL2

I use Firefox all the time and use it for web development.

But modern frontend stack - with the whole pile of transpilers, uglifiers, and what not - is almost unusable with Firefox, because source maps don't work with Webpack.

https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/1194

This put me in a position where I had to choose between switching to Chrome for development or not using Webpack that comes nicely integrated into the web framework of my choice.

I went with ditching Webpack, but it's hard.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55669725/require-module-...

Developers will not use Firefox if FF dev tools are inferior to Chrome.

Some comments from devs:

> Can we please fix this? I don't want to choose Chrome as the browser only coz of this issue.

Mozzila took notice of the issue after 4 years...

Source maps don’t work well on Chrome either. :/

Your linked issue says that certain types of source maps will work with Firefox. Can't you just use one of the working options (e.g, "eval-source-map" works but "cheap-source-map" does not).

Also buggy firefox extensions that will crash firefox or eat up resources.

Is Firefox able to identify misbehaving extensions at runtime? And alert the user?

I don't remember many times that I encountered Firefox-specific web bugs.

I've had bugs where the site doesn't work in Firefox but works in Chrome, but as far as I can tell, those were always caused by the aggressive privacy settings I use in Firefox (whereas the Chrome profile is mostly default).

I'm not particularly concerned with the article's complaint about onboarding. The problem is that Firefox is simply slightly worse (less polished, often slower) in many, many aspects.

On Desktop, Firefox is quite usable, even if it is a bit less polished than Chrome.

On Mobile, it's another story. The only thing saving it is the fact that Chrome doesn't let you install extensions, so you have the choice between an ad-filled web on a browser that runs well, with the ads slowing you down (with Chrome), and a clean web in a slow browser with an unpolished UX and infuriating bugs that don't get fixed (with Firefox). So far, I'd say the two experiences are comparably annoying.

Well here is the well-documented YouTube slowness with Firefox: https://fortune.com/2018/07/25/youtube-slow-mozilla-firefox-...

Or you can install brave and not deal with anything

This does not help prevent the blink monoculture though.

I don't have this experience at all with mobile firefox. I find it faster and with better UX.

> I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues.

I don't know if meeting online counts: I'm bothered by Mozilla having a partnership with Google. I'm bothered by the fact that Mozilla maintains an official Facebook container but the Google equivalent is left to the community, I can't help but think that the reason why there isn't an official Google container by Mozilla is that Mozilla and Google have a commercial partnership which apparently provides most of Mozilla's income (as per link provided in the article).

>I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues

This is a game of reducing friction incrementally, not big ticket bothered by it

One of the biggest issues with Firefox for me has been the U2F support - because they came so late to that party and so many of the web sites that do support U2F gate it by user agent instead of feature detection, because Firefox was so slow on the uptake, they made a lot of problems for everyone and set back one of the better security standards.

I also have a big issue with their handling of webm/webp. There was one single guy at Mozilla killing that for years - may still be - despite heavy demand for support.

Both were really disheartening because it showed that Mozilla had lost its fight and had become so complacent that it didn’t even feel the need to match its competitors much less try to lead.

On the flip side Chrome has now become so comfortable with their position that their users are more of an annoyance, which lets them do very unpopular things like pinching off all of the ad blockers. This is where Mozilla could make a comeback because I think a lot of people (myself included) would take another look at Firefox if that is what it took to keep ublock and ghostery functioning.

Exactly, at my place we have about eight front-end developers. Guess how many (excluding me) use Firefox? None. When I started I found a tonne of little bugs just because no one thought to test in Firefox.

There is definitely a vicious circle here. For many web sites/apps, the browsers that matter are Chrome on desktop and Chrome and Safari on mobile. There is now a huge gap between the number of people using those and the second tier browsers, which in most contexts are IE, Firefox, Edge and (desktop) Safari. That inevitably leads to development and testing resources concentrating on the 80% with the other 20% often being an afterthought if they are considered at all. But then there are more bugs in the second tier browsers, which just opens the gap wider.

But not testing Safari I can understand since it's only officially on Mac. Sure you can kind use it via Epiphany and Midori but a lot of features, like Service Workers for instance, don't exist and therefore can be tested with a download. For me, even after wasting time trying to build from source, it didn't seem like the feature flags worked.

Or just develop on Firefox. Some of its dev tools are better than Chrome's. Mozilla should keep working towards making Firefox better for web developers.

Web developers can help by using and endorsing Firefox in their coding tutorials/videos/screenshots.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest.

You can report sites broken in Firefox (or other browsers) at https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla web developers will debug the broken site and either file a Firefox bug report or try to reach out to the site developer.

Mozilla even has a convenient Firefox extension to make reporting broken sites quick and easy:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webcompatcom-...

The thing is, chrome follows the spec. If the website breaks with Firefox, then maybe the problem is with Firefox (a bug, an unimplemented feature) itself rather then Chrome.

The solution is simple. If you are a developer, then use Firefox as your browser. And make sure that other people in your organization test for Chrome ;)

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow

I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR.

It actually reminds me of Wikipedia, especially with the donation links littered throughout the experience. They're both growing out of control, spending mountains of cash in order to justify spending previous mountains of cash on ventures that nobody asked for or wanted. The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird.

Those 500 million are easily eclipsed if you compare it to what Google's revenue is...

EDIT: It was 136 billion in 2018: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

And Google builds only a browser? What's the budget of the Google Chrome team?

Mozilla doesn't build only a browser either and as a Rust user, am glad they don't.

The Rust community prides itself on being independent from Mozilla, when their relationship is pointed out, but now Rust is suddenly a major beneficiary of those 500 million?

They do build only a browser.

> The Rust community prides itself on being independent from Mozilla, when their relationship is pointed out

In terms of decision making, Rust is definitely a community oriented project, but there's not denying reality and at present practically all of Rust core devs who work on it full-time are paid by Mozilla.

Were Mozilla to pull out support, development would likely continue, but at a much, much reduced pace.

> a major beneficiary of those 500 million

I agree with you that the vast majority of it is not going to Rust and I do wish they'd increase the share of their revenue that goes to engineering from 45% to something closer to 85%.

If you’re wondering who spends more on their browser team, Google does

Even though Google is 250 times or so bigger, the point is still valid. Where the hell money gets spent? That kind of revenues are huge for any software company, especially for a one that is just making a browser.

Just making a browser? It's the piece of software I'd least be willing to touch. Even Microsoft gave up and switched their core to Chromium.

Considering that, it's quite amazing that Mozilla is capable of not just making a browser, but also an email client, with a budget of 500 million.

MS didn't give up, their new strategy is similar to Google's, so they teamed up with Google to make Chrome an even better spying machine. They just have to change the telemetry URL in the source and replace the Google log in with their own.

Microsoft still makes a browser; they just don't make their own rendering engine anymore. Which makes sense because it's hard and Blink works just fine. I wouldn't mind if Mozilla did the same thing. The Vivaldi folks are using that strategy and managing to make the best web browser out there with what I assume must be a microscopic fraction of $500 million/yr.

And I don't share your opinion of how far a $500 million budget goes. They're not rewriting the entire thing every year.

> I wouldn't mind if Mozilla did the same thing.

Then there would literally be no point to Firefox existing as a counterbalance to Google deciding the web's future.

Theoretically they could still focus on developing a privacy-first browser on top of the core engine, and continue to influence web standards by implementing them as plugins with some glue patches maintained as a running fork on top of the Chromium code. As it is now, the fact that Firefox uses Quantum instead of Blink and SpiderMonkey instead of V8 isn't really a differentiator for the vast majority of users. There's a vague sense that a technology monoculture is unhealthy, but I would argue that the real threat is a browser monoculture, and Mozilla apparently can't stop that from happening with their current strategy because Firefox is losing.

Given the rise of devices with many cores that are not particularly powerful, technology that moves web page rendering to a multithreaded model, like Servo and WebRender will only become more important, no?

I disagree, it's a good thing that Mozilla develops their own engine, this way, when we give either browser some data, we can verify that both engines are doing what they're supposed to be doing by comparing the results, and they should be the same.

If we switch to a single, universal engine for all browsers, bugs, faults and errors in that engine may slip through, and no one would really notice for absence of comparison.

Brave is trying that approach. It feels like an uphill battle, but time will tell.

Chromium based Edge is definitely much more than the rendering engine. Do they use their own networking, process management, Javascript engine, extension system? It is probably still 80-90% chromium.

Rendering/layout engine is an admittedly sloppy term referring to the whole stack, except for the JavaScript engine.

I think my point is still valid, that Microsoft hasn't given up on their browser, just most of the technology underlying it - which their users don't care about. The fact that Edge is a pretty decent epub reader (for now... https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/microsoft-edge/2...) isn't necessarily tied to the fact that it's EdgeHTML based. If they wanted to, Microsoft could implement the same feature set on top of Chromium.

The most recent financial statement I could see is from 2017: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...

They spent $253 million (45% of revenue) on software development, presumably the bulk going to Firefox. Other major expenses were $66 million for marketing (yay Moz://a!), $72 million for the dubious "general and administrative" category, a few million here and there for other things, and the rest went into the $500 million nest egg.

So they could certainly spend a lot more on Firefox if needed, but it's not evident to me that Firefox's weaknesses are money related.

> They spent $253 million (45% of revenue) on software development, presumably the bulk going to Firefox.

I'm curious if anyone can locate information on how much of that was spent specifically on Firefox, the browser. It seems like Mozilla was working on a bunch of peripheral stuff during that 2016-2017 period.

* Work on Firefox OS was still ongoing through 1H 2016. (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.fxos/FoAwi...)

* They were building a free subscription service to check HIBP for your info. (https://monitor.firefox.com/)

* They were building a file-sharing service (https://github.com/mozilla/send/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md)

* They were building a new VR-first browser and content aggregator (https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/09/18/firefox-reality-now...)

>They were building a free subscription service to check HIBP for your info. (https://monitor.firefox.com/) //

Wasn't HIBP a single person.

So presumably a checking system could have been churned out by, being generous, a team of 6 on a mean-average $100,000 wage. Lets say $1.2M per year (doubled to account for facilities, etc.) as a top end. Realistically surely that's a couple of months work for such a team?

Looking at the Send github (https://github.com/mozilla/send/graphs/contributors) it's essentially 2 people, about 1.5 person years in the commits.

The first and fourth items you list sound like absolute white elephants that management should have allowed only as "we'll give you a full time dev wage for it and spare facilities, show us what you can do and we might take it on".

So, what have we got left $240M?

The examples were intended to illustrate the point that Mozilla has a lot of non-Firefox software development going on, not to be an exhaustive accounting of everything they do. But even so, I have to question only allocating $13 million to the items I listed. Particularly Firefox OS and Firefox Reality. Those are big projects. The blog post I linked even has a pull quote emphasizing how much work the latter was:

> We had to rethink everything, including navigation, text-input, environments, search and more. This required years of research, and countless conversations with users, content creators, and hardware partners. The result is a browser that is built for the medium it serves. It makes a big difference, and we think you will love all of the features and details that we’ve created specifically for a MR browser. – Andre Vrignaud, Head of Mixed Reality Platform Strategy at Mozilla

Even something like Firefox Monitor has lots of design work and art assets and backend infrastructure and management overhead that makes it not as trivial as you make it sound.

>General and administrative expenses pertain to operation expenses rather than to expenses that can be directly related to the production of any goods or services, including rent, utilities, insurance, and managerial salaries....Examples of general and administrative expenses include building rent, consultant fees, depreciation on office equipment, insurance, supplies, subscriptions, and utilities. Salary and benefits attributable to corporate management, as well as any legal staff, are also classified as general and administrative expenses.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/general-and-administrat...

Doesn't sound 'dubious' to me.

But Google's revenue isn't only generated by Chrome.

And even if it was, Mozilla shouldn't try to chase that revenue. It should generate only enough revenue to sustain and futher develop web technologies which allow people to stay free on the web.

> But Google's revenue isn't only generated by Chrome.

It has been driven by chrome though (by having improved web standards in general - note the past-tense). However the future is looking far more murky, now on top they are making changes that benefit only google (crippling ad blockers for one).

The majority of Google's revenue is generated through websites accessed via browsers. I don't know how much Google spends on controlling the browser market with Chrome, but I have little doubt that Google would spend a billion per year on it if they had to.

> I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue.

Mostly agree.

> The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird.

I can understand your view. With that said, I am quite happy they funded Rust and also gave a grant to the Godot project to develop their webassembly interface.

> I can understand your view. With that said, I am quite happy they funded Rust and also gave a grant to the Godot project to develop their webassembly interface.

I agree, but it seems problematic they aren't monetizing that. They're making money doing the things users don't really like while not making a dime of good things like fostering a legitimate free and open web.

Firefox has been making great strides on the performance and reliability side with a rendering engine and other things that they claim they could not have been done without Rust. If that is true, the investment probably already has paid for itself.

Directly monetizing programming tools is quite difficult.

And, as other have said, Rust has already paid off for them with the vastly improved performance of FF Quantum.

I think a better avenue for Mozilla would be offering an equivalent to Chrome Enterprise and GSuite. A paid set of services and managed functionality for Firefox.

Last I heard, the performance issues for GMail and GSuite was due to them using an outdated draft version of an internet standard that Chrome implemented, but no one else did. Offering a paid 'Mozilla Mail' may bring some needed competition.

I'm not sure it's possible to put a price on Rust (probably in single-digit millions so far), but that Godot grant was $50k. That's pocket money for a $500m org.

It is, but it still a crucial amount of money for an open source project breaking through that obscurity barrier.

> The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird

And the whole point of Google is search? I think it makes sense that Mozilla would expand into more than just Firefox and Thunderbird. They’re a software foundation so limit themselves to a browser or mail client? I like the fact that they’ve becomes champions of privacy and internet safety.

Agreed though. What they’re doing is technically hard but you would expect Mozilla to do more.

Yeah, when FF and TB are perfect they can move on to other stuff!

>they’ve becomes champions of privacy and internet safety //

Two years or so ago I'd have agreed.

Well... they did tried firefox mobile.

Which failed but somehow found a new lease in life in 3rd world countries now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

I hear this a lot but here in the USA I never saw a phone with the OS for sale that worked on my carrier. I still wish they had done FirefoxOS laptops.

This is the downside of what happens when a corporation is not forced to report to someone from outside the corporation, i.e. shareholders, and does not have a direct relationship with their customers.

Usually public corporations are shaped in order to maximize profit and market share. But Mozilla doesn't have to report to someone else, so no one forces them to spend money economically, especially as the Corporation is being controlled by the Foundation who hasn't primarily economics in mind, either.

Additionally, Mozilla has grown exponentially between 2007 and 2014 not only due to a superior product but also because IE was bad, and the web grew exponentially and thus browser usage grew exponentially, too.

Mozilla has inherited a large userbase, and they are in an extremely comfortable position where they can be lazy and do not experience any immediate consequences. Employees earn a lot at Mozilla. Mozilla's own post-mortem of the extension-outage has also hinted at a systemic mismangagement inside what is nowadays a pretty complex entanglement of different groups working on similar stuff while not communicating efficiently.

Mozilla has a leadership problem.

Their business-relationship is not with the users, but the search engines who want to monetize the user base, and due to the exclusive deal with Yahoo for 2015-2019, losing 80 million monthly users within 2 years did not translate to a loss in revenue, revenue actually continued to increase despite user loss. So why care?

I suspect the CEO just resigned because he knows that 2020+ will be extremely difficult for Mozilla, as the Yahoo deal is running out, and for the first time ever mozilla will have to spend more money than they recieve. Lack of money will also be the only real motivation for Mozilla to change fundamentally.

IIRC 90% of that revenue comes from google. It's essentially a grant to stop innovating maybe?

> The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird.

Mozilla dropped Thunderbird years ago. It is now an independent project, financed through independent donations.

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/about/

Half-true. Thunderbird is still a Mozilla project, relying on Mozilla to own its trademarks and other legal issues, as well as for all of the infrastructure (source code hosting, issue tracking, continuous integration, etc.).

No, the whole point of Mozilla is to "ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all."

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/

Firefox, Thunderbird, and other projects are a means to that end.

Well I was there when Firefox was born (i even sent a donation and got the CD). To me these “corporate missions” are just marketing fluff. Just give me the browser.

to be fair, looking at their product page (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products)

firefox (different spins) and thunderbird appears to be about it at this point. I'm glad for the work they do but I also find the entire size of the operation staggering.

This isn't a jab at Mozilla, but it's actually kind of amazing that throughout this whole time Mozilla has had only two (arguably one) large, successful, consumer-facing projects.

I think this says something about Mozilla or large organizations in general.

> I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space.

What's Chrome's budget?

> I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees

The figure is pretty much correct. To put things in perspective, though, only a fraction of those thousand people work on the actual browser. And, of that fraction, an even tinier number work on the rendering engine.

The Chrome team, on the other hand, has pretty much the same number of people of the entire Mozilla (or MoCo, to be specific) but almost all of them work on the browser/rendering.

> This raises some questions: why is Firefox usage going down, and what does Mozilla need to do to bring it back up?

> How does an average user get started with Firefox?

This misses the elephant in the room : the main reason Chrome is eating other browsers is that Google is putting its advertising might behind it. You know that little "want a better browser" pop-up displayed on Google's search engine? That's an absolute killer for other browsers.

not entirely true. firefox has solved a lot of startup and other performance issues, but the core rendering engine still lags when confronted with heavy loads, just a scrollable div of a couple dozen large images is enough to make it stutter seconds at time while they load and render, sure it's partly a developer issue for not using thumbnail in the listing, but chrome shows them all with zero lag.

stating that the only reason chrome is ahead is because advertising is disingenuous: firefox only started catching up with them only in the last three-four years performance wise and the gap it's still there.

just a scrollable div of a couple dozen large images is enough to make it stutter seconds at time while they load and render

I might be wrong, but with WebRender, isn't scrolling now done asynchronously so it doesn't stutter while things are loading? I certainly haven't experienced any scroll stutter since I turned it on.

WebRender is not really used by Firefox yet. They're currently rolling it out to some very narrow sets of end users.

Scrolling has been async for many years, both with WebRender and without it.

Chrome lags on some webpages that Firefox don’t and vice versa. Overall I get a smoother experience on Firefox but ymmv.

> That's an absolute killer for other browsers.

I'm not so sure about that. First of all, most "normal" people I know don't actually know what a browser is ("open your browser" - "my what?" - "... open the internet" - "ohh, okay!") nor which one they are using. I've never had anyone ask for help in switching browsers - unless something is seriously wrong with the one they have, they don't see the alternatives, and most users aren't adventurous, they don't want to mess with their computers "just to take a look".

Google Chrome is bundled with a lot of freeware apps and the user needs to uncheck a checkbox to avoid it being installed as a default browser. That's literally how it got current market share, along with being heavily advertised on google.com.

Makes sense, and works well with my experience that users don't really care or know what they are using. If the extent of customization is your bookmarks, being converted to a happy chrome user isn't hard. If it's more than that, a coerced install is probably not going to make you switch.

But for most people, they won't really notice a difference between Chrome and Firefox in their daily usage.

Let me tell you about a fascinating anecdote that happened to me a few years ago. My grandfather bought a new laptop. I set it up with firefox and saved his common sites (gmail, facebook, etc) to the new tab page so that he dosen't have to do anything else to open them.

A month later I get a call from him asking about why he is unable to find gmail and facebook. What happened is that my grandpa ended up with google chrome on his machine, which obviously did not have the pinned sites on the front page.

Here's the real kicker - He does not know the difference between about "firefox" and "chrome" and browsers, nor he did not install any other app that bundled google chrome with it. He did not go around adventuring with his browsers.

He was literally baited by google into installing chrome in a completely sneaky and underhanded way. How? Through the front page ads.

Would he generally install software if he sees an ad for it, or was that special because it wasn't obvious that it was an ad and therefore had more trust (like some security product company saying "your door is unsafe, buy our product" vs your friend telling you that your door is unsafe)?

It's strange that Chrome doesn't take the bookmark, bookmark-bar status and new-tab-page from firefox - if they did, he likely wouldn't have noticed and called you.

I'd wager it was the "Browse Faster" ad - which coming from Google is a tempting click.

Just a small aside on the grandparents topic: my grandfather lost every dime to email scams in the late 90s. The man was a Westpoint grad who served in the Pacific theater as an officer, and in his last years he clicked away his retirement. Installing Chrome is a pretty benign mistake but boy, we need guard rails for our older folks.

I most definitely agree regarding older folks. Unless you have a very good feel for the digital environment, consider everything harmful, and all emails you don't expect, know the sender for (or where the sender behaves atypically) to be malicious. It's a touch lesson to teach, much like stranger danger for kids, and it's going to become more and more important the more stuff moves online. When you're required to file your taxes via a website, you're much easier to attack than when you took a bunch of forms, completed them and then mailed them to the government (or, if you're late, go and put them in their mailbox). Plus the general inconvenience of good security ("why can't I use the same password?"), fun times lie ahead.

>Would he generally install software if he sees an ad for it, or was that special because it wasn't obvious that it was an ad and therefore had more trust

That's the trick in here. He doesn't install anything else off the internet. It only happened with chrome. And I am positively sure it was due to the very sneaky and underhanded chrome ad on the front page of google itself (a place where it is impossible for anyone else to get a single ad).

>> that little "want a better browser" pop-up displayed on Google's search engine?

I actually do not know what you're talking about. Been using Firefox for the last few years and haven't seen this pop-up once.

As another Firefox user, I know the pop up very well. Not even the results page where people at distracted, it's on the actual Google homepage (as well as other places). Abusing monopoly in one market to monopolize another.

Is it possible that this is somehow forbidden by EU law, that's why me, being EU citizen, never encountered it?

running an adblocker?

Now that you mention it, I think I remember an ad blocker indeed blocks those ads.

It would be an incomplete adblocker if it didn't :D

I'm an EU citizen as well.

For reference, booting up Windows Sandbox and loading google:

https://i.judge.sh/any/Diamond/WindowsSandbox_hE75Eaor7Z.png

It was also an enormous improvement over other browsers on performance, usability and security perspective. People are not mindless drones, they use it because they see a benefit not because of an ad.

I use Firefox on Linux and (current) Edge on Windows, in both cases because they feel faster than Chrome (which I used to use when it felt faster). I still use Chrome on my phone because I can't uninstall it. :)

You should be able to disable system packaged apps unless you are running an absolutely ancient version of Android. It's the same effect as uninstalling except it keeps the original package in storage in case you re-enable.

Firefox on Linux doesn't have GPU acceleration out of the box nor GPU video decoding (at all still?). Firefox on Android has it's own litany of issues (though to be fixed in their new version soon™).

Edge was actually pretty great on Windows but everywhere else it wasn't Edge and it's going away to come back as a Chromium clone shortly anyways.

Exactly, disabled apps still take up space. So on a limited space device I just use what's there.

I haven't tried the new version of Edge based on Chromium, but my guess is that it'll be as slow as Chrome. :(

It’s the non-technical users, who are convinced by their technical relatives to install it, who need to be convinced.

Ironically, whenever I've complained about those irritating first-run experiences (not necessarily for Firefox, but for other software), the response has always been "that's for the non-technical users". Remember that these users are accustomed to/desensitised to being bombarded with adverts and such, so perhaps it's not as irritating to them as it is for us. Ideally, I think the first-run experience for a browser should be to open a blank page with the address bar focused and ready for you to type a URL into; but maybe average users are so used to that bombardment of attention and mollycoddling that it would look "broken" to them.

I'm not sure if those users care much about privacy either, which seems to leave the only other reasons to use Firefox being more control/customisation (which is itself slowly disappearing...) and "not controlled by an advertising company", the latter a not-so-compelling argument for the non-technical user.

Firefox is in an unfortunate position, especially as it tries to become more Chrome-like; I don't think that's going to make it gain more users at all, and on the other hand only serves to anger its already-small userbase and threaten to drive them away.

My ideal browser is one that doesn't require any installation, is a single tiny executable that starts instantly (to a blank page, as mentioned above), and is both fast and low on memory usage. I wonder if that "instantness" or ease of using it for the first time might appeal to non-technical users.

Away to what? Where can an upset long time Firefox user go? hardly to Chrome or Edge.

There's nowhere better; Firefox may not be optimum, but if you don't want rebranded Google crap, you have basically no choice.

Maybe there's Safari, Epiphany, Konqueror: but only one of these is serious and it requires you to be willing to buy a Mac - which is clearly an easier choice than Google for an anti-Googling estranged Firefox user - but still not a likely choice if the reason you're leaving Firefox is they took away your options.

Epiphany took away all its options years ago, and now it's main purpose is to be replaced with Firefox.

I've barely used Konqi, but it doesn't seem like it's any more viable than Epiphany. It looks like it fell out of a 1990s office suite.

(Web browsers can be as light on memory as they want, but since they're not programs but rather runtimes for a specific programming language, they're always going to put a huge demand on your memory. Unless you change the JS programming model, they will be your biggest app.)

you haven't dived into the rabbithole of firefox forks yet huh. every hardcore firefox user ends up with a litany of these options on hand coz they do one thing or the other well.

I think it's far more likely that typical non-tech users simply presume all claims about privacy are lies. Every company, including FB and Google claims to value their privacy - as a resource to be wildly over-exploited.

As it tried to become more Chrome like I can't help but feel they shot themselves in the foot for no gain. Several of the friends/relatives I once successfully moved to FF, way back when, ended up back on chrome for variations on "because it's the same now". Yet anyone criticising Australis and UI changes at the time was instantly drowned out.

Me, I still resent the long ago burying of the Phoenix 0.2 idea of being lean, fast and light, and everything not core to being a browser should be in an addon. e.g. Pocket, WebRTC, Sync.

Your ideal browser did once exist. It was called Phoenix.exe. It was a little executable you could run from anywhere that launched quickly. Compared to its competitor at the time - the bloated, boat-themed Netscape Navigator suite - it was sleek and efficient.

The rest is history: Phoenix.exe literally became Firefox, and now the cycle repeats again.

> Remember that these users are accustomed to/desensitised to being bombarded with adverts and such, so perhaps it's not as irritating to them as it is for us.

Many of us also reflexively avoid most "cloud" features, because we like control over our data. However, these features are quite convenient. Many people want them, and they would switch to other browsers that offer them aggressively if they weren't sufficiently discoverable.

Sync would be a prime example for this.

Everyone's talking about what Firefox should do to beat chrome, and meanwhile here I am still suffering the bug that makes it unusable for many MacBooks with retina screens set to "more space".

Start Firefox and fans are blaring in seconds, hundreds of reports, years of waiting and no solution... Maybe making it usable in one of the most common devices for devs would be a start, I've got a full building of coworkers here waiting for a fix to try to come back.

Yep, same here. I really want to use Firefox but when it eats through my battery at twice the speed, I have to go with Chrome or Brave.

Firefox is a dumpster fire on Mac. No pinch to zoom? Whatever. Scrolling issues? Whatever. Lighting up my CPU to the point it's noticeably warm on idle? Not cool. Having 60% of the battery life as Chrome and 50% of Safari? Unacceptable.

Simply idling Firefox on my Mac would use almost the same amount of battery as actively browsing Safari. I love Firefox on my home Linux desktop, but that's as far as my love goes at the moment.

Wierd. I've been using Firefox Quantum Dev Edition on MBP for a few years now and it consistently uses less CPU and RAM than Chrome, with way too many tabs, and consequently better battery life by far.

Power usage still lags behind Safari, but at least it doesn't give me the spinning beachball for 30 seconds on every other new tab after 3 hours of browsing with tons of tabs.

Do you have a retina mbp? And if so, do you have the screen resolution set up to the"more space" configuration in your macos system settings?

Those two factors seem to make the problem worse for most users, since the power drain increases with your display resolution.

Fixes are starting to land for the power consumption issues. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522

I saw that earlier, I'm hoping this resolves my issues, but we'll see.

I would absolutely love to see a project like Camino start up again, that was the last time I had a tolerable experience with a “Mozilla browser”. I’m in alignment with what they want to do on the web but I’m on a Mac and the experience has just been not right for as long as I’ve been a Mac user. There’s obviously issues though given that project was 3rd party to the mozilla org, but if they’re not gonna build a nice Mac browser, can we not find a way for someone to & kick money back or something lol.

Firefox got most of its early momentum from tech-savvy users recommending it to their friends and family.

Many of us use retina MacBooks, and none of us can honestly recommend it since we can't use it ourselves.

I understand from the bug report that it's not a trivial solution, but then again the new JS engine wasn't trivial either. Mozilla is going to have to step it up and realize that its own version of advertising is making power users want to evangelize.

For now, on a retina Mac, you can pick up significant power savings by having Firefox opt out of the OS wide window scaling when on a retina display.

Get info on the Firefox app and then check ”Open in Low Resolution” on the get info panel, then restart the app.

You can pick up more energy savings by telling Firefox to stop using transparent pixels.

Go to about:config, and set gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true.

Firefox has just been overloading the GPU by painting the entire window over and over and sending the output to the window compositor where it is slowed down even more by scaling and dealing with transparency.

Yep this is the ONE thing that kills FF for me. I use an external 4K display (via Display Port) on a 2015 15 inch MacBook Pro and Firefox basically just spins the fans up nonstop while it is running.

Same problem here, last time I mentioned this on HN I got an angry mob after me but its true. Firefox is totally unusable on a mac. I believe the culprit is the WebRender implementation FF has.

That would be strange considering webrender is not enabled on Mac

The solution is to rebuild Firefox to use Core Animation to draw the window contents and then send only changes to that content to the graphics compositor after that instead of using the long deprecated OpenGL implementation it currently uses that repaints the whole screen over and over, so it's hardly surprising to see such a massive change take quite a while to implement.

The earliest changes in this process have finally made it into beta and there are already substantial improvements in power usage/heat generated by an overworked GPU even before all the changes in progress have been enabled.

Glad to hear that there's finally progress being made!(or if it has been on the way all this time, glad to see that it's finally getting to the point where final users can see a difference).

Are you involved in the fix? If so, do you have a rough ETA for the remaining changes?

I've just been reading the bugzilla discussions on the issue since back when people were first trying to figure out what was causing the issue.

pcwalton is involved in the fix, and as he mentioned, really significant improvements are starting to land for testing in nightly with more fixes yet to come

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522

I agree on most points, except for the part of changing the default search engine from Google. I do support not using Google, but I think that would definitely be too much change for a non-technical user to take in one go.

If the user thinks and feels "This is just like Chrome" on the surface, that's actually good, people hate changing habits (especially if they wouldn't understand why).

Most of the time, we're asking our non-technical relatives and friends to make the change for us technical users, to simply reduce the market share Chrome has, so that Google can't forcefully (and silently) change the web to their suiting.

The author clearly started with the point they wanted to prove and then went searching for the evidence.

Sitting each step of the browsing process into things like "They open it. Whoa! That’s a lot of stuff in my face." and then giving a much thriftier summary of the Chrome process doesn't automatically show that Chrome is simpler to get started with

I don't want Firefox to "beat" Chrome, that is a terrible idea that is killing Firefox.

Even if Firefox was superior in every way, Google has more leverage, and will always be able to shift the goalposts to stay ahead of their competition. And they will also be able to get the vast majority of users who don't know what Chrome is and just want to go on Facebook.

But what exactly does beating Google at their own game even accomplish? An ego boost for Mozilla? Focus on making a better browser!

Imagine if it were 2005, and Mozilla was like: Firebird needs to beat IE6! Only by out Microsofting Microsoft can we "win".

We need to abandon the features that make us unique and attractive to the smartest people, and focus on Windows support. We need to have better support for Microsoft's proprietary plugin architecture!

Better Windows Media Player DRM integration!

Javascript should be able to eject the cd tray!

Has anyone considered that Chrome actually has a lot of problems, and maybe Firefox should be the antidote to those problems? Containers are actually the first innovative anti-Chrome thing Firefox has done in a long time.

Firefox initially had success because of their integrated popup blocker and empowering the user to actually control what plugins were added to their browser. Awhile later, rogue plugins and browser bars were becoming an epidemic, and Firefox was there, diligently refined, and ready for IE users.

And Firefox will probably still continue to lose users, but so what?? I think if they seriously focus on being anti-chrome, they will in the long term win users back. (not that number of users should be a goal itself)

So, Mozilla should shut off the damn analytics, fire the UX and marketing people, and then roll up their sleeves and make something cool. Success will follow if they do a good job.

Agreed, and focusing upon the telematics is not a good idea when many Firefox users might be switching them off.

I feel there's an opening for mobile experience on Android. Chrome is pretty terrible in that space. No extensions, no reader mode, no eacape from AMP, etc.

I strongly agree. It feels like Google has been mostly phoning it in on mobile chrome for a long time. Obviously it is very difficult to take something designed for a desktop and make it work well on a phone, but there definitely seems to be opportunity here.

Have you tried Firefox Android? The only complaint I have is when it hits 100 tabs, the tab count becomes ∞ which is slightly humorous.

Yes, me too. It's funny, but once I can't measure my progress it's all over. I wish they would put into the number so I can at least tell if it's going up or down and hopefully get it lower. I don't want funny features, I want features that give me control.

Knowing exactly how many tabs are open doesn't make it easier to close tabs.

Also it wasn't exactly done as a joke, the number used to overflow onto a second line and not be readable.

I use Firefox on Android and prefer it a thousand times over Chorme (because ublock), but it's definitely not bug free.

In particular, at least a couple of times a week Firefox will stop loading pages on all tabs, like if the connection was abismally slow. Killing and restarting the app fixes the problem.

I'm experiencing the same issue, and it seems related to uBlock.

I've suspected that, but have never been able to prove it.

When Firefox starts misbehaving like that, disable uBlock and the problem disappears.

I mostly use Opera on mobile, as it's the only browser I've found that can properly scale and reflow text.

Many years later, still nice to come across this kinda comment. :)

It had actually been taken out of scope when I unwittingly started working on it. I had enough success within the first week or so that I managed to convince my manager that we should bring it into scope again for the initial release of the Chromium-based browser.

I use Firefox and Brave, and the latter does the same but with a smiley: :D

which is even funnier

Firefox has its problems; most times after opening it for the first time, I have time to input some search terms and _then_ Firefox ends loading up, and suddenly my search blanks out and stops loading. That happens a lot.

I think kiwi browser(1) is great in this regard. It supports almost all the chrome extensions including ublock, reader mode, etc.

It also has a mode which automatically redirects to non-AMP version of site automatically.

(1) https://www.google.com/search?q=kiwi+browser+android

I can't bring myself to trust this browser. There is a repo out there but it's not the whole browser and it's extremely out of date compared to the app. Free things based on open source code that aren't open source themselves give me the heebie jeebies without a clear reason why.

Also the browser itself tends to be a version or two behind which isn't particularly comforting either.

Mozilla seems to think so too: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/06/27/reinventi...

I use Firefox on mobile, but... it's pretty terrible. Feels much slower than Chrome, and I constantly discover small things that are simply not as polished. The only reason why I keep using it is because the ad-filled web is also a terrible experience, so the overall experience with Firefox + uBlock is roughly on par with Chrome (without ad blocking).

I exclusively use firefox for android. It's better than android chrome in nearly every way I can think of you. You get extensions.

Two things has me almost dropping firefox and going over to chrome:

- It still doesn't remember my credit card details, and is generally worse at filling out forms.

- On mobile, I regularly experience that the cookie jar gets broken somehow and all my logins are broken which will work again by closing the browser down and starting it again.

The only think keeping me on Fx is a sense of ethics, the same reason I don't eat meat even though I love it.

FF used to remember and autofill CC information, but about 10 years ago they removed it for security reasons. But this blog post from last 2017 says they were adding the option to securely store and autofill CC information:

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/online-shopping-autofill-cr...

However, the feature is still not available, probably because of nagging security worries. Apparently it can be enabled in a nightly build if you edit a config: option:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Form_Autofill

> It still doesn't remember my credit card details, and is generally worse at filling out forms.

I think BitWarden does.

BitWarden is also open source and allows you to use your own backend if you want.

> It still doesn't remember my credit card details

(Slightly off topic) Personally, I don't get this. I wouldn't store my credit card, even encrypted, on any device if I could manage not to. It seems way too convenient for me that my personal+sensitive info is just a click away from being put into a form. I get that it's stored securely but it still doesn't sit right.

> The only think keeping me on Fx is a sense of ethics

So do I. At least I still use Firefox as my secondary browser.

My own main recriminations:

- The download manager is awful. I sometimes download several times a file because I didn't see it started. And I could describe half a dozen bugs with it. For example, under some conditions, the size of a download is replaced by the sum of the previously downloaded files (4GB/4.1GB instead of 0/100MB + 4GB old files).

- about:config is broken. When I open the settings for power users in Chromium, each option has a short description. With Firefox, the documentation is not linked to the setting, it's in a wiki or blog posts.

- I need an extension to confirm on quit. I sometimes press Ctrl-q when I intended Ctrl-w. The config browser.showQuitWarning and browser.warnOnQuit have no effect. I had to read FF's source code to understand it was intentional: the code had evolved (IMHO, in a bad way), the doc had not.

- Local extensions are removed when FF stops. I heard that this is not the case with "developer FF", but I don't want to drop the OS packaging of ESR FF. And that feature is already in Chromium based browsers. I don't even know what devFF is, though I've heard it's based on a FF beta branch.

These are mostly not problems for the main target of FF. My parents main problem were that an update once replaced their custom starting page (tailor made) with the default one (recently visited sites + ads). They also had a few UI hard times, but these were either fixed by FF (adding a link to the starting page was impossible without reading a doc) or my parents got used to them.

> - I need an extension to confirm on quit. I sometimes press Ctrl-q when I intended Ctrl-w. The config browser.showQuitWarning and browser.warnOnQuit have no effect. I had to read FF's source code to understand it was intentional: the code had evolved (IMHO, in a bad way), the doc had not.

That's odd; I'm running stable Firefox, and the second option in my Preferences is "Warn you when quitting the browser" - and it does what it says, for me, without an extension.

I'm in a similar boat.

Although I prefer Firefox in general, I was surprised to see how much better Chrome's performance was when doing development on a super-low-spec "travel laptop".

Firefox has plenty of room for improvement, but this article doesn't touch on it.

1. People don't install their own browser, unless they're on a new computer and want the browser they've always used — people are conservative when making technological choices and when they switch browsers, it's often because they get a friend to install it for them, or they buy a new computer, or install some app that tricks them into also installing a new browser.

How do you think Chrome became so popular anyway?

2. The Pocket integration has been good; there was always the issue that it's a third party proprietary service, however AFAIK it has been bought by Mozilla and I personally like it a lot — I do wish to see its source code soon, AFAIK it's not open source yet, but it's much more polished than open source alternatives (e.g. wallabag).

3. I've never had issues with Firefox's fonts. Maybe on Linux you have, but font problems on Linux are to be expected.

4. Google has the best search engine, especially for local searches. People want Google, they'll switch to Google anyway — and Mozilla might as well get a piece of the action.

Saying this as a DuckDuckGo user ... I would never advise my non-technical friends to use anything else but Google. Mozilla tried switching to Yahoo/Yandex/etc and failed. I'm pretty sure that they know what they are doing and random bloggers on the Internet with opinions don't.

Also let's be frank — Google is a big target. When you switch targeted advertising off, when you switch your app history off in your Google profile, I'm pretty sure that Google does indeed turn those off. Otherwise they risk huge fines, especially now post GDPR. I trust smaller companies less than I trust Google. I trust technology more of course, I trust open source, I trust encryption, but when we are talking of companies, I'd rather have a big target, than a smaller one.

Again, saying this as a DDG user — switching off Google for DuckDuckGo due to privacy issues is a stupid thing to do ;-) And it's not the same thing as with a Chrome to Firefox switch, because privacy claims for this one can be verified, instead of being something that's basically non-falsifiable for consumers.

> I've never had issues with Firefox's fonts. Maybe on Linux you have, but font problems on Linux are to be expected.

Not really. On Linux for a decade, fonts have been fine. It's just some distros perhaps don't ship with the best defaults.

I've used Firefox with Ubuntu for over a decade and have never had any issues with the fonts the OP mentions. Maybe it's a problem with some other distros, but I thought Firefox followed your system's settings regardless.

Chromium, on the other hand, has never fully obeyed the default font settings. Even messing with the flags there are plenty of times the font hinting would be different on certain sites than what I've set it too (e.g. grayscale instead of RGB). Never got into troubleshooting it too much though, since I don't use it as my default.

Although I have come to not mind pocket as a decent and not completely invasive news feed, I still have absolutely no concept of wtf pocket actually _is_ beyond some kind of bookmark sync addon that's now first party, but not like the firefox account sync that i dont use either?

Pocket downloads web pages locally for offline viewing, but with a friendly UX

Last week, a Brave browser developer documented the first-time startup phase of the competition through the eyes of a packet analyzer in a "What Happens.."-Series. Of the ones inspected, "Firefox [was] one of the most active upon installation." and ".. the only one to immediately collect telemetry data too"[^1].

Reading through his findings in detail and others responses - and what is read in this article I do not find much issue in the aggregate: bringing attention to nitpicks through bugtrackers, an organisation has the opportunity to make a concerted housekeeping effort to streamline the onboarding again. It is customary for websites and software to accumulate cruft over time from different internal teams with different goals. So it is best to turn to the bugtrackers, gently raising awareness with descriptive and good issue tickets.

[1]: https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...

It's the best mobile browser bar none thanks to the uBlock / uMatrix. It makes the web usable again.

But the new Firefox for Android will not support extensions.

The story for extensions in Fenix has not been finalized yet.

They'd better get their act together.

I bet a sizable fraction of their mobile user base only went with Firefox for addon support.

I'd (grudgingly) move to one of the Chromium-derived alternatives that still give me uBlock and uMatrix.

This is on their roadmap: https://github.com/orgs/mozilla-mobile/projects/28#card-2405...

It looks like there are some other tickets on the road map that have the needs:gv label (Needs Gecko View). So, it seems they are on it or at least aware of it and there is some unfinished work to bring over more of the components they have for Fennec and Desktop.

Unfortunately for my application (which includes helping doctors create medical care plans) Firefox still does not support SpeechRecognition. This is despite Mozilla's DeepSpeech project on GitHub having had its first public commit in Nov 2016 (judging by its README file). As a result we don't have much choice but to recommend Chrome for the best experience.

> What privacy has the average Joe user gained by switching to Firefox? None. They’re still using Google Search and (most likely) other Google products.

I don't agree with this part. Though the bigger point is that not using Google as a default engine is very user hostile - as everyone is using Google. Of course this isn't ideal from a privacy perspective. But setting it to something else will only frustrate most common users. When I think Microsoft Edge I think Bing - and I don't like Bing.

Duckduckgo is fine for like 80-85% of searches I do, but there are areas where Google is unbeatable (unbeaten?) yet

It's not for everyone I talk to he doesn't really value privacy that much (but still dislikes Chrome for some reason).

My own opinion is that no default search engine needs to be set.

User hostile as well I think. I think the expectation that you can just type something in the address bar and have it search the internet is quite normal.

Maybe, although still I don't like it. If I enter anything in the address bar which is not a complete absolute URL, I would want it to be interpreted as a relative URL.

Actually what Firefox needs to be doing is doing more community devrel.

It's beyond ridiculous that Google's biggest rival Microsoft has a service called Skype (that competes with Google's Hangouts) and Skype Web only works on Chrome.

Seriously ? This is a massive fail for the Firefox devrel team if you can't get Microsoft on your side. Same case exists with many products.

This is pretty much the only reason I switch back to Chrome. It's far too inconvenient not to.

I'm a Firefox user. But recently, thinking about switching to Chrome. It's because some website don't work as they are supposed to on Firefox (Ex. Google analytics, Codesandbox etc.). And as the number of add-ons increases, the animations and transitions get increasingly janky and slow.

In Firefox mobile it's worse – complex (but sometimes simple) animations stutter. I have tested it using some other 4 or 5 popular ones available, including Chrome – they all produced smooth results. So, Firefox is below average in terms of animation performance. I hope they improve it.

> thinking about switching to Chrome. It's because some website don't work as they are supposed to on Firefox (Ex. Google analytics, Codesandbox etc.).

At least on Google's part, that's likely intentional, switching is sending them a signal that being an abusive bully works.

I still wish FirefoxOS had pivoted on to Netbooks. As much as I appreciate the tech behind a Chromebook I rather buy a Macbook air than be another Chrome browser footprint.

I would love a Quantumbook (or whatever) to be a thing. It would make for a nice change especially if they build a Linux Distro that is very secure much like ChromeOS is (rogue Chrome plugins aside).

I've never seen a Chromebook, not from my friends not in a shop when I'm trying to buy something. I guess they're not in the market here - lots of things aren't since it's a physically very large, medium sized country a long way from the major markets.

Who has them? are they somehow useful?

I bought one for my parents two years ago, zero 'tech support' calls since.

Low cost, 10 h battery live, Linux support.

Every major retailer in the U.S. that I've visited has them. Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Amazon, etc.

They are extremely secure Linux laptops based off of Gentoo with everything hardened is what I read here on HN ages back. As others have said major retailers such as BestBuy sell them. My wife bought one for her mother from a Office Depot if memory serves me. Aside from Chrome plugins, it's a secure device. I just rather not have another device that tracks me across the ends of the internet(in this case Google).

From their FAQ: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/3438631?hl=en

I agree with the author’s criticisms of Firefox. Maybe the new MS Edge is better positioned to take over where Chrome is leaving off.

But I will say - I’ve been using Firefox as my daily driver for about 2 years, and I have to say I’m very happy... though I still use Chrome for the dev tools (but planning to switch to Edge as soon as their production release for macOS is out).

Safari might be my next stop for a daily driver browser. I hear Apple’s doing an incredible job with power management and security.

I hear this dev tools argument occasionally, but I don't really get it. The Firefox dev tools seem just as good to me. What am I missing?

Oh man, where do I begin?

- workspaces. This allows updating live code (JS, CSS, and languages that compile to them) without refreshing. Also allows editing and saving source files in place from DevTools, including CSS changes in the element inspector. It effectively turns DevTools into its own IDE. You can open, edit, and save any file from the workspace, regardless of whether it’s been requested/loaded by the web app.

- breakpoints on much more than just a particular line of JS. Set JS breakpoints on particular DOM and page events (including pre-navigation), XHR/fetch requests with a matching URL, and other exotic things. Find out where in the code a particular action is originating.

- hover info during debugging: lots of extended info available, like which JS file this function is defined in, or direct access to variables in the lexical scope(s) of a function

- stack traces that span async invocation boundaries, even fetch/XHR call to response

I’m sure there are others, but those are the big ones for me.

I debug in chrome daily and I didn't know it could do any of that.

I do however know that when working with my SPA compiled with webpack that the chrome debugger will try to open the giant chunk.js file and freeze chrome until I close the debugger and that everytime after the source tab is opened it'll freeze. Only fix is to open the debugger to another tab and then control-p to open another file.

Rather silly annoyance.

Source being reloaded on change is so-so reliable. Sometimes I have to close the debugger and reopen, sometimes refresh, and sometimes chrome thinks 2+ filed with the same name exist and starts setting breakpoints in the wrong version and nothing gets hit.

> Safari might be my next stop for a daily driver browser. I hear Apple’s doing an incredible job with power management and security.

I switched to it last year. Best decision I made when it comes to browsers. It's super-fast, light and doesn't drain the battery.

I switched to Firefox from Chrome a few months ago, and I love it so far. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I think Firefox is great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My biggest complaint with firefox is that the devtools experience still lags behind chrome.

Try the new MS Edge. (Not a shill, just impressed). DevTools is fully intact.

That's up to your preference, personally, I work with the Firefox one and I only test on Chrome after for compatibility since I don't like their devtools.

Have you actually tried the dev tools in the last year? I can only use chrome for web socket support and that’s coming to ff dev tools sooooon.

Yes, i primarily use ff dev tools. And it has greatly improved in the last couple of years. But there are still some shortcomings. For example websocket frame debugging is just barely on nightly. Load time for a web app with thousands of unminified sources with devtools open is terrible. Plus a bunch of small annoyances. It's not so bad i won't use it. But it does make me wish firefox had the same resources for devtools that google does.

A bunch of new stuff just landed on Nightly. I suggest you give it a try.

Having better Linux support than Chrome does would be a nice first step. Better HW accel. support, better integration with DE's, better themeing support.

This isn't a problem with FF. It's a problem with the author's pitch.

"You want to be using Firefox for the foreseeable future" is plenty. If they're technical tell them FF plus Ublock Origin. If not, install FF plus Ublock Origin for them.

Firefox addons are awesome! Highly-configurable about:config is awesome! Developer tools are bit behing Chrome, true... But Firefox is what saves us from Google monopoly and I am really glad it exists. Thanks to all FF devs! ️

Can I say please that it's very annoying that Chrome (and everything Blink based) doesn't let you to open a file in an application you can choose and see the size of the file before downloading it?

https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/firefox-do...

If Firefox wants to beat Chrome, it has to lead on the technical front and focus on the developer communities. Developers won't wait for you to implement a feature (i.e. Filesystem API, custom scrollbar styling, etc...). Developers won't care about your political stand. When a critical feature already existed in Chrome, they will simply move on without you; while at the same time, bringing their users with them.

FF needs a google sandbox like the facebook one. I'm tired of sites knowing who I am, showing my picture and name and asking if I want to sign in with my google profile, when I get to their site that I've never been to before. I just hit the back button and don't browse those sites, but it's really annoying google tracking you everywhere and in your face about it.

It has to freaking stop crashing first. And stop freezing my computer with just 20 tabs open (for 32gb of ram). And complete their password manager. And implement recent standards to make apps work. And... Yeah, I'm still using it instead of Chrome just because I want to depend less on Google, but dammit Chrome is better.

It has to stop taking 3 times as long to load Slack, or crashing/freezing when I'm using WebEx. Yes, the applications bear a lot of blame here, but they are the applications I am stuck with for business use.

>the applications bear a lot of blame here

...or Firefox simply has some performance problems.

Touching the DOM in Firefox is a terrible bottleneck, for example

> Touching the DOM in Firefox is a terrible bottleneck, for example

Yep. Speedometer 2.0 shows this pretty well. It's 25% faster in Chromium for me on desktop, and over 100% faster! in mobile Chrome than Firefox for Android. Mozilla have done a remarkable job of catching up on raw javascript engine performance and the speed of the renderer, but they have a ways to go yet in other areas, probably none more so than bringing recent improvements to mobile.

I can't recall it ever crashing in the past year and I use it all day on multiple computers including nix, macos and windows.

I find it crashed every other morning when I wake up my mac

Probably this bug - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1201401

I never saw it in High Sierra, but after upgrading to Mojave last week, I see it once in a while after resuming from sleep.

At my university the sysadmins have done something fucky with the W10 image, that makes it so Firefox crashes 30s-5mins after launching it. Chrome and Edge are somehow completely fine and I've never encountered this crashing issue on any system outside of those PC labs.

> And implement recent standards...

And maybe even some not so recent standards. Chrome has an extremely novel feature:

I can use my media keys...

...to control the playback of my media.

Why didn't anyone think of that before? :)

Uh? Media keys are supposed to control system volume.

Volume controls aren't the only type of media keys. There's also pause, backwards, forwards and others. Most of them don't make much sense in the context of the OS, so applications need custom handling for them.

>This seems like an extremely difficult but necessary change, considering how much of their income comes from Google.

In the statement listed, at most ~28% came from Google ad Yahoo paid them $375 million that year. I realize things have since changed, but they aren't as hopelessly tied to Google as people make them out to be.

> What privacy has the average Joe user gained by switching to Firefox? None.

Firefox blocks trackers by default now.

Sounds like an exercise in pedagogy.. a billion full spectrum users exercise.

I agreed that chrome won me because it was at extreme lean points.

- binary setup to download was 600kB, a smart trick - UI .. was naked and to the point, yet it did show some stuff if you needed it (the tiny status bar that would pop right or left depending on context)

Personally, Firefox only issue is UI lag. Chrome is still ahead and it matters. But not for the average (non millenial) user.

Most people today, sadly, are on internet because they have to[0]. Taxes, utilities.. every service is now on internet, and these people are mostly urged to be able to be able to interact with these in the simplest manners.

The browser is just one more hurdle between them and these.

[0] remember when internet used to be a fun distraction or a gateway to learning ?..

Except... Chrome is a non-starter because it fails on the one axis I care about as a user -- along many many other users -- which is the axis upon which Google has every intention of enforcing filter rule limitations in order to neuter adblock extensions like uBlock Origin, so they can more easily force users to endure advertising. Whether or not people vehemently complain to Google will have zero bearing on Google pushing these changes into production.

We are all frogs in boiling water, so to speak. Consider if the you of 2005 would have used Chrome (or Firefox!) knowing about things like WebRTC leaks or "extension signing" walled gardens or binary blobs with microphone access or injection of executable to promote TV shows.

On macOS, I've never used Chrome unless I needed to use some specific addon. Safari just works better, especially if you also have an iPhone/iPad, and takes fewer system resources.

Firefox just has to provide the strengths of Safari on Windows and that would be good enough.

Ff should just mimic chrome down to last detail but be open source and pro privacy. Guarantee all features that chrome will have as soon as they will and faster. Mozilla has shown they don't know UI, probably artifact of user base and developers being heavy Linux users which is no where near other two os. Linux has lot of configuration, good, but too many steps / tedious. Mozilla should have developed mobile os by now as well. They should have built fuschia.

Pro tip for Mozilla stop focusing on Linux users.

Mozilla could capitalize on its reputation and offer cloud storage and partner with duck duck.

The biggest problem for me is, I like to learn by watching videos at 3x speeds. Chrome's audio pitch correction works great whereas Firefox's pitch correction makes the audio unintelligible.

There is a bug report for this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1383363

Manifest V3 and killing web.request API were the reasons that finally convinced me to go back to Firefox. Almost a month later, I didn’t find a single thing that would make me go back to Chrome.

My main complaint about fresh Firefox installations is that it takes a lot of time to fine tune everything. Every single time I have spend hours changing settings in about:config, from disabling telemetry, Pocket, changing networking/DNS settings, pipelining etc. Vanilla installation is just not well optimized.

Do the changes to pipelining settings to have a noticeable effect?

Yes, a small but measurable improvement. The biggest perf bump you can get is probably enabling various prefetching, but most of time you are doing a performance/privacy tradeoff (e.g. enabling DNS prefetching)

> My main complaint about fresh Firefox installations is that it takes a lot of time to fine tune everything.

And a lot of it is barely documented and there's no easy way to set/test it. Took me quite a while to go through the different things for scrollwheel scrolling until I had found a style regarding speed, distance, acceleration etc that I feel good using.

For me, I have found Firefox to drain my laptop's battery more (Macbook Pro, 2017) compared to Chrome (and Safari). Once it changes, I would gladly go back to using Firefox.

Firefox has been hilariously bad for Macs for as long as I can remember.

I refused to touch for over 15 years because it was incredibly slow each time I tried. Now that I'm trying to get out of Google's sphere of influence, I'm kind of forced back into it (Safari just doesn't feel right to me). Speed seems much better than it used to be and I can't really tell any difference between it and Chrome. Memory usage is an absolute disaster though. There are times where I only have 4 tabs of HN open and Firefox will be consuming over 9 GB of memory.

Right now I'm sitting at 3.6 GB used for just a couple tabs of programming documentation. Madness.

Is that actual memory use, or cache? If it's the latter, it's actually a good thing.

This is probably OSX issue, my FF works great on Ubuntu. I wish more users will install Linux on their Macs, it is eons better than OSX Toy.

Well, since Chrome and Safari both don't have this issue I doubt it is something intrinsic to MacOS itself.

Also, how is MacOS a toy? It's literally a certified Unix system.

MacOS is complete junk. If you want to get software security, hardware, and system stability problems then good luck. Latest MBP and Airs are total crap. Just go to nearest Apple Store and you can even see how it reboots randomly; or create a text file and chances are you will see different problems as you type.

9gb for 4 tabs of HN sounds ridiculously wrong. (Thanks for mentioning what is in your N tabs. I tend to ignore complaints that only give the value of N. Nobody would say "Why is my computer running out of memory when I'm only running 20 applications?")

Can you please file a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org and include an about:memory dump? You'll probably need to report what addons you have too.

They're working on it, it seems to already be a lot better in the nightly builds[1]. Hopefully the fixes will make it into FF70.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522

Firefox still uses OpenGL to draw the window to the screen and also uses transparency in those windows, unfortunately neither of those things play nice with the scaled windows in MacOS.

They are in the process of converting their code to use Core Animation instead of OpenGL to draw to the screen, which will help tremendously with the power consumption issue, so help is on the way.

As a temporary workaround until all those changes land, you can have Firefox opt out of using scaled windows on a retina Mac by getting info on the Firefox app and then checking ”Open in Low Resolution” on the get info panel.

Transparency in Firefox can be turned off by going to about:config, and setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true.

Does Firefox really want to beat Chrome? Netmarketshare shows "Firefox - 9.28%, IE - 8.29%" on desktop/laptops, it's not the position to win the race.

Also, Firefox sends analytics/telemetry to Google - https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...

Very strange decision for competing products, don't you?

Mozilla spent a year negotiating a contract with Google that prevents them from ever viewing or using the analytics data.

I wish firefox would give money to people who find security flaws in firefox.

I've heard that firefox is not very secure.

Other than that, I've switched back to firefox a looooong time ago.

Mozilla have a bug bounty program: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/bug-bounty/

If they just block all ads (which burn performance), that's already a big improvement over Chrome, and probably sufficient to make people switch browsers.

> Mozilla needs to [...] move away from Google as their default search engine

I hope they consider Startpage if so. That might be an easier switch for non-technical users if they explain it's still Google under the hood, but without the privacy concerns.

https://www.startpage.com/

I would much rather use Firefox full time, but many sites (like youtube.com, for example) just don't render well/speedily/at all on FF.

Open Chrome and everything is fine. I get TFA said some devs don't write/test for anything but Chrome... but you _have_ to keep Chrome around for some things.

So much for an open web. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

>you _have_ to keep Chrome around for some things.

You don't though!

I agree; YouTube (and most everything else) is WAY faster on Chrome than on Firefox. But, on Firefox, I can block JS and soundly defeat YouTube ads. Trading that for whatever interval of page load time would feel gross to me.

heres a better new tab page for firefox -- yet another speed dial:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/yet-another-s...

(im the author. and its open source of course!)

This could be a little off topic here. I would like to contribute to Firefox but I have no idea where to start with. I dabble with C and x86 assembly. Can anyone suggest where I should get started?

I have barely contributed to any open source projects except for a few minor bug fixes.

On https://codetribute.mozilla.org/ you can find mentored Mozilla project bugs to work on (not just Firefox) indexed by language.

Good news! Minor bug fixes are an excellent place to start!

Since the Manifest v3 debacle, I grudgingly switched to Firefox, and... I reckon it's really great.

It's fast, it's developer tools are good, after a few customisations I was very happy.

After that small adjustment I'm right at home. I'm using Developer Edition.

Well, I love Firefox! It's definitely a better browsing experience for me e.g. most-recently-used alt-tab order, vertical tab extensions, containers and deep configuration with about:config. Stability is great and my only performance problems are on Google sites.

The things I would like:

- default to private mode

- store bookmarks with choice of container - really weakens the feature when I can't e.g. bookmark two different gmail accounts

- built-in vertical tabs - extensions just can't achieve perfect UX e.g. can't tear out tabs to move to different windows, poor use of space due to side-panel header, keyboard shortcuts etc.

- Firefox IOS - lots of rough edges e.g. like always trying to autocomplete my urls to the worst possible sites that I never willingly visit e.g. outbrain, guice, oath etc. and no way to remove them

- better debugger and dev tools - still not a patch on chrome dev tools sadly

- become the better choice for Electron style apps (smaller, faster, easier)

- become the better choice for headless testing

Yes, default private mode is absolutely necessary! I always open links in 'New private tab', while some of them like comments on HN in normal tabs because I am logged in to HN.

If I right-click on my launcher icon I get the option to open Firefox in Private Mode (KDE desktop).

If you want to always default to Private Mode, then set that in the Options.

https://www.howtogeek.com/137466/how-to-always-start-any-bro...

Firefox will make text on some pages tremble and vibrate like jello. It’s quite a sight.

I just wish they had a restore feature like chrome does. On firefox, once you close gracefully, there doesn't seem to restore the whole previous session without using an extension.

See https://support.mozilla.org/kb/restore-previous-session

The reason why I stopped using Firefox and switched was their clear and complete disregard of their users. I had enough during the recent addon pocalypse. It was clear that they were just simply FORCING their users hands to follow what THEY want. I started using Firefox BECAUSE of the freedom it gave me to make my browser the way I want it, whether using addons or CSS styles. But now, go to the addon page and make a search and most of the results I find are themes!!!

Call it a conspiracy or whatever you like, but I hope all the money Firefox leaders are getting from Google is not just to help them kill firefox for the benefit of Google.

I want to use Firefox more, but every other major update wipes out all my containers so I have to start over. The biggest reason for me to use Firefox is unreliable.

firefox could work to create network effects that would "lock" its users to it, or at least make google unwillign to follow them. E.g. integrated sign-in like they tried with Persona, or integrates cryptocurrency micropayments. It doesn't have to be better to win, thats not how it works.

They could also take advantage of the flash deprecation in chrome to steal some disgruntled users from chrome. Yeah its a competition

Frankly, the usability is what killed my use of Firefox. No pinch-to-zoom without installing an extension in 2019, really?

If you don't use extensions, you can set apz.allow_zooming to true.

There is an open bug with extension pop-ups, so it helps if you don't use them: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1560770

> What privacy has the average Joe user gained by switching to Firefox? None. They’re still using Google Search and (most likely) other Google products. They’re being subjected to misleading ads on their new tab page. From their perspective, installing Firefox was a pointless hassle.

I use DuckDuckGo instead Google in Firefox. I'm a happy user. I will switch to Safari as soon as I get a new iPhone and ditch my Xiaomi phone to gain more level of privacy.

"The everage joe".

Firefox is way slower than chrome to just open a web page on my pixel 3a. Do others not have this experience?

I’ve never had this experience, on desktop or mobile.

That's my experience too. Both on mobile and mac.

The only reason I (and many I know) use Firefox mobile is because it can run uBlock Origin.

It is uncertain if the new mobile Firefox will support uBlock Origin so even there I might stop using it.

Which is sad since I'm all for diversity.

You may have a better experience with Firefox Preview: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...

Nothing will change wrt usage of Google products unless/until Google starts deplatforming users from Gmail-type services on the basis of their Google searches or email content.

This is not currently happening, but a) it wouldn't be super out-of-character for what Google has become b) it's likely a necessary condition for non-technical users to start caring about Google's threats to privacy.

The author complains about Pocket, but I actually really like it. The quality of articles is good, and it isn’t just full of clickbait like a lot of other news feeds.

The browser does use your browsing history to decide which articles to show you, but they claim that information does not leave your device. The browser downloads the full list of articles onto your device and filters them there.

I never understood the opposition (at least on HN) to Mozilla's integration of Pocket into Firefox. Pocket is a superb tool, and it's completely optional.

Firefox has a lot of room to suck more before I switch to a browser designed to be an optimal tracker.

But our metrics show nobody is using any features except for the ones that are identical to chrome.

If you are the author, increase your line height, I have to track the its start to read the next.

I don't think too many people actually care about all that. People stop using Firefox because enough sites just plain don't work on it, and it lacks browser extension parity. Fix the actual browser and users will stay. Continue being too clever with the rendering engine, and people will continue to abandon it.

I don't really get most of this stuff about Firefox vs. Chrome. I guess Chrome might be slightly faster or something, but for me personally I don't have a reason to switch. It's fast enough.

I originally went to Firefox because of Vimperator. There simply hasn't been a compelling reason for me to switch away.

For me the lack of good support for tree style tab is what made me left firefox

What? This sounds backwards to me. I use Firefox almost exclusively and Tree Style Tab is one of the killer features for me. I tried it in Chrome once but it ran in a separate window and was therefore basically unusable. Has this changed recently?

I'm voting for Edge. Chromium, but with all the Google shit ripped out, a massive privacy dashboard, responsive developers, popular rendering engine, not ad supported. There's telemetry so Microsoft knotter if it works (which you may not like and I get it) but that's it.

'know' not 'knotter'. Odd HN doesn't seem to agree, but:

Firefox relies on Google for revenue. Edge doesn't.

Mozilla should just buy DuckDuckGo.

I'd prefer they didn't, because I fear they'd just start making it indistinguishable from google.com.

As something of power FF user, I do two key things in Firefox that used to work perfectly, especially with a third thing from Session Manager.

* Multiple profiles simultaneously, one for normal browsing, another for authenticated sites I care about, etc.

* Lots of windows and tabs. My main FF usually had around ~20 windows (spread across a huge virtual desktop) and ~300 tabs.

* The amazing Session Manager addon, which would, when FF imploded, let me restart FF, choose which session to restore, and then do so, perfectly, even restoring windows to their correct positions in sections of the virtual screen several feet to the sides of my monitors.

Like I said, Firefox worked flawlessly for this, while Chrome was a flaming disaster.

The decline in Firefox since has been like this:

1) Session Manager loses the ability to restore off-screen positions.

2) So I switched to using more topic-oriented FF profiles, so that if topic X on virtual screen (2, 3) dies, I can just go restart it on the right virtual screen, without having to move a dozen windows there. Annoying as hell, but not fatal.

3) Firefox has the Great Addon Debacle - where many addons abruptly stop working, including Session Manager.

4) The firefox team recognizes that something like SM is required, but the result has far less time put into it, is buggy, forgets which URL went into some of the tabs, can only restore the last session (so if you restart twice without restoring, rank stupidity follows to restore the session you wanted), and so on.

5) At some point, Firefox starts consuming a LOT more process slots (by default), greatly increasing its ability to consume far, far more CPU time

6) This doesn't affect me a lot at first, since I've long saved process cycles - and power - by suspending all Firefox processes when my screen locks. It's worked perfectly since about a year after JavaScript become a thing (but...)

7) I discover that some aspect of FF, the new, sad, session management, and contention between all the FF content procs now means that when FF awakens after its nap when I unlock the screen, they now want to dump some 2 MB/s of data into my hard drive. After a night of suspension, since FF doesn't realize it was asleep, it apparently walks through every time point where it would have saved and does it all at once. My home and work computers (both of which are pretty meaty) are completely useless for up to 20 minutes after unlocking the screen, as FF hammers the disk drive continuously, often made even worse by FF's ongoing tendency to balloon up to 10 to 20 GiB in each content process.

Obviously I've taken steps to find variables relating to how often it checkpoints, and reduced the frequency. I've cut the number of content proc process it runs, but the fundamental issue is:

For power users with lots of profile and windows/tabs, Firefox used to be The Answer.

Chrome is horrible in the same situations Firefox used to excel in.

I don't want Firefox to become Chrome. Chrome is garbage for us. A browser only suitable for a handful of tabs (i.e. < 100 or so), which will then eat your CPU cores (depending on JS content)

The only thing I wanted was for Firefox to be able to tell me WHICH TAB IS EATING CPU TIME SO I CAN KILL THAT TAB.

Still doesn't do it.

Sigh.

(Arcana: I miss NeWS and "psps" / "pskill" which did address this kind of problem)

> The only thing I wanted was for Firefox to be able to tell me WHICH TAB IS EATING CPU TIME SO I CAN KILL THAT TAB.

about:performance may help you.

You should come work on Startpage.com

I hope you don't take offense but I feel it's hard on my eyes to read text on a black background. I tried to read the article but it kind of hurt my eyes and had to leave.

Probably moreso because of the low contrast.

Just install Firefox and use Reader mode... oh...

Fortunately Firefox has a feature by default not found in Chrome, which can help with that: you can easily turn off the CSS.

On Firefox Android, you just reflexively hit the big reader mode button and choose one of three better modes (dark, light, white).

That's one of my favourite features. Sometimes I tend to read stuff on line when I'm in a dark room and I either use FF reader mode or one of the darm mode plugins. My only complaint is that the URL bar in my Android is always light and I can't seem to find a way to make it dark.

Yeah I visited and insta-left. That thin monospace with a faint gray color on that dark background was just impossible to read.

Were you reading in Chrome? Use the Reader mode in Firefox and you'll be fine.

It's funny how much I find myself using it since I've switched full time to Firefox. Site has never been tested on wide monitors? font-size is tiny? Terrible color choices? Annoyed by the font? Don't like flashy sidebars next to the content? Reader mode has you covered.

Previously, when reading longer pieces, I'd go into dev tools and quickly kill the side bar, set a max width etc, but it's so convenient with reader mode.

Out of curiosity, is it this page in particular that was hard on the eyes, or dark-theme pages in general?

The interesting part is that the body text appears to have a 5.71 contrast ratio, which meets the WCAG 2.1 Level AA criterion [1] but not Level AAA. I wonder if folks pursuing dark themes are making sure to give enough consideration to contrast.

Oddly enough, this is actually one of the reasons I prefer Chrome Dev Tools. They've been adding a lot of accessibility-focused features [2][3], and as it relates to my question, it seems much easier get some of these essential details from Chrome Dev Tools than Firefox.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#contrast-minimum

[2] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/acce...

[3] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/01/devtools#i...

I can't easily read dark theme apps. Basically if I start one, I have to closely study the app till I find its options and choose the light theme. (This was awful when I had to make a new install of the Gimp recently - it used to be much more user friendly. I was about a minute away from searching the internet for how to change the config file manually or - shock - asking a friend.)

not what i would call a "dark" background. that's pale. and obviously the material theme google has been pushing... anyways, sorry some people don't like it.

I don't think this is even remotely Material Design. The background colour looks like Solarized.

Material Design would have higher contrast than this.

Yep pretty much Solarized Dark and a reminder to me why I prefer a monokai derived theme.

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow

Put a paid Firefox app in Mac, iOS and Windows app stores. Make it clean from integrations and pre-configured for privacy, like no 3rd party cookies, uBlock Origin installed and so on. I'd buy.

Try IceCat. It's a GNU-approved Firefox clone (tracking Firefox codebase continuously), clean from integrations and pre-configured for privacy. It's also free, in both senses!

Thanks! But IceCat is on 60.7 while FF is 68.0 ?

It tracks the Extended Support Release (ESR) branch of Firefox. That means it gets new features once a year and then only bugfixes after that. ESR 60 is last year's, work is probably ongoing to rebase IceCat on ESR 68 which came out last July.

I am forced to used Firefox for an app, and the popup that prompts you to update drives me crazy.

Chrome--among other things that make it clearly superior to any other browser--gets updated in the background and without stopping your work.

I feel they definitely need to revamp the UI. It’s old and ugly. Perhaps they should separate into pro and amateur modes/builds...

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