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If you think Firefox has stagnated you clearly aren't aware of the substantial and complex improvements that have been made to the firefox core over the last couple of years:

* Faster Quantum Engine (multi-process architecture, etc)

* Faster CSS rendering with Stylo

* GPU-based rendering with WebRender

Any Moz engineer who worked on the above will have boosted their CV's substantially. They don't need to work on tangential greenfields to do that.

Sure so extensions had to be rewritten for Quantum, but sometimes that's the price to pay for deep architectural/security improvements.

How many people worked on these features vs how many are employed though?

There's a big difference between Firefox the product and the renderer.

I'd argue the parts outside the renderer have got worse even if the renderer part has got better.

As an engineer I see the value in these projects, but as a user my biggest gripe with FF is the lack of proper multilingual spellchecking.

This has been on their Bugzilla for 20 years:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687

I honestly don't see these as a good sign for a browser as a tool, instead of some software development adventure.

Firefox has a much smaller team than Chrome to begin with, and they can only work on so many things. If they keep spending time in "re-inventing the wheel" (in addition to what you listed, they also revamp their mobile client quite a few times in my recent memory), what left behind is attention to details in UX and UI that users can feel, which is what Firefox was famous for.

I'm not a developer, but I've submitted or engaged in many bug tickets on Bugzilla. What I can tell from my experience is that the response to bugs (critical or not) are getting slower and slower. Not just patches, sometimes you will have tickets that took years to have someone even looking at it. My feeling is most of developers are more likely to spend their time on Mozilla's "big goals" than maintenance.

Just to give one example, there is still no full range video support in Firefox in the era of video game streaming. This alone lets me to have to use Chrome to watch Twitch.

I think performance matters to more people than full range video.

Performance isn't the only thing people care when choosing a browser. If it is, they probably abandoned Fx for a Blink based browser long time ago. Also does Firefox really have significant performance issue after 57?

Who said it was the only thing?

Blink based browsers aren't faster across the board. They would be without Firefox developers working on performance.

Did they not just lay off most of the engineers who had built all of that stuff?

Quantum was a marketing name for various improvements that landed before support for old extensions was removed.

> how many working on Firefox? 50? and 950 doing various (useless) side projects?

You have a source for those numbers? It looks to me like you're just making them up because you want to sling mud.

There were question marks along with the numbers.

Clearly it’s a rhetorical device, presenting a reasonable speculation that matches the evidence (number of projects, and quality), as part of the natural flow of the writer making their point.

Sorry, but a team of 50 persons in total to support a project as complex as Firefox is not reasonable speculation at all.

Is it? I feel that people vastly overestimate the actual number of competent programmers (not managers, CxOs, etc) many projects need.

Consider that even here on HN we have one person who wrote their own HTML5 renderer, JS-like scripting language, CSS, etc from scratch (csmile). How do you figure that to go from that to what is needed to make a browser that renders sites properly you need to add more than 49 additional programmers?

Can you link the HTML/CSS engine you mentioned?

Its not just about the code though. Somehow that code needs to keep up with the latest standards and magically be delivered to my client device. To think that a project as complex as the Firefox ecosystem can be maintained with less than 50 engineers doesn't match my experience working on large product teams.

Here's my estimate:

* A dozen build engineers to support development and builds for X client platforms

* A dozen engineers for the Javascript VM

* Dozens of engineers to support ongoing javascript and CSS standards

* A dozen engineers or more to support the firefox core

* Dedicated teams for Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux targets

* Dozens of Team/Programme/Project managers to _enable_ devs to do their best. These folks aren't optional.

* UX designers

* Graphical design artists

* Technical writers

You work on large teams, so your estimates are for large teams. Smaller teams work faster and can get more done with less. Basic "Mythical Man Month" stuff.

I'm not saying you're wrong. Just that you might not be right.

All these "dozens" are exactly what i mean with people overestimating what is needed. You throw "dozen" around like crumbs on pigeons.

> * A dozen engineers for the Javascript VM

> * Dozens of engineers to support ongoing javascript and CSS standards

Fabrice Bellard is a single person who in his free time has made a full modern JavaScript engine. Key parts: single person, free time.

I call bullshit that you need "dozens of engineers" to make a JavaScript engine - what you need to good engineers (and to ensure they stay around).

Sciter doesn't even come close to a fraction of what Gecko or WebKit offers or does, and it still took the author many years to get to that point, so I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. The "JS-like engine" is an excellent example. It turns out, you need an actual JS engine to run real websites, not a "JS-like" engine. The difference between 80% and 100% of that problem is massive, and it also turns out running that fast is a ridiculously complex project on its own. (And, unsurprisingly, the recent Sciter FOSS Kickstarter announced that it would pivot to QuickJS instead. It might be educational to think about why they would do that.)

This doesn't even get into things like translations, technical writing (manuals, help pages, etc), infrastructure needed to actually deliver updates and downloads, collaboration on web standards, etc.

> Sciter doesn't even come close to a fraction of what Gecko or WebKit offers or does

It is close enough to show that a web engine can be made by a single person even if it doesn't fully adhere to the standards and its functionality is certainly not less than 1/49th of what you'd need to go there.

> The "JS-like engine" is an excellent example. It turns out, you need an actual JS engine to run real websites, not a "JS-like" engine.

Fabrice Bellard has written (among many other things) a full modern JavaScript interpreter, again showing you do not need a "dozen" people (like another commented mentioned) to make such an interpreter.

Yeah, as someone who wrote a good chunk of a CSS layout engine (Servo) I can confidently say that this comment demonstrates a huge lack of appreciation of what the scale of work involved is.

From experience, what happens internally in an organization is quite different from what is visible from the outside. Making up numbers like that is just a terrible insult to the people who work on a lot of useful stuff in Mozilla.

You can question the waste (which is obvious; Mozilla was bloated, and has no evolutionary pressure as long as the money keeps flowing in from Google deals) without it denigrating what’s useful.

It wasn't a "reasonable speculation". More like pure fiction, simply intended to denigrate the target.

You criticised their guess as baseless just to follow up by denying their numbers without sources. Only one of you two chose to present a fact without backing it up.

There's also this gesture of assuming that the opponent is motivated by evil intentions, which is almost always wrong.

On topic though: Our conversation could really benefit from some actual numbers. I made a quick search but didn't find anything.

A quick search turned up this for me: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/the-new-firefox-by-the-numb...

It's a bit dated, but at the time of the Quantum release,

> How many authors contributed code?

> More than 700 authors contributed code to Firefox ...

and I guess the majority of those code authors were working for Mozilla.

It seems unlikely there's been a 90% reduction in the engineering effort being put into Firefox in the last couple years.

The comment was not asking out of curiosity, because when you do that you don't frame it in a way (50 out of 1000) that matches the larger point you're trying to make.

Should not be too difficult to estimate the actual number: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central

Same deal regarding people who work on FF vs those who work on FS

hgmo is a good starting place, but there is lots of code in other places that is either incorporated into a Firefox release or directly supports it.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/GitHub#Is_.22mozilla.22_the_only_gi...

(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

> Recently they shipped Firefox for android that feels like alpha version. It is even unclear why did they ship it, they could have waited.

Apart from extensions requiring whitelisting, how is it worse than the old mobile FF?

I didn't notice any new bugs and it fixed the issues I had with the address bar hiding being fickle.

My tabs change order.

That's a personal preference, but I prefer the way the tabs were shown in the older version, I could see more at the same time and reorganize them

Bookmarks and top sites are only visible when opening a new tab, not when placing focus in the URL bar. If I want to go to a new site I have to either type the address, or open a new tab leading to a lot of old unused tabs that need to be cleaned up.

This made me install Fennec from F-droid.

UI is significantly changed for the worse - things like tab handling (tabs go to the top of the list which may be hidden from view), swipe controls (close tab requires some weird "must swipe across 40% of the screen" motion to be recognised) and graphical issues have all suffered badly. It's not just a case of getting used to the new design, usability is an afterthought.

But yeah, the ability to use extensions on mobile was the key feature for me switching to firefox. Now I would just like to find a non-sucky-non-chromium browser.

I've had many bugs since the URL bat went to the bottom -- it crashes on some websites and often has multi-second hangs. I had to go back to chrome (I will try it again in a month, and hope it has improved, as I prefer Firefox).

Tab ordering is messed up. Tab scrolling is bugged. Everything from before requires more taps than before. Pages randomly render blank. Normal and private mode gets stuck and next intent tab is opened on whatever mode was explicitly opened before.

I would count the bullshit extension whitelist as the single biggest regression. But it is not new, so its not counted as such anymore?

The worst part, I will still be using Firefox because of my principles. Mozilla knows that userbase like me isn't leaving, and those unlike me aren't staying. It doesn't matter how big of a screwup they cause next time. The writing is already on the wall.

They made simple workflows more complicated, removed features and move UI elements around for no apparent reason.

Weirdest thing is how they moved the address bar to the bottom of the screen. You can put it back to the top of the screen but it's like - why?

There was a useful list of most frequently visited sites on the homepage, which they've decided to remove.

Opening a new tab or a favourite now requires at least two taps (one on top of the screen, and the second at the bottom), or one long press, while it required only one tap before.

With their experience in software development, Mozilla should now that users mostly hate changes, although we can be fine with it when there are improvements too. But in this case, there's no improvements as far as I could see, just random changes to the UI, a few things worse, a few things different for no reason, but nothing better.

Overall it gives very little confidence in what they're doing. It seems there's no leadership or overall vision at Mozilla, just random teams making random changes just for fun.

> Weirdest thing is how they moved the address bar to the bottom of the screen. You can put it back to the top of the screen but it's like - why?

As someone with a larger phone, this has made things 100x easier. Previously, the address bar was out of reach with one hand.

Personally, I'm really happy with all of the changes.

> Weirdest thing is how they moved the address bar to the bottom of the screen. You can put it back to the top of the screen but it's like - why?

One hand operation / large screen sizes?

No tab queuing means I can't open a bunch of tabs from another app without constantly having to switch back and forth (Open link in another app -> Auto-opens firefox with that tab -> switch back to origin app).

> Apart from extensions requiring whitelisting, how is it worse than the old mobile FF?

This is the most important point by far. First-class add-on support was the one differentiating feature that Firefox for Android had over every other browser on the platform. There are a handful of other browsers with add-ons on Android, like Kiwi, but they aren't nearly as seamless as Firefox was.

I'm using Fennec to write this comment because of Refined HN, I just turned off auto-updates. Not going to switch (at least for now) and I love Firefox but who knows where we'll be in a year? If we're in the same spot then I'll have to switch to Kiwi for these use cases.

I have Nightly installed and it's faster - whitelisted uBlock Origin alone solves a lot of problems in addition to GeckoView's massive speed improvements - but it doesn't fit every use case, so I have to keep Fennec installed.

The devs seem obstinate about ever allowing non-whitelisted add-ons outside of Nightly, which is... odd, it's the one feature they have over the competition. They seem similarly obstinate regarding about:config on stable.

There are other grievances (I actually disagree with the detractors on the default position of the address bar - it's far easier to use on tall devices) but this is the one thing that can't be found elsewhere, and it's gone now.

To reiterate, this feedback comes from a position of love, not hate, and I think most other people here feel the same. The devs are getting a lot of heat on places like reddit though, and the Play Store reviews for another. My limited understanding is that Fennec had to go eventually.

A huge annoyance for me personally: stored passwords are no longer applied to HTTP basic auth.

This is entirely a collection of terrible takes and misrepresentations.

> Those teams know very well that those projects have no use case, but they dont care.

This seems like a case of "hindsight is 20/20". There are tons of successful projects that had people saying things like this about them at the start. When it works, we call it bold risk-taking. But when it doesn't work, we feel like we always knew it wasn't going to work.

Regarding 2) ...evidently focusing on their existing userbase isn't viable.

So often these comments like "they are ignoring their user base" and "why won't they let us donate to firefox" miss the point (even if true / beneficial)...they don't want to double down on their existing user base; they want to expand their userbase to go with their mission of bringing more trust to the web

Firefox was the better extension platform for years, and that wasn't enough to entice users away from Google and Chrome. They are trying, and failing, to find a differentiator that will give market share. Trust, privacy, and security on the web so far hasn't got to consumers' hearts, and extensibility and donations are basically just pandering to those few users that remain.

> evidently focusing on their existing userbase isn't viable.

I disagree.

First of all: their strategy to ignore the requests of existing users in order to focus on some potential new users doesn't work. Firefox lost around 10 percentage points of market share in last few years.

Second of all: the whole "strategy" of alienating current user base in hope of finding new users is batshit insane.

Browsers are a mature product: it is much easier to keep current users happy and grow organically. This is not some start-up that will come up with a killer feature - you evolve the product.

You can scroll a bit up, even in this thread to see people complaining about the terrible user experience in last Firefox for Android roll out. Do you see a single person praising it? Long gone are the days when tech-savy users would recommend Firefox to their friends and family. Also, why did they even roll out a half baked product? Couldnt they fix it before rolling it out?

As an user, at this point you might start to wonder if it is even worth it to update Firefox. How will the new patch break your workflow? Will some useful features be cut? It's not even about the bugs and the project seems to have them.

People go to Chrome because it is stable. No batshit insane changes to UI or workflow. [and yes, I am aware that Chrome wants to kill the address bar to introduce "AMP" - what is a terrible thing for whole internet]

To self quote, "Firefox was the better extension platform...and didn't entice users away".

Firefox's share has been declining for years, and I wouldn't say it's become a significantly worse browser in that time. They aren't showing any signs of growing organically. They are trying to get away from Google, and for that, they need to grow their base and bring in much more revenue from users, or just accept being a small side player in the browser market.

You mention tech-savy...but is 'tech savy' what the public wants, or needs? Firefox has always been the more tech-savvy browser I would say, and yet they are losing ground to Chrome. The tech-savy browser is the one that's trying to push the boundaries; they are trying to do more technical stuff, which gives more opportunity for problems, such as workflow breaking.

I don't know if Firefox _can_ compete with Google, given how badly their market share is declining. I think a lot of that isn't even due to Firefox, it's in my view partly driven by Web Devs no longer caring about ensuring Firefox is supported, and also just that "Google" is the average users' doorway to the internet. I think it's also partly because the Chrome way just works for your average consumer...click the browser, search, job done. Again, the HN crowd seems to conflate 'what I want' and 'the reviews I see', and fail to really think about what _the market_ wants, or how the average consumer interacts in ways that may be wildly different than the way a current firefox user interacts. Chrome is stable because they don't really seem to do much from release to release, and that _works_ for the average user.

The loss of users happened when Chrome came out. At that time Firefox was eating tons of memory and getting buggy with more tabs open. Chrome was also marketed very aggressively by Google.

Firefox partially removed those problems with later versions: it stopped eating so much RAM.

Sadly after version 56 the "batshit insane" strategy started. It's like a set of terrible decision after terrible decision. (1) alienating users by killing extensions (2) constant changes to UI, workflow (3) 1 year later forgetting to sign extensions so everything stopped working (4) patching everything via strange side-channels that shouldn't exist (5) even more batshit insane changes to browser, killing extensions AGAIN and chaing extensions again

If all those things simply did not happen and Firefox was simply maintained like a normal program, their unique selling point would be "our product is similar, but offers you your favorite extensions and also we don't spy on you". That would be their secure niche, from which they can expand and which they cannot lose.

But they do everything they can to lose their users.

> Chrome is stable because they don't really seem to do much from release to release, and that _works_ for the average user.

What is the value add of constant shifts of Firefox? Definitely not security.

It's so negative, why people keep being cynical towards Firefox Mozilla.

Because Mozilla keeps burning up their good will.

I hesitate to reply to this, because it's such a caricature of negativity. It's kind of a rollup of all of the crap that HN comes up with to fling at Mozilla. Everything has some kernel of truth in it, but it's pretty heavily buried.

1) The majority of developers at Mozilla are working on Firefox. Many more than 50. It is true that we have fewer staff than Google has working on Chrome (Mozilla is less than half, I heard rumoured?).

2) We did kill XUL extensions, after resisting for years. It would have been a self-inflicted fatal wound not to. https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...

3) Anyone who's had to make a decision of when to ship a product will be familiar with the things you need to juggle. There was a much earlier alpha that got close to shipping and then held back. You would have been less happy with that. There are later versions that would have been more complete, at the cost of maintaining two separate code bases longer. Massive opportunity cost. Was it shipped at exactly the right point? Almost certainly not.

1000 might seem like a large number to you, but we are a small organization relative to others in the same space; we can't keep a lot of extra bets going.

4) Superficially: uh, isn't that what bugs are? The only way to prevent your decisions from causing problems is to not make decisions, and then that's a bigger problem. Specifically with the signing, nobody forgot to sign anything, a cert expired. We screwed up.

The decision to sign addons had consequences, yes. A decision to not sign addons would have consequences as well -- which we knew intimately, because they were very, very real and growing rapidly. But I can't make anyone believe that if the starting point is the assumption of incompetence.

5) Shifting resources away from enterprise does not equal "not caring about the product at all". I've long taken issue with that particular (now changed) decision too, but I never assumed that I had enough of the full picture to be confident that I was right and the decision makers were wrong. Contrary to prevailing opinion, just "providing" something is not free. Enterprise support costs resources. Throwing something over the wall and saying "patches welcome!" when it doesn't work for people is worse than not pretending to support it in the first place.

Your beef with side projects is a little bizarre to me. Why do you think they take up such a huge percent of resources? Assuming 95% is not a good faith argument that I can even respond to. Maybe we could agree that 0% would be unhealthy and shortsighted?

I'll stop there. I will suggest that you at least stop repeating things like "development teams are not working on core product" since I know that to be objectively false.

(I'll admit that at present there is one fewer developer working on core product right now, but that'll be fixed as soon as I close this tab.)

(not the parent)

2) I'll concede the technical reasons. But it's been something like four years now, and you still haven't caught up with what the previous extensions could do. There's still no way to remap keys without waiting for the current tab to load, for example. This is a very important UX feature!

4) The problem is, when you force users to go through the Mozilla gatekeeper, it's all the more important to get this right and not have that gatekeeper sleeping on the job.

Second, the failure behavior was not fail-safe. Users had their previously-signed addons disabled when this struck. Many of these were necessary to protect their privacy, which was then compromised.

(Proper fail-safe behavior would have been to allow already-signed addons to keep working or put up a warning, so don't tell me it would have needed a huge investment of resources to avoid that catastrophe.)

How many other browsers have had a sudden global feature outage like that?

And, to make it worse, your leadership thought it was somehow reassuring to say, "Oh, don't worry, we broke the promises of the user experiments feature to push out a forced update that fixed this!"

>A decision to not sign addons would have consequences as well -- which we knew intimately, because they were very, very real and growing rapidly.

Mozillians keep insisting this but I have yet to see evidence. Has there been even one case of a user a) who is technically adept enough to enable unsigned add-ons, and b) sideloaded an extension, and c) suffered a security catastrophe that merited Mozilla intervention? Most of the naive users you're claiming to protect can't even get past a).

Chrome allows unsigned addons just by toggling developer mode. Where are their massive security breaches from that?

The original promise of Firefox was to give me back control of my machine. Having to go through Mozilla for my custom extension just feels like the days of getting software from shrinkwrap at Best Buy again.

My parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8

1) When I write about people working on Firefox I mean people fixing old bugs and working on the features that USERS want. Users are the most interested in the core product: the browser. They also want the browser to get the functionality that was removed (extensions!).

When you write about Firefox, you seem to write about various side projects like Firefox-Send, or Pocket that barely add any value to the actual users. Users don't want them (or even ask for them) - yet the teams are very happy to start and make some half-baked greenfield product [after all Firefox Send is a project failure - couldn't stop malware + nobody used it].

This might be a blasphemy, but IMHO even creating Rust is a bad side project. [maybe good for the world, but definitely bad for Firefox - resources are removed from browser development team]

2) Your comment makes me lose hope. Users are very clear: they want extensions. Yet you act as if XUL extensions is the only way to make extensions. Ever.

Do you mean that the whole Firefox team (probably 1000 people) cannot invent a new and secure extension model that allows to adjust the browser per user needs? I get it - creating it is hard. But it is literally your job. When you are a Firefox programmer you should work on the core product. Not on some easy side-project.

From outside perspective it looks that nobody wanted to deal with the difficult problems. Management just let the developers to ignore them and create new, sexy, greenfield side projects.

Another user pointed out that the new extension model does not even allow to remap keys immediately (personally haven't tested it) - most computer games allow this, so don't act as if this was some impossible programming challenge.

3) When you release unfinished, buggy products you alienate your user base. Most users understand that software can have bugs. But why does Mozilla constantly release things that break the users' work-flow? From user perspective it feels like change for the sake of change. You start to wonder what feature will the new patch remove or break.

At the same time your competitor is reliable. They can change the inside, but they don't touch the outside: the user interface stays constant.

4) The problems with extension signatures is a complete fiasco of the Firefox project management. It shows that inside you have zero control over the process - no tools to track workflow, critical tasks and what needs to be done? (are you still stuck on mailing lists?)

This one is 100% on Mozilla and please dont come up with some excuses, because they sounds pathetic.

I repeat: from user perspective it looks like a very small part of Mozilla deals with the actual Firefox and everyone deals with other, random stuff. Some gatekeeper had one job: sign the extensions once per year - and failed.

Also when you sign the extensions using some strange side channels, you sound like hypocrites when you claim that Firefox does not spy on its users.

5) Instead of focusing on core product, old bugs, user requests - the teams prefer to make "sexy" greenfield projects.

Proving proper Firefox installers to companies, means higher market share and consequently more money from Google. It's like someone at Mozilla was sabotaging the company from inside. Sorry, your argument that providing installers cost money is just absurd. Why you dont use the same argument about Firefox-Send, Pocket, or 20 other side-projects that are leeching development time/money from the actual browser? Browser is the one that earns money, but it is stripped from resources that are used for "adventures" of developers. Like the Firefox Send "adventure" that was a failed idea from the start, failed at the end. That money could have been spent working on your core product.

Also, when we speak about installers for corporate multiple people claim that inside Mozilla, there was a stubborn idiot that didnt want it to happen. It is a complete failure of management who didnt identify that person and fire on the spot.

You assume that "side projects" are taking up a substantial proportion of development resources. They really, really aren't. Experimental projects are mainly small groups exploring possibilities. Initially 1-2 people, growing when (and if) they seem to be getting somewhere. At various points in the history of the project, it's been more developers vs product people who come up with the initial ideas.

The rest of us are working on stuff like: Fission (process-per-tab, roughly). Pageload performance. Memory usage. Printing. Moving stuff to the GPU. The never-ending treadmill of new web APIs. Porting to new platforms. Fixing bugs.

As for extensions: there is no intention to regain 100% of the power of XUL extensions. Never has been. Many extensions used to get the source code of an internal function, search and replace to update the code, and reinstall it. We're not going to return to that level of power. (Yes, XUL extensions don't have to do it this way; I'm using an extreme example to illustrate the former power.)

But that's not to say that Mozilla doesn't want to increase the power of WebExtensions. I'm not really privy to the decisionmaking there, but look -- we just laid off 250 people. I hope that's adequate proof that we have to make some hard resourcing decisions. And most of the "why don't you just..." requests are not as trivial as they seem, even when the requester's exact use case would be fine. Any extension API that allows deceiving the user or subverting their intentions must be handled carefully to maintain the security of users, and people are pretty darn good at finding unexpected ways to exploit seemingly innocuous capabilities.

I'm not going to debate the history or correctness of all the decisions that bother people. I agree with some, disagree with some, and aligning my views with yours or anyone else's isn't going to have much of an effect on anything. We've screwed up. I'm sure we haven't properly admitted to some screwups. People's experiences and workflows are different, and I know I'm always surprised to discover that 99% of users are not seeing something that bothers me. My intuition of what is or isn't important is not as good as I expect it to be.

I think you made most of these things up.

Yep. Microsoft had great timing with Chromium Edge. I haven't looked back since.