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Comment by DarkWiiPlayer | Hacker News Reader

> It's a fine browser

I wouldn't exactly argue that chrome is any better, but firefox isn't a good browser either. It's neither minimalistic, nor does it have many features and it most certainly isn't easily to customize.

I've been an Opera user from version 12 (the last good opera) up to twenty-something, then switched to vivaldi a few years ago and never looked back.

Even just in the current development version, vivaldi is getting support for calendars, mail and rss right in the browser, adding to the already present notes feature. What does firefox do in terms of UX innovation? Ant they certainly don't seem to be pumping that money into the under-the-hood components either, seeing how they still haven't managed to get @property working.

Firefox is turning into the next internet explorer and it's not even googles fault. It's sad, but completely deserved.

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I think it's perfectly fine browser. Obviously like any software there are hundreds of ways you could think of how to improve it.

> it most certainly isn't easily to customize.

I can't think of any other browser I ever used which is more easily customizable.

> Even just in the current development version, vivaldi is getting support for calendars, mail and rss right in the browser, adding to the already present notes feature. What does firefox do in terms of UX innovation? Ant they certainly don't seem to be pumping that money into the under-the-hood components either, seeing how they still haven't managed to get @property working.

Multi-tab containers is definitely a super useful UX innovation which I've been using for years and surprised why other browsers are slow to pick it up. I'm not sure I actually want any of the above listed features in my browser but I'll be happy to be convinced.

Reader mode which I use regularly -- other browsers either don't have it or it's a worse implementation.

I have an old 4gb ram 11" macbook air that's more or less dedicated to streaming video and music these days. For video, we use firefox over chrome because chrome stutters more. Firefox is smooth. I have no idea why, but I'm guessing the GC is implemented differently.

I am a casual internet user and have no connection to IT industry, but i've been using Firefox practically since the very beginning - I installed v. 1.0.0 back in 2004. It's main selling points for me were: 1) it wasn't IE; 2) easy customizability of the UI layout - FF had as many great themes as Winamp; 3) lots and lots of different plugins and extensions for even more customizability: from AdBlack and Smooth Scrolling to various video downloaders and paywall skips.

And it was great! More importantly it was already a more or less finished product. The updates were slow, sparse in time and didn't change much (it took 3 years to get from v. 1 to v. 3).

Then something changed in 2011 and updates started showering almost every week for no apparent reason. It was annoying and I've completly stopped installing updates after v. 13(everything worked perfectly anyway). Then after 4 or 5 years I started to have a problem with playing youtube and twitch videos, so I decided to finally update my FF. It was already v. 57 (Quantum) and it made me absolutely livid. 2/3 of my extensions weren't working (and still aren't) and the ability to change UI theme was completely gone (and so I am now stuck with that bland default theme). And all that for no visible benefit on my part whatsoever.

I've immediately installed Chrome, Opera and Safari to see if they were any better, but ... they all are almost identical to the new Firefox (although I am now using Opera on mobile). There is almost no incentive to change from one browser to another now.

Well, it's year 2021 now, but somehow my user experience is worse than it was fifteen years ago. How is that possible I do not know.

It's the rise of Chrome and web as an app delivery platform instead of just interlinked documents. This has necessitated a huge, ever expanding API and ever-increasing security concerns, and these have totally swamped browser devs to the point that they have simply stopped caring about end-user UI, productivity, customisation, backward-compatibility and such.

The web is now essentially an operating system under active, nascent development, so the churn is going to be enormous and the whole thing will lack any kind of polish or UX. Expect it to stabilise in a few decades as something else takes over (maybe).

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