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> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken.

I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel?

I believe browser diversity is healthy for the world wide web. I don't want Firefox to become dominant either, but right now there is a short supply of browsers which are independent from Chromium. I don't want the W3C to be replaced by the Chromium Project.

I believe Firefox is a good enough browser to go toe-to-toe with Chrome. It and it's developer are not without problems. However, at this point I'd use Firefox even if Mozilla was just as bad as Google because I think the diversity is worth it.

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> If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel?

OT, but I think this is an interesting psychological phenomenon that occurs in a lot of settings, in particular politics: People, services, products etc are not judged by objective (or even just common) standards but by the standards they announce for themselves.

So someone who claims strict moral integrity and then falls short of that is seen as less trustworthy than someone who is upfront about being shady and then surprisingly acts less shady than expected.

If anyone knows a name for this effect, I'd like to know.

There's another angle here I think you are missing

> If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel?

It's because it's not enough to be wrong about something (according to certain people), but you must be punished for being wrong. And narcissists can't handle a company not being "100% right" so they punish them by going to their competitors, with no regard if their competitor is objectively worse for their causes. The intent is to cause harm to get your own way.

How about Brave as a Chromium-based alternative to Firefox that isn't worse for the cause?

That would require nuanced discussion. We can't have that! (Kidding aside, I happily use Brave because I find Firefox borderline unusable, but also find Google's tactics unpalatable.)

The larger issue is there shouldn't be a war. There should be as many browsers as people have the hearts desire to create, and it shouldn't matter because they all follow the same standards.

However, in the real world, we've seen the noble goal of open standards get tarnished by the same bullying corporatist tactics. What we need is open and democratic standards, not just a few voices in the room running the show.

But browsers are by nature an engineering project several level divorced from hardware. There is no natural law demanding that they have to be democratic. Ultimately somebody has to foot the bill for their development time. C++ developers are not exactly a scarce commodity yet you don't see any major governments willing to fund browser development despite it being a critical piece of infrastructure. "Professional services" companies like IBM, Deloitte, Oracle, Accenture, get paid hundreds of millions to billions a year to build CRUD software for the public sector. Maybe it is time to redirect some of those funding to more useful purposes.

This post touches on the 'other' issue with Firefox - the various user unfriendly features that cause friction when using it. I want to love Firefox, but my time is valuable and using Brave instead saves time and frustrations, vs Firefox.

I'm pretty sure these subtle but numerous usability issues are on purpose from up high, because the usability could be fixed so easily. Still Google isn't paying 95% of Mozilla's and Moz's executives bills for them to beat Chrome, but rather to provide a lightning rod for monopoly concerns. From Google's point of view it's a bonus that it wastes the time of the market segment that cares about open systems!

Agreed -- Brave takes all those proprietary APIs for things like bookmark synchronization and does them in a distributed way without hitting third party servers. This is the way forward. I have 10 devices on my sync chain and it works great!

Can you install extensions on Brave for Android?

The best I could find is the "false-signaling theory of hypocrisy": social psychology research which demonstrates that "people judge hypocrites negatively-even more negatively than people who directly make false statements about their morality" [1]

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28107103/

> So someone who claims strict moral integrity and then falls short of that is seen as less trustworthy than someone who is upfront about being shady and then surprisingly acts less shady than expected.

I don't think this effect exists at all. Google broke "don't be evil" and people still massively choose to use Google services as if nothing ever happened.

I'd say it's more about other groupings we simultaneously apply to members of the browser group.

Mozilla has to live up to ethics norms we assume for nonprofits in the free software domain which might be Apache or FSF? Google has to live up to UX(?) norms for corporate tech giants, maybe MS and Apple?

Interesting take. But then, I'm old enough to remember the times when Google's motto was simply "Don't be evil."

Killing people's browser sync / safe-browsing / search suggestions / spell-checking / etc is pure evil.

Throw the anti-trust book at them. Make them spin-off YouTube and the rest of the alphabet (ha!).

I would think it is an excuse to just use chromium, because this is what the person actually prefers, but his ideology(or peer group) tells him or her to use FF.

Firefox laid off the majority of their security teams last year. I don’t trust Google but I trust Firefox less.

False.

(I am a Mozilla employee)

This is what I know about what happened there:

There were two enterprise IT teams with similar duties but different purviews. When management was deciding on layoffs, they decided to unify those two teams. Unfortunately that meant that there were redundancies.

My heart goes out to those who lost their jobs, and they have every right to be upset.

But the inferences being made as a result of the resulting tweets just weren't true: this notion that all security teams were wiped out is false. And there are now others assigned to threat management.

Furthermore, the security teams that work on Gecko and Firefox were left mostly if not entirely intact.

I work on security hardening for Gecko on Android, and I’m still here. So is our entire hardening/sandboxing team: https://twitter.com/gcpascutto/status/1293519587967983616

TL;DR: Don’t base your understanding of an organization’s capabilities off of one tweet.

> I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going.

A very key point. I may rage against the occasional anti-user decisions Mozilla makes every now and then, but objectively Google and thus Chrome are 100x worse in every aspect. Mozilla still does respect privacy and user choice mostly, even if they blunder sometimes. Google is an advertising company with a mission fundamentally contrary to privacy. No way I would ever run Chrome.

And that's before considering the monoculture risk of a single browser which is an even larger threat. Maybe some are too young to remember when IE was dominant and there was a real fear of them closing off most the popular web to be Windows/IE only.

Today Google's control over interoperable web traffic is larger than Microsoft's ever was, through things like the curse of recaptcha that makes browsing more difficult on non-chrome. Another reason to vote with my mouse clicks and never run Chrome.

I think you're conflating different issues here. Usability, vs privacy. Chrome usability is actually better, 'not 100x worse'. I've stopped using Chrome because of the privacy issues, but let's be accurate about the issues so we build better community understanding and possibly solution.

e.g. By realising that Mozilla has better (than Chrome, but still flawed) privacy, but also issues with usability, a nice solution suggests itself: another user-focussed organisation could maintain patches to Firefox to produce a better browser fixing the regular anti-user things Moz does.

Yeah I've had some disappointments with Mozilla over the years, but as this point I use it as my main browser in part because I don't want there to be a monopoly with Blink (and Webkit) rendering engines.

And Firefox is honestly still quite good. I have to open up another browser once in a while, but I use Firefox for 99% of my browsing on macOS, Linux, and Windows (mainly Linux these days), including a lot of web apps.

I second that. Reinstalling Ubuntu, I decided not to install Chrome, just to see. And honestly, everything is going fine (except for some DevTools minor issues).

> I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going.

Totally agree. You'll see me criticize Mozilla harshly but I still use FF because

1. the alternative is worse

2. secondary: technically speaking Firefox has always had an edge one way or another

What would you say their technical edge is now?

Not eating memory like it's candy for starters.

Also Tree Style Tabs can be made to work.

Containers are really nice too.

No immediate risk of ad blocking api getting neutered.

Also, just changing to a Chromium based browser is not sufficient. Google still takes most of the decisions in where Chromium is going, and downstreams either accept them or workaround them (but for every workaround they do it is more things to keep maintaining in the long run).

So yeah, using a non Chromium browser is the only way to ensure that the Web is still healthy (i.e.: not controlled by only Google) in the long run.

I think natural entropy will solve that problem over time. Give Microsoft another year or two, and I think we’ll see a hard fork.

Looking back at WebKit, Google forked that into Blink. I don’t know why Firefox couldn’t do the same.

I suppose in a couple years we’ll be able to check this post to see if Microsoft has done a hard fork or not. Will be interesting to see.

I don't know why we'd want Firefox to do that...

As a Firefox developer, I'm not sure why we'd want to do that.

Forking isn't cheap if you want to make significant changes to that fork. We'd be better off staying with Gecko.

(Oh, and we're still all-in on Gecko)

why is a redirect after the submission of a login form needed? Usually they say, that's to avoid the misuse of the history function to login. But firefox already knows, that there is a password field and could clear the data after the submit. Why it's not done?

I don’t either, but the option is there if it’s ever needed. I guess I wasn’t as clear with my point for Firefox (which was a very different point for Microsoft).

> using a non Chromium browser is the only way to ensure that the Web is still healthy

Just using some other browser isn't enough. Unfortunately not all webmasters take this seriously, I reported many website issues as a Firefox user to many orgs, even university departments, the most common answer is "Just use Chrome". The ignorance is enormous.

I wish I could stomach firefox, but everything about it just absolutely infuriates me. Even with a bunch of addons it is bothersome to run. The issue is that most people spend majority of their time on a PC in a web browser, including myself. Even a 5% worse product is still going to add up to a sizable amount of wasted time/ unneeded frustration. I personally spend hours tinkering with my OS to make it better for me to use, I can't justify using an inferior product in regards to taking a moral stand.

Or at least if I was going to take a moral stand I would start by spending at least 50% more time & money for clothing/ other products not manufactured immorally.

Out of curiosity, what is it that makes Firefox 5% worse than Chromium-based browsers in your eyes?

Not GP, but I decided to try Firefox again last week, and had to give up because I couldn't navigate to intranet URLs without explicitly typing http://

Strangely foo/ works (goes to http://foo/) while foo/bar does not (instead does a web search for foo/bar).

It's these sorts of things that make me realize that people just don't care about the health of the open web, or about protecting their privacy.

Ultimately this is a super minor issue (and turns out there's a way to fix it, per the sibling comment), but everyone just has their own pet excuse why they "can't" change to a browser that is objectively better for the web in every way.

Tragedy of the commons, I guess.

Just to be clear, I think having to prefix my web searches is not a fix, but rather an even greater inconvenience. I'll either have to type "http://" dozens of times per day, or "g " a hundred times per day, for no discernible reason.

Aside from that I don't think Firefox is particularly good for the web. Their license is no better than that of Chromium, and Chromium has proven time and again it's a good starting point for a fork.

Mozilla employees are paid with search ad revenue, to an even greater extent (95%) than the subset of Blink developers employed by Google -- so their incentives aren't even any better.

about:config → keyword.enabled → set to false

You'll have to prefix your searches with a key (in my case it's w for wikipedia, g for Google, and so on), but that's what I prefer personally anyway.

Also set browser.fixup.alternate.enabled to false to prevent Firefox from retrying whatever you have typed in with a .com suffix.

Slightly slower page loads (5% times all day remember)

Less usable ctrl+tab behaviour for managing lots of tabs

20 second pause to start if not already running on many of my locked down systems over the years, seems to have been fixed in last year or so but perennial problem that was infuriating in the same way nag-ware delays are

F** with the extensions

Ongoing 'minor' user-unfriendly decisions to the actual users of the products to the point where it seems motivated to provide a not-quite-ideal result. In basketball there's a saying, watch the waist not the ball, which translates as watch what they are doing not what they are saying, and by doing this I've begun to realise the regular nature of these snafus is probably intentional (at a high level) and I theorise it's to keep Google's money flowing in by not being a serious competitor to average users who want the best usability.

etc etc

I had the pause problem about when you had it as well. For me the pause happened periodically, but it was for network requests IIRC, the rest of the browser worked fine, but pages wouldn't load a thing for quite a few seconds. I have not noticed the problem now for quite a few months at least. Since it looks like the pause went away at the same time, I think we had the same problem.

When I use Firefox on my work laptop I get harassed by Microsoft. They keep signing me out of Outlook and saying they wouldn’t have to do that if I was on Edge. And they occasionally put up a message on Microsoft To-Do that they won’t sync my changes because I’m on an unsupported browser. This doesn’t happen with Chrome so unfortunately that’s what I use now. It’s not Firefox’s fault, it actually works better for me everywhere else, but I wanted to stop signing in 6 times a day.

A killer feature for me is opening the history & download list in a tab instead of a window. This way I don't have to alt+tab twice to switch to the next application. Opening the history in the same tab (ctrl+h) isn't good enough because I usually need the time of visit and there is no shortcut to open the download list in the same window.

Perhaps this is just muscle memory and I would think oppositely if I never switched to chrome.

    about:downloads

    chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml

1. general UI

2. keyboard shortcuts

3. moving around tabs/ windows

4. crashes/ memory issues

That sounds like some of my complaints about Chrome. Different strokes.

Same. The Mozilla organization has not covered themselves in glory over the past few years. And I like some of the things Brave is doing. But using a Chromium browser is a non-starter for me. I will not switch to one until I have no other choice.

I've tried to use Firefox, even though I don't like Mozilla's direction. But it just sucks too much. The new updates have made it worse, not better: these days, it leaks CPU. What do I mean? If I leave it running for too long with a bunch of tabs open, it will eat more and more of my CPU until it's hogging it all. Killing and re-opening solves it, but I can't do that all the time.

Surf, Midori, and Qutebrowser are all good options (webkit-based) that I'd encourage others in similar situations to explore.

That would be a bug. I use it all day with hundreds of tabs (sometimes thousands, but I'm getting better about pruning back) and don't see this. I know many, many people who could say the same.

If you have time, please file it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi . If you're willing, include a profile ( https://profiler.firefox.com is pretty easy to use). You can look at about:performance (or in newer versions, about:processes, but I don't think that's in release yet.) When you file the bug, you will probably be asked if it still happens in safe mode (which would probably blame an addon).

> If I leave it running for too long with a bunch of tabs open, it will eat more and more of my CPU until it's hogging it all.

That's not normal Firefox behavior. I run multiple windows (one in each monitor), each of them with many dozens of tabs and only time I ever quit Firefox is if I have to reboot the machine for an update, so it runs for many months on end. Never seen this runaway CPU consumption.

> so it runs for many months on end

Danger. You want to restart it more frequently than this for updates.

I've been using it for the last 2 years. both on linux and windows, works ok on the later, but on linux I keep getting random corrupted graphics / black screens each time ram/swap are almost full. looking into filled bugs this doens't seems to be something new, I can find some bug reports dating back to 6 years and no sugestions for a fix beside disabling hardware acceleration, which doesn't work for me at least.

I’m not sure anyone claims their reason for not using Firefox is that they think Google is a better organisation than the Mozilla Foundation.

I agree that browser diversity is a good thing for the web, and I’d love it if Firefox was more popular. But I’m not going to let that motivate my reasoning about whether it’s a good web browser.

That depends - is software quality, especially security, a relevant part of "better organization"?

I want to use Firefox, but when I use it, mobile or desktop, I notice a lot of page-induced crashing bugs or severe rendering errors (e.g., things that absolutely look like pointer discipline issues, blocks copied into the wrong area, etc.), which makes me extremely uncomfortable using it, as those crashes may be exploits in waiting, and there are a lot of them.

> I believe Firefox is a good enough browser to go toe-to-toe with Chrome. It and it's developer are not without problems. However, at this point I'd use Firefox even if Mozilla was just as bad as Google because I think the diversity is worth it.

But what good is it if it won't deviate from Google's vision of the web? It will go toe-to-toe with Chrome at being Chrome, and almost nothing more.

Mozilla is fine with DRM being a core part of the web, and they completely validated and enabled EME extensions. They deprecated useful technologies that have not been replaced.

I can't forgive them for validating the direction that the web is going in. They had enough leverage to slow it down, and they didn't. They have the same arrogance as Google but they don't have any of the success.

Firefox (then Firebird) didn't beat Microsoft and IE6 by trying to implement half-baked Windows ActiveX and Janus DRM support. They didn't even bother implementing stuff that they didn't think should be part of the vision of Microsoft, Adobe, etc.

I wish they would aim for the web they want, not just follow in the footsteps of others.

I for one use Palemoon, alongside Chrome for sites that need it. There are incredibly useful XUL based extensions that I rely on still, and Palemoon is much friendlier to sandbox and modify. And for modern web garbage, I have Chrome. I don't need Firefox.

> But what good is it if it won't deviate from Google's vision of the web? It will go toe-to-toe with Chrome at being Chrome, and almost nothing more.

By all means, criticize Mozilla. I'm not even saying people should use Firefox. Like I said, I don't want Firefox to become dominant. People just shouldn't use criticisms of Mozilla as justification for using a browser developed by a demonstrably worse organization.

I've seen a few people respond with examples of poor experiences they've had with Firefox. I haven't shared those experiences, but if people have found that Chrome/Chromium is a significantly better product than Firefox that's at least a valid reason to consider sticking with Google's browser.

If people are comfortable using a completely different browser like Pale Moon with no ties to Firefox or Chromium, that's even better.

One nice thing with open source is that often you don't have to use a "vanilla" version of a given system. I'm using Ubuntu but I view Unity and Gnome-Shell as brain-dead, tablet oriented interfaces but fortunately, I can use Ubuntu Mate and don't have to deal with this stuff at all.

I mostly like where Firefox is going, I like it's multiple identity tabs and it's general look. But it might help Mozilla to work out various ways to make sufficiently "skinnable" that someone else could maintain a Chrome-like version for all those people who like whatever it is about Chrome that's cool.

If not leaving Firefox, what is the preferred way to signal to Mozilla that we aren't happy with their leadership's choices?

If product usage signals an organization that you're happy with their leadership choices, then doesn't leaving Firefox for Chrome/Chromium signal to Google that you're happy with theirs? Is that really a better message?

I'm not advocating for Firefox here. It's the browser I use, but there are other options out there. Safari is obviously an option for people in the Apple ecosystem and another user suggested Pale Moon. I think there are even justifiable reasons for using Chrome/Chromium. Like I said, I don't want Firefox to become dominant. I want browser diversity.

I switched to Brave. To me, it seems like the best compromise.

Their leadership has sold their soul to Google already. Checkout the executive pay issues, and how 95% of the money comes from Google. Moz is just a lightning rod for Google these days. Change has to come from the top, and if Firefox became a serious competitor by fixing their usability issues then Google would kneecap them, subtly and privately at first by exerting pressure on the executives about whether the money spigot would dry up ..

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