Firefox 92 | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 92

mozilla.org

233 pointsDan_Red121 comments

Geez all the negative comments. I still love firefox. Weird priorities sometimes, sure. Other than that, give me a browser not backed by evil corp with good developer functionality.

I will no longer be a silent majority when it comes to these articles and express my fondness.

Agreed! Love Firefox, never jumped on the Chrome bandwagon. People like to complain about Firefox/Mozilla corp. but I sure as hell trust them more than I trust Google.

I love it. Use it on mobile & desktop in combination with DuckDuckGo going on for about a decade now. For both development and personal browsing. So you are not alone.

Despite Mozilla Inc not caring about the browser I still use it because of principles and because it's the most user friendly of all browsers to me.

I'm so happy to have it available after my fresh Linux installations.

Also typing this from mobile Firefox with uBlock which is the best thing around.

Always so many negative comments about Firefox. I still use it as my main browser, it's awesome. But people value imaginary speed over privacy. It's been like that for many years now.

I can't say I "love" it, however there is no viable alternative.

> Certificate error pages have been redesigned for a better user experience.

If you'd like to test: https://badssl.com/

Oooh. That's a really nice tool. Thanks!

EDIT: I also like http://neverssl.com which has no TLS defined which is handy to trigger finicky network login screens.

I especially like the dashboard feature: https://badssl.com/dashboard/

That's your first point of troubleshooting anytime you're on a new network and aren't certain whether a problem you're seeing is due to some kind of tampering proxy or configuration policy.

Ooh! Yes! Nice tool indeed! New to me. My only critique - I kind of wish it was badtls, not badssl.

I usually use old good http://example.com for such cases

I wish Firefox would improve their release notes pages. This is exactly the sort of thing I'd like to see a screen shot of.

Awww, I actually enjoyed feeling like I just fired up a new game of Adventure when visiting an unsecured site. Accepting the risk and continuing was my modern day key to the yellow castle.

It might be a personal opinion, but I do not like this at all. A cert error now looks way too similar to other connection errors. Other errors you cannot bypass, but cert errors you can. This change means I am going to go cert error blind and assume the site is just inaccessible. The older loud yellow alert made things easy to differentiate.

https://imgur.com/a/jF37m8G

I think that, for most users in most situations, the best thing is to approach a certificate error as a connection failure.

In 99% of connections, a certificate error should be connection failure. In the 1% where it's the sysadmin forgetting to renew or a dev using a self-signed cert, you can still bypass.

All I want is the ability to disable "Proton" (the tablet friendly, chock full of vertical white-space, and low contrast UI) and use version > 88's "Photon" design. This was a simple about:config option but it only lasted for two releases. I know they want to 'modernize' the UI but I can't stand it. None of the css hacks I have come across so far work coherently, so I ended up downloading 88 and then disabling updates via polices.json.

Also, to whomever thought Proton and Photon were good names for two versions right next to each other, it was a really bad choice to pick two particles that only differ by a single letter. Do you have any idea how easy it is to confuse the two? Especially when search engines try to guess what you were really looking for. It is extremely frustrating and I still mix the two up.

I struggled for days trying to eliminate proton ui to no avail.

This is what finally worked (manual installation): https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix#installation-gui...

I expect no-one will see this comment, but anyway...

I just installed 92 and the awful new tab bar has actually gotten worse since 91. The tab bar and toolbar now merge into a formless grey mass. According to my settings I'm using the default System Theme. "Follow the operating system setting for buttons, menus, and windows." Yet it ignores the system accent colour. To reiterate, the theme designed to follow the system colours now ignores the system colours and this is WONTFIX [1]. Though it does follow the system colours on other platforms. This is a special Windows annoyance introduced on purpose. A pox on them all!

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701266

Yes I'm stuck on 90 for this reason.

Hey, please don't post stuff like that last bit to HN. Maybe you don't think you owe better to web designers you disagree with (though "fuck you" seems completely over the top), but you owe this community better if you're posting to it. It's all too easy for places like this to poison themselves to death, which is a fate we'd prefer to stave off if possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

My apologies, dang. I will refrain from doing so in the future. If I could go back and edit my comment I would do so.

I guess one last thing I'd like to clarify is that I'm only curse-word-mad at the people who decided to pick the names "proton" and "photon" for two products released back to back. Not so much at the people who implemented them.

> If I could go back and edit my comment I would do so.

I've reopened it for editing if you still want to do that!

> Continuing work to restructure Firefox’s JavaScript memory management to be more performant and use less memory.

I went back the last few versions major release notes and didn’t see mention of the initial work to improve the JavaScript memory management. Is anyone aware of this work/what’s going on to improve memory management here? Interested to read more about the technicals!

This is probably referring to some work to use Stencil for self-hosted code. That reduced process overhead by 6%, which is quite a bit: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1688794

There might have been some other Stencil work that landed in 92 to reduce memory.

There's a description of what Stencil is, and some work related to it that landed in Firefox 90 and 91, here: https://spidermonkey.dev/blog/2021/07/19/newsletter-firefox-...

I believe this refers to the constellation of work surrounding the ReShape hidden class datastructure refactoring https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=reshape

There was an initial change and then various bits of followup work to take advantage of it.

(Ah. mccr8 says it's Stencil. That probably makes more sense.)

I'm interested as well since they had a layoff of the Servo team. Did they rebuild that team with unannounced hires? Outside contributions?

Servo has very little to do with JavaScript, so no.

The parts of Servo that made it into Firefox are still being worked on by Firefox developers. I don't know how much activity is happening on the now-external Servo project itself.

When I am watching youtube video in firefox, in Task manager I can see its using "3D" part of my GPU, while video decode and video processing is idle. When I open the same video in edge, 3D part of my GPU is very low and its video processing unit taking the load.

This means I cannot watch 4k videos on my 4k laptop, as the GPU is dropping frames, 8k it renders just one single frame. In edge, no issue playing 8k..

Drivers are up to date, vp9 codecs installed, hardware acceleration flipped x times.. Anyone got a lead?

edit:Windows 10, iGPU of intel 11th gen i9-11950H

Are you sure Youtube is serving you VP9 video? I've seen Youtube roll out AV1 to more and more devices so this may have something to do with that. You check check by right clicking the video and selecting "stats for nerds".

For me (Linux, Firefox) Youtube has been serving more and more AV1 content. Decoding speed for AV1 is very different between browsers if you don't have hardware support on your device.

I've personally never had too many frame drops on Youtube, but regardless of the quality I usually need to restart Firefox regularly because of memory leaks that cause massive browsing lag. Video content, specifically from Youtube, seems to cause this problem for me.

In case Firefox is your main browser, maybe check if the installed addons matter (try: menu -> help -> troubleshoot mode). I've run into a lot of browser crashes because of a seemingly unrelated addon messing with other pages; this took me a few months to find out.

>Are you sure Youtube is serving you VP9 video?

very, checked codec in the youtube player in stats for nerds

tried running in safemode aswell, not better

Which OS and GPU? It's working great for me on wayland linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#Hardware_video_acce...

Windows 10, iGPU of intel 11th gen i9-11950H

It might be worth a shot to turn off GPU acceleration [0]

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings

yes, tried that aswell few days ago, no change

I've never seen Youtube not drop frames. Best it seems to be able to do is about 1 dropped frame per second, regardless of OS and browser. It also seems to almost always use codecs which require CPU decoding, which is obviously terrible for power efficiency (though it might save them a little bit in bandwidth I guess).

I don't watch long videos on YT for this reason, I download them and use a real video player, which can play video without dropping frames at 2 % CPU. This also gives me my mandatory archival copy, as interesting things are often deleted or channels deleted / terminated.

It would be nice if some addon would intercept video page opening, initiated background download via youtube-dl, and plopped VLC window running the video (as it's downloading) inserted into the page.

I would pay for that

This was possible before WebExtension. Unfortunately, it is not possible now. And your suggestion is a security nightmare as it could download malicious code that masked as video automatically.

My current setup is Video DownloadHelper + JDownloader 2. I have VDH set to copy the direct URL of the video only. And JD2 will detect the video url via clipboard monitoring and will prompt to download the video.

I believe it is still possible to do it in PaleMoon and WaterFox (fork of Firefox). They still uses XUL which it was before Mozilla decide to move to WebExtension. However a warning, they are not current with securities updates as Firefox are. I believe they are few version behind.

Hey! I wrote this for myself https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/external-app-...

it is fairly crude, but I use i daily.

Code lives here https://github.com/DavidVentura/Firefox_External_Application...

It works fine for other sites, and Google are surely not short of resources.

Draw from that what conclusions you will. Charitably, they view it as irrelevant; less charitably, they do not want it to work.

I believe hardware acceleration is not enabled by default on firefox and require a flag in about:config [1]

[1]:https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#Hardware_video_acce...

it was enabled in my installation, but both states produces the same effect

While not the issue you're running into, I think VP9 is required for anything over 1080P on Youtube. I used to have to run h264ify[0] because of certain GPUs not supporting it, and it putting it all on my (also aging) CPU.

The only thing you can really do is try enhanced-h264ify[1] and play around with the codecs to see if one works better for you with Firefox.

I also have an Intel 11th gen CPU, but desktop form of 11900K, so I may play around with this in Firefox to see if I can duplicate your results but I also have a Geforce 1060FE. I leave Intel Driver Support Assistant[2] installed on all of my machines. There is a conflict recently between it and the driver version that MS is pushing out over Windows Update, so I have hidden that driver for a couple months now. But you may want to at least give that driver a try as well and see if it changes anything.

I've consistently used Firefox since 2002, never having moved to Chrome, but made the switch to Microsoft Edge last month. There's a few reasons for that, which I won't bore you with here. But if you do decide to make the leap, I can say as a very longtime and formerly extremely dedicated Firefox advocate, I don't regret it.

Hopefully something here helps you, if not, Edge is Chromium Done Right.

[0]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhanced-h264...

[2]https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/intel-driver...

It could be related to https://www.vsynctester.com/

Another issue could be https://krpano.com/ios/bugs/ios8-webgl-video-performance/

For me, ungoogled-chromium 89 gives 60 fps, while Firefox 91 gives 14 fps on the same machine (x201-520m, Win7)

That part usually guns down on my old machine at home, with any VM that uses GPU memory.

YOu gotta make sure YouTube isn't using AV1

I used to be a big fun of Firefox, but biggest turn of the event was when they disabled about:config on Firefox for Android -- for justification provided was in line of because people make bad choices with it, etc., and only alternative that was offered was to use beta.

Mostly I wanted this feature was to enable TRR on it -- but since they don't expose GUI for it, that's not feasible. This and the fact they made it off limit because some people do stupid thing made Firefox a lot less attractive for me.

It's sad if they haven't disabled about:config, I would still be using Firefox today...

Try Firefox Beta on Android, it has the about:config enabled for advanced users :)

I remember when the jump from FF3 to FF4 was a big freaking deal, and here we are on FF92 :')

Rapid release cycle FTW! [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_version_history#Rapid_...

Soon, Firefox will have a greater version number than Chrome (currently 93).

Can some folks chime in on FF battery usage on macOS? For a couple of reasons I’ve spent the last couple years in Safari-land, but FF is always a click away if it’s starting to improve in that area. I just was having issues a couple years ago with FF being an energy hog, and thus switched.

(Though the autofill of SMS security codes in Safari is such a nice quality of life improvement! I’m betting it’s a private API, but man I want other browsers to implement it too.)

I've been very happy with FF power usage on macOS. It's still a web browser and with all of the nonsense that comes with the "modern" web, it's still a relatively heavy application, but a tab suspending extension will go a long way toward fixing that, as will an ad blocker. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... is what converted me from Chrome to Firefox. Coupled with a couple bits of config (https://github.com/cweagans/dotfiles/tree/master/Library/App...), it's a really nice experience.

Also, you may be interested in https://www.ohtipi.com/ for SMS security codes.

Ah, interesting mention of Ohtipi, thanks! I'll have to dive into the source a bit to see how it feels. Thank you!

I've been using it for around a year now and honestly I haven't noticed any big difference with Safari in my MBA M1. Would definitely recommend to give it another try!

I'm not a big-time Mac user- only using it for work. So, I'm usually plugged in to a power source. I also don't use Chrome or Safari, so my answer is almost completely useless to you. :P

But, those times when I am "free range", and I pull up the Activity Monitor thing, Docker and my IDE(s) are almost always using more energy than Firefox for me, unless I have a tab open that's doing something stupid.

That being said, it's always in the top 3, beating out the mail client and Teams chat. I don't know if that's better or worse than Chrome or Safari, but I wouldn't be surprised that either of those are superior than Firefox in technical metrics.

I think the rendering pipeline issue that caused excessive battery usage on MacOS was fixed quite a while ago.

I'm using Firefox as the sole browser on a 2015 MacBook Pro, can't complain at all about the battery life even on that clapped out old battery.

I'm seeing incredible battery life in firefox on my M1 macbook air. Although maybe I just don't have high expectations after my linux based lenovo before this.

Nothing to do with firefox and everything to do with M1.

I haven't revisited this issue in several years, but the solution at that point was to use the developer version.

I'm surprised that Firefox has recently slowed down on the WebAssemply implementation. Especially thinking about the tools for developers to support WASM debugging with DWARF.

Unfortunately the only one solution is to use Chromium based browsers and install a plugin, that itself has some limitations (like dwarf file cannot be larger thatn 2GiB).

Sorry for a sad note in front, I'm happy because of the release!

Almost the entire Wasm team was acquired by Fastly.

For what it's worth, the Fastly team recently ported spidermonkey to WASI

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701197

https://spidermonkey.dev/blog/2021/07/19/newsletter-firefox-...

https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/making-javascript-run-...

Yep, that's a neat development. Finally we are putting JS where it belongs, one layer above, in userspace :-)

This seems like wise priorization as WebAssembly uptake is going quite leisurely and improvements in FF isn't really low hanging fruit in improving user experince.

I have been having absolutely terrible DNS performance in Firefox when I am not using the dns-over-http feature - anyone else? It started happening very recently, within the last week or two.

Yes! I'm in the same boat. Linux / NixOS.

I was wondering if it's something with my system setup, but Chromium does not show the same issue.

I am on an M1 mac (Arm) running Big Sur (macOS 11.5)

Were you running Firefox 91 a week ago, or one of the various dev/beta/whatever-they're-called versions?

91.0.2 as of this moment, rebooting now into the newest one.

Okay, so it’s not 92-specific. Huh. I wonder if it’s related to the US hurricane problems somehow.

>> Mac users can now access the macOS share options from the Firefox File menu.

I've been waiting for this for while..glad they finally implemented.

Now if only they'd implement the Mac keychain for storing passwords.

This just looks like sharing via the file menu, sadly the web share API doesn't look like it's yet supported. It's still a good addition though.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...

The more the ShareAPI is supported, the better the web will be.

Looks like still no general support for extensions on Android.

uBlock origin works, but I really want my containers to sync.. That is, before I switched to iOS, in iOS land I can't even have ad blocking in FF (unless I set up my own DNS). DDG browser is a bit better, still leave through a lot more than Safari which fully utilizes the adguard app..

Non-Apple web browsers on iOS are all webkit wrappers that cannot do their own rendering or content filtering.

I know. Horrible right.

I don't get it. It is such a user hostile move. Is it some app store rule? Since Ublock is white listed I guess it is not the Google money atleast.

>Is it some app store rule?

No, previous version (Fennec) didn't have this limitation...

That has been a long and steady trajectory for Mozilla. Personally I think they're trying to create another walled garden for themselves and/or trying to make a buck while making sure they don't give stupid reason to Google for blocking their app from Play Store for random reason of the week. I hope its latter, because then Mozilla remains in slightly brighter light, but I'm not holding my breath for it anymore. They have been promising 'more extensions' on mobile for years now, and still neglect the one thing that actually sets their browser apart from mobile.

> Looks like still no general support for extensions on Android.

I tend to find Firefox Focus preferable on mobile anyway.

Just curious but why? I use FF regular on mobile, mostly for the ublock, but I wonder if I'd be better off with Focus.

Not the op, but I use both. Firefox focus as default (any link from a random app open on a short lived session, it just feels right), for regular browsing Firefox mobile (and yes, if I'm there and I choose to open a temporary tab, I use the normal incognito tab, with ublock origin)

> any link from a random app open on a short lived session

My reason is mostly the above (and other related security reasons). In particular the ability to clean sessions, cookies etc. just by hitting the trash can next to the URL bar.

Secondary reason is on a small screen usability. The simpler the better. Firefox Focus is simple, minimal settings, and of course quick and easy to reset sessions.

I do that as well. One problem I have is that if I send a tab from FF desktop to FF Android it opens in FF Focus, although it's basically a click from a FF Android notification.

And here I was considering finally upgrading. Good to know.

They hilariously managed to roll out yet another UI revamp on top of the UI revamp that broke extensions without actually fixing extensions. Of course the revamp is worse, Windows 3.1-style 3D bevels on bookmark icons now (while ignoring the total waste of screen space from the bookmark grid layout, of course). Mozilla's death spiral is obvious because it's clear all the smart people have already left the building

edit: defending this a bit since it seems the negativity isn't warranted. The build that broke extensions and rearranged the entire UI was pushed as an automatic update with no warning. The last update on the AMO blog about this state of affairs is from 8 months ago. This was a huge breakage done without warning and nothing seems to have been done to resolve it in the interim.

If you're just tuning in, addons were about 80% the reason to use Firefox on mobile at all. Now there is a committee to approve which extensions are permitted on mobile to "protect the experience", when previously open ended access to extensions literally was the entire experience.

HTTPS RR is great, but not super useful at this point... I wish they would would invest more in stuff that would have a practical benefit to user experience/security. Firefox's lack of TouchID support for WebAuthn is what keeps me on Chrome.

Feel free to chime in on the open bug report for this missing feature. Maybe more attention will provoke progress: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536482

I "voted" on it a couple years ago. I assume "+1" comments are frowned upon, since that's the point of the voting feature.

> HTTPS RR is great, but not super useful at this point.

I still find it a shame that SRV records never caught on. Active Directory uses them very well

and SIP, and XMPP, and maybe the odd email client

And full FIDO2 token (e.g. yubikey) support for passwordless (CTAP, also part of webauthn) would also be amazing.

Did you get Firefox to actually issue those HTTPS RR requests? Or is it locked behind using DoH ?

HTTPS RR really only makes sense with DoH.

Why?

- Apple devices running iOS 14+ are querying HTTPS RR for some time now, and they work on normal DNS setups.

- Google Chrome just enabled HTTPS RR queries over standard DNS on version 92.

If an attacker is in a position to downgrade your TLS connection, they are in a position to much with your standard DNS responses as well.

I would appreciate it if you revert the data management change that made it harder to select/delete specific cookies stored. The scrolling let’s you select one then immediately scrolls up to top again. Super annoying.

FF has a bug that shows from time to time when used with my screen reader where the browser freezes and needs to be restarted. Hopefully, this is the same bug fixed here.

Thanks to the team for the accessibility commitment.

I've been using Firefox religiously for the last 3 or so years. Just wiped my Mac, and decided to compare it against Chrome (didn't even install FF).

Outside of the tracking and privacy, Chrome is just so much smoother. I didn't even realize. Now my heart is telling me that I need to return to FF, but my mind is questioning that.

I recently started a new job where our main product is accessed by a browser (your typical SaaS vendor), and from what I understand we mostly focus on compatibility with Chrome and IE11. Edge using Chromium will probably mean that in the future we will only support Chromium. We mostly target corporate users so I was a bit surprised, as I thought corporation used Firefox LTS more than Chrome, but that seem to be not the case.

This is one of those things that's going to make it harder for Firefox to have market share, and help Chromium. I guess the only thing I could do about it is work for a company that has Firefox compatibility as a business goal. It's a bit depressing.

If you think your new Firefox's vertical spacing is way too large, here is the fix. https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

Source: firefox 91 - how do you fix this ridiculously large vertical spacing (esp for bookmarks?) https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/p2yuzx/firefox_91_...

My exit from Firefox was on 91, having moved over to Edge last month. After nearly 20 years on it, through thick and thin since 2002. While I'll always love Firefox, I won't be using it because they disabled what made the browser indispensable for me. That's keyword searches in the dedicated search bar. While the settings UI says they're supposed to work, they don't. They only work in the address bar. If I'm to use an omnibar, why am I not taking the superior performance and compatibility from Edge? So I did.

There were a few changes to get used to. Instead of the LiveMarks[0] extension (which I highly recommend to FF users), I had to move to Inoreader. Which I already used on my phone so that was easy. And to any Inoreader users seeing this, if you don't have a premium account, don't forget to disable uBlock Origin on their page. It's one of the few sites that I make sure ads come flowing through as it's such a well-done service.

I also just love the direction Microsoft has taken Chromium. It just feels like microseconds are taken off of everything I do, and it adds up to a cumulative effect that matters. But I should note that moving from my 5900X to my 11900K cleared up most of the difference between Firefox and Edge in performance. While Edge feels fast on both systems, there's a bigger difference for Firefox going from the AMD system to Intel, for whatever reason. Either the 5.3GHz clocks, compiler optimizations, or both. Otherwise the vertical tabs, the tab groups, the ability to remove the top toolbar while using vertical tabs are really nice. It's just great for my work since I do need to develop in something-Chromium. And most importantly, I just suspect it's going to get better and better. Since while it's an unpopular notion around here, Microsoft does do software pretty damn well in my experience. I'm not sure a large entity actually does it better in either design or quality. That's just my opinion based on my experience, so don't hit me! They're definitely up there in any case, broadly speaking. I've resisted native browsers, which have a lot of inherent advantages over anything else, for a long time. I think Edge has a bright future.

[0]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/

Also, on one 32-bit computer (there are still such) under W10 I observe much less issues in Egde than in Firefox when watching videos.

Also, I also have the problems with the Proton, like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28444315 Hacks don't work on 92, on 91 were "half" better. With 92 even the close button is not visible when trying to reduce the vertical space loss. Sad.

Also, previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27439917

I have been using Firefox when Firefox 2 came out many years ago. Each time it was updated there were always a few minor complaints. My complaint about Firefox 92 us the ridiculous space between bookmarks in Firefox v92 Bookmarks!!!

This should also mark the release of Firefox ESR 91.1, which I would expect should make it way into stable releases like Debian that follow the latest ESR.

my first reaction on seeing the title: "Yikes! what have they broken this time?"

They still keep losing millions of users every couple of months. Looks like there are a lot of bad decisions being taken at Mozilla.

What makes you think there is a connection between Firefox market share and the decisions happening at Mozilla?

This is not 2005. No matter how good Firefox is—I'd argue it's still the best browser out there—Chrome, Edge, and Safari are backed by the biggest corporations in the history of the world behind them. It's not a meritocracy. The decline could be inevitable.

By analogy, we could look at the decline of film studios. The quality of major studio films has declined with the popularity of Marvel films. From the perspective of people that care about the industry from a critical perspective, it's a disaster. From the perspective of Disney, they are merely leveraging their advantages in existing market share, brand awareness, and advertising to beat everyone else.

It's hard to show causation, in general, for anything, but here's a theory.

Mozilla is making decisions to remove power-user features, which is alienating power-users (we've got a whole comment-section of them right here).

This doesn't directly kill marketshare, because there aren't that many power-users. But every time Mozilla alienates another web developer, one less website works in Firefox. When websites stop working right, that's when marketshare really drops.

Also, I'm not convinced the quality of major studio films has dropped as a result of the Marvel era. It just seems that way because 1) we tend to forget the worst films when looking back into the past and 2) Covid really is hurting studio budgets.

> I'd argue it's still the best browser out there—Chrome, Edge, and Safari are backed by the biggest corporations in the history of the world behind them

You didn't define what makes a browser 'best' so hard to argue there (although I would argue otherwise, at least on Mac, Firefox is nowhere near being the 'best' browser if by 'best' you mean fastest, most battery efficient and best native OS integrations).

Also Mozilla is 'backed' by the same corporation 'backing' Chrome (90% of its revenue coming from Google).

So I believe case could be made that there is a very real correlation between Firefox market share and the decisions happening at Mozilla.

Getting paid for ads is not "backed", Googles budget for Chrome dwarfs all competition.

So you mean it's not their fault. They are just victims. I understand now.

No; blame is a moral concept, and I did not invoke it.

You seem to think Mozilla could have competed with the likes of Google and Microsoft if only they would have made better decisions, or because Firefox once had the largest market share. This is far from obvious.

If a company is incapable of competing, could that mean that whoever is in charge of it is incompetent and must be replaced so that the company can compete again?

When Firefox was dominant, Chrome came from nothing, competed and then dethroned Mozilla. If Mozilla is this incapable, they either have to change people at the top and make better decisions, or just die and stop pretending and selling lies to its users.

I agree, there was a perception that Mozilla was, not just a browser vendor, but a tech company and an (successful) outsider against giants like Google or Microsoft.

This image was gone the moment Mozilla via its foundation started to push partisan politics after the eviction of Eich. Using Mozilla's Firefox instead of browser XYZ was also a militant (but non partisan) act.

The removal of the Rust, Servo teams and the MDN team, abandoning Firefox OS, all avenues of possible growth, completely mismanaged since Eich's departure, didn't help either.

Management at Mozilla certainly is at fault.

People take bad decision using Chrome.

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