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Comment by dingdongbing | Hacker News Reader

I honestly believe that the leaders at Mozilla are actively trying to ruin Firefox, and are perhaps paid off/run by people with interests in another competing browser. Even if that's the case I can't keep using this shitty browser, Chromium here I come

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It's really amazing how far Firefox has fallen. This used to be a browser people bought TSHIRTS for. TSHIRTS! And wore them! And not just in SV: I'd see them in the wild in small cities too.

The discussion is always the same, I'm not sure what can be added at this point. Yes the way they're actively destroying it is mystifying, yes, maybe money issues are part of that but god can't you just make your own browser? Mozilla's problem, more than any specific incident like this, is that they've become completely incapable of thinking for themselves. Everything is a follower move, trying to find something popular and than emulating it.

I'll continue to use FF, but only because it's easier to massively "tweak" into a usable product than chrome.

They fired Eich and turned from a company of smart engineers and users of their product to randos who work on weird projects using their big paycheck from Google.

Their products suck because they don’t care about them. They don’t genuinely want to compete with or anger Google for fear of losing funding.

They’d be better off cutting down to a lean $5/year spend and just making a browser.

I think.

A lot of their lack of focus predated Brendan Eich's 11 day CEO tenure. By 2014 Firefox had already lost a ton of mindshare and Mozilla was working on their unsuccessful Firefox Phone.

In retrospect it seems firefox phone was actually a good idea, it’s been reborn as KaiOS and doing great. Pretty embarrassing for Mozilla to fail and cancel the project and then have another company take it and succeed…

Eichs short lived reign was a symptom, not a cause. The decision to put him there was certainly a decision made by an executive board that is out of touch.

(HANGS UP JAVASCRIPT PHONE) https://www.bonequest.com/5546

I owned several of those shirts and wore them proudly.

I'm out!

I don't care how few users Firefox has. I do care that the product has become a pile of garbage. I already tolerate the dumb tab bar, the update nag screen that interrupts my work, the telemetry setting that doesn't actually disable telemetry, the web services I don't want like Pocket, the ads, the memory issues that hobble my machine when I stream video...

I won't move to a browser like Chromium with a connection to Google, but I'm moving to something. I'm done with Firefox.

And what browser would that be? Mozilla keeps doing these things because they're desperately searching for a revenue stream that doesn't make them beholden to their biggest competitor. There aren't any other viable options because no one else knows of any better revenue streams for web browsers either

Of Wikipedia can survive on donation, why not Firefox and MDN?

Firefox might survive, but the salaries of the people in charge of that decision might not.

Boom. "Mozilla Firefox Usage Down 85% but why are Exec’s Salary Up 400%?"

https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

Firefox could, I think. I don't think the Mozilla Foundation could. And that's the rub, at least to those in charge at the Mozilla Foundation.

To avoid significant layoffs they'd something like 10% of their user base to donate $20/year. I'm far from an expert on nonprofit finances, but that strikes me as a tough but potentially doable goal

Their cost base is too bloated.

The reason I stopped donating to Mozilla is because they have too many people not doing things I think are important and are paying their executives too much.

There is no single piece of software I use more than Firefox. At $20.00/month it would be a bargain. Assuming it wasn’t a dumpster fire.

what about Firefox's forks such as Waterfox[1], Pale Moon[2], IceCat[3], SeaMonkey[4]...? Genuinely asking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfox

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Moon_(web_browser)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey

None of these projects have enough resources to keep up with web standards, and patch security bugs on their own. So forks are either almost the same as Firefox, or may be less secure and/or doesn't work for as many websites and addons as Firefox.

Waterfox is owned by an ad company, which IMO is enough to disqualify it. Sure it's probably fine now, but it'll assuredly have problems soon.

Of the four, I've only ever heard of SeaMonkey before. I'll definitely check them out though.

Opera / Vivaldi

That's another chromium browser.

yes, but with a completely separate set of features, options, defaults, revenue stream, incentives, etc.

Try LibreWolf -- it's Firefox with the nasty stuff stripped out. You can use your existing Firefox profile, but be sure to go through LibreWolf's settings as some of the defauts may be different than what you already have set up (they select privacy-protecting options by default).

>the update nag screen that interrupts my work

If you're on Linux, exclude it from automatic updates in your package manager, and it won't interrupt you. On Windows, you should be able to set app.update.auto to false in about:config, but I don't know if that still works.

Try Brave, really. I always had issues with Chrome and RAM usage. Brave behaves better, plus the UI is slick.

People here complain about it having some sort of cryptocurrency embedded, but it's opt-in, so as long as you don't enable it, I don't see the issue. Plus it comes with an ad-blocker / anti-tracker out of the box.

Seems to me that Brendan Eich actually knows what he's doing.

Brave would be better if they replaced ads with their own ads.

Last I used Brave, it gave me stupid little popups on my notification bar and that's, to me, worse than in-page ads.

Using Brave right now and no stupid popups. Make sure you turn off "Brave ads" or whatever causes popups. Always scan through every option in Settings at least once and turn all the junk off. The only mild annoyance left after doing this is that sometimes the new tab page has a little box shilling some Crypto coin biz which you can then silence. If this is all I have to suffer in order to fund a solid de-googled Chromium it's not too bad.

We don't put any popups anywhere by default. Are you sure the website wasn't trying, which flies a permission prompt same as in Chrome and other browsers?

I turned on the special, approved Brave ads thing last time I used it because I wanted to support Brave; and they only showed up as little pop ups on the systray and were infinitely more annoying to me than a static banner ad.

You click on them to open new tab pages if interested, can thumbs down and lower frequency in ads settings. You also get 70% of the sponsored images shown in 1 of 4 new tab pages. Static banner isn’t going to perform as well, so I hope you will give ads a try again. You could even turn off notifications but keep the sponsored images.

Speaking of sponsored images: If I've chosen to see them, but don't have Rewards enabled, do you still get ad revenue?

Yes, we need to keep the lights on and we won’t just give the sponsors free lunches. Here is a comment on Reddit (sorry) I wrote about it. TANSTAAFL!

https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/pl2lgi/were_bre...

Not sure your definition of pop ups but the brave ad units definitely “pop up” over my browser screen and I never opted in (iOS)

I think those ads are much better. In-page ads interrupt my content, claim my attention when I want to see something else, and distract from the page (and sometimes even break it). Ad-heavy pages are nearly unusable, especially on lower-power mobile devices. OTOH, I don't mind a popup once per hour - it's not modal, does not require me to do anything, does not consume resources and I can easily deal with it whenever I want. Page popup ads are infuriating, but Brave ones never really bothered me.

To each their own. I don’t like anything blinking or appearing in my peripheral

Before reading TFA, I would have called you paranoid. Now I wonder... Excluding Firefox from my package manager won't work for long -- surely I'll have to update, just for security purposes. Does anyone know of a good Firefox fork?

Chromium also has search suggestions by Google per default.

Just so I understand you, is your position that Sundar Pichai or Tim Cook or whoever is approaching Mozilla employees in dark alleys, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Slugworth style, and offering cash to covertly sabotage the product?

And to protest they go use their product instead.

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