Firefox 94
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
This is really cool. I wonder how difficult it would be to allow users to wire this up to arbitrary user-specified VPNs e.g. through WireGuard.
Better in Firefox:
* Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently-used order. Just like Cmd+Tab. This feature is wonderful and is easier to access than Chrome’s Shift+Cmd+A.
* In Firefox the two-finger swipe forward/back works much better. Three-finger swipe works well in both.
* Built-in reader mode that’s instantaneous and works well. In Chrome you need an add-on.
Better in Chrome:
* Has tab groups. There doesn’t seem to be a tab group add-on for Firefox that works like Chrome’s tab groups.
* Google Docs dictation works. But I never use that.
* Printing lets you scale up past the page size (useful for printing my AYSO team’s lineup).
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
(I too don't know how Chrome tab groups work)
This is one of the main reasons why I still use Firefox. Also in my experience Firefox address bar does a better job pulling urls from history based on the words you typed.
Have you tried Tree Style Tabs? Presents your tabs as a collapsible, hierarchical sidebar tree. Even when Chrome was kicking Firefox's ass in every other aspect, I stuck with FF because of TST. It's so much better than any other UI for tab management I've ever seen.
If you go through the steps of disabling the top tab bar and sidebar padding elements in user chrome CSS, it's more space effective than anything else too.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
How about the fact that ublock origin is more effective on Firefox?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24212176
Then there are the other features like TRR, first party isolation, ECH, actual video hw decoding support on Linux...
Funny you mention uBlock Origin being more effective on Firefox. As I mentioned, it seems to block things I don’t want it to block when I’m using Firefox.
"I lost my tabs after the update — What can I do?
You may notice that after updating Firefox to version 94, the tabs from your previous session were closed. To learn how to restore a previous session, visit How do I restore my tabs from last time? Alternatively, following the prompts in the Open previous tabs? one-time notification that will appear after the update will also allow you to restore the tabs from your previous session. "
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-configure-close-tab...
about:tabs
... which would be a plain text listing of all the URLs of all the tabs you have open.
You could just copy and paste it to a file or whatever.
Instead, we need to dig several directories deep into /Library (or whatever, depending on OS) and then use JSON tools to export ... I've already lost most people.
Go search for "how can I export tabs" or "how can I save tab urls" and you'll see thousands of people trying (usually in vain) to achieve this very, very simple thing.
Here is our $500 bounty for this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28129829
... and no, I don't want to install an extension. This should be built into the browser.
I expect tabs to be unloaded (I start and stop Firefox frequently). I may not be seeing what you mention.
I rather they didn't.
EDIT: Ah good, they have an option in the General Settings to disable the background updater.
It's just inefficient to have each and every installed app run a service… I suppose they take care of it for Windows Store apps, but I don't see why they couldn't make a service for other apps too.
Same on the Mac, of course.
They have sort of started to do it. But it seems to be very adhoc in how it is supported. A couple of packages I use are 2-3 versions behind in that system.
It's still a nasty old MMC snap-in in Windows 11 from its legacy as an old, classic NT component for advanced admins only. Maybe one day it will get a bit more love and UI polish. (Though it's not like cron has ever had a good UI.)
1. Clicked in the URL bar. 2. Started typing something. 3. Arrow-keyed down to one of the entries under “Firefox suggest.” 4. Tapped Shift+Del.
The entry was gone and didn’t come back next time I typed the same thing in the URL bar.
I've been manually turning this feature on so this is a welcome improvement.
> And on Linux, we’ve improved WebGL performance and reduced power consumption for many users.
It links to a page with some more info[0]. Exiting stuff.
[0] https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2021/10/30/switching-the-li...
I found another article by Martin Stransky who worked on this feature and gives more technical details: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2021/10/30/firefox-94-comes...
I don't want to give an impression that I'm a shill, but I'm getting more and more intrigued by Brave every day. I think they made the right call by focusing on crypto, their search indexing technique is very unique (and it works!), as is their BAT attention token. They are _trying_ to doing something different, Firefox is not.
What I instead get from Firefox for trying to support their monetization, is seductive-looking spammy ads on their New Tab page that come back even after I dismiss them. Brave ads vs Firefox ads would be a tough comparison - the former is more annoying and intrusive, but I definitely think I prefer them. And long term, I think I would bet on Brave _over_ Firefox, unless something changes.
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
In 2018 Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO) received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
By 2020 her salary had risen to over $3 million, while in the same year the Mozilla Corporation had to lay off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/
EDIT: At this point either pocket or their vpn seem to be the only way to get money to the corporation, even then may not be a lot.
My long term question is - will there end up being one browser implementation of the virtual machine? Browser rendering engines are basically that these days, a big virtual machine for web apps. Is there value having a separate implementation? Some languages that run inside a virtual machine only have a single implementation. Is that bad?
Would it be bad if Mozilla used the internet-vm (why even call it Blink at this point?)
The problem here and the difficulty, is that upstream Linux is coordinated and controlled by a non-profit consortium and community, and the implementation is developed and controlled by community efforts and the joined efforts of hundreds of companies and thousands of hobbyists. The upstream Blink browser implementation is coordinated, develped, and controlled by one giant advertising corporation, and no control or input is ever in the hands of anybody else.
I don't believe that there's harm in having "one implementation", but there is harm in that implementation being completely centralized by a single for-profit entity.
I argued this before[0], and I still stand by it:
> I can see that being an issue if the web is centralising around one proprietary engine, but why does that apply to Blink? If Google turns completely evil that won't take away from all the webcompat, optimisations, and security in Blink, and any bad feature (ManifestV3) can be patched out easily. Mozilla could switch to Blink (and I think they should, and Apple too, they clearly don't have the manpower to maintain a whole engine and keep it modern and secure, see my other comment in this thread; there are many more 0days with Safari and Firefox than Chrome) and it wouldn't harm the web in any way, because they can just swap out bad components with their own, and still reduce their dev time requirements by orders of magnitude compared to today. You have Intel, Samsung, tons of companies contributing to Blink, to a much, much greater extent than Gecko or WebKit.
> If every browser switched to Blink, that would actually benefit consumers, because right now Chrome basically has the enterprise market on lock, since nobody cares to test internal webpages on other browsers, and Chrome has better enterprise features (though I don't know how much of that is to do with the engine); and many consumers also just switch to Chrome as the first thing they do, because they've run into compatibility issues with Firefox or Safari and they just want to access the web without issues. If every browser used Blink, you'd have a lot more people using Safari and Firefox, just because most people don't want to keep two browsers around (Firefox + Chrome or Safari + Chrome) when websites break (which is not often, but often enough, trust me). I really hope we see this.
But I think that's the wrong solution, it just means that we need to decouple Blink from Google and put it in the hands of a neutral, nonprofit third-party. This is arguably what the Mozilla Foundation should have been.
I'm going to re-enable that. I appreciate choice, but just because I use three-key commands, doesn't mean I'm infallible. That dialog has saved me several times from having the wrong window in focus and accidentally trying to kill the whole browser.
One could argue the only controversial decision here was changing existing user's settings without post-update warning. Since in the previous version this warning was always "on" and now it is "off" after update, and you aren't notified of this unless you're in the demographic that reads Firefox release notes.
In general though still appreciate more choice/control.
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-configure-close-tab...
[1]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si...
I can see the Firefox child process count maxing at around 10 processes with the default fission.autostart set to false:
> ps aux | grep "firefox.*childID" | wc -l
> 10
Also the about:processes page shows some processes containing 'Shared tabs'.
As soon as I flip fission.autostart to true it creates proper separate processes for each tab with the above ps aux command increasing the count as I open up tabs.
> To better protect all Firefox users against side-channel attacks such as Spectre, we’ve introduced Site Isolation. We’ve got your back...errr...side!
Making an account in their bug tracker and spamming the threads sounds annoying, I'd personally get upset if someone did that to my repos or issue trackers so I don't want to do it to others. Also I'm not capable of contributing that feature myself so I'm kind of stuck.
Still, version after version of Firefox gets released and posted here, highlighting new things that get developed, and I see no progress there and the more time goes by it gets frustrating. I am using the profile functionality right now, it does work, and does what it's supposed to, just wish it was exposed to me via the same UX as in chrome and from the basic, default install, without needing extra add-ons or config.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1542189
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
I don't have a good answer to that question. I guess the straightforward answer would be to make an account on the bug tracker and vote (it's under Details), but my impression is that votes usually don't carry much weight.
Oh, and for the reasons you gave, please don't post bug comments in support, unless you really do have additional information or perspective to contribute. (And "there's one more person who wants this, and I suspect many more" is not additional information.)
I know Mozilla has had various iterations of tools for collecting input, all of them ending up abandoned eventually. The current iteration is https://ideas.mozilla.org -- which, given that it's a fairly recent introduction, might actually be paid attention to. At least for a while. (Yeah, I'm cynical.)
A more effective but higher effort and noisier mechanism would be https://chat.mozilla.org where you could try to dig up the right channel and discuss it directly with people, but that seems like it's probably not appropriate for your example.
I'd really like a better mechanism for this. I think it's one of our bigger gaps, personally.
As to your specific request, it seems like right now the current answer to that need is about:profiles for full-on profiles, and container tabs for the lighter-weight, integrated within a single session mechanism. It may be that the latter has sucked energy out of improving the multiple profile support? (Multiple profiles have been supported forever and are unlikely to go away, but I agree that they're not getting much UX love.)
But I'm not involved in that area, nor do I know how Chrome's profile switcher works other than that people seem to like it. I'm happy with container tabs, myself, but I recognize that they fulfill a slightly different need.
I've managed to dig up these (that's where https://ideas.mozilla.org redirects me):
- https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/719914
- https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/724883
Guess it's just a matter of making an account and voting/commenting on these now. The thing is, most people don't go through the trouble of leaving feedback like this. What they do is install Firefox, look into the available functionality, see that there's no profile button, assume the functionality does not exist and call it quits.
E.G: no proper support for webauthn (CTAP2) in firefox on macos (abysymal situation shown here: https://fidoalliance.org/fido2/fido2-web-authentication-weba...) linux not much better. Safari, Chrome, even Edge have it, while firefox is stagnating since 2017 (bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1530373 ) :-(
When I hear about features like Colorways being prioritized over things like proper webauthn support on important platform (4 years now) it makes me sad.
Would have helped personally, but moving parts of firefox to rust not even decimated the contributors margin, but probably reduced it 100x. and here we are with rs_webauthn lib lacking necessary fixes in security important area :(
p.s. I knot how my post sounds, but I'm frustrated with (some) mozilla decisions.
Also did you know that you can launch firefox with -p switch and do it that way?
All right!
> Users of the proprietary Nvidia driver will need to wait a little bit longer as the currently released drivers lack an important extension. [1]
Oh no :(
[1]: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2021/10/30/switching-the-li...
CTAP2/FIDO2 part is completely unimplemented. And that's why e.g. TouchID doesn't work. Or newer devices that don't support the old u2f standard.
CTAP2 gives fancy features like enforcing a pin (which Firefox doesn't implement) or fingerprint (which Firefox doesn't implement).
Why would anyone want this? On macOS it is infuriantingly easy to press CMD + Q by accident. Why would you not want to confirm that you actually want to close ALL your tabs?
> The only instance in which a close modal is on by default is for two-key quit shortcuts on macOS and Linux. The risk of accidental closure is higher in this context since the quit shortcut (⌘+Q) is adjacent to the switch-application shortcut (⌘+Tab).
Also:
> you will still have full control over the quit/close modal behavior. All warnings can be managed within Firefox Settings.
I’m happy with this change. I regularly use Ctrl-Shift-W and Ctrl-Shift-Q – and never inadvertently – so I don’t need a confirmation prompt. I was – and still am – delighted when Firefox introduced the confirmation prompt for Ctrl-Q (which is too easy to hit instead of of Ctrl-W).
Restoring the window doesn't preserve the data on pages with infinite scroll and it is a crap-shoot on whether or not the progress of a video I was watching gets restored.
Particularly if you use a Dvorak keyboard layout where "Q" is mapped to the key directly above CMD. I think I fat finger that at least every week or so. :D
Losing dozens of tabs because of that is so damn infuriating that it ruins my entire day when it happens.
It's not perfect (sites lose unsaved state usually), but I know that pain and it's not so bad when you know you can just recall all the tabs.
Signed: a fellow Mac user who pressed CMD+Q by accident one too many times.
1. Open System Prefs and go to Keyboard > Shortcuts
2. Select "App Shortcuts", then press the + Button
3. Choose "Firefox" (or other relevant app) from the dropdown
4. Type *exactly* the name of the menu option that has the CMD + Q shortcut next to it, in this case "Quit Firefox"
5. Focus on the Keyboard Shortuct input and choose whatever new key combination you want to be used for quitting the app. I usually use CTRL + CMD + SHIFT + Q
6. Press the Add button
I think i'll have to ship a userchrome.css with my dotfiles soon.
edit: Found it! In the settings on the bottom left you can choose "Extension & Themes", and then you click "Themes" in the new sidebar, and scroll down a bit.
For a limited time only? What the heck? Feels like Starbucks.
Otherwise great release of course.
That, plus the fact that this is the lead bullet point for their new release makes me think "way too many marketers, not enough engineers".
'Theme', to me, suggests ye olde browser customisation wherein you could have animated gifs of Homer Simpson barking D'OH as your 'Home' button, &c. I'm assuming that's not the case here?
I'm not saying I like it necessarily, but it's quite clear what it means in context and language does have a tendency to evolve despite our best efforts.
shrug
Not in software it isn't. It appears to be a marketing term, just as I said.
The writing was on the wall when they started publishing different white papers about different UI tweaks almost a decade ago. Does anyone remember that video of a collaborative web browsing session?
It’s like train fans drawing fantasy subway maps: “Now that the colour for the new subway line is settled, let’s hire a construction firm to figure out how we can get this thing built”.
- Excellent performance and reliability. Quantum delivered a lot of performance wins, and work continues at a rapid rate on reliability. Unfortunately, to be competitive on performance and reliability given Mozilla's funding required dropping XUL :(
- A simplified, modern UI. It's fair to argue about specifics here like "tabs as buttons", but not about simplification overall. This may frustrate power users, but power users are the vast minority.
Then, to out-compete the other browsers, Firefox needs exceed the other browsers in those areas, or use marketing tactics on non-technical axes to grow the userbase.
Chrome has tons of first-party themes (see https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/themes), so it makes sense for Firefox to try to drive some engagement here too
Edit: Sorry, that was snarky of me. Firefox is regularly releasing new privacy-focused, power-user features like tab containers. Can't they spent a little time addressing non-power users too?
If that was true I would expect power-user browsers with unchanging UIs to have a larger market share than they do.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
1) Being amazing for power users and also everyone else is why power users did all their marketing work for them in the Phoenix/Firebird days and installed it on every computer they were allowed access to for more than two minutes. We did that because having people in our support-sphere using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox made our lives much easier, and those users happier. Maybe try something bold like building in ad-blocking? Blocking pop-ups by default was basically exactly that, back in the day, and was a huge part of why we evangelized it so readily.
2) How many users do they still have who aren't power users, or didn't have their browser installed by their friendly neighborhood power user?
Not really true. For starters, they did not drop XUL with Quantum. In fact, they did not drop XUL to this very day[1].
The thing they did drop was XUL and low level access for extensions, copying the "well-defined" extension API from chrome[2]. This was largely a political decision, not a technical one. The aim here was to make extensions more secure by limiting their capabilities, to provide a common stable API to piggy-back on the success of Chrome and get more Chrome-only extensions on board by providing a largely compatible API, and to polish up Firefox reputation by removing the "Firefox breaks some of my extensions with every update" problem[3]. Of course, it kinda backfired, as it largely removed one of Firefox competitive features other browser lacked (extreme combustibility and very powerful add-ons), and people, especially the power users who drove the word-of-mouth, wondered why they still should use Firefox if it just feels like another Chrome. From my vantage point, it didn't polish the reputation, quite the opposite, it destroyed a lot of reputation and goodwill.
>- Excellent performance and reliability.
Firefox performs better for me in general[4], and it eats fewer of my system resources doing so. But YMMV, of course.
>A simplified, modern UI. It's fair to argue about specifics here like "tabs as buttons", but not about simplification overall. This may frustrate power users, but power users are the vast minority.
I do like the current UI, even tho I was rather skeptical at first. It's not perfect of course (when is something ever), but I like it a lot better than say Chrome's UI.
Of course, given mozilla's track record in this regard, it probably will be reinvented soon :P
[1] E.g. while the main UI file is now browser.xhtml not browser.xul, it's actually a mix of (x)html and xul in there, with a lot of the UI still implemented in XUL. They did remove some XUL widgets (especially those that were not actually in use by Firefox anymore, only used by either extensions before the WebExtension forced migration or by third party projects like Seamonkey), and IIRC they killed XBL (which was basically WebComponents for XUL, long before WebComponents was a thing), as XBL was particularly finicky, old and unmaintained and riddled with bugs.
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/base/co...
[2] Implementing the chrome-API badly, I might add. There is still a ton of bugs years later where behavior differs significantly from Chrome. And quite a few APIs that aren't implemented at all. In effect, every reasonably complex extension has to have browser specific code, or avoid certain APIs entirely and come up with creative work arounds that hopefully work consistently in different browser. I am not blaming the team which implemented this stuff; they did the best with the very limited resources mozilla gave them to get an initial implementation going, and then after the initial roll out from what I saw the team was effectively largely disbanded and reassigned, leaving only enough resources to kinda-maintain the existing implementation but not really enough resources to fix all the glaring parity bugs and missing features, instead hoping that volunteers would fill the gap here (and some gaps were indeed filled that way, but not too many).
[3] Which was a bit of a problem, indeed, as extensions did not really have a stable API to use. While mozilla largely tried avoiding major breaking changes by e.g. providing a compat-layer if they changed something or carefully announcing such changes in advance meaning features relying on these changes were often delayed in favor of giving extensions a grace period to adopt to the upcoming stuff, this wasn't always possible and it wasn't always known in advance what change would actually break (a lot, or at least important) extensions. And such compat-layers added to the maintenance cost, and delaying features added to the impression that mozilla was slow-moving.
Providing a chrome-compatible API was probably a good idea, providing only a chrome-compatible API probably not.
[4] Except notoriously on youtube, where it still performs well enough, but worse than Chrome.
This is genuinely surprising for me. Would you mind showing me what your JetStream[1] numbers are?
I care a lot more about "lived" performance, and that's where Firefox performs better for me. YMMV.
E.g. I regularly have noticeable stalls in Chrome e.g. when doing page navigation or just switching already loaded tabs. Nothing massive, but I do not have the same thing in Firefox. I didn't mean to imply there is a real major difference. Firefox is just a little better.
But anyway, since you asked: I just very unscientificially ran the benchmark in Firefox and Chrome just now, wasn't motivated enough to make it entirely fair by shutting down other processes which may "steal" CPU time, etc, and the grand result was... Chrome's score was 1.103x the score of Firefox[0]. Chrome is faster in raw js perf, but at the same time, this is still misleading, I would say, considering the context I provided.
[0] I know that on more high-end systems than this shitty laptop I am writing on right now, e.g. systems like my actual desktop, the difference might be larger[1], but even then it still holds true for me that js perf differences are mostly noise in my daily use, and Firefox edges out Chrome in other areas that I actually notice.
[1] e.g. mozilla's own arewefastyet have Chrome at about 1.4x as fast in JetStream2, and they aren't running this on a shitty laptop like mine. V8 is a terrific js engine, I am not denying that. But js perf is only a small part of the entire picture.
https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/raptor-desktop-jet...
I hope that can be disabled. If I kill Firefox, I want it to be completely dead. I deplore background "download agents".
> Plus, closing devtools now reclaims more memory than ever before.
Perhaps reducing devtools memory usage might have been more useful; more than once it has brought my machine to a standstill, and forced me to reboot.
Gods, just might as well restart the computer while you're at it.
That should be nice, I'm looking forward to poking around in there.
Still no improvement in font anti-aliasing on Windows though
How considerate of them, I felt I didn't have enough auto-updating background agents yet.
It's not clear to me if MozillaMaintenance is the service that will be checking for updates, or if there is a new service.
It was the first thing I'd nuke before allowing my PC to reconnect to the internet, the second was to nuke every talk-home-Mozilla link that about:config would allow to either be changed or deleted. This worked, as updates wouldn't even work when clicking 'updates' in the menu.
Mozilla has a damned hide to automate updates, not to mention gathering data about users' habits without telling them what's been gathered, and also not allowing users to turn off that collection if they wished.
(BTW, we know the depth of this surveillance just by looking at Mozilla's comments on v94's webpage. There's no way Mozilla would know that data unless Firefox's surveillance of its users had been all-pervasive.)
By going the way of the rest of the industry, Mozilla is shooting itself in the foot. People who've used Firefox in the past have done so because they want an alterative - not more of the same.
I expect Mozilla will go defunct soon, it's now been on its self-destruct path for too long for it to be rescued.
Exactly!
Despite of all the telemetry Mozilla still has absolutely zero clue who their core audience actually is, because they sure as hell are set on decimating what's left of it.
It's bizarre. It's almost as if moles from other browser manufacturers have been smuggled surreptitiously onto Mozilla's staff to sabotage the Firefox project.
But then, perhaps that's a bit too close for comfort if you work for Mozilla.
Bad faith or just plain stupidity, you cannot escape the fact that Firefox is on a fast slippery slope to obivlion and that Mozilla personnel have done nothing to arrest the process in recent years.
Why not? What's driving them to continually implement features and policies that clearly turn users off using Firefox?
"Don't assume bad faith in everybody who doesn't think the same way that you do."
I usually don't, in fact I always welcome a solid debate but there comes a time when things go so wrong or turn so bizarre that one has to look to offtrack ideas for an explanation.
If you've a better rational reason (or perhaps inside knowledge) for why Mozilla continually shoots itself in the foot then many of us would like to hear it.
Edit: I usually use the Firefox fork Palemoon to get around many of Firefox's most egregious features but I'd prefer not to do that as it increases my vulnerability to browser fingerprinting,etc., as such, I have to take additional remedial action such as spoofing the user agent for a more common one - and frankly it's a damn pain having to do so.
You ought to be able to at least understand why many of us are so annoyed when essentially the last independent browser manufacturer is seemingly (willingly) attempting suicide .
You'd obviously be able to uninstall this, too. If your OS allows third-party programs to install services that can not be disabled or uninstalled, the problem is deeper than just the programs you are installing; you need a different OS.
> Mozilla has a damned hide to automate updates, not to mention gathering data about users' habits without telling them what's been gathered, and also not allowing users to turn off that collection if they wished.
Telemetry is optional. You can disable it. I can understand disliking Mozilla or Firefox's direction, but I absolutely don't understand this paranoid, cynical doomposting and straight-up misinformation about one of the only browsers where you can actually outright disable telemetry, and where you can still separate the address bar from the search bar to avoid leaking information.
> we know the depth of this surveillance just by looking at Mozilla's comments on v94's webpage. There's no way Mozilla would know that data unless Firefox's surveillance of its users had been all-pervasive.
What do you expect to happen when you check the "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" other than them sending data about how people use the browser to Mozilla? It even has a link right next to it in the settings where you can see what data is used. You can know the "depth of this surveillance" by just clicking "learn more" and reading the very first section you are linked to, titled "Interaction data".
More importantly, what do you actually propose? What browser are you using that is much more private and secure than Firefox, and allows you the same flexibility in controlling the level of privacy you actually want?
Likely so, or I'd never install it. The OSes I use do allow one to uninstall it: specifically Linux, heavily rooted, fully deGoogleized Android and and a highly-hacked Windows 7† (wouldn't be seen dead with any later version for the same reasons).
"Telemetry is optional."
Turning off telemetry is optional for only some of Firefox's telemetry. The first thing Firefox does when launched is to contact home irrespective of how normal user settings are set. And as we well know, most users will use the defaults and Mozilla is counting on this quirk of human nature.
If Mozilla's bona fides were actually genuine and not sleight of hand then it would default all and every bit of telemetry to off and allow the user to switch it on if he or she so desired. BTW, I don't buy the argument that only some of the phone-home data counts as telemetry; by definition, any data sent to Mozilla is telemetry.
"What browser are you using that is much more private and secure than Firefox, and allows you the same flexibility in controlling the level of privacy you actually want?"
Palemoon. Read my 'Edit' in another of your related posts. Please note: that edit was posted before I'd read this post of yours.
__
† For starters, Internet Explorer code no longer exists, thus calls to IE by any program that wishes to bypass the new default browser will fail. This is only one of several thousand tweaks to Win 7 needed to make it user-friendly to yours truly.
Mozilla is very open about what is collected, and all of it can be turned off. We'd really rather you not lock in insecure versions; until you've worked on a browser, you won't believe how active and pervasive the attacks are. As a developer, I'll also say that the internal process for adding any additional collection is pretty heavyweight. Even if you're just collecting the distribution of garbage collection time slices, you need to go through a privacy data review.
Mozilla spells out its data collection policies at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/ (first DDG hit for "mozilla privacy", which is how I found it). If something there is unclear, or you have reason to believe we're a bunch of scheming liars and you have the receipts to prove it, please let me know.
Firefox Suggest is a calculated tradeoff to provide more functionality in exchange for sending more data, but again it's totally configurable if you disagree with the tradeoff.
I honestly don't know what you're going on about with "Mozilla's comments on v94's webpage", so I can't respond to that.
I will assert that Mozilla is very much not going the way of the rest of the industry, and we are in fact being very conscious to carve out a different path. Which isn't easy. But if you have the degree of distrust conveyed by your message, then please don't use Firefox. It's not doing you or us any favors.
It's fine to call out specific problems and gaps though. Feedback is good, and anyone interested enough to seriously look at this is welcome to get involved with the Mozilla project and contribute to improving this stuff.
To respond adequately to your post would require me to start detailing what I (and many others) reckon what's wrong with Firefox (and similarly so with Thunderbird). Clearly that's not very practical here, as to do so we'd be bogged down in detail and the key points of the argument would be lost.
That said and not wanting to let anyone assume I'm avoiding your points, I've divided the key objections into the following groups.
1. Features that by their intrinsic nature should be in both Firefox and Thunderbird but which are missing. These are left to be picked by add-on developers who eventually give up after Mozilla broke the compatibility model once too often. Thus a useful feature we'd gotten used to via an add-on literally disappeared with an upgrade (more about this in point 2.)
2. The single biggest fiasco with Firefox from a user's perspective is Mozilla's perennial breaking of its add-ons. Not only is this disrespectful to third-party developers who develop them, and it often it turns them off from doing further development work, but also it infuriates users whenever their add-ons no longer work.
In essence, to them an upgrade is actually a downgrade in terms of user ergonomics. Whilst Mozilla may have done this for noble reasons such as improved security it's of very little concern to the the average user (myself included) whose facility no longer works. As far as he/she is concerned, Mozilla has fucked up yet again - I'm not exaggerating here, it's been a constant theme for Mozilla to blatantly ignore compatibility from the early 2000s until today. Just go to Mozilla's add-ons site and check the huge number of incompatibility issues one finds even with the items that are still listed (many are not).
For the record, I'll mention one add-on that should have been in the core program that was fixed by an add-on which was later busted by a 'retrograde' Mozilla 'upgrade' and that was Lazarus, it very usefully allowed undos in dialogue boxes etc. which often get lost for nefarious reasons after one has typed much text. If just about every text editor and wordprocessor has multiple levels of undo then why doesn't Firefox?
Whilst there may be many reasonable excuses for why Mozilla acted the way it did, the user isn't interested in hearing any of them - all he/she knows is that a useful feature that once worked now doesn't and Mozilla's actions are the reason. Many of us remember those failures and it's why so many of us go to inordinate lengths to nuke automatic updates, as they're likely to backfire just when we least expect it (inconviently in the middle of an important job etc.).
(The picture that such actions (and there's been many of them) engender in many of us users is that Mozilla programers primarily program out of self-interest rather than that of users' actual needs. Naturally, you programmers prefer simpler, cleaner code that doesn't support legacy features - similarly, it seems none of you are prepared to do the extra yard work - the extra coding - need to keep old-API add-ons safe. I know, it's boring shit, and no one will do so willingly, they have to be compelled to do so, and no one in authority at Mozilla has made that call (and that alone speaks a great deal about the ethos/culture at Mozilla).
Again, just get it into your heads that no one other than you Mozilla programmers care a damn about the reasons why you nuked XUL/NPAPI as laudable as you at Mozilla deem nuking them to be. Morever, many of us aren't interested in DRM or pandering to the tech giants. Right, include new features if you have to but at least provide us users with the option to let us turn them off. For instance, the first of these annoyances was the removal of the switch to turn JavaScript off. Right, default it to 'on' for the majority who wish to use it but it's down outright authoritarian programming to insist that you programers know best - especially when you haven't a clue about user ergonomics or what actually annoys users (and I've a damned good idea having run an IT department for years only to find myself continually falling foul and being blamed and held responsible by users for your programming changes.
Why you programers want to be on such a power kick is something that only psychologists can figure out if that's at all possible. Of course, it's not only Mozilla programmers here, Microsoft's are possibly the worst. It's the sheer arrogance that you programners diaplay when you think you know what's best for users when you often don't have a clue which is so annoying (I'm not aiming specifically at Mozilla programmers here, rather that inflated ego is characteristic of breed. BTW, I've done a considerable amount of programming in my time but I don't consider myself a professional programer.)
3. Similarly, instead of fixing boring bugs such as those longstanding ones in the printer routine and the overall outdatedness of the printer routine per se, not to mention that other first-class annoyance - the failure of text selected by the mouse to be copied from the context menu thus requiring a full highlight followed by CTRL-C then CTRL-V to actually work - you Mozilla programers simply ignore them year after year. Right, fixing bugs is boring, but adding new features obviosly isn't - even if many users deem them unnecessary or of secondary importance to rectifying the more utilitarian features of the program. I mention Australis here. As it's clear it annoyed the hell out of many users, thus it's fitting to ask why Mozilla didn't include an optional fallback to the older UI? Right, I've already answered that point.
4. If Mozilla's programmers genuinely claim they're trying to do the right thing by users then it's almost impossible to conclude that they actually understand users - or what features they actually want from a browser. Yes, it's a restatement of what I've already said, but it has to be true otherwise Firefox's usage ratings wouldn't be nosediving off the graph. An adjunct to that is that Mozilla never fully levels with its users concerning the real reasons for why its takes certain actions - that is other than to dress up changes with PR-speak and spin. If Mozilla's leveled with users more honesty then users would likely reciprocate. Moreover, you would have fewer users like me upping critical hyperbole out of sheer frustration.
Finally, likewise, I don't understand why you can't see my reasoning for why the Firefox 94 webpage contains said info you mentioned. I'll get the quote and post it here when I've a moment.
Again, what I've said hurts and I know it. Please understand it's no vendetta and it hurts me to be so negative (especially when there's so much negativity about these days); and it also hurts to see the only essentially independent browser going down the gurgler when it ought not to be. You should spare a thought for people like me who insist that the corporate browser should be Firefox only to find us between a rock and a hard place when it all goes belly-up for the many reasons mentioned. Defending Firefox against Chrome is no easy task these days.
Incidentally, the problem occurred when I was editing the text and I responded too quickly to a page that wasn't appearing to update. The server responded with a one-line message to the effect that it hadn't uppated the text and whatever I did next somehow created a duplicate.
To respond adequately to your post would require me to start detailing what I (and many others) reckon what's wrong with Firefox (and similarly so with Thunderbird). Clearly that's not very practical here, as to do so we'd be bogged down in detail and the key points of the argument would be lost.
That said and not wanting to let anyone assume I'm avoiding your points, I've divided an overview of the key objections into the following groups.
1. Features that by their intrinsic nature should be in both Firefox and Thunderbird but which are missing. These are left to be picked by add-on developers who eventually give up after Mozilla breaks the compatibility model once too often. Thus a useful feature we'd gotten used to via an add-on literally disappears with an upgrade (more about this in point 2.)
2. The single biggest fiasco with Firefox from a user's perspective is Mozilla's perennial breaking of its add-ons. Not only is this disrespectful to third-party developers who develop them, and it often turns them off from doing further development work, but also it infuriates users whenever their add-ons no longer work.
In essence, when an add-on no longer works after an upgrade, users consider such an upgrade as actually a downgrade in terms of performance and user ergonomics. Whilst Mozilla may have done this for noble reasons such as improved security it's of very little concern or comfort to the average user (myself included) whose facility no longer works. As far as he/she is concerned, Mozilla has fucked up yet again - and I'm not exaggerating here, it's been a constant theme for Mozilla to blatantly ignore compatibility from the early 2000s until today. Just go to Mozilla's add-ons site and check the huge number of incompatibility issues one finds even with the items that are still listed (many are not).
For the record, I'll mention just one add-on that should have been in the core program that was fixed by an add-on which was later busted by a 'retrograde' Mozilla 'upgrade' and that was Lazarus, it very usefully allowed undos in dialogue boxes etc. which often get lost for nefarious reasons after one has typed much text. If just about every text editor and wordprocessor has multiple levels of undo then why doesn't Firefox?
[Edit, Firefox's not alone here, I just lost many edits whilst editing typos in this post from my mobile. Had undo worked then there'd had been no problem. Thus it's a problem with many browsers. No, I'm not using Firefox or Chrome here.]
As stated, whilst there may be many reasonable excuses for why Mozilla acted the way it did, the user isn't interested in hearing any of them - all he/she knows is that a useful feature that once worked now doesn't and Mozilla's actions are the reason. Many of us remember those failures and it's why so many of us go to inordinate lengths to nuke automatic updates, as they're likely to backfire just when we least expect it (inconviently in the middle of an important job etc.).
The picture that such actions (and there's been many of them) engender in many of us users is that Mozilla programers primarily program out of self-interest rather than that of users' actual needs. Naturally, you programmers prefer simpler, cleaner code that doesn't support legacy features - similarly, it seems none of you are prepared to do the extra yard work - the extra coding - need to keep old-API add-ons safe. I know, it's boring shit, and no one will do so willingly, they have to be compelled to do so, and no one in authority at Mozilla has made that call (and that alone speaks a great deal about the ethos/culture at Mozilla).
Again, just get it into your heads that no one other than you Mozilla programmers care a damn about the reasons why you nuked XUL/NPAPI as laudable as you at Mozilla deem their nuking to be. Morever, many of us aren't interested in DRM or pandering to the tech giants. Include new features if you must but at least provide us users with the option to let us turn them off.
As you've seen with Firefox, sticking to some moral highgound, or overdoing security above all else - not to mention overly pandering to new web standards forced on us by the new owners of the Internet, Google Facebook et all, has its heavy penalties. Provide these features by all means but stop taking full responsibility for a user's security. If he/she wants to deliberately downgrade his/her security from the default then so be it, you've no right or ultimate authority to dictate that. Moreover, if you want to pander to the security mob, then I'd again point to the fact that such righteousness has cost Mozilla dearly in market share.
For instance, the first of these forced annoyances was the removal of the switch to turn JavaScript off. Right, default it to 'on' for the majority who wish to use it but it's down outright authoritarian programming to insist that you programers know best - especially when you seemingly haven't a clue about user ergonomics or what actually annoys users (and I've a damned good idea having run an IT department for years only to find myself continually falling foul of users who blame me and or my staff as they hold us directly responsible for your 'irresponsible' programming changes).
Why you programers want to be on such a power kick is something that only psychologists can figure out if that's at all possible. Of course, it's not only Mozilla programmers here, Microsoft's are possibly the worst. It's the sheer arrogance that you programners display when you think you know what's best for users when you often don't have a clue which is so annoying (I'm not aiming specifically at Mozilla programmers here, rather that inflated ego is characteristic of breed). BTW, I've done a considerable amount of programming in my time but I don't consider myself a professional programer.
3. Similarly, instead of fixing boring bugs such as those longstanding ones in the printer routine and the overall outdatedness of the printer routine per se, not to mention that other first-class annoyance - the failure of text selected by the mouse to be copied from the context menu thus it requires a full highlight followed by CTRL-C then CTRL-V to actually work - you Mozilla programers simply ignore them year after year. Right, fixing bugs is boring, but adding new features obviosly isn't - even if many users deem them unnecessary or of secondary importance to rectifying problems with the more utilitarian features of the program. I mention Australis here. As it's clear it annoyed the hell out of many users, thus it's fitting to ask why Mozilla didn't include an optional fallback to the older UI. Right, I've already answered that point.
4. If Mozilla's programmers genuinely claim they're trying to do the right thing by users then it's almost impossible to conclude that they actually understand users - or what features users actually want from a browser. (Who do you ask and why doesn't Mozilla respond to the many thousands of complaints just like mine?) Yes, it's a restatement of what I've already said, but it has to be true or otherwise Firefox's usage ratings wouldn't be nosediving off the graph. An adjunct to that is that Mozilla never fully levels with its users concerning the real reasons for why its takes certain actions - that is other than to dress up changes with PR-speak and spin. If Mozilla's leveled with users more honesty then users would likely reciprocate. Moreover, you would have fewer users like me upping hyperbole to critical levels out of sheer frustration.
Finally, likewise, I don't understand why you can't see my reasoning for why the Firefox 94 webpage contains said info you mentioned. I'll get the quote and post it here when I've a moment.
Again, what I've said hurts and I know it. Please understand it's no vendetta and it hurts me to be so negative (especially when there's so much negativity about these days); and it also hurts to see the only essentially independent browser going down the gurgler when it ought not to be. You should spare a thought for people like me who insist that the corporate browser should be Firefox only to find us between a rock and a hard place when it all goes belly-up for the many reasons mentioned. Defending Firefox against Chrome is no easy task these days.
Ironically, constant add-on breakage is exactly why we broke all the addons. The situation really was as bad as you describe; every release broke large numbers of addons because the addon architectural was far too invasive. It was unsustainable. Bug fixes, security fixes, and new features all required changes that broke addons.
That doesn't happen anymore. (Or at least, it is now rare instead of ridiculously common.) Addons are much more limited, they break very rarely, and we have been able to make some changes necessary for some survival-threatening shortcomings (eg Spectre vulnerabilities that the competitors do not have). I miss Lazarus too.
We have not done as good a job as we liked at implementing the new extension model. The massive layoffs made that much harder.
Arguing over what users want is a losing proposition. I know I've often been surprised (and disappointed) by the data. And I freely admit that there are some major deficiencies still present. Often, though, I find that results are different in different environments. The context menu thing works here, for example. Please file a bug if there isn't already one. I have other cut & paste bugs that irritate the hell out of me, though, so I'm not surprised by another one.
The printer stuff was completely ignored and abandoned for a very, very long time. It has dramatically improved in the last few versions.
Supporting older UX is always a hard one. I feel it too, I generally don't see the point in most changes, but I'm not going to second-guess the people who say that UX refreshes make more people happy than sad. And maintenance of past stuff has a surprisingly high cost that can't be waved away as devs being lazy. Especially in the face of mass layoffs.
> ...Mozilla never fully levels with its users concerning the real reasons for why it takes certain actions - that is other than to dress up changes with PR-speak and spin. If Mozilla's leveled with users more honesty then users would likely reciprocate.
I tend to agree. I don't think it's as bad as you say, but I do think it's an area of weakness.
----
Anyway, not meant to be a comprehensive answer. I don't think you're completely wrong about all this, but it does look a lot different from the inside.
The maintenance service is used to prevent the need for UAC prompts during upgrades. That's it. No background update functionality.
I'm starting to feel like I should just run Qubes.
But generally it's just annoying.
It definitely requires thinking differently and sometimes simple things are less simple, but overall I feel it's worth it. It's rewarding to feel that you're in control.
Some things I like:
- Having password manager in a Qube(/VM) that cannot access the internet (and the VMs that can, are of course isolated from the password VM).
- Logging out of your bank, and when they tell you to "clear your cache and cookies", you do one better and actually destroy the whole OS, because you opened the browser in a disposable VM.
- Needing to attach the microphone (or camera) to a VM before it can be used.
- Ability to have specific VMs' network go through a VPN/Tor.
edit: oh yeah, and consider trying Qubes 4.1 release candidate, which could possibly have better hardware compatibility.
When Firefox releases to Windows Store (https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/mozilla-firefox/...) they will probably let Windows update it, and use this self-updater only for standalone installs.
If there is any application I want to autoupdate, it's my web-browser. It's a giant bundle of security vulnerabilities whose main purpose in life is to hit untrusted servers that might be sending me malware, and when an update is available to me, the list of security fixes is also available to attackers.
I'm just curious because as much as I disagree with many of Mozilla decisions, I still can't honestly compare it to other browser vendors like Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
I'll probably just find some fork of Firefox or a Chromium based browser and just make-do.
It would be nice if rather than reinventing the wheel for the billionth time, apps could just use the OS based update mechanisms where possible. (i.e. App calls apt, or snap, or winget, or windows store, which updates Firefox).
Whether that be store based or packaged based. It really sucks both in resources and UX when apps bundle their own update/install mechanism.
There's probably an advanced setting buried somewhere if you _really_ want to turn that behavior off, but why would you?
Because updates can introduce breaking changes. And potentially new security vulnerabilities.
but you can flip the switch if you really must.
Linus calls this trading old bugs for new bugs, and is vehemently against introducing commits that may introduce new bugs, no matter the severity of the bug that the commit squashes.
You can create a policy for it
{
"policies": {
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
Not sure why you want to do that, as updates are essential for security. Apparently it's for 'enterprise organizations' who probably want to limit the chatiness of their network and reduce latency.
You could also install Firefox ESR which doesn't ping Mozilla for updates nearly every 10 seconds.
There's an economically powerful EU country that has a lot of train travel and not so many trains having great internet access. This was my commute life for a few years.
Most people don't.
For the rare people that do (probably 100 on the entire planet), they can disable the automatic updates and do it manually.
I have no problem with automatic updates I can disable.
- Browser updates often carry more than just security fixes, which may or may not be wanted by the user
- Background updates make it less likely for the user to know why their software is being updated
- The user may have a legitimate reason for sticking with an older version of a piece of software
- Most browsers already show the user when a new update is available. For users interested in all of the latest security updates, they can read about what these are and simply download the update right away
It's a good thing that this feature can be configured.
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/04/28/mozilla-is-working-on-fire...
"Bother the user with a dialog that lets them shoot themselves in the foot every time there's an update." isn't a good solution to that problem. Firefox's Extended Support Release[1] is a better one, but even with that users will need to accept a feature update eventually.
There may be legitimate situations where it does make sense to turn off automatic updates (that's why the option is there), but they're very niche and require a lot of expertise to pull off without compromising security. Well designed software should intentionally make it hard to disable critical security features without knowing what you're doing.
I also don't think informing users about the contents of an update usually meets the bar where it is "absolutely necessary" to interrupt them just for that. Unless your update is about to break something important (which you should certainly avoid if at all possible) patch notes shouldn't be required reading.
I'd stop right at "auto-installation of updates with security fixes is the correct default", because that's very solid.
And updates that don't install until you open the program. Sparkle apps on macOS do this and it drives me nuts.
If you're going to update or want my attention about a new thing, have a red dot somewhere that is not conspicuous. Don't get in the way of a user trying to be a user. This is one thing that the Slack app gets absolutely right.
Firefox toes the line. New versions occasionally pop up a new window. It's easy to close but jarring. At least the updates happen mostly transparently and tend to not radically change appearance or behavior. They're bringing this experience to Windows now.
If I wanted an auto-updating key-logging tool on my systems, I'd have sold my soul to Chrome already.
I had upgraded before seeing this ... In preferences, you have the following options:
> Allow Firefox to:
> --------------------------------------------------------
> [x] Automatically install updates (recommended)
> [ ] Check for updates but let you choose to install them
> This setting will apply to all Windows accounts and Firefox profiles using this installation of Firefox.
> --------------------------------------------------------
> [x] Use a background service to install updates
How about "don't ping home"?
For some double-speak, read the Manifesto: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
In a sense, they are very open about their goals, if you have read the classics by Kafka, Orwell, and Bradbury.
Unfortunately, taking things completely out of context and editorializing the facts is par for the course. Discourse is getting very disingenuous.
> Firefox will send Mozilla search queries (what you are typing into the address bar), and city-level location (what's nearby and relevant, determined from your IP address). Firefox also informs the service if you click on a provided suggestion.
Combine this with "studies" which were never made public, extra avenues of telemetry that one finds out about waaaayyy after the fact etc, the last couple of years have seen Firefox become increasingly hostile to users.
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/navigate-web-faster-fir...
I don't like that level of telemetry, and I also dislike the "studies" and some of the other things they've pulled, but glibly referring to search suggestions as "key-logging" is disingenuous at best. It seems to imply that there's some nefarious logging happening that people aren't familiar with and can't disable.
Most regular users think you search for something on Google, it is between them and Google. This "feature" started sending one's incomplete queries to Mozilla as well. Every time user presses a key, search suggestions update, meaning every key user presses is sent to Mozilla before the search is even executed on Google.
Upon upgrade, users where not asked "We would like to see every key you press while typing anything in the search bar. Do you give us permission?"
> glibly referring to search suggestions as "key-logging"
Yeah, I think I am going to keep glibly referring to sending every key-stroke to Mozilla while the user is constructing a search query or looking for a bookmark or a page in their browser history as "key-logging."
But what is this accusation of key-logging now? Where did that come from?
I'm guessing they are improving it so the UX for updates involves even less effort for users.
Finally yesterday I got so sick of Microsoft's incessant prompts to try Bing, and shoving news and ads in the new tab page, and integrating Bing rewards, etc. that I said I was done and moved back to Chrome.
First thing I did when I opened Chrome was to go into the settings and update it since I hadn't opened it in I-don't-know-how-long and I was surprised to see it was already on the latest version. Great to know it was wasting system resources to update itself without me knowing even though I wasn't using it, and don't even have a process indicator for Chrome in my system tray
I'm not sure you are aware that this feature is toggled in Firefox's settings. You can get a glimpse of the settings panel in the following link:
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/11/02/firefox-94-0-release-here-...
The end game, I assume, is that updates eventually come through the store. But that effectively prevent updates unless they agree to it.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
People often confuse this feature with the Mozilla Maintenance Service, the latter has shipped with Firefox for more than a decade and is used to avoid UAC prompts during updates.
(I used to work at Mozilla and at one point also worked on the team that owns install/update.)
https://uk.pcmag.com/browsers/136146/firefox-now-shows-ads-i...
https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-firefox-su...
> To deliver smarter contextual suggestions, Firefox will need to send Mozilla new data, specifically, what you type into the search bar, city-level location data to know what’s nearby and relevant, as well as whether you click on a suggestion and which suggestion you click on.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi...
> As always, we believe people should be in control of their web experience, so Firefox Suggest will be a customizable feature.
> We’ll begin offering smarter contextual suggestions to a percentage of people in the U.S. as an opt-in experience.
I'd recommend checking your settings to see if sponsored suggestions are enabled.
So instead of not being a part of it by simply disabling it (or never enabling it to begin with, as it's currently opt-in), you're abandoning the browser altogether?
Even if it were inferior in any aspect to other options, I'd still use it for the above mentioned reasons.
https://mozilla.crowdicity.com
They seem to be reading and considering some of the suggestions, though none have been implemented yet.
- Most popular idea (819 votes): Compact Interface Option - https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/719764
- Most critical idea (in my opinion): Expand support for extensions for the stable android version - https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/723675
Edit: The kind of feedback they're willing to accept is probably only barely impactful. Suggest going back to the old tab bar? Sorry, but you'll learn to love it and we aren't changing it. Suggest a slightly different shade of gray for the edge of the rounded tab bar? They might just take the suggestion. That kind of thing.
If that's true, it probably explains why they're bleeding users. Why stick with a company that ignores your complaints?
* completely changing the settings UI;
* the very annoying "present" icon that appears after updates;
* constantly messing the address bar in how it works and what it searches;
* constantly re-enabling stuff like searching in Amazon and Google;
* changing the menu to the hamburger menu.
There's probably more that I forgot. But it seems every two or three months or so I need to make effort to turn off some feature I don't want. Stuff like the stupid pocket functionality no one ever asked for.
Defaults settings are far from being great, but there's no competition in term of privacy, firefox + ublock origin is still the best option.
A lot of web APIs are rolled out by Google without sufficient standardization or agreement from the other organizations that ship engines. So Google is being a poor citizen here, but because of their dominance, everybody else is blamed.
>Last year, more than 400,000 individuals gave to Mozilla to protect and improve the health of the Internet. The Mozilla Foundation also receives support in the form of grants from other like-minded major foundations, including the Knight, MacArthur, Bill & Melinda Gates, and Ford foundations.
How about we praise the positives as well? They listed a slew of performance improvements and a battery usage improvement on macOS.
Firefox team: keep it up.
(also, they've even caught up to Chrome in version numbers! joke)
Also no Google in my browser is a huge plus.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
It works, but is a decidedly poor experience.
-"X moved Y pixels making Firefox UNUSABLE! So now I use Brave."
-"Mozilla is run by a bunch of SJW idiots because they ran their CEO off. So now I run Brave." (I had to look into this, as I wasn't paying attention at the time. They picked a new CEO who cared so passionately about removing the right of gay people to get married he even donated his own money to the cause. That was a dumb hill to die on. Now he's an anti-masker who actually runs Brave.)
-"My precious browser workflow was completely dependent on the interaction of 156 distinct XUL extensions so now I use Brave."
-"something, something, Mr. Robot." (that, like everything, you can turn off)
-"Ads in the address bar!" (that, like everything, you can turn off)
-"They take money from Google!" (Hey, free money, since everyone either switches to DGG or were going to use Google anyway.)
There are real criticisms you can make of Firefox/Mozilla. But on the whole, for the general user, none of them are grounds for moving to a Chromium based browser out of spite.
Regarding standard discussion patters I see it often. I imagine sometimes a pinned comment that would outline those. Along with all the usual corrections and corrections to those corrections.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bg8vc/what_websi...
I disagree with some of his assumed views, as you never know until you actually speak with someone directly. Could be any number of motivations. I supported Biden not because I disagreed with a lot of what Trump did, but because I felt he was a toxic agent to the republic. Is that anti-Trump? Yes and no. And I may be the last person in existence that supports Eich's right to express them in any way he chooses. If that causes social backlash by a bunch of sensitive people that's fine, but I think there's a majority that get no press, who like me, never had it impact my view of Eich. I see no connection to the projects he has or does work on.
"Anti-masker" is broad as well. I don't think based on the science, that masks make sense for young children. I do support them for adults, indoors at least. Is that an anti-masker? It's called nuance. A concept lost in society today.
After ~19 years on Firefox I moved to Microsoft Edge and only Edge fulltime in August and love it. So I couldn't care less about FF vs Brave.
This comment is rather anti-intellectual, and I'd much rather see the "cesspool of whining, bitching and utter negativity" that has actual thought put behind it than something empty and meaningless (actually, worse: something underhanded) like this.