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Comment by loudtieblahblah | Hacker News Reader

Breaking Addons to be more compliant with a standard between other browsers - making things like TabTreeStyles not work.

Putting ads in the address bar: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22715179/firefox-suggest-...

Recording what you type in the address bar: https://today.in-24.com/technology/450296.html

Putting ads on the New Tab Page: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/12/31/firefox-with-ads-on-new-ta...

Randomly installing Addons for people: https://itsfoss.com/firefox-looking-glass-controversy/

Some times installing addons without permission to promote TV Shows: https://gizmodo.com/mozilla-slipped-a-mr-robot-promo-plugin-...

They last 5-6 years, Mozilla has made a number of baffling decisions. And most of their advancements just seem to be very 'me too, me too!' as they chase design decisions made by Google.

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These are valid complaints; frankly Mozilla hasn't been the steward that I would like for them to be, but I really struggle to understand how these are enough to make someone switch to Chrome. They're all things that make FireFox less better, but surely not worse?

The auto-installed addons thing was a bit of a fiasco (though one which didn't affect me), but things like advertising or extension support are still worlds better in FireFox than on Chrome.

Yeah, I have the same feeling. Chrome feels like a carefully planned campaign of tricks to enter every aspect of your life and make it controlled by Google. Facebook feels like a browser with occasional frantic episodes of random folks having an idea "let's make money on $this" (where $this is so stupid you can't believe it), and the usually it disappears and another person has another equally brilliant idea. Not ideal, but I can live with that, it doesn't even come close to what Google is doing. And each year they go further.

oh i'm not switching to Chrome. FF is still my main driver.

but boy has it made Brave more attractive.

I just feel like Mozilla has a very "Democratic Party" attitude. They do really stupid shit that no one likes and stares you square in the eye and says "what are you gonna do about it - vote for the other guy?" and it's super frustrating.

FF's behavior over the last decade or so makes it seem like about three different and totally unrelated factions/departments/people that should never have been given any power have been given lots of power.

This is known as "shipping the org chart", aka Conway's Law.

Don't forget firing the Servo team and cutting funding / support to MDN while execs. and middle management got a pay rise..

You can turn off all this nonsense. Most of these mis-steps have been mitigated.

Never going back to Chrome - even though I'm forced to use Google apps @ work, and it has noted incompatibilities with FF.

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