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Comment by winternett | Hacker News Reader

Chrome has just been getting worse and worse over time, but if you can recall, Firefox was also a slug when it was at a peak of market dominance and before that MSIE...

The problem is that orgs and companies stop caring once they gain the primary market share. They also start dictating standards to everyone and ignoring user feedback. It's symptomatic of our current software development driven economy.

I recall when as a web dev I had to ensure my code was best supported by 3-4 browsers and don't miss that era at all, but it would be much better if proper regulation, consumer protection, and ethical corporate behavior came into play before hostile competition, corruption, and monopoly-driven "dictatorware" do in software market dominance for a change.

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Mozilla never seemed to get out of that "the user is an idiot, best ignored" mindset even as their market share falls lower than a vendor-specific mobile browser. It's mind-boggling how just about everyone except the people calling the shots in that org can point out the problem.

I've used Firefox as a daily driver for over 15 years, and while I do think it treats me more like an idiot than it used to, and don't like that, I still feel far more in control, trusted, and able to configure it than I do with chrome.

How do you mean? I use both browsers and, while I certainly wasn't happy with the changes that accompanied their move to WebExtensions back around version 57, I don't find FF these days to be any worse overall than Chrome. Not trying to be argumentative, just not clear on your meaning.

I rely on Firefox for everything a browser does, and praise its many unique features and conveniences; I don't want to imagine using a garbage flavor of Chromium. But the folks at Mozilla keep hitting my morale. Examples-

1. History of installing and running arbitrary code on clients in the name of "Experiments" without user permission.

2. Full telemetry on by default.

3. Shoving their products like Pocket (added to the address bar by default, shows up as an advertisement on the page that opens after Firefox updates itself), Mozilla VPN (non-removable advertisement on every Private Window you open) in the name of revenue, while their clueless leadership enjoys fat paychecks for whatever value they bring to the organization.

4. Forcing undesirable changes down people's throat (removed the "Compact" density address bar after a redesign, hiding it under about:config).

Feel free to pile on.

4.5. Constant UI redesigns and changes for no benefit.

5. Ignoring any and all negative feedback.

6. Taking more and more control away from users.

7. Being funded by their competitor and never really looking for an alternative.

8. Firing a good chunk of their engineers when needed most.

They also removed live bookmarks, a feature I loved since 2002. There is a browser extension now, but I just moved to Inoreader (and Edge).

Final straw was the dedicated search bar not working with keyword shortcuts for other search engines. While the settings page claims those are supposed to work in the address bar and the search bar, they only work in the address ("omni") bar.

Too many features removed. I'd rather just go to my native browser and all the inherent advantages to it at that point, which as mentioned is MS Edge. I love it. In fact, their unnecessary additions (MS Shopping) actually opened my eyes to things I didn't know existed, like the Honey extension. I have no complaints about Microsoft Edge on Windows 11 or iOS. After 19 years of Firefox.

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