We’re making Firefox accessible and delightful for everyone | Hacker News Reader

We’re making Firefox accessible and delightful for everyone

blog.mozilla.org

123 pointsAmorymeltzer142 comments

> We’re making Firefox accessible and delightful for everyone

Then don't draw anything in the titlebar and let the user decide how big shall be the scrollbar . For a start ...

You can enable a classic titlebar (at least on Windows, can't test on other systems right now) by right clicking next to the URL bar and choosing Customize Toolbar. Then theres an option to enable the title bar in the lower left corner.

I just checked and this is an option on my Mac too.

Thanks for this! Mine was on, and I never thought to turn it off (Linux, KDE). Unlike what seems like 99% of the people on HN, I don't pay that much attention to browser chrome, b/c my browser is just a window for stuff, but I do like the extra screen real estate.

Yeah, drawing the tabs in the space that would otherwise be the titlebar, that's a win in my books, reclaiming some space. If I want to see the page title I can hover over the tab.

Or let me customize the controls. Yes, yes, even before a tab has loaded a document from the internet!

1. go to about:config

2. search for: widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override

3. set the value from 0 to however many css pixels wide you want the scrollbar

Accessible and delightful indeed. /s

That image to text feature is great. I have someone who is almost blind in my immediate family and the increase of text screenshots is a really big problem for people who rely on screen readers. As a side-note this seems to be fueled by short-form platforms like Twitter that impose character limits, really not a good thing.

"Delightful", when applied to software, is a scary fucking word these days. It conjures images of horrific UI changes made by the whim of some designer who may or may not have ever actually used the software in question.

That said, I recently switched to Firefox and am generally pleased with it.

Firefox invented vertical tabs but then forgot about them. Always having to search for the next short lived plugin made me switch to Edge. I'd be delighted if this would change

Wow really? I thought vertical tabs was invented by extensions.

FWIW "Tree Style Tabs" has been around a long time, even making the jump to web extensions early.

I used vertical tabs when Firefox was Netscape.

I used OmniWeb.

Currently Firefox is the only browser that I can get an addon to provide vertical tabs. IUt is called Tree Style Tab

Off the top of my head, Edge and Vivaldi have vertical tabs built-in.

I know that's not the benchmark in this comment chain, but Tree Style Tabs can actually do ... trees (who would've guessed?). Plain vertical tabs are fairly crippled in comparison.

Edge can do groups, but there are only two levels.

Ah yes I forgot Vivaldi - which I did use but it just leaked memory even worse than Firefox - running on macOS

Wow, and here I thought I was the only one to make this move from Firefox to Edge, precisely because of the excellent native vertical tabs functionality.

It's not perfect, but the level of UX polish and the first-class integration with other browser features is unmatched by any Firefox vertical tabs extension I've tried.

I still can't believe the other browsers haven't caught on to the fact that power users want vertical tabs and are willing to switch browsers for it after so many years of Firefox extensions showing the way...

Orion (Mac only) has a great implementation, and in my experience has been quite fast. It's also supposed to be good on battery life, though I've not really tested it.

For anyone else reading this, there's a newer take of tree style tabs called "Sideberry" that I've been liking a lot. It integrates well with container tabs and is really customizable.

Firefox writers have some serious case of toxic positivity. It's very off-putting.

Could they stop disabling the browser when it updates (running against the about:config settings) so that I don't lose work when I have a partially functional browser that won't load new pages which breaks every single page application?

> a partially functional browser that won't load new pages

I thought it was just me because it was going on for so long!

Since maybe half a year, every time you use Firefox for a while (I suspend to RAM when not using my system), it starts to cheerfully go "whoops, this tab has crashed!" or "We need just one tiny thing to keep going [nuke¹ and restart whole browser as the only button]". Makes me want to firewall mozilla IP ranges and subscribe to an rss feed to see when a security release came out so that I can go to the update menu manually and do it not when I am in the middle of looking something up during a phone call with someone.

It's also not as though this uses the regular updates mechanism. There is still Menu -> About -> "you're up to date" / "click here to download update" / "click here to restart to apply update" and it will also notify you of those releases. This is some other mechanism going on under the hood. Perhaps the Experiments thing that gets randomly deployed to random people's browsers, not sure, I thought I disabled all of that years ago.

¹Yes I know firefox and other browsers nowadays have this textarea/input content restoring and such. Ask me how well that works now that every developer decided they're too cool for basic HTML elements whose functionality have been honed for close to three decades now, and would rather re-invent everything from page loading to input fields by using dynamic javascript instead.

> This is some other mechanism going on under the hood.

Could be this if you are on Windows:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-mozilla-maintenanc...

Linux, but thank you for the hint anyway!

This is offtopic (and probably against the rules) but why is it that every thread about Firefox seems to be filled with toxic vitriol? It seems that everything Firefox does causes anguish for everyone in the comments, but I rarely see such hate leveraged at Chrome posts/updates. What causes this effect?

Possibly a sense of betrayal? There was a time when FF seemed like it had a future of being a large player in the browser market. Hanging in single-digit usage seems like that time has come/gone, yet we continue to see loads of things that are... ancillary to that earlier dream of 'being #1' (or just a larger player).

Some announcements are 'nice', but almost all seem to point to 'too little too late' for the original dream.

I say this as someone who uses chrome/ff/safari daily, and threw a 'Mozilla release party' (with a Mozilla cake!) back when Mozilla hit 1.0, and donated early on to FF/mozilla.

They seemingly squandered years becoming less and less relevant to day to day usage, and it bugs some folks. On top of that, we get treated to press releases and social media tidbits now and then of "we're laying off dozens/hundreds of people, and our CEO makes millions of dollars". Depressing to see what it's become vs what people expected years ago...

speaking from a distance, mozilla has long struck me as one of these parasitized open source orgs like wikimedia, famous for one piece of software or project but stuffed to the brim with bureaucratic careerists who contribute nothing

I dunno, when I started as a junior dev I really appreciated mozillas js guides and other webdev related documentation. They just seemed to have top notch stuff that made me respect the foundation, since they didn’t need to go out of their way to produce such a communally helpful thing. I’m sure to a webdev that already had a ton of experience they might’ve thought it was a waste of their donation money or whatever but I personally got a lot of benefit

The MDN documentation is great actually.

1 great thing for 30 terrible ones.

I dunno, like I said the docs were helpful to me when I was new, but probably less so to someone who never needed a reference in the first place. I can imagine maybe I just am not the people who benefit strongly for 30 “terrible” things. Like this ocr stuff doesn’t benefit me at all, but you know, I bet it’ll be hugely useful to some people.

Idk this position just seems a little narrow minded and negative nancying.

Nup, I still use MDN constantly after 10+ years of regular JS work.

MDN is still the gold standard for web docs, but my understanding is that Mozilla fired most of the people responsible for it [1] and it's currently run as a joint project with funding from microsoft, google, and various other companies who contribute to it. the list of MDN advisory board members [2] is a good reference for what companies are actually leading MDN these days

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90539632/mozilla-vows-mdn-isnt-g...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/MDN_Product_Adv...

This is probably a direct result of the toxic polemic that invades every article published about Firefox.

You're right, I feel betrayed. Not because the browser is behind (it is), but because Mozilla seems much more interested shilling in random proprietary shit than working on the browser.

I know they're in financial trouble. But how they spend what's left doesn't make it look like they're interested in surviving that much, only management salaries.

If one of the major chromium skins supported tree style tabs I'd long be gone.

speaking only for myself personally, this is pretty much it.

i'm not intentionally coming into the threads and badmouthing firefox, but i get why people want to - it feels like they've very deliberatly set the perception of their brand as being "the good guys" in comparison to chrome/google, and they haven't really been living up to that. they're essentially just another corporate browser development firm, same as chrome, edge, opera, brave, etc, but they try to project the vibe of being the saviours of the internet. and at one point it seemed like they might be, but now we all understand that they're not.

of late, it feels like they've come to the conclusion that their browser can't actually compete on merit, so they're leaning into the reputation of mozilla of old. but they're not the mozilla of old, they're just another company doing corporate things and collecting that fat paycheque from google for search engine placement.

I would argue that the fact they even have a "brand" has been a fork in the road.

It used to be a bunch of people writing a piece of software for whatever damn reason they had, and that was enough to produce something notable and worthwhile.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that anything so fundamental has changed that this cannot still be enough. The moment anyone does, I'll leave the net for good, because then all truly is lost.

Chrome is understood to be controlled by a profit-seeking corporation. If people are using Chrome, they're mostly ok with this.

Firefox is controlled by a not-for-profit which is dedicating to making the internet a better place. People who would also like to make the internet a better place tend to get quite worked up when they feel Mozilla is not doing what they'd do.

(Disclaimer: I mostly happily use Firefox)

I'm a Firefox user, too, but let's keep the facts straight: Firefox is controlled by the Mozilla Corporation, a profit-seeking corporation. That corporation is owned by the Mozilla Foundation, but they want to make money with Firefox to fund their other projects, they're not there to fund the development of Firefox.

Because it used to feel like Firefox was on our side. At some point over the last 20 years it started to feel like they didn't care about us anymore. It felt like they cared more about attracting others than keeping us around because they know we're stuck without any viable alternatives. Everybody has always known Chrome was evil, so no one bothered getting an emotional attachment, at best the only argument anybody had in favor of chrome was that it was fast.

> It felt like they cared more about attracting others than keeping us around

And worse, they weren't (and aren't) even attracting others, so their antagonism towards their long-term users was even less justified.

Colorways anyone?

> at best the only argument anybody had in favor of chrome was that it was fast

Literally the only thing I and probably most people care about. 99.9% of the time I spend using a browser is browsing, so speed is pretty much the only thing I care about..

I switched to FF because it was faster than IE. Then it became slow, and I found chrome. Then I switched to chrome because it was faster, and that's the end of the story.

I tried FF once on a work MacBook. It installed, but wouldn't launch. Uninstalled and haven't looked back since.

I could probably make it work for me again, and it might be alright. Chrome just works, though, and my workflows all just work. I literally have no reason to switch... Until January.

Once manifest v3 rolls out, i will be very interested to see just how badly hampered ublock becomes.

Exactly. They're so focused on this delusion that can be the dominant browser that they threw away us, the ten percent. Be the tech browser again.

> at best the only argument anybody had in favor of chrome was that it was fast

When Chrome came out, the other big argument in its favor[1] was stability and security due to how it isolated tabs (and plugins) into separate OS processes.

Firefox supports something similar now, but it definitely didn't at the time.

---

[1] see the Chrome comic: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

Its only within the last year or so that Firefox supports OS level process based site isolation! Chromium supported it from the start afaik!

Even to this day Chromium is superior wrt security, but I am sure the gap has narrowed quite a bit.

Maybe because people in the know think that Chrome is pure evil and Firefox should be the shiny knight in golden armor to behead the evil monster, but in reality it's a clown disguised as a knight.

The announcement reads: "more than 1 billion people around the world who live with disabilities."

And with the new ocr image feature they will all become Firefox users, just watch the usage statistics in the next few months.

That's why.

I'm pretty sure the OCR thing is just enabling a recent-ish, built-in Mac and iOS platform feature (I bet it already worked on FF iOS, in fact, since that's Webkit under the hood).

Thought it is a pretty great feature, to be fair.

This is exactly the vitriol that GP is talking about. Yes, their market share is low, and yes, they're working on accessibility features anyway. Why does that bother you so much?

They could be working on other things instead. If your car is missing a wheel, you can absolutely add a wheel chair ramp in the back, and that will improve the experience for some people who might potentially be drawn towards your car, but it's not going to sell your car on the mass market, because your car is missing a wheel.

What the are you going on about? non-sense analogies?

this a press release about an accessiablity features allowing firefox to support images to text when using a screen readers, and screen reader performance improvements

the press release was written by someone who is blind and worked on the feature

There is zero problem with this feature. The feature is perfect, and will be used by many, and it is useful. The problem is this will help the established users and those who are in need, but won't give them extra market share. FF should work on gaining new foothold and since this is not happening, people can be edgy.

Anyways, maybe Ladybird will have a dragon lance.

That doesn't bother me. Accessibility is good and great, but where are the features that would benefit everyone? That would make it stand out and enables them to compete with Chrome. This interface that today's browsers offer is rooted in the 90s era. We are in 2022, where the fuck is the innovation? Because I can't see anything new. Ahhh, 5 new color spaces and gradients for css? Nobody cares!

If there is no other way against reckless/gargantuan companies, then use patents to prevent Chrome/Safari to copy newly added features. Demonizing patents is partly because they don't want the small guy/small company to arm themselves and fuck up the big ones up the wahzoo.

tbh I think the ocr image feature is precisely the sort of thing I want people working on browsers to be thinking about. A lack of accessibility in technology is a huge barrier to an increasingly bigger facet of interacting with society. Working on increasing accessibility is the sort of fighting-for-the-little-guys I want a nonprofit to be doing.

Firefox team has a history of making huge, sweeping UI changes which users absolutely hate. Chrome has remained largely unchanged since its first version. Users that chose Firefox because of the way the UI works at that moment often have the rug pulled out from under them.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some light brigading going on from rivals. There's also some really lazy frontend devs out there that get indignant about testing on Firefox.

Chrome is the new IE and Google is the new Microsoft. They make up their own standards on a whim, which thanks to market dominance everyone is forced to follow. They collect user data without permission. They waste computer resources. They push people towards other Google products in an anti competitive way.

Mozilla has made some dumb mistakes here and there but it pales in comparison to the very serious threat that Chrome, and Chromium in general has to the free web and to users.

It's worth noting that the complaints below have nothing to do with the article, which shows a pretty promising tech, and are just bagging out FF because just as you said, that's what happens on HN.

> Mozilla has made some dumb mistakes here and there but it pales in comparison to the very serious threat that Chrome, and Chromium in general has to the free web and to users.

The company that owns Chrome is nearly the sole financial support of Firefox.

Which is also based entirely on their market dominance. I'm 100% convinced Google continues handing millions of dollars a year to Mozilla so Google can point at Firefox as competition when the regulators come knocking.

I suppose it's better than the alternative...

I must have missed all that revenue coming to Google from "Chrome+" subscriptions.

Google can't allow Firefox to die because it would raise questions about Google's own funding of Chrome.

>I wouldn't be surprised if there was some light brigading going on from rivals. There's also some really lazy frontend devs out there that get indignant about testing on Firefox.

The vitriol comes from people who want Firefox to return to being "just a browser", and to be honest more often than not are the Linux crowd. It's seemingly got nothing to do with rivalry (all the browser vendors are actually fairly chummy with each other) and frontend devs are more likely to just ignore Firefox than to complain about it (IME).

HN has also just become far more vitriol-filled as of late. That's devolving into meta commentary and outside the purposes of this thread, though - just can't leave it uncommented on here.

>I wouldn't be surprised if there was some light brigading going on from rivals.

the opposite is true. a certain group of emotionally invested people will come out of the woods to defend any dumb or authoritarian decision Mozilla makes.

>Mozilla has made some dumb mistakes here and there but it pales in comparison to the very serious threat that Chrome, and Chromium in general has to the free web and to users.

that doesn't give Mozilla a pass. pox on both their houses

It literally takes a few extra minutes to test and fix minor issues on Firefox and Safari. A lot of this incompatibility is laziness or poor process.

One issue that Chrome app developers run into is when Firefox and (especially) Safari don't contain Chrome's latest feature-of-the-week.

I don't understand how surprising gaps would even emerge if you are using some resource like MDN to guide your efforts.

There's really no excuse. When I started web development I had at least 3 browsers open at any given time and writing code that worked in all major browsers could be really difficult at times. In more recent years, I would just develop with one, quickly check if everything looks alright in the other ones, do some super-minor adjustments, and call it a day. Sure, some minor stuff may not be supported by Firefox, but it's never deal-breaking stuff. Safari is the only browser that regularly requires more work, but it's nowhere close to the troubles that every single IE caused.

> Mozilla has made some dumb mistakes here and there but it pales in comparison to the very serious threat that Chrome, and Chromium in general has to the free web and to users.

It is because the threat of a Chrome monopoly is so great, that it's so important to point out Mozilla's many failures, so that they can be corrected before it's too late.

Yeah I'm a firefox user and I don't click on posts about chrome. This is just a guess, but maybe everyone left using firefox does so because they believe in a free and open web and privacy and wish for firefox to succeed, but often feel disappointed when many news about firefox seem like step backwards. I for one am ok with how firefox is right now, it could be better, I hope that mozilla invests more in firefox, but I'm still holding out for alternatives like ladybird even if they are years away from being a usable alternative. Anyway just my 2 cents

I use Firefox, except when I need to look at a web site that was developed by people who don't care about Firefox users.

When I see Firefox roll out features that don't really change anything, all the while steadily losing market share, I'm disappointed.

But I also can't think of anything Mozilla could do to fight the dominance of Chrome and Safari, so I guess it's not that disappointing.

your point might've been more salient if you'd waited for said vitriol to actually materialize before posting

I don't think the hate is directed towards Firefox, but rather Mozilla. I know I lost faith in Mozilla when they posted a blog entry a couple years ago to detail reasons behind their restructuring and what their renewed focus is, and made it seem like Firefox was an afterthought [1].

Choice quote:

>Mozilla exists so the internet can help the world collectively meet the range of challenges a moment like this presents. Firefox is a part of this. *But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests.* (emphasis mine)

What other products? The entire organizational focus should be centered on Firefox so that it can meaningfully compete with Chrome, as Firefox is the only truly open alternative to Safari/Chrome.

A little below that, they list their new 5 areas to focus on and ... no mention of Firefox there.

[1]https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/changing-world-changing-...

Browsers don't generate revenue and Mozilla needs revenue to fund development of Firefox. Mozilla's competitors fund the development of browsers with revenue from other products. For Mozilla to effectively compete in the browser market, Mozilla needs revenue from other products.

Unfortunately those other products are nothing special and Mozilla seems happy to damage Firefox by adding ads for Pocket.

Browsers do generate revenue, though. As per https://www.wired.com/story/firefox-mozilla-2022/

  In its 2020 financial results, the most recent available, Mozilla
  listed its total revenue as $496 million, with royalties from search
  deals equaling $441 million

The issue is that Mozilla, inc. is not happy with being a browser vendor and wants to go "beyond the browser" (as their management puts it.) Therefore, they use the browser revenue as a piggy bank for other projects like a rebranded VPN service, a bookmark storing service (Pocket), etc. and let the browser wither on the vine.

In my opinion, if Firefox was owned by a company that liked and wanted to focus on Firefox, it would not be in a death spiral right now. But instead it's owned by a company that wants to use the browser as a cash cow while its market share collapses. And when it finally dies they'll just point at Chrome and say "there's nothing we could have done, Google is too big." Never mind the fact that Firefox beath IE which was also funded by a megacorporation.

That revenue is almost entirely from Google, their biggest competitor. I don't think it's any surprise that they want to diversify from that.

They could reduce dependency by focusing on their core mission, cutting out the cruft, and using the extra money to build up an endowment that can last them forever.

Obviously, they didn’t take that option.

That's one way to look at this. Another way is that Firefox lost market share, and is falling behind. Firefox is also the primary cash-cow for Mozilla. Given both, shouldn't Mozilla be investing in Firefox development to make sure Firefox doesn't fall further behind?

(Mozilla's non-Firefox products didn't actually make any impact thus far).

Their revenue is from Google because they chose to make a deal with Google. They could have made a deal with Microsoft or some other search engine provider.

Firefox beat IE because Microsoft development of the browser stagnated and Windows + IE were struck with a string of massive security vulnerabilities. Firefox was a more featureful, secure, compliant browser out of the box. Non-technical people were tricked into adding search bars and add-ons to IE that massively degraded performance, perhaps some malicious. Pretty easy to instruct the least technical person you know to click on Firefox and the problems go away.

That is absolutely nothing like the environment that Firefox operates in, today. IE was irrelevant to Microsoft's business and revenue. Chrome was (and still is) a core aspect to Google owning search, which underwrites everything else it does.

Even with limitless resources, there is nothing Mozilla could do to make Firefox so much better that it would regain market share against Chrome. And Firefox's primary competitor's enterprise is highly dependent on being in the driver seat, so that isn't going to change.

Firefox is a great browser, and some people may independently decide to use it. But at this point, if you aren't using Chrome or Edge, it's probably because you have been on Firefox since 2005 and see no point in switching, or because you are making an ideological statement against Google (for privacy, or against web engine monopoly).

I take that to mean that they know where their bread is buttered. If you're rival is paying you much more than you can earn otherwise, best not to rock the boat.

The best thing in the long run for firefox in my opinion would be to not renew the contract with Google when it comes up again. It's pretty drastic and it might kill the Mozilla foundation, but firefox itself can be forked and continue on. I'd love to see a group of developers (or more than one group) do a hard fork of the project and move in the direction of "performance, bug-fixes, standards compliance, and a healthy add-on infrastructure" as their main goals. A firefox-focused dev team wouldn't be adding things like Pocket into the mix or bothering the user so much.

I don’t believe that Firefox going from N paid devs to 0 would be positive. As much as I didn’t care for Pocket + etc, I doubt they consume anywhere near 100% of the paid developer time. As a result, zero paid devs would almost certainly leave less dev time for performance, bug fixes, standards compliance, add-ons, leaving us further away from those goals.

Put another way, there’s absolutely nothing stopping this hard fork from happening today. It’s just that maintaining a browser engine is a Herculean amount of work, and having full-time devs is a huge asset.

If a bunch of people want to fork it right now and do this stuff for free, nothing is stopping them. Obviously, it isn't happening, so if Mozilla dies, FF will end up abandoned and we'll be stuck using Chrome.

It seems this is because the company has broadly shifted focus to softer social issues rather than technical topics. Mozilla keeps struggling with market share and users are anguished to see that their (former) favorite browser is investing resources in topics they find to be a distraction.

At least that is my interpretation. Mozilla is not addressing the same audience any longer, a lot of which is technically-minded folk on HN, Reddit, /g/, etc.

I think for the same reason that nobody is as critical of the Star Wars movies as the most die-hard Star Wars fan, or the same reason that nobody hates anybody as much as ex-spouses hate each other after a marriage gone wrong.

Most such behavior is people following a herd. Firefox isn't the hot thing, so like last year's clothes, is ridiculed by people wanting to be (geek-)fashionable.

Do you remember Firefox pushing its limited edition themes (or whatever pretentious label they used)?

How does that disprove my assertion? It seems to be the behavior I described?

Mozilla is following the herd too. I don't attack Firefox because it's not trendy, but because Mozilla is trying to be, and doesn't seem to know who its users are. As someone who used Firefox for 15 years, I stopped believing that they know what they're meant to be doing.

I enjoy Firefox and I'm still thankful but a lot of Mozilla's actions over the last year or so have degraded the product. In particular, mobile Firefox gets worse with every update. I haven't contributed to the vitriol but imagine that could be part of the reason.

Personally: It's hypocritical to state that you're privacy focused, especially when telemetry is enabled by default, and doesn't inform the user that this is the case.

I feel Mozilla has lost its way.

'delightful' in the title feels manipulative.

Because Firefox constantly announces nearly pointless features it may or may not continue to support while it refuses to even acknowledge its major problems and slowly bleeds out into irrelevance.

Firefox feature announcements are like when your alcoholic husband who won't take his heart pills or get his turn signal fixed throws a catered party to show everyone his new five-iron.

I badly miss smiling at that little Firefox icon my taskbar and I'm tired of being re-invited to watch the decline.

I think many people on HN feel that Firefox used to exist to serve the user and has lost its way, while Chrome always existed to serve Google and continues to do so.

This is also offtopic, but I cringe when software companies use the word "delight" when describing their software.

Also modern and/or beautiful. If a third-party decides to write that, fine but praising your own work to this degree is rather annoying.

Really? What about extension manifest v3? The axing of jpeg XL?

It's the only alternative and Mozilla usually seems clueless and wasteful of precious resources. Hatred of Google domination is the fuel that fires the passion against Mozilla's random wasteful decisions really.

Although in this specific case, I think what they're doing is great personally.

The worst thing they did was firing the servo team for me.

It's like Sun microsystems before Oracle ruined them, seeing a great org get ruined.

I don't get it but the phenomena is not unique to mozilla. Signal is another example, they start doing great but then they need to find value outside of doing what is useful to customers and taking care of their core product. Valuing short term gains when you're big but nowhere big enough to take risks like they're taking.

I feel like with the right prioritization firefox can totally decimate Chrome in just one year.

A few things: It all started when they ousted Brendan Eich over some controversial political donations. I don't agree with this decision but Mozilla was catching a ton of bad PR so it was probably the only option. Right wing types have had a hateboner for Firefox ever since. For technically minded people, Mozilla lost a lot of credibility when they laid off many engineers working on innovative projects like Servo. Firefox development has been stagnant ever since, and they rarely push new non-cosmetic features.

I'm sure there are people like Larry Ellison who give money to right-wing causes. Why don't people like him get ousted but Eich did?

You can't easily cancel billionaires and remove them from things they own. You can absolutely remove people from non-profits (and replace them with your friends and funnel money into your other friends' projects).

There is a lot of comments here that demonstrate how people feel today in regard to Mozilla (in particular) but also Firefox. The one thing I think is missing is the historical aspect. I think many here is both old enough but also remember how Mozilla and Firefox came into popularity during the time when Microsoft and Internet Explorer dominated the market, with Mozilla beating the closed and monopolistic designs with openness and community. People installed Firefox, people developed websites that worked for Firefox, other donated time and money, and little by little Firefox started to win over Microsoft. And then Mozilla changed direction, changed focus, changed their political direction, and slowly became something very different from what people joined that many years ago.

People don't have that kind of personal history with Chrome. There are still criticism when Chrome does updated, but that is usually related to the relation between google and chrome with things like preventing ad-blocking.

This is a fairly good summary for me, at least.

Firefox used to be an awesome standards focused alternative to the bloatware that was Internet Explorer.

But that's not really what Firefox is anymore, under the current direction of Mozilla Corp.

Lately, the goals seem to be about copying Chrome (things like killing XUL in favor of webext, jumping on similar UI themes, Forcing bloatware into the browser by integrating things like pocket, laying off most of the dev team for servo, etc).

Basically - the current vision of Mozilla just really doesn't line up with what got me interested in Firefox as a younger dev.

Am I glad Firefox is still around? Fuck yes.

But I'm glad in the same sense that I'm glad Safari is still here - alternatives to chromium are healthy. But it's lost a lot of the luster it had.

The focus just isn't on making a great browser that empowers users (not to discredit the folks working on it). The focus shifted to a multi-project revenue based model exactly like all the other for-profit companies (of which Mozilla Corporation definitely is).

And not only is that not great for me as a user of the product - they aren't even doing it all that well, which is like watching the project sell its soul for pennies on the dollar.

So really - it's absolutely the history. I expect better from Firefox than I do from Chrome, and I'm not really a fan of Mozilla Corp at all. Too much talk, too many buzzwords, too much money spent like a typical corp.

Disappointment mostly. FF went from de facto browser to "my employer isn't even obliged to support it for clients because market penetration is below 5%".

Like, containers are nice feature.... and I ran out of things to praise them for.

Quantum finally caught on speed but broke stuff I used, and limited plugins so now I can't have vertical tab bar normally, existing tab bar addons have to shove themselves into sidebar.

...which means every time I Ctrl-H it gets replaced with History! and disappears completely when I enable it again! Wasn't a problem before but someone decided "plugin replacing everything you see on site is fine, but modyfing browser window? BIG NONO". I even had to dig in some files to hide the actual tabs because of course plugin can't be possibly allowed to do that.

They had also few PR blunders like auto-installing some addon for promotion some time ago, or the fact they bundled pocket with it. I mean it's a nice service that I used before anyway but people complained Mozilla decided to essentially force-install a plugin in it.

While before they were leader, now they are catching up, all while getting involved in some random stuff instead of making better browser. And the fact marketshare is low also means some sites just subtly break from time to time.

> What causes this effect?

Because in 2020: https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

Because in 2022: http://techrights.org/2022/02/17/mozilla-salaries/

All the while slashing the headcount of actual engineers, canning the very promising Servo, canning Android extensions, slowing down the development on Firefox (how long has been the new Android Firefox in beta now?), and spending most of their lavish resources on half-assed, badly sustained random initiatives there an there (Pocket, VPN, Monitor, ...).

Frankly, IMHO, the Mozilla foundation is the current scam of the century when it comes down to the Open Source world.

When are there posts about Chrome, other than the rage-filled threads about manifest v3?

The data seems to indicate the opposite?

For ex look at the top 30 firefox threads in the past year: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

> "I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome"

> "Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox" and a lot of threads highlighting new features for FF

Compare that to the top 30 chrome threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

> "Chrome users beware: Manifest v3 is deceitful and threatening"

> "PSA: uBlock/AdBlocks on Chrome to lose function thanks to Manifestv3"

> "Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab"

> "Chrome allows websites to write to the clipboard without the user’s permission" etc

I had the same thought. This article is about cool features in Firefox, and the 3 top comments are about unrelated stuff and/or just toxic. HN is disappointing sometimes.

Surprise and delight users by displaying their birthday on the settings page.

is it possible to abstract chrome extensions to firefox natively, this would 10x its value and adoption as chromium extenions are what keeps many people using chrome based browsers.

Both supoort Web Extensions, though the exposed APIs differ sightly and Chromium's version will be less powerful soon. What extension keeps you with Chrome? All that I need are available for Firefox.

How similar are the two?

How hard would it be to "shim" them in, like Deno is doing with Nodejs modules out of necessity.

define "delightful" for me please.

it's hard to put this properly into words but recently I've noticed a trend of software self-describing as having subjective qualities that one would typically leave to the consumer to determine on their own. specifically, indie games self-describing as things like "cute" or "cozy", in addition to "delightful" (as seen here) and other similar words. it might be good marketing or whatever but to me it comes across as… presumptuous? like, I should be the judge of whether or not your product is cute/cozy/delightful/etc., you should show me that instead of telling me.

it also evokes the Fire Phone's "Delighter" https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/20/excitement-eng...

The automatic image OCR thing is so nice that it's one of those features where once you use it, you immediately regard anything without it as obsolete. Instantly must-have.

... but that's a mac/iOS feature, not FF. Firefox is just enabling it, which is why that's mac-only (I'd guess it already worked on iOS "Firefox", but I'm not sure)

After using many other browsers,Firefox,Brave,Vivaldi,Edge,chromium..I back to Chrome, it just work,even if MV3,leave only Firefox as backup.

Yeah, is that why they forcefully shut down my browser mid session any time they feel like updating?

Seriously thinking of moving away from firefox these days

I believe that only happens when a Linux package manager updates Firefox while it's running.

Probably. Never seen anything like that on Windows or macOS.

I get 'Firefox needs to restart' all the time on MacOS.

Right, but it doesn't auto-update and kill your session.

Yeah it does. It might be possible to disable it though but as far as I'm aware it's enabled by default.

No, it prompts first.

It is a preference you can set.

It is a preference. I’m not sure what the default is, but the recommended is to have it done without prompting.

Happens on Mac all the time.

… Firefox on my work macOS is presently has an emblem on the hamburger menu, and if you open the menu: "Update available — restart now". I've been delaying for days? weeks? at this point.

Clicking it causes the browser to disappear for ~20 seconds, +10s for the UI to become available.

Happens on Windows

Never once in my experience, and I haven't configured it otherwise.

Whenever firefox on Windows at work starts to act flaky (won't let me open a new tab, stutters, locks up for a while) it's probably going to update when I close it down in frustration and open it again.

I have (macOS).

How can this happen when Linux package managers don't auto-update (without help)? I mean if you don't want Firefox updated while you are using it you just just don't update it. If your distro has some sort of auto-update by default (do any do this?, I thought available update notifications was the standard) then disable it and get control of that back. Auto-updating packages is an anti-pattern (ie. bad).

It can also happen if you have two copies of 'stock' Firefox running (with different profiles) and one of them runs the update.

… it doesn't, and I've just run `pacman -S` to check. (& it didn't.)

(It does cause some tabs to message that a browser restart is required. Even so … this is really the first I hit this, as I'm usually doing updates when it is opportunistic to do so, such as right before a reboot (so any kernel updates happen).)

This could well be an issue with 'snap', see earlier thread on the subject.

Nope, on ubuntu you get a popup while you are browsing the net saying that SNAP UPDATES ARE POSTPONED because you started something that is entombed in a snap...

Then it does this every time you boot your os and start the browser first.

Maybe, next time, before you start your browser it should update the snaps, then let you use the browser. NOOOOOOOO WAAAY! Display the popup for 2 weeks... or before you commit self harm you do the update yourself.

And we are going to Mars!

I've never had this happen on Windows or macOS. In Linux, I have had Firefox complain when my package manager updates Firefox while it is running, which I think is perfectly normal.

What an odd thing to randomly complain about, and completely off-topic in regards to the article.

Agreed. I often update (in Fedora) which causes Firefox to be restarted - never had any issues clicking the 'restart Firefox' button though which relaunches it and opens the last session, often opening dozens of older tabs without issue. Bizarre thing to complain about.

I'm not the parent poster, but this happens to me as well. It's new and didn't happen about a year ago or before that.

To everyone saying this is Snap: I'm using Debian. It does not have snap.

To everyone saying this is apt: no, I also do not apt upgrade and then wonder why tab processes suddenly can't talk to the master process anymore. Unattended upgrades is not installed on this system (it's not a server and I do manual upgrades regularly, it's not as though that unexpectedly reports that there aren't any to be applied).

It happens both on systems where firefox-esr is installed via apt and where Firefox is installed directly from Mozilla without going through apt (stability vs. timely features).

I do remember that this indeed happens when I once did upgrade via apt and then continued using Firefox. Similar effect with e.g. Signal.

Should have invested into rewriting Firefox into Rust instead of doubling down on unrelated to browser activities (who needs them anyway?). Accessibility is important though, I have nothing against it.

I laughed... mozilla isn't the first company to hide user unfriendly nonsense under a guise of accessibility, but they're certainly in the running for causing the most annoyance with it!

What's user unfriendly about copying text out of images and making screenreaders faster?

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