There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to...
Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.
Android has native support for keyboards since API 1.
An iPad can support a keyboard too. It's a touch-first device.
A Mac can support a touchscreen with a third-party driver, but it's a KBM-first UX and support of the touchscreen is horrible in most apps that only accept one input at a time.
Will it drive worthwhile value? No.
Are there more pressing matters? Yes.
With that said, it's open source. Why don't you implement it yourself? Meanwhile the rest of us have long since moved on from Firefox.
Even the fully local translation is really usable now <3. I don't use chrome for anything and it's not even installed on my daily driver anymore.
Ironically, the only time I have had issues, overriding the user agent to look like chrome or edge fixed it. So those websites were deliberately broken with Firefox, not Mozilla's fault but pure malice and dark patterns. Office 365 is one of these sites by the way.
The issue here is that this wasn't always the case, or at least wasn't always this bad. While Firefox has always been far from perfect, there was a time when mozillazine consisted mostly of praise and evangelism, and not all of it naive fandom. Also, as a former Opera user, there was also a time when the landscape as a whole contained a higher quality set of options in general. There were numerous browsers then better than the current least worst.
Even recently, Firefox has inspired hope & interest with Servo, Quantum, and even things like the amazing webextension migration effort: controversial and unpopular with many it was nonetheless a greatly successful engineering effort, and has borne fruit in the recent furore over v3 manifests, with Firefox coming out ahead. It's also got cool added APIs that makes sense for the traditional Firefox community but are still standards compliant and interoperable. But all that progress is now already waning with Servo dev cut, progressive popular distinguishing features like MAC being relegated to APIs & UI removed from core.
There's precious little left to distinguish Firefox from Chrome, and nothing new on the horizon.
I'm pleased to see others have good experience with FF performance, but for me, the performance simply became unacceptable.
with their continued slide in marketshare to what is essentially an irrelevant portion of the market, i'm guessing this isn't just me.
However, I did do a lot of frontend back in the old IE6/IE7/IE8 days when you essentially had to code a whole separate front end for Microsoft's standards-flaunting mess. So this is definitely an issue I care about.
but behind the curtains it took additional effort from
the developers of websites you visit to make it so
So yes, you often can't run your Chrome-specific shit elsewhere without workarounds and polyfills, but this doesn't automatically mean everybody except Google is screwing up. In some cases, complaints such as yours sound like folks in 2004 complaining that their ActiveX controls work in IE but not Firefox.
And not to forget that Google has even shipped several early-days standards track features to production of which the API was still in flux. In a few cases the API later changed in - for Chrome, at least - breaking ways. Fun times.
okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not supporting that stuff other than "we have limited resources to implement these things"?
a lot of that chrome-specific shit is really really nice. like CSS nesting - that would be amazing. firefox has a bug for tracking the implementation, and supported the standardization of it. but there's no sign of any progress towards an implementation. meanwhile safari and chrome have both shipped it.
That depends on what you are referring to. No there is not a one size fits all answer. For example, Chrome has implemented Filesystem API that Mozilla is still debating on because they see it as a security issue. You can agree or disagree but there reason is still something other than "we don't have the resources to do it"
For example, Chrome has implemented Filesystem API
that Mozilla is still debating on
Google explicitly wants two major things from Chrome.
One, they obviously want to track as much personal information as they possibly can, because they are an ad company.
Two, they want "the web" to essentially be a full OS replacement, with filesystem access etc. Because Microsoft is one of their primary rivals (or frenemies, if you will) and they can't leave themselves to the whims of others' platforms. They need their own platform.
These goals are... well, let's say divergent (to put it mildly) from what "the web" means to others. HTTP was originally supposed to be a human-readable way to publish and link information, not an OS replacement, and certainly not a PII-siphoning tool.
And yet, some folks still default to simply assuming whatever Google decides for the web is right, simply because they seem to be moving the fastest.
Yeah, they're usually moving the fastest, but people should think about where they're heading and why.
If FF is lagging behind Safari on a particular CSS feature that certainly points to FF being behind the curve.
Sometimes it's FF or Safari simply being slower than Google. Sometimes it's a matter of the Chrome team creating an implementation of feature XYZ and getting it minted into the standard so of course they have the only implementation for a while.
Sometimes the FF and Safari teams have specific objections to a feature, often because unlike Google they actually consider user privacy a core part of their mission. Although, of course, with CSS features... that's not gonna be a privacy thing.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+market+share&oq=fire...
IMHO there is a room for innovation in this space, long term but you can see if this happenning observing the project. Currently browser engines are one of the most complex pieces of software. There are new ways to attack these mammoths.
The amount of Rust code in Firefox is pretty substantial, and growing. Did you expect an instant rewrite?
Man, I wish that were my experience. I'd love to keep using Firefox. My experience is the opposite of that, though.
Maybe that's the problem. Why Mozilla should be large enough to do those things? I'd rather have one good browser than 20 mediocre side projects.
If Apple allows third party browsers and Chrome is adopted by enough iOS / iPadOS users, everything other than Blink will be non-standard in a de facto sense.
This is a fairly new opinion for me. On Windows I've started using Edge alongside Firefox and I find myself using Firefox less and less often. On my machine doing the things I need to do, Edge is significantly faster.
> Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes no sense to me.
And that's exactly why we need a strong independent org to do this. Because it is hard and it doesn't make sense for most people. Anyone can get an idea of a chrome improvement, get a VC to sign up and start yet another "same browser as 50 others but with this little twist" thing. This is not a huge breakthrough that has any fundamental importance. Having the whole web rendering infrastructure not owned by a single entity sounds kinda important though. Yes, it's hard to pull off - that's exactly why it is valuable, as opposed to make another quick buck by doing a quick tweak over somebody else's work. Quick buck things are valuable too - but they are not fundamental. It's like developing a new theme for Windows as opposed to developing Linux. I think having Linux is much more important than having one more Windows theme.
Yep. Browsers in general are meh at this point. Mozilla is looking for things like Fakespot because all of the big browsers have been good enough for quite a while now. There really isn't anything they can do with the core of Firefox make a difference. Users don't care.
That comment placed in a thread filled to the brim with "Firefox is slow" and (at least on macOS) "Firefox eats my battery"
That's not even getting into the horrors of their dev-tools impl, or the missing CSS items cited in this same discussion, both of which I grant not _every_ user cares about but there are for sure users who care about all 4 of those things
There's plenty to improve. On Android there's the whole extension mess (and tons of other quality of life improvements), on desktop Firefox could use some proper PWA support (even Safari has that implemented well now), Spidermonkey is still the slowest mainstream Javascript engine out there, and Chrome's process sandboxing has some features that Firefox is yet to implement if at all. Firefox users on Gnome on Linux are a subset of a subset of a subset, that's hardly important, but "Firefox is slower than all the other browsers" is.
Mozilla cares more about their charity programs than they do about their browser (that's why you can't directly donate to Firefox, only to Mozilla). Maybe this acquisition is a way to add a new revenue stream, though I doubt it'll matter much because I've never seen AI detection that actually works. I hope this was a smart move, but I fear this will end up as one of those buttons everyone disables in the default toolbar, like Pocket has become.
Mozilla has also fired 250 people during the pandemic, so somehow coming up with the money to buy a company feels a little jarring when dev capacity still hasn't recovered.
"Firefox is slower than all the other browsers"
I use both Chrome and FF regularly on Mac and PC desktops and laptops with vintages ranging from 2011-2023. There is no perceptible difference to me. Admittedly all of my machines are relatively comfortably specced. Desktop-class CPUs, 16GB+ of RAM, SSDs. Perhaps the difference is more pronounced when the computing environment is more constrained.
Moving from my subjective opinion to hard benchmarks, Firefox wins some and loses others. Overall they're close.
I don't use Android so I don't know the FF situation there. It certainly sounds like a mess. I will take your word for it.
Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB. Than Firefox unleashes its ability to work just fine even with a lot of extensions.
Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB
FF absolutely smooth on there.
Typical usage on that machine is usual recreational web crap. It's my game/relaxing machine. Running 1-2 windows with some mix of Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, Amazon, whatever.
Zooming out, I have been running a mix of FF and Chrome for dev work ever since their respective debuts. We're talking easily 2000+ hours a year of browser usage for 20+ years. I have never seen the FF performance issues others get into a fuss about.
I honestly have no explanation for this. I'm sure that other people are telling the truth but I find it mystifying. I've never had monster high-end CPUs but I've always run AdBlock/uBlock, I generally have as much RAM as feasible, and was an early SSD adopter. Maybe I dodged some FF issues that way. I also never have massive numbers of tabs/windows... usually a max of 10-15 tabs over 1-3 windows. I'm also not running "big" browser-native apps like Figma or whatever in FF.
It's not that I'm insensitive to performance. I run 144hz monitors for gaming and that's a big difference to my eyes. There are also some UI things that are noticeably faster in Chrome like dragging a tab to a new window but that's not a big part of my browsing experience.
(FWIW, Safari has always felt significantly faster to me during my infrequent usage. IIRC they do some latency reduction tricks on MacOS. So even though typical web benchmarks show it as slower, it "feels" faster to me)
Using https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ this is quantified not only by some arbitrary number but also through the visibly slower update speed during the DOM tests.
I use Firefox on every device, but Chrome is just faster. I can live with the impact on speed for all the privacy features, but if Mozilla ever wants to get their market share above 5% again they'll need to provide the common user a reason to switch and that'll be hard when the browser is noticeably slower.
But benchmarks are fun too...
this is quantified not only by some arbitrary
number but also through the visibly slower
update speed during the DOM tests.
My opinion is that while benchmarks are vital, I don't believe that a benchmark such as that necessarily correlates with user experience. There are benchmarks where FF is faster and certainly they can't all be right. (At first glance, the one you linked appears to be a mix of modern UI frameworks, which seems pretty reasonable to me)
A look at a browser's dev tools during my "normal" usage certainly aligns with what I'm saying -- network bandwidth/latency really dominates perceived performance in nearly every use case; blasting out DOM updates as fast as possible via a synthetic benchmark does not resemble my browsing sessions.
That is of course just my subjective opinion. You may have other use cases in which your browser is truly the bottleneck. Or you can just have another set of preferences.
I rarely encounter loading times that are caused by network traffic. Some servers are slow to reach, but most pages load almost instantaneously. Perhaps that's why things that I see Firefox lose to Chrome at are noticeable to me but not to many others.
The benchmark itself is not an indicator of what the average user will do in their browser, but it does show that Firefox is objectively slower in certain areas. Whether those areas bother you is another question, of course.
Firefox becoming completely unresponsive happens to me more than I like. This is due to a difference in architecture; Firefox spawns a process for every CPU thread and divides the work whereas Chrome spawns a new thread for every page. When a badly written page slows down to a crawl (i.e. leaving Reddit open for more than two minutes), the tabs sharing that process become unresponsive. On multiple occasions I've had to kill tabs that were shown as "loading" because other tabs stopped functioning if they lost the render process lottery. It's not as extreme as people claim and it's certainly not as bad as it was five years ago, but Firefox does have weird freezes and bugs that Chrome seemingly just doesn't have.
On the other hand, I'm convinced part of the reason for slowdowns and problems is that Firefox tries to strip away a lot of the privacy invasions that have become the norm on the modern web. I'll gladly keep taking those slowdowns, but even outside those there's still a lot of work that can be done to bring Firefox on par with Chrome.
No other browser I've used performs this poorly. Even the old, pre-reworked, FF performs much better than that.
But on every machine I've put the new FF on, the
startup time for it ranges from 2-5 minutes
I've never seen that on any machine and again, this is many dozens of computers over the years, including one company where FF was the standard browser for the company enterprise/intranet app so thousands of people were using it all day long.
and the initial load time for web pages is
achingly slow (sometimes up to a minute or so).
It's not a typo. It's also not a particular machine. It's all of my machines.
It's why I stopped using Firefox. It wasn't always like that -- pre-quantum, Firefox was reasonably performant. And post-quantum it was as well (although I never saw the performance gains others reported). I don't remember which release this started happening in, but it was a couple of years ago.
Just to forestall advice -- every time I've mentioned this, people have engaged with me to make sure it's not the usual issues (have I completely erased FF and installed it fresh, am I using extensions, etc.). And many think I'm lying.
But this is my actual experience with Firefox. I was willing to stick with using it on principle despite the fact that post-quantum firefox does a poor job if meeting my browser needs, but I couldn't. It's essentially unusable for me.
Does the issue persist on other networks? I wonder if it's a DNS/proxy/something issue.
I don't know the particulars, but Firefox does some talking over the network at startup. It checks for browser updates, blocklist updates, captive portal detection, etc. I am not certain which if any of these happen at startup, and AFAIK none of these are blocking (but I admittedly have only the vaguest knowledge here)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...
Also just out of curiosity, what OS?
I've not tried with those machines on a different network. I assume it's related to networking in some way. My network is more complex than most. All of these machines are Linux (Debian). I haven't experienced this on Windows machines at work (although I also haven't noticed that Firefox had become any faster on them).
On MacOS and Windows (I can try this on PopOS as well if you like) FF launches instantly with no complaints if the network is down. Which tells me that FF seems to properly handle situations where things are merely unreachable.
The fact that it's hanging for you implies to me that perhaps FF is getting some kind of malformed response from... something on your network. A firewall, a proxy, I don't know.
I've not tried with those machines on a different
network. I assume it's related to networking in some
way. My network is more complex than most.
I don't think it's disingenuous because it's only Firefox that has this issue. Every other browser is fine.
I think there's an edge-condition bug in Firefox that I'm triggering that causes this. I've spent quite a while trying to work this out before giving up entirely. However -- since it's really not at all hard to find people who have performance problems with Firefox generally, there is something going on with it. And it's something that (based on interactions with the dev team) Mozilla seems not willing to worry much about.
All that said, I try very hard to be fair to Mozilla and Firefox, in part because I've been a huge backer of Firefox since the very beginning, and still care.
The things I suspect could make a difference to Firefox marketshare are performance and transformative features.
For performance, UI latency needs to be near-zero to make it feel snappier than Chrome, and JS- and CSS-heavy pages noticeably faster than in Chrome. (Yes, pages shouldn't be so JS- and CSS-heavy, but they are, and users don't care that it's the web developers' fault. The browser that solves that problem wins.)
For features, tabs are one clear example, as were blocking popups, and session restore. Containers, adblock, Pocket integration, and Reader Mode all seem like they could have been this, but they weren't. Big features will be hit-or-miss, and will quickly be copied, but possibly a big deal for a short while.
Perf, of course, is a lot of hard engineering work, and features may be as well, in addition to being potential duds. Things like gnome-keyring feels like a relatively simple quick-win, despite being very low value compared to various other possibilities.
Personally, I thing I switched back to Firefox when they made restarting it when you have a hundred tabs retain the tabs, but not load them until you switch to them. That moved restarting the browser from a big deal to something I can just do whenever. (It was also when Quantum/Servo stuff was happening, but I think it was the tab thing that got me.)
Is Firefox-centric Mozilla still relevant in 2023? No, not really.
People also assume that x is a distraction to the goal of y, but why would it be? If it hasn't happened yet, it probably isn't going to.
At this point, they arguably lost the browser war, even if they made a great browser, it is going to struggle to win meaningful marketshare, and even then, how many people are going to subscribe to Pocket or a VPN? Nowhere near as much as what their search royalties make them, which likely isn't going to last forever in this climate.
What about if Google pulls the plug on their search partnership due to declining Firefox numbers? They're largely dependent on Google. They probably can't pay their CEO $3m salary if that goes South.
Wouldn't they get more royalties if they could attract more users to their web browser?
The browser war isn't going to be won by Mozilla at this point. It's been and gone. Most consumers live in non-browser apps most of the time.
"Techies" have or are moving on because Mozilla's pace of development is woeful, and compatibility is poor. Killing the RSS reader was the final straw for many. Disney advertising in-browser was another major moment.
The idea would be a gambit that you could improve the software sufficiently that it accidentally became actually competitive with chrome.
Right now, it feels like some weird hobby project that falls short of the engineering chops that went into Chrome, and I suspect people can feel this too.
I expect better from Mozilla.
They may not lean into it as much as I'd like, but they still do better than Google or Microsoft in this regard.
Will Microsoft do it just because the potential exists? No.
Mozilla CEO takes a $3m salary and their biggest earner by many magnitudes is a search partnership with Google. Nothing is going to change with how they treat Firefox at a consumer-level until they need to man the battle stations with a rugpull on losing that partnership.
"Why would they lose it?" AI happened and the current economic climate means Google is reducing spending by killing things that don't bring tangible value.
Technically true, but I've become convinced that Microsoft is genuinely incapable of actually accomplishing that.
If I remember correctly the Mozilla foundation is more than Firefox. You also have Thunderbird for example.
I haven't tried to build Firefox for Android in a really long time but I wonder what the level of effort would be to just track the release tags with such a patch applied (i.e. the world's shallowest fork)
That's basically Fennec. Download it from F-Droid. It's basically a clone of Firefox with extensions turned back on.
Maybe you're thinking of Firefox Nightly, which I do run from the Play store and is better than "normal people Firefox" but this for sure is not the good old days of "Let Me Install Violentmonkey not stupid Tapermonkey"
Mozilla is a separate company, with separate employees, that does everything except building Firefox.
(This division was originally created to firewall off the corporate moneys donated to, and influence of corporate developers on, Firefox, from the rest of Mozilla. Back when Google was sponsoring Firefox to use Google as its search engine, their money went exclusively to Firefox Corporation, with none of that money ever going to Mozilla.)
Note that this doesn't mean that Mozilla doesn't build a web browser. Mozilla develop the engine (Gecko/Servo) that goes into Firefox; and they also co-develop some of the Gecko/Servo-based browsers used by various FOSS projects — Tor Browser, for example. This is roughly the same structure as how the open-source Chromium project (which produces its own "Chromium browser") is the basis for the closed-source Google Chrome.
Interestingly, this means that for Firefox Corporation to get features into Gecko, they have to submit PRs "upstream" to Mozilla, who might very well reject them as "only serving corporate interests at the expense of the user." This is quite unlike Chromium, where both Chromium and Chrome are ultimately steered by Google.
In 2005 they said a for profit subsidiary was for revenue flexibility. Where did you learn it was to limit corporate developers influencing Mozilla Foundation?
Google's sponsorship of Firefox continues. Most of Mozilla Foundation's revenue comes from Google through Mozilla Corporation.
Mozilla Corporation employees develop Gecko. They developed Servo until it was transferred to the Linux Foundation. They land code with no sign of Mozilla Foundation review routinely. Can you show a PR Mozilla Foundation rejected as "only serving corporate interests at the expense of the user."?
It took this massive effort 15 years ago to get Firefox onto people's computers back in the day. Mozilla kicked off the web standardization drive and transformed the Internet. That sort of thing is not feasible now because the commercial browsers are damned good.
They're either done or they have to find another way to use their resources to advance their mission. Unsurprisingly, they pick the latter.