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Comment by gustavus | Hacker News Reader

> To commemorate this moment, we are hosting a five-day event at the Alte Münze in Berlin this Oct. 12 to 16 that embodies all of what Mozilla has been, what it aims to be and what it envisions for the internet.

If Mozilla really wanted to reclaim the internet they'd focus their efforts on their flagship product rather than hosting awards ceremonies to "explore the future through four immersive rooms that show what’s possible when internet users reclaim individual expression, inspiration, wonder and community"[sic]

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Mozilla's entire existence as anti-monopoly "paid opposition" seems more and more plausible.

This is the dumbest take i have ever seen, is apple paid opposition? mozilla are paid to have google as the default search engine just the same way google pays apple billions for the right to be the default search in ios

I switched to Firefox when Chrome started blocking/disabling ad blocker extensions. I would rather use Internet Explorer with an ad blocker than Chrome without an ad blocker. I'm really not sure what more one could want from a browser than what Firefox offers.

> what more one could want

The prospect of Firefox surviving?

The prospect of a non-Chrome browser having significant enough sway in defining interoperable web standards to steer much of web tech away, not towards, ad-industry-driven tech like Topics et al.

The status quo is never something to wish for

Being able to easily use different profiles, I like to have one profile for work and one for personal stuff. Chrome/Edge implementation is really nice, you can have different taskbar icons, different theme, history, bookmarks, etc.

The modern Firefox solution are the containers mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Basic UI for that feature is part of default install, and that basic UI covers exactly the work/personal/banking/porn usecase.

Also, Firefox still supports the original Mozilla concept of multiple profiles (which probably even comes from Netscape 4) which is more or less the same thing as Chromium profiles. IIRC the command line options involved in that are same, except last time I cared about that (~2017) Chromium did not have an GUI profile selection/management dialog

A commitment by its makers to advantace the product, to regain its pathetically dwindled market share?

Oh no, nevermind, the company wants to virtue signal and shmooz. Carry on.

I miss Chrome tab groups. Firefox doesn’t seem to have an elegant equivalent.

Firefox has an extension (developed by Mozilla I believe) that allows you to have multiple tabs open of the same website but logged into different accounts. This was handy when I had to sign in to different Azure accounts every day at my old job. Basically prevented me from needing to open multiple Private windows or use Firefox for one, Firefox Developer Edition for another, etc.

I know this is different from tab groups, but it's something I don't think exists in Chrome, at least not as a Google-maintained extension. I've encountered some really awful 3rd party Chrome extensions.

Yep, this extension is called "Multi-Account Containers" and I highly recommend it as it allows me to be logged on in different contexts without polluting sessions on non-containerized tabs. I have a container for each specific Workspace within Google. This makes it much easier to avoid accidentally logging in with Google in some random website that wants my account info.

I have a RedditSucks container that allows my account to not be linked to anything else I do, and have a company account accessible if I need it. Really a great feature.

Try Sidbery extension.

Not sure whether this is a good recommendation at the moment, after their major update last week seems to have been a big fail.

> when Chrome started blocking/disabling ad blocker extensions.

That has never actually happened (yet). Though it is true that firefox offers APIs for better blocking.

HDR support, I have this fancy monitor that's great for watching content on but I can't view it at full quality because of my browser.

The same can be said for Safari. It doesn't surprise me that YouTube has inferior support on browsers other than Chrome/Chromium base. Likewise there are features in Safari that are exclusive to Safari.

I don't really consume HDR content through Youtube,so the Chromium relation doesn't have much bearing on my situation. Although it does make me sad that the only browser that really caters to what I want from a technical perspective is Chromium, I'd love to continue daily driving Firefox.

Is there a lot of HDR content on the web?

Some youtube videos have it now, but not really. I ripped all my blurays and have them hosted on Jellyfin for consumption which I prefer to use as just a tab in my browser than their dedicated player.

No, not yet. 4K is still relatively niche as well.

Firefox on iOS still doesn’t support content blockers, or web extensions - something supported by Safari and other browsers on iOS.

At this point, I think they are really just incapable of doing the right things for promoting their products and cause. I'm recently getting a lot of Ads for Mozilla on Instagram, but surprisingly they are the most useless ads I've ever seen. They tell absolute nothing, communicate nothing and are probably just pure waste of money. It's just random pictures, without any text, no message, no logo, without the advertiser-name in the corner, I wouldn't even know it is from Mozilla.

That feels a bit negative and hostile. They can do both. Price of hosting this event is, hopefully, negligible compared to money that goes into Firefox development.

We all here would prefer technical goals, but raising awareness and social projects are, for better or worse, other major Mozilla goals.

> That feels a bit negative and hostile. They can do both.

Why they don't do it ? Why they copied the Chrome interface ? Why they use Google as a service ?

> Why they copied the Chrome interface ?

Because Chrome did a lot of things right and copying it is a benefit to most users.

Getting rid of the status bar and menu bar comes to mind (both can still be added back in firefox). Or the unified address bar, most people WANT it to search (and again, in firefox you can disable that).

> Why they use Google as a service ?

Is this really a question? It's of course for the money. But guess what? When they briefly switched to bing, people were just switching back to Google. Because for better or worse, people expect/want Google Search.

The firefox UI works like chrome, but looks worse, calls attention to itself while chrome stays in the background. They want to look different, but they can't do the same thing better. If they did an actually different interface, like tree-style tabs, they might find a niche.

Tbh the browser is alright.. the problem is that nobody uses it and nobody tests their code on it. I'm not sure how (or if) they can fix that.

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