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Comment by KingOfCoders | Hacker News Reader

"Firefox to be free and open source. "

And die.

And spending >$6.000.000.000 to do it.

As a 30 years user, it's just so sad to see Firefox going down down down. No innovation, no progress since the introduction of tabs. At least the sell-customer-data-for-marketing-experiments phase is done. And at least it's not unusable slow like it was for some years, so the bare minimum works. And it somehow survived the XUL/extension debacle. But it's 2024 and I'm through my 10th vertical tab extension (Tab Center Reborn for now) since using FF. How is FF supposed to work with >20 tabs open? The only reason to use it for me is it's open source and not owned by M$ or Google. Would there be another open source browser with traction, I'd be gone in a second.

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Every thread about Firefox there's a comment like this and I truly don't know if we're using the same browsers. Firefox keeps getting better and faster, while chrome is getting more bloated and aggravating.

"better"

What does better mean? What is better in the last 10 years? And I'm not trolling, I'm interested in what 10 things FF got better for you in the last 10 years.

Say, I have been buying on Amazon 10 years ago using FF.

In which ways has FF made that better or easier for me as a user? Can't think of anything with Amazon.

The only things I can think of: More secure when misclicking somewhere and better video on Youtube.

Multi-account containers are a feature I use tirelessly. Standardized add-ons are great too, so people can release one add-on and hit multiple browsers. I also really like Firefox sync for sending bookmarks/tabs between devices. Firefox is also extremely fast nwadays, and comparatively easy on system memory.

These are things that have improved in the last decade. I also like the fact that FF isn't owned by an Ad company that pushes binaries supposedly built from an open-source project controlled by an Ad company.

Containers and first-party isolation in FF are my killer features. Echoing your comments to the GP post, that didn't exist a decade ago and is genuinely one of the best improvements they've made in that time.

I just wish they made vertical tabs built-in. Or at least made enough UI hooks that extensions could do it properly (instead of duplicating the tab bar via side panels).

Yes, that's a major irritation. Or at least allow me to switch off the built in tabs when I have an extension that provides that functionality. It would be absolutely trivial to do so.

Firefox's built in password manager is pretty good, ten years ago you had to install a separate extension for that.

The synchronization of browser tabs and history across devices is also very good nowadays, so if you look at some product on Amazon with your phone on the way home, you can continue the same browsing session on your regular PC right away.

There are also multiple profiles. That helps in case you have multiple Amazon accounts like one for shopping, one to mooch off your cousin's prime video subscription, and one to work with the AWS console for your workplace. I think you couldn't do that out of the box 10 years ago.

Good points, I concede for some users and perhaps the majority there is progress.

(For me - and probably many others - though I use 1password since the beginning, have 50 tabs open so sync is a challenge and never understood to use the profiles, perhaps I'm too stupid or the UI is bad)

When it came out I thought profiles was a good idea, eager to use it, but it's often difficult to say what is in what profile. AWS is clear, and banking, but reading some articles? For me to work the UI would need to be smooth so I don't need to switch profiles just because something is in the other. Perhaps I'm not focused enough ;-) It then was too complicated for me to use and switch and I dropped it.

Writing this in FF, where would I need to click to switch profiles? I have a drop down on the right (it's not in there), I have a drop down on the left (also no profiles), I have a menu at the top(can't find it there) and a drop down in my sidebar (no profiles in there).

Sync has no problem with lots of tabs - I routinely have multiple hundred open on multiple devices and firefox sync just does it's thing without complaining.

> where would I need to click to switch profiles?

Go to about:profiles. From there, you can create and switch between profiles. This is not as convenient as it perhaps should be, but I did find one add-on that claims to simplify the process [1].

[1] https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher

Will take a look

"Create, edit, delete and switch between browser profiles seamlessly in Firefox. Inspired by Chrome's profile switcher."

;-)

It is an extension for Firefox, but one created by Mozilla. It's official in that sense, but it does seem a little strange it's not included by default.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...

I have, at this moment, 5501 tabs open. Sync does just fine.

How do you work with 5501 synced tabs on your phone? I didn't mean technically but UI? I have a 38" on my desktop which is 30x (?) larger than my phone?

On my phone, I'll just open a new tab and not even bother trying to get to the other tabs. The syncing is more phone -> computer than the other way around. And, beyond that, syncing is more useful for me for between computers.

In Brave one can press command-shift-a to get a search bar for your open tabs. Otherwise I periodically consolidate similar tabs into same windows. It would be nice to have an ontological browser for tabs but search is normally sufficient.

On a phone iOS Safari has “tab groups” that effectively act as windows in a desktop browser. It also has a tab search feature.

* sync of tabs and passwords across devices __that always works__

* multi account containers

* better implementation of standards than chrome (i swear to god chrome date pickers...)

* cool privacy features like blocking facebook properties, email relays, etc

* smaller memory footprint than competitors

to your point about things being worse than they were 10 years ago, in part i agree. the web as a whole has gotten much more bloated and frustrating than it was a decade ago. pages take gobs of bandwidth and memory, everything is in a walled garden or infected with facebook's tentacles. in terms of experience, imo it's really hard to separate the browser from the browsed because the end result is that the experience of using the web in 2024 is downright unpleasant, where it wasn't really before, but i just don't see that as mozilla's fault. i think without mozilla it would be even worse, and it can always get worse...

Better video on youtube? Youtube works like shit on firefox.

Open 20 tabs and you get delays. (probably intentional gutting by google)

On my one PC I have a Firefox instance with over 2500 tabs open. I'd guess about 5% of those are youtube.

I often open a string of 30+ tabs of youtube to watch in one go, and it works fine for me.

The FF I used a decade ago was far more embedded and matched to my workflow than the present day one, including more efficient use of screen real estate and far more powerful plug ins. As far as I'm concerned it's been a slow and steady slide backwards. Yes, it's more secure (probably) and it is faster (but I don't notice that all that much because I very aggressively block bloat on the sites I visit).

Firefox keeps getting better?

Are there any major features or reason that chrome is better these days?

Are we only allowed to compare to chrome?

I miss session manager, tab mix plus, a few others.

I really miss having a gesture extension that runs at the GUI level, so it doesn't stop working while pages are loading and lag all the time and not work in certain places. And that one isn't even about XUL, they simply refuse to implement the mouse callback in the new system.

Yes.

For a long time, chrome has had significantly better memory use. I really tried firefox again 2 or 3 years ago. If you have to keep jira open all day for work, it was unusable.

Regardless, your comment illustrates why Baker should have been fired for cause. Browsers are not really evaluated on technical merits past a minimal quality threshold. Rather, browser marketshare is built on distribution -- like any business.

And firefox was incompetent at that. Google has effectively used search; Microsoft effectively uses their OS; Apple effectively uses their OS, etc. And all products work this way: this is the reason Slack sold to Salesforce, ie Microsoft was using Office's distribution to effectively clobber Slack with Teams. The same reason that Google pays billions of dollars to Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine.

What could have been done here? I dunno, but focusing on technical measures is not the right lens. BD is and was the necessary component, and that could have started with companies that don't want to see Chrome be the sole browser in the world. What could you have done to get eg Facebook or other companies with large web properties to ask their users to use Firefox? What partnership could have been forged with Microsoft when they were broadly uninterested in browsers? What could you have done to make Firefox a better browser for technical users specifically? etc.

Firefox could have build a niche, e.g. be clearly the best browser for developers - like native autoreload API support. Or the most secure one. Or be the best browser for power users. Or or or. But you need a vision for that.

Apple started their comeback with developers who liked the combination of a slick UI, commercial software and a unix shell (Got a G4 Cube around 2002 or so, then a Macbook). Dominating that niche made them hip and then everyone wanted one. The rest is history.

Everyone uses Linux, even if MS did everything to push MS on servers. And don't forget Apple spend millions (billions?) on pushing OSX to the server two (I had some XServe and XSans). But Linux dominated, and not because of Red Hat.

Many people and perhaps in the future everyone uses Postgres, even if MS and Oracle spend millions (billions?) to prevent this.

Are there other browsers that have successfully built a niche? And how does one use that to bring in enough money to sustain a reasonable sized organization? To me it neither seems easy, nor any guarantee of success.

Well Mozilla got >$6.000.000.000 - so I do thing this is enough money. Do you think they would have needed more money?

Brave currently tries to grow from the secure niche. I think Chrome started from the developer niche, with developer tools, being embeddable, open sourcing a rendering engine etc.

I am not sure clawing back a significant amount of marketshare can be done with any amount of money. As long as there is no access to a distribution channel that is similar in size and low friction to what the other browsers have, it will at least be extremely tough. Far from "easy".

Vivaldi has been around for 9 years now, and they manage to get by without regular donations from Google.

Firefox has yet to top Firefox 57.

Bring back multi-row tabs.

Actually, while we're at it, bring back XUL. And apologize to all the addon developers and users they straight up lied to.

> Bring back multi-row tabs.

I can't live without multi-row tabs but it's totally doable in current Firefox. It's now possible with just CSS. It still breaks every so often when they make big UI changes but it's manageable.

It's the reason that Firefox is my main browser.

I played that game for a while, it gets old. Also the UX is not nearly as good as TMP when it comes to moving tabs around.

If that's your main reason have you tried vivaldi?

Vivaldi is great on paper (if you don't care about it being F/OSS), but it's wildly unstable compared to all other major browsers including Firefox. Every time I try to use it as a primary, I end up running into something blocking within a week, reporting it, and switching back to whatever.

Which is a shame, because, stability aside, it really is the best option among Blink-based browsers, at least for the power user. No containers, sadly, but the problem there is Blink itself.

I've been led to believe that xul played a large part in the memory leaks, security issues, and poor performance Firefox was known for.

dropping anything goes xul was a large improvement in security. Extensions still have a lot of power.

Why not drop the browser entirely and get maximum security? Firefox without TMP is not worth using for me.

I can only think of @scope in css

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:scope

I have no problem with Firefox staying as it is. But do not push new products via it. Focusing on the things other companies cannot copy (privacy, extensibility for the user) is definitely the angle for Firefox IMHO.

It becomes better after it became worse. It's not that hard to make it better after you burned all the bridges who lifted your product into the sky. Though, at this point, there isn't much left anymore outside the core-abilities.

Firefox has been always the best browser as it is the only open and free (as free from adversarial incentives).

Unfortunately many people (especially here) have advertised Chrome instead, naively believing Chrome to have these important properties.

Chrome has always been the controlled frontend for Google business and Google is readily willing to hurt the browser to aid its business and keep its dominance.

Blink is also open and free enough. The wide usage of it, and the manifold companies pushing successfully against Google, is proof enough. Firefox on the other side is not free from hostile behavior itself. The manifold bullshit that Mozilla did over the years telling.

And in general, your requirement is not matching the demand of the majority of users. I don't give a f** if something is open or liberated, I'm a user, I care firstly whether it's doing what I need, and being open&free are just tools to balance the powerplay of the creators.

But if not enough people are using the browser, they have no power anyway. And if there is only one developer, then we as the users have not way to balance our power against them. Mozilla has shown over the last decade that the user has no power in their game, which shows that free and open software in itself has little meaning.

The multiple blink-browsers are showing better how this is supposed to work, then the one project who always claims this as one of their main goals.

Majority of the Blink browser users are Chrome users, followed by Edge users and then somewhere come Opera users, what depending on the polls is on par with Firefox users or far behind it.

But none of this matters as I was talking about browsers, not browser engines, that are not the same thing and none of the Blink browsers listed above are open source browsers.

Majority of the users are using the browser they are told to use. If everyone is telling them to use Chrome, they use it. And there practically has not been much resistance to Chrome. How many IT people have told over the years to not user Chrome, and use Firefox instead? There was huge resistance to IE, but not to Chrome, and it pays now its dividends.

Is Chrome now doing what the users want? How many people are upset about the latest moves by Google. For me it was obvious result for long time, I was actually surprised that it didn't happen earlier. Now based on the reactions, many users didn't expect it.

Chrome is better for websites that are specifically tweak to run well only on Chrome. Surprisingly, such websites are not trivial in amount and traffic.

A personal gripe is FF's refusal to implement WebSerial or any form of screencast functionality.

Just use a screencast tool. It's a browser, not an OS.

I'd rather not use something that's less convenient, less consistent, and generally worse.

Firefox definitely gets better, as much as it frustrates me sometimes. It's not hard to come up with examples, I've yet to see any other browser use persistent or temporary containers per tab and per site - just to name the most obvious.

7 years later Firefox still hasn't caught up to 2017 Firefox in functionality. Using ancient versions of Firefox isn't an option, so I switched to Vivaldi.

"Firefox keeps getting better?"

In which way?

Its “appeal has become more selective”

> No innovation

Except for Rust.

I thought we were talking about the browser, but yes I like Rust a lot, although I switched to Go because the benefits of the borrow checker were just not worth the effort in my use cases. I would wish more main stream languages would experiment with owner transfer though

   a = 3
   do(a)
   // can't use a

> the benefits of the borrow checker were just not worth the effort in my use cases

Hot take: it's usually not, and people are using Rust in a lot of places where it's the wrong choice. It looks a lot more appealing when you're writing an OS or a browser.

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