What We're Working on in Firefox
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Oh no, more of this.
What about less used options? How much slower? How much less discoverable?
Desktop applications are already for power users almost by definition, let’s not slow them down for the sake of reducing “clutter”. Absolutely annoying trend of the last 15 years or so.
I get it, though. FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person. I just wish that it (and other applications) would at least have an "expert mode" that isn't aimed just at the casual user.
The problem with Firefox isn't the UI, the problem with Firefox is mismanagement by the board that has been captured by Google and the lack of proper antitrust action against Google by the US and EU.
If Mozilla could maintain 10% market share in perpetuity and also keep signing search licensing agreements with Google that works just fine for Google. Sadly it has a lot less than that.
Assuming that "surviving" is good and "reasonable" is... what... 3% and dropping?
I'm sure Google would like a slightly healthier captured 'competitor' but that doesn't mean that they didn't put them in this place through subversive practices.
(Checks calendar) ugh, it really has been 15 years since they ground up the url box + search box into the big mystery meat mash-up that mostly works but is so damn obnoxious when it doesn't.
You can't disable search suggestions on Chrome (I wonder why...) This is the main reason I am still on Firefox despite the weird UI design choices... which can easily be fixed with that script :
Whether or not you can enable the search bar is unrelated to this. You can enable the search bar without changing the behavior of the "awesome bar". In my personal preferred configuration, I don't enable the search bar and I disable searching in the awesome bar. When I search, I use the search engine's website. That's just my personal preference and I'm not recommending it to others. I'm just mentioning it to illustrate that the two things are independent of each other.
But yes, it's time to give Firefox another spin. Hey, looks like youtube is un-broken in base FF! Keeping FF "base" for debug purposes is far more important than fixing my petty grievances so I have to pass on the tips, but I appreciate the sentiment. Here's hoping its next stint in the "daily driver" seat is a long one.
Yeah... the problem is that these people are frankly never going to use Firefox unless driven to by their techie friends, and Firefox seems to have given up on the power user market that they used to own.
The trend in UIs to use space and reduce interface actions to the most important actions is both aesthetically more pleasing and more functional. I do not look back to the time where every interface cramped 20 buttons in a tiny space and five of the buttons did the same thing. (looking at you, KDE settings menus)
Aesthetics is a matter of taste, of course, so there's no right or wrong there. Only if you like it or not.
But the trend towards minimalist UIs is something that actively gets in my way and makes the software more difficult for me to actually use. That's why I dislike it.
The only company worse for this is Microsoft. Any google search for a setting has been outdated, the location has changed, the wording has changed.
I'm completely convinced that there are FAAMG plants in FOSS company that have 1 job: Make pointless changes to waste engineering hours. Firefox and LibreOffice convinced me of this.
Or precisely because it was not enough to have the better product? Don't tell me you believe that the better product usually wins. Marketing wins.
This was the time of normies. All the @aol addresses still in use were minted here.
Which says that people were trying to learn how to use their computer, right? Nowadays professors need to teach their university students what a file is... I can definitely accept that the users were more technically-inclined in 2004 than in 2014.
Microsoft did it to themselves, IE4 was a great browser for its time. It was bundled in Windows, for free, it was anticompetitive, but its technical merits made a big part of its adoption. But as it became old, and Microsoft did nothing to improve the situation. When Firefox came out, it didn't need advertising from a tech giant. It was a godsend for developers (it followed standards!), who advertised for it on their webpages, user tried it and loved the cool new features (tabs!) and installed it on their friends computers, the whole tech world except for Microsoft rooted for Firefox because it was just so much better.
When trade commissions arrived, the job was already done, Firefox had enough critical mass that it couldn't be ignored and IE-only sites were becoming a thing of the past (except for corporate intranets, these have always been the worst). If anything, they helped Chrome more than they helped Firefox as it was just launching during that time.
Marketing alone doesn't win for browsers. It is really easy to switch browsers, all it takes is to have some semi-geek friend to come by and say "hey, try this new browser, it is just like the old one, but better", and if it really is better, that's it. That's how Firefox was winning in 2010. And look how hard Microsoft is trying with Edge, and fail, that's because Edge has nothing over Chrome, unfortunately, Firefox don't have much over Chrome either (yeah, privacy, maybe 5% care).
I strongly believe it was sufficient. Which does not mean that Chrome was not better when it came out. But most people really don't want to try new tech: because you were excited by Chrome back then does not mean, by far, that everyone on the planet was.
Funny how different people's experiences can be. When Chrome came out in 2008 I remember trying it just for fun (more than once), and it never clicked with me, so I stayed with Firefox.
What was harder for me was keeping with all the unnecessary redesigns, empty eye candy, dumbing down, the Fennec debacle (exensions used to work, then they suddenly stopped for a bunch of years; plus, no keyword search for no reason).
By that time staying away from Google had become a goal in itself, but I understand who migrated to chrome.
Anyway, I am firmly convinced Chrome won because of Google's abuse of its web search monopoly. The innovations that its team introduced were groundbreaking from a technical point of view, but Firefox was a perfectly capable browser.
Sure, for the average Joe I might buy this, but also it's the same kind of people who can't tell the difference between the address bar and the search field on the Google homepage, so I'm still kinda skeptical they don't actually refer a UI with as few options and buttons as possible....
> Unless your friends specifically prefer Chrome because of UX reasons, it could be unrelated.
... But I absolutely can't follow you here. What other reasons should there be? That that one or two websites they infrequently visit don't work? If you can't be arsed to just use chrome for these specific occasions and stay with the customizable, powerful alternative for the rest of the time, I don't believe you're someone who'd like a UI with more than three buttons anyways.
(And on that note I've yet to encounter a site that doesn't work in Firefox, but maybe that actually is a thing in places other than Europe...)
"One thing Mozilla does have going for it is a lot of money—more than $1 billion in cash reserves, according to its latest financial statement. The primary source of this capital is Google, which pays Mozilla to be the default search engine on the Firefox home page. Those payments, which started in 2005, have been increasing—up 50% over the past decade, to more than $450 million, even as the total number of Firefox users has plummeted. In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue."
source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...
I read it as: "If Google says jump we jump".
You can hardly blame them for trying to emulate what's currently working for everyone else when everything you've tried so far has led to your downfall.
People would move back to firefox if it were still anything like firefox.
But I am not convinced most people see it like this. Most of the people I know honestly don't make the difference between Firefox and Chrome: they just use what they know. I think Chrome won those people because Google managed to convince them that "Internet == Chrome", not because they consciously chose Chrome as a better alternative.
And those people are not Firefox's audience. They don't care about their browser as long as it loads facebook.com, so they're just going to use whatever browser is more popular or pushed harder onto them, which is Chrome. If Firefox positions itself as just a Chrome clone, there's no reason to use it over Chrome.
If Firefox wants to survive, it needs to position itself as a niche alternative for people who actually have preferences for what their browser is like, and do not like Chrome. Of course, it won't ever be as popular as Chrome, but that battle was lost a long time ago.
Or... I'm still hoping that the EU Digital Markets Act may help.
Over the years, I have converted people to Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Safari. The only common denominator is that they all strongly prefer the one they use now.
Getting rid of most extensions and removing about:config are two big wtf decisions. All that does is piss off power users, which are the main advocates for this browser. Plus so many other baffling changes to remove or worsen existing features, along with the pointless UI reshuffles.
Edit: I should clarify that about:config has only been removed from mobile Firefox, so far at least.
What?
about:config is right where it's always been, unless I've missed something?
From your link, there are problems that are specific to `about:config` only on mobile, due to Android OS and GeckoView API specifics:
- There are preferences that …is reset when the app restarts.
- There are many preferences that …do nothing.
- There are preferences …which breaks interacting with some websites.
- There are platform preferences that …result in startup crashes …and reinstalling results in the deleting of data like bookmarks, passwords, history, etc.
Look, it’s not like we’re insensitive to the desire for configuration; it’s that we know that on Android there are footguns that don’t exist on desktop!
We want to figure out a way to do this in a way that makes it difficult to break GeckoView. I’m sorry that this isn’t good enough for many of you, but with all due respect, you’re not the ones on the receiving end when somebody breaks their browser because they didn’t know what they were doing!
Kinda reasonable, honestly? It sounds like more than just "page may render funny" types of footguns. Unknown quantities of unlabelled "Lose All My Data" buttons are probably what this site would call an antipattern.
> They're talking about the mobile application, where only a small subset of extensions was available for a few years.
On the above Reddit link, they also explain the extensions thing was because they were "literally not done implementing the APIs yet" and focused on the "highest priority extensions". So, the "big wtf decision" might be why they released it in that state, rather than "getting rid of most extensions".
If some settings can cause a crash (and you don't have a complete list), create a separate launcher that only edits the settings in about:config without ever trying to run other Fenix code, so the user always has a way to revert settings if they're causing a crash on startup.
If some settings can be applied but are reset the next time the app runs, save the setting value itself and then re-apply it on each startup.
Other problems like settings doing nothing or breaking websites are just ordinary bugs. Until they're fixed, the user can just refrain from using those settings, or revert them if they cause problems. These sorts of issues are acceptable for users knowingly mucking around in about:config, it's fine, fix the bugs when you get time. It's no reason to disable access to the other settings that actually work in the meantime.
They just haven't had anybody to spend engineering time doing so yet. Perhaps:
https://codetribute.mozilla.org/projects/fenix
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/contributing_c...
We may disagree with Mozilla's priorities, but they do have finite resources. E.G. Should the extensions API have been delayed even more than it already was, to first build this separate `about:config` launcher as a kludge?
They're not being wilfully bullheaded in this case, is what I mean. The "P5"/"Enhancement" Bugzilla issue is open, but unassigned.
But this has been the other major criticism of Mozilla. They take the money they get from Google and spend it on not-Firefox when Firefox market share should be their top priority, because if that number goes to zero they're defunct.
about:config already has a warning when you first open it that you'll screw up your settings if you don't know what you're doing. So if someone borks their install as a result, it isn't Mozilla engineer's job to apologize or hand hold them through it.
Every software until the 2010s (Windows itself, with its registry) has had this implicit disclaimer that you forfeit all official support if you dick around with the internals in an non standard way. So why is it now at the other extreme of 'fuck all power users, we will only target those who can't walk and chew gum simultaneously' ?
>While FF is still the best browser for me (barely)
Give Pale Moon a try and ignore the FF fanboy propaganda of it being oLd aNd iNSeCuRe. It isn't, it's regularly updated to keep up with Google dominated web standards and security patches, and runs on an independent fork of Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. It is not a mere rebuild like Librewolf, Waterfox etc but a separate browser that retains all the full customizabiity of pre 2017 Firefox with full XUL extension and NPAPI plugin support.
I am still butthurt
What extensions did they get rid of?
I think all in all getting sandboxing as well as making it easier to provide cross-browser extensions was worth the breaking change.
Optional sandboxing can be good because users can have more confidence that something can't hurt them. But it can also be bad because users will have more confidence that something can't hurt them, and then it does anyway.
Meanwhile the ability to exercise arbitrary permissions given the user's authorization is something we've lost. And what have we gained, when the user just runs how_to_actually_uninstall_mcafee.avi.exe and gets the malware regardless?
> what have we gained, when the user just runs how_to_actually_uninstall_mcafee.avi.exe and gets the malware regardless?
Nothing would happen if I double-click that file, since it doesn't run on my OS. On the other hand, a compromised browser extension could deal an incredible amount of damage to me.
Are you saying that because we can't protect all users from all harm, we should just give up?
The problem is the reverse. Some permissions are now considered "too dangerous" for the extension, so there is no facility to grant them even if the user wants the extension to do that and it has a good reason to.
> Nothing would happen if I double-click that file, since it doesn't run on my OS.
In which case the website could have fingerprinted your browser and served you the one that does.
> Are you saying that because we can't protect all users from all harm, we should just give up?
I'm saying that we should give people the tools and information they need to decide if and to what extent they can trust something, instead of presuming to decide for them.
Requiring them to maintain two completely different extension APIs (the old XUL-based one and Web Extensions) would work too but seems excessive.
The problem is new WebExtensions APIs are not welcome.
And ironically for all the talk of making it more secure, the amount of cross browser malware has only shot up since Mozilla decided to dump XUL in favor of copying Chrome's extension system.
What Mozilla promised would have been worth it. Parity with Chrome's APIs. APIs to support popular features of old extensions. Support for extension developers to develop new APIs. But they abandoned these promises.
And they managed the transition badly. They chose an arbitrary deadline before evaluating scope or designing a migration path. They held the arbitrary deadline as they missed estimates. Extension developers didn't know when or if APIs they needed would be implemented. And no version of Firefox supported old extensions and reasonably complete WebExtensions APIs. These decisions made many problems for developers and users. And this was shortly after many developers spent much effort making their XUL extensions multi process compatible or converting them to sandboxed extensions.
Hopefully, they'll offer some way to turn this off.
Put them in sub-menus?
I really don't see what's bad about doing user research and organizing feature discoverability by importance (rather than, say, profitability, which a for-profit browser might be tempted to do).
Meanwhile monitors and their resolutions have grown tremendously, so there's a lot more space for things. Yet they'd rather you give up control and argue that the tiny extra amount of space you get is a good idea.
> Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500.
> Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible.
Wow, that ... actually is what users have been asking for, for ages. Nice.
> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.
Oh, there's the other foot dropping. I wonder how SeaMonkey is doing...
How about it they continued to iterate on container tabs and make it possible to pattern match urls to containers without a 3rd party addon.
At least that's the behavior you get with Google Container and (Mozilla's own!) Facebook Container extensions. Twitter Container gets it right. Having it centralized could remove plenty of potential failure points.
I just accidentally clicked at a YouTube link from a comment on this very page and couldn't get back!
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
So multiple profiles are seemingly difficult to get right/fully isolated. I hope Firefox doesn't have similar limitations.
Holding the "option" key is even somewhat of an UI convention on macOS to allow opening an alternative media library (e.g. for Photos, Music aka iTunes etc.), yet Firefox maps it to "startup in safe mode".
[Desktop Entry]
Actions=new-private-window;new-window;profile-manager-window
Categories=Network;WebBrowser
Exec=firefox --name firefox %U
---snip---
[Desktop Action profile-manager-window]
Exec=firefox --ProfileManager
Name=Profile Manager
> I hope Firefox doesn't have similar limitations.
I hope Firefox doesn't implement MDM at all, or at least provides a non-negotiable way for the user to opt out of it on a per-profile basis.
Personal profiles on your work computer? That's a no for me. The only account I brought to my work computer was my Github's one. And I'd rather use Incognito Mode or another browser if I want to do something I did not want associated with my google account.
I rarely have more than about 300 to be honest, how do you keep track?
I don't. I usually work with just the latest subset of a few dozen or so, the rest just sits there until I decide that it's time to close them all (like I did last week, so I'm at just 700 right now). I also use vertical tabs, see my other comment here for how it looks like.
Keeping tabs open lets me quickly context-switch, which is super helpful when you get distracted and don't remember what you have worked on an hour ago. No need to clean them up, as they get eventually unloaded, but still remain quickly accessible if needed (which is much less cumbersome than the history view which I never really use unless trying to find something I was on months ago).
basically something a google PM thought of so you can shop incognito and not be incognito.
ok?
> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.
Stop it. Gnome-ification is incredibly user hostile. Almost every time folks "simplify" a UI, they actually make it far more complicated instead.
If your users now have to use dconf or userChrome.css to do the things they are accustomed to doing, you have not simplified anything.
I think it is very much possible, very much needed by lots of software out there, but indeed it’s hard.
The hardest part is not alienating existing users when messing with muscle memory.
You can only donate to MoFo, and indeed it doesn't spend much (if anything) paying Firefox staff. This is because Firefox staff is on the MoCo payroll, which gets its revenue mostly from their search engine deal with Google. MoCo actually pays MoFo to use the trademarks that are owned by MoFo.
The relationship between Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation can make some details confusing. But most people who claim what they did never looked at Mozilla finances in my experience.
Get pissed at tax law, not Mozilla. Mozilla Foundation cannot legally funnel tax-exempt donations into the development of products for a for-profit entity (Mozilla Corporation). That would be a crime.
> You can expect even faster, smoother browsing on Firefox, thanks to quicker page loads and startup times – all while saving more of your phone’s battery life.
and regarding privacy
> we’ve worked hard to make things like translation and PDF editing in Firefox happen locally on your device, so you don’t have to ship off your personal data to a server farm for a company to use it how they see fit
– so they seem to have ticked your boxes, but they've also committed the sins of boasting about design and used the "AI" buzzword.
Yes, "most people" don't care about "adding alt text to PDFs" but then most people don't even know what accessibility means. For the people who do need it, it's essential, and I think it would be awesome if it happens on-device instead of giving google/amazon/microsoft a description of every pdf image a blind person might want described.
They did; they've been pushing on speed and privacy for a long time. It mostly turns out that the problem isn't usually technical superiority, unfortunately. (The problem is that Microsoft shoves Edge in users' faces every chance they get, and Google has been giving Chrome an unfair advantage for ages (notice that when people complain about Firefox being slow, it's usually on Google sites).)
Anytime Firefox works on UI stuff, people seem to get really annoyed they aren't working on something else. You mention that "Reorganizing menus or adding alt text to PDFs won't make any impact on user adoption", I think it's the exact opposite. There is no greater thing the average everyday Joe cares more about than the UI, and if they just called it good 10 years ago, the project would be in an even worse state.
As another Firefox active user, I say this has nothing at all to do with it. I use Firefox because it lets me control what I need to control to be productive, but I recognize this isn't why most people used Firefox at its peak. 99% of the reason Firefox got so big was that IE was so awful. Edge is serviceable, so that takes away the vast majority of Firefox's former user base.
Firefox isn't going to grow as big as it was before Edge came along unless one of the major consumer OS provides a broken default browser on its platform and allows Firefox to run on its platform (iOS fulfills only one of the requirements). It won't grow as big as it was before Chrome came along unless both of the earlier requirements are met and Firefox renders Google sites better than Chrome.
And even that “requirement” isn’t filled to anywhere the same degree — Safari has its issues but IE was on a different plane of existence in terms of brokenness, with some of the barest of basics being absent or needing hacks to make work (remember the DirectX filter hacks required just to have transparency support for PNGs?).
There's been a proliferation of conflicting just-so stories purporting to explain the history of Firefox's browser market share, and they seem to relate to idiosyncratic preferences for customization instead of actual market dynamics.
I don't think there's a single piece of software I've gotten more utility out of in all that time. It's definitely not perfect, but we'd be in a worse world without it.
It was just such a different release cadence.
But Mozilla leadership did not have an interest in this, in light of endless google money. Google essentially captured Mozilla back in the day.
Now people have got used to ads because they only could chose between browsers that don't protect them.
Brave is trying to correct the mistake of FF and is attracting a small userbase, but not large enough to make a big difference, because the times have changed a lot.
Now with the new management at Mozilla and the dim outlook for the next 5 years, the realization is kicking in that listening to users is actually important. But the elephant in the room is the contracts with large ad-based search engines.
Sure, but would the users have sided with FF? I'm not convinced. The users use whatever BigTech tells them to use, that's how I see it.
> Brave is trying to correct the mistake of FF
Brave is Chromium. I don't see how this would even begin correcting the mistakes of FF. The one thing FF does right is that it is not Chromium.
But that's the problem, isn't it? Google controls Chromium, everybody uses Chromium, so Google controls the web.
The web is more than tracking and ads. Chromium is not an ad engine.
but they certainly care about the search engine. I remember several years ago when Firefox changed their default search from Google to Yahoo, so many clients that we supported complained that IT's response was just to switch everyone over to chrome.
To be fair the biggest issue was that yahoo was worse with dangerous ads in their results then Google was the time.
Yes, I run my own independent search engine[0].
> successful
Now that's the challenging part, especially since Mozilla needs to fund browser development. The initial differentiation for a Mozilla search would have been difficult, but at their peak they had 30%+ market share, and if the default search on Firefox was Mozilla Search then they might have been able to make it all work financially. DuckDuckGo makes over $100 million in revenue per year[1], if a Mozilla Search made as much money annually, then even though it's below their current $500 million search contract with Google, with some fiscal responsibility they probably would have had enough to support a search engine and browser development concurrently.
[0] https://ichi.do/
[1] https://techreport.com/statistics/software-web/duckduckgo-st...
One cannot compete with those who hold the choke points. Google owned the Web when they launched Chrome. Microsoft and Apple own desktop and mobile defaults. With three major competitors setting defaults, nagging users, and aggressively developing their browsers, Firefox was doomed.
Only unskippable browser ballots, with random order, and outlawing promotion of owns own browser from a dominant business would help.
My argument is that short of ballots and anti-trust enforcement, nothing could have stood against three chokepoint-holding and well resourced competitors.
With Chrome I can drag a tab and it moves with me, with Firefox the tab being dragged blocks the view. Also since with Chrome, the tab moves with the mouse I can with one drag move a tab and use Windows' snap-to-edge feature. This is a two-step process with Firefox.
Firefox is an underdog, it should focus on making the UI familiar and fast, but keep customizability. Another thing I noticed is that Firefox doesn't allow to keep unpacked extensions loaded as Chrome does, there is no good reason why not, luckily I fixed that with some userChrome scripts.
The other things mentioned are just features that I would expect to keep improving over time, but are nothing groundbreaking.
For example it has facilities for caching the web application so that it can work offline. They can also register URL handlers on the system, which is very useful.
Nice that vertical tabs are officially coming back, although I've been using them in a DIY manner for years already; sidebar extension with a bit of userChrome.css can do wonders: https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif
Meanwhile, Google Chrome doesn't even need to pretend like they care about privacy, so they automatically target the other "ordinary" people who are not so picky about every new release note.
This kinda teaches you something about the importance of product positioning.
[0] Firefox has always been at its strongest as a power-user's browser, chock-full of extensions and tweaks. Mozilla met this advantage with... two extinction events for extensions, and removal of customization options.
Unfortunately Mozilla's leadership does not see it that way and have steadily pissed off a huge number of former fans, without making inroads with any other groups.
They are in a tough position regardless, but combining that with terrible product and organization management has gotten them into the state they're in now.
I use Safari + Wipr Content blocker with iCloud Private Relay, and it is just so inconvenient to do anything on many major websites. At the least I have to reload the website without a content blocker, and at worst, I have to use Chrome, giving up my privacy.
If a somewhat computer literate person like me who knows about content blockers/iCloud Private Relay/VPN/ublock Origin has to relent and use Chrome, then what chance does a layperson have? They will just use Chrome and go on about their business. They want to spend their life doing other things, not figuring out why Target is not letting them order this clothing item they spent 10 minutes looking for because they are getting flagged as a bot or fraudster or simply not letting themselves be tracked.
I especially love when you block location access to a retailer's website, and then the retailer breaks their functionality for choosing the actual store you want to shop at. They have your billing and shipping address from previous orders, they have your 2FA login, and yet, every single time, they ask for access to your location, and when you decline, they set your store to some random store within a few hundred miles of you because (I assume) they are trying to use your IP address to show you the store.
Firefox with uBlock origin works much better, and I use for most reading, research, coding related things.
Arc for hacker news.
Then I only use Chrome when the above don't work. Which is very rare.
Mac user here, and streaming video or doing a video call just kills my battery compared to Chrome or Safari.
Would love to see more focus on energy consumption optimization.
Is it not using hardware acceleration or something?
And are you suggesting Chrome is similar to Safari in terms of power usage? That would surprise me
Safari will of course always be better. It's no competition
Intel MacBook from 2021.
My laptop gets so hot when running Firefox -- almost instantly (certainly after 3-4 minutes). But I can do a call for an hour on Chrome and it doesn't get nearly as warm. And the battery just drops accordingly as the fans struggle to keep up.
I like to use Firefox, but I end up doing all my calls when I'm not plugged in on Chrome as a result of the power use / heating issues.
Firefox is my main browser, and it's a beast. Very low footprint, snappy and very decent in terms of power consumption.
I am a Sideberry user though, and this excites me because a native implementation will likely look a lot cleaner, integrate better with your chosen theme, and actually allow the removal of the regular tab bar (you have to keep it with Sideberry because there is some functionality that cannot be replicated through an extension).
Theming in particular might be a big one, I had to spend a couple hours tweaking the Sideberry CSS to make it look nice with the skin I use in Firefox. Not having to do that sure would be convenient, especially for the average user who doesn't know what a stylesheet is.
And goes without saying, full support for powerful XUL extensions and full themes that actually extend the browser's functionality and change its appearance the way it used to be on Firefox back in the day.
For everyone here complaining about this, have you ever looked at how many ways there are to access your history on Firefox? At my last count, there were 4 different ways to do it, depending on which menu you picked first. Cutting down this kind of inconsistent, and repetitive flow is something that we should be applauding.
If FF can manage a good implementation of vertical tabs, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
I love that I can start a web search open a bunch of links, each in a new tab, then once I have what I need, I can close the parent tab and all the child tabs are closed automatically.
1. Representing the public interest wrt Web -- especially fervent respect for privacy in the browser, almost as much emphasis on security, fighting commercial excesses around de jure and defacto standards, and social equity within the scope of what Mozilla does (e.g., software accessibility, encouraging all volunteers).
2. Competitive browser compliance and performance. To be viable as a daily driver, to have impact.
3. Forward-looking R&D on Internet public interest things not currently considered "browser", but potentially big in near term.
4. Fancy browser features that actually increase uptake and retention. (Much lower than the first 3.)
5. Designer's opinion/portfolio UX changes. (Could be improvements, and there's value in an appealing and moving-target modern appearance, but misalignment is a risk to be careful of.)
6. Necessary-evil money-making compromises. (Very, very carefully. Many past ones were negatives. And we still see arguable dark patterns around some of those, such as as Firefox updates sometimes reverting users' express Search-related preferences.)
A marketing challenge of these priorities would be that even most techies can't assess how well you're doing #1.
But that mix of things you do can include things understandable to your typical user, such as superior blocking of abusive ads. (But don't drop the ball on things that your typical user can't understand -- they're entrusting you as an expert to act in their interests.)
Educational outreaches can also help. And if you get to the point that you're generating an order of magnitude fewer security vulnerabilities than your competitor, then marketing people can run with that. But be careful with positioning, so that communications about smart, hard activities don't get conflated in people's minds with confusing mission drift and fluffy PR.
Yeah, I would say I think these are actually a good thing as long as the cost-benefit ratio is acceptable and it doesn't compromise core efforts (people have asserted this kind of compromise has been happening, but rarely with any coherence or substantiation).
I would consider the example of Opera in its heyday - whether it was Turbo, "widgets", extensions, or Unite, which in my opinion was a triumph of originality and innovation that went unsung. Those are good when done right.
Vertical Tabs and Profile Management system - seem good. I was a bit shocked that to get the tree style tabs working properly I had to go typing code (to stop the old tabs being there too).
The thing that got me back to Chrome this time was I started getting out of memory errors which I have not had in any other software in a couple of years of using the M1 macbook. Maybe they'll fix that under the "speed, performance" stuff?
P.S. the project you linked is no longer FOSS.
I boot up a fresh Linux install and everything looks A+ nice, then you open up firefox and it feels like I'm on M$ Windows 11 + Edge. Chromium doesnt have ads!
I'll be happy when something replaces Firefox, they are a legacy company that might only exist due to anti-trust purposes. Something that is merit based would be an improvement.
Currently using an addon, but that's not synced among PC and Laptop (or phones, but there I don't need it)
Finally. Chrome has this feature for a while and it's really handy when working with lots of tabs, but I use Firefox on my main machine so I couldn't take advantage of this feature (and I don't like vertical tabs).
The current firefox sync where they are probably the only folks who can host it is not that good. (there's an old sync server but it requires a non-local account)
Also, I wish firefox would stop uncontrollably phoning home.
I'd just like a simple, secure browser that gets the hell out of my way and let's me extend it however I want (i.e., with an adblocker). I don't need or want AI models involved in the process.
The modern AI stuff is typically useless crap that was thrown there because... I don't know... FOMO?
> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter
If this means the same as for Thunderbird, I'm going to have to switch after 20 years...
Multiple rows of tabs, even more through mouse-wheel scrolling, and fixed width tabs for easy closing. Like Tab Mix Plus.
“Chrome supports draft standards like webUSB, which more and more hardware tools and platforms have started to adopt to enable being able to support users regardless of platform, without needing to design native apps for them.”
You can argue this is good in other ways too, it means that instead of a potentially invasive hardware application for something you might configure or update once, you are using something heavily sandboxed that has to request permissions for anything outside the normal. Another benefit is that depending on what the hardware device is, suddenly these hardware devices can be configured on platforms like Linux and FreeBSD, where vendors are much less inclined to support or cater to natively.
Say what you want about draft standards, but Firefox not playing ball and adopting commonly used ones is a massive miss on its part that hurts its ability to be competitive.
I would like certain apps to open always in private browsing.
Granted, between ublock origin and tree style tabs Firefox is still my favorite browser, but why are they changing this stuff...
Can someone please ELI5 - what does "more streamlined menus" mean?
[0]: https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/manifest-v2-phase-out-begi...
An action that's used once when setting up a browser, and never again. And you're not allowed to remove it to put something else there instead that's actually important.
Fucking Arseholes. :( :( :(
Browsers are terrible at accessing devices on a local network. Make this work well in Firefox, extending protocols as needed.
Browsers are terrible at configuring IoT devices. It device makers are terrible at making apps for this purpose that don’t suck. Make Firefox (on desktop and mobile!) be the premier way to usable and securely configure IoT devices. Get device vendors to sign on: someone could (and probably would) sell a gadget where the instructions suggest installing Firefox to set up the device.
Leverage the same technology to go after enterprise users. Ever seen a piece of high-end, expensive networking gear with a web UI? Ever contemplated how pathetically insecure this is? Ever contemplated how unpleasant it to provision certificates to make it secure? Make this work, easily and securely, on Firefox, using new protocols as needed. Make everyone else play catch-up.
Heck, start small. Allow setting domain constraints on imported root certificates.
The moral: do something new and better.
Can we just make this include some sort of dark mode. There is an addon that kinda works, but not all the time. That bright white flash is pretty annoying.
Definitely not yet another "reduction of visual clutter".
Look at Manifest V3. Microsoft said the harm to extensions would be acceptable. Opera hedged and echoed Google's FUD about the removed APIs. Brave acknowledged the problem, recommended their integrated blocker, said they would support MV2 until Google removed the code, and declined to promise more. Vivaldi said similar.
Why would that be best? I don't think the problem with Firefox is the engine (anymore), I think it's the design choices Mozilla continues to make.
If Firefox switched to the chromium engine, then why would I bother to continue to use it? Surely it would be better to switch to one of the "privacy-oriented" Chromium-based browsers that have been around for a long time now.
Firefox had very advanced addons for the time, and very good developer community. XUL removal just gave everyone PTSD
Don't know how good is the continuous fragmentation of the community