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Comment by JonChesterfield | Hacker News Reader

Shed a tear for the Firefox that could have been

Firefox is still working great for me, and I intend to keep using it for the foreseeable future.

I don't know what it might take for people to migrate away from Chrome en masse, but the alternative is there.

Firefox is usually great for me, but with Chromium-based browsers having such a massive market share monopoly I do occasionally find a website that doesn't work properly on Firefox. But, I will stick with Firefox as long as possible.

Do you have any recent examples? It's more often I see websites that claim they don't work with firefox but actually do if you change your user agent.

Yeah I keep hearing this but it never pans out, seems like in my experience a lot of people don’t know they might have to turn off an extension or two (ublock, built-in trackers, etc) to get a website to work.

I cannot open message in LinkedIn with Firefox linux. Haven't pinpoint the error cause though

I have no problem with anything on LinkedIn with Firefox/linux.

I have one internal corporate site which won’t work with Firefox for some reason, but never had any problems elsewhere.

YouTube, FreshDesk, Google TV (sharing from Firefox)

Huh? I use YouTube all the time on Firefox and it's fine. Better than fine, really, thanks to the YouTube improvement extension I have loaded. Never heard of the other two though.

Google is essentially using A/B testing methods to slow it down for one group of FF users while keeping it absolutely fine for another. Funnily enough, I've been placed in this 'slowdown' group even though I am a Premium subscriber ever since it launched (post-Red renaming) and another channel on the same Google account has 0 issues in the same browser on the same PC etc.

Mozilla is slowly turning to ad company too. Let's see what future brings us.

And the recent antitrust ruling against Google might see Mozilla lose like 80% of their revenue...

A sane company would then give the boot to their overpaid CEO and hire back talented developers.

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5053290/mozilla-2023-annual-...

Mozilla has a range of different priorities now and most of these do not revolve around the flagship project which Firefox should be.

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I remember reading news in 2005 saying that Mozilla has established its Corporation subsidiary - and I had a bad feelings about it at that time. And years later we can see the effects - what's the revenue, how browsers market share looks like. Now, every time I'm reading that project, foundation xyz is creating "for profit" branch, subsidiary I know that this most likely won't end well. Profits will go over users needs, wishes each time and those at the project will change as well. It's like a magic wand appears and turns open-minded contributors into some mindless corporate drones with an arrogant attitude.

I want to still like Firefox but in last 14 years Mozilla managed to seriously deteriorate trust in its capabilities of handling their main product. And I also cannot fathom how they managed to screw up promotion of the browser and let Google dominate the market. That didn't happen overnight but Google at some point started to bundle their browser as "additional offer" in almost every software installer for Windows, while Mozilla did nothing similar.

Lunduke is a known right wing propagandist. Engaging with any of his content is a waste of time.

Thanks for the information. I'm the last person who would spread right wing stuff, the link came from a search, however in this case the problem about the overpaid Mozilla CEO and developers being sacked is real and well known outside politically involved sites.

There’s a massive overlap between right wing activists and anti-Firefox commentators

I look forward to Verso

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41215727

I mean...they have to fund operations somehow. There's no money in pure open source in today's society.

Mozilla has a lot of money, almost none of which is spent on Firefox/Servo.

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

I certainly do. That said, I struggle to find another browser that's any better and most are worse. So I accept Firefox as the lesser evil.

Brave browser is such an obvious win for me… chrome + privacy. None of the bugs and missing features that come with Safari or Firefox.

That's what I used for a year or so before switching back to Firefox. It's OK, but doesn't come as close to meeting my needs as Firefox does.

Curious about what needs you had that Brave didn't fill?

Not your parent commenter but I love Firefox more after discovering that you can't even customize the toolbar buttons in Brave. That's such a basic functionality that I'd taken for granted, until I tried to move out of Firefox for a brief time.

Lack of sufficient customization and lack of extensions I want. The customization is a big deal because I dislike the Chromium UI and want to be able to fix the worst of it. My dislike of the UI is also a source of grumbling from me about modern Firefox, which has picked up a lot of Chromium and which is also less customizable than it used to be, but I can still fix a lot.

I also want to be able to use the same browser at work as at home, and my workplace banned the use of Brave when it started including a VPN.

The fact that it's Chrome is the problem with Brave. What you call "bugs and missing features" I call necessary diversity to avoid Google dominating the standardization process more than they already do.

Safari. That's the only browser I really use.

That's not an option unless you're an Apple user, though.

I can't say what it's like on Linux or Windows, but the Duck browser is pretty good. It's my second choice.

On Macs and iOS, and iPadOS, it's clunkier than Safari, but less clunky than Firefox.

Perhaps the Windows experience is similar.

Just use Firefox... No need for more Chromeium forks.

What does “clunky” even mean in this context?

With the massive tide of browsers converting to Chromium under the hood, I wonder how long Apple can hold out. Fingers crossed they keep allocating budget for it.

Apple can hold out indefinitely. If a website doesn't work on Apple devices, that's not Apple's fault, according to legions of Apple users. And they're kinda right: there really are a lot of them, and they do tend to spend more money than other users, so websites that somehow manage to stupidly not work on Safari (presumably by using Chrome-only functionality and never testing) are potentially losing a lot of users and business.

I'm not normally a fan of Apple at all, and I have no interest in using Safari myself, but here I am glad that they've so far refused to jump on the Chrome bandwagon: it's good for keeping the web standards-based so we don't have a repeat of the IE6 days.

Firefox Nightly just got official vertical tabs. It is also just as fast as Chrome now, subjectively just browsing around.

No issues with Google services like Youtube (I'm an addict)

I keep Chrome installed just in case, and Edge due to being on Windows.

Firefox already has "vertical tabs" * from the Tree Style Tabs addon. Why not just support that?

* side tabs, I would say, the tab is a horizontal extension of the page, so they're horizontal tabs, right?

Vertical tabs addons have been a thing for years yes. But it is clunky and does not work as well as the native implementation.

Also the notion that Mozilla should "just support that"

lol

This is a thing the devs of Firefox should make and implement.

Supporting working open source implementations of software that are already part of your ecosystem, lol, crazy, right. /s

When have they supported an addon like that officially?

They are making their own solution for vertical tabs.

You are free to install addons.

What is the issue?

Don't just make these snipe driveby comments.

It's a very clunky solution that falls apart the moment you turn on whatever Incognito was named in Firefox.

Kind of wondering what you’re talking about here? Firefox still works great for me, did I miss something in the news? Is there some sort of big change coming down the pipeline?

Not OP, but Firefox didn't have to lose nearly all its market share to Chrome. Mozilla could have course corrected and righted the ship, but instead they got distracted on dozens of unrelated and often controversial projects and ended up burning most of their credibility.

Mozilla is a husk of what it could have been, and that's hurt Firefox.

What, specifically, should they have done differently that would have made Firefox not lose most of its market share to Chrome, and how do you know it would have worked?

Keep Firefox in focus instead of losing sight of the browser and getting distracted on a million side projects, most of which had only a tangential relationship to the internet. Raise money to support the browser rather than to support politically divisive causes of the month.

I can't say for sure it would have worked, but I know that what Mozilla actually did do was actively counterproductive.

Firefox is working just fine for me, not sure why people seemed to think that it was a problem.

I think Mozilla is poorly managed and feature may have been slow or "lagging behind". But for me the lack of those shiny new things might as well be a feature than a bug.

I'm concerned that if Google ever stopped paying Mozilla to be the default search engine in Firefox, Mozilla would not be able to afford continued development on Firefox.

Mozilla barely funds Firefox as is. All of its money is spent on other things.

LibreWolf is my only installed edition of Firefox, similar to Brave in place of Chrome.

Forget Firefox as a fix. Call your legislators and explain this Google Chrome funny business to them.

Why swim upstream?

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