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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with Firefox? It's my daily browser and works great. What am I missing?

The managemant behind firefox does not care about web browsers. They carre about their vision of social justice and the browser is just a tool to get funds for that.

That doesn't really have anything to do with how it works though. I was looking more into its actual operation as a browser.

I use FF as well. I think the problem is lack of focus on core workflows. This is a problem with all major browsers.

For example, why is the address bar so tiny on high resolution screens? One would think this is an easy fix that would improve the UX for many people. Yet years go by with unresolved issues in the trackers.

> For example, why is the address bar so tiny on high resolution screens

Because in the year of our lord 2024, we for some reason still don't know how big a pixel is. Making a textbox 1cm tall should be trivial, but is for some reason either impossible or never done.

For a browser UI 1cm is NEVER a useful measurement. 1cm is useful if you are writing CAD software (which you could write as a web app so firefox should know what 1cm is only for purposes of supporting such web apps), so you can touch a physical part to your monitor and visually verify it fits before having a one off part made to do further verification of your design. For everything else what matters isn't the physical size, but if it is visible, which in turn is a function of how far away the monitor is from your eyeballs and your glasses. My phone, laptop, desktop, and movie room (I don't have all of the above, but someone does) all need different sizes of address bar to be useful.

I would be happy to be able to adjust the font size. It's almost as if these orgs don't use their product...or the effort to make this small change would require a major re-architecture.

What's high resolution for you? I'm using Firefox on a 32 inch 4k display and would not want the address bar to be bigger. Of course I could make it smaller / bigger thanks to Firefox supporting custom CSS

If management cared about the browser they would have never had this staff in the first place, a similar amount of staff for programming, testing, and marketing their browser would have been effective at making a better browser and getting more market share.

Now that few people use it, major sites are not just no longer testing on Firefox they are actively blocking it. Slack, for instance.

Source? I've been using Slack through Firefox for years, and I remember only one issue - huddles didn't work at the beginning, but it was a minor one, since I use Zoom.

I went back and investigated: Huddles is blocked and I was using a user agent switcher to get around it. Then I had to switch back to Firefox agent string so Google Meet would work. Apparently my user agent switcher has out of date agent strings for Firefox so Slack started blocking me entirely.

So Slack was blocking me entirely because it thought I was using an out of date Firefox but using the default user agent string it works again.

Huddles worked just fine if you spoofed the user agent, they actively blocked the functionality on firefox.

I use Slack on Firefox for over 3 years now, without any issues. I've never seen any blocking attempt.

It's funded by its main competitor.

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