As Firefox turns 20, Mozilla ponders how to restore it to its former glory
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
they can't seriously think this can they?
who was asking for telemetry, mr robot, pocket, VPN ads, "use our email" (relay) ads, "check your accounts!!" (monitor) ads and built-in AI slop generators
and soon, more built-in ads: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/
I don't think a single user wanted any of that
at least Chrome doesn't actually show you ads directly throughout the browser's interface
Of course, it doesn't need to. Google controls enough space in the web content itself. On Firefox there are options to disable that; at least it is a supported setting. For Google, you need third party extensions to take care of this.
Not saying that I like that Firefox displays ads / is ad supported, but Chrome not displaying ads in its UI is hardly a positive against Firefox.
This reply however focuses on comparing Firefox and Chrome. Yes, Firefox is better.^1 But the parent's comment is still valid.
There is so much in Firefox's design that is not for browser users but for the benefit of others. Mozilla cares deeply about web advertisers and an online advertising "ecosystem". This is reflected in the design.
1. On average, but not in every respect. For example, in Chrome I can set the default search engine to any valid URL. I use a localhost-bound netcat that serves a useful web form^2 that I created in lieu of a "search engine". In Firefox, this is not possible.
2. It sends text clips from Chromebook Chrome to the "developer mode" (frecon) console stdout.
I do agree with the parent commenter that some things in Firefox are not designed for the user, but for the adcertisers. Which is something I don't like about Firefox.
> In Firefox, this is not possible
You can implement OpenSearch (which is basically a small XML file describing your search engine to write), then you'll be able to add your local search enigne: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch. It's a bit less straightforward than just a URL but if you implemented an actual search engine, it's nothing, and you probably want to handle suggestions, for which you need OpenSearch anyway.
Though for your use case, the web shortcuts feature of firefox seems a bit more convenient. I guess you don't always want to direct your searches to your web console, just sometimes, so you currently have to temporarily switch search engines when you want to do this. With a web shortcut, you just prefix your text with a word (which can be one char long). This works by adding a bookrmark, and setting this word in the bookmark.
The web form is for sending copied and pasted text to the frecon console.
For various reasons, I do not use the Ctrl-Alt-T browser-based "console".
I do not use a graphical web browser much. I do searches from the console. I type the search query on the command line or into a file if I am doing bulk searches.
As such, when I set a localhost address as a custom default search engine I am doing so as a way of disabling searching from the address bar. It also functions as a shortcut to reach local HTML files served by a localhost-bound httpd/netcat. For example, if the default search URL is set to http://127.0.0.1/%s.html and the local HTML file is a web form called clip.html, then I type "clip" in the address bar to open the web form.
Mozilla really wants to send everything that a user types in the address bar to a remote address, e.g., that of its business partner Google, before the user ever hits Enter. This desire, perhaps an implicit or explicit requirement of their contractual relationship, is reflected in the Firefox default settings, i.e., the design of Firefox.
> Mozilla really wants to send everything that a user types in the address bar to a remote address, e.g., that of its business partner Google, before the user ever hits Enter. This desire, perhaps an implicit or explicit requirement of their contractual relationship, is reflected in the Firefox default settings, i.e., the design of Firefox.
All browsers do this, including Chrome. There is nothing Firefox specifically does here. I don't like this feature but it is expected to be there by default from virtually every user. It is also very easy to disable this feature.
But I don't need to be conviced that Firefox is ad supported and doesn't have optimal defaults because of this. I know, and I wish it were not like this, and kinda hope another browser with another business model will somehow appear if Firefox can't be this browser, but for now every browsers are ad supported. Even Safari (which also has fundings from other sources of income that I don't like neither). And Chrome, of all browsers, is absolutely not a model that can be used against Firefox on the topic.
Yet Mozilla apparently wants us to believe Firefox is different. If in fact it was a browser designed for users cf. advertisers, it would surely choose a different design. Alas, it chooses essentially the same design geared toward facilitating online advertising.
On the one hand HN commenters defending Mozilla argue Firefox is different, in fact better than Chrome. And yet on the other hand Firefox more or less matches Chrome, "feature" by "feature". HN commenters claiming to have worked for Mozilla in the past have stated this is intentional and makes sense. They are likely correct.
Anyway, I am not a graphical browser user. I use different, text-only software. I see no ads. This works and makes sense for me.
Comparing graphical browsers does not make much sense for me. To me, they all suck. They are more similar than different.
For others who rely on these graphical browsers, comparisons might make more sense.
Computer owners and internet subscribers striving to control their hardware, e.g., trying to prevent unwanted UDP and TCP transmissions. These so-called browser "features" seem to benefit advertisers and advertising corporations more than they benefit computer owners and internet subscribers.
Chrome actively prevents proper adblockers from working as it has removed the extension framework integral to their function, and most web ads are Google's to begin with.
You can’t complain about them advertising their own services while still producing a leading browser.
this is not some small charity, they were generating $500 MILLION a year from the search deals
they should have shoved the the billions of dollars into an endowment
from that they could have funded a medium sized team focusing on the browser in perpetuity
but no, they blew it on obvious boondoggles (like Firefox OS)
Mozilla could have done the same thing if they had a little foresight and didn't just assume the piles of cash would keep flowing in forever.
And that is why I'm very annoyed by the fact that every year the donation begging is more in my face. Bigger, louder, harder to block.
Since they don't need the money that bad, why not keep it to a small banner and respect the users FFS.
Mozilla should have done everything in its power to gain it's independence(and still should).
I have been a Firefox user since day 1. I rememember, it was Phoenix, then Firebird, and for the last few years, Firefox.
I still use Firefox, which makes me so sad to see how incompetent(or potentially just greedy) the Mozilla leadership is.
Great product, poor stewards.
The glimmers of technical hope within Gecko like Servo and Rust were chopped.
> but no, they blew it on obvious boondoggles (like Firefox OS)
I agree they wasted money on a heap of useless things (as we see plenty of failed companies do - like Borland).
But I thought Firefox OS was one of the most promising ideas. I'd still like to see a vendor try and produce a phone that supported browser-tech for Apps - the idea is clearly valuable for Apps delivered using WebViews on iPhone and Android.
Personally I think the rot is throughout the org - and blaming one section is pointless - it weren't just management or tech. Watching previously successful corporations die has a similar feel to me.
Firefox on Android used to be a really good product--it supported basically every popular extension there was for desktop, then in 2018-2019 they appeared to start a new revamped project for some reason. I downloaded the beta for it--it was rough around the corners, it had a quite short whitelist of extensions, most of the functionalities were absent, but there were a few improvements here and there. And out of nowhere, a few weeks later they made it the default.
It's been way too long and the app still feels unfinished. It crashes way too much and I can't even move around the icons for the websites in the start page. They've enabled the list of extensions recently but it's a mess. I only use it since it's where I can have uBlock origin.
It feels that every couple of years they have a golden opportunity, but somehow they never seem to know what to do.
I use Firefox because Chrome is worse, not because I feel respected, "in control", or heard.
Consider also that most web users don't use an ad blocker; by definition most web users won't care about the Mv3 change, as that's what it seems to affect most.
On top of that, it seems like ad blockers still work decently well under Mv3. That could change over time, certainly, but there's not really a compelling reason for most Chrome users to switch.
> [Firefox for Android] crashes way too much
Interesting; I've been using it for years and very rarely encounter a crash. Desktop Firefox (Linux) crashes more often than Firefox for Android, and there too it's incredibly rare.
Huh ? Who needs a dev team ? Just fork Chromium, replace all instances of "Chromium" with "Firefox" and call it a day. And don't forget to add that it is more privacy focused than the last version, while still sending data to Google, even with SafeBrowsing disabled.
Mozilla's leadership might have even made the right move by dabbling in other platforms and with other value propositions, but it neglected the browser to the point that it doesn't matter.
And I'm still a Firefox user.
Honestly, I'm not sure how GNOME manages to be, and remain, the de-facto default desktop for SO many distros. It's alienated so many users with its, well, opinionated approach to things, causing not one but multiple forks and competing projects (Cinnamon, MATE, etc.), in addition to other competitors (KDE, xfce, lxde, lxQt, etc.). Why SO many distros still feature GNOME as the default, instead of trying to differentiate themselves and push a different default like KDE, I really don't know, but I suspect it involves some kind of politics within the Linux distro realm. Perhaps there's still some crazy idea about it being more "newbie-friendly", but it's been decades now and Linux on the desktop has barely made any inroads, so I think it's really time to give up on that and focus on users who actually like Linux and are already experienced.
Anyway, as I wrote before, I don't think this is something you can just replicate with Mozilla/Firefox; it's a completely different situation, and I don't think GNOME's apparent success holds any lessons elsewhere.
In general, my UI gripes:
* Bookmarks dialog from the 90s, various usability issues
* History dialog, same
* Lack of Tab Groups, still, and no plugin has given me the experience as Safari
* Profile switcher UI is also terrible
* Still no vertical tabs
* Still nothing like Safari "tab overview"
* Miscellaneous UX fails like not being able to hover over a Tab preview and close it without switching to it (like the 'x' on List All Tabs) or close a tab by hovering over a persistent x without switching to it
* Create bookmark dialog is limited so a small size and can't fit more than a few location folder entries
* macOS : after all these years, still can't full-screen like a normal macOS app (all app bar toolbars / chrome shift when mouse)
I can't remember an interesting UI feature in at least several years.
I use Firefox on my android almost completely because the URL bar is at the bottom, which is simply way better.
And also reader mode is awesome.
Plus I want to support Mozilla.
Same here (and for uBO), but bad news - it's been moved to the top by default (with an option to be at the bottom).
And I have a hunch that the option will disappear at some point.
What that looks like, I don't know. Maybe Arc (or Zen, which is like Arc for Gecko) has the right idea.
Some websites are inexplicably slow. Sometimes the whole UI freezes up for half a second.
Some of it can be explained by Google and other giants not testing their stuff on Firefox. But it really does seem like they don't have enough development bandwidth to keep up with the modern web.
When developers had an incentive to develop Firefox-first, then users had a better experience using it.
Software that doesn't work well for developers will eventually not work well for users either.
In the age of early Firefox, we had employers telling people specifically not to support Firefox, but we just smiled and waved until they left. Because nobody wants to debug shit on IE6. You'd get it working on FF first and then fix the four things that broke only on IE6.
Yes that's what i'm saying! It wasn't IE6. It was better in so many ways, and I don't think it's primarily the devtools. It had tabs!!!! Firebug (a few years in). form data didn't go "poof". Basic security happening by default. Regular improvement. Faster.
I think if anything the devtools situation made Firefox viable because so much of the web was ActiveX or refused to talk to or work with non-IE browsers in other ways. But I think if it was just a set of good devtools, and otherwise was slow or annoying for general usage, all it would have done is capture the market for good devtools.
Back in the day when I started using Chrome, it was in spite of the devtools situation – I had been using Firefox devtools daily for years at that point, but checked out Chrome for its other improvements: speed, omnibar, tabs on top, even better stability. Those improvements were enough to win me over in spite of needing to learn new devtools.
Now when I think about switching to Firefox, it seems like it has parity in devtools. Certainly the Firefox profile explorer is better, I do all my profile analysis on https://profiler.firefox.com/ even for Chrome profiles because it has a real flamegraph, not just a stack timeline. But it means learning new habits, and besides the profile explorer, it is just at parity with Chrome, or perhaps a little bit ahead in places like performance, but not enough to really keep me there. Stability of both is so good its hard to see an improvement mattering to me. The biggest problem is that as a web developer, I know Chrome represents the average user agent pretty darn well - it's closer to Safari/Webkit than Firefox, and its a perfect match for all the Android users. So even if the Firefox tooling is 20% better overall, it's still gonna be hard to overcome the network effect for me as a developer unless its amazingly better somehow, or embeds Blink/Webkit or something.
What about supporting a better hypertext meta language under a `moz:` protocol that’s only guaranteed to work with their browser?
It seems though Mozilla fell into the “go woke go broke” trap and lost focus on their core mission.
and not to annoy the patron (Google)