Firefox Is the Superior Browser
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asindu.xyz
> Firefox Is the Superior Browser
Original article title:
> Switching to Firefox
An important thing that both titles miss: this is talking about Firefox for Android. The things discussed in the first section mostly actually happened around desktop Firefox, but the rest of the article is exclusively about Firefox for Android.
Please, HN, a request: given that this is what the article is about, could we please make this discussion about Firefox for Android, and leave desktop Firefox alone as much as possible? Firefox versus Chrome on desktop gets discussed frequently¹, we all know the arguments; but Firefox versus Chrome on Android doesn’t, and the calculus is quite interestingly different. For example, the first two points raised are mobile-only, as they’re things both give you on desktop, but only Firefox on Android.
—⁂—
¹ My guess is that there’s a dedicated Firefox- or Chrome-related thread that ends focusing on such matters in some way at least once every couple of months, and a few more minor subtheads in between.
That's the problem: Mozilla makes ~590 million, but the vast majority is not for engineers, but for:
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/women-in-ai-ethics-ex...
Not to mention firing a CEO with cancer, throwing a Party (Feminist, Decolonial, LGBTQIA+, Climate Justice using Al) in Zambia (no joke) after firing 1/3 of the staff and so on. Firefox/Mozilla is the best paid OSS project (apart from Linux), but spends most of the money on non-technical stuff (same with the Linux Foundation).
Mozilla.org/Mozilla is now a Ad-Company not a OSS-Project.
besides, how would YOU finance to pay around 1200-1800 employees (from my initial online search) salaries that are competitive to Facebook and google or microsoft? why would someone work at mozilla for less money when they could work in the same city at a bigger office for more cash?
now, if mozilla took to employing foreigners, like from asia, they could reduce their salary spend by 5-10 times which would make them less dependent on external funding or employ 5-8 times many people for same money.
point is, building a browser takes money so how will YOU finance the company/non profit if you were given the charge
edit: also, how much would you consider your remuneration be commensurate to the level of work you are putting in?
My point is that they dont invest it into the browser but:
>managers, administrative and finally moonshots.
>how would YOU finance to pay around 1200-1800 employees
Get rid of most of the non-technical staff and work on the software you get your donations for. Out with the leeches, in with the makers, it's software, not a political campaign.
Google Chrome has/had ~23 paid developers, then we bring back the MDN team, let's say 8 people, administrative stuff 5 for a total of 36 people, let's double that because we have $590 million to spend and round it up to 80 people, okay?
But hey, look at that ("Firefox Maker Rebrands as 'Global Crew of Activists'"), this is where the money is going:
Side note, one thing that is good about this place is the downvoting is never that crazy, maybe -5 worst case most of the time. Reddit is far more expensive to say true things that are uncomfortable and that's a big problem.
If you believe this, you maybe shouldn't be making claims about the economics of browser development. That's off by ludicrous amounts.
>Chrome, with an emphasis on making the web great for the next billion users. The team consists of around 40 engineers, in addition to a number of PMs, test engineers, UX designers, researchers, and others. We built a lot of features in Chrome that are used by more than a billion people.)
https://mdwdotla.medium.com/some-thoughts-on-running-success...
"MY" Mozilla has 46 engineers ;)
But if you think ludicrous big teams can make "much" product you should read "The Mythical Man-Month"..again ;)
The ~23 was from 2012, sorry about the outdated information
> Chrome Mobile teams in Seattle and Kirkland, spanning four sub-teams in Chrome, with an emphasis on ...
It's not the number of engineers working on Chrome. It's the number of engineers who worked in that guy's Chrome Mobile team in a specific location. (It's not clear whether there were other teams working in Chrome Mobile in other offices). That's a team making mobile-specific improvements to Chrome or adapting it to the mobile environment, not a team making a browser from scratch. So it's ignoring the people working on the layout engine, rendering engine, the javascript engine, security, the desktop UI, codecs, web APIs, developer tools, networking and protocols, extension APIs and store, etc.
There is also absolutely no way Chrome had 23 engineers in 2012, but since you didn't give the source, I have no idea of exactly what tiny subset that number was actually representing.
>Officially chrome has 23 members.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-on-Google-Chrome
2008:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227122339/http://s.niallken...
https://web.archive.org/web/20120116201141/http://code.googl...
And what does that page say? Right at the top:
> Here are some members of the Developer Relations team
It's not the Chrome engineering team. It's some part of just the team doing developer outreach (not necessarily even the entirity of that team).
You keep finding these obviously incorrect references to support your arguments, and presenting them as facts. And by obvious I mean really obvious. There is no way you can read that page and mistakenly think it's the Chrome engineering team. At this point the best case is that you're not actually reading any of these sources, and just randomly pasting them here. The worst case is that you've noticed that your sources are bogus, and just don't care.
Neither of those is arguing in good faith.
In 2011, when asked "How many engineers work full-time on Chrome[...]?", a member of the Chrome team already said there were "enough to fill many buildings around the world". So even in 2012, ~23 seems way off.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gdyun/iama_we_are_thr...
Just look who wrote the second article i linked, i never said Google is slim and fast, but at least they have invite money.
And look at the second question from your "reddit" post:
>I don't understand. There are enough devs to fill many buildings for Chrome, that work on things exclusive to Chrome, not Chromium? In this post it sounds like Chrome is not much more than Chromium. What gives?
...no answer, WHAT a SOURCE
In 2018, Baker received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, a 400% payrise since 2008. Over the same period, Firefox market share was down 85%. [..] In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary rose to in excess of $3 million. In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5 million, and again to nearly $7 million in 2022). In August 2020 the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues, after previously laying off roughly 70 in January [2]
I'm of the opinion that there should exist mechanisms for nonprofits to reclaim ill gotten remuneration from ex CEOs
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/09/mozilla_ceo_mitchell_...
Absolutely on your side, also the foggy connection between Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla.org leaves a sour taste.
They loved Mitchell Baker's focus on culture: Mozilla's progressive social causes and performances. They loved their culture more than their business and their own browser.
Like other companies in the ZIRP era, the staff wanted a fun tech company culture that made them feel like they were good people. Even great people. They preferred a celebrity CEO with pleasant illusions over a business leader with hard truths.
It sounds like they were just unlucky, but they are part of the loss.
First they loss the mass, that's a Google marketing problem.
But then they loss the power users and that was their issue. (Since then I'm a blink engine user)
If I must rally behind something that is something browsable I would pick servo or ladybird.
While browser projects like servo or ladybird are certainly appreciated, I think their state of "something browsable" is not really what most users, even technical ones, would like for their daily browsing.
/
How do you think Firefox has lost the power users/devs?
Now we have a addon system that's the same as chrome(+ manifest v2).
Later the network effects started going against Firefox but most people go by percentage of market and assume they were losing users long before they actually did.
Mozilla recently becomes more and more greedy in terms of breaking down privacy.
It's the old "but it's just the Metadata that we keep"
Yes, just happened to me. Not happy about losing my session. Even less happy about the dependency and what might be being telemetered or 'verified'.
Tree Style Tabs. uBlock Origin.
There, I rewrote it for you.
Chrome feels like it was written for the benefit of Google, not for me.
> extensions
You can use a Chromium browser like Samsung Internet
> View PDFs in browser
Chrome is adding support for that https://www.androidauthority.com/open-pdf-files-chrome-andro...
Not to mention, performance is better on Chrome (and Samsung Internet), and the difference is obvious in Speedometer benchmark.
Source: https://ublockorigin.com/
I've just had the third experience over just a couple of months, where FF has completely lost all my tabs etc. Previously I've been able to recover some state by moving the sessionstore-backups files around, but this time, completely gone.
The trigger this time was starting FF when my internet was down. It could not 'verify' all the addons, and just seemed to hang indefinitely. Really, why does it need t 'verify' the extensions on startup? And what does that involve, actually? Is it phoning-home all my addons and settings just to even start up?
I've really lost trust in this browser.
And let’s not talk about the pleas to keep the funnel of Google’s money.
Once in a while I retry Firefox but text scaling is a hot mess. On some sites it simply doesn't work, on others content will go outside of the bounding box and on some sites it just clips text. For me it is barely usable in its current form leaving me at Brave.
On Mac and iOS, it seems to be more stable and it's still my main browser.
Multi account containers, especially with temporary containers improved my web experience so much that I don’t think I could ever go back.
It’s so much more fluid than profiles.
HN should change their policy to ensure that users who flag articles should publicky explain the reasons for it.
- Firefox Sync is much better than Safari/Chrome options, you can close tabs remotely, sending tabs is instantaneous and never fails (Chrome IME was flaky)
- as the article mentions, a lot of mobile addons, including Stylus and the *Monkey userscript addons, I have cloud sync set up for both and it's nice to have userscripts running on all platforms
- Tree Style Tabs is still the best UI for managing tabs in any browser I've used
- browser UI customization via userChrome.css file, and user.js for persistent about:config flags, every time you set up a new Chrome profile, have to set up flags manually
- it's fast (enough), ironically I switched from Chrome after I started have inexplicable slowdowns that I couldn't solve by disabling extensions or a new profile, since the Manifest V2 moment was upon us, I took the opportunity to give Firefox a try again
Firefox doesn't have that issue. It is a more fully featured browser across mobile and desktop with access to the exact same content as Chrome or Safari.
The mos://a logo is (was) iconic and completely sums up what the org should be about.
To me the new logo looks like a dinosaur, or a lizard or a snake. Quite appropriate.