Where's Firefox going next?
connect.mozilla.org
connect.mozilla.org
> Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style? [List of emoji animals]
The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting. This is the most egregious part but the whole post has a similar tone.
I'll note that I'm not saying outreach should necessarily be professional or devoid of fun/humor. There's just a sterile, saccharine way about Mozilla's community engagement that evokes artificiality.
Apparently, no. Bodes well for this Q&A with someone thoroughly air-gapped from development and management.
Considering, you know, Firefox is their most important product.
Is it? The guy is "highly offended" (???) by playful language and color themes and does the performatively enraged internet guy thing of being shocked that Mozilla has a political agenda, despite the fact that Mozilla, a purpose driven non-profit has had a manifesto written by Mitchell Baker since 2007?
If you're enraged by an emoji or by someone saying thank you for loving our browser it's probably time to turn the computer off or something
>> The article began:
>>"Last year we upleveled our Private Browsing mode."
>> Sorry, "upleveled" is not a verb I've ever heard of, in decades of using the Web. Why are you beginning articles with made-up verbs that you know people aren't going to understand? Why not use standard, plain, clear English?
Just because the person ranting had never heard of it doesn't mean that uplevel isn't a verb; and I am not sure how their amount of time spent using the web would correlate to their grasp on the English language.
Although the word alone is found, there are zero matches for it combined with various articles and determiners:
>Ngrams not found: upleveled a, upleveled the, upleveled fewer, upleveled less, upleveled more, upleveled fewest, upleveled least
>Ngrams not found: upleveled most, upleveled this, upleveled that, upleveled these, upleveled those, upleveled each, upleveled every
>Ngrams not found: upleveled any, upleveled some, upleveled either, upleveled neither, upleveled enough, upleveled sufficient
>Ngrams not found: upleveled what, upleveled which, upleveled you, upleveled all, upleveled both, upleveled certain, upleveled several
>Ngrams not found: upleveled various, upleveled few, upleveled little, upleveled many, upleveled much
>Ngrams not found: upleveled my, upleveled his, upleveled her, upleveled its, upleveled our, upleveled their, upleveled your
This suggests all the supposed matches for the word alone could be OCR errors or typos. If "upleveled" is a real word it's so rare that it has no place in any writing that you expect to be broadly understood.
I want to make it as clear as possible that my primary issue is Mozilla's insincerity. I'm also put off by the particular tone they're using, but that's just a matter of aesthetic preference.
It's easy to take pot-shots at complaints about usage of "upleveling" (which is not a word, for the record), but his point is well-taken. Take a look at the Mozilla's blog post that has that sentence: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/privacy-online-just...
The writing is just weak, pretty much across the board.
> October is one of our favorite months of the year with autumn and Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
"favorite months", "with autumn"? I feel like a 5th grader wrote this from the get-go.
Second paragraph is almost incoherent:
> Earlier this year we celebrated our 100th Firefox release and reaffirmed our commitment to put people first. For today’s release, we’re rolling out new features that deliver on our user promise to provide web experiences that prioritizes people’s privacy and needs whenever they go online.
The writer is somehow trying to tie the idea of the 100th release to "people first", but the 100th release has nothing to do with what this paragraph is about, and neither does "people first". This paragraph is actually about Firefox's privacy features. If that's "people first", any user feature is "people first", right? The writing is a bunch of fluff around "We've improved the usability of Firefox's privacy features". My summary is just a better way to say that than the original post.
It's a slog to reading writing critique, but let's do one more: Firefox View
> We created Firefox View to help users navigate today’s internet. For today’s launch of Firefox View you will see up to 25 of your recently closed tabs within each window of your desktop device. Once you’ve synced your mobile devices, you’ll see the last three active tabs you had open on your other devices. You’ll also get to refresh your Firefox with a new Colorway inspired by the Independent Voices collection. Firefox View will continue to be a place where you can quickly get to the information that matters most to you.
I can do a lot of critique of useless words here, but let's put that aside. They seem to be explaining that there's a new feature that shows recently closed tabs. Cool. And then the second to last sentence is just jammed in there, unrelated to anything else in the paragraph, and introducing terms I'm not really sure about.
> You’ll also get to refresh your Firefox with a new Colorway inspired by the Independent Voices collection.
No clue what that's doing there. I'm an engineer, so I thought Colorway was a Firefox feature or something, but I looked it up and it seems to be a term-of-art:
> The scheme of two or more colors in which a design is available. It is often used to describe variegated or ombre (shades of one color) print yarns, fabric, or thread. It can also be applied to apparel, to wallpaper and other interior design motifs, and to specifications for printed materials such as magazines or newspapers.
But they capitalized it, so it must be a product? So I go and do more research and discover it's an add-on I've never heard of: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...
And then I realize all the links to Colorways that should have been in the post, are in the post! They are just at the end. So all the mentions of Colorways are unlinked until the end of the post, where they finally explain what they are referring to. This is just basic editing feedback that any decent editor would provide. The fact is Mozilla is just not paying people to write well for them.
It's a short post that's mediocre end-to-end, not because of playful language, but because it's bad writing.
The reason this kind of critique seems so lame is that I don't think people think very much about what they're reading (when reading stuff like this, at least), so they just don't care that the writing is sophomoric. But that doesn't mean the rant isn't fundamentally correct that Mozilla is doing a poor job in their writing.
It's not. People who take issue with every little thing like this are extremely unpleasant to be around, and extremely unpleasant to have as users.
Microsoft has been doing this for years, with its messages during Windows setup, along the lines of "sit back and relax while we work our magic" which is at best annoying.
Hah, perfect. I recently got a contract to "upskill" a team. I mean, I kinda get it: training, right? But I was not confident that I really did understand it, specifically. I asked what the hell that meant and was met with a lot contorted phrases to describe it. Sure enough, training.
We're inventing work...
Most average users don't ever change settings or otherwise customize stuff, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy a different theme. Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry. In fact, three years later colorway themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox anymore.
My current desktop has been Fedora since Fedora 16, and I just upgraded from one release to the next continuously. So yes, whatever choice I made back in 2013 is just going to stick around on my current machine unless it goes away entirely or I manually change it. Colors are just not that important, if I like it well enough, it's going to stick around forever.
The only one that caused intense feelings in me was the "Dreamer – Bold" theme that caused a fair amount of confusion about why the heck couldn't I tell which tab was active, and what could be possibly broken. Because it never occurred to me that the theme could be designed that way intentionally.
Right, I assume that's what the parent comment meant by "force-fed to us." That screen was indeed the whole point: It made the theming feature visible and accessible to the average users.
What? It's the one you conceded:
> I'll grant you, somewhat wide adoption is almost a given when putting this kind of UI in front of all users
I see now that "force-fed" is hyperbole. It was merely "put in front of all users". And then the thing that happens when you put this kind of UI in front of all users happened.
Thanks!
People using colorways after the feature was removed? Well, that sounds like a failure of the feature then.
The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing rested, was they were temporary! You get to change your theme for a few months, and then later on at some random point, it changes again as it's taken away from you.
If users have managed to continue using those themes, well, that's in spite of what Mozilla did with them, not because of them.
The criticism of colorways wasn't because people hate browser themes, it's because making features that self-destruct after indeterminate amounts of time is user-hostile. "Limited time features" is alone enough to make someone want to swap to a fork.
> The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing rested, was they were temporary! You get to change your theme for a few months, and then later on at some random point, it changes again as it's taken away from you.
It was sort of a marketing gimmick, one I wasn't particularly fond of. (I was the lead engineer for colorways.) What it really meant is that we'd offer the onboarding screen and colorways built into about:addons for a limited time. The intent was never to remove them once users installed them. We have since migrated them to AMO where they can still be installed: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...
People know when they are being sold to and emotionally manipulated, and they don't like it, even if it's effective.
That's why colorways was a failure, complained about years later, even if "the metrics look good". People don't remember what you did, they remember how you made them feel.
I still don't consider colorways a failure, all things considered. To me, the fact that colorways are still some of the most used themes outweighs you remembering that you were angry three or so years ago, but thanks for the feedback.
It may well be that colorways are used and loved by many users and that's a success. You made something people like; well done!
That we are having this conversation at all I think could be considered evidence, though, that it was a strategic failure for Mozilla. How much public opinion is worth burning for how much increased usage of a new theme feature? In my opinion, very little.
That colorways work well, that the people who use them continue to do so, that they were technically well designed and well engineered, is one yardstick by which to measure success/failure. By that measure they are certainly a success. But another yardstick is "did they have a net-positive or net-negative effect on the organization", which is where I think it came up short.
Based on the things you've said it sounds like you and I are more or less on the same page.
I think we're squarely in the "very little" range here in terms of how much public backlash we saw. You might be overestimating how widely folks got angry the same way you got angry, or perhaps we weren't monitoring the right forums and channels when releasing the feature, who knows.
Firefox Mobile is great, it has uBlock Origin. I'm not recommending it to people though.
So it hadn't occurred to me since then that I could change it.
I guess I count among the users who are still using a colorways theme. But after getting used to it, I ended up thinking of it as being what current Firefox looks like by default.
The users who regard colorways as frivolous likely also disabled the telemetry.
Rather like how the "psychological profile of a serial killer" is merely the psychological profile of a serial killer the police are capable of catching.
Also, I think we can sense where Firefox is going. Mozilla is a mismanaged company. A victim of itself and Google's monopoly/life support.
There must be internal discussion on this. I imagine more than a few shouty meetings might have happened. This indicates to me that management doesn't know how to deal with that and clearly isn't dealing with anything effectively. If anything this makes me more worried, not less worried about how things are going at Mozilla.
More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Firefox needs more people that work on the product and are allowed to work on the product not people that do busywork like this and just get in the way.
I'm an actual user BTW. The product is fine for me. Performance is great and steadily improving. My main concern is that the developers are allowed to stay on mission and empowered to do that. Which means doubling down on making sure I never get confronted with shitty ads, popups, and other advertising abuse. And that it keeps up technically with Chromium and Webkit in terms of standards support.
Playing devil's advocate: how does that help your average Joe adopt Firefox?
What they could do is something the other guys are institutionally unable or unwilling to do: build a proper user agent for power users. Radically transparent, trustworthy and extendable up the wazoo. With footguns and everything.
That gives you a comfortable moat, a raison d'être and a stock of rabid, technically inclined fans which spread the word for you to their friends, family and coworkers the next time Google tightens the thumbscrews again.
Basically: repeat what happened the last time when it was Firefox vs. IE, twenty years ago.
I recently got an M4 Mac Mini to replace a failing Windows laptop that my wife was using to access the network. Previously she was using Firefox with uBlock Origin, but she was absolutely livid after browsing the web with Safari and being harassed by horrible ads which got me to install Firefox right away.
They killed the dino logo:
- https://imghost.online/GBswvjTZ38PtAnf
- https://imghost.online/0HTX7YVnImu49qc
We were hackers, we became "cute and inclusive" (nothing wrong about inclusive… it just became the brand).
Fuck this.
Edit: I said 10+ years… but actually, it was more like 15 years ago.
Having mascots is fine. It's like having a logo. Having multiple mascots is not good. What does a dinosaur have to do with a Firefox? The dinosaur was supposedly Mozilla's logo, as in Mosaic and Godzilla. Firefox is one of the many projects under the Mozilla umbrella. Keep the fox theme in Firefox communications, leave dinosaurs for Mozilla's one.
How did I never know this?
I think this is just changing with the times. Go back a bit further and the idea of communities around products is the new cool thing. Personally I find that a bit weird. We have a whole generation of people who find social media managers talking to each other hilarious.
More than not being genuine, it's condescending and patronizing.
I've never seen this unique mix of listicle-like light-hearted fluff with emojis AND special dashes written by humans. LLMs seem to love it, though.
I will be sad if en-dashes come to be seen as LLM fingerprints, because I rather like them.
- – —
Em-dashes do not start a new sentence. Lack of capitalization is correct, and LLMs generally get spelling/punctuation/grammar right.
> This is for those who insist they can easily spot AI-generated text. Many of us old farts were using bulleted lists and em dashes and en dashes long before artificial intelligence was no more than a (usually) reliable plot device for sci-fi, much less the fever dream of tech bros. So, for God’s sake, stop using those as “proofs” that some text is AI-generated. As for my own writing, I reiterate what I said over two years ago: “... although the stuff on this site ... may not be any good, it always has been and will be written by a human, namely me.”
It's because those entire departments are daycare for the people working in them.
8-9, snacks. 9-10, tweeting. 10-11, snacks and socializing. 11-12, nap time. 12-2, lunch. 2-3, tweeting. 3-4, socializing.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.
There is another interesting detail from your reference that makes it seem even worse to me: it says the CEO's salary is "paid only by a related for-profit"; at first, I was thinking "ok, at least the Foundation in fact is spending the money it is being donated (though, not on Firefox)"... but then I realized that means the Corporation is, in fact, spending $7m that it could have spent on Firefox.
The glass-half-full take I heard a while back was: at least every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that they could have found a way to take from Firefox development instead.
No, if you destroy the flawed-but-sometimes-okay organization you just wind up with something worse. There is no magic save-the-thing-you-like fairy.
Large bureaucracies don't "learn their lesson" from being torn down.
Vote against increased taxes because the road department already has "such a large budget" and "maybe this will teach them to cut the administrative fat"? No, you'll just wind up with more potholes.
Vote for Donald Trump because you think the Federal Government is wasteful and the Democrats need to be taught a lesson? No, you'll just get billionaire tax cuts, erosion of civil liberties, and absolutely no behavior change from the people you wanted to "punish". Everything just gets worse.
I don't think these are comparable at all or how it's a scam. The CEO of the entire wikimedia foundation makes half a million a year. The foundation is considered a GREAT charity to donate to by Charity Navigator. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f6/Wikim...
On the other point: Discussions are at the core the movement, and how to do fundraising "right" and how to use funds is worth discussing and gets discussed. But that it is needed in general is obvious I think. What else should be done? Let all the projects run out of funds and call it a day? That would mean the end - and today Wikipedia is more needed than ever.
Since I was a kid I thought that the endless fundraising drives destroy the legitimacy of public television. At the bellyfeel level it is visible moneygrubbing, but at a political science level these run side by side with ads promoting the sponsorship of the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation. ADM is notably the prime beneficiary of ethanol subsidies in the U.S. that wreck the environment and make farmers go broke spending money on nitrogen fertilizers that kill off life in the ocean off the mouth of the Mississippi River.
The trouble is that small donations don't give voice, but large donations do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
I can logically justify how I feel about fundraising drives on PBS, but I feel a resonance that causes me to feel the same way for Wikipedia -- I don't know what the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation of Wikipedia is, but it probably exists. Finding out that they don't really the money confirms this feeling.
Top of my idea stack is: should gov disintermediate the debt transfer?
"There be no middleman but Gov", translated for the nirvana of all
(In a sense, the Fed does exactly this, but the procedure needs to be orders of magnitude sharper/faster before it should be thought safe for bellies)
They are transparent. No one's being conned into donating. As long as Wikipedia is running fine, and is not degrading, and they're not actively harming it, I don't care. People routinely spend money on much worse things. Is donating $3 to Wikimedia once a year really worse than giving 50-100x more to Starbucks?
You've never seen the banners asking for money to cover the costs of the servers?
They are. The banners are dishonest every year, making it seem like they can barely keep the lights on.
> No one's being conned into donating.
These statements are consistent but they are what's getting in your way of understanding.
For a lot of people, what the Wikimedia does to raise donations does constitute conning people into donating. Hence the angst.
I currently still use Firefox but stopped donating to Mozilla after that.
If I give you $500 to help pay for your medical bills and a few months later (bills have been paid by then) I see you bought a PS5, can I say, “not cool you used my money to buy a PS5”?
Don’t get me wrong I think Mozilla/FF has been very poorly managed. But I have just never liked these kinds of “transitive property” arguments or whatever we want to call it. Unless they’re straight up funneling donations into the CEO’s bank account I just don’t see it that way.
If that person had the money, they should have spent on medical bills. If they got it after, they should have paid you back before buying a ps5 maybe.
Or if you just gave them the money and don’t expect any accountability, it is ok.
Mozilla develops Firefox, and they also pay their CEO a lot. Their CEO may be overpaid, the company may be mismanaged, but at least they are still upholding their commitment to maintaining Firefox. Picking out one expense that you don't like and saying "all the donations go to this, see!" is just disingenuous.
Whether donating is worthwhile is another question, and it seems like the answer would be no. But it is a very different thing to say "All the donations just go to the CEO" instead of "I think the CEO is paid too much".
We could also cherry-pick in the other direction and say the CEO is negotiating deals to bring in the 90% of non-donation revenue of Mozilla, in which case you could easily say that his pay is a result of that revenue creation.
If they had money enough for medicine, then why beg for donation?
Mozilla/FF has a pot of money that donations go in to, which is the same pot they use to operate as well as pay people, which includes their CEO.
there's no such thing as a specific $100.
The donation of the $100 was contingent on you not having $100 for dinner. If it turns out you _did_ have $100 for dinner, but now that you received $100 in donations, you can choose to also spend the extra $100 on something else (which the donor may or may not like).
It is on the donor to figure out whether donating the $100 is worth it - at least the recipient needs to declare all their financials, so they'd have the info to make a judgement on future donations.
Also at the end of the day, they are requesting donations to keep things operating. And that means paying people to run things, including CEOs. Every charity has somebody at the top, so your donations are also paying for those people as well. Unless you’re willing to say that all charities are therefore fraudulent because you are paying executive personnel, I just don’t see how this argument can really be put forth in earnest.
>but a better example is that you gave someone enough money to live on entirely, and the spent it on that as they said, but then took their income which could have paid for it and purchased something unnecessary.
But that doesn’t really apply here, it’s not parallel to the Mozilla/Firefox situation. And if we want to arbitrarily decide that all donations go to the CEO strictly because the numbers are kind of similar, why can’t I just say “no all that money goes towards staff and operating“? Why is my assertion any less valid? The numbers being similar doesn’t tell us anything about how it’s being spent. It’s just a coincidence.
I mean that’s what this all hinges on right? That the two numbers are kind of close? I can’t really think of how that tells us where the money is going. I don’t understand how that follows.
If donations 10x tomorrow can we no longer claim the donations are going into the CEO’s pocket? Or if they cut to 1/10th? Would we be having this conversation if either was currently the case?
I hate doing the “source?” thing but this is not obviously the case to me so can you explain your reasoning here or show me a source?
It is dishonest to pick out one expense you don't like and equate that to all of the donation money being spent on just that. That's all. I don't know how you got from that to "this guy thinks money isn't fungible."
Transactions happen at the margin. If a junkie spends every dollar of a bonus on dope, it’s fair to say the bonus is being burned on dope. Even if they also pay rent with their base salary.
If donations doubled, would CEO pay double?
If donations halved, would CEO pay halve?
I suspect the answer is "no" to both of those.
They essentially do. The problem is they have a greedy, self-obsessed CEO taking it.
If donations halved, would CEO pay halve?
I suspect the answer is "no" to both of those.
If you split up your donation by how Mozilla actually spends its money, then most goes to operating Mozilla, and a small amount (~1%) goes to paying the CEO.
Fungibility [1].
Money is fungible. There's no such thing as funneling. There is ring fencing though - that's when a certain budget cannot exceed a certain source of revenue, some countries do this with road tax I think. Afaik Mozilla is not doing any ring fencing. It is perfectly appropriate to compare the fraction of their income as donations to the fraction of their costs as CEO salary.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge, but you have to keep it rudderless and ineffective.
In my limited career I have been in several projects whose plight didn't make any sense -- with all the smart people and the effort poured over them, how could the disaster continue to unfold! -- until I realized failure rather than success was the goal.
I'll still keep using it for as long as I can, though.
I don't know what makes you believe Firefox is ineffective. It's by far the best browser around. What do you think is missing?
I'm not sure if you are serious. I mean, look at Chrome and Edge and Safari. They are managed by corporations that control their own platform. I get Chrome, Edge, and Safari because it is actively pushed onto me.
What does Firefox have?
The ugly truth is that browsers like Chrome and Edge and Safari are just as good as Firefox, and a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.
What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
> What does Firefox have?
Every single nontrivial Linux distribution out there comes packaged with Firefox as the default browser.
> a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.
Clearly then all Chrome users on laptops/desktops are software militants..
> What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
Firefox had at least half a decade of a headstart against Chrome and did jack shit with it.
Also they killed visual tab expose, and any extensions that could replace it, so all I have for managing the tabs is a vertical list.
2. A legal and advocacy department that can work with governments to stop monopolists like Google and Apple privileging their own browsers on platforms they control
3. To use its seat on standards boards to stop abhorrent practises like the W3C endorsing DRM, or Google dropping effective web-blocking APIs from extensions.
I think this independence is much needed in the future to come.
No normal person will switch to Firefox for tor, despite us nerds thinking it's cool. And if they can't get actual users to switch, the browser has no future.
All Firefox needs to do is make adblocking an integral part of the browser, but that would cut the Google money off.
On the other hand, if your definition of "effective" and "best" describes Firefox the last time I checked it out, then our definitions do not match, and I don't need to check it out again.
Sorry to all the devs grinding inside the machine - you are doing great work, and while it is not your fault the ship is going in the wrong direction, you are providing the fuel for it to keep going there by keeping your heads down and not revolting.
VGR's "Gervais principle" is a great series about recognizing the psychopaths at the helm and their power games. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
There were major noticeable speed differences in Firefox when they implemented key component in Rust. I say this having used Firefox since 2004.
I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind here but this really isn't true for basically any plausible value of "finished Oxidation of Firefox".
As context for scale, during the Quantum Project, Mozilla imported two major pieces of Servo: Stylo and WebRender. Each of these involved sizable teams and took years of effort, and yet these components (1) started from pre-existing work that had been done for Servo and (2) represent only relatively small fractions of Gecko. Replacing most of the browser -- or even a significant fraction of it -- with Rust code would be a far bigger undertaking.
Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.
They hang on by a thread.
The web need Firefox to be thriving but it’s been a sinking ship since a while.
They know perfectly what users want, what makes a good browser : speed, good user interface, low on energy, block ads,.. These are universal things.
Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.
And it’s not even that I want to see the url every second, but it just looks and feel bad.
On computer, there are 4 different browser history. The traditional one that opens in an outdated window, the « recent one » that shows only the 10 or something last links , a better looking browser history when you go in the top left button where there are synced browser tabs, synced history ,.. and an history in the sidebar.
Seriously ? 4 different history.
There need to be one clear, working history.
At least on my phone, an Poco X3, Firefox for Android url box it's BIGGER that Chrome for Android. Chrome shows 4 buttons on my phone.
Have you seen how much data Chrome collects for Google? Especially on Android. That's another massive advantage of Firefox.
I get it, it's very useful to understand what and how features are used. But it's a fine line to walk for a browser playing market share catch-up.
Most people happily give away their privacy to these companies for very little or no benefit, on the other hand being able to block ads is a big thing. Everyone is annoyed when a pop up on how to enlarge your penis show up.
So I opened the same page on both, my comments page on HN.
Firefox Android UI:
Home button, SSL padlock, URL, reader mode, tabs, hamburger menu. URL displays extends from 20% of the screen to 70% of the screen. I see news.ycombinator.com/thre(a) [the a is partially faded].
Chrome Android UI:
Home button, settings icon (shows cert details), URL, new tab button, tab list, hamburger menu. Icons have like 50% more padding that firefox icons, so URL extends from 20% to 60% of the screen. I see "news.ycombinator.com/t"
The only difference in icon count is firefox gives reader mode a dedicated button while Chrome gives new tab a dedicated button. Given how often I use reader mode (as a paywall bypass, or poorly formatted sites) that's... fine?
There is a stylistic difference where the coloured area for the address bar encompasses the reader mode icon so it looks like it's deducting space for the URL but it appears that Firefox actually has more URL space. By like... 3 characters, so it's not a huge difference.
---
As for the desktop history example:
Firefox history views:
- Firefox View: Full page view of your account including history, synced tabs, etc.
- Sidebar history: Useful to see with less disruption to browser
- Overflow menu recent items
- Legacy "Manage history" popup
Chrome history views:
- chrome://history as a full page modal (with sync and other stuff, so closest to Firefox view)
- recent history in the overflow menu
- "grouped history" which is a sidebar history with way too much padding.
So the only extra view of history that Firefox has is the legacy one, which is buried in the UI for power users who don't want to let it go (or more likely the bookmark manager that it lives with).
What are you talking about? Firefox pioneered the whole concept of browser extensions. Can you try to explain to me your train of thought?
> Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.
What point do you think you're making? Firefox works perfectly well on Android, as well as Firefox Focus might I add.
Your comment reads like you're trying to grasp at straws.
Google Is An Advertising Company. Honestly, this is more significant.
You are the product, for Google Chrome.
Google's MV3 replacement for MV2 means you are their product and will be served Ads regardless of your preferences.
Mozilla and the story on "How to waste money and resources" is getting tiresome at this point.
What do you mean? The AMA?
> listen to the community
Huh? Isn't that exactly what they are doing with this?
Better web compatibility and speed, be more lean (higher dev to admin ratio) and no more shenanigans / distractions.
To keep asking the question when you know the answer is at best incompetence according to Hanlon.
> What do you mean? The AMA?
I’m not the parent but it’s not the AMA, it’s paying multi-million dollar salaries to CEOs that layoff engineers and divert money to political campaigning.
We could have had a Servo based Firefox by now if the team hadn't been canned in 2020 instead of Mitchell Baker giving herself a $3 million pay increase every year.
It's shameful to then come cap in hand for donations after that.
I had an email from Mozilla last week on how to prepare my phone for participation in violent political demonstrations.
I have to ask myself, what does this have to do with web browsers?
With how they've been in recent years it's almost as if they're trying to be inept competition, as if they're being paid by Google to suck - in fact, that is all but established by now.
Every person I talk to has a completely different idea of what Mozilla should be doing. Keep pocket, or pocket is stupid, or pocket is the second coming of Christ, or the VPN is stupid, or the VPN is a revenue stream not dependent on Google, or whatever fucking bullshit.
Firefox does not "suck" - this is a legitimate psyop. It has all the features of Chrome minus the horrendous privacy violations. It has all the performance of Chrome, too.
I mean, what are we missing? Web USB? Give me a fucking break.
If you really, really need Web USB then fine - use Google Chrome. You win. 99.99% of people I've ever talked to don't even know what Web USB is, let alone do they rely on it.
A few years ago, they changed their interface for downloading. This introduced more than a dozen of bugs. Some were cosmetic, e.g. hover was the same color as foreground. Some were rare but caused a file loss. Some were performance related, e.g. deleting the history of downloads could take a minute with no visible change until the end. Most of these regressions are now fixed, but that made me lose confidence in the quality of Firefox.
This year, I had to develop a cross-platform extension for Chrome and Firefox. I started using Mozilla Documentation Network, but many pages seemed unmaintained. The relationship with extensionworkshop.com is unclear. The status of manifest v3 is poorly documented (most pages are for v2 only). The page about the compatibility with Chrome is incomplete. After a few struggles, I switched to Google's documentation. Then I lost time and energy on a severe bug with the Firefox tool that publishes web-extensions: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/webexterror-unsupported-file...
Even chromium-based web browsers are tightly coupled to Google. They rely on them for 99.99% of their source code. Mozilla just uses Google as the default search engine.
If I had to estimate, the developer time required for Mozilla to change the default search engine is ~.5 hours. In order for, say, Brave to not be dependent on Google, they'd have to spend ~100,000 dev hours. Because, you know, they'd have to completely develop a new web browser.
- This was probably said by someone in a meeting at Google in 2006
Rather than paying browser makers for every search, they can make one time payments to convert users to Chrome, and then get the searches for free.
I guess they don't want to listen to things they need to pour money into.
Google's marketing budget for Chrome is greater than Mozilla's entire budget. They sponsor a Formula 1 team FFS. They spent a decade paying off Adobe, Java, AVG, Avast and all the other shitty free AV softwares to auto-install Chrome. They targeted Firefox users with Chrome ads on the homepages of Google and YouTube. That's literally billions of dollars worth of marketing alone that they don't even have to pay for.
Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents combined (Africa, South America, Australia) with a couple trillion USD to spare. Each controls an operating system (or two) with more than a billion users each on which their browsers are pre-installed.
No shit they struggle to compete on brand and marketshare. They're basically forced by the economics of the market to do search deals with Google, and whenever they try to develop independent sources of revenue people shit on them for that too. People shit on them for making deals with Google and make insinuations about them being "controlled opposition" because of that dependency, but also shit on them for pursuing any other independent sources of revenue, like the branded VPN service or the innocuous cross-promotion of that Disney movie with the Red Panda.
People shat on them for trying to compete with Android via FirefoxOS because the bet didn't work out, even though it was probably the only way they could have avoided this outcome and gained real independence, had it worked out.
"Just focus on Firefox", they say - unless that means laying off people that work on Rust, or AV1, or Opus, or WebAssembly, or Let's Encrypt, or experimental browser engines that wouldn't have been production-ready for a decade. According to HN, Mozilla should focus but also keep churning out and spinning off research projects, but only successful research projects, not ones that fail. Anything Mozilla does is always retroactively terrible if it fails but if it works out great they never get credit for it anyway.
Sort of a puppet browser made only for proving the court that the giants are not technically a monopoly, while ranking a bare minimum number of users for them to count.
While that's not entirely unreasonable, I don't think that's the doom of Mozilla. Puppet or not, their tangled codebase makes it a pita to contribute anything if you're not being paid a salary for it.
Despite having a high expectation for the "free browser", deep down we know that it's the same "Free in theory" software, not unlike Java or Vscode. Software that's made by a company and once they stop pouring money on corporate development and support the project will become a zombie in no time.
It's the sort of thing people say mostly for their own self-satisfaction, without actually thinking about it or trying to figure out the answer. Like: "both parties are the same" or "what have the Romans ever done for us"
Google develops Chrome and Chrome relies entirely on Google's money. Google is the default search engine. They are much, much, MUCH more tightly coupled to Google than Firefox could ever be.
But nobody says anything. And yet, Firefox makes Google the default search engine, and everyone has a think piece on it. Firefox is dead, they say, they're just Google's puppet. Then what is Chrome?
The "kneejerk Mozilla hate" isn't about marketshare, it's about ineffective leadership bringing features nobody wants while ignoring problems users currently have.
Please get real. Comparing real output money measure in an annual basis with market capitalization is ridiculous. It's like someone comparing your annual salary with their net worth.
Otherwise, they'll be gone. Thunderbird has proven people are willing to donate millions if they know their money will go directly to the software. In 2022, Thunderbird collected ~6 million in donations (~20 million users) compared to Mozilla's ~9 million (from >200 million users)
Otherwise I 100% agree.
Everything else is minor details compared to that.
(Yes, this was posted using LibreWolf, but I often wonder if I can even trust that, having the vast majority of it's code written and managed by Mozilla.)
Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table stakes for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell it.
No, it isn't. They killed adblock, and have a business model of throttling other browsers to force people to Chrome (Youtube throttling) and doing digital fingerprinting with exclusive-only Chrome finger prints as seen here on HN the other day.
Firefox has anonym, where it sells your 'anonymous data'
https://lifehacker.com/tech/why-you-should-disable-firefox-p...
I just looked, go to Settings -> type advert and you'll see
Website Advertising Preferences Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you. Learn more
It comes pre-checked for you.
I use Chromium for dev stuff, but now; there's no ublock origin.
You might've tried it during an arms race moment. YT is constantly changing it's anti-blocking measures, and uBO and uBO Lite are constantly responding. uBO had the same issue.
uBO Lite does lack custom filters and custom filter lists. It also doesn't have sync, but uBO didn't do sync well anyway. Also sync is far less useful without custom filters.
One of the reasons I've moved to Chrome is because of the memory problems with Mozilla that I've been experiencing for years. Every so often I look up other people who've been having the same issues. They seem to have been reported for years, but there's often a surprising amount of hostility from Firefox fans whenever they get mentioned.
As an aside, both Firefox and Chrome made their browsers significantly worse when they changed the order of windows in the windows menu from chronological to alphabetical.
You might want to check it out.
Also- what kind of animal are you?!
No one really cares about a majority of the UX sugar, IMO.
I personally find the LLM context menu useful and reading mode awesome, but these are not features that by themselves would drive me to use the browser.
The reality is that with so many different users, there will be lots of opinions about the best way to do things, and especially in OSS communities, it's literally impossible to keep everyone happy.
Mozilla should let others do UX experimentation (like Zen, which is an Arc copy), and focus on the core performance and compatibility of the engine itself. Keep FF itself more streamlined as a core browser, and empower others to build fancy stuff on top.
And ditch literally anything related to ads & sponsorships, which have no place in a piece of tech so foundational to the open web.
- I wanted ad-blocking on Android, so I tried out Firefox on mobile.
- Then there were times I wanted to sync browser history/tabs between mobile and desktop, so I picked up Firefox on desktop again.
- I fell in love with reader mode (and using the narrate feature to listen to articles when my eyes get tired)
- I flirted with Zen browser, but now that Firefox has vertical tabs and tab grouping, I'm having trouble finding a reason to use Zen
Firefox basically does everything I want it to do, and it's incredibly rare that I need to open a chromium-based browser to handle something Firefox can't do.
The address bar has become cluttered with buttons THAT SHOULDN'T BE THERE: "home" (useless), "translate" (won't go away no matter the setting), and now "share" (for real!?), "reading mode"; remove them from there, I can barely see the first few letters of the address! Also way too much spacing around them
I always have to manually close the previous tab when tapping on a link, let us reuse them instead, you may call us owls or wharever, but we don't like having zillions of tabs open to be closed automatically after x time
Improve speed, it's currently the slowest browser out there
Allow more customization (like about:config) and extensions, and for ex. to be able to remove the useless buttons from the address barhttps://www.askvg.com/how-to-access-about-config-page-in-fir...
Firefox may be far from perfect, but I've found it must more malleable than Chrome.
But there's another private-tab-killer, and it happens when the screen times-out automatically or manually (eg, when you push the power button). I don't have a passcode or anything, so when I push the power button to power the screen on, it shows the simple "swipe to unlock" screen. The problem is that FF leaves a "private browsing" notification — and FYI, if you click on any notification on my lock screen, it will unlock and go to straight to that app — so of course I see that notification and think "shit yer, here's a shortcut" and click it, to which it unlocks the phone and opens FF, but it wipes all my private browsing tabs in the process!!! But if you unlock it by swiping, then your tabs will survive...
Actually, as I'm typing this, I think it might wipe ALL tabs, but that's not so bad for regular tabs (as you have history, cookies, etc), but it can still ruin your "state" of a search/scroll/etc.
Edit2: I'm also just realising that the way it wipes tabs when I click the notification sounds just like the first issue I mentioned (which I presume is android-OS garbage collecting the memory held by "background" apps). I have a POCO phone that runs Xiaomi HyperOS, and if it's running a non-standard lock-screen "app" by default (because I'm using the default whatever with settings that suit me), then perhaps that's why clicking a notification counts as "changing apps"?! (or perhaps even the default android lock screen counts as its own app?) But this idea seems strange because it would imply that the "swipe to unlock" feature is not part of the "lock screen app"...?
The comment was: make the Firefox containers work in private mode.
In Safari private mode. Each tab has no knowledge of another (e.g. log into Gmail and then open a new tab and go to Gmail and you won't be signed in).
Firefox doesn't have this tab level isolation.
Also offer equivalent of safari's lockdown mode. So images and site features capable of loading malware etc are blocked by default.
My solution to this is having multiple Firefox profiles where the default one clears all history/cache/etc automatically upon closing (default in Librewolf). It's not technically private mode so containers work.
> disposable containers which isolate the data websites store (cookies, storage, and more) from each other
Granted, they're not in private broswing mode just normal mode, but same effect
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
Why would you create a privacy tool, and then not offer it in private mode. Makes no sense.
(You can setup Firefox so it's permanently in Private Mode and clears history and data on exit - as per Libre comment above -,which is how I have it set)
Pretty interesting how preferences can vary, because this bothers me everytime I use incognito mode on safari and think, can this not just work like in Firefox.
It's very handy for sites where you may have more than account
For that Firefox's container tabs are a much handier option as you can stay logged in and also open new tabs that are already logged in. It has colours to tell apart which tab is part of which container
But I understand that other people have other needs. It can be very useful for developers for instance. Make it an option, maybe.
firefox --profile $(mktemp -d) --private-window
- Firefox is alive, so that they are a theoretical competitor to avoid anti-trust measures
- Firefox has the lowest market share that remains that said competitor without distracting many users from G engagement
- Firefox emains of few steps behind in features and perforfance so that it remains in this pesky market share
- of course Firefox keeps Google search the default
- may be other under the table agreements? (Request for comments)
I cannot foresay what will happen next with the state of MV3.
It puzzles me how more programmers don't switch to a real open source browser not controlled by an advertising giant which will use their overwhelming monopolistic force to steer the way browsers work so that it benefits its bottom line.
Vote with your feet, use Firefox.
Mozilla should be focusing on fixing things like that and making the browser be good before the barely related campaigning, let alone the whole "we're going to be an advertising business as well" thing.
Hundreds of tabs open, memory usage is ~3GB for main process, 2-3GB for isolated content (ie the tabs).
Really not sure what the problem is.
Let us know when you find one.
Google access to Firefox telemetry data?
I knew people at mozilla at that time and complained loudly to them about breaking my extensions with their constant releases.
And then there's all the dark pattern default config values which are totally unethical
The list of user hating behavior is long.
There is no saving anything there now. The good people have left and been replaced by the author of that awful article.
WebUSB. The only time I open chrome nowadays is to flash an ESPHome device. I'd like to drop that dependency.
I wish the extension API supported favicons in a better way. I use vimium and due to a recent change it's nice and easy to have a key binding to select bookmarks. It can't have the visual favicon which would it easier to distinguish things at a glance.
But then, maybe I'm too old. Why do you need chrome when there's a stand-alone python program to build and flash esphome?
And yes, there are security implications. But that's true for any other platform and as long as the users are asked for the proper permissions, I'm good with it.
We should not poke holes into the browser sandbox to satisfy the needs of amateur programmers.
I did look into the standalone version, but decided it was fewer hoops to jump through to just use chrome.
The user experience _is_ good there, and I'd like it in my preferred browser.
Any ESP device I have isn't even connected to the Internet so I do control when it updates.
I want the browser to have less interfaces that aren't strictly needed to display self-contained websites. Using a separate program for potentially dangerous stuff like programming external devices is absolutely how things SHOULD work.
*(yes I know on iOS it’s fake Firefox but this is still a profoundly stupid change that shows they think their users are idiots)
Computer A:
Sometimes I cannot close tabs by clicking the X, or refresh/go-forward/go-back using the buttons next to the address bar.
Computer B:
Sometimes I get downloads that have "Unknown time left" (0 bytes/sec) when the X of X KB/MB is 100% and you can't remove it from the downloads dropdown.
I just discovered a new bug on Computer B, clicking the hamburger menu doesn't do anything.
Both are Ubuntu.
(I'm not a fan of the new menu in Firefox Beta for Android. I guess it looks nicer due to the greater whitespace, it just break muscle memory and has less options/selections.)
Do you see any disk i/o spikes when this is happening?
No, it stays there until I close the browser at which point I get the option to cancel the download or not to exit.
> disk i/o spikes
Unknown, I don't monitor that, and the bug doesn't happen all the time, not sure how to recreate it.
I suspect you have an Ubuntu problem.
That means, to use my browser I have to wait literally minutes and yesterday, it was so long somehow on Zen (I created an issue there but they linked me to the firefox (downstream?) issue which wasn't solved in like sooo many years)
I basically just use a password manager and just create a new profile and start afresh most of the times but still its a little inconvenient I guess.
Then she (Dr. Love) continues to say... "I welcome this change to dialogue. To relate to you OCP's commitment...."
So when I read the FF's post, Dr. Love and the beginning of a big spin came to mind!
After opening FF while previously using Arc for a while I was super happy with the usability improvements (that don’t seem to have impacted older workflows fortunately… big fan of how FF makes it easy to customize the toolbar etc)
For example, I sometimes run with hundreds of tabs and my wife has many thousands, at all times. My needs and hers are very different from typical users who have single digits numbers of tabs open, heavily biased toward the low end.
Of course I would prefer TST or Sideberry, but I'm not like most users. For most users, the Firefox experience is superior to Sideberry for its ease of use and fewer failure modes.
To me, what they shipped seemed lacking in features to both, with no real improvements.
One other feature that is nice for me is the ability to collapse the sidebar to just the tab icons. It's a nice middle ground between being able to see what I have open and getting a full screen experience.
TST and Sidebery are both fantastic extensions, I don't think they do anything wrong. For whatever reason though, the FF native implementation worked for me where they didn't
cd $FIREFOX_PROFILE_DIR
cd chrome
git clone https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks
touch userChrome.css
@import url('firefox-csshacks/chrome/hide_tabs_toolbar.css');
@import url('firefox-csshacks/chrome/window_control_placeholder_support.css');
I think if you are extremely narrowly scoping well-trusted ad blockers, you may be okay, as long as you understand you are trusting the ad blocker with your banking info. But it would be far better for a browser to include capabilities in first-party and eradicate extensions altogether.
A Pihole is also far safer than an adblock extension, because it can't see your decrypted your web traffic the way a browser extension can.
Installing PB is easier (and more powerful) than configuring the browser for better protection. For example, Firefox doesn't block much by default.
https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
Any extension with post-decryption ability to read and modify everything on all websites could, if they choose, see any sensitive info you do, and subtly even change it without your knowledge.
And I'm not saying uBlock would, or that as a super popular extension it likely wouldn't be discovered quickly, but arguably they can because you've given the extension the ability to see and rewrite your entire reality.
I’d even go so far as to say that extensions should have full control over Firefox again. They shouldn’t have to wait 20 years for a tray icon on minimize feature to be added or require external apps to add that feature on certain operating systems. Min2Tray existed. They should have the ability to completely alter the UI to make it function however you want. For example, the old search was great for keyboard users. A couple of strokes and you could switch search engines to site specific ones. Now it takes dozens. And when they all have the same icon, it is a painful experience. There was even at one point an add-on to restore that functionality. All this should be exposed.
The extension and plugin infrastructure didn’t die. It was killed! If security is a concern, just add more warning cones and blood red messages.
Compatibility: these addons could be broken very easily because they could depend on almost anything, and with the monthly release cycle, it is very difficult for mod authors to keep up. For instance, some addons would work by taking a core browser function written in JS, convert it to a string, run a regular expression to edit the string, then use eval to create a new function to replace the old one. In some release, the syntax of the "convert a function to a string" output changed slightly and it broke these addons, because it broke the regexp they were using.
Performance: XUL addons could do all sorts of things that are horrible for performance, and there was no real way for a user to tell what was causing it, because the addon wasn't isolated in any way. I ran into somebody who was having severe performance issues because the browser was generating colossal amounts of garbage for no reason. It eventually turned out that on a whim they'd installed a "LaTeX the World" addon, which would look for LaTeX typesetting instructions on pages and replace it with the nice looking output. The problem was, the way it worked was that every 10 seconds or so it would convert the entire contents of every single tab you had open into a zillion strings, search those strings, then throw them out.
(Also we know from long experience that "warning cones and blood red messages" don't in practice suffice to prevent end users from being exploited, but that's a separate issue.)
They also spent tons of effort explaining the background of these choices and why they felt they had no choice and this was the only path forward. It's disappointing people are still coming up with this "oh, why don't they just [..]?!" type stuff.
Several proposals backed by "the primary competitor" failed to get through the process, or were radically changed to make other implementors happy.
* Use Vulkan for rendering instead of OpenGL
* Drop dependency on GTK (it's a source of many problems) and just implement their own full fledged Wayland handling like Wine is doing.
* Back Servo again as the future engine.
How much of a difference does it make?
> just implement their own full fledged Wayland handling
As long as they still support X11... (I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine)
> Back Servo again as the future engine
100% yes, if they still can that is
Wayland is also the modern option, so I don't really worry about X11 use cases. For remote desktops, better to use something like FreeRDP anyway. X11 forwarding is much worse in every sense.
I think KDE are working on integrating FreeRDP server into Plasma for seamless usage.
Another thing to add for Firefox would be may be switching to Vulkan video from VAAPI (or at least having it as an option since ffmpeg already supports it) and using hardware acceleration for video encoding too, not just for video decoding.
Haven't looked into it, but FreeRDP might support specific window forwarding too rather than the whole desktop.
If you need something fancier there is Sunshine / Moonlight, but they still have an issue with not using Pipewire for window / screen capturing (and kmsgrab is not really the proper way to do it).
Anyway, X11 is a complete dead end in general so it's not really a viable option for anything serious.
X11 may be a dead end but Wayland sucks as a replacement, so for now, I see no other option than supporting them both.
It may be technically possible to do the equivalent do X11 forwarding with Wayland, that is connecting to a server with a ssh terminal (no remote desktop, headless server), run a GUI app, and have it display its windows on my own desktop as if it was running locally. The problem is that Wayland is 17 years old and I still can't.
For any kind decent remote desktop access you need good performance, specifically low latency. X11 just isn't there.
Headless server is headless server - you can't have anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's already not headless.
Instead of X server you can have any Wayland compositor (Wayland server) and whatever part that provides streaming (FreeRDP or what not).
So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge for such scenario if anything.
It doesn't seem to support Wayland though.
And no it doesn't support Wayland of course. It's an X11 accelerator, the design is heavily connected to the X11 design. It doesn't replace X11's remote display support, it just augments it. Wayland doesn't have that at all so there is no point there.
It basically removes the many round-trips in the protocol that increase latency, by caching values locally. And it can also keep the session alive when disconnected, similar to what termux or screen do for SSH.
To me this reads a bit confused, but perhaps I'm misreading it? In X11 terminology the server is sitting in front of you (the one that draws to the screen), so no, you don't need need the remote host to be running X11 server.
You do need the program that draws to the screen, but I think it's fair to say the remote host is headless if it doesn't have a GPU nor a program to interface with the GPU at all. All the remote host needs is code to interact with such a server over TCP or Unix domain sockets. And that code is tiny, even small computers without memory for frame buffer can do it.
> So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge for such scenario if anything.
I think X11 was actually pretty great at the time it was created, i.e. clients can create ids and use them in their requests (no round-trip to the server) and server can contain large client bitmaps that the client can operate on, but sometimes poor client coding can kill the performance over the network. As worst offender I once noticed VirtualBox did a looooot of synchronous property requests during its startup instead of doing them in concurrently, stretching the startup time from seconds to minute or more. (Whether it truly needed those properties in the first place is another question.)
Sending the complete interaction as a video stream? That's what I'd call a hack—though X11 should be modernized in various aspects, for example to support more advanced encodings for media, controlled by the client.
In some sense the web is the direction where I would have liked to see X11 going: still controlled by the client, but some light server-side code could be used to render and interact with the widgets. This way clicks would react immediately, but you would still be interacting with the actual service running on the remote host, not just a local program.
(Another reason why I consider X11 better is the separation of the server and the compositor.)
You can use software rendering for Wayland cases too. There are even OpenGL / Vulkan software implementations.
> All the remote host needs is code to interact with such a server over TCP or Unix domain sockets. And that code is tiny, even small computers without memory for frame buffer can do it
I don't really see much value in such use case. Thin client (the reverse) makes more sense (i.e. where your side is a weak computer and remote server is something more powerful).
But either way, running a compositor even with software rendering should be doable even on low end hardware.
> Sending the complete interaction as a video stream? That's what I'd call a hack
Why not? Video by the mere nature or modern codecs is already very optimized on focusing only on changes to the encoded image, so it's the best option. You render things were they run, then send the video.
It works even for such intense (changes wise) cases as gaming and actual video media. Surely it works for GUIs too.
That's actually besides the point I intended, which was to provide an example how little code the X11 client actually needs. OpenGL/Vulkan software implementations are the opposite of little.
> I don't really see much value in such use case. Thin client (the reverse) makes more sense (i.e. where your side is a weak computer and remote server is something more powerful).
Yes, I can see that, e.g. remotely using a super computer. However, I think GPU-capability wise the devices people use to interact with graphical systems are quite sufficient to most any interaction task and if X11 was able to video stream just the important bits (I imagine the important bits would be large updated bitmap areas within the user interface, so video encoded server side bitmap transport would do it), it would be just as suitable for that kind of asymmetric case; while being still usable for IoT scenarios, where you have those tiny computers providing sensor data, of which there are probably hundreds of millions if not billions by now.
In principle it's also trivial to convert an X11 style display interaction with video transport (just run the X11 server in the remote end), while the inverse is impossible. So with X11 style you could choose either or, depending on your devices and needs.
> But either way, running a compositor even with software rendering should be doable even on low end hardware.
And how about video-encoding that data on low end hardware without help from hardware? And even with the help of hardware, i.e. NVidia has limited number of video encoding sessions (so number of distinct video streams) to five and not all hardware can even do that. So it's CPU time if you have multiple such sessions, and running high-quality video encoders are not a walk in the park for them.
Because the streams would be between two end points, multiple streams could be packed inside the same stream to save encoders, but I don't think anyone's doing that..
Alternatively to the number of encoders limitation it helps if you run a single stream (stream the desktop), but personally I consider per application remote use a much more flexible system, and the default provided by X11.
> Video by the mere nature or modern codecs is already very optimized on focusing only on changes to the encoded image, so it's the best option. You render things were they run, then send the video.
Surely scrolling a document by instructing the server to render a different part of the server-side bitmap to its own screen is going to be way more effective than encoding+decoding video, i.e. when considering latency, quality, energy consumption, memory usage and bandwidth?
I have an HTTP server running on my printer and I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a powerful CPU. The web page it provides is more than adequate for controlling it.
Remote interface in streaming fashion only makes sense to me when remote computer is strong enough to do all that's needed for GUI to work. Like thin client idea above, game streaming and so on.
Look into xpra
Isn't https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe supposed to cover that?
The correct repository for Waypipe is https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe, but yes it does what you said and works well.
So may be check your version or check what Ubuntu is doing wrong / use something else.
What I want to see is VAAPI encoding used, not just decoding. Better even Vulkan video both for decoding and encoding.
It's somewhat of a taboo around here, and every time I have mentioned this there has been a bunch of responses certifying that Firerox works perfectly for them.
Not sure about Windows where I play full real games.
I haven’t found a way to block this very annoying behaviour in any browser, short of installing “new tab blocker” browser extensions, but they are unreliable.
Maybe we should collectively put our money where our mouth is!
Would there be any interest in starting a fork or even a new browser that was supported by the community via donations?
What would people actually want in such a thing? IMHO I would like something like that to be the best damn standards adhering browser, minimalistic but configurable, secure and fast.
… to be hones, thinking about how everyone wants something different and you can’t please everyone, the most ideal situation would be something like an Emacs for browsers (yes I know Emacs has browser functionality).
Imagine a JavaScript console that could call functions that ran browser functionality! You could script your own browser, use someone else’s config, build your own plugins, etc!
I just don't really feel like using FireFox while Mozilla has a hand in it.
You have Chrome, which disrespects it's users as a principle. And then you have chromium forks, which rely on Google for... let's see here... 99.99% of their application's code.
Mozilla might make mistakes, but next to Google, they are angel.
Interestingly enough, right, we can see that the same CEO left Mozilla and then started Brave, and we can see the growth of Brave and the decline of Mozilla.
You can argue, sure, that market conditions are responsible for Mozilla's plight--the decreasing value as antitrust insurance for GOOG and so forth. But, Brave managed to do well in spite of that, and to my knowledge if you look at the pay, at his peak at Mozilla Eich was making in the 800-900K range while Baker made over 6M a year from 2022 to 2023 (and just a bit under 6M in 2021). So, for around 8x the price, you had worse leadership.
To restate again: the dude started a new browser company and grew it to a quarter the size of Firefox--and this without having GOOG as a sugardaddy.
It's an incredibly mid take to assume that individual competence in business is somehow not actually relevant.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...
I'm not an infant so I don't need pretty pictures of animals to express myself. This is offensive and ridiculous. Please fuck off.
I use Firefox as a fucking browser, to, you know, browse the web. Open web pages. Read stuff. Avoid ads at all costs. And that's pretty much it.
=====>>> Optional <<<=====
(2) Again, in the middle of busy work, I move the mouse and, presto, bingo, again, if a gun would do any good, another INTERRUPTION in my work as Firefox has a POPUP that covers what I'm trying to look at. Sometimes the popup is of a URL, a LONG URL with ~10 lines of text, and covers a LOT of the screen. Sometimes so, ASAP I have to get rid of the popup. I hate interruptions, "Tab Pickup", popups, changes I didn't ask for.
Yeah, that's ChatGPT. And not a particularly high quality ChatGPT style sentence. They weren't just ideas, they were direct responses? Ok.
that is the fault of apple. Firefox on iOS is not really firefox.
Other than it being an extension, I've had no complaints.
Ironic that "fox" isn't even an option. And the fact that they even ask this tells that they probably don't want serious feedback.
https://superuser.com/questions/1532688/pasting-required-tex...
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webusb
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34564119
https://nullrequest.com/posts/thecaseagainstwebusb
and on and on...
Personally, I think choice is great. Why be upset when you can download chromium (it is supported by pretty much any platform FF is) and use it to do all sorts of stuff with WebUSB, if you are into that?
Still, I would like to see FF disable these features by default and allow opt-in. I don't see a great reason to avoid implementing them behind some "wall" (other than to avoid an increase in a concealed attack surface).
This is the same a surgeon saying they refused to perform life-saving surgery on you because they don't believe you understand the consequences of the possibility of dying in surgery.
The average person cannot be an expert on surgery or on browser security it's up to the people that have the education and work experience in there to make those decisions and handle them. Mozilla as another poster said has taken their toys home because they didn't get what they want.
No improvment to the spec can fix users.
What a bunch of idiots. They seem to have a completely misguided concept of what a browser is. They still have a 1990s mindset of the browser being a window into the Internet, instead of the universal UI that it has become today.
Agreed. Also pointless hill to die on. It just forces users to another browser. This supposed average user only sees one side of this argument. Firefox doesn't work so I don't use it.
If only there was some nonprofit with the funds to hire full time devs to work on this issue.....
I want to like Firefox. I try so hard to like Firefox. Why is it so hard for them to like their users back?
I want a basic tree style bookmark/tab combo like Arc. This approach works extremely well for me.
But in Firefox, you have:
- All bookmarks - Bookmarks toolbar - Bookmarks Menu - Other Bookmarks - Mobile bookmarks
I don't give a shit about toolbars and menus and others. I want to organize it by my own categories. I can get close by putting all my folders in "menu" -- then I can have a button to access my tree of bookmarks. but then on mobile, I have to click "desktop bookmarks > bookmarks menu" just to see those.
Plus whenever you install fixefox, new bookmark entries are created in random spots. Not a fan.
In Debian, I'd use FF-LTS and regular FF. Since moving to Void, xbps allows only one version, so I use FF and Vivaldi.
I'd appreciate any opinions on Vivaldi. It's the only functional alternative browser I've found in the repos. But I have to start it with:
LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1
That sounds like the the keyring issue that pops up if you have your user account auto-login on machine start. If you don't let Chromium store passwords⁰¹ this can be safely disabled: see https://archive.is/G6pPH#ID15 ²
I ran into the issue when setting up a simple temporary public kiosk a short while back.
--------
[0] I don't, I prefer to keep my internet facing UAs and my credential stores a bit more separated than that. It also removes some friction from moving between browsers, when one annoys me enough to (re)try another.
[1] If you do let Chromium store passwords, then you can still do this, but not safely as per the warnings in that article.
[2] Or https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/tips-1.html#ID15 for the original, if you enjoy consent dialogues or want to be commercially internet stalked
Absolute disgrace the amount of telemetry and home phoneing bloat in the official releases
They are absolutely yesterday's browser and tomorrow's browsers are trying to be better/faster while they just keep pouring cement on the grave they're already in.
mozilla are now an advertising company, so other than ublock origin there's no reason to use it over chrome
and I'm pretty certain they'll get rid of manifest v2 soon too
I’d say it made some mark on FOSS, but in any book not dedicated to that it’s nothing more than a footnote.
I have run Firefox on Linux for decades (and a few extensions, and metric gobs of tabs), with zero cases of the behaviour you describe.
Maybe their distro has a broken Firefox package, they messed with the default installation, have too many extensions, or malware? A slow mechanical disk?
Something is wrong with your system.
The problem appeared to be a lot of unnecessary disk io coupled with DNA lookup that only get done after every single read request is complete. This means that when tab #10 is taking long to read whatever from disk it blocks every other tab.
Noticeable only when using spinning rust disks.
I am looking forward to the day I can discard Firefox.
I am currently semi-forced to use it on one website ( ankiweb's desktop view does not seem to work well in Brave or Chrome ).
Go on a hardcore crusade on performance and battery life. Safari currently uses half the amount of energy compared to Firefox (according to macOS measurements), so I switched from Firefox to Safari and noticed hours of difference in battery life when I’m out and about.
That type of optimization requires tons of profiling and is less glamorous than implementing new features, so I could see how it's hard to prioritize for Mozilla, especially if optimizations might look very different across OSes.
Only if they properly maintain those APIs. I'm still salty that they had tab groups, then broke that feature out to an extension, then killed the extension. (Then, much later, recreated the feature over again)
But yes, if done well modularity is probably good from a development perspective too.
It doesn’t look all that different to how it did back then.
Spending donations on C-levels bonuses?
/s
Would you please __try__ paying attention to the top 10+ years old issues in the FF bug tracker?
I guess another one would be a political news filter given so much polarization online.
This is AI-generated text. It's also insanely dense with suffocating coddlespeak.
RSS feeds were great because you could choose what you wanted and opt in to them; using algorithmic analysis would require not only a lot of infrastructure and dev time but also a lot of data collection and all the privacy concerns that comes with it.
I don’t want to send my searches through Google or OpenAI just to get basic tasks done. Give me a sandboxed local model that can:
* Read pages and data that’s loaded through it
* Summarize content
* Act on rule-based prompts I define (e.g. auto-reply in Slack, triage emails, autofill forms, upvote followed author’s posts…)
Let me load a Slack tab and have the AI draft replies for me. Same for Gmail. Basically, let Firefox interact with the web on my behalf and train the AI to be my assistant.
Beyond that, extensions already do most of what I need — but a built-in, private AI agent would actually move the needle.
I just want to get to the point where I can say: "Siri, draft an email response to my boss..." or "Siri, monitor all my Slack and Teams channels and text me if anything important comes up... and go ahead and auto-respond with RTFM links if the answer is already in the docs or a past part of the channel thread..." or "Siri, go do the grindy parts of the video game so I can log in and just do the fun parts this weekend..." or even, "Siri, take my stupid defensive driving course I got slapped with for going 5 miles over the speed limit."
That’s when AI will be fun. Right now, it still feels like I’m doing way more work than I want to. I want to be able to start handing it tasks I can hand interns now. (Ha, and yes, I have made interns do the boring grindy parts of video games for me, and take my defensive driving tests.)