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Comment by captainepoch | Hacker News Reader

So... Here's an idea: stop wasting time and money on things like that, listen to the community, hire engineers, and make a browser that can be at the same level as Chrome. We already told you what we want and need, no need to keep asking.

Mozilla and the story on "How to waste money and resources" is getting tiresome at this point.

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It's wild how often Mozilla asks for feedback, gets clear answers (less bloat, better performance, fix regressions), and then drops something like another random experiment no one asked for

The market often rewards bloat (more features) not technical excellence. I think a big marketing push or pre-install partnership would help them a lot. Their marketshare is now so low that web developers unironically state “Best viewed in Google Chrome” like it’s 2003 when IE6 had 95% marketshare.

The "market" doesn't care about Firefox at all. It has already chosen Chrome and making a second Chrome won't change that.

"The market has already chosen Internet Explorer and making a second Internet Explorer won't change that."

- This was probably said by someone in a meeting at Google in 2006

Chrome is an obvious win for Google.

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.

And now with their dominant position they can choke off competing ad networks by removing 3rd party cookies.

Sure, but Google didn't make a second Internet Explorer, they made a new thing.

Maybe the one where they decided not to make a second Internet Explorer and create a different browser? But I doubt they even considered it.

Maybe because as from another comment: "Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge". They also absorb some useful users feedback. But do they have a real intention to increase market share (which could be done easily)? They are well paid - see in other comments how much its CEO is earning. So, "antitrust litigation sponge" sounds plausible?

I think exactly the same. It's always the same play.

I guess they don't want to listen to things they need to pour money into.

Mozilla develops a better browser than Chrome in a lot of ways, and they do it with a tiny fraction of their budget. I would not describe that as "money wasting".

To be fair, most of Chrome’s budget is spent on developing ever more complex web standards to stay ahead of the competition, and to make sure no one will ever catch up to them.

And advertising, if I had to guess. The Chrome ads were very pervasive for a few years there.

Just two personal experiences of why the quality of Firefox is far from Chromium's: downloads, and creating an extension.

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...

So just think how much greater the browser could be if Mozilla put more of the money they get into improving Firefox instead of into pointless UI redesigns that only slow things down, or breaking existing functionality - not to mention all the other frivolous nonsense they seem preoccupied with instead of being a credible competitor to Google.

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.

One man's "useless UI redesigns" is another man's feature.

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.

The only thing Mozilla has right now better than Chrome is that the APIs needed for uBlock Origin to work as intented exist.

chrome doesn't have container and having to manage tens or hundreds of profiles would be impossible.

.. and about a thousand less privacy violations. Plus significantly less ties to Google.

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.

> stop wasting time and money on things like that

What do you mean? The AMA?

> listen to the community

Huh? Isn't that exactly what they are doing with this?

> > stop wasting time and money on things like that

> 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?

I think your parent poster has a point. What is needed from firefox is fairly clear to any person of good faith:

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.

Asking the same questions, and getting the same answers over and over again doesn't really seem like listening to me.

Read the comments from Lio and skywal_l, both replies to your comment <- that's what I mean.

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