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csin

Please enlighten me. How does one make a browser "better" these days?

- They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.

- They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.

- They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them.

- They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.

- The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup.

How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas.

Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.

Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them.

The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.

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How would I make Firefox better?

First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3].

Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should.

Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before?

And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/three-years-after-its-reva...

[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1330109

[3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.

[4] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a...

> [3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.

Yeah as someone who picked up Firefox when it was Phoenix, it was “free Opera with a less-odd-feeling UI”. That was basically the initial (great!) sales pitch.

What got me installing it on any computer belonging to a person I would have to help support was the auto-pop-blocking and that it performed a ton better than IE/Netscape/Mozilla. Opera also performed better and I think it also blocked pop ups out of the box, but it wasn’t free (well, kinda, but the free edition… had ads).

> - They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.

They were ahead of the game with extensions, then they destroyed their own extensions. They copied everyone else, not the other way around.

> - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.

They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then while destroying their extensions they made vertical tabs harder, while still leaving it as a charitable contribution by the community instead of an internal project, and slow-walked it for a decade. I still have to do weird CSS to make them look right, because they decided to have an opinionated sidebar for no particular reason.

> - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.

This, again, is not their fault. It's because of a man who they don't pay, who has had to battle with them on multiple occasions. Their only contribution is not accepting a Chrome standard completely. Imagine wanting to be given credit for not exactly copying your neighbor, after an enormous amount of pressure was brought to bear. It's my belief that Google decided that Firefox wouldn't kill ad blocking in the end, because it would have looked horrible in antitrust court. Now that's over (Obama judges don't believe in antitrust), and you can expect Firefox to kill it soon enough.

> Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.

Nah. They kept telling me, while ignoring everyone's complaints about their actual experiences, that the most important thing was to reduce startup time for some unknown reason.

Make Firefox fully and exclusively a tool in service of the user.

Eliminate - both in code and by policy - anything that compromises privacy. If a new feature or support of a new technology reduces privacy, make it optional. Give me a switch to turn it off.

Stop opting the user into things. No more experiments. No more changing of preferences or behavior during upgrade.

Give the user more control; more opportunities for easy and powerful automation and integration.

Not only would this win me back as a user, I'd pay for the privilege. I'm paying for Kagi and happy to be doing so. I'd love to pay for an open source browser I could trust and respect.

> They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.

Anyone remembers when Firebug was released?

Today we have amazing dev tools in all browsers but back in the day Firebug was such a game changer.

In my experience Chrome does not just load faster, but it also uses less memory than Firefox because of its more aggressive tab hibernation that is enabled by default.

On my laptop I had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because it kept filling up all of my RAM resulting in other applications crashing.

For me:

- Enable Color Management and HDR display on non-MacOS platforms

- Play HDR video

- Support common and rising media codecs and container formats (HEVC, MKV, JXL)

- Support WebXR properly on desktop

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