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Comment by Diti | Hacker News Reader

I hope to see the day when (or if) the LLMs get so good at spotting and fixing bugs that all that’s left for the Firefox engineers to do is to focus on adding new features.

This isn’t sarcasm. Firefox deserves to be used more. Most people I know don’t use it because “Chrome does almost everything better”, and Firefox can’t compete with the other browsers’ roadmaps.

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Chrome ain't better in any meaningful way for >99% of use cases. Heck, I am a dev and I use FF with ublock origin only, for past... 10 years?

Same with my wife, after I've explained things to her and she understood how different internet experience can be thats the primary browser.

So please don't put the argument like 'here is crappy underdog but please use it because monopoly is bad and google is a bit evil', its first class experience in everything I have ever thrown at it. Tripple that on mobile, by far the best mobile and useful mobile experience, bar none.

Agreed, though many websites only test on Chrome and are unusable on Firefox. Ramp.com and mailgun come immediately to mind. Zoom also won't let you join with browser on Firefox. There's enough that I have to keep a chrome available for those types of sites. It shouldn't be this way, but it is

> Zoom also won't let you join with browser on Firefox.

FF works for me.

do you hack your user agent or anything to get it to show you the option?

You haven't needed to in quite a while. Well, assuming you're on desktop? I guess I've never tried it on mobile. That feels like asking for trouble.

I ran Zoom in my Firefox desktop browser for a while, but it tended to overheat my laptop. Other things overheat it too, so I don't know how much was specific to Zoom on Firefox.

I just checked. Still gives me the option ("Join from browser" in a less highlighted option, trying to drive you to their native client I guess.)

> Firefox deserves to be used more

Totally agree. I even go as far as choosing which website I make purchases on depending if they work on FF, or writing to support occasionally to tell them it's not supported or a feature isn't working properly and this would be appreciated.

I know it pretty much always goes nowhere, but I feel it's what I can do to keep the browser somehow on the radar.

> Firefox deserves to be used more

Part of the problem is, when they stop working on fixing bugs, they start doing Mr Robot things... We just want a web browser. Nobody asked for pocket, or AI...

If they use AI to fix all the bugs, then what else is for them to do, other than maintain syntax compatibility with the various languages they build with? They're just going to go back to making the browser trash again.

I have an old apk of Firefox pinned on mobile. I do this because I genuinely believe that for my very limited usecases, the browser has become actively worse.

(Don't worry- I use the system browser for any site I don't fully trust.)

when was the last time you made a contribution financially or physically? Those features were economically tied, who's giving the dough?

Browser haven't needed new features in a very long time. Extensions were supposed to be the solution to that.

Wouldn't that quality and availability just allow Chrome to pull ahead of Firefox that much faster?

If Mozilla created some proprietary LLM or harness that they used internally to outpace Chrome that may be a different story, though I also don't see that happening.

Unfortunately we're probably still quite far from that. This is the best case for LLMs still - the quality of their output didn't matter as long as it worked, and there was a near-perfect oracle for checking if their output worked.

That's a really good use case for LLMs. It also applies to things like finding proofs in Lean and creating test stimulus. In both cases you know automatically whether the output is good, and it doesn't really matter if it isn't.

That isn't the case for most bugs, and definitely isn't the case for actually fixing bugs.

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