Hang on to Your Firefox
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newsonaut.com
It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings in about:config and make edits to userChrome.css
It isn't bots complaining about Firefox here, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into. Users who are seriously concerned about what Mozilla is prioritizing, and who are genuinely worried about what is at stake.
I hope people here never stop bitching about Firefox. Refusing to talk about Firefox's problems wont help make them go away. Keep discussing what you'd like to see in Firefox and what things you hope they'll focus on and prioritize. There are Firefox devs and mozilla employees around here. If we're lucky, a few of them might see and listen to some of what we say. It's the most tech savvy users who disable all the telemetry and data collection, so our feedback isn't really going to be seen any other way.
Its getting harder and harder, at some point they'll deprecate their last sane ESR, and we'll all get stuck with all their junk.
I'm not paid full time to work on a web browser. As a volunteer, I can't find the time to dedicate to that. I could do a few lines here and there if I really got dedicated, but like most people, I have a life. I have kids and such. My retirement account won't fund my midlife crisis to quit my job and work on a web browser, so I depend on something to build a good browser. And that is assuming I even would work on a web browser if I could afford to do whatever I want full time. There are a ton of other activities in my community that need volunteer help, some of which I'm helping a little bit, but I could do more for.
I, like many here, have wished that we could donate a small amount to Firefox every month to fun development, however it turns out that the Mozilla Foundation does not fund development of Firefox and so any money would go not to Firefox but to other causes of which I may or may not support but are not a web browser which is what I want to support.
And no, a fork of Chromium isn’t “the same as Chrome”.
Does "make Firefox compatible with more web site" make chrome stronger?
A thought experiment: if Firefox can use all chrome extension, does this make chrome stronger? I guess yes, right? What makes a website different from extension?
[ I am trying to show the "chrome ecology" argument is ridiculous, not saying we show stop supporting website ]
Firefox has to follow along because of all the web developers who only test things in Chrome and expect all browsers to work exactly like Chrome does. If anything about your browser is different, a website doesn't work, and if you complain the response will be "We don't support Firefox, you should use Chrome or Edge instead."
I actually think this is an interesting case for AI not being evil, because I think it's at least plausible that it could close the gaps between big dogs and little guys, though in the long run it might just prove to be another form of acceleration.
People who can handle this complexity are extremely mobile in the industry. They can always find employment in a much better paying place than Mozilla. And a competitive browser has to have such developers on generous payroll.
One of the issues with Firefox is its codebase. Some parts of it are slowly rotting and it has its own fair share of 20-year-old bugs. Mozilla is slowly failing to keep up with the ever changing landscape and dealing with the age of their codebase. There is a reason why Electron could be developed with Chromium but not Firefox. Mozilla really tried this as well, it just didn't work.
If you're forking, Chromium or Safari are a better start point than Firefox.
Also without Mozilla (and Google’s funding), “just fork it and make your own” isn’t reasonable either.
If Mozilla/Firefox goes away, so do all those ragequit forks maintained by a group of people I can count on one hand.
It would be up to companies like Redhat, Suse and/or Canonical (preferably AND) to step in but realistically I don’t see that happening either.
But seriously, web is asymptotically approaching zero usefulness precisely because of all those "capabilities". In those circumstances, can't you see a million nerds muttering "we'll build our own interweb! with blackjack and hookers!" And one of them might even get lucky, and get a tipping point. Gemini's just an example.
I don't think web's ever going away for corporate stuff, but I can imagine the cultural party moving next door, to a less capable protocol.
Konqueror could be an option.
the frustration i have with that is the "i don't have a problem with it" crowd is the poster child for lower standards and shittier software experiences. there seems to be no meaningful way to convey "hey, you should care about this".
firefox fumbled super hard earlier this year trying to push their on-by-default AI. it took entirely too long to get them to backtrack a little. you could feel the insulation between customer feedback and their teams working it, they already have the operating models in place to try and force an enshittified offering and you can tell their new MO means they are hungry to do it and i expect more bullshit from firefox up ahead. hopefully we have other options locked and loaded before we get there because they're playing with fire considering how much user share they don't have. mozilla has completely shifted its priorities and structure, i do not expect them to move independently in a direction that benefits us anymore. no one should be surprised if/when they resume shipping some real bullshit up ahead
That's fair. In this case though, the divide is pretty massive and also important. A lot of people couldn't tell you what a browser is. They just know what button to hit to make Facebook appear on their screen. A few would know what a browser is, but couldn't tell you what engine it used or why that would even matter. Many of the folks around here know about browsers in a way that goes far beyond what is typical. We've sought out and experimented with several. We've written websites, extensions, and applications for them. We understand how browsers work, and the standards and protocols involved in what they do.
The result is that we tend to hold stronger opinions about web browsers than many others would. Our knowledge matters especially to Mozilla because the user who couldn't tell you what a browser is isn't going to bother going to their app store and searching for a new one. We are the ones who go to our friends and family and tell them about Firefox. We encourage them to install a new program on their devices and to learn to recognize and use an unfamiliar icon whenever they want to search "The Google". The more users like that Firefox pushes away, the more they'll miss out on the benefits of that kind of evangelism.
It used to be a whole lot easier to recommend Firefox. I could tell a moderately skilled person to download it and install it. If someone weren't comfortable with downloading and installing software I could install it for them plus an extension or two in just a few minutes. I knew firefox would work for them, and not try to exploit them. That's no longer the case.
Now firefox provides an enshittified product out of the box, and every update threatens more harm. While I might be willing and able to keep an eye on whatever new bullshit Mozilla pushes and make a bunch of config changes and customizations to work around it, I can't expect my less technical or passionate friends and family to do that.
I have gotten most of my family and friends to switch to Firefox, and I have never gotten a Firefox-specific complaint or question that I can remember.
Most non-technical users are exclusively using android devices and chrome is pre-installed. Today you can still install firefox for others and it will probably work fine for them, but it will be exploiting them too. It will collect their personal data and use it to push personalized ads. It will use updates to force anti-features onto them.
Firefox has gone from something I could recommend unreservedly to something I can only suggest while cautioning about it's increasingly user-hostile practices and providing a list of setting changes that should be made and monitored for silent changes after every update.
It could be a generational thing, but I've always associated "power user" with the DOS/Windows crowd and it isn't so much about knowing more as, well, treating a computer like a computer. That is to say that the person who uses scripting in Excel is as much of a power user as the gamer who tweaks power profiles or overclocks their processor. On the flip side, someone who uses the basics of Excel or the gamer who buys the fastest GPU is a consumer of products, rather than a power user.
Funny thing is, I never hear that term being used on the macOS or *ix side of the fence -- even though there are certainly people who who would qualify.
As for the AI thing: AI is something that nobody wants but "everybody" expects. I don't blame them for pursuing it, even if it's a type of integration that I really don't want.
oh ok I'll change to Chrome then surely they would never do stuff like this
So I think if you're going to be ambiguous on a point where ambiguity is inexcusable you deserve to get nailed for it every time.
I'm sorry but I don't take you seriously.
Chrome: no blocking ads on websites whatsoever. The comparison isn't even close.
We don't see many people here hating on Edge for instance, they may hate the fact that it always wants to force itself in, but not the browser itself. And that's simply because they don't use it, they don't even bother trying, they don't know what to hate about it and they don't care. Occasionally, some people say it is actually good, they get ignored.
Compared to this, hate is a good thing.
Hate more if you care.
The more you hate, the more you care.
Support hate.
Relax people it's a joke, if I have to say it it's not funny anymore.
Reality is that non-tech people to know what surfing the web is like with Ad-Block vs non-Ad-Block browsing. Once you teach some one it becomes night and day.
Without teaching someone very few people will step out of their comfort-zone to self educate.
Is letting Firefox slip into irrelevance (by not using it) in the interest of the users, writ large? What developments should we expect if this happens? This is the ethical side of the user.
Everyone has their own ethical standards around this but I think Firefox is clearly seen as the browser to use if you care about the open web. A lot of people therefore feel the need to defend their preference for a Chromium-based browser.
IMO that obfuscates the fact that even non-Chrome Chromium based browsers still affords Google massive influence over the future of the web.
About compatibility, there are some odd sites that use a Chrome only API or something that FF didn't implement. They are really rare but people that must use one of them to do their job don't have a choice.
Then I intentionally break every single site by using privacy add-ons like uBO, uMatrix, PrivacyBadger etc so sometimes I have to play with them and find a configuration that lets me use a site. In the case of uMatrix it usually means finding the minimum set of scripts that enables enough functionality leaving out all the 3rd party tracking and then saving it. When it's too complicated and I will not use that site again but I must use it, I either disable every add-on on that site or I run Chrome.
Finally, I run integration tests with a headless Chrome, but I develop with FF. If it works with FF it works with Chrome and Safari too.
BTW, I use FF on Android as my primary browser too.
I only have an issue because I set a big disk cache (because data cap). 8gb is fine IIRC, but 24gb causes slowdowns on startups and new tabs. (Also much more of an issue on my older laptop than my newer desktop.)
Doesn't outweigh anything tho.
In that case you can be satisfied of yourself while your user base and promoters is plummeting.
It is a great thing that you still have a large user base that will still complain of issues they have so you can improve or ever on that if it is your wish.
And nothing as strong in the end that the fidelity of an user that was complaining about an issue and now feel that his voice was heard!
Obviously, I hate edge. I dont mention it because useless garbage is what I expect out of microsoft.
But it just laugh at it because it's so incompetent and mediocre like everything from Microsoft.
Firefox on the other hand I use privately and I deeply care about it. That's what makes me pipe up more.
People whine about the features every time. Guess what? I like sync. I like having a dedicated container for the rare times I must log in to google. I like some of these "useless" things they "tack on." Not every change must be met with "nobody asked for it." I actually don't want a super basic, boring browser - that's what I have mullvad browser for! FF is my daily driver, sometimes they roll out stuff I legitimately want and expect.
That’s because this mismanagement has been going on for nearly 10 years now, nothing is being done to address it, and if anything, it seems to be getting progressively worse.
As much as Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of Good, the existence of Worse shouldn't make anyone stop demanding Better.
Generally, while I know it can take time away from working on other things, I don't mind if firefox adds optional features like Sync, FlyWeb, Pocket, or Hello as long as they can be easily and permanently disabled.
Ideally they wouldn't be installed by default and users would be informed about what the features are, told what the risks of installing/using them are, and given an option to enable them or not first.
I also used to be a Thunderbird lover, but I was forced to ditch it due to crippling freezes, crashes, and slowdown when you have a lot of emails. Mozilla just feels like an awful steward of their projects at times.
EDIT: I also subscribed to Mozilla VPN for almost two years and was forced to ditch that too, due to... solvable technical issues, again. Mullvad was just a greatly superior product for the same price. I still use Firefox for all my browsing on desktop and Android at least.
1. Pocket was an external company, which Mozilla bought (and claimed they would open source), which already had a web extension. There was no need for the pre-acquisition integration, or to buy it later on.
2. After buying it, Mozilla did nothing with it, including failing to open source it, and seemingly failed to get enough revenue from that they shut it down last year.
This saga provided no benefit to Firefox users who did not use pocket, and at best for pocket users left them with a dying solution that they would need to migrate from (given the failure to open source it). It's not clear how much Mozilla paid for Pocket, but those funds could have been spent on something more valuable.
Often it goes unacknowledged, leaving the reader to read the criticism as a tacit endorsement of switching off of Firefox to something else.
I just wish they would fix the memory leaks and stuttering.
Someone needs to take Firefox from Mozilla itself and provide it better funding under the understanding no more shennanigans.
I don't see how cloudflare buying firefox would keep it from being a victim of corporate interests. That'd just make them subject to the corporate interests of cloudflare instead.
That's even worse.
It is also very bad if the company that gets to decide which user agents get to see a webpage owns a browser. I could easily see some kind of fingerprinting mechanisms built into the browser if cloudflare is in charge. For your safety, of course.
That was not in fact the purpose of project Quantum
Would you care to expand?
I've been using Firefox on Android for years and haven't noticed a lack of polish. However, I am genuinely curious what I am missing out on.
Prefaced: I respect Mozilla's mission. All of these criticisms ARE overly harsh. At the same time, app UI should be as invisible as possible to the user, and Mozilla's apps are... "loud"
My last installs of Firefox Klar and Developer a year or two ago had the APKs at over 200 MB, no ability to block sound per-site, confusing UI icons (e.g. I couldn't find the forward button after clicking back, abstract shapes for everything), reader mode that doesn't place you at the same place where you were on the original page, annoying gestures that can't be disabled (swiping tabs away UGGGHHHH), Collections which were really quite silly/not my thing, no toolbar customizability like in the desktop app, no WebHID, and data collection on by default.
Today, Firefox is under 100 MB. It has very much bought into Android's overrounded/inproperly-whitespaced/shadow-heavy/unintuitively-animated Material 3 Expressive. Like most Material Design apps, this Firefox is ugly in a way that offers zero usability benefit: Despite the excessive margins nearly everywhere the three dot menu and menu search icon are still too close to the screen edge. I would place extra emphasis on the unused 8 mm above and 6 mm below the URL text, which SHOULD be 2% rather than 9% of my screen real estate.
I have always felt that Mozilla could join Canonical in dumping the Nickelodeon color scheme. (Did the founders of all these plus FedEx go to Clemson or something??) At least respect my device theme (grey) rather than Grimace purple everywhere! It's particularly strange to me that they have 23 different icons to choose from as well as a "Device Theme" setting but no method of deamethysting all the UI elements.
Tab overview and tabs.
Holding a tab selects its checkbox, holding it longer does "something" but it's not clear what, I guess "show full URL" and then eventually "Share"?
The "swipe tab away" gesture is still there.
Closing multiple tabs creates a sequence of "Closed tab (Undo)" toasts, so you aren't actually sure which toast to click that will undo a specific closure. (Coupled with the swipe detail, it becomes annoying accidentally swiping a tab away while deliberately closing others.)
Per-tab disabling of Sound is still missing; this is not the same as Autoplay!
There are prominent features that I'd never use: private mode icon, "grab tabs from any device", "search your tabs", the giant "FIREFOX IS ON GUARD" reminder, a home screen.
New Tab is across the entire screen from the tab overview button, so you either need to enable the New Tab shortcut (which encroaches on URL space) or just live with "tap top-right, tap bottom-right" for every new tab you'll create in your lifetime which is DEFINITELY not nice for one-handed navigation. There was enough space in the tab overview top bar for a "New Tab" button, but then they'd have to ditch the default Jetpack Compose floating action button.
Everything else.
The shortcut to get to Settings is in a different place on each View.
I couldn't find Reader Mode at first. It only shows up on supported pages and is not as customizable as desktop Firefox. Good enough.
Collections still seem dumb as hell. Maybe I need to use them to appreciate them.
I still have to change just about every default setting to match my personal preferences.
WebHID will never be added. There are a lot of passionate opinions on HID/USB in the browser with solid moral stances against its adoption. I get this and generally agree. However. If I want to reprogram a Gen 1 Shure MVX2U with a cellphone---and I often do---my options are writing my own APK or some very quick/dirty Javascript that I can edit/host anywhere. Mozilla takes away the convenient option and leaves only the labor intensive Google-approved technique.
Oh, and I guess there's no about:config unless you re-enable it at chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml which is not-at-all memorable. :( about:config doesn't matter much anyway, since I can't find any flag that will improve any one complaint I've listed.
I liken Firefox to mediocre toilet paper. It gets its job done and is certainly better than nothing but can get irritating to use day after day.
Also, to be fair to you, I rarely use my phone as a dedicated browsing device so I am probably least representative of someone who relies on their phone as a primary browsing tool.
Not implying that you do btw, I just thought I would color my experience with Firefox. I live largely on Desktop and see my phone as a secondary experience so I excuse a lot of this because I get a Native Add-on experience that isn't addressed by Android's Chrome.
And fuck then for buying and killing fakespot.
Jk but tbh I think group them in with Firefox
Tired: Firefox
Wired: Floorp, Midori, Mullvad Browser, SeaMonkey, Waterfox, Zen, GNU Icecat
Inspired: Basilisk, Pale Moon
The future looks pretty clear to me. We will have to use two browsers. One government approved, google (or some other thing) vetted browser for all the official and banking stuff. One other for all the other causal stuff.
This would be bundled as a single package, with something like firefox containers automatically switching to the "approved" browser based on domain loaded in the tab.
Most of the Chromium-based browsers remove Google's telemetry and integrations, so if someone has a problem with Chrome "looking over my shoulder", then they have many more alternatives.
And sure, Manifest V2 will disappear in all those forks, but many browsers have built-in adblocker instead, for example both Opera and Brave claim to. And other than adblockers, what else is lost in Manifest V2?
Mind you, I am still using Firefox, but saying "the only alternatives are Chrome and Firefox" is completely incorrect.
This exactly what I disagree with and I think I supported my argument quite clearly. The more we say "Chrome is not Chromium" the more stuff like V2 will happen. At some point we need to admit that the dominance of Chromium does in fact give Google power over the web
It is kind of the same daydream as the Windows 11 debloaters have that if they just keep doing that, everything will be okay. That is until Microsoft implements features they can no longer fully disable, like recall, or just exercise their control to revert any changes at will.
Well, then the good news is nobody is saying that.
There’s room for people to disagree on what constitutes a serious “transgression”, though.
Google pays Mozilla for default search engine selection in Firefox, no other product. If Mozilla then redirect that money to other non-Firefox ventures then maybe they should explain why.
The non Firefox ventures are things like lobbying and building a community of support for principles of the open web, which seem pretty defensible to me. It's not like the CEO of WeWork paying himself from his own company's money to turn his private property into a revenue stream. Which I know might disappoint people looking for things to accuse Mozilla of.
That they decide to burn through it by paying 7 figures salaries for their C-suites, buying luxury offices at the heart of Paris and launching plethoras of feel-good initiatives left-and-right is their own choice.
Most of their money is spent on software development, they seem to pay at market rates and CEO spending is something like 1.5% of their overall budget and consistent with industry norms. I don't personally love it, but I also don't think it's a conspiracy or enough to legitimize theory that they're supposedly wasting money. If anything, mozilla stands alone as the most successful pure full stack browser company in the history of the tech industry precisely owing to their intelligent handling of revenue streams and long-term financial planning. Got to go back to the drawing board and find a new accusation.
I don't think it's a conspiracy, it's a simple application of the purse theorem: if there is money to be spent, it will be spent, regardless of whether it makes sense to do so.
_E.g._ OpenSSL, PostgreSQL, or Wayland make do with a dozen contributors and maybe a couple hundred grands per year, but because Mozilla drowns in Google money, they feel the need to spend it fast.
> CEO spending is something like 1.5% of their overall budget
That's... huge? If I donate $100 to Mozilla, it's not to give $1.5 to an already multi-millionaire CEO.
The problem isn't that they're frustrated it's that they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about.
They don't just complain for themselves, they think this is the causal explanation for Firefox declining market share. Which it isn't because what they complain about 99% of people have never heard of. Nobody out there cares about who the CEO of Mozilla is or what detail of their Term of Service for telemetry they've changed. Power users is the only thing Firefox doesn't lack.
The average user doesn't really understand what a browser is, or how it works, and will never bother to look for an alternative to whatever default browser shipped with their OS. If Firefox plans on surviving by appealing to that audience they're doomed to fail.
Firefox got what success it's had by appealing to the people who care about browsers. They installed Firefox and then convinced the other people in their lives who couldn't care less about what a web browser is to install and use Firefox. It was easy for power users to recommend Firefox because it was a good product that offered clear advantages and didn't exploit its userbase. Alienating the people who know and care about browsers by enshittifying is probably not going to work out for Mozilla, and that means we all lose.
They completely revitalized the browser and... kept losing market share. Because it's 99% about distribution and Chrome was distributed by the world's most visited website and the pre installed default on over a billion devices.
In fact, we have a perfect natural experiment for what it looks like to execute on features perfectly, listen to core user concerns, getting first to market on mobile devices, and outcompeting on customizability and features as well as experiment with every imaginable fundraising model you could imagine. Opera was that company, and to this day I maintain that nobody has a better browser engine than Presto at its peak, I still think even now, in terms of features, innovation, customizability. Opera was the best browser company that ever existed. If being a perfect browser company was rewarded with market share we would all be using Presto right now. But browser economics just don't work that way.
Also, there's a history of curbing browser monopoly dominance by giving users choice (antitrust case against Microsoft in the '90s), and Mozilla's market share issues would be solved overnight if Android users had to choose from a list of browsers. The narrative that market share change has anything to do with feature development is a hallucination born in the backwaters of internet comment sections and completely ignores the actual drivers, which are the flexing of monopoly power and pre-installed defaults.
Which is exactly why the first thing Mozilla needs to to is to stop driving them away. They are never going to win the popularity contest for the average user without the word of mouth from enthusiasts.
What would you have them do? Somehow they have to make some money somehow.
Alternatively they have to live purely from donations, which means that people like you and I have to part with of our money. Or they could be purely open source, in which case people like and I donate our time.
It's not the panacea people keep assuming it is, it's just one of many accusations that gets flung at the wall.
This would be the point where Logan Roy says you're not serious people.
Yet somehow Firefox is different? It needs to make money! It needs to make money so much that they keep spinning up all sorts of new projects so that they can make more money, or at least that was the argument for some of what they were doing.
At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.
And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.
>At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.
They already do that, they have a huge endowment set aside. It's obvious that people don't actually care about it because they don't know, and they only mention the possibility to make the accusation, never to give them credit once they discover Mozilla already does this and has been doing it for about 2 decades.
>And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.
Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users. And that's the best pure online fundraising program on planet Earth. Again, people only think this through to the point of being able to make the accusation not to the point of figuring out if it would actually work or not.
Isn't half a billion dollars per year enough to maintain that? Over $10 per LoC annually?
To get pedantic about it, they aren't developing that much code, they are maintaining that much code.
Not that I think LOC is the best metric but here are the figures for 2 of the project I brought up. Linux kernel is ~40M LOC FreeBSD kernel 7.8~9M LOC
I would argue that the OS's that run the internet are much more cutthroat than a browser, not just in terms of attack risk but in business terms as well.
>Microsoft aggressively tried to destroy Linux in the late 1990s and 2000s. This era included the internal "Halloween Documents" mapping out strategies to fight open source, former CEO Steve Ballmer calling Linux "a cancer," and Microsoft covertly funding SCO Group's proxy lawsuits against Linux users.
The larger your codebase is, the greater the attack surface. One of the arguments about the way that Firefox is progressing is that they keep adding more stuff into the codebase. If it's getting too complex, maybe they shouldn't be adding those features...
>Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users.
Mozilla received 16.9 million from contributions in 2024.
Wikipedia took in ~170 million in the same time period.
Not sure where you got that Mozilla was bringing in more than Wikipedia through donations?
In going through the Mozilla Financials, I don't see where they have a huge endowment set aside, 73% of their revenue is royalties. I did however see that they spent 31 million to buy Acronym(an ad company) and 21 million to buy Fakespot. So that's neat.
https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
Mozilla Corporation already has funds totaling about $1 billion today. They're simply choosing not to develop Firefox actively.
Just fork it and have the agents maintain security patches moving forward.
On the one hand, you're totally right. Pushback should exist.
On the other hand, I have seen some seriously lazy and wild justifications for sticking in the chrome universe because tech users aren't immune to justifying a bad product through inertia (and, honestly, are probably champions at it).
I have seen and heard plenty of firefox "can't handle all the sites they need" and I have always been curious as to what these people are doing because I've been on FF for decades and the ONLY time I switch to a chrome browser is for VIA (and that's a whole google did a standard no one else wants to do situation).
To be fair, I suspect some of that has to do with major web dev stuff that I don't have to do, so it is very possible I'm actually just missing the mark here and the tooling/use case is really that much better in chrome (although I know that's its own issue since that's kinda the problem), and there are those who've found some major feature on a chrome spinoff that they just love and FF doesn't do well.
Still accounting from those, I'd safely bet money a lot of people who claim firefox just cannot work for them haven't really bothered to try to adopt. It's functionally identical to me outside of the whole "better adblock" and "arguably better bookmarks i forget to use".
I'm very sick in general of "the criticism will continue until moral improve" attitude that has become more and more common.
And no, Chrome never "bought an ad-tech company, collected data on users, and used chrome to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force users to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings". NEVER IN THE WORLD. That's why you use it.
Mozilla Corporation does not get to do whatever they want to get funds for something that should be a project run for the public benefit.
Google/Chrome being worse is irrelevant to criticism of Mozilla/Firefox.
And I hate them trying to push the ethical ads angle. For my there is zero ethics in advertising anymore.
I disagree with Mozilla about many things, but I agree with this article - I use Firefox because it’s the only browser out there that isn’t Chrome or WebKit, and that’s worth enough to me that I’m willing to disagree with them on other issues.
Am I missing out on cool features of the URL bar in Firefox?
Edit: made my question more specific
But you can do that in Firefox.
Firefox also find open tabs (so you can jump to the open tab instead of opening a new tab) and allow you to explicitly search for bookmarks, open-tabs etc. The open tab thing is also nicely integrated with Firefox sync (not sure if Chrome has something similar)
Their built-in adblock is quite good but still not nearly as sophisticated as uBO which intelligently intercepts and modifies requests from advertisers to stop tracking. uBO is much more than an adblock tbh
Are you saying their code was horrible and unsafe, or just that its a byproduct of using C++. They've been rewriting parts in rust: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/8f0a1b19114....
> They also re-implement everything whether it is needed or not.
No they don't. SerenityOS did, and that was the goal of the project. But Ladybird has plenty of third party libraries.
Yes.
It's both terrible because it's C++, and it's terrible because they're not following the modern C++ safe coding practices.
> They've been rewriting parts in rust: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/8f0a1b19114....
And it's not going to amount to anything major. Rewriting in Rust properly requires architecting things from the beginning.
> No they don't.
For a long time, their policy had been "no third-party code". Eventually it became untenable, so they started using third-party libraries. But they still ended up reinventing the wheel at least several times.
The only brokenness is misalignment of text on the tag cloud. I took a glance, and it has the content marked as scrollable with the min-height of 0, height of 20 and line-height of 24. I have no idea what _is_ the correct behavior in this case.
People tend to read certain things with a negative tone because people tend to write certain things with a negative tone. That kind of pattern recognition is fundamental to language, not a regrettable quirk. Otherwise "You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about" would be equivalent to "I think you might have misunderstood".
I'm sorry you feel "you didn't understand" has a similar range of interpretation as something like "you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about". I'm not sure I can help with that, I can only say this is not the interpretation of every native English speaker. If anything, the split in views should hopefully help convey English often cares about context and the audience over a singular meaning for a set of words (though I don't think that's particularly unique to English).
[I'm sure you won't have any desire for me to explain my position and will regard this interaction positively.]
Interestingly on fingerprinting test websites, Brave also did significantly better than Firefox + PrivacyBadger + ublock Origin + one or two more which I forgot. When I ran some tests a couple months back.
Vivaldi is cool (I loved Opera 20 years ago) but very laggy on my machine. (They did the UI in JavaScript or something.)
I use both now (Brave and Firefox), when I want to use a second account. And Firefox scrolls PDFs more smoothly. (But Chrome-based browsers have sharper text rendering in PDFs! Can't win 'em all!)
I like that they both have vertical tabs now.
"Hey, we recognize that normal Brave is exploitative and user-hostile by default. We'll fix it if you pay us $59.99 in mutual acknowledgement that you're a chump who can't install UBO."
I'm glad (and unsurprised) that Brave's vision for the web never hit the big leagues.
Ethically, for one. I'll be fucked if you expect me to "donate" to a browser that thinks my friends and family deserve a lower-quality browser experience.
Google pays Mozilla something like $400 million a year. So what browser do you use that you claim is ethical, and what exactly is the ethical method to fund development which you haven't actually defined? Origin, like Kagi, seems the best way to do it imo.
Who do you trust to fight the good fight against Google? Mozilla, who get $400 million per year from Google? Makes no sense. Brave has a great built in ad blocker that is configurable with lists and works great. What's the problem?
The last lifetime license I bought expired when the developer was bought, stopped releasing updates, and the software stopped working the next major OS upgrade. It is on a clock, and you don't know when it runs out so you can't value it.
This is a brilliant browser for iOS/Linux usage, and now its UI is minimal, and its settings are filled only with stuff for my benefit. It feels like the early 2000s again! This should be much more ballyhooed.
But OP asked if "is this not enough of a selling point" and I wanted to answer that honestly.
The user interface is a bit different which took getting used to but I think I now prefer the one in lite.
{
"policies": {
"AppUpdateURL": "http://127.0.0.1/",
"DisableAppUpdate": true,
"DisableFirefoxStudies": true,
"DisableSystemAddonUpdate": true,
"DontCheckDefaultBrowser": true,
"ExtensionUpdate": false,
}
}
File should be located in $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR/distribution/
$FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR is the installation directory for firefox, which (for default setup) probably will be printed by this:
sed -nE 's/^\s*exec (.*\/)firefox .*/\1/p' $(which firefox) # and it's probably /usr/lib/firefox
[1] https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/guides/policies-confi...
[2] https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/reference/policies/
Just look at how many people pump positive comments into influencer's posts that are nothing more then ads (sorry, collaborations). While some are bots, plenty seem real.
Or the new local takeaway that's just opened and all the reviews saying "I keep seeing this place appear so I had to check it out"
I got the Chrome extension that adds the "Open in Firefox" option to the hyperlink right-click menu. That's how I view all YouTube videos.
I'd switch completely to Firefox except for all my data being on Google. It's clear that eventually I will switch to Firefox completely.
Google is pure evil.
Also I swear YouTube runs much worse on FF. But that's secondary.
If it's uBlock or 3.33W, I know which I'm choosing.
2. My employer requires Chrome or Edge to access all resources.
I prefer vivaldi's UX to firefox enough that i am willing to settle for technically-worse adblocking. If I notice this becoming practically-worse, I will consider switching.
I hate that you are right about this :-)
It really hit home for me today. My project manager was sharing her screen so we could see the free planning poker webapp our team uses. I had it open locally on my machine. She had ads, I did not.
She's not a programmer, but she _is_ technical. She's worked adjacent to programmers for many years, and she's very adapt at writing SQL to query our DB. But she didn't think to install an ad blocker.
I guess I really do live in a bubble where I think _most_ people run ad blockers.
I love this. Many ADs are blockable because they don't care adblocker.
If everybody use an Adblocker, they will come up with something even harder to block. This is engineering time arm race.
I imagine others feel the same?
Only downside is I keep getting Google Recaptcha so I have to switch to DDG.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/blob/main/chromium...
From "ublock-filters" only 1 filter was unsupported and 90 had unsupported domains dropped out of 10436. From "easylist" 18 out of 56109 filters are unsupported, no unsupported domains.
I'm sticking with uBlock-Origin, but not sure how much of a difference it makes these days.
- We "need" firefox or else everything's just chrome
- Forks of chrome don't count as different browsers because they all use the same engine
- Using the same engine makes you basically just chrome because you can't diverge from upstream
- You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it
- You need to keep merging with upstream because upstream is implementing new web platform features
- You need those web platform features because if you don't add them then websites will stop working in your fork
- Websites will stop working in your fork because web developers don't support older browser versions
- Web developers don't support older browser versions because... they don't care?
If web developers had a culture of supporting, say, 10 years of previous browser versions, then chromium would lose a lot of the power it has to drag the forks (and firefox) behind it. I don't really see this happening without some sort of major culture shift, though. Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.
- Web developers don't support older browsers because they lack the skill and economic motivation for it.
- The managers of web developers will not support them, because there is no money to be made in supporting older browsers. Nor are there career benefits in maintenance projects. No developer or manager will get promotions for it.
- The actual management of the companies will not promote or compensate engineering managers or developers for maintenance projects since it doesn't contribute to "line goes up"-economics.
Blink is very modular. Merging your changes is easier than you think. Exponentially easier than creating a whole other browser engine.
As recently as 2012, web developers had to make sure their websites ran on IE6, a browser from 2001, and were very frustrated that had to support this 11-year-old browser instead of being able to implement new features available with Chrome/Firefox/Opera and even newer versions of Internet Explorer.
There was a lot of resentment caused by this situation, resulting in web developers just not wanting to hold back their website so that it will render correctly in some random ancient browser.
There have been a few attempts at this already and I have something like this myself for websites I design. Ultimately they fail to gain widespread traction since everyone has very different ideas on what of the various Web standards should be included at each version level. Someone else’s standard will likely not include that one feature you cannot go without so you simply do not follow it.
The headline results are:
- Chrome 94.7% (1053647/1112582)
- Firefox 90.6% (1008073/1112582)
- Safari TP 88.7% ( 987377/1112582)
- Ladybird 84.2% ( 937019/1112582)
- Servo 74.4% ( 827216/1112582)
So Ladybird is catching up with the other pretty fast! Although it's worth noting that it still has a bunch of extra work to do with regard to performance.
(my engine Blitz whose website this is on scores 42.2% for specifically the `css` subset, compared to 50.3% for Servo and 72.3% Ladybird)
(the results above exclude the `encoding` suite, because that's 1 million test ~50% of the whole suite, that doesn't really measure rendering capability).
But this is absolutely NOT how this site is meant to be used. For example, Ladybird jumped from about 30% to over 70% when it added a bunch of unicode logic. Secondly, these tests aren't all even officially agreed upon standards. Some are specific to Chrome features that are still in the draft stages for W3C. Many tests are written by the developers of the engines themselves. Chrome, having a larger team, will naturally contribute many more tests relevant to whatever feature they're prioritizing
[0] https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&product=chrome&product...
That's true, but you can dive into specific categories to get a more accurate picture and also see which sets of tests are only implemented by Chrome.
Firefox on my laptop has a propensity for eating lots of RAM, and constant CPU usage, even if nothing is going on. Task manager is useless. Profiler just shows "GC collecting".
Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not. And don't even get me started on the "new tab" [age - it gives me 6 choices and all of them are "AI" ones which never show what I want. The only way to show a manually curated link list is "collections" and those do not get synced, and occasionally disappear for no reason.
Probably due to my age, I religiously close every tab after I read it. If that gets more than a dozen, I literally quit the browser and declare bankruptcy because it’s not worth it to sort through the mess of tabs I clearly am not using.
Firefox is old too. I’m sure it could manage memory better, but couldn’t we all? If you have tabs in GC and using CPU when you aren’t using them, kill them maybe? What else is that tab doing all day when you aren’t looking?
I’ve never understood why people keep so many tabs open and why they’ll literally switch to an entirely different browser platform rather than change a bad habit
When it balloons into the low thousands and starts hurting performance, I dump Firefox's open-tabs store (file called recovery.jsonlz4) into a different file and start over. At some point I'll point an LLM at that junk pile and see if I missed anything important. (Probably not).
If a tab is important, you'll be using it more often than once a week. I have a similar rule with impulse purchases: anything I want needs to sit in the cart for 24-48 hours before purchasing. If I still need it, I buy it. Probably cut the crap I buy down by 75%. Steam? It goes on the wishlist (personally capped at ~50) until I can commit to playing and finishing it right then and there.
Doesn't Firefox already do this? (Or at least have an option for it?)
There's also a higher chance that things will slip through the cracks and be forgotten if I bookmark them, whereas with tabs they're staring me in the face any time I'm using my computer.
I also use Firefox on Android, I have less experience of using other browsers on mobile but what I've got is fine for me.
I'm not questioning your experience but I would like others, who might be considering using Firefox, to know that different people have different experiences.
For what it's worth, I've been known to have 300+ tabs open all in separate windows (I just forget about them and they tend to accumulate), and for the most part it handled it just fine (it did use quite a lot of RAM, of course.) That was on an i7 7700k with 32GB of RAM.
I remember being quite impressed indeed.
A few hundred HN or Wikipedia tabs work absolutely fine, I've tested. But there are much heavier sites, and only a few of those can cause the machine to start swapping until OOM, especially when left to work in the background.
(And unlike Chrome, Firefox does not seem to throttle/unload background tabs automatically... or if it does, it does it much less aggressively)
I'm using Fennec from F-Droid, but I have a little document symbol on the URL bar I tap for reader mode. I guess the issue is it doesn't show on all sites then?
This is false. I am seeing that button right now in Firefox, on the right side of the address bar.
It seems that any time I find a website with a horrible design and start looking for that "reader" button, that button is disabled in Firefox. Sometimes I tolerate the design, sometimes I switch to Chrome - because reader mode works on all sites there.
Also: Substack posts don't seem to show the reader symbol immediately, often only after switching tabs or a page refresh, e.g. posts linked here: https://dynomight.substack.com/
For me, it's pretty clear that a much better idea is not to fix the broken concept, but do what the Chrome does, and show the button on every single page. Then users won't have to report the pages where button is missing, and Firefox devs won't have to keep updating that functionality all the time as the new types of pages appear.
Yes, this means that sometimes reader mode might miss some relevant text, but that's OK, reader mode does this occasionally already. And Firefox is supposed to be for power users, right?
It’s not really a feasible alternative.
What exactly is Firefox going to do differently to grow its market share? Or just "more of whatever the last fifteen years have been"? Unless they have a plan to do better it seems foolish to trust that they'll steer the project miraculously towards success.
The former. Ladybird is currently not practically usable, it is unclear whether it will ever catch up to the main engines, and even if it does, it is unclear whether it will ever reach the market share that Firefox has. It is a nice project but science fiction at this point.
as for detecting that the browser is not chrome/safari/firefox, the days where you could trust the user agent value to reliably identify a browser are long gone. ladybird will just have a value that will make it pass any checks.
Plus I genuinely like firefox its a great browser and I dont feel bad telling people that its good.
As long as the business world is going to continue centrallizing on the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, any existing or future alternative browsers will either have to kowtow on the alter of compatibility or make the deliberate decision not to support "advanced features" that enable the next generation of proprietary webmail, social media, banking webpages, etc - tending towards a total revocation of privacy in exchange for KYC via a glut of metadata.
This will get even crappier as mechanisms used to filter out "suspicious" traffic (read: competing products) become standard. I imagine using Firefox in 2030 will be akin to using Tor in 2019 - web requests will be blocked, denied, or deemed "insecure".
Lynx revolution when?
I know much of this is subjective, but the chrome experience just feels better / faster. This is what precipitated the first breakup, and when I think about the situation now, it feels like this dynamic is probably long lasting. It does make me sad though. I'll come back to firefox later, perhaps when I get a laptop refresh and can be a little more cavalier with RAM.
Literally what is the issue?
But yeah it's ultimately fear.
Also that it is controlled by Mozilla, an org ALLEGEDLY more interested in fringe politics than tech.
A bit tangential, but that's not a meaningful analysis (depending on how you tested):
FF CHR
Site 1 n Y
Site 2 Y n
It's like what I've seen some DuckDuckGo users say about search engines: 'Google is better because when I can't find something on DDG I do find it on Google'. (I think there's also some confirmation bias with Chrome and Google.)
It's like the old sales technique of comparing your product's features with the other product:
MyProduct YourProduct
Feature A X X
Feature B X
Feature C X X
Feature D X X
Feature E X
Feature F X
Feature G X X
Feature H X X
Feature I X
Feature J X
Feature K X
Feature L X
Feature M X
Feature N X
Feature OIt was the alternative to IE6, the first rays of dawn bringing hope to to a desolate, war-torn funereal valley of culpable corporate complacence.
Hatred for IE6 drove people to Firefox more than anything else - IE was horrible. Firefox users crowdfunded a two-page ad in the New York Times, mostly to get people to move off of IE6.
I don't say that because I personally mind if they are on X one way or the other, I've just given up on the idea anyone but an extreme few, usually tech nerds, seem to give a damn about this topic as a whole.
Why do people hate firefox? It's the only mainstream browser with an rcfile?
Instead of jumping over using another browser of the 'fox family; you have to dig under by removing all the unnecessary junk. Telemetry, Pocket, VPN et cetera; only then do you get to trek. I see why they named it fox. Each release that grey side of the fence gets a fresh coat of paint and the holes filled.
Rumours from the graves are that Cloudflare are going to introduce turnstiles to your own hole if you decide to dig.
A) Don't know what an rc file is
B) Haven't manually configured one in the last few years
I'm sure there are plenty on HN who are eager to say how much they love rc files, I mean to point out how many, even here, really have no attachment to these kinds of things. Of course it's very possible they don't care enough to read this far or respond either... but it's worth a shot :D
For example, some distros add an alias for rm to bashrc to make it ask for confirmation (the -i switch iirc).
I didnt know Firefox has one. I can't find any documentation on it either...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RUNCOM
</pedantry>
This isn't really true, and hasn't been for some time. It's just the only other browser engine with meaningful production users. Servo and Ladybird are both making great strides.
And it was all the fault of a judge seeing an alleged Google search monopoly despite the fact that countless users were already using ChatGPT rather than Google.
With killing off one of the last remaining web rendering engines, the ruling would instead create a Blink/Webkit (Chrome/Safari) duopoly.
This is one of the big reasons I'm against the EU trying to force Apple to open up the iPhone and allow other rendering engines. The market share of the iPhone is the only reason Google doesn't have 90+% marketshare, at which point no one will even bother testing in other browsers or worrying if features are Chrome-only. It will be Internet Explorer all over again.
I know some devs want this, because it will make their life easier, but you're assuming Google will keep doing what you want and like even after all the competition is gone. That's a bad bet.
it's not like the types of webapps that are broken on firefox dont also force you to install an app if you're on a phone.
i do wish govts. with spines had real power over big tech besides threatening userbase numbers, since basically everyone in the space is due for a breakup
You’d need to sell an annual subscription of 150$ to like 10 million people to get a browser that’s actually developed for users and not in some bizarre exploitive fashion.
But at the end of the day, it's not the amount of money that matters, it's the goals of the people running it.
I think that matters quite a bit. Otherwise, if you've got a spare $1,000, build us a browser. Maybe vibe code it?
Marketing costs money. Taxes, etc. Not everyone is going to pay the full 150$. Various discount programs would probably exist.
Anyway, even if my numbers are off not enough people will pay for a browser for this to be a viable business.
If you disagree you can start today and I’ll gladly subscribe. Not a fork, no build a new browser from scratch with feature parity to chrome
I guess you know you're wrong because why else would you need this bizarre requirement?
I guess if we really get technical we could say you can fork, but need to independently implement updates going forward.
Progress!
> but need to independently implement updates going forward.
That's not needed either? But since you've provided no rationale, it's hard to point out where the mistake lies. What's wrong with using known code updates as long as you remove the anti-user parts?
Anyway modern browsers are too hard to build profitably I guess without anti-consumer weirdness. Might have to switch to a cli RSS reader...
I'm still sticking with Firefox, at least until Ladybird comes toe-to-toe in terms of features and functionality.
And then there are the web developers who make their site functional only on Chrome. They deserve a special place in Hell.
My current main browser across desktop and mobile is Brave. Pretty happy with it. Overall more efficient and with a better UI than FF. I've used FF for many years, but I feel it's simply not as good as competitors anymore.
I think flatpacks also have some sandboxing.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-background-updat...
Not bots. Am here. Not some google bot. People putting Firefox with chrome, Vivaldi and whatever Safari users in one bag is absolutely stupid.
Firefox users and community have invested heavily into Firefox unlike other browser users and the people who move from firefox for flimsy reasons like X. I will use firefox until it's available. But I don't want firefox to go on this road that they are on right now.
We've done install fests and what not as communities to get Firefox installed on computers. I've stuck through firefox even when they ditched development until quantum release. It literally has effected work cos Google meet didn't use to work reliably. So if u think I will shutup about mozilla making intentional stupid decisions... Sorry not going to.
First thing they should do is stop virtue signaling in their marketing stuff. Stick to technicals if they don't want to give a damn about community. That won't stop me. But I'll back off a lil.
Firefox is a product of community collaboration which has also stopped recently. People who don't know that part of Firefox development... Community leaders era and stuff might think we are overreacting. We are toning it down actually since we don't want people to go to chrome.
Their vision and the way it was built is why Firefox was loved even when it was technically bad. They are technically greater than or on par with chrome now. But they have lost the soul which is why there is criticism.
- Not a bot.
I left looking for low-friction answers to my need to organize tabs and content. I didn't love giving up control to some central organization to process my data, but I had promised myself I'd write one or two extensions to answer my needs "next week" for years.
After doing some research, most of what I wanted already exists. Sidebery, Tab Wrangler and the new Agents window (with some styling to eliminate the default tab list), together with my other old friends like uBlock Origin, Auto Tab Discard (suspend) and a number of container-related extensions, deliver the same functionality I found elsewhere, without taking control from me.
Plus, this is just me, but chromium-based browsers manage to get my m3 pro macbook with 36GB RAM hot pretty consistently with normal use. I noticed the moment I left Firefox. And I noticed the problem gone as soon as I went back to Firefox.
I have often criticized Mozilla, because I care that Firefox remains the best browser, not just an alternative worth keeping.
On Earth, nothing is perfect, and nothing satisfies everyone.
Yeah, you can feel uncomfortable or disappointed, but Firefox is still the best option we have.
We should hold the line for Firefox.
It is the so-called "modern" web browser itself
For certain users who care about certain things, the concept is fatally flawed
The problem of the so-called "modern" web browser concept is that every computing task ends up "inside the browser" and thus outside the user's control
"Ad blocking" is no exception
Many so-called "modern" browsers now contain their own "ad blockers"
These "ad blockers" are not under the user's control^1. By putting them "inside the browser" the browser vendor has the final control, not the user
These browser vendors are generally seeking to profit from advertising or marketing services
For any user that seeks to avoid internet marketing and advertising, this presents a problem: the user's and the vendor's interests conflict
This is why I could never take Javascript-based "ad blockers" that work "inside the browser" seriously as a long-term solution
I use them, in conjunction with other methods, but I am prepared for them to stop working at any time.^2 I have always relied on programs that are "outside the browser", not under the browser vendor's control
1. In theory, if the browser is "open source", large numbers of users should be able to modify the source code to stop the browser from automatically requesting unwanted ads, tracking and telemetry. In practice, for a variety of reasons, this does not happen. The browser vendors, including Mozilla, make no effort to remove those reasons
2. This includes UBO in Firefox. The question is not if but when
If LibreWolf would disappear, it would still be FF for me, with carefully selected and regularly reviewed privacy settings.
IMHO, that Firefox can only really stay free if it is supported by donations (i.e. people like us who use it). Anything else will lead to various things that either push people away or make less free - probably both.
Even switched the telemetry and reporting on to help them out.
Personally I have the same view to things like Github, Google, and many companies/products that offer public services (largely) for free for mass.
Granted they have their own monetization scheme behind it, I don't feel I am entitled to used them, I feel grateful regardless.
The only community they have any penetration in is the developer one (in its prime non-technical people would tell me they used Firefox since IE was insecure. Their techy friends would tell them to use it and the message carried some actual weight back then).
Today they are a large organization that needs to make money to sustain itself, while facing declining usage, and less favorable terms for search engine integrations.
And our community (developers) is the least likely to take kindly to the increasing monetization slop (promoted articles, pestering about pocket and their VPN offering, continually requiring accepting new ToS, reminders to use new features, etc).
I mostly use FF, because I think we'll lose something if it disappears (for example, DRM will become intolerable, web inspectors will become more opaque, and generally future web standards may be much more controlled by a small set of large orgs with their own interests).
But I use FF with less enthusiasm every passing day
I don't know how we solve this, other than to hold Google accountable, but that in turn hurts Firefox. At least in that case we'll hopefully have Ladybird as a truly independent browser.
Why would ladybird be any different? The developer is not anti corporate and is closer ideologically to Google than Mozilla.
To save FF, Mozilla needs to enter the DC swamp, hire PR and lobbists to buy politicians to pass a law to force Gov.gov and (if possible) Big Corp sites to support Firefox. Maybe they can ally with EFF or others who understand Google's (don't be evil, lol) deepstate roots.
Occasionally something doesn't work right and I use Chrome for that one thing.
It's nice to slightly reduce the totally overbearing presence of Google in my life.
> My personal rule: anyone who uses any chromuim based browser is a tech illiterate
> I have had more than 1500 tabs in one machine a couple weeks ago on a laptop of 16gib ram, running 1% of those on chromium based and it will crash.
> Plus the proper ad blocking and control over privacy, making it the last bastion of browsers right now.
Cutting off your nose to spite your face kind of thing.
Anyway, I’ll stick with FF for the adblocking but these Mozilla guys need to piss off with the constant popups for new features I don’t give a shit about (like a VPN). 1Password has been doing the same thing lately, too. Both my browser and my password manager fall into the category of software that should absolutely never bother or distract me from whatever I’m trying to do.
However, on my iPhone and iPad I've stuck with Safari. Because it's "good enough", I'm not a heavy phone user, and really any browser on iOS is just a reskin of Safari given they don't allow different web browser engines.
When I'm using windows or mac I use chrome. I've used chrome on x11 before. But somehow it never hooked me.
Isn't that sufficiently divorced from most of what makes Chrome unpalatable to people who appreciate Firefox as an alternative?
Why then aren't there more forks of Chromium? I would think with the progression of SOTA LLMs it should not be long now before everyone can simply ride their own custom flavor of Chromium.
Try some tab suspend extension like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
Maybe it works if you are de-googling your life at the same time and consciously choose to use apps over websites whenever possible.
A friend recently got into making JS games, the FPS is always unplayable on Firefox. I'm not going to be snotty and ask someone doing this for fun to test stuff on multiple browsers.
SVG rendering occasionally slows down to a crawl. I used to open up bug reports ten or so years ago when I worked on something SVG related, but none of those bugs got looked at from what I can tell.
If I always have to have Chromium installed as a fallback, might as well use it.
If ff needs to turn a profit to survive how can it not follow the directives of the market?
What is the appropriate non-convoluted feeling towards the company that's been killing this hope for many years?
> the over thinkers on Hacker News come up with convoluted reasons to hate on Firefox
Firefox is worse today than it was in ~2012.
That is all.
(Though, I do use FF on Windows).
I think there's immense value+profit for our society in having multiple choices for what browser and browser engine you use. If you have many options, then Chrome killing adblockers with Manifest v3 is a much smaller issue.
Criticism is criticism.
Its daft to think something should be exempt from criticism because it is good or necessary.
Microsoft killed off all competition. Then the only improvements were Microsoft proprietary.
Web apps like twitter youtube discord that is left open for a few hours take up >2gb ram and is jittery. I have to shift+esc and close them to make them run smoothly again. Why hasn't stuff like this been fixed yet?
Why do I need to open about:profiles just to launch a new profile?
Once in a while someone talks about digital sovereignty, but much like climate change, nothing will be done (successfully) about it.
That's how it is, I've come to terms with it.
Do people care? What signs of this are there?
Does it matter to the average person that the society is marching further and further down the road of digital monopolies and surveillance capitalism? My impression certainly is that the percentage of people who care about this is so small that it might as well be a rounding error, while on the other side I see tremendous momentum, effort, and cunning.
And that's pretty much a rounding error, getting smaller every year, right?
Or would you say that "most people don't care" does not apply when it's only 99% of people that don't care?
When you have 97% of the market, you own the market, right? It's actually problematic to own 100% because then it's strictly a monopoly. Whereas with 97% you can pretend it's not a monopoly.
Can we agree on "the vast majority of people don't care", then? Does 97% or even 93% qualify for me to say "the vast majority"?
Actually I believe for most normal people it is a feature of other platforms that they don't have to appear to be associated with weirdos who use terms like "surveillance capitalism".
firefox is the only mainstream browser with an rcfile, that alone gives you incredible powers. I hope one day it also grows something like chrome's CDP. What is everyone so upset about?
I'm no designer, but I can't understand why someone would make a graphical choice like this. It absolutely detracts from the content, and in my case, will prevent me from reading it.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...
Firefox forks however are still the ones with light in their eyes. LibreWolf, Waterfox, Ironfox, keep those going.
Their ui was bad, they could not get ui locks up issue fixed for many years, and instead of focusing on core browser, they time and spend money on bullshit. Kick out technical people like Eich, pays useless Baker 6M while market where keeping crashing.
I'll still happily recurring donate money to Firefox, but not to Mozilla. Mozilla makes it impossible.
Firefox is a lost cause, overtaken by mentally ill sjws. That's the reason it can not compete with chrome even though firefox always had a soft spot in everyone's heart back in those times. They also failed to capture new generation.
Ladybird is the answer. A true diversity in the world of browsers; focused on making the best software instead of playing politics and paying 6M to useless CEO.
It is still not ready but that's fine.
To the inevitable down voters, I'm not calling musk a Nazi because I dont like him, I call him a Nazi because he did a friggin' heil Hitler salute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk's_Salute_at_Don...
Dont get me wrong, I object to anything and everything they'd be doing that requires a license to my private data. Fuck that and fuck Mozilla. I just think it's important to be accurate when calling out scummy techbros on their bullshit.
And this is a good thing why? It just makes web developer's lives harder and wastes engine developer's time building multiple engines when they could be contributing to a single foundation making that better.
Can barely keep my eyes socketed from all this involuntary rolling that's overtaken them ...
I'm personally here for the non-bullshit stuff that isn't about getting clicks with hot ledes grounded on warmed over, barely modified well worn takes on well-understood stats so miss me with _that_ shit ...