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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

Normally I'd agree but at this point it's basically "Firefox is mismanaged, updoots to the left my 1337zors" behavior. It's basically a meme. It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted. Yes they make mistakes. Yes they can be frustrating. But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged.

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.

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> But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged.

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.

There are half a dozen quality Firefox forks that can (not) do that for you. That’s the beauty of Firefox if you ask me. Just use a stripped down version like Mullvad. Thank god Firefox exists so we can have it.

Who complains about sync thought? What tilts me is Pocket, AI features, integrated ads, and a plethora of other random acquisitions and side projects that constitute outsized expenses yet do zilch to drive adoption.

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.

Totally agree they lose focus and spend a lot of time on things that are questionable. But again, they do release things that are super useful. There are probably people out there who like pocket. As for AI, as much as I was raising my eyebrow, I watched a whole threat of people the other day raving about Kagi’s AI implementation. Maybe Mozilla will make something useful shrug

Pocket (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_(service) for those who aren't aware of it) is an excellent example:

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.

Sync and container tabs aren't on the list of features I recall seeing people complain about.

Everyone complains about something is the point.

> It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted.

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.

> But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged.

Often it goes unacknowledged, leaving the reader to read the criticism as a tacit endorsement of switching off of Firefox to something else.

For real. Honestly all I need is some token acknowledgment that it is still the best option for browsing right now, even if we demand it be better

I’m fine with Firefox and run it as my main browser on all my devices. But their corporate behavior means I’ll never give them my money again.

I don't have any issues with the extra features they try to tack on. I just disable them.

I just wish they would fix the memory leaks and stuttering.

It's always there because it remains unaddressed. You may be used to people just folding then corporations move forward with enshittification but that's not going to happen with all enthusiasts, which is the only kind of user FF has left.

I don’t disagree but the dog piles are predictable, repetitive, and unproductive.

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