I love Firefox. It just doesn't always feel like it loves me back.
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.
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.