What We're Working on in Firefox

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/heres-what-were-working-on-in-firefox/

240 263 2 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

kome• 2 years ago

Nice! Firefox is in a good place, because the browser, at this stage (version 126), is really good and fast. And this post seems to point that the development is going in a good direction.

Night_Thastus• 2 years ago

I still remember the launch of Firefox 3 back in the day. I'm so glad it's still around, and they keep working on it.

I don't think there's a single piece of software I've gotten more utility out of in all that time. It's definitely not perfect, but we'd be in a worse world without it.

i80and• 2 years ago

It's funny to think about in retrospect how exciting Firefox 3 was. Planning began in 2006, and release was 2008. Acid2! Cairo! Better Linux theming!

It was just such a different release cadence.

OtomotO2• 2 years ago

I have fond memories of 3 and 4... Started using it somewhen around 2 :)

sli• 2 years ago

I have fond memories of discovering Phoenix ~v0.1 during high school and mostly never looking back. Had a short stint with Chrome until it intermittently stopped even attempting to load pages. Switched back and couldn't imagine daily driving Chrome.

dochtman• 2 years ago

I remember when it was still called Phoenix — the lean pure-browser reborn “from the ashes” of the Mozilla Suite (SeaMonkey). Amazing run…

OtomotO2• 2 years ago

I am looking forward to synced tab groups.

Currently using an addon, but that's not synced among PC and Laptop (or phones, but there I don't need it)

blizdiddy• 2 years ago

More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker

Oh no, more of this.

What about less used options? How much slower? How much less discoverable?

Desktop applications are already for power users almost by definition, let’s not slow them down for the sake of reducing “clutter”. Absolutely annoying trend of the last 15 years or so.

JohnFen5• 2 years ago

The dumbing down of applications, including FF, is incredibly annoying and off-putting.

I get it, though. FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person. I just wish that it (and other applications) would at least have an "expert mode" that isn't aimed just at the casual user.

Teever2• 2 years ago

The implication of what you're saying is that it somehow isn't friendly and approachable to your average non-techie person, which doesn't make sense because the UI paradigm of browsers hasn't really changed for 20+ years and Firefox has been just fine for technies to switch their parents/grandparents over to for years now.

The problem with Firefox isn't the UI, the problem with Firefox is mismanagement by the board that has been captured by Google and the lack of proper antitrust action against Google by the US and EU.

jimjimjim• 2 years ago

I would love for applications and even web sites to have an expert mode. Maybe when the UX teams aren't looking devs could add a mode that puts Everything back in the UI.

saurik• 2 years ago

FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person.

Yeah... the problem is that these people are frankly never going to use Firefox unless driven to by their techie friends, and Firefox seems to have given up on the power user market that they used to own.

layer8• 2 years ago

I like the approach where it’s configurable which items are available in menus and toolbars. The application can come with a default configuration that is suitable for the average and novice user, and power users can change the menus and toolbars to their needs. When not all items are shown, the respective menu or toolbar can have a “More…” item that opens the configuration dialog. That way it’s discoverable.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

I'm also for user choice but this consistent notion that uncluttered UIs are only for non-techie people is very annoying. I'm a software developer by trade but that doesn't mean I want every UI to look like the inside of an airplane cockpit or a 90s teletext.

The trend in UIs to use space and reduce interface actions to the most important actions is both aesthetically more pleasing and more functional. I do not look back to the time where every interface cramped 20 buttons in a tiny space and five of the buttons did the same thing. (looking at you, KDE settings menus)

resource_waste2• 2 years ago

And all the old documentation/forum help to change settings is obsolete, but google still has them Indexed.

The only company worse for this is Microsoft. Any google search for a setting has been outdated, the location has changed, the wording has changed.

I'm completely convinced that there are FAAMG plants in FOSS company that have 1 job: Make pointless changes to waste engineering hours. Firefox and LibreOffice convinced me of this.

iforgotpassword2• 2 years ago

IDK, they're just following what Chrome has been doing forever now, and it has worked there. I guess that really is what the vast majority of normal people want. And considering how even among my most tech-savy friends and colleagues Chrome appears to be the browser of choice, it seems even these folks don't really care...

yjftsjthsd-h11• 2 years ago

That doesn't necessarily follow; a person could easily argue that Chrome won because Google abused its search monopoly to push it, then kept winning because of inertia. Unless your friends specifically prefer Chrome because of UX reasons, it could be unrelated.

dagurp• 2 years ago

Or is it Google deciding for you what you should want?

lainga• 2 years ago

Quickly thumbing through my product book for "gaining market segment by making yourself indistinguishable from competition"

palata13• 2 years ago

IMO the vast majority of users cannot make the difference between Chrome and Firefox. They just use whatever they are used to and like it because they are used to it.

Over the years, I have converted people to Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Safari. The only common denominator is that they all strongly prefer the one they use now.

kreyenborgi2• 2 years ago

I hope they don't put more of the menu items into unremovable buttons in the address bar (which already contains four icons: tracker protection, certificates, containers, bookmark) or next to it (both an overflow menu for extensions and an overflow menu for ..other things? and a hamburger for ..other-other things? in addition to the buttons I actually do want there). On my laptop I can hardly read the domain name of the url unless I fullscreen the window.

rurp3• 2 years ago

The amount of regressions Mozilla has inflicted on Firefox in recent years blows my mind. One of their few big advantages over Chrome is better user control, but they have been working continuously to destroy that.

Getting rid of most extensions and removing about:config are two big wtf decisions. All that does is piss off power users, which are the main advocates for this browser. Plus so many other baffling changes to remove or worsen existing features, along with the pointless UI reshuffles.

Edit: I should clarify that about:config has only been removed from mobile Firefox, so far at least.

olejorgenb• 2 years ago

and removing about:config

What?

aquova2• 2 years ago

removing about:config

about:config is right where it's always been, unless I've missed something?

mrandish2• 2 years ago

Yes! FF PMs and designers seem to HATE user customization, add-ons and power user capabilities yet those are the main reasons I came to FF and why I still use it. While FF is still the best browser for me (barely), it's only achieved this by all the alternatives enshittifying and dumb-ifying their browsers even faster than FF. As it is I have to spend significant effort under the hood customizing UserChrome scripts just to maintain minimal usability. (...and thank the heavens for Lepton (https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix), a regularly maintained, well-curated, all-in-one collection of essential Firefox fixes (which can each be turned off individually via flags.)

anal_reactor• 2 years ago

Getting rid of most extensions

I am still butthurt

shrimp_emoji3• 2 years ago

Sounds like they hired GNOME devs.

lxgr7• 2 years ago

Getting rid of most extensions

What extensions did they get rid of?

mrandish2• 2 years ago

My cognitive style in using computer interfaces is to remember where things are, so features that move things around (or hide them) based on some algorithm are not only annoying but slow down my workflow and increase cognitive load.

Hopefully, they'll offer some way to turn this off.

mwcz• 2 years ago

If all actions and options were reachable from a fuzzy finder, then I'd be very happy with all UI components being hidden to reduce clutter.

iza• 2 years ago

I hope this means they're changing the main menu back to functioning like an actual menu instead of a weird panel thing, but somehow I doubt it.

Zecc• 2 years ago

I don't know if you know this, but you can still get the traditional kind of menu if you tap the Alt key. It won't stay permanently visible if you change focus back to the content page though.

lxgr7• 2 years ago

What about less used options?

Put them in sub-menus?

I really don't see what's bad about doing user research and organizing feature discoverability by importance (rather than, say, profitability, which a for-profit browser might be tempted to do).

userbinator• 2 years ago

Every time someone complains about "clutter" I suspect they're trying to turn users into lusers --- stunting their chance of growth by removing everything that could possibly catch their attention, so they can be lead blindly and exploited for whatever is most desirable.

Meanwhile monitors and their resolutions have grown tremendously, so there's a lot more space for things. Yet they'd rather you give up control and argue that the tiny extra amount of space you get is a good idea.

dbg314152• 2 years ago

For me, the big thing Firefox needs is better power management.

Mac user here, and streaming video or doing a video call just kills my battery compared to Chrome or Safari.

Would love to see more focus on energy consumption optimization.

yjftsjthsd-h11• 2 years ago

Mac user here, and streaming video or doing a video call just kills my battery compared to Chrome or Safari.

Is it not using hardware acceleration or something?

stqism3• 2 years ago

Probably need to check on this, but I’ve heard of issues around video decode and Firefox.

switch007• 2 years ago

Is this a comment from 2018? I thought FF on MacOS was pretty good these days.

And are you suggesting Chrome is similar to Safari in terms of power usage? That would surprise me

Safari will of course always be better. It's no competition

dsego• 2 years ago

My experience as well, it used to be bad, it's okay now.

e44858• 2 years ago

It's the opposite for me on Linux. Firefox can play 4k 60fps perfectly, while Chrome drops frames and gets hot. I guess hardware-accelerated video is hard to get right.

cassianoleal2• 2 years ago

Mac user here as well. Chrome kills my laptop (though I've uninstalled it about a year ago and never looked back). Firefox is pretty good. Safari is better, at least in terms of power management.

Firefox is my main browser, and it's a beast. Very low footprint, snappy and very decent in terms of power consumption.

finack8• 2 years ago

Could it actually be the hundreds of megabytes of JavaScript each website insists on executing?

slobiwan• 2 years ago

Is anybody currently using Sidebery who could comment on how the Firefox "Tab grouping, Vertical tabs, and sidebar" compare?

cassianoleal2• 2 years ago

Given that they seem to have only prioritised those features, I doubt anyone can since there's nothing material to compare to.

babypuncher• 2 years ago

They haven't actually shown off their vertical tabs yet, so there isn't much to say.

I am a Sideberry user though, and this excites me because a native implementation will likely look a lot cleaner, integrate better with your chosen theme, and actually allow the removal of the regular tab bar (you have to keep it with Sideberry because there is some functionality that cannot be replicated through an extension).

Theming in particular might be a big one, I had to spend a couple hours tweaking the Sideberry CSS to make it look nice with the skin I use in Firefox. Not having to do that sure would be convenient, especially for the average user who doesn't know what a stylesheet is.

torstenvl• 2 years ago

Intuitive privacy settings that deliver all the power of our world-class anti-tracking technologies in a simplified, easy-to-understand way.
More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.

Stop it. Gnome-ification is incredibly user hostile. Almost every time folks "simplify" a UI, they actually make it far more complicated instead.

If your users now have to use dconf or userChrome.css to do the things they are accustomed to doing, you have not simplified anything.

illiac786• 2 years ago

It sounds like in your view simplifying a UI is not possible or has never been successfully implemented.

I think it is very much possible, very much needed by lots of software out there, but indeed it’s hard.

The hardest part is not alienating existing users when messing with muscle memory.

resource_waste2• 2 years ago

I wonder how much money they get from their ads and spammy home menu. (Oh you can turn it off! /apologists)

I boot up a fresh Linux install and everything looks A+ nice, then you open up firefox and it feels like I'm on M$ Windows 11 + Edge. Chromium doesnt have ads!

I'll be happy when something replaces Firefox, they are a legacy company that might only exist due to anti-trust purposes. Something that is merit based would be an improvement.

yjftsjthsd-h11• 2 years ago

We’ve been listening to your feedback, and we’re prioritizing the features you want most.
Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500.
Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible.

Wow, that ... actually is what users have been asking for, for ages. Nice.

More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.

Oh, there's the other foot dropping. I wonder how SeaMonkey is doing...

tresclow• 2 years ago

I remember around 2012 Firefox did use to have tab grouping, and they dropped the functionality after. I remember a friend of mine being annoyed for that, although I myself didn't appreciate much the functionality.

Kye5• 2 years ago

I could never figure out how it worked.

yjftsjthsd-h11• 2 years ago

Oh, it's better than that: They had tab grouping as a native feature, and it was great, then they factored it out into an extension... and then they changed the way extensions worked, and didn't bother porting it. Kind of an insulting way to kill a feature IMO.

morsch• 2 years ago

I'll take the "streamlined" menus if it gets me first party vertical tabs and auto segregation of profiles. The latter especially, I'm excited about whatever they come up with. The former, I think it'll take a long time to reach feature parity with existing add-ons, if they ever get there, seeing how they tend to keep novice users in mind.

raffraffraff• 2 years ago

honestly, container tabs are way more useful to me than profiles every were. I can have 3 different Gmail accounts and a bunch of AWS accounts open in the same browser, with different colours for each so that I can figure out which is which.

How about it they continued to iterate on container tabs and make it possible to pattern match urls to containers without a 3rd party addon.

seba_dos18• 2 years ago

Oh yes, native matching would be faster and remove plenty of glitching opportunities if done right - you can often see the tab being reloaded into a proper container and taking twice as long to load as it should, and sometimes the tab ends up being duplicated. You also lose the tab's history when it switches between containers at the moment.

thwarted• 2 years ago

I've been using multiple profiles in Chrome for years for keeping things separate… right up until my company started using Google's centralized browser/device management which infects the entire browser not just the single profile that is tied to my corporate Google account. Specifically, they forced a homepage setting browser-wide that can not be changed on a per-profile basis.

So multiple profiles are seemingly difficult to get right/fully isolated. I hope Firefox doesn't have similar limitations.

pleb_nz• 2 years ago

Firefox does have profiles and has had for as long as I’ve needed them. For some reason they’ve always been hidden away and needed different args on start to change the profile being started, or the use of an extension to allow profile switching. I don’t use them anymore but from what I remember they worked well and were very isolated. Hopefully they’re using the current implementation and just making it more user friendly?

jasonjayr• 2 years ago

Can you still launch chrome manually with the --user-data-dir=/custom/path option when MDM is enabled?

lxgr7• 2 years ago

My guess would be that your company probably wants the MDM profile to be globally enabled or is alternatively limited by their MDM's or Chrome's capabilities.

I hope Firefox doesn't have similar limitations.

I hope Firefox doesn't implement MDM at all, or at least provides a non-negotiable way for the user to opt out of it on a per-profile basis.

skydhash• 2 years ago

my company started using Google's centralized browser/device management which infects the entire browser not just the single profile that is tied to my corporate Google account

Personal profiles on your work computer? That's a no for me. The only account I brought to my work computer was my Github's one. And I'd rather use Incognito Mode or another browser if I want to do something I did not want associated with my google account.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

If you had 7,500 tabs open, it would take firefox approximately three and a half weeks to start.

seba_dos18• 2 years ago

I regularly have 10 times as much open in Firefox and it works just fine. Chromium barely works at a fraction of that (or at least used to, haven't felt the need to recheck for a few years now).

yjftsjthsd-h11• 2 years ago

Having hit 4-5k tabs in a session, it's really not that bad of a perf hit. It's also an unreasonable thing to ask of the browser, but it holds up well enough.

jackson1442• 2 years ago

I really hope the profile management system keeps tab containers working the same. It's incredibly useful to have different containers automatically generated for AWS console sessions.

1oooqooq4• 2 years ago

current implementation of container is terrible.

basically something a google PM thought of so you can shop incognito and not be incognito.

darth_avocado• 2 years ago

I just use Arc, it already has all of this

iczero• 2 years ago

I just use [yet another closed-source Chromium fork developed by some strange startup which forces you to sign in before you can do anything and will likely not even bother to continue supporting Manifest v2 APIs], it already has [such a long list of antifeatures that it could practically double as marketing material for the FSF]

ok?

yownie2• 2 years ago

Heeyyyy are we actually getting Tab Grouping back? Finally?

gamepsys2• 2 years ago

As a Firefox daily user, this list makes me better understand why Firefox has such a low market share. Reorganizing menus or adding alt text to PDFs won't make any impact on user adoption/churn because users don't care. The alt text specifically sounds like resume engineering for some developers that want "on device generative ai" as a bullet point on this LinkedIn. Bullet points like this wouldn't be a problem if Firefox had more resources, but the list of actually pretty small and doesn't have a lot of space for fluff. I think they should pick 2-5 things and focus on those, such as multi-device sync, privacy, speed, battery life performance, customization, etc.

em500• 2 years ago

How are they stretched for resources? Mozilla's revenue is around a half billion USD per year.

luyu_wu• 2 years ago

It's important to note here that Mozilla spends the majority of that money on non-Firefox projects (something that has pissed off people who have wanted to donate to Firefox specifically for ages). Firefox itself gets a sliver of that.

kreyenborgi2• 2 years ago

Are you saying that they should avoid writing about features that aren't "core" (privacy, speed, battery life, sync) when telling you about the work they've done? I mean, they do say that

You can expect even faster, smoother browsing on Firefox, thanks to quicker page loads and startup times – all while saving more of your phone’s battery life.

and regarding privacy

we’ve worked hard to make things like translation and PDF editing in Firefox happen locally on your device, so you don’t have to ship off your personal data to a server farm for a company to use it how they see fit

– so they seem to have ticked your boxes, but they've also committed the sins of boasting about design and used the "AI" buzzword.

Yes, "most people" don't care about "adding alt text to PDFs" but then most people don't even know what accessibility means. For the people who do need it, it's essential, and I think it would be awesome if it happens on-device instead of giving google/amazon/microsoft a description of every pdf image a blind person might want described.

yjftsjthsd-h11• 2 years ago

I think they should pick 2-5 things and focus on those, such as multi-device sync, privacy, speed, battery life performance, customization, etc.

They did; they've been pushing on speed and privacy for a long time. It mostly turns out that the problem isn't usually technical superiority, unfortunately. (The problem is that Microsoft shoves Edge in users' faces every chance they get, and Google has been giving Chrome an unfair advantage for ages (notice that when people complain about Firefox being slow, it's usually on Google sites).)

leoc• 2 years ago

Didn't they fire the Servo team?

aquova2• 2 years ago

Without even scrolling down, there's a header describing the work they're doing for "Continuous work on speed, performance and compatibility", exactly what you asked for.

Anytime Firefox works on UI stuff, people seem to get really annoyed they aren't working on something else. You mention that "Reorganizing menus or adding alt text to PDFs won't make any impact on user adoption", I think it's the exact opposite. There is no greater thing the average everyday Joe cares more about than the UI, and if they just called it good 10 years ago, the project would be in an even worse state.

lern_too_spel• 2 years ago

As a Firefox daily user, this list makes me better understand why Firefox has such a low market share

As another Firefox active user, I say this has nothing at all to do with it. I use Firefox because it lets me control what I need to control to be productive, but I recognize this isn't why most people used Firefox at its peak. 99% of the reason Firefox got so big was that IE was so awful. Edge is serviceable, so that takes away the vast majority of Firefox's former user base.

Firefox isn't going to grow as big as it was before Edge came along unless one of the major consumer OS provides a broken default browser on its platform and allows Firefox to run on its platform (iOS fulfills only one of the requirements). It won't grow as big as it was before Chrome came along unless both of the earlier requirements are met and Firefox renders Google sites better than Chrome.

gamepsys2• 2 years ago

I know we aren't going back to peak popularity. The concern is that FF moves to so little marketshare that websites no longer build for compatibility.

jwells89• 2 years ago

Firefox isn't going to grow as big as it was before Edge came along unless one of the major consumer OS provides a broken default browser on its platform and allows Firefox to run on its platform (iOS fulfills only one of the requirements).

And even that “requirement” isn’t filled to anywhere the same degree — Safari has its issues but IE was on a different plane of existence in terms of brokenness, with some of the barest of basics being absent or needing hacks to make work (remember the DirectX filter hacks required just to have transparency support for PNGs?).

glenstein2• 2 years ago

I think this perpetuates the fiction of assuming browser share is directly tied to specifics of browser functionality instead of more important macro forces like differences in brand awareness and ability to leverage market sector domination.

There's been a proliferation of conflicting just-so stories purporting to explain the history of Firefox's browser market share, and they seem to relate to idiosyncratic preferences for customization instead of actual market dynamics.

strken3• 2 years ago

The alt text thing sounds like someone who thinks disabled access to the internet is an Important Thing. I'm not sure it will end up being better than an extension or doing the image recognition in a screen reader, but it's not necessarily cynical resume padding.

tapper• 2 years ago

alt text is grate for blind people thanks.

finack8• 2 years ago

Firefox has a low market share because Chrome is the default browser on so many systems and in IT departments everywhere. 99% of people don't think about which browser they want to use.

some_furry• 2 years ago

I just hope there's an option to totally disable the AI junk.

I'd just like a simple, secure browser that gets the hell out of my way and let's me extend it however I want (i.e., with an adblocker). I don't need or want AI models involved in the process.

eesmith• 2 years ago

I like Firefox's built-in language translation feature. Does that count as "AI" these days?

palata13• 2 years ago

I don't think it counts as the modern "AI" buzz: it was there before and it is useful.

The modern AI stuff is typically useless crap that was thrown there because... I don't know... FOMO?

meiraleal• 2 years ago

What about catching up with PWA?

bdjsiqoocwk• 2 years ago

I'm still upset that theyve removed the "compact" style.

Granted, between ublock origin and tree style tabs Firefox is still my favorite browser, but why are they changing this stuff...

Can someone please ELI5 - what does "more streamlined menus" mean?

behnamoh• 2 years ago

Looking at the comments, I'm not surprised about FF's low market share. They chose to target geeks and nerds, and let's face it, we tend to be whiny about almost everything and complain about any new change.

Meanwhile, Google Chrome doesn't even need to pretend like they care about privacy, so they automatically target the other "ordinary" people who are not so picky about every new release note.

This kinda teaches you something about the importance of product positioning.

yjftsjthsd-h11• 2 years ago

No, it's worse than that - they chose to target geeks, then decided to throw out the geeks in an attempt to target a more mainstream audience[0] and then failed to actually get the mainstream userbase, leaving them with neither the nerds nor the normies.

[0] Firefox has always been at its strongest as a power-user's browser, chock-full of extensions and tweaks. Mozilla met this advantage with... two extinction events for extensions, and removal of customization options.

rurp3• 2 years ago

Yes, exactly. Google and Microsoft have huge anti-competitive advantages that they have been able to use to target casual users. As long as that continues Firefox will be facing an uphill battle to get casual downloads, but neither of those large companies care at all about power users. That gives Mozilla a big opening to get a niche of users that will heavily evangelize their browser and install it on friend and family devices.

Unfortunately Mozilla's leadership does not see it that way and have steadily pissed off a huge number of former fans, without making inroads with any other groups.

They are in a tough position regardless, but combining that with terrible product and organization management has gotten them into the state they're in now.

141132• 2 years ago

No, Firefox never targeted geeks. It's just that, when it came out, the only people who used a browser other than Internet Explorer happened to be geeks. The audience came to them, rather than them going to the audience.

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

It also does not help that many of the big businesses break their website if you do not let them track you.

I use Safari + Wipr Content blocker with iCloud Private Relay, and it is just so inconvenient to do anything on many major websites. At the least I have to reload the website without a content blocker, and at worst, I have to use Chrome, giving up my privacy.

If a somewhat computer literate person like me who knows about content blockers/iCloud Private Relay/VPN/ublock Origin has to relent and use Chrome, then what chance does a layperson have? They will just use Chrome and go on about their business. They want to spend their life doing other things, not figuring out why Target is not letting them order this clothing item they spent 10 minutes looking for because they are getting flagged as a bot or fraudster or simply not letting themselves be tracked.

I especially love when you block location access to a retailer's website, and then the retailer breaks their functionality for choosing the actual store you want to shop at. They have your billing and shipping address from previous orders, they have your 2FA login, and yet, every single time, they ask for access to your location, and when you decline, they set your store to some random store within a few hundred miles of you because (I assume) they are trying to use your IP address to show you the store.

diroussel3• 2 years ago

I have the same problem in Safari with Wipr, and iCloud Private relay. But I still have it as my default browser.

Firefox with uBlock origin works much better, and I use for most reading, research, coding related things.

Arc for hacker news.

Then I only use Chrome when the above don't work. Which is very rare.

finack8• 2 years ago

I truly do not understand the complaints about Firefox, the browser (and not Mozilla's questionable stewardship thereof). Every time someone starts talking about their issue, it's either something super niche and inconsequential, or something that doesn't seem to have sufficient evidence to blame on the browser (turns out, crappy web apps will make any browser slow to a crawl). I used Chrome for a few years back in the mid-teens, then switched back to Firefox, and manage to use the Web just fine. It's a browser, it renders web pages. I really don't understand the fuss. Meanwhile, Google (the advertising company) would totally like you to use Google (the browser), for totally innocent reasons.

ghostpepper• 2 years ago

I am happy it's nothing to do with Pocket, VPN or Colorways. Those are examples of visual clutter that I would love to see removed entirely.

seba_dos18• 2 years ago

Somewhere in the last two months Firefox Nightly got a massive performance boost on GNU/Linux. Thanks!

Nice that vertical tabs are officially coming back, although I've been using them in a DIY manner for years already; sidebar extension with a bit of userChrome.css can do wonders: https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif

privacyking• 2 years ago

What do you mean coming back? I don't recall it ever having vertical tabs. Most people have just used treestyletabs for the past decade or two

seba_dos18• 2 years ago

It used to be a part of their Test Pilot program as "Tab Center", somewhere around 2016, but got discontinued. What's on the GIF above is a WebExtension-based reimplementation of that called "Tab Center Reborn" plus a bit of custom CSS that reimplements the original auto-hide behavior and makes it blend nicer with Plasma.

gilgamesh3• 2 years ago

Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500.

Finally. Chrome has this feature for a while and it's really handy when working with lots of tabs, but I use Firefox on my main machine so I couldn't take advantage of this feature (and I don't like vertical tabs).

FounderBurr• 2 years ago

I stopped donating when they declared ‘rss is too complex to be maintained and is also old and gross and stuff, so we removed it’. Oh by the way totally unrelated here is Pocket(tm)!

yownie2• 2 years ago

Yes I agree that was some straight up bullshit

kwanbix3• 2 years ago

I really love Firefox. I even organized events for them on my home country, so don't get me wrong, wouldn't it be best for the web/devs that they switched to chrome's engine? They can still implement whatever changes to privacy and their changes just like MS does, and devs will only have to target one engine. Or am I missing something? Please discuss it if you agree or disagree, do not downvote. Thanks.

Kye5• 2 years ago

Monoculture in software rarely goes well. Right now Safari and Firefox exist to push back on Google completely controlling the fate of the web. You do not want Google to have the same unquestioned power Microsoft did in the IE6 era.

kwanbix3• 2 years ago

But that wouldn't be the same. Everybody can work on the engine. Worst case, if google wants to take over, the others can push their own version of the engine, compatible whenever they feel like, and different otherwise. IE was different because was totally closed and only MS could add features.

JohnFen5• 2 years ago

wouldn't it be best for the web/devs that they switched to chrome's engine?

Why would that be best? I don't think the problem with Firefox is the engine (anymore), I think it's the design choices Mozilla continues to make.

If Firefox switched to the chromium engine, then why would I bother to continue to use it? Surely it would be better to switch to one of the "privacy-oriented" Chromium-based browsers that have been around for a long time now.

diroussel3• 2 years ago

I would prefer it if Mozilla continued is great rust rewrite, and innovate the core technologies. Just adopting Chrome's crumbs will mean giving up control and voice in stearing the web technologies.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos2• 2 years ago

Are you bringing back XUL? No? Then please cease operation.

thisislife2• 2 years ago

PaleMoon - http://www.palemoon.org/ - is a hard fork of Firefox that still supports XUL.

guilhas• 2 years ago

Although PaleMoon is great, it creates a brain split

Firefox had very advanced addons for the time, and very good developer community. XUL removal just gave everyone PTSD

Don't know how good is the continuous fragmentation of the community

Am4TIfIsER0ppos2• 2 years ago

Which I already use. Thanks though.

neilv2• 2 years ago

Prioritization that I'd like to suggest for Firefox, driven by needs of society (from high to low):

1. Representing the public interest wrt Web -- especially fervent respect for privacy in the browser, almost as much emphasis on security, fighting commercial excesses around de jure and defacto standards, and social equity within the scope of what Mozilla does (e.g., software accessibility, encouraging all volunteers).

2. Competitive browser compliance and performance. To be viable as a daily driver, to have impact.

3. Forward-looking R&D on Internet public interest things not currently considered "browser", but potentially big in near term.

4. Fancy browser features that actually increase uptake and retention. (Much lower than the first 3.)

5. Designer's opinion/portfolio UX changes. (Could be improvements, and there's value in an appealing and moving-target modern appearance, but misalignment is a risk to be careful of.)

6. Necessary-evil money-making compromises. (Very, very carefully. Many past ones were negatives. And we still see arguable dark patterns around some of those, such as as Firefox updates sometimes reverting users' express Search-related preferences.)

A marketing challenge of these priorities would be that even most techies can't assess how well you're doing #1.

But that mix of things you do can include things understandable to your typical user, such as superior blocking of abusive ads. (But don't drop the ball on things that your typical user can't understand -- they're entrusting you as an expert to act in their interests.)

Educational outreaches can also help. And if you get to the point that you're generating an order of magnitude fewer security vulnerabilities than your competitor, then marketing people can run with that. But be careful with positioning, so that communications about smart, hard activities don't get conflated in people's minds with confusing mission drift and fluffy PR.

glenstein2• 2 years ago

4. Fancy browser features that actually increase uptake and retention.

Yeah, I would say I think these are actually a good thing as long as the cost-benefit ratio is acceptable and it doesn't compromise core efforts (people have asserted this kind of compromise has been happening, but rarely with any coherence or substantiation).

I would consider the example of Opera in its heyday - whether it was Turbo, "widgets", extensions, or Unite, which in my opinion was a triumph of originality and innovation that went unsung. Those are good when done right.

1oooqooq4• 2 years ago

curious about your motivations to typing all that here

neilv2• 2 years ago

It should be said, I had a moment, and I type fast.

amluto2• 2 years ago

I have a suggestion for Mozilla: find use cases that benefit your users and are not possible in other browsers. For example:

Browsers are terrible at accessing devices on a local network. Make this work well in Firefox, extending protocols as needed.

Browsers are terrible at configuring IoT devices. It device makers are terrible at making apps for this purpose that don’t suck. Make Firefox (on desktop and mobile!) be the premier way to usable and securely configure IoT devices. Get device vendors to sign on: someone could (and probably would) sell a gadget where the instructions suggest installing Firefox to set up the device.

Leverage the same technology to go after enterprise users. Ever seen a piece of high-end, expensive networking gear with a web UI? Ever contemplated how pathetically insecure this is? Ever contemplated how unpleasant it to provision certificates to make it secure? Make this work, easily and securely, on Firefox, using new protocols as needed. Make everyone else play catch-up.

Heck, start small. Allow setting domain constraints on imported root certificates.

The moral: do something new and better.

palata13• 2 years ago

Please, no.

finack8• 2 years ago

None of these things are in scope for a program that is supposed to browse the web (by fetching web pages and rendering them).

amluto2• 2 years ago

How is securely connecting to a device that isn’t, itself, connected to the cloud, fetching a webpage from it, and rendering it out of scope for a web browser? Certainly URLs like http://192.168.1.1 have been in scope for decades — why can’t a web browser figure out how to support that use case well?

stqism3• 2 years ago

It sounds dumb, but honestly modern browsers feel way closer to the JRE than they did things designed to fetch and render sites.

speckx• 2 years ago

I would like Firefox to be able to set extensions to run only on click or allow me to provide a list of domains, like Chrome does, so every extension is not running on every page. See https://support.google.com/chrome?p=enable_extensions and https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/option-to-allow-extensi....

willywanker6• 2 years ago

You're describing userscripts, which is what site focused web extensions essentially are anyway. Install the Grease/Tamper/Violet monkey extension and you can find scripts from Greasyfork.org, or author your own. Each script defines a scope listing the sites it's allowed to run on.

drewg123• 2 years ago

One thing I wish they'd work on is making saved credit card information work correctly and reliably. I use FF on Macos laptop and FreeBSD desktop, with multiple profiles on each. I have different profiles where CC saving work fine, and others that don't across both OSes. I'm so annoyed at having to pull out my CC that I've gone back to chrome a lot of the time when I need to buy things...

no-dr-onboard• 2 years ago

After using FF for the past 7 years, every day at work I switched to Arc. It's been __okay__. I'm not a fan of them trying to nix the bookmark system and much prefer FF's implementation of just good old fashioned, indexable bookmarks.

If FF can manage a good implementation of vertical tabs, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

diroussel3• 2 years ago

Try TreeStyleTabs plugin, it's great. It also works well with Firefox Multi Account Containers, so you can keep peronal, work, research, shopping in different containers, so cookies aren't shared.

I love that I can start a web search open a bunch of links, each in a new tab, then once I have what I need, I can close the parent tab and all the child tabs are closed automatically.

gsuuon3• 2 years ago

Lack of PWA / installable apps is why I switched back to chrome after trying to daily drive firefox for a while. Really wish they'd reconsider the decision to drop it.

fabrice_d2• 2 years ago

Untested, but I think this Firefox fork added support back: https://floorp.app/en

MrAlex94• 2 years ago

I believe a lot of the work comes from: https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox

P.S. the project you linked is no longer FOSS.

gsuuon3• 2 years ago

Interesting, thanks!

worksonmine2• 2 years ago

Great, now please give me back the option to set my new tab page without resorting to extensions.

jimbobthrowawy• 2 years ago

Does setting it in about:config do it for you? I see what you mean though, since the option right above that in the menu lets you set custom url(s) for your start page.

worksonmine2• 2 years ago

That would help a lot yes, what option am I looking for? A custom URL used to be a setting in all browsers back in the days.

michael94234• 2 years ago

The way I see it, there was a time when FF had the chance to not accept the google contracts and go 100% independent with their own search engine or something similar. This would have resulted in FF actually siding with users. It would have resulted in FF radically rejecting ads, and this would have changed the entire web because people would have flocked to Firefox.

But Mozilla leadership did not have an interest in this, in light of endless google money. Google essentially captured Mozilla back in the day.

Now people have got used to ads because they only could chose between browsers that don't protect them.

Brave is trying to correct the mistake of FF and is attracting a small userbase, but not large enough to make a big difference, because the times have changed a lot.

Now with the new management at Mozilla and the dim outlook for the next 5 years, the realization is kicking in that listening to users is actually important. But the elephant in the room is the contracts with large ad-based search engines.

palata13• 2 years ago

This would have resulted in FF actually siding with users

Sure, but would the users have sided with FF? I'm not convinced. The users use whatever BigTech tells them to use, that's how I see it.

Brave is trying to correct the mistake of FF

Brave is Chromium. I don't see how this would even begin correcting the mistakes of FF. The one thing FF does right is that it is not Chromium.

michael94234• 2 years ago

End users do not care about the browser engine. But as I said, Brave is trying. It won't be successful in the way FF could have been.

ajdude• 2 years ago

End users do not care about the browser engine

but they certainly care about the search engine. I remember several years ago when Firefox changed their default search from Google to Yahoo, so many clients that we supported complained that IT's response was just to switch everyone over to chrome.

To be fair the biggest issue was that yahoo was worse with dangerous ads in their results then Google was the time.

squidbeak• 2 years ago

Is a successful search engine such an easy thing to produce?

anthonyhn• 2 years ago

search engine such an easy thing to produce?

Yes, I run my own independent search engine[0].

successful

Now that's the challenging part, especially since Mozilla needs to fund browser development. The initial differentiation for a Mozilla search would have been difficult, but at their peak they had 30%+ market share, and if the default search on Firefox was Mozilla Search then they might have been able to make it all work financially. DuckDuckGo makes over $100 million in revenue per year[1], if a Mozilla Search made as much money annually, then even though it's below their current $500 million search contract with Google, with some fiscal responsibility they probably would have had enough to support a search engine and browser development concurrently.

[0] https://ichi.do/

[1] https://techreport.com/statistics/software-web/duckduckgo-st...

paulryanrogers2• 2 years ago

...this would have changed the entire web because people would have flocked to Firefox.

One cannot compete with those who hold the choke points. Google owned the Web when they launched Chrome. Microsoft and Apple own desktop and mobile defaults. With three major competitors setting defaults, nagging users, and aggressively developing their browsers, Firefox was doomed.

Only unskippable browser ballots, with random order, and outlawing promotion of owns own browser from a dominant business would help.

michael94234• 2 years ago

15 years ago, lots of things were possible. Most people were using firefox, it had like 30 or 40% market share.

Ciantic• 2 years ago

I switched to Firefox about 3 weeks ago, what is killing me is dragging the tabs. It is so much worse with Firefox. Someone has made a video of this if one can't remember how they differ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRuBDH32hPI

With Chrome I can drag a tab and it moves with me, with Firefox the tab being dragged blocks the view. Also since with Chrome, the tab moves with the mouse I can with one drag move a tab and use Windows' snap-to-edge feature. This is a two-step process with Firefox.

Firefox is an underdog, it should focus on making the UI familiar and fast, but keep customizability. Another thing I noticed is that Firefox doesn't allow to keep unpacked extensions loaded as Chrome does, there is no good reason why not, luckily I fixed that with some userChrome scripts.

xchip• 2 years ago

Not very exciting, to be honest.

I would like certain apps to open always in private browsing.

mrinterweb• 2 years ago

I love that Firefox continues to be been focused on performance. There was a while where FF perf was looking kind of bleak compared to Chrome. These days FF and Chrome have similar performance. FF might have the edge now.

amanzi• 2 years ago

Mozilla asks people to contribute ideas on "Mozilla Connect", but then chooses to ignore most of the top-rated ideas. To be fair, better tab management is first and third of the list, so they are looking to improve that one. But PWAs is second on the list, and there's no mention of this in their announcement. Bringing back proper PWA support seems to align perfectly with Mozilla's mission, so it blows me away why they aren't actively working on it or talking about it.

The other things mentioned are just features that I would expect to keep improving over time, but are nothing groundbreaking.

altairprime• 2 years ago

PWAs, as in "File > Save Website As... > website.exe" on a PC?

cpeterso• 2 years ago

The "PWA support" that people are clamoring for is the option to open a web page shortcut in a browser window without an address bar.

benatkin• 2 years ago

Only 81% of revenue from Google, who has a competing browser that they beg you to switch to...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances

qwertox• 2 years ago

That site needs a dark mode. I'm surprised it hasn't.

Multiple rows of tabs, even more through mouse-wheel scrolling, and fixed width tabs for easy closing. Like Tab Mix Plus.

roesel• 2 years ago

I still miss the icons for items in the hamburger menu, this was one of the worst changes ever for me personally.

More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter

If this means the same as for Thunderbird, I'm going to have to switch after 20 years...

difosfor• 2 years ago

I wish they'd finish up their webcodecs implementation. Even Safari at least supports VideoDecoder.

justinclift• 2 years ago

This is the crowd that "listened to user feedback" then decided to add a button (that can't be removed) to the taskbar whose only purpose in life is to open the Extensions page.

An action that's used once when setting up a browser, and never again. And you're not allowed to remove it to put something else there instead that's actually important.

Fucking Arseholes. :( :( :(

surfcao• 2 years ago

As long as I can hide the address bar to have more screen real estate and vim extensions work, I am happy..

aldanor• 2 years ago

If Firefox natively integrated TreeStyle tab or Sidebery and made it lightning fast, searchable and syncable, I would probably return to FF on that day.

Definitely not yet another "reduction of visual clutter".

causality0• 2 years ago

How about making it so all those stupid purple pop-up messages on mobile that tell me what I already damn know can be swiped away instead of sitting on my screen blocking the UI for an eternity every time I dismiss a tab or full-screen a video?

up6w6• 2 years ago

Related news: Servo Web Engine Continues Advancing But Seeing Just $1.6k In Monthly Donations

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-Engine-May-2024

throw7• 2 years ago

AI generated text should always have a way that identifies/tells the user that it's fake.

m463• 2 years ago

I wish there was an open way to save all your settings across devices - you could host them yourself. maybe webdav?

The current firefox sync where they are probably the only folks who can host it is not that good. (there's an old sync server but it requires a non-local account)

Also, I wish firefox would stop uncontrollably phoning home.

wegfawefgawefg• 2 years ago

Some time in the last few years firefox changed the new boommark poput to be unresizable and very small. If you have more than twenty bookmark folders it is very difficult to use. Ive been forced to use sideberry, which I dont like.

mvdtnz• 2 years ago

Why can I not auto fill credit cards in Firefox mobile even though I know this is a feature offered in other countries?

mateusz_• 2 years ago

Priority feature could be, well... Catching up with the standards? It hurts my meow meow when i have to run chrome to use bt or usb api

finack8• 2 years ago

Those web APIs aren't actually standard (WebUSB, for example, is still in draft status), and they have some gnarly privacy implications. Google steamrolls over standards bodies, and then somehow people believe their browser is the standard. I'm not sure if this is a concerted marketing effort by Google, or simply intellectual laziness. Either way, though, Firefox is not at fault for not supporting non-standard Web APIs.

stqism3• 2 years ago

While I’d never personally use Chrome, you can describe this in another way too.

“Chrome supports draft standards like webUSB, which more and more hardware tools and platforms have started to adopt to enable being able to support users regardless of platform, without needing to design native apps for them.”

You can argue this is good in other ways too, it means that instead of a potentially invasive hardware application for something you might configure or update once, you are using something heavily sandboxed that has to request permissions for anything outside the normal. Another benefit is that depending on what the hardware device is, suddenly these hardware devices can be configured on platforms like Linux and FreeBSD, where vendors are much less inclined to support or cater to natively.

Say what you want about draft standards, but Firefox not playing ball and adopting commonly used ones is a massive miss on its part that hurts its ability to be competitive.

cultureulterior• 2 years ago

Bring back xul or keep your promise on supporting tab tree, please.

joshka• 2 years ago

Customizable new tab wallpapers that will let you choose from a diverse range of photography, colors, and abstract images that suits you most.

Can we just make this include some sort of dark mode. There is an addon that kinda works, but not all the time. That bright white flash is pretty annoying.

cooloo• 2 years ago

When will Firefox will support webrtc encoding/ decoding offload on Linux?

domysee• 2 years ago

I didn't think I'll ever get to see native vertical tabs in FF.

141132• 2 years ago

More streamlined menus

For everyone here complaining about this, have you ever looked at how many ways there are to access your history on Firefox? At my last count, there were 4 different ways to do it, depending on which menu you picked first. Cutting down this kind of inconsistent, and repetitive flow is something that we should be applauding.

sebazzz• 2 years ago

Subtle reminder that ManifestV2 phase out now has a timeline at Chrome[0]. The best moment to switch to Firefox is now.

[0] https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/manifest-v2-phase-out-begi...

butz• 2 years ago

Hear me out, I know this might sound crazy, but, how about letting users to customize menus to their own liking and workflow. Link UI customization to profiles and you will have many happy users. In example, I would remove most development related options (hey there, "Inspect Accessibility Properties") from my "leisure" profile, but would move those to more accessible places in my "work" profile.

tim333• 2 years ago

As a recent newbie attempter as switching to Firefox

Vertical Tabs and Profile Management system - seem good. I was a bit shocked that to get the tree style tabs working properly I had to go typing code (to stop the old tabs being there too).

The thing that got me back to Chrome this time was I started getting out of memory errors which I have not had in any other software in a couple of years of using the M1 macbook. Maybe they'll fix that under the "speed, performance" stuff?

willywanker6• 2 years ago

And this is why I stick with Pale Moon. The desktop UX reached maturity years ago, Pale Moon in the spirit of pre 2011 Firefox (which introduced version 4 with many of the controversial Chrome imitating changes beginning from then) offers a powerful and fully customizable browser out of the box with no telemetry or third party bullshit needing 'hardening' tweaks to get rid of. You get the separate search bar, tabs below addressbar and other features that can be changed to your liking directly from the preferences without having to go near about:config.

And goes without saying, full support for powerful XUL extensions and full themes that actually extend the browser's functionality and change its appearance the way it used to be on Firefox back in the day.

What We're Working on in Firefox

Related Stories