Where's Firefox going next?

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/where-s-firefox-going-next-you-tell-us/m-p/100698#M39094

by ReadCarlBarks • 1 year ago

327 520 1 year ago

connect.mozilla.org

Animats2• 1 year ago

Not going compute-bound for two minutes after launch, while not displaying pages?

blahaj• 1 year ago

Android?

Animats2• 1 year ago

No, Linux. I don't know what it's doing in there. Lots of disk I/O. Clearing the "startup cache" can help.

jjordan• 1 year ago

It would be great if they restored the `Smart Bookmarks` feature they removed a number of years ago. Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality, but it's not quite the same as having native support for them.

dwayne_dibley• 1 year ago

I’d forgotten about this. What a banging feature that was.

deanc• 1 year ago

I want nothing more now from Firefox than iterative performance improvements across all platforms and adherence to web standards. That’s it. Let extensions handle all the other crap.

Scramblejams• 1 year ago

Agreed! I stuck with Firefox for a long time, but within the last year moved to Brave because too many sites were breaking. To your list I'd add "adblock," though, because it seems like extension standards are converging on a point where that's more effectively scaffolded inside the browser.

rtpg• 1 year ago

Tbh I disagree, the official vertical tab support is so nice and less janky than any of the extensions I used that had this functionality

After opening FF while previously using Arc for a while I was super happy with the usability improvements (that don’t seem to have impacted older workflows fortunately… big fan of how FF makes it easy to customize the toolbar etc)

dns_snek2• 1 year ago

I've tried the new vertical tabs and I'm not a fan, it's very primitive compared to my favorite vertical tab extension Sideberry.

Centigonal2• 1 year ago

I tried Tree-style tabs and Sidebery, and I bounced off of both. The new native vertical tabs feature works for me, and it is the most impactful feature they've shipped in years for my particular firefox experience.

ocdtrekkie3• 1 year ago

I really have to emphasize that browser extensions are a terrible security nightmare and generally speaking, should be avoided at all costs. I understand they're fun and convenient, but it's one of those things that really doesn't age well into our modern cybersecurity issues.

RandomBacon3• 1 year ago

I only stick with the "recommended" extensions that are reviewed by Firefox.

labster• 1 year ago

Running a browser without an adblock extension is an even worse cybersecurity issue, since tracking online is so extensive. I live in a country where the government routinely buys surveillance data from data collection companies to spy on us. But even if you don’t live in the US, it’s still a good thing to protect your privacy.

molticrystal• 1 year ago

Yes, Firefox should focus on being a lean mean machine, with the caveat that it returns to exposing its API and making it easily accessible for anyone who wants to go beyond that principle of leanness at the expense of speed or memory.

I’d even go so far as to say that extensions should have full control over Firefox again. They shouldn’t have to wait 20 years for a tray icon on minimize feature to be added or require external apps to add that feature on certain operating systems. Min2Tray existed. They should have the ability to completely alter the UI to make it function however you want. For example, the old search was great for keyboard users. A couple of strokes and you could switch search engines to site specific ones. Now it takes dozens. And when they all have the same icon, it is a painful experience. There was even at one point an add-on to restore that functionality. All this should be exposed.

The extension and plugin infrastructure didn’t die. It was killed! If security is a concern, just add more warning cones and blood red messages.

mccr8• 1 year ago

In my personal opinion, while the flexibility of the old XUL addons was amazing, the two big issues are compatibility and performance.

Compatibility: these addons could be broken very easily because they could depend on almost anything, and with the monthly release cycle, it is very difficult for mod authors to keep up. For instance, some addons would work by taking a core browser function written in JS, convert it to a string, run a regular expression to edit the string, then use eval to create a new function to replace the old one. In some release, the syntax of the "convert a function to a string" output changed slightly and it broke these addons, because it broke the regexp they were using.

Performance: XUL addons could do all sorts of things that are horrible for performance, and there was no real way for a user to tell what was causing it, because the addon wasn't isolated in any way. I ran into somebody who was having severe performance issues because the browser was generating colossal amounts of garbage for no reason. It eventually turned out that on a whim they'd installed a "LaTeX the World" addon, which would look for LaTeX typesetting instructions on pages and replace it with the nice looking output. The problem was, the way it worked was that every 10 seconds or so it would convert the entire contents of every single tab you had open into a zillion strings, search those strings, then throw them out.

ameliaquining• 1 year ago

The problem isn't security per se, it's compatibility. Exposing all the browser internals to extensions means that all the internals are part of the platform's public API and it's almost impossible to change anything. A lot of HN users will be like "that's fine, software should be finished, I don't want any more features", but things like performance and especially security require ongoing maintenance. The particular thing that killed off Firefox's old extension model was that it blocked migration to a multi-process architecture, which was clearly necessary even at the time and became even moreso when Spectre showed up a couple years later. "Warning cones and blood red messages" do not solve this because a vulnerable architecture exposes all users to exploitation, not just those who choose to use sketchy extensions.

(Also we know from long experience that "warning cones and blood red messages" don't in practice suffice to prevent end users from being exploited, but that's a separate issue.)

EasyMark6• 1 year ago

For me after they started limiting what extensions can do, firefox became a lot more stable. Before that I was using chrome because of firefox instability with extensions I wanted to use. After they got in isolated process for tabs and limiting extension permissions it actually improved quite a lot and became stable.

halJordan• 1 year ago

You don't want that though. Nobody wants that. Browsers have been nothing but edge-case handlers since servers figured out they could segment by user-agent, and users realized they could lie about their agent.

slightwinder• 1 year ago

Then they should improve the ground for addons too. Add more API, more abilities. I'm still waiting for Firefox improving the shortcut-handling, gaining back the level we once had with extensions like vimperator. How long is this now? 8 years of broken promises?

qiqitori• 1 year ago

The concept of "web standards" is odd because new "standards" keep getting added. And what's more, they're being added rather promiscuously by an entity with almost unlimited resources, who is also the primary competitor. ;)

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y74• 1 year ago

Mozilla is a founder of WHATWG and they have, historically, had opinionated takes on standards.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions

zdragnar• 1 year ago

That's literally the process. TC39 in particular requires two real world implementations to exist before some new feature becomes a formalized part of the standards.

Several proposals backed by "the primary competitor" failed to get through the process, or were radically changed to make other implementors happy.

m-schuetz• 1 year ago

I abandoned Firefox because it was dragging its feet on some vital web standards such as WebGPU and import maps. The former is obvious. The latter is such a massive quality of life improvement for devs (makes build systems obsolete) that I simply could no longer care for Firefox which ignored it for the longest time.

v5v33• 1 year ago

Made a comment, it then asked me to sign up and couldn't be bothered.

The comment was: make the Firefox containers work in private mode.

In Safari private mode. Each tab has no knowledge of another (e.g. log into Gmail and then open a new tab and go to Gmail and you won't be signed in).

Firefox doesn't have this tab level isolation.

Also offer equivalent of safari's lockdown mode. So images and site features capable of loading malware etc are blocked by default.

_lvbh• 1 year ago

The comment was: make the Firefox containers work in private mode.

My solution to this is having multiple Firefox profiles where the default one clears all history/cache/etc automatically upon closing (default in Librewolf). It's not technically private mode so containers work.

weikju• 1 year ago

temporary containers [0]

disposable containers which isolate the data websites store (cookies, storage, and more) from each other

Granted, they're not in private broswing mode just normal mode, but same effect

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

v5v33• 1 year ago

Yes, that's the one I want fixing, and possibly moving from extension to feature.

Why would you create a privacy tool, and then not offer it in private mode. Makes no sense.

(You can setup Firefox so it's permanently in Private Mode and clears history and data on exit - as per Libre comment above -,which is how I have it set)

CjHuber• 1 year ago

I might be the only one but I'm quite annoyed that Safari's incognito mode works like this. I WANT it to have knowledge of all the other incognito tabs of the same window. Only when I make a new incognito window, it should be a new container.

Pretty interesting how preferences can vary, because this bothers me everytime I use incognito mode on safari and think, can this not just work like in Firefox.

v5v33• 1 year ago

In the old days logging in twice would bother me as is have to type in a password, but now with password manager and fingerprint/face scan it's low effort.

It's very handy for sites where you may have more than account

lxgr2• 1 year ago

On desktop OSes, I definitely also prefer that behavior. I wonder if Safari behaves like that for consistency with iOS, where there isn't any hierarchy above tabs, so it would be a choice between no separation at all or sandboxing each tab individually?

GuB-423• 1 year ago

I actually prefer it the way it is now. For me, private mode is effectively an extra temporary profile that is full featured, but wiped once the last window is closed. I usually don't need more than one.

But I understand that other people have other needs. It can be very useful for developers for instance. Make it an option, maybe.

kevincox2• 1 year ago

I see both. I wouldn't want every tab to be separate but I occasionally want to have more than one independent private profile at a time. It would be nice if I could do this. Any sort of ephemeral container tabs option would probably satisfy this option and could maybe even remove most of my use of private browsing if I could just open ephemeral containers in an otherwise regular window.

joshuaturner• 1 year ago

A "private tab" feature in addition to "private window" could be a useful, if potentially confusing

account427• 1 year ago

Unfortunately it doesn't work like a separate profile for extensions so you can either enable them and trust that the extension doesn't leak data from private windows into your main profile or you can disable the extension - there is no option to enable the extension but enforce that the extension sticks to the private profile (with possible exceptions for extension settings which should persist).

wslh• 1 year ago

Shameless, deprecated plug: I built a very hackish Firefox extension to do that about 17 years ago [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EBkB-Yp-zM

dietr1ch• 1 year ago

I still feel that the isolation is backwards. Instead of having me to split containers, ask me to merge things like google.com and youtube.com, but by default keep every domain isolated.

EasyMark6• 1 year ago

They have to ask for sign ups, otherwise they'd get blasted by bots spewing whatever.

sneilan1• 1 year ago

How about fix copy and paste on Linux?

quesera2• 1 year ago

Hm. Are you referring to the bracketed paste weirdness? This is fixable.

https://superuser.com/questions/1532688/pasting-required-tex...

nicman234• 1 year ago

no sometimes paste does not work for discord and messenger.com especially when the clipboard is a picture

ac29• 1 year ago

I cant think of a single time ctrl-v or middle click didnt work

charcircuit4• 1 year ago

Firefox has search based discover of content on the web, but it has failed to keep up with the trend of discovery using recommendation feeds. Firefox should be able to recommend new web pages I would be interested in.

csmantle2• 1 year ago

No, thanks. After I finish my task on my browser, I would take a break offline rather than indulging into an endless stream of "You May Also Like". Actually, I would thank FF for not filling their homepage with these noises.

charcircuit4• 1 year ago

Getting people to use Firefox less and take more breaks from it is not how you gain market share. You need to make it easy for people to find content they are interested in.

jksflkjl3jk32• 1 year ago

Please tell me this is sarcasm. That is exactly the kind of terrible idea that Mozilla would come up with and force on users.

charcircuit4• 1 year ago

It's not sarcasm. Firefox used to have a built in RSS feed, but instead of modernizing this by not requiring sites to setup a RSS feed and using algorithmic rating to find the best article they got rid of it altogether.

17186274402• 1 year ago

Firefox does have recommended and promotional websites in the default new tab/startview, what is missing for you?

RandomBacon3• 1 year ago

They should fix bugs.

Computer A:

Sometimes I cannot close tabs by clicking the X, or refresh/go-forward/go-back using the buttons next to the address bar.

Computer B:

Sometimes I get downloads that have "Unknown time left" (0 bytes/sec) when the X of X KB/MB is 100% and you can't remove it from the downloads dropdown.

I just discovered a new bug on Computer B, clicking the hamburger menu doesn't do anything.

Both are Ubuntu.

(I'm not a fan of the new menu in Firefox Beta for Android. I guess it looks nicer due to the greater whitespace, it just break muscle memory and has less options/selections.)

ImPostingOnHN• 1 year ago

Does computer B ever finish?

Do you see any disk i/o spikes when this is happening?

RandomBacon3• 1 year ago

Does computer B ever finish?

No, it stays there until I close the browser at which point I get the option to cancel the download or not to exit.

disk i/o spikes

Unknown, I don't monitor that, and the bug doesn't happen all the time, not sure how to recreate it.

arp2423• 1 year ago

At the end of the day, if you want to see these types of bugs fixed then by far the fastest way is to report them, which will probably mean you'll have to spend some time to track down what's causing that on your system. I have generally found reporting bugs to Firefox to be a reasonably positive experience.

TrueSlacker0• 1 year ago

I just made the switch to ubuntu as my main os from windows. Firefox on windows never seemed to have any problems. Now I keep getting the same problem as your computer a. It doesnt happen every time, and i havent figured out the pattern. But clicking the x to close a tab does nothing, middle clicking the tab still closes it. Any time this problem starts I also have issues using the mouse middle button to scroll (on all apps, not just ff) Very, very annoying. Since these issues seem linked it seems bigger than just ff.

BeetleB2• 1 year ago

I use Firefox as my main browser on both Linux and Windows and have no problems.

I suspect you have an Ubuntu problem.

nicman234• 1 year ago

yeah the download thing was a corrupted profile when i had it.

denzil• 1 year ago

I wonder, if these problems aren't Ubuntu fault, since it forces snap version of Firefox on you. I had Firefox crashing repeatedly on me with the snap version. Maybe switching to Firefox apt repo would help? (I tried the repo, but before I had chance to test it properly, I found I could use Debian instead of Ubuntu and reinstalled immediately.)

dordoka• 1 year ago

Never experienced those with Firefox on Windows, macOS or a myriad of Linux distros along the years. Not using Ubuntu anymore, but when I did, I did not use flatpaks. That might be the origin of your issues.

shmerl9• 1 year ago

What I want to see:

* Use Vulkan for rendering instead of OpenGL

* Drop dependency on GTK (it's a source of many problems) and just implement their own full fledged Wayland handling like Wine is doing.

* Back Servo again as the future engine.

GuB-423• 1 year ago

Use Vulkan for rendering instead of OpenGL

How much of a difference does it make?

just implement their own full fledged Wayland handling

As long as they still support X11... (I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine)

Back Servo again as the future engine

100% yes, if they still can that is

shmerl9• 1 year ago

Vulkan is the modern option, the difference is not being stuck with legacy paths and using something that allows explicit sync.

Wayland is also the modern option, so I don't really worry about X11 use cases. For remote desktops, better to use something like FreeRDP anyway. X11 forwarding is much worse in every sense.

I think KDE are working on integrating FreeRDP server into Plasma for seamless usage.

Another thing to add for Firefox would be may be switching to Vulkan video from VAAPI (or at least having it as an option since ffmpeg already supports it) and using hardware acceleration for video encoding too, not just for video decoding.

heavyset_go• 1 year ago

As long as they still support X11... (I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine)

Look into xpra

yjftsjthsd-h3• 1 year ago

I often do ssh -X ... firefox when I need to see a webpage from a remote machine

Isn't https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe supposed to cover that?

danudey2• 1 year ago

Would love if FF could support VA-API decoding + Wayland + GPU acceleration on Ubuntu by default, rather than having to follow a possibly outdated Arch linux guide to hack it into working at least some of the time.

shmerl9• 1 year ago

I'm not using Ubuntu, but any recent version of Firefox supports VAAPI by default for quite some time already.

So may be check your version or check what Ubuntu is doing wrong / use something else.

What I want to see is VAAPI encoding used, not just decoding. Better even Vulkan video both for decoding and encoding.

bigiain• 1 year ago

Sadly "I'd like Firefox to not be owned by an advertising/surveillance company" is unlikely to be considered in that forum (even if I were prepared to sign up to comment).

Everything else is minor details compared to that.

(Yes, this was posted using LibreWolf, but I often wonder if I can even trust that, having the vast majority of it's code written and managed by Mozilla.)

AlotOfReading2• 1 year ago

This is the key differentiator Mozilla seems to deliberately avoid understanding. Chrome is a perfectly okay browser from almost every perspective: standards, functionality, performance, etc. What Chrome is not good at and can never be good at while it's owned by an advertising company is respecting user choice to disable advertising and choose privacy models that exclude the browser company.

Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table stakes for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell it.

vpShane• 1 year ago

Chrome is a perfectly okay browser from almost every perspective

No, it isn't. They killed adblock, and have a business model of throttling other browsers to force people to Chrome (Youtube throttling) and doing digital fingerprinting with exclusive-only Chrome finger prints as seen here on HN the other day.

Firefox has anonym, where it sells your 'anonymous data'

https://lifehacker.com/tech/why-you-should-disable-firefox-p...

I just looked, go to Settings -> type advert and you'll see

Website Advertising Preferences Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you. Learn more

It comes pre-checked for you.

I use Chromium for dev stuff, but now; there's no ublock origin.

PaulHoule4• 1 year ago

Now that Google blocked uBlock origin, that's a good reason to keep using Firefox. It amazes me how much worse the web is on Chrome.

gonzobonzo• 1 year ago

Features and bugfixes are important, but they're table stakes for an everyday browser. They aren't enough to sell it.

One of the reasons I've moved to Chrome is because of the memory problems with Mozilla that I've been experiencing for years. Every so often I look up other people who've been having the same issues. They seem to have been reported for years, but there's often a surprising amount of hostility from Firefox fans whenever they get mentioned.

As an aside, both Firefox and Chrome made their browsers significantly worse when they changed the order of windows in the windows menu from chronological to alphabetical.

f-ffox• 1 year ago

I’d also ask them how they plan to build a time machine to undo selling their users’ data when they said they wouldn’t.

Also- what kind of animal are you?!

eth0up2• 1 year ago

I use FF as a primary browser on Desktop and Nightly in Android. There's much I could say about FF, but I think it would be futile.

In Debian, I'd use FF-LTS and regular FF. Since moving to Void, xbps allows only one version, so I use FF and Vivaldi.

I'd appreciate any opinions on Vivaldi. It's the only functional alternative browser I've found in the repos. But I have to start it with:

    LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1

Which sucks, and applies to OpenShot and a lot of other software that gets fussy with intel chips in some versions of Linux. Chromium I prefer to avoid, and it wants a password to initiate, which I understand but refuse to comply with. But that's all aside the point. Opinions, please...

yjftsjthsd-h3• 1 year ago

Can you run a different Firefox via flatpak? (Or x11docker or plain docker, or nix, or I guess Snap)

eth0up2• 1 year ago

Yes. Thanks for the reminder.

dspillett• 1 year ago

Chromium … it wants a password to initiate, which I understand but refuse to comply with.

That sounds like the the keyring issue that pops up if you have your user account auto-login on machine start. If you don't let Chromium store passwords⁰¹ this can be safely disabled: see https://archive.is/G6pPH#ID15 ²

I ran into the issue when setting up a simple temporary public kiosk a short while back.

--------

[0] I don't, I prefer to keep my internet facing UAs and my credential stores a bit more separated than that. It also removes some friction from moving between browsers, when one annoys me enough to (re)try another.

[1] If you do let Chromium store passwords, then you can still do this, but not safely as per the warnings in that article.

[2] Or https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/tips-1.html#ID15 for the original, if you enjoy consent dialogues or want to be commercially internet stalked

dbg314152• 1 year ago

Firefox should ship with a local AI agent that can browse, summarize, and act on the web — entirely on-device.

I don’t want to send my searches through Google or OpenAI just to get basic tasks done. Give me a sandboxed local model that can:

* Read pages and data that’s loaded through it

* Summarize content

* Act on rule-based prompts I define (e.g. auto-reply in Slack, triage emails, autofill forms, upvote followed author’s posts…)

Let me load a Slack tab and have the AI draft replies for me. Same for Gmail. Basically, let Firefox interact with the web on my behalf and train the AI to be my assistant.

Beyond that, extensions already do most of what I need — but a built-in, private AI agent would actually move the needle.

bigstrat2003• 1 year ago

I very much do not want AI slop added to the browser. That would be such a negative feature.

nicman234• 1 year ago

think it as an adblock to the slop

dbg314152• 1 year ago

Where should "Jarvis" live -- in the OS, not the browser? I guess that makes sense.

I just want to get to the point where I can say: "Siri, draft an email response to my boss..." or "Siri, monitor all my Slack and Teams channels and text me if anything important comes up... and go ahead and auto-respond with RTFM links if the answer is already in the docs or a past part of the channel thread..." or "Siri, go do the grindy parts of the video game so I can log in and just do the fun parts this weekend..." or even, "Siri, take my stupid defensive driving course I got slapped with for going 5 miles over the speed limit."

That’s when AI will be fun. Right now, it still feels like I’m doing way more work than I want to. I want to be able to start handing it tasks I can hand interns now. (Ha, and yes, I have made interns do the boring grindy parts of video games for me, and take my defensive driving tests.)

scubadude• 1 year ago

Straight to under 0.5% usage no doubt. Making a mockery of all the unpaid people who have committed code over the years. The Mozilla foundation have shirked their responsibility as a bastion against commercial interests.

kevin_thibedeau• 1 year ago

Their job was to rake in millions while keeping the benefactor happy with no real competition. Mission accomplished.

dralley3• 1 year ago

The kneejerk Mozilla hate on HN gets so fucking tedious.

Google's marketing budget for Chrome is greater than Mozilla's entire budget. They sponsor a Formula 1 team FFS. They spent a decade paying off Adobe, Java, AVG, Avast and all the other shitty free AV softwares to auto-install Chrome. They targeted Firefox users with Chrome ads on the homepages of Google and YouTube. That's literally billions of dollars worth of marketing alone that they don't even have to pay for.

Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents combined (Africa, South America, Australia) with a couple trillion USD to spare. Each controls an operating system (or two) with more than a billion users each on which their browsers are pre-installed.

No shit they struggle to compete on brand and marketshare. They're basically forced by the economics of the market to do search deals with Google, and whenever they try to develop independent sources of revenue people shit on them for that too. People shit on them for making deals with Google and make insinuations about them being "controlled opposition" because of that dependency, but also shit on them for pursuing any other independent sources of revenue, like the branded VPN service or the innocuous cross-promotion of that Disney movie with the Red Panda.

People shat on them for trying to compete with Android via FirefoxOS because the bet didn't work out, even though it was probably the only way they could have avoided this outcome and gained real independence, had it worked out.

"Just focus on Firefox", they say - unless that means laying off people that work on Rust, or AV1, or Opus, or WebAssembly, or Let's Encrypt, or experimental browser engines that wouldn't have been production-ready for a decade. According to HN, Mozilla should focus but also keep churning out and spinning off research projects, but only successful research projects, not ones that fail. Anything Mozilla does is always retroactively terrible if it fails but if it works out great they never get credit for it anyway.

nixpulvis2• 1 year ago

idk, get more people to use it? Release a standalone password manager that integrates nicely? Buy some ads on instagram or something?

ivanjermakov• 1 year ago

How you would benefit from FF having more users?

nixpulvis2• 1 year ago

More developers would test for Firefox again.

wkat42425• 1 year ago

Sites would not mark my session as suspicious so much which causes me so many evil captchas

wvenable• 1 year ago

Lockwise? They killed it.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...

xeonmc2• 1 year ago

If I get a nickel every time an advertising company in possession of a mainstream web browser gains a reputation for an accumulated history of product graveyards, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.

JumpCrisscross3• 1 year ago

Are Mozilla’s donations still roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2]?

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023

[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7

saurik• 1 year ago

That's insane :/. But, maybe, "on the bright side", The Mozilla Foundation is unrelated in some sense to Firefox? AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway.

The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.

There is another interesting detail from your reference that makes it seem even worse to me: it says the CEO's salary is "paid only by a related for-profit"; at first, I was thinking "ok, at least the Foundation in fact is spending the money it is being donated (though, not on Firefox)"... but then I realized that means the Corporation is, in fact, spending $7m that it could have spent on Firefox.

anonymousab• 1 year ago

AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway

The glass-half-full take I heard a while back was: at least every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that they could have found a way to take from Firefox development instead.

KPGv2• 1 year ago

The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.

I don't think these are comparable at all or how it's a scam. The CEO of the entire wikimedia foundation makes half a million a year. The foundation is considered a GREAT charity to donate to by Charity Navigator. https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703

BeetleB2• 1 year ago

I don't really understand the angst against the Wikimedia Foundation.

They are transparent. No one's being conned into donating. As long as Wikipedia is running fine, and is not degrading, and they're not actively harming it, I don't care. People routinely spend money on much worse things. Is donating $3 to Wikimedia once a year really worse than giving 50-100x more to Starbucks?

KurSix5• 1 year ago

Mozilla's setup feels more like a shell game

nick0garvey• 1 year ago

It says "PAID ONLY BY A RELATED FOR-PROFIT", which looks to be the Mozilla Corporation. Donations are not directly paying the CEO, although I agree more of the profits from the Corporation could flow into the non-profit.

setopt• 1 year ago

The reasonable assumption here is that without any donations, most of that money from Mozilla Corp would have had to cover what the donations paid for instead. So in practice, every dollar donated might have increased the CEO bonus by say 90 cents, which feels like donating to the CEO.

I currently still use Firefox but stopped donating to Mozilla after that.

BolexNOLA8• 1 year ago

I mean if you reduce something enough you can say “x pays for y” in almost any case for anything since it’s all technically one big pot for one group. Even earmarked money.

If I give you $500 to help pay for your medical bills and a few months later (bills have been paid by then) I see you bought a PS5, can I say, “not cool you used my money to buy a PS5”?

Don’t get me wrong I think Mozilla/FF has been very poorly managed. But I have just never liked these kinds of “transitive property” arguments or whatever we want to call it. Unless they’re straight up funneling donations into the CEO’s bank account I just don’t see it that way.

ozgrakkurt• 1 year ago

You could say “you bought a ps5 with my money” though.

If that person had the money, they should have spent on medical bills. If they got it after, they should have paid you back before buying a ps5 maybe.

Or if you just gave them the money and don’t expect any accountability, it is ok.

JumpCrisscross3• 1 year ago

whatever we want to call it

Fungibility [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility

ccppurcell• 1 year ago

straight up funneling

Money is fungible. There's no such thing as funneling. There is ring fencing though - that's when a certain budget cannot exceed a certain source of revenue, some countries do this with road tax I think. Afaik Mozilla is not doing any ring fencing. It is perfectly appropriate to compare the fraction of their income as donations to the fraction of their costs as CEO salary.

c0nducktr2• 1 year ago

Wow, I could run a brand into the ground for far less than $6.9mm.

MathMonkeyMan• 1 year ago

But could you do it while convincing yourself and everyone you're beholden to that you're not?

KurSix5• 1 year ago

$6.9M just seems like overkill

thesuitonym4• 1 year ago

And that's why you're unqualified to be a CEO: Never offer to do something for less money.

ramsj• 1 year ago

Meredith Whittaker at Signal made < $800K [1]. I can't fathom how $6.9M is even remotely acceptable.

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...

echelon• 1 year ago

A plant from Google.

Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge, but you have to keep it rudderless and ineffective.

guelo• 1 year ago

She's not the ceo anymore.

Sephr• 1 year ago

The new CEO isn't any better. According to their first CEO (Brendan Eich) "Mozilla is being looted now, mitchell taking $38M+ out over 9 years was just a start"

KurSix5• 1 year ago

Makes it hard to justify chipping in as a user. Transparency is great, but alignment with mission matters more.

giancarlostoro2• 1 year ago

If you cut that compensation in half you could have funded a small team of devs to have finished Oxidation of Firefox and have a really interesting browser, and potentially a really rich GUI stack, JavaScript Engine and who knows what else for Rust itself as a result, on top of it all being production ready and proven because of the nature of Firefox's reach.

There were major noticeable speed differences in Firefox when they implemented key component in Rust. I say this having used Firefox since 2004.

ekr____2• 1 year ago

If you cut that compensation in half you could have funded a small team of devs to have finished Oxidation of Firefox and have a really interesting browser, and potentially a really rich GUI stack, JavaScript Engine and who knows what else for Rust itself as a result, on top of it all being production ready and proven because of the nature of Firefox's reach.

I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind here but this really isn't true for basically any plausible value of "finished Oxidation of Firefox".

As context for scale, during the Quantum Project, Mozilla imported two major pieces of Servo: Stylo and WebRender. Each of these involved sizable teams and took years of effort, and yet these components (1) started from pre-existing work that had been done for Servo and (2) represent only relatively small fractions of Gecko. Replacing most of the browser -- or even a significant fraction of it -- with Rust code would be a far bigger undertaking.

deepspace4• 1 year ago

I interact with physical devices frequently. Mozilla's adamant refusal to implement WebSerial and WebUsb in Firefox forces me to install Chrome on every platform i use. That is just an asinine hill to die on.

Neywiny• 1 year ago

At least edge supports it so I have something users can use without needing to install even chrome. So disappointing Firefox is too high and mighty

accelbred• 1 year ago

If firefox implemented WebSerial and WebUsb, I'd lose a lot of trust in it. I say this as an embedded developer.

deepspace4• 1 year ago

Care to elaborate?

oneshtein• 1 year ago

WebSerial and WebUsb can be implemented as separate plugins in the same way as support for H264 and DRM was added.

citizenpaul2• 1 year ago

asinine hill to die on

Agreed. Also pointless hill to die on. It just forces users to another browser. This supposed average user only sees one side of this argument. Firefox doesn't work so I don't use it.

If only there was some nonprofit with the funds to hire full time devs to work on this issue.....

robswc• 1 year ago

Mozilla is the problem, not FireFox.

I just don't really feel like using FireFox while Mozilla has a hand in it.

const_cast6• 1 year ago

These luke-warm takes become even more luke-warm when you look at the competition.

You have Chrome, which disrespects it's users as a principle. And then you have chromium forks, which rely on Google for... let's see here... 99.99% of their application's code.

Mozilla might make mistakes, but next to Google, they are angel.

blibble• 1 year ago

straight into the history books unless they drop the AI, ads and telemetry

mozilla are now an advertising company, so other than ublock origin there's no reason to use it over chrome

and I'm pretty certain they'll get rid of manifest v2 soon too

pipeline_peak2• 1 year ago

Genuinely curious, what history book would talk about a browser with 10 years of commercial success?

I’d say it made some mark on FOSS, but in any book not dedicated to that it’s nothing more than a footnote.

radley• 1 year ago

It would be great if they figured out that about:config and command-line to do anything is not actually good UX for most humans.

musicale3• 1 year ago

How else would they hide the useful settings that they don't want you to mess with because you might change the bad default behavior?

msgodel• 1 year ago

It really seems to me like they've been intentionally adding friction to the configuration.

krackers2• 1 year ago

inb4 "We've simplified and streamlined the firefox experience by removing confusing control knobs and options."

musicale3• 1 year ago

TL;DR: nowhere good.

promiseofbeans• 1 year ago

Keeping up with web standards, and dropping the advertising rubbish that's making them somehow atrophy users faster than they were before.

Otherwise, they'll be gone. Thunderbird has proven people are willing to donate millions if they know their money will go directly to the software. In 2022, Thunderbird collected ~6 million in donations (~20 million users) compared to Mozilla's ~9 million (from >200 million users)

kennywinker• 1 year ago

Mozilla made $826.6M in 2024. If they got thunderbird levels of support $6/20 firefox would bring in $60 million. Aka 7% of current revenue. Idk all their revenue sources so idk what the overall picture would be, but my gut says $60mil wouldn’t cut it and firefox will never get the support thunderbird gets because of different user bases.

chrishare• 1 year ago

Most would be search engine agreements I presume, which is still proportional to the user counts.

Tadpole91812• 1 year ago

A single Google antitrust case can lose $500,000,000 of annual revenue.

tristan957• 1 year ago

You can't donate to the Mozilla Corporation. The Foundation is where donations go.

Squeeeez• 1 year ago

Eh... I'm not too sure about Thunderbird. For example on Android, they bought a very good product (K-9 Mail), rebranded it to Thunderbird and then proceeded to break every feature which made it stand apart.

Otherwise I 100% agree.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y74• 1 year ago

Firefox should focus on privacy, keeping extensions viable, and implementing standards, so they don't get swamped by competition.

No one really cares about a majority of the UX sugar, IMO.

I personally find the LLM context menu useful and reading mode awesome, but these are not features that by themselves would drive me to use the browser.

aorth2• 1 year ago

Reading mode is awesome! Especially on mobile. Yes to everything else you said too.

danelski2• 1 year ago

I feel like the addition of LLMs is an introduction to finding another source of revenue. That Perplexity pop-up we've been shown lately seems like an experiment in that.

anon70002• 1 year ago

Agreed -- I'm using the hell out of Zen browser on Linux and Windows. It's missing a couple things, but it works pretty great as a Firefox wrapper.

The reality is that with so many different users, there will be lots of opinions about the best way to do things, and especially in OSS communities, it's literally impossible to keep everyone happy.

Mozilla should let others do UX experimentation (like Zen, which is an Arc copy), and focus on the core performance and compatibility of the engine itself. Keep FF itself more streamlined as a core browser, and empower others to build fancy stuff on top.

And ditch literally anything related to ads & sponsorships, which have no place in a piece of tech so foundational to the open web.

EasyMark6• 1 year ago

*and fixing bugs.

lucius_verus• 1 year ago

Honestly, the Firefox feature-set it what prompted me to pick it up again after years of not using it.

- I wanted ad-blocking on Android, so I tried out Firefox on mobile.

- Then there were times I wanted to sync browser history/tabs between mobile and desktop, so I picked up Firefox on desktop again.

- I fell in love with reader mode (and using the narrate feature to listen to articles when my eyes get tired)

- I flirted with Zen browser, but now that Firefox has vertical tabs and tab grouping, I'm having trouble finding a reason to use Zen

Firefox basically does everything I want it to do, and it's incredibly rare that I need to open a chromium-based browser to handle something Firefox can't do.

aetherspawn2• 1 year ago

Uh yeah, rip nearly every feature out of Firefox and move it to “official extensions” that you can install optionally.

Go on a hardcore crusade on performance and battery life. Safari currently uses half the amount of energy compared to Firefox (according to macOS measurements), so I switched from Firefox to Safari and noticed hours of difference in battery life when I’m out and about.

lxgr2• 1 year ago

I don't think Firefox uses meaningfully more energy due to "optional features", but rather due to simply not optimizing for battery efficiency at the same level that Apple does for Safari.

That type of optimization requires tons of profiling and is less glamorous than implementing new features, so I could see how it's hard to prioritize for Mozilla, especially if optimizations might look very different across OSes.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 1 year ago

rip nearly every feature out of Firefox and move it to “official extensions” that you can install optionally.

Only if they properly maintain those APIs. I'm still salty that they had tab groups, then broke that feature out to an extension, then killed the extension. (Then, much later, recreated the feature over again)

But yes, if done well modularity is probably good from a development perspective too.

aetherspawn2• 1 year ago

I’m salty that at some point the Firefox interface became laggy on a state of the art 3GHz laptop when it wasn’t laggy in the past on a 400Mhz machine.

It doesn’t look all that different to how it did back then.

dec0dedab0de• 1 year ago

I was wrong, Brendan Eich would have been better.

ai_critic2• 1 year ago

This was obvious to anybody with half a brain at the time of the pitchfork mob. At least a lot of folks got to feel like they were on the right side of history, one supposes. That was surely worth the free and open browser.

thoroughburro2• 1 year ago

This is the Great Man Theory. It’s a child’s view of history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

bitlax• 1 year ago

Eich should be installed as a change agent, with absolute power to hire and fire. Until then Mozilla will continue to circle the drain.

ripped_britches• 1 year ago

Change your name to Rust Foundation and give up on browser market

nektro• 1 year ago

i like where firefox is going but stop paying the executives so much, get leaner

Spivak2• 1 year ago

Mozilla brings in a lot of money and they're sitting on a pile of cash. There's nothing even remotely close to pressure to become lean. They could double the CEO compensation and it wouldn't even be noticed. They have the opposite problem, a lot of money but not enough worthwhile ventures to invest it in.

aspenmayer3• 1 year ago

Could they hire more people to ask Firefox users what they want Mozilla to work on? They’d probably say Firefox features and bug fixes. There are people who could do the work in exchange for some of that money. I don’t think this is a case of too much money chasing too little profits, which seems to be what you’re suggesting.

nicoburns• 1 year ago

Everyone I know who works on Firefox says their team is understaffed and people are not always being replaced when they leave. They could stand to invest a lot more (or more efficiently) into their core product.

pipeline_peak2• 1 year ago

/dev/null

EbNar2• 1 year ago

Pretty much.

rappatic• 1 year ago

When are we getting Mac biometric support for extensions? I want to be able to use my Touch ID with my password manager on my Mac! Do any HNers have solutions for this (Dashlane)?

Reason077• 1 year ago

What I’d like to see is a setting that prevents websites from opening links in new tabs. eBay and AliExpress, specifically, but I’m sure others do it too.

I haven’t found a way to block this very annoying behaviour in any browser, short of installing “new tab blocker” browser extensions, but they are unreliable.

tsoukase• 1 year ago

I am pretty sure Google donates a great share of Mozilla's revenue but demands the following with this money:

- Firefox is alive, so that they are a theoretical competitor to avoid anti-trust measures

- Firefox has the lowest market share that remains that said competitor without distracting many users from G engagement

- Firefox emains of few steps behind in features and perforfance so that it remains in this pesky market share

- of course Firefox keeps Google search the default

- may be other under the table agreements? (Request for comments)

I cannot foresay what will happen next with the state of MV3.

mparramon• 1 year ago

I've yet to have one single problem after running Firefox as my main driver for ~3 months. Only 2 webpages have made me quickly open Chrome instead to check them out, and the content wasn't worth engaging for long.

It puzzles me how more programmers don't switch to a real open source browser not controlled by an advertising giant which will use their overwhelming monopolistic force to steer the way browsers work so that it benefits its bottom line.

Vote with your feet, use Firefox.

CamouflagedKiwi4• 1 year ago

I used it for many years but ultimately abandoned it because its memory use was just unacceptably high. A couple of windows with 30-40 tabs in each would eat all my laptop's memory - Chromium in a similar setup will sit around 40% used. I don't know what Firefox is doing but it's crazy far off the pace there.

Mozilla should be focusing on fixing things like that and making the browser be good before the barely related campaigning, let alone the whole "we're going to be an advertising business as well" thing.

account427• 1 year ago

It puzzles me how more programmers don't switch to a real open source browser not controlled by an advertising giant

Let us know when you find one.

CamouflagedKiwi4• 1 year ago

I think clearly Google want Firefox alive as a 'competitor', and they explicitly are buying that Google search is the default. I highly doubt they have any agreements limiting Firefox's market share or features though - that would undo the benefit of it being a competitor if it ever came out, but more significantly they don't have to. Mozilla have managed to achieve all that on their own. I actually think Google would probably rather that Firefox was at say 10% market share so they had a more legit argument that it was a competitor.

M95D3• 1 year ago

- may be other under the table agreements? (Request for comments)

Google access to Firefox telemetry data?

t1234s• 1 year ago

The only feature a browser needs is speed. Anything else should be an extension.

captainepoch4• 1 year ago

So... Here's an idea: stop wasting time and money on things like that, listen to the community, hire engineers, and make a browser that can be at the same level as Chrome. We already told you what we want and need, no need to keep asking.

Mozilla and the story on "How to waste money and resources" is getting tiresome at this point.

lblume• 1 year ago

stop wasting time and money on things like that

What do you mean? The AMA?

listen to the community

Huh? Isn't that exactly what they are doing with this?

skywal_l• 1 year ago

I think your parent poster has a point. What is needed from firefox is fairly clear to any person of good faith:

Better web compatibility and speed, be more lean (higher dev to admin ratio) and no more shenanigans / distractions.

To keep asking the question when you know the answer is at best incompetence according to Hanlon.

Lio• 1 year ago

> stop wasting time and money on things like that
What do you mean? The AMA?

I’m not the parent but it’s not the AMA, it’s paying multi-million dollar salaries to CEOs that layoff engineers and divert money to political campaigning.

We could have had a Servo based Firefox by now if the team hadn't been canned in 2020 instead of Mitchell Baker giving herself a $3 million pay increase every year.

It's shameful to then come cap in hand for donations after that.

I had an email from Mozilla last week on how to prepare my phone for participation in violent political demonstrations.

I have to ask myself, what does this have to do with web browsers?

captainepoch4• 1 year ago

Read the comments from Lio and skywal_l, both replies to your comment <- that's what I mean.

thesuitonym4• 1 year ago

Asking the same questions, and getting the same answers over and over again doesn't really seem like listening to me.

const_cast6• 1 year ago

Mozilla develops a better browser than Chrome in a lot of ways, and they do it with a tiny fraction of their budget. I would not describe that as "money wasting".

uncircle• 1 year ago

To be fair, most of Chrome’s budget is spent on developing ever more complex web standards to stay ahead of the competition, and to make sure no one will ever catch up to them.

NackerHughes• 1 year ago

So just think how much greater the browser could be if Mozilla put more of the money they get into improving Firefox instead of into pointless UI redesigns that only slow things down, or breaking existing functionality - not to mention all the other frivolous nonsense they seem preoccupied with instead of being a credible competitor to Google.

With how they've been in recent years it's almost as if they're trying to be inept competition, as if they're being paid by Google to suck - in fact, that is all but established by now.

idoubtit• 1 year ago

Just two personal experiences of why the quality of Firefox is far from Chromium's: downloads, and creating an extension.

A few years ago, they changed their interface for downloading. This introduced more than a dozen of bugs. Some were cosmetic, e.g. hover was the same color as foreground. Some were rare but caused a file loss. Some were performance related, e.g. deleting the history of downloads could take a minute with no visible change until the end. Most of these regressions are now fixed, but that made me lose confidence in the quality of Firefox.

This year, I had to develop a cross-platform extension for Chrome and Firefox. I started using Mozilla Documentation Network, but many pages seemed unmaintained. The relationship with extensionworkshop.com is unclear. The status of manifest v3 is poorly documented (most pages are for v2 only). The page about the compatibility with Chrome is incomplete. After a few struggles, I switched to Google's documentation. Then I lost time and energy on a severe bug with the Firefox tool that publishes web-extensions: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/webexterror-unsupported-file...

captainepoch4• 1 year ago

The only thing Mozilla has right now better than Chrome is that the APIs needed for uBlock Origin to work as intented exist.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

It's wild how often Mozilla asks for feedback, gets clear answers (less bloat, better performance, fix regressions), and then drops something like another random experiment no one asked for

novaRom2• 1 year ago

Maybe because as from another comment: "Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge". They also absorb some useful users feedback. But do they have a real intention to increase market share (which could be done easily)? They are well paid - see in other comments how much its CEO is earning. So, "antitrust litigation sponge" sounds plausible?

supertrope2• 1 year ago

The market often rewards bloat (more features) not technical excellence. I think a big marketing push or pre-install partnership would help them a lot. Their marketshare is now so low that web developers unironically state “Best viewed in Google Chrome” like it’s 2003 when IE6 had 95% marketshare.

captainepoch4• 1 year ago

I think exactly the same. It's always the same play.

I guess they don't want to listen to things they need to pour money into.

hyruo• 1 year ago

Firefox only supports a limited number of alphabetic text translations, and other third-party plugins are not as convenient as Chrome & Edge.That's why I gave up on using it.

KnuthIsGod• 1 year ago

Firefox on android has a weird interface and is irritating.

I am looking forward to the day I can discard Firefox.

I am currently semi-forced to use it on one website ( ankiweb's desktop view does not seem to work well in Brave or Chrome ).

sebtron• 1 year ago

What's wrong with Firefox on Android? I have been using it for ages and I have no issue with it.

gfdjghd• 1 year ago

Firefox Android:

    The address bar has become cluttered with buttons THAT SHOULDN'T BE THERE: "home" (useless), "translate" (won't go away no matter the setting), and now "share" (for real!?), "reading mode"; remove them from there, I can barely see the first few letters of the address! Also way too much spacing around them
    I always have to manually close the previous tab when tapping on a link, let us reuse them instead, you may call us owls or wharever, but we don't like having zillions of tabs open to be closed automatically after x time
    Improve speed, it's currently the slowest browser out there
    Allow more customization (like about:config) and extensions, and for ex. to be able to remove the useless buttons from the address bar

nicman234• 1 year ago

this honestly sounds unhinged. except the part about abou:config

SushiHippie• 1 year ago

FWIW about:config is available in beta and nightly on android, my main browser was nightly for a while but it sometimes was too unstable, so I switched to beta as my daily, which seems to be stable.

_Algernon_3• 1 year ago

It is also available on stable though you have to enter the more verbose `chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml` to get there.

neRok2• 1 year ago

There's another way to get to about:config, see the following link.

https://www.askvg.com/how-to-access-about-config-page-in-fir...

II2II3• 1 year ago

I was going to say that different people have different needs, but many of the things you bring up simply aren't true or are context dependent. For example: translate and share are not on the address bar (they are accessed via a menu, along with many other things, that is on the address bar). For the most part, tabs are reused. The main exception is when sites tell the browser to open a link in a new window.

Firefox may be far from perfect, but I've found it must more malleable than Chrome.

charcircuit4• 1 year ago

See the first picture.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/android-translation

test1235• 1 year ago

if there's one surprising thing I've learnt from HN users, it's that there're loads of people out there who run browsers with zillions of tabs open all the time

barrenko• 1 year ago

People approach browsers in the same way they approach sex or basically anything else - whatever can be done will be done.

neRok2• 1 year ago

Meanwhile I do 50% of my internet-ing in private mode and get annoyed when I change between apps the wrong way and loose my 4 tabs lol. I think this particular issue happens because firefox-android must get told by android-OS to free up RAM as it's now a background-app.

But there's another private-tab-killer, and it happens when the screen times-out automatically or manually (eg, when you push the power button). I don't have a passcode or anything, so when I push the power button to power the screen on, it shows the simple "swipe to unlock" screen. The problem is that FF leaves a "private browsing" notification — and FYI, if you click on any notification on my lock screen, it will unlock and go to straight to that app — so of course I see that notification and think "shit yer, here's a shortcut" and click it, to which it unlocks the phone and opens FF, but it wipes all my private browsing tabs in the process!!! But if you unlock it by swiping, then your tabs will survive...

Actually, as I'm typing this, I think it might wipe ALL tabs, but that's not so bad for regular tabs (as you have history, cookies, etc), but it can still ruin your "state" of a search/scroll/etc.

Edit2: I'm also just realising that the way it wipes tabs when I click the notification sounds just like the first issue I mentioned (which I presume is android-OS garbage collecting the memory held by "background" apps). I have a POCO phone that runs Xiaomi HyperOS, and if it's running a non-standard lock-screen "app" by default (because I'm using the default whatever with settings that suit me), then perhaps that's why clicking a notification counts as "changing apps"?! (or perhaps even the default android lock screen counts as its own app?) But this idea seems strange because it would imply that the "swipe to unlock" feature is not part of the "lock screen app"...?

ngruhn• 1 year ago

Honestly, "reading mode" is the one reason I switched to firefox on mobile. When I open a page with tons of ads and popups, it gets rid of all of that.

sarthaksoni2• 1 year ago

I’ve used Firefox for years and really wanted to stick with it, but too many sites keep breaking. I originally ditched Chrome because it chewed through my RAM, but on the new M4 MacBook I’ve got headroom, so I’ve reluctantly gone back to Chrome. Painful switch, but I don’t have much choice right now.

fooker2• 1 year ago

I have the same experience.

It's somewhat of a taboo around here, and every time I have mentioned this there has been a bunch of responses certifying that Firerox works perfectly for them.

NamTaf• 1 year ago

I genuinely can't think of any sites I come across that are broken, at least visibly enough for me to notice. I think that speaks more to the variety in browsing habits than anything else. I'm sure they exist and I don't think it's a taboo. People who don't share that impression probably just don't visit any of those broken sites, e.g. me.

ksec2• 1 year ago

Which site don't work on Firefox ?

sarthaksoni2• 1 year ago

Some forms just break in Firefox for me. I’ve been applying to a lot of tech companies, and roughly 10% of their application forms fail in Firefox but work fine in Chrome. I can’t figure out why it’s inconsistent. Even some CAPTCHA and payment pop‑ups won’t load.

jerhewet• 1 year ago

Home Depot. They never test against Firefox, so most of their pages are a dumpster fire.

Lord-Jobo• 1 year ago

Most browser games(I play an absolute shit ton) run WAY better on chrome than Firefox, on both macOS and Android.

Not sure about Windows where I play full real games.

Imustaskforhelp• 1 year ago

Firefox has this really unsolved issue for me where firefox and firefox based forks basically first load through all of my cache which after months of using will take literal minutes and then and only then would my search queries / network requests by browser take place.

That means, to use my browser I have to wait literally minutes and yesterday, it was so long somehow on Zen (I created an issue there but they linked me to the firefox (downstream?) issue which wasn't solved in like sooo many years)

I basically just use a password manager and just create a new profile and start afresh most of the times but still its a little inconvenient I guess.

SnowProblem• 1 year ago

All I want today is Chrome-style profiles in Firefox. None of this about:profiles nonsense.

17186274402• 1 year ago

As a non Chrome user, can you explain the features of Google Chrome's profiles, that Mozilla Firefox doesn't have?

kevinlinxc• 1 year ago

Ive used firefox for a decade, theres only two features I want: uBlock origin on iOS (hard?) and PWA support on Desktop

chii4• 1 year ago

uBlock origin on iOS

that is the fault of apple. Firefox on iOS is not really firefox.

globular-toast• 1 year ago

Yeah somehow Apple is allowed to get away with this for years despite Microsoft being forced to give users options like browser back in the day.

thoroughburro2• 1 year ago

This argument doesn’t hold now that Firefox’s smaller and less funded competition manages to deliver. Being forced to use a webview does not leave you as helpless to implement features as Mozilla stans claim.

https://kagi.com/orion/

mijoharas3• 1 year ago

There's a third party PWA support now, that is maybe semi official? I think the Mozilla docs link to it.

Other than it being an extension, I've had no complaints.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

The animal thing's cute, but maybe focus less on branding exercises

krackers2• 1 year ago

Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style?

Ironic that "fox" isn't even an option. And the fact that they even ask this tells that they probably don't want serious feedback.

idle_zealot2• 1 year ago

I know there are plenty of more serious issues people have with Mozilla's direction and focus, but patronizing stuff like this really grinds my gears.

Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style? [List of emoji animals]

The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting. This is the most egregious part but the whole post has a similar tone.

I'll note that I'm not saying outreach should necessarily be professional or devoid of fun/humor. There's just a sterile, saccharine way about Mozilla's community engagement that evokes artificiality.

ReadCarlBarks• 1 year ago

Thank you for loving Firefox - https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/m/m-p/16863/highl...

ralfd• 1 year ago

This is an amazing rant! Too bad it was only had 4 comments here at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892

93po• 1 year ago

while i agree that mozilla is silly for thinking they're bring about positive social impact, it's also concerning for the author to call DEI (as a sentiment, not as a flawed implementation) "divisive politics" when it's just basic recognition of being a decent human. It makes me think the author is an "all lives matter" person.

MollyRealized2• 1 year ago

"Welcome to Costco, I love you." That movie was so damn eerily prescient.

ibejoeb• 1 year ago

"Last year we upleveled our Private Browsing mode."

Hah, perfect. I recently got a contract to "upskill" a team. I mean, I kinda get it: training, right? But I was not confident that I really did understand it, specifically. I asked what the hell that meant and was met with a lot contorted phrases to describe it. Sure enough, training.

We're inventing work...

Y_Y3• 1 year ago

Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could, and that the limited time and ebergy available were being spent on things like compatibility and escaping from Google.

account427• 1 year ago

Wasn't that added around the same time where they removed compact mode from the UI because supposedly it was too much of a burden to maintain?

dao-7• 1 year ago

Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could

Most average users don't ever change settings or otherwise customize stuff, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy a different theme. Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry. In fact, three years later colorway themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox anymore.

d3nj4l• 1 year ago

What do you mean non-feature? What do you mean force-fed? It’s literally just themes my dude, they just had a first run dialog for users to select one.

OldfieldFund• 1 year ago

100%.

Also, I think we can sense where Firefox is going. Mozilla is a mismanaged company. A victim of itself and Google's monopoly/life support.

jillesvangurp• 1 year ago

Agreed, this just looks really tone deaf and amateurish. And it's avoiding the bigger issues. There are plenty and they actually need dealing with. Even just acknowledging some of those issues would be progress.

There must be internal discussion on this. I imagine more than a few shouty meetings might have happened. This indicates to me that management doesn't know how to deal with that and clearly isn't dealing with anything effectively. If anything this makes me more worried, not less worried about how things are going at Mozilla.

More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Firefox needs more people that work on the product and are allowed to work on the product not people that do busywork like this and just get in the way.

I'm an actual user BTW. The product is fine for me. Performance is great and steadily improving. My main concern is that the developers are allowed to stay on mission and empowered to do that. Which means doubling down on making sure I never get confronted with shitty ads, popups, and other advertising abuse. And that it keeps up technically with Chromium and Webkit in terms of standards support.

motorest6• 1 year ago

More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please.

Playing devil's advocate: how does that help your average Joe adopt Firefox?

miki_oomiri• 1 year ago

This all started with the "Engagement Team" like … 15+ years ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with mascots, being cute, having this infantilizing attitude towards users.

They killed the dino logo:

- https://imghost.online/GBswvjTZ38PtAnf

- https://imghost.online/0HTX7YVnImu49qc

We were hackers, we became "cute and inclusive" (nothing wrong about inclusive… it just became the brand).

Fuck this.

Edit: I said 10+ years… but actually, it was more like 15 years ago.

AndyMcConachie• 1 year ago

Kinda hard to be inclusive if no one uses your browser. The greatest thing Mozilla could do for inclusiveness is to have more users. Not treat your users like children.

motorest6• 1 year ago

This all started with the "Engagement Team" like … 15+ years ago. I was there (part of the team). They started with mascots, being cute, having this infantilizing attitude towards users.

Having mascots is fine. It's like having a logo. Having multiple mascots is not good. What does a dinosaur have to do with a Firefox? The dinosaur was supposedly Mozilla's logo, as in Mosaic and Godzilla. Firefox is one of the many projects under the Mozilla umbrella. Keep the fox theme in Firefox communications, leave dinosaurs for Mozilla's one.

basisword• 1 year ago

> The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting.

I think this is just changing with the times. Go back a bit further and the idea of communities around products is the new cool thing. Personally I find that a bit weird. We have a whole generation of people who find social media managers talking to each other hilarious.

account427• 1 year ago

I think the root problem here is that the communication isn't genuine. It's marketing trying to craft a certain brand image instead of actual stakeholders being open about the what is going on with the project.

motorest6• 1 year ago

I think the root problem here is that the communication isn't genuine.

More than not being genuine, it's condescending and patronizing.

raffael_de• 1 year ago

I suggest we democratically rename Firefox to FireFoxy MacFireFace.

0x000xca0xfe2• 1 year ago

Because the entire post reeks of LLM writing. It even got the long dashes.

DaSHacka• 1 year ago

Well screw all of us that like using em dashes, I guess.

gjm11• 1 year ago

I agree that it feels LLMish (though the LLMs learned it from humans and it's always possible that whoever wrote it just has that sort of style) but the dashes there are en-dashes rather than the longer em-dashes that LLMs seem particularly fond of.

I will be sad if en-dashes come to be seen as LLM fingerprints, because I rather like them.

ziml772• 1 year ago

It doesn't have em-dashes and although a list where each line starts with an emoji is very LLM-coded, the lack of capitalization after the dashes does not feel like LLM output. And if something isn't plainly LLM generated, I do not want to accuse it of such. That's incredibly insulting to the author if they didn't actually use an LLM.

brycewray• 1 year ago

As I wrote recently on my own blog site:

This is for those who insist they can easily spot AI-generated text. Many of us old farts were using bulleted lists and em dashes and en dashes long before artificial intelligence was no more than a (usually) reliable plot device for sci-fi, much less the fever dream of tech bros. So, for God’s sake, stop using those as “proofs” that some text is AI-generated. As for my own writing, I reiterate what I said over two years ago: “... although the stuff on this site ... may not be any good, it always has been and will be written by a human, namely me.”

Szpadel• 1 year ago

that's might also be false positive, I use languagetool for grammar/spelling correction and one of the corrections it to replace dashes with em-dashes

fortyseven• 1 year ago

Stop this. I use em-dashes all the time. Em dashes are cool and I don't want some knob to eventually accuse me of being "an AI" because of this kind of thing. :{

t0lo• 1 year ago

Too tired to cover my tracks tonight

imglorp• 1 year ago

Go on...

dmix• 1 year ago

This is an AMA with product managers, not the engineering team, so it tracks

lupusreal• 1 year ago

The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting

It's because those entire departments are daycare for the people working in them.

8-9, snacks. 9-10, tweeting. 10-11, snacks and socializing. 11-12, nap time. 12-2, lunch. 2-3, tweeting. 3-4, socializing.

another_twist• 1 year ago

Built in fact checker would be nice.

I guess another one would be a political news filter given so much polarization online.

signa11• 1 year ago

i am kind of surprised that no one has mentioned ladybird (https://ladybird.org/) here. it seems to be progressing quite nicely along.

bambax• 1 year ago

Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style?

I'm not an infant so I don't need pretty pictures of animals to express myself. This is offensive and ridiculous. Please fuck off.

I use Firefox as a fucking browser, to, you know, browse the web. Open web pages. Read stuff. Avoid ads at all costs. And that's pretty much it.

_Algernon_3• 1 year ago

Mozilla should drop this BS, and instead deliver on feature parity of web extension API with the old XUL plugin system. Yes; I'm still salty about that.

icar• 1 year ago

I had to move to Brave/Vanadium on Android because Firefox is slow as hell. It happens when you log in, which for me is the whole point, as that's what I use on my computer (Linux).

aucisson_masque2• 1 year ago

Let’s be honest, the only advantage Firefox has over other browser and especially chrome is its extension support. And it’s not even Mozilla merit, it’s Google who removed MV2 support.

Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.

They hang on by a thread.

The web need Firefox to be thriving but it’s been a sinking ship since a while.

They know perfectly what users want, what makes a good browser : speed, good user interface, low on energy, block ads,.. These are universal things.

Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.

And it’s not even that I want to see the url every second, but it just looks and feel bad.

On computer, there are 4 different browser history. The traditional one that opens in an outdated window, the « recent one » that shows only the 10 or something last links , a better looking browser history when you go in the top left button where there are synced browser tabs, synced history ,.. and an history in the sidebar.

Seriously ? 4 different history.

There need to be one clear, working history.

littlecranky672• 1 year ago

Strong disagree. Firefox gives you more options to configure things, and I am using the Containers Extensions (sandboxed tabs based on domains).

rendaw2• 1 year ago

I'm not using the containers extension, since it only goes about 20% of the way and then they lost focus and stopped developing it. I think most people don't use it. It could have been a differentiator.

RamblingCTO• 1 year ago

how are you doing that btw? apparently I'm incapable. I tried different container extensions, some of which crash zen completely. I just want some domains to be automatically opened in a specific container.

Zardoz84• 1 year ago

Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.

At least on my phone, an Poco X3, Firefox for Android url box it's BIGGER that Chrome for Android. Chrome shows 4 buttons on my phone.

tgv• 1 year ago

the only advantage

Have you seen how much data Chrome collects for Google? Especially on Android. That's another massive advantage of Firefox.

hu3• 1 year ago

Firefox could improve here too. They have telemetry on by default.

I get it, it's very useful to understand what and how features are used. But it's a fine line to walk for a browser playing market share catch-up.

TiredOfLife3• 1 year ago

Firefox ships with google analytics built in. And you can't use extensions like uBlock Origin to block them.

abtinf• 1 year ago

Firefox recently changed their privacy policy. This is no longer the advantage it used to be.

aucisson_masque2• 1 year ago

Does people care ?

Most people happily give away their privacy to these companies for very little or no benefit, on the other hand being able to block ads is a big thing. Everyone is annoyed when a pop up on how to enlarge your penis show up.

Macha3• 1 year ago

Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface

So I opened the same page on both, my comments page on HN.

Firefox Android UI:

Home button, SSL padlock, URL, reader mode, tabs, hamburger menu. URL displays extends from 20% of the screen to 70% of the screen. I see news.ycombinator.com/thre(a) [the a is partially faded].

Chrome Android UI:

Home button, settings icon (shows cert details), URL, new tab button, tab list, hamburger menu. Icons have like 50% more padding that firefox icons, so URL extends from 20% to 60% of the screen. I see "news.ycombinator.com/t"

The only difference in icon count is firefox gives reader mode a dedicated button while Chrome gives new tab a dedicated button. Given how often I use reader mode (as a paywall bypass, or poorly formatted sites) that's... fine?

There is a stylistic difference where the coloured area for the address bar encompasses the reader mode icon so it looks like it's deducting space for the URL but it appears that Firefox actually has more URL space. By like... 3 characters, so it's not a huge difference.

---

As for the desktop history example:

Firefox history views:

- Firefox View: Full page view of your account including history, synced tabs, etc.

- Sidebar history: Useful to see with less disruption to browser

- Overflow menu recent items

- Legacy "Manage history" popup

Chrome history views:

- chrome://history as a full page modal (with sync and other stuff, so closest to Firefox view)

- recent history in the overflow menu

- "grouped history" which is a sidebar history with way too much padding.

So the only extra view of history that Firefox has is the legacy one, which is buried in the UI for power users who don't want to let it go (or more likely the bookmark manager that it lives with).

motorest6• 1 year ago

Let’s be honest, the only advantage Firefox has over other browser and especially chrome is its extension support. And it’s not even Mozilla merit, it’s Google who removed MV2 support.

What are you talking about? Firefox pioneered the whole concept of browser extensions. Can you try to explain to me your train of thought?

Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.

What point do you think you're making? Firefox works perfectly well on Android, as well as Firefox Focus might I add.

Your comment reads like you're trying to grasp at straws.

TiredOfLife3• 1 year ago

They have legacy extensions. Mozilla is very hostile to new extensions. When Gorhil - creator of the most popular Firefox extension uBlock Origin (honestly the main reason Firefox still has users) wanted to add his manifest 3 extension uBlock Origin Lite to firefox Mozilla told him to get bent. Same with "Enhancer to Youtube" (number 11 extension by user count) it is stuck on old version because of Mozilla

ncr100• 1 year ago

No.

Google Is An Advertising Company. Honestly, this is more significant.

You are the product, for Google Chrome.

Google's MV3 replacement for MV2 means you are their product and will be served Ads regardless of your preferences.

dartharva3• 1 year ago

I honestly believe Firefox is better off just ripping off Chrome's minimalist design. This overengineered bloat is just putting me off.

appointment• 1 year ago

People have been raging about Mozilla copying Chrome's minimalist design for many, many years.

acephal• 1 year ago

Firefox's WebExtensions implementation still has service workers disabled and no File System API. MV3 requires service workers, so Firefox extension ecosystem is on a countdown.

fiverz• 1 year ago

That update that added the unremovable share button to the address bar on Android really pissed me off. I was hoping an update would come that would allow the stupid home button to be toggled on/off, but instead they add yet another unremovable button. Like wtf, I can't even see the URL now on any sites.

HenryBemis• 1 year ago

I was reading a couple of days ago the Frank Miller's Robocop comic series. I laughed so hard at the comment/response of "Dr. Love" when asked "have you sold out?" and the response was "I'm reposisioned Lilac to where I can more efficaciously relate values of cooperation and participation to our children. Where I can infuse a spirit of caring and sharing to marketing and media."

Then she (Dr. Love) continues to say... "I welcome this change to dialogue. To relate to you OCP's commitment...."

So when I read the FF's post, Dr. Love and the beginning of a big spin came to mind!

bonoboTP• 1 year ago

weren’t just ideas – they were direct responses to what you told us you wanted.

This is AI-generated text. It's also insanely dense with suffocating coddlespeak.

CalRobert• 1 year ago

Apparently it’s getting dumbed down since the url bar on iOS* no longer shows anything but the domain. What subreddit am I in again? Hell if I know, apparently “Reddit.com” should be the only thing I see about my current site.

*(yes I know on iOS it’s fake Firefox but this is still a profoundly stupid change that shows they think their users are idiots)

anon70002• 1 year ago

While we're piling on Firefox, here's my current least favorite thing: it's not possible to share a bookmark hierarchy between desktop and mobile.

I want a basic tree style bookmark/tab combo like Arc. This approach works extremely well for me.

But in Firefox, you have:

- All bookmarks - Bookmarks toolbar - Bookmarks Menu - Other Bookmarks - Mobile bookmarks

I don't give a shit about toolbars and menus and others. I want to organize it by my own categories. I can get close by putting all my folders in "menu" -- then I can have a button to access my tree of bookmarks. but then on mobile, I have to click "desktop bookmarks > bookmarks menu" just to see those.

Plus whenever you install fixefox, new bookmark entries are created in random spots. Not a fan.

spwa42• 1 year ago

Before reading, I'm going to say "AI". I'll ad-fundum a beer if I'm right.

spwa42• 1 year ago

Nope.

mijoharas3• 1 year ago

I've got two on my wishlist:

WebUSB. The only time I open chrome nowadays is to flash an ESPHome device. I'd like to drop that dependency.

I wish the extension API supported favicons in a better way. I use vimium and due to a recent change it's nice and easy to have a key binding to select bookmarks. It can't have the visual favicon which would it easier to distinguish things at a glance.

M95D3• 1 year ago

One of the most horrible things ever invented.

But then, maybe I'm too old. Why do you need chrome when there's a stand-alone python program to build and flash esphome?

ciberado• 1 year ago

It allows using the browser as a very convenient and accessible programming platform for many types of applications, not only web-based. That's specially important for beginners, I think, as they can run (and create) all kind of projects just by opening a web page. But it is also very handy for more advanced users, as the wled project [1] shows.

And yes, there are security implications. But that's true for any other platform and as long as the users are asked for the proper permissions, I'm good with it.

[1] https://kno.wled.ge/

mijoharas3• 1 year ago

I only use ESPHome with home assistant and the web usb device flashing is well integrated.

I did look into the standalone version, but decided it was fewer hoops to jump through to just use chrome.

The user experience _is_ good there, and I'd like it in my preferred browser.

mherkender6• 1 year ago

It's nice to be able to flash something without having to give some random software access to your computer, or having to build three different versions of a device flasher for each major OS. It's boosted adoption of ESPHome devices.

account427• 1 year ago

My wishlist is the opposite.

I want the browser to have less interfaces that aren't strictly needed to display self-contained websites. Using a separate program for potentially dangerous stuff like programming external devices is absolutely how things SHOULD work.

immibis5• 1 year ago

WebUSB, and a lot of other web APIs, are cancer that should not exist. No web page should ever be able to have direct access to my USB devices. You should install the app that comes on a CD with the device or from the manufacturer's website for that. Random web pages are not trustworthy enough. I can make you click a permission prompt by making you press tab,tab,tab,enter many times and then popping it up in the middle of that.

zx8080• 1 year ago

Where's Firefox going next?

Spending donations on C-levels bonuses?

Would you please __try__ paying attention to the top 10+ years old issues in the FF bug tracker?

sub7• 1 year ago

Firefox might as well rebrand to Mozilla365 Spyware Edition

Absolute disgrace the amount of telemetry and home phoneing bloat in the official releases

They are absolutely yesterday's browser and tomorrow's browsers are trying to be better/faster while they just keep pouring cement on the grave they're already in.

alfiedotwtf• 1 year ago

People have said (including me) that I’d pay for Firefox if I could…

Maybe we should collectively put our money where our mouth is!

Would there be any interest in starting a fork or even a new browser that was supported by the community via donations?

What would people actually want in such a thing? IMHO I would like something like that to be the best damn standards adhering browser, minimalistic but configurable, secure and fast.

… to be hones, thinking about how everyone wants something different and you can’t please everyone, the most ideal situation would be something like an Emacs for browsers (yes I know Emacs has browser functionality).

Imagine a JavaScript console that could call functions that ran browser functionality! You could script your own browser, use someone else’s config, build your own plugins, etc!

M95D3• 1 year ago

Ask Me Anything with Firefox product managers! Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Is it going to be live? I can hardly wait to ask them how long until they remove Manifest v2!

graycat• 1 year ago

(1) "Tab Pickup". I've never used it, don't want to use it, doubt if I will ever use it, but when I'm in the middle of my work, moving fast, lots of windows open, then bring a window to the top of the Z-order and get "Tab Pickup" and an INTERRUPTION of my work. If I had a gun and if it would do any good, I'd SHOOT the computer. I HATE "Tab Pickup". PLEASE, in Settings, make "Tab Pickup"

       =====>>> Optional <<<=====

hopefully with default OFF.

(2) Again, in the middle of busy work, I move the mouse and, presto, bingo, again, if a gun would do any good, another INTERRUPTION in my work as Firefox has a POPUP that covers what I'm trying to look at. Sometimes the popup is of a URL, a LONG URL with ~10 lines of text, and covers a LOT of the screen. Sometimes so, ASAP I have to get rid of the popup. I hate interruptions, "Tab Pickup", popups, changes I didn't ask for.

allthedatas2• 1 year ago

The same place the author should go.

allthedatas2• 1 year ago

As an original firefox backer I knew the daily version updates were the beginning of the end.

I knew people at mozilla at that time and complained loudly to them about breaking my extensions with their constant releases.

And then there's all the dark pattern default config values which are totally unethical

The list of user hating behavior is long.

There is no saving anything there now. The good people have left and been replaced by the author of that awful article.

kuschkufan• 1 year ago

hn would seriously benefit from a system to display user "contributions" like this as the ai rage bait and lies that they are.

graphememes• 1 year ago

The further we go, the more I want old web back

MollyRealized2• 1 year ago

I'm not saying that removing it was a bad decision, but I will say that Firefox became infinitely less useful to me when they wiped out so much extension capability. There were so many 'power user' things you could do. I miss my extensive Keyconfig, for example.

trefoiled• 1 year ago

Features like tab groups, vertical tabs, profiles, new tab wallpapers, PWAs, and taskbar pinning weren’t just ideas – they were direct responses to what you told us you wanted

Yeah, that's ChatGPT. And not a particularly high quality ChatGPT style sentence. They weren't just ideas, they were direct responses? Ok.

9021007• 1 year ago

This is just so sad. It’s like they don’t even use their own product.

I want to like Firefox. I try so hard to like Firefox. Why is it so hard for them to like their users back?

6thbit• 1 year ago

I guess OpenAI's browser does have a real chance to get a big bite of the browser market?

qiine• 1 year ago

now that I think about it its not just firefox that has reach zombie states, its the whole web browser ecosystem.

xnx2• 1 year ago

Firefox should fork Chromium so they can spend more time on differentiation instead of re-creation of Chrome feature.

Where's Firefox going next?

Related Stories