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.
"Surely, you have one job and that is to deliver tech that works—not to waste users' time by giving them irrelevant copy to read which has no functional value."
Microsoft has been doing this for years, with its messages during Windows setup, along the lines of "sit back and relax while we work our magic" which is at best annoying.
95, 98, Me, and XP all at least provided screenshots of some new features in the release. 10 and later just have the fuzzy "getting things ready" flavor text.
Tbf most os‘s including windows install extremely fast. It’s the shit show you need to do after the installation that is annoying. Even starting edge after you did the worlds slowest after installation wizard. You need to fucking await it’s fullscreen feature announcement until you can download another browser.
Is it? The guy is "highly offended" (???) by playful language and color themes and does the performatively enraged internet guy thing of being shocked that Mozilla has a political agenda, despite the fact that Mozilla, a purpose driven non-profit has had a manifesto written by Mitchell Baker since 2007?
If you're enraged by an emoji or by someone saying thank you for loving our browser it's probably time to turn the computer off or something
I find it concerning that my top-level comment is garnering a lot of support and agreement from people who see my complaints and this ranting guy's performative indignation as aligned. He pretends to not understand vague, virtue-signally marketing speak rather than be honest about the fact that it just bugs him. Maybe for reasons he doesn't understand, or maybe for reasons he's uncomfortable with sharing.
I want to make it as clear as possible that my primary issue is Mozilla's insincerity. I'm also put off by the particular tone they're using, but that's just a matter of aesthetic preference.
The rant makes a great point that professional writers should be able to write substantially better than we're seeing from Mozilla.
It's easy to take pot-shots at complaints about usage of "upleveling" (which is not a word, for the record), but his point is well-taken. Take a look at the Mozilla's blog post that has that sentence: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/privacy-online-just...
The writing is just weak, pretty much across the board.
> October is one of our favorite months of the year with autumn and Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
"favorite months", "with autumn"? I feel like a 5th grader wrote this from the get-go.
Second paragraph is almost incoherent:
> Earlier this year we celebrated our 100th Firefox release and reaffirmed our commitment to put people first. For today’s release, we’re rolling out new features that deliver on our user promise to provide web experiences that prioritizes people’s privacy and needs whenever they go online.
The writer is somehow trying to tie the idea of the 100th release to "people first", but the 100th release has nothing to do with what this paragraph is about, and neither does "people first". This paragraph is actually about Firefox's privacy features. If that's "people first", any user feature is "people first", right? The writing is a bunch of fluff around "We've improved the usability of Firefox's privacy features". My summary is just a better way to say that than the original post.
It's a slog to reading writing critique, but let's do one more: Firefox View
> We created Firefox View to help users navigate today’s internet. For today’s launch of Firefox View you will see up to 25 of your recently closed tabs within each window of your desktop device. Once you’ve synced your mobile devices, you’ll see the last three active tabs you had open on your other devices. You’ll also get to refresh your Firefox with a new Colorway inspired by the Independent Voices collection. Firefox View will continue to be a place where you can quickly get to the information that matters most to you.
I can do a lot of critique of useless words here, but let's put that aside. They seem to be explaining that there's a new feature that shows recently closed tabs. Cool. And then the second to last sentence is just jammed in there, unrelated to anything else in the paragraph, and introducing terms I'm not really sure about.
> You’ll also get to refresh your Firefox with a new Colorway inspired by the Independent Voices collection.
No clue what that's doing there. I'm an engineer, so I thought Colorway was a Firefox feature or something, but I looked it up and it seems to be a term-of-art:
> The scheme of two or more colors in which a design is available. It is often used to describe variegated or ombre (shades of one color) print yarns, fabric, or thread. It can also be applied to apparel, to wallpaper and other interior design motifs, and to specifications for printed materials such as magazines or newspapers.
And then I realize all the links to Colorways that should have been in the post, are in the post! They are just at the end. So all the mentions of Colorways are unlinked until the end of the post, where they finally explain what they are referring to. This is just basic editing feedback that any decent editor would provide. The fact is Mozilla is just not paying people to write well for them.
It's a short post that's mediocre end-to-end, not because of playful language, but because it's bad writing.
The reason this kind of critique seems so lame is that I don't think people think very much about what they're reading (when reading stuff like this, at least), so they just don't care that the writing is sophomoric. But that doesn't mean the rant isn't fundamentally correct that Mozilla is doing a poor job in their writing.
If you are just a freeloader sure, but someone who's been involved and supporting the project for years would certainly be right to be offended at the blatant abuse and wastage of his efforts.
>>"Last year we upleveled our Private Browsing mode."
>> Sorry, "upleveled" is not a verb I've ever heard of, in decades of using the Web. Why are you beginning articles with made-up verbs that you know people aren't going to understand? Why not use standard, plain, clear English?
Just because the person ranting had never heard of it doesn't mean that uplevel isn't a verb; and I am not sure how their amount of time spent using the web would correlate to their grasp on the English language.
>Ngrams not found: upleveled what, upleveled which, upleveled you, upleveled all, upleveled both, upleveled certain, upleveled several
>Ngrams not found: upleveled various, upleveled few, upleveled little, upleveled many, upleveled much
>Ngrams not found: upleveled my, upleveled his, upleveled her, upleveled its, upleveled our, upleveled their, upleveled your
This suggests all the supposed matches for the word alone could be OCR errors or typos. If "upleveled" is a real word it's so rare that it has no place in any writing that you expect to be broadly understood.
We should stop inventing useless words. "Footgun" has some use because it's shorter than the alternatives. "Upleveled" is just a worse version of "improved".
No, Firefox is the conduit through which the funding provided by Google to stave off claims of monopoly are used for pet projects and padding CVs by people wholly uninterested in Firefox.
I know everyone says you should use Firefox not Chrome but one of the nice things with Chrome is for the most part it just works without that kind of thing. Just looking at switching over after they scrapped Manifest V2 and I ads popping up on youtube!
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Not surprising, since I believe Firefox gave everyone the Colorways screen when that feature showed up, but nothing equivalent happened whenever it went away.
My current desktop has been Fedora since Fedora 16, and I just upgraded from one release to the next continuously. So yes, whatever choice I made back in 2013 is just going to stick around on my current machine unless it goes away entirely or I manually change it. Colors are just not that important, if I like it well enough, it's going to stick around forever.
The only one that caused intense feelings in me was the "Dreamer – Bold" theme that caused a fair amount of confusion about why the heck couldn't I tell which tab was active, and what could be possibly broken. Because it never occurred to me that the theme could be designed that way intentionally.
> Not surprising, since I believe Firefox gave everyone the Colorways screen when that feature showed up,
Right, I assume that's what the parent comment meant by "force-fed to us." That screen was indeed the whole point: It made the theming feature visible and accessible to the average users.
Drop the hyperbole for a second. It was a choice screen, a far cry from force-feeding. I'll grant you, somewhat wide adoption is almost a given when putting this kind of UI in front of all users, but that still doesn't mean that it was a mistake or a net loss to give folks who wouldn't normally customize Firefox a chance to do so. So, what's your point?
It was something I didn't want, put between me and my browser, because someone at Mozilla decided they wanted wveryone to stop what they were doing and pay attention to this new method of self expression. If it wasn't a big deal them why do I still care about it? Maybe I should just change my desktop theme until I feel better.
> I'll grant you, somewhat wide adoption is almost a given when putting this kind of UI in front of all users
I see now that "force-fed" is hyperbole. It was merely "put in front of all users". And then the thing that happens when you put this kind of UI in front of all users happened.
Does your internal telemetry tell you that "average" users don't know what Firefox is, and that proficient users who might recommend it to them are sick of the mismanagement of the browser?
> 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.
People using colorways after the feature was removed? Well, that sounds like a failure of the feature then.
The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing rested, was they were temporary! You get to change your theme for a few months, and then later on at some random point, it changes again as it's taken away from you.
If users have managed to continue using those themes, well, that's in spite of what Mozilla did with them, not because of them.
The criticism of colorways wasn't because people hate browser themes, it's because making features that self-destruct after indeterminate amounts of time is user-hostile. "Limited time features" is alone enough to make someone want to swap to a fork.
> People using colorways after the feature was removed? Well, that sounds like a failure of the feature then.
> The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing rested, was they were temporary! You get to change your theme for a few months, and then later on at some random point, it changes again as it's taken away from you.
It was sort of a marketing gimmick, one I wasn't particularly fond of. (I was the lead engineer for colorways.) What it really meant is that we'd offer the onboarding screen and colorways built into about:addons for a limited time. The intent was never to remove them once users installed them. We have since migrated them to AMO where they can still be installed: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...
Yes, and when people complain about colorways, the marketing gimmick is what they are complaining about. No one objects to colored themes, and adding a UI "hey this is a feature" isn't a thing people really dislike either beyond a few.
People know when they are being sold to and emotionally manipulated, and they don't like it, even if it's effective.
That's why colorways was a failure, complained about years later, even if "the metrics look good". People don't remember what you did, they remember how you made them feel.
There's for sure a lesson to be learned in here. The product owner who had decided and pushed for making it seem like colorways were ephemeral has long left Mozilla, so you're preaching to the choir at this point.
I still don't consider colorways a failure, all things considered. To me, the fact that colorways are still some of the most used themes outweighs you remembering that you were angry three or so years ago, but thanks for the feedback.
I think perhaps we are using the same words to talk about different things.
It may well be that colorways are used and loved by many users and that's a success. You made something people like; well done!
That we are having this conversation at all I think could be considered evidence, though, that it was a strategic failure for Mozilla. How much public opinion is worth burning for how much increased usage of a new theme feature? In my opinion, very little.
That colorways work well, that the people who use them continue to do so, that they were technically well designed and well engineered, is one yardstick by which to measure success/failure. By that measure they are certainly a success. But another yardstick is "did they have a net-positive or net-negative effect on the organization", which is where I think it came up short.
Based on the things you've said it sounds like you and I are more or less on the same page.
> How much public opinion is worth burning for how much increased usage of a new theme feature? In my opinion, very little.
I think we're squarely in the "very little" range here in terms of how much public backlash we saw. You might be overestimating how widely folks got angry the same way you got angry, or perhaps we weren't monitoring the right forums and channels when releasing the feature, who knows.
Most of the Firefox adoption I've seen has been driven by tech evangelists pushing it. It's a vocal minority that is upset but it's also a vocal minority that was responsible for a lot of growth.
Firefox Mobile is great, it has uBlock Origin. I'm not recommending it to people though.
Oh... I'd completely forgotten that I picked a theme when those were offered.
So it hadn't occurred to me since then that I could change it.
I guess I count among the users who are still using a colorways theme. But after getting used to it, I ended up thinking of it as being what current Firefox looks like by default.
> Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry.
The users who regard colorways as frivolous likely also disabled the telemetry.
Rather like how the "psychological profile of a serial killer" is merely the psychological profile of a serial killer the police are capable of catching.
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.
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.
It does not, and that is fine. That ship sailed a decade ago.
What they could do is something the other guys are institutionally unable or unwilling to do: build a proper user agent for power users. Radically transparent, trustworthy and extendable up the wazoo. With footguns and everything.
That gives you a comfortable moat, a raison d'être and a stock of rabid, technically inclined fans which spread the word for you to their friends, family and coworkers the next time Google tightens the thumbscrews again.
Basically: repeat what happened the last time when it was Firefox vs. IE, twenty years ago.
uBlock Origin is a selling point for everyone now that it's been kicked out of Chrome.
I recently got an M4 Mac Mini to replace a failing Windows laptop that my wife was using to access the network. Previously she was using Firefox with uBlock Origin, but she was absolutely livid after browsing the web with Safari and being harassed by horrible ads which got me to install Firefox right away.
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.
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.
> 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.
The people I know that were using special dashes since before AI were all technical and precise writers (which is probably why they paid attention to it in the first place).
I've never seen this unique mix of listicle-like light-hearted fluff with emojis AND special dashes written by humans. LLMs seem to love it, though.
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.
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.
When I'm writing, I've always used en-dashes, but only because it's on my keyboard. Until people recently started talking about this, I didn't realize there was such a thing as en and en-dashes.
It's common knowledge that em-dashes are a sign of LLM writing. This incentivizes anybody who generates slop to manually search and replace with a different dash or hyphen in an attempt to hide what they did.
> 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.”
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. :{
>> 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.
In my limited career I have been in several projects whose plight didn't make any sense -- with all the smart people and the effort poured over them, how could the disaster continue to unfold! -- until I realized failure rather than success was the goal.
I can't understand how this keeps coming up when Google just lost an antitrust case largely because they pay Firefox and Safari for their default search. Chrome only exists to funnel people into Google, they wouldn't risk their search monopoly so there's browser competition.
1. A marketing department that can get it more than 2% market share
2. A legal and advocacy department that can work with governments to stop monopolists like Google and Apple privileging their own browsers on platforms they control
3. To use its seat on standards boards to stop abhorrent practises like the W3C endorsing DRM, or Google dropping effective web-blocking APIs from extensions.
Firefox should focus on not hemorrhaging users, they're about to reach the cutoff (1%) where the US government will no longer even support their browser.
No normal person will switch to Firefox for tor, despite us nerds thinking it's cool. And if they can't get actual users to switch, the browser has no future.
I'm trying to use it right on mac right now. It's still slow with many tabs (even with autosleep enabled), visibly slower than both Safari or any Chromium based browser.
Also they killed visual tab expose, and any extensions that could replace it, so all I have for managing the tabs is a vertical list.
In addition to what everyone else said, comments like yours confirm that it would be a waste for me to check out Firefox for the hundredth time. You are among a sea of comments enumerating the specific reasons why it sucks, and you're here insisting with zero substantiation that it is "effective" and "by far the best browser around". A better approach would be to acknowledge the issues that users have had with it and explain how it has improved.
On the other hand, if your definition of "effective" and "best" describes Firefox the last time I checked it out, then our definitions do not match, and I don't need to check it out again.
I'm not sure if you are serious. I mean, look at Chrome and Edge and Safari. They are managed by corporations that control their own platform. I get Chrome, Edge, and Safari because it is actively pushed onto me.
What does Firefox have?
The ugly truth is that browsers like Chrome and Edge and Safari are just as good as Firefox, and a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.
What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
Edge and Safari yes, but Chrome doesn't come pre-installed in both Windows and MacOS. You and every Chrome user actively goes out of their way to download and install it.
> What does Firefox have?
Every single nontrivial Linux distribution out there comes packaged with Firefox as the default browser.
> a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.
Clearly then all Chrome users on laptops/desktops are software militants..
> What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
Firefox had at least half a decade of a headstart against Chrome and did jack shit with it.
This here is a single comment that explains everything. Firefox is kept clueless.
Sorry to all the devs grinding inside the machine - you are doing great work, and while it is not your fault the ship is going in the wrong direction, you are providing the fuel for it to keep going there by keeping your heads down and not revolting.
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.
> 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.
Every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that enables them to better sabotage Firefox development actually. If they were starved like cancerous tumour the body might heal and survive.
"If we destroy the organization responsible for this thing I like, then only the bad parts of the organization will die and the thing I prefer will become better!"
No, if you destroy the flawed-but-sometimes-okay organization you just wind up with something worse. There is no magic save-the-thing-you-like fairy.
Large bureaucracies don't "learn their lesson" from being torn down.
Vote against increased taxes because the road department already has "such a large budget" and "maybe this will teach them to cut the administrative fat"? No, you'll just wind up with more potholes.
Vote for Donald Trump because you think the Federal Government is wasteful and the Democrats need to be taught a lesson? No, you'll just get billionaire tax cuts, erosion of civil liberties, and absolutely no behavior change from the people you wanted to "punish". Everything just gets worse.
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?
People get annoyed at them for their massive banners begging for money making it seem like wikipedia is on the verge of being closed down unless you donate despite the fact they have a ton of money they have saved away which could keep wikipedia running for decades. Even long running wiki editors and donators get pissed off with the behavior of the wikimedia foundation as not enough of this money actually seems to get spent on Wikipedia. Kinda similar to the whole Firefox situation now I come to think about it.
If the donation is given on the false belief that the donations are necessary to keep Wikipedia running, I'd argue donors are being conned into donating. And that is exactly the message the donation banners convey.
> 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
wikipedia still being around after all this time and still maintaining links to just download the entire thing and having no ads makes whatever they're doing good to me, ha.
And they do experiment and i think the passion for the society upholding project that is the encyclopedia is still there. Its the same wirh web archive.
Wikimedia is run transparently which is great but I dont really believe they need the money when you see their financial statement (link below) and think about what they need to run. Plenty of really deserving charities running on the sniff of an oily rag not paying 100m in salaries plus travel, conferences etc.
Keep in mind that the community aka the editors etc are all volunteers so the foundation organizes conferences, hackathons, grants etc for them (not as a compensation, but to help strengthen the community). Keeping "servers running" is only a small aspect of the whole. There's a lot of maintenance work necessary and there are also sister projects as well, like commons, wikidata, etc.
They have 82 million dollars in cash and 116 million in short term investment, why do they need to run giant screen sized popup banners a few times every year begging for money and making it seem like everything will be gone tomorrow unless you donate now? They don't even run these adverts by the wiki editors themselves, just impose them from on top. They are very controversial in the wiki community and always cause pages of arguing every year.
Because you don't have to pay and most people don't, + the reasons from my previous comment.
On the other point: Discussions are at the core the movement, and how to do fundraising "right" and how to use funds is worth discussing and gets discussed. But that it is needed in general is obvious I think. What else should be done? Let all the projects run out of funds and call it a day? That would mean the end - and today Wikipedia is more needed than ever.
As a liberal I've always had to fight the tendency we have to not see legitimacy sinks in the name of politeness. Lately I think people are willing to listen and I'm working on ways to explain this to people who don't bellyfeel them already.
Since I was a kid I thought that the endless fundraising drives destroy the legitimacy of public television. At the bellyfeel level it is visible moneygrubbing, but at a political science level these run side by side with ads promoting the sponsorship of the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation. ADM is notably the prime beneficiary of ethanol subsidies in the U.S. that wreck the environment and make farmers go broke spending money on nitrogen fertilizers that kill off life in the ocean off the mouth of the Mississippi River.
The trouble is that small donations don't give voice, but large donations do.
I can logically justify how I feel about fundraising drives on PBS, but I feel a resonance that causes me to feel the same way for Wikipedia -- I don't know what the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation of Wikipedia is, but it probably exists. Finding out that they don't really the money confirms this feeling.
a lot of engineering positions at WMF don't pay particularly competitively - you do take a pay cut working there to run/manage k8s clusters than you would elsewhere (even some public sector gigs pay better in big cities).
i dont know, the way they have managed to consistently roll down a hill that seemingly is the wrong one, despite how obviously it could have been done better, is frankly quite impressive
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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"
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.
But that's the whole point: they did pay their medical bills. It's not like they didn't pay their medical bills and instead bought a ps5. They did both.
Mozilla develops Firefox, and they also pay their CEO a lot. Their CEO may be overpaid, the company may be mismanaged, but at least they are still upholding their commitment to maintaining Firefox. Picking out one expense that you don't like and saying "all the donations go to this, see!" is just disingenuous.
Whether donating is worthwhile is another question, and it seems like the answer would be no. But it is a very different thing to say "All the donations just go to the CEO" instead of "I think the CEO is paid too much".
We could also cherry-pick in the other direction and say the CEO is negotiating deals to bring in the 90% of non-donation revenue of Mozilla, in which case you could easily say that his pay is a result of that revenue creation.
I'm not trying to defend Mozilla begging for donations when they really don't need them. My point is that cherry-picking one expense that you don't like, and then saying all the donations go to that, is cherry-picking the financials, and is misleading.
This is absolute nonsense. I am arguing that cherry-picking one expense is ridiculous. A much more reasonable approach would be to say that your donation is spread out over the entirety of the spend of Mozilla. That would suggest 1% of your donation is going to the CEO, not 100% of it like earlier commenters suggest.
It is dishonest to pick out one expense you don't like and equate that to all of the donation money being spent on just that. That's all. I don't know how you got from that to "this guy thinks money isn't fungible."
> much more reasonable approach would be to say that your donation is spread out over the entirety of the spend of Mozilla
Transactions happen at the margin. If a junkie spends every dollar of a bonus on dope, it’s fair to say the bonus is being burned on dope. Even if they also pay rent with their base salary.
You gift me $100 on Venmo or cashapp or whatever to go dinner with my partner. I transfer it to my bank. It’s in the same bank account as all my other liquid cash. How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?
Mozilla/FF has a pot of money that donations go in to, which is the same pot they use to operate as well as pay people, which includes their CEO.
> How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?
there's no such thing as a specific $100.
The donation of the $100 was contingent on you not having $100 for dinner. If it turns out you _did_ have $100 for dinner, but now that you received $100 in donations, you can choose to also spend the extra $100 on something else (which the donor may or may not like).
It is on the donor to figure out whether donating the $100 is worth it - at least the recipient needs to declare all their financials, so they'd have the info to make a judgement on future donations.
You’re making this a very strict, binary situation. Either you’re broke and every single dollar you are gifted or requesting is specifically earmarked for a specific thing, or you have all the money you need and you can’t ever receive a gift or request a donation. Nothing is that simplistic. Charities doing well and able to meet all their goals/payroll still keep asking for money because they need it to be sustained for more than months or a year.
Also at the end of the day, they are requesting donations to keep things operating. And that means paying people to run things, including CEOs. Every charity has somebody at the top, so your donations are also paying for those people as well. Unless you’re willing to say that all charities are therefore fraudulent because you are paying executive personnel, I just don’t see how this argument can really be put forth in earnest.
It isn't binary in general but in this case it is. The money from mozilla corporation is close enough in quantity to the donations to make it so. Someone used the example of a medical bill and a ps5, but a better example is that you gave someone enough money to live on entirely, and the spent it on that as they said, but then took their income which could have paid for it and purchased something unnecessary. That wouldn't be ok. Furthermore one of the key pieces of research before donating to a charity is executive compensation. This level of compensation is a red flag in any non profit and means it won't be getting good ratings from the watchdog groups. That in turn hurts future donations.
I gave the PS5 example fyi. Not that it changes anything it just felt weird to not clarify that haha
>but a better example is that you gave someone enough money to live on entirely, and the spent it on that as they said, but then took their income which could have paid for it and purchased something unnecessary.
But that doesn’t really apply here, it’s not parallel to the Mozilla/Firefox situation. And if we want to arbitrarily decide that all donations go to the CEO strictly because the numbers are kind of similar, why can’t I just say “no all that money goes towards staff and operating“? Why is my assertion any less valid? The numbers being similar doesn’t tell us anything about how it’s being spent. It’s just a coincidence.
I mean that’s what this all hinges on right? That the two numbers are kind of close? I can’t really think of how that tells us where the money is going. I don’t understand how that follows.
If donations 10x tomorrow can we no longer claim the donations are going into the CEO’s pocket? Or if they cut to 1/10th? Would we be having this conversation if either was currently the case?
If it was the head of the foundation making that much no one would donate. It would be a matter of opportunity cost. A non profit that size would normally have a leader compensated on the level of a software developer. I'd argue the ceo of the corporation is also wildly overcompensated too, but that normally wouldn't be relevant to the decision to donate. The issue arises because of the close financial ties between the corporation and the foundation, which is enough to prevent my donations by itself, those ties though create the perception that fewer donations would increase transfers from the corporation. If that is in fact true, then the question of opportunity cost does extend to all of the corporations expenses and someone considering donating sgould absolutely consider all of those expenses and decide if they are doing good with their donation or not.
Charitynavigator and guidestar have datasets. Most websites have you pick a charity and then give you metrics to judge by rather than picking a metric. But they indicate for a non profit with revenue between 10-50M (mozilla foundation is 30M I think?) usually has compensation for the leader between 180k and 350k.
Exactly, so the donations are not being funneled to the CEO, and suggesting that they are would be silly.
If you split up your donation by how Mozilla actually spends its money, then most goes to operating Mozilla, and a small amount (~1%) goes to paying the CEO.
I agree but your tone suggests you’re disagreeing with me? That’s the point I am driving at. Directly linking every donated dollar to the CEO’s pay simply because they’re close in number does not make sense.
Mismanagement or waste isn't the same as corruption. Corruption means deliberately lying, cheating, or acting unethically for personal gain, not just spending money poorly.
Paying their CEO $7 million is generous, but not particularly unusual for a corporation with $650m in revenue (as of 2023).
Calling it mismanagement IS corruption. What we are discussing here is known by Mozilla high-ups and board. They know their current and past CEOs are getting a huge prize for destroying Firefox and they couldn't care less. That's clearly corruption.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use it every single day.
It helps open the same website in "Cognito" instead of opening it in Cognito mode.
Plus, as a developer, it makes it easy to run tests using multiple accounts.
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.
The UX is horrible but works once you got your head around it. I also use temporary account container extension so ever new tab is a throw away (and i use ms copilot for AI search in those throwaway as they don't require a login to use their AI)
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
> 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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".
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.
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...
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.
One man's "useless UI redesigns" is another man's feature.
Every person I talk to has a completely different idea of what Mozilla should be doing. Keep pocket, or pocket is stupid, or pocket is the second coming of Christ, or the VPN is stupid, or the VPN is a revenue stream not dependent on Google, or whatever fucking bullshit.
Firefox does not "suck" - this is a legitimate psyop. It has all the features of Chrome minus the horrendous privacy violations. It has all the performance of Chrome, too.
I mean, what are we missing? Web USB? Give me a fucking break.
If you really, really need Web USB then fine - use Google Chrome. You win. 99.99% of people I've ever talked to don't even know what Web USB is, let alone do they rely on it.
.. and about a thousand less privacy violations. Plus significantly less ties to Google.
Even chromium-based web browsers are tightly coupled to Google. They rely on them for 99.99% of their source code. Mozilla just uses Google as the default search engine.
If I had to estimate, the developer time required for Mozilla to change the default search engine is ~.5 hours. In order for, say, Brave to not be dependent on Google, they'd have to spend ~100,000 dev hours. Because, you know, they'd have to completely develop a new web browser.
> > 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?
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.
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.
The idea behind the parent comment is not that they can't compete, but they are specifically made not to.
Sort of a puppet browser made only for proving the court that the giants are not technically a monopoly, while ranking a bare minimum number of users for them to count.
While that's not entirely unreasonable, I don't think that's the doom of Mozilla.
Puppet or not, their tangled codebase makes it a pita to contribute anything if you're not being paid a salary for it.
Despite having a high expectation for the "free browser", deep down we know that it's the same "Free in theory" software, not unlike Java or Vscode.
Software that's made by a company and once they stop pouring money on corporate development and support the project will become a zombie in no time.
It is completely unreasonable and (willfully) ignores the long, long list of places where Mozilla has fought against the other vendors including (especially) Google on privacy grounds.
It's the sort of thing people say mostly for their own self-satisfaction, without actually thinking about it or trying to figure out the answer. Like: "both parties are the same" or "what have the Romans ever done for us"
Mozilla can do a lot more to fight on privacy grounds. I realize it isn't going to happen since even enabling a lot of the existing privacy features by default is going to break many websites (which, in the minds of most people, would reflect a broken web browser), so they are stuck talking about it while end users have to jump through a bunch of hoops if they want to get the browser as it is advertised.
Yes, I agree completely. You cannot even compare Chrome and Firefox because the sheer privacy violations of Chrome make it not a worthy competitor. The difference is, nobody cares.
Google develops Chrome and Chrome relies entirely on Google's money. Google is the default search engine. They are much, much, MUCH more tightly coupled to Google than Firefox could ever be.
But nobody says anything. And yet, Firefox makes Google the default search engine, and everyone has a think piece on it. Firefox is dead, they say, they're just Google's puppet. Then what is Chrome?
>Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents
Please get real. Comparing real output money measure in an annual basis with market capitalization is ridiculous. It's like someone comparing your annual salary with their net worth.
They don't need alternative revenue streams. Just take the millions they receive from Google and spend it on tech. Cut out all the warm and fuzzy political marketing bullshit and all the management that have promoted it.
It is not so clear cut now, is it? The often silly wannabe social justice stuff does cost money, and their management does get record high payments, even though they don't do a particularly good job, and even though important engineering projects were cut. Mozilla's behavior is not a culture of engineering, that fosters trust in the browser product.
This is such a nonsense argument. Nobody is upset that that more people use Chrome than Firefox. That has never been the case. In fact, historically, Firefox users tend to like being on the outside.
The "kneejerk Mozilla hate" isn't about marketshare, it's about ineffective leadership bringing features nobody wants while ignoring problems users currently have.
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)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
There are quite a few browser that don't ever need extensions to block ads. There's thus no reason for me to use Firefox (and I don't want to, until it's managed by Mozilla).
I didn't downvote you, but your vague mentioning of some browsers "that don't ever need extensions to block ads" is not helpful at all and sounds wrong to me. There are only three major browser engines in the world, and only Firefox's one blocks ads reliably.
Well, I dont see ads in my non-FF browser. Don't know what else I could say. And, to be precise, FF doesn't block anything by itself. It just relies on an the job of unpaid volunteers to block ads.
Your're just not giving enough details for a refute, so I had to dig links about all browsers I could find. You're trolling, since you only give vague, general statements, which don't move the discussion.
Almost nobody cares about anything other than ad blocking and to top it off the reply to the comment you linked is even mentioning that they were only talking about ad block...
You may be right, but I have no trust in Brave. Not just due to their shady decisions in the past but also because they would have to fight a huge ad industry on a tiny budget with their built-in ad blocker. At least if it's an add-on, the community would be able to help easier.
I think you don't understand the difference between an extension (for which manifest version matters) and an intrinsic feature (for which the manifest means nothing). It's either that, or you want to convince people that FF the only way. No, it isn't. Deal with it.
> 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.
> 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'
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.
I tried to be clear about how Chrome is fine in most respects except for the incentives conflict, and you've simply pointed out symptoms stemming from that fundamental issue. Are we actually disagreeing or do you just dislike how I phrased it?
You might've tried it during an arms race moment. YT is constantly changing it's anti-blocking measures, and uBO and uBO Lite are constantly responding. uBO had the same issue.
uBO Lite does lack custom filters and custom filter lists. It also doesn't have sync, but uBO didn't do sync well anyway. Also sync is far less useful without custom filters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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"...?
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.
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.
They move things in mobile UI a lot, so the docs might not reflect that. I know it used to look like on this screenshot, but I haven't had it in my Nightly for a while.
I've tried German and French pages, languages for which translation is supported, but haven't seen the translate icon in the toolbar. I had to go through the menu each time.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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
> It's very handy for sites where you may have more than account
For that Firefox's container tabs are a much handier option as you can stay logged in and also open new tabs that are already logged in. It has colours to tell apart which tab is part of which container
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had a few extensions, I don't think anything especially unusual. Regardless, Chromium with a few similar extensions (ublock is the most notable) performs far better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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)
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.
Back when I tried sidebery, there was some weird issue where either shift-click or right clicking didn't work on mac, and that turned me off. I just tried it again, and both work fine now.
One other feature that is nice for me is the ability to collapse the sidebar to just the tab icons. It's a nice middle ground between being able to see what I have open and getting a full screen experience.
TST and Sidebery are both fantastic extensions, I don't think they do anything wrong. For whatever reason though, the FF native implementation worked for me where they didn't
The biggest benefit I've seen is that it automatically hides the old tab bar at the top. Before that, you had to dig into some hidden profile directory and modify some userchrome CSS file and modify the CSS directly hoping it would work.
I use this method personally and it works great on GNOME and KDE. First set `toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets` to true in `about:config` then find your profile directory in `about:profiles`.
cd $FIREFOX_PROFILE_DIR
cd chrome
git clone https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks
touch userChrome.css
I'll wager most users are happy with primitive over advanced.
For example, I sometimes run with hundreds of tabs and my wife has many thousands, at all times. My needs and hers are very different from typical users who have single digits numbers of tabs open, heavily biased toward the low end.
Of course I would prefer TST or Sideberry, but I'm not like most users. For most users, the Firefox experience is superior to Sideberry for its ease of use and fewer failure modes.
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.
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.
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.)
It should also be pointed out that the Firefox devs spent years and countless dev hours trying to keep the old extension system and solve the problems wrt. multi-process, security, performance, and compatibility. They removed the extension system only after they tried everything else, and mostly failed.
They also spent tons of effort explaining the background of these choices and why they felt they had no choice and this was the only path forward. It's disappointing people are still coming up with this "oh, why don't they just [..]?!" type stuff.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This sort of used to be true and mostly isn't today. Firefox and Edge both have reasonably good tracking prevention features. They rival Privacy Badger in effectiveness (it's largely moot these days), and the only thing between tracking prevention and ad blocking is that the latter also focuses on protecting your poor innocent eyes from advertising, which I mostly couldn't care less about if the tracking is being defeated.
I think if you are extremely narrowly scoping well-trusted ad blockers, you may be okay, as long as you understand you are trusting the ad blocker with your banking info. But it would be far better for a browser to include capabilities in first-party and eradicate extensions altogether.
A Pihole is also far safer than an adblock extension, because it can't see your decrypted your web traffic the way a browser extension can.
No strong opinion on it specifically, but you are trusting the author of that extension to never abuse access to your banking info, so as long as you trust them with all your money, you're golden!
Any extension with post-decryption ability to read and modify everything on all websites could, if they choose, see any sensitive info you do, and subtly even change it without your knowledge.
And I'm not saying uBlock would, or that as a super popular extension it likely wouldn't be discovered quickly, but arguably they can because you've given the extension the ability to see and rewrite your entire reality.
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?
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.
X11 can also do remote window forwarding, not just desktops which is super handy. Your windows appear in the remote computer with its own window manager just like you run them locally. One of the reasons I still use X.
For barebones window forwarding (no input) I use something like gpu-screen-recorder with SRT streaming output and play the result on the other end with mpv / ffplay.
Haven't looked into it, but FreeRDP might support specific window forwarding too rather than the whole desktop.
If you need something fancier there is Sunshine / Moonlight, but they still have an issue with not using Pipewire for window / screen capturing (and kmsgrab is not really the proper way to do it).
Anyway, X11 is a complete dead end in general so it's not really a viable option for anything serious.
X11 may be a dead end but Wayland sucks as a replacement, so for now, I see no other option than supporting them both.
It may be technically possible to do the equivalent do X11 forwarding with Wayland, that is connecting to a server with a ssh terminal (no remote desktop, headless server), run a GUI app, and have it display its windows on my own desktop as if it was running locally. The problem is that Wayland is 17 years old and I still can't.
FreeRDP is pretty feature rich, so I wouldn't call it a kludge.
For any kind decent remote desktop access you need good performance, specifically low latency. X11 just isn't there.
Headless server is headless server - you can't have anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's already not headless.
Instead of X server you can have any Wayland compositor (Wayland server) and whatever part that provides streaming (FreeRDP or what not).
So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge for such scenario if anything.
> Headless server is headless server - you can't have anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's already not headless.
To me this reads a bit confused, but perhaps I'm misreading it? In X11 terminology the server is sitting in front of you (the one that draws to the screen), so no, you don't need need the remote host to be running X11 server.
You do need the program that draws to the screen, but I think it's fair to say the remote host is headless if it doesn't have a GPU nor a program to interface with the GPU at all. All the remote host needs is code to interact with such a server over TCP or Unix domain sockets. And that code is tiny, even small computers without memory for frame buffer can do it.
> So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge for such scenario if anything.
I think X11 was actually pretty great at the time it was created, i.e. clients can create ids and use them in their requests (no round-trip to the server) and server can contain large client bitmaps that the client can operate on, but sometimes poor client coding can kill the performance over the network. As worst offender I once noticed VirtualBox did a looooot of synchronous property requests during its startup instead of doing them in concurrently, stretching the startup time from seconds to minute or more. (Whether it truly needed those properties in the first place is another question.)
Sending the complete interaction as a video stream? That's what I'd call a hack—though X11 should be modernized in various aspects, for example to support more advanced encodings for media, controlled by the client.
In some sense the web is the direction where I would have liked to see X11 going: still controlled by the client, but some light server-side code could be used to render and interact with the widgets. This way clicks would react immediately, but you would still be interacting with the actual service running on the remote host, not just a local program.
(Another reason why I consider X11 better is the separation of the server and the compositor.)
> but I think it's fair to say the remote host is headless if it doesn't have a GPU nor a program to interface with the GPU at all
You can use software rendering for Wayland cases too. There are even OpenGL / Vulkan software implementations.
> All the remote host needs is code to interact with such a server over TCP or Unix domain sockets. And that code is tiny, even small computers without memory for frame buffer can do it
I don't really see much value in such use case. Thin client (the reverse) makes more sense (i.e. where your side is a weak computer and remote server is something more powerful).
But either way, running a compositor even with software rendering should be doable even on low end hardware.
> Sending the complete interaction as a video stream? That's what I'd call a hack
Why not? Video by the mere nature or modern codecs is already very optimized on focusing only on changes to the encoded image, so it's the best option. You render things were they run, then send the video.
It works even for such intense (changes wise) cases as gaming and actual video media. Surely it works for GUIs too.
> You can use software rendering for Wayland cases too. There are even OpenGL / Vulkan software implementations.
That's actually besides the point I intended, which was to provide an example how little code the X11 client actually needs. OpenGL/Vulkan software implementations are the opposite of little.
> I don't really see much value in such use case. Thin client (the reverse) makes more sense (i.e. where your side is a weak computer and remote server is something more powerful).
Yes, I can see that, e.g. remotely using a super computer. However, I think GPU-capability wise the devices people use to interact with graphical systems are quite sufficient to most any interaction task and if X11 was able to video stream just the important bits (I imagine the important bits would be large updated bitmap areas within the user interface, so video encoded server side bitmap transport would do it), it would be just as suitable for that kind of asymmetric case; while being still usable for IoT scenarios, where you have those tiny computers providing sensor data, of which there are probably hundreds of millions if not billions by now.
In principle it's also trivial to convert an X11 style display interaction with video transport (just run the X11 server in the remote end), while the inverse is impossible. So with X11 style you could choose either or, depending on your devices and needs.
> But either way, running a compositor even with software rendering should be doable even on low end hardware.
And how about video-encoding that data on low end hardware without help from hardware? And even with the help of hardware, i.e. NVidia has limited number of video encoding sessions (so number of distinct video streams) to five and not all hardware can even do that. So it's CPU time if you have multiple such sessions, and running high-quality video encoders are not a walk in the park for them.
Because the streams would be between two end points, multiple streams could be packed inside the same stream to save encoders, but I don't think anyone's doing that..
Alternatively to the number of encoders limitation it helps if you run a single stream (stream the desktop), but personally I consider per application remote use a much more flexible system, and the default provided by X11.
> Video by the mere nature or modern codecs is already very optimized on focusing only on changes to the encoded image, so it's the best option. You render things were they run, then send the video.
Surely scrolling a document by instructing the server to render a different part of the server-side bitmap to its own screen is going to be way more effective than encoding+decoding video, i.e. when considering latency, quality, energy consumption, memory usage and bandwidth?
I still find it a very questionable idea to run some GUI stuff on IoT device streaming the GUI to you. I just don't get why you would want to do that, vs let's say having an HTTP access.
I have an HTTP server running on my printer and I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a powerful CPU. The web page it provides is more than adequate for controlling it.
Remote interface in streaming fashion only makes sense to me when remote computer is strong enough to do all that's needed for GUI to work. Like thin client idea above, game streaming and so on.
Yeah, I've seen it in action (nomachine/nx) It's not bad. But problem is that it's not open source, so it's sort of DOA, unlike all the open options. They should have opened it from the start for it to be relevant.
Yes it is a direct clone from the earlier NoMachine NX. That was open source, and later they moved to a new closed-source protocol. FreeNX took the earlier one over.
And no it doesn't support Wayland of course. It's an X11 accelerator, the design is heavily connected to the X11 design. It doesn't replace X11's remote display support, it just augments it. Wayland doesn't have that at all so there is no point there.
It basically removes the many round-trips in the protocol that increase latency, by caching values locally. And it can also keep the session alive when disconnected, similar to what termux or screen do for SSH.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interestingly enough, right, we can see that the same CEO left Mozilla and then started Brave, and we can see the growth of Brave and the decline of Mozilla.
You can argue, sure, that market conditions are responsible for Mozilla's plight--the decreasing value as antitrust insurance for GOOG and so forth. But, Brave managed to do well in spite of that, and to my knowledge if you look at the pay, at his peak at Mozilla Eich was making in the 800-900K range while Baker made over 6M a year from 2022 to 2023 (and just a bit under 6M in 2021). So, for around 8x the price, you had worse leadership.
To restate again: the dude started a new browser company and grew it to a quarter the size of Firefox--and this without having GOOG as a sugardaddy.
It's an incredibly mid take to assume that individual competence in business is somehow not actually relevant.
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.
We might be able to get you up to a whole dollar, just listing off the various chat/messaging apps Google has killed off over the years. I take it as an opportunity to move to FOSS/self-hosted substitutes when that happens.
I do all my dev in Firefox and rarely test in Chrome. I've been made aware of maybe a handful of issues over many many years doing it this way. If it works in Firefox, 99.9% of the time, it's also working in Chrome.
(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.
> 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.
it is true that iphones itself isn't a monopoly (yet), but i reckon consumer protection should extend to the ability to install arbitrary software on a device they purchased, regardless of the intent of the company selling the device.
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.
being able to block ads, vs being able to install extensions, are two separate requirements with different difficulties. In the past, apple was anti-extensions - your app weren't allowed to be able to load remote (and thus unreviewed) extensions that executed code and changed app behaviour.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It literally is their job. One of Mozilla's roles is to give their opinion on proposed web standards. It's one of the factors that determines what actually becomes a standard. WebUSB is Chrome (and derivatives) only at the moment. You can not like where they landed, perfectly valid, but they were asked.
Yes, but instead of saying "this spec is shit and full of vulnerabilities. Let's work on improving it", they just refused to participate in the discussion. What a childish POV.
I don't think that's a fair summary of Mozillas Position on the WebBluetooth/WebSerial/WebUSB specs. Interacting with arbitary devices has arbitrary consequences, mozilla seems to assume users are not able to understand these consequences and therefore cannot consent to it.
Well, the reason is in the links I provided, and the reasoning doesn't scream arrogance to me.
Personally, I think choice is great. Why be upset when you can download chromium (it is supported by pretty much any platform FF is) and use it to do all sorts of stuff with WebUSB, if you are into that?
Still, I would like to see FF disable these features by default and allow opt-in. I don't see a great reason to avoid implementing them behind some "wall" (other than to avoid an increase in a concealed attack surface).
You are completely missing the point just like Mozilla.
This is the same a surgeon saying they refused to perform life-saving surgery on you because they don't believe you understand the consequences of the possibility of dying in surgery.
The average person cannot be an expert on surgery or on browser security it's up to the people that have the education and work experience in there to make those decisions and handle them.
Mozilla as another poster said has taken their toys home because they didn't get what they want.
So, basically, they noticed some potential insecurities in the implementation proposed by Google. Instead of negotiating modifications to the spec like adults, they threw their toys out of the stroller and refused to participate.
What a bunch of idiots. They seem to have a completely misguided concept of what a browser is. They still have a 1990s mindset of the browser being a window into the Internet, instead of the universal UI that it has become today.
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.....
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).
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!
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.
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)?
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
Same here, vanilla Firefox snap on Ubuntu. If anything, Firefox with hundreds (literally) of tabs starts way faster than Chrome with 10, thanks to lazy its loading. RAM usage has always been stellar in Firefox, in my experience.
Maybe their distro has a broken Firefox package, they messed with the default installation, have too many extensions, or malware? A slow mechanical disk?
Maybe try creating a new profile? I've had cases where a profile can cause Weird Shit™ to happen. Kind of annoying though. Probably something in a SQLite database or some such, but I didn't have the interest to track it down.
I've experienced this since 2018 across all versions of linux mint since 2018.
The problem appeared to be a lot of unnecessary disk io coupled with DNA lookup that only get done after every single read request is complete. This means that when tab #10 is taking long to read whatever from disk it blocks every other tab.
I'm noticing it on a fast SSD, though it's more like 5-10s after launching. No issues once it's running. I'd guess it's related to my very old and large profile.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The last thing Mozilla should be spending time and money on is some kind of hosted algorithmic discovery feed. There are a ton of those out there, so if you want that you can get it anywhere you like.
RSS feeds were great because you could choose what you wanted and opt in to them; using algorithmic analysis would require not only a lot of infrastructure and dev time but also a lot of data collection and all the privacy concerns that comes with it.
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.
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.)
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.
Thank you for loving Firefox - https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/m/m-p/16863/highl...
This is an amazing rant! Too bad it was only had 4 comments here at the time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293892
"Surely, you have one job and that is to deliver tech that works—not to waste users' time by giving them irrelevant copy to read which has no functional value."
Microsoft has been doing this for years, with its messages during Windows setup, along the lines of "sit back and relax while we work our magic" which is at best annoying.
95, 98, Me, and XP all at least provided screenshots of some new features in the release. 10 and later just have the fuzzy "getting things ready" flavor text.
Those were informative and at least not boring and changed often enough to keep you interested and tell you that set up is still working.
Tbf most os‘s including windows install extremely fast. It’s the shit show you need to do after the installation that is annoying. Even starting edge after you did the worlds slowest after installation wizard. You need to fucking await it’s fullscreen feature announcement until you can download another browser.
I beleibe you can grab Firefox by FTP in the CMD or powershell at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ and never actually open edge or ie.
At least Windows is giving that to you at a time when you cant be doing anything else. The nonsense mozilla gets up to is truly on another level.
>This is an amazing rant!
Is it? The guy is "highly offended" (???) by playful language and color themes and does the performatively enraged internet guy thing of being shocked that Mozilla has a political agenda, despite the fact that Mozilla, a purpose driven non-profit has had a manifesto written by Mitchell Baker since 2007?
If you're enraged by an emoji or by someone saying thank you for loving our browser it's probably time to turn the computer off or something
I find it concerning that my top-level comment is garnering a lot of support and agreement from people who see my complaints and this ranting guy's performative indignation as aligned. He pretends to not understand vague, virtue-signally marketing speak rather than be honest about the fact that it just bugs him. Maybe for reasons he doesn't understand, or maybe for reasons he's uncomfortable with sharing.
I want to make it as clear as possible that my primary issue is Mozilla's insincerity. I'm also put off by the particular tone they're using, but that's just a matter of aesthetic preference.
You really don't think the tone contributes to the insincerity?
The rant makes a great point that professional writers should be able to write substantially better than we're seeing from Mozilla.
It's easy to take pot-shots at complaints about usage of "upleveling" (which is not a word, for the record), but his point is well-taken. Take a look at the Mozilla's blog post that has that sentence: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/privacy-online-just...
The writing is just weak, pretty much across the board.
> October is one of our favorite months of the year with autumn and Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
"favorite months", "with autumn"? I feel like a 5th grader wrote this from the get-go.
Second paragraph is almost incoherent:
> Earlier this year we celebrated our 100th Firefox release and reaffirmed our commitment to put people first. For today’s release, we’re rolling out new features that deliver on our user promise to provide web experiences that prioritizes people’s privacy and needs whenever they go online.
The writer is somehow trying to tie the idea of the 100th release to "people first", but the 100th release has nothing to do with what this paragraph is about, and neither does "people first". This paragraph is actually about Firefox's privacy features. If that's "people first", any user feature is "people first", right? The writing is a bunch of fluff around "We've improved the usability of Firefox's privacy features". My summary is just a better way to say that than the original post.
It's a slog to reading writing critique, but let's do one more: Firefox View
> We created Firefox View to help users navigate today’s internet. For today’s launch of Firefox View you will see up to 25 of your recently closed tabs within each window of your desktop device. Once you’ve synced your mobile devices, you’ll see the last three active tabs you had open on your other devices. You’ll also get to refresh your Firefox with a new Colorway inspired by the Independent Voices collection. Firefox View will continue to be a place where you can quickly get to the information that matters most to you.
I can do a lot of critique of useless words here, but let's put that aside. They seem to be explaining that there's a new feature that shows recently closed tabs. Cool. And then the second to last sentence is just jammed in there, unrelated to anything else in the paragraph, and introducing terms I'm not really sure about.
> You’ll also get to refresh your Firefox with a new Colorway inspired by the Independent Voices collection.
No clue what that's doing there. I'm an engineer, so I thought Colorway was a Firefox feature or something, but I looked it up and it seems to be a term-of-art:
> The scheme of two or more colors in which a design is available. It is often used to describe variegated or ombre (shades of one color) print yarns, fabric, or thread. It can also be applied to apparel, to wallpaper and other interior design motifs, and to specifications for printed materials such as magazines or newspapers.
But they capitalized it, so it must be a product? So I go and do more research and discover it's an add-on I've never heard of: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...
And then I realize all the links to Colorways that should have been in the post, are in the post! They are just at the end. So all the mentions of Colorways are unlinked until the end of the post, where they finally explain what they are referring to. This is just basic editing feedback that any decent editor would provide. The fact is Mozilla is just not paying people to write well for them.
It's a short post that's mediocre end-to-end, not because of playful language, but because it's bad writing.
The reason this kind of critique seems so lame is that I don't think people think very much about what they're reading (when reading stuff like this, at least), so they just don't care that the writing is sophomoric. But that doesn't mean the rant isn't fundamentally correct that Mozilla is doing a poor job in their writing.
If you are just a freeloader sure, but someone who's been involved and supporting the project for years would certainly be right to be offended at the blatant abuse and wastage of his efforts.
Sending a clear message that the lights are on and nobody is home is always a bad idea and should be resisted.
Agreed, also:
>> The article began:
>>"Last year we upleveled our Private Browsing mode."
>> Sorry, "upleveled" is not a verb I've ever heard of, in decades of using the Web. Why are you beginning articles with made-up verbs that you know people aren't going to understand? Why not use standard, plain, clear English?
Just because the person ranting had never heard of it doesn't mean that uplevel isn't a verb; and I am not sure how their amount of time spent using the web would correlate to their grasp on the English language.
I checked for "upleveled" in Google Ngram Viewer ( https://books.google.com/ngrams/ )
Although the word alone is found, there are zero matches for it combined with various articles and determiners:
>Ngrams not found: upleveled a, upleveled the, upleveled fewer, upleveled less, upleveled more, upleveled fewest, upleveled least
>Ngrams not found: upleveled most, upleveled this, upleveled that, upleveled these, upleveled those, upleveled each, upleveled every
>Ngrams not found: upleveled any, upleveled some, upleveled either, upleveled neither, upleveled enough, upleveled sufficient
>Ngrams not found: upleveled what, upleveled which, upleveled you, upleveled all, upleveled both, upleveled certain, upleveled several
>Ngrams not found: upleveled various, upleveled few, upleveled little, upleveled many, upleveled much
>Ngrams not found: upleveled my, upleveled his, upleveled her, upleveled its, upleveled our, upleveled their, upleveled your
This suggests all the supposed matches for the word alone could be OCR errors or typos. If "upleveled" is a real word it's so rare that it has no place in any writing that you expect to be broadly understood.
Just checked for "footgun" and... surprise surprise, doesn't appear either. Should we stop inventing new words then?
We should stop inventing useless words. "Footgun" has some use because it's shorter than the alternatives. "Upleveled" is just a worse version of "improved".
Or even just "leveled up".
quick, do startup and upstart next
I just resubmitted. It deserves attention IMO. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44580702
> Ah, but does anyone from Mozilla take any notice of our grumbling and complaining here?
Apparently, no. Bodes well for this Q&A with someone thoroughly air-gapped from development and management.
I’d love a Q&A with the Mozilla exec team… https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/
Considering, you know, Firefox is their most important product.
No, Firefox is the conduit through which the funding provided by Google to stave off claims of monopoly are used for pet projects and padding CVs by people wholly uninterested in Firefox.
I know everyone says you should use Firefox not Chrome but one of the nice things with Chrome is for the most part it just works without that kind of thing. Just looking at switching over after they scrapped Manifest V2 and I ads popping up on youtube!
>> This is an amazing rant!
It's not. People who take issue with every little thing like this are extremely unpleasant to be around, and extremely unpleasant to have as users.
"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...
"Welcome to Costco, I love you." That movie was so damn eerily prescient.
On nearly every point. We should be glad we still have water, if not just to flush the toilets with.
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.
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.
> I think the root problem here is that the communication isn't genuine.
More than not being genuine, it's condescending and patronizing.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Not surprising, since I believe Firefox gave everyone the Colorways screen when that feature showed up, but nothing equivalent happened whenever it went away.
My current desktop has been Fedora since Fedora 16, and I just upgraded from one release to the next continuously. So yes, whatever choice I made back in 2013 is just going to stick around on my current machine unless it goes away entirely or I manually change it. Colors are just not that important, if I like it well enough, it's going to stick around forever.
The only one that caused intense feelings in me was the "Dreamer – Bold" theme that caused a fair amount of confusion about why the heck couldn't I tell which tab was active, and what could be possibly broken. Because it never occurred to me that the theme could be designed that way intentionally.
> Not surprising, since I believe Firefox gave everyone the Colorways screen when that feature showed up,
Right, I assume that's what the parent comment meant by "force-fed to us." That screen was indeed the whole point: It made the theming feature visible and accessible to the average users.
Okay? The thing that you force-fed users saw good adoption. Imagine that.
Drop the hyperbole for a second. It was a choice screen, a far cry from force-feeding. I'll grant you, somewhat wide adoption is almost a given when putting this kind of UI in front of all users, but that still doesn't mean that it was a mistake or a net loss to give folks who wouldn't normally customize Firefox a chance to do so. So, what's your point?
It was something I didn't want, put between me and my browser, because someone at Mozilla decided they wanted wveryone to stop what they were doing and pay attention to this new method of self expression. If it wasn't a big deal them why do I still care about it? Maybe I should just change my desktop theme until I feel better.
> So, what's your point?
What? It's the one you conceded:
> I'll grant you, somewhat wide adoption is almost a given when putting this kind of UI in front of all users
I see now that "force-fed" is hyperbole. It was merely "put in front of all users". And then the thing that happens when you put this kind of UI in front of all users happened.
Thanks!
Does your internal telemetry tell you that "average" users don't know what Firefox is, and that proficient users who might recommend it to them are sick of the mismanagement of the browser?
> 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.
People using colorways after the feature was removed? Well, that sounds like a failure of the feature then.
The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing rested, was they were temporary! You get to change your theme for a few months, and then later on at some random point, it changes again as it's taken away from you.
If users have managed to continue using those themes, well, that's in spite of what Mozilla did with them, not because of them.
The criticism of colorways wasn't because people hate browser themes, it's because making features that self-destruct after indeterminate amounts of time is user-hostile. "Limited time features" is alone enough to make someone want to swap to a fork.
> People using colorways after the feature was removed? Well, that sounds like a failure of the feature then.
> The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing rested, was they were temporary! You get to change your theme for a few months, and then later on at some random point, it changes again as it's taken away from you.
It was sort of a marketing gimmick, one I wasn't particularly fond of. (I was the lead engineer for colorways.) What it really meant is that we'd offer the onboarding screen and colorways built into about:addons for a limited time. The intent was never to remove them once users installed them. We have since migrated them to AMO where they can still be installed: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...
Yes, and when people complain about colorways, the marketing gimmick is what they are complaining about. No one objects to colored themes, and adding a UI "hey this is a feature" isn't a thing people really dislike either beyond a few.
People know when they are being sold to and emotionally manipulated, and they don't like it, even if it's effective.
That's why colorways was a failure, complained about years later, even if "the metrics look good". People don't remember what you did, they remember how you made them feel.
There's for sure a lesson to be learned in here. The product owner who had decided and pushed for making it seem like colorways were ephemeral has long left Mozilla, so you're preaching to the choir at this point.
I still don't consider colorways a failure, all things considered. To me, the fact that colorways are still some of the most used themes outweighs you remembering that you were angry three or so years ago, but thanks for the feedback.
I think perhaps we are using the same words to talk about different things.
It may well be that colorways are used and loved by many users and that's a success. You made something people like; well done!
That we are having this conversation at all I think could be considered evidence, though, that it was a strategic failure for Mozilla. How much public opinion is worth burning for how much increased usage of a new theme feature? In my opinion, very little.
That colorways work well, that the people who use them continue to do so, that they were technically well designed and well engineered, is one yardstick by which to measure success/failure. By that measure they are certainly a success. But another yardstick is "did they have a net-positive or net-negative effect on the organization", which is where I think it came up short.
Based on the things you've said it sounds like you and I are more or less on the same page.
> How much public opinion is worth burning for how much increased usage of a new theme feature? In my opinion, very little.
I think we're squarely in the "very little" range here in terms of how much public backlash we saw. You might be overestimating how widely folks got angry the same way you got angry, or perhaps we weren't monitoring the right forums and channels when releasing the feature, who knows.
Most of the Firefox adoption I've seen has been driven by tech evangelists pushing it. It's a vocal minority that is upset but it's also a vocal minority that was responsible for a lot of growth.
Firefox Mobile is great, it has uBlock Origin. I'm not recommending it to people though.
Oh... I'd completely forgotten that I picked a theme when those were offered.
So it hadn't occurred to me since then that I could change it.
I guess I count among the users who are still using a colorways theme. But after getting used to it, I ended up thinking of it as being what current Firefox looks like by default.
> Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry.
The users who regard colorways as frivolous likely also disabled the telemetry.
Rather like how the "psychological profile of a serial killer" is merely the psychological profile of a serial killer the police are capable of catching.
And on the other end of the spectrum, Colorways was extremely bland compared to user themes.
Telemetry Brain and "Most average users don't..." may explain why Firefox has been getting consistently worse for a long time.
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?
No, that had happened about two years earlier I think (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1678742 goes back to 2020). Alas, the bottleneck there was UX staffing rather than engineering.
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.
Well, they were available for "a limited time only!!!!!" which is definitely somewhere between "non-feature" and "anti-feature".
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.
> More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please.
Playing devil's advocate: how does that help your average Joe adopt Firefox?
It does not, and that is fine. That ship sailed a decade ago.
What they could do is something the other guys are institutionally unable or unwilling to do: build a proper user agent for power users. Radically transparent, trustworthy and extendable up the wazoo. With footguns and everything.
That gives you a comfortable moat, a raison d'être and a stock of rabid, technically inclined fans which spread the word for you to their friends, family and coworkers the next time Google tightens the thumbscrews again.
Basically: repeat what happened the last time when it was Firefox vs. IE, twenty years ago.
uBlock Origin is a selling point for everyone now that it's been kicked out of Chrome.
I recently got an M4 Mac Mini to replace a failing Windows laptop that my wife was using to access the network. Previously she was using Firefox with uBlock Origin, but she was absolutely livid after browsing the web with Safari and being harassed by horrible ads which got me to install Firefox right away.
Safari adblockers that are at least passable exist. And work on iphone, too!
By improving the product
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.
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.
> 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.
> Mozilla's logo, as in Mosaic and Godzilla
How did I never know this?
This is an AMA with product managers, not the engineering team, so it tracks
Because the entire post reeks of LLM writing. It even got the long dashes.
Well screw all of us that like using em dashes, I guess.
Keep using the em-dash with pride! Don't let the AIs steal such a beautiful thing from us!
The people I know that were using special dashes since before AI were all technical and precise writers (which is probably why they paid attention to it in the first place).
I've never seen this unique mix of listicle-like light-hearted fluff with emojis AND special dashes written by humans. LLMs seem to love it, though.
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.
>the lack of capitalization after the dashes does not feel like LLM output
Em-dashes do not start a new sentence. Lack of capitalization is correct, and LLMs generally get spelling/punctuation/grammar right.
There are two types of "long" dashes, and it is using the other one (en-dash).
Not to mention the two-em-dash (U+2E3A) and three-em-dash (U+2E3B).
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.
When I'm writing, I've always used en-dashes, but only because it's on my keyboard. Until people recently started talking about this, I didn't realize there was such a thing as en and en-dashes.
FWIW I think the - character on qwerty keyboards is a hyphen, which is a smidge shorter than an en dash
- – —
On a Mac it’s easy to type n and m dashes using option and the hyphen key.
It's common knowledge that em-dashes are a sign of LLM writing. This incentivizes anybody who generates slop to manually search and replace with a different dash or hyphen in an attempt to hide what they did.
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.”
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. :{
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
I suggest we democratically rename Firefox to FireFoxy MacFireFace.
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.
Too tired to cover my tracks tonight
Go on...
>> 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.
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
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...
A plant from Google.
Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge, but you have to keep it rudderless and ineffective.
How on point.
In my limited career I have been in several projects whose plight didn't make any sense -- with all the smart people and the effort poured over them, how could the disaster continue to unfold! -- until I realized failure rather than success was the goal.
IMO that's basically all there is to say about FF, sadly. Any other speculation and commentary seem moot to me.
I'll still keep using it for as long as I can, though.
I can't understand how this keeps coming up when Google just lost an antitrust case largely because they pay Firefox and Safari for their default search. Chrome only exists to funnel people into Google, they wouldn't risk their search monopoly so there's browser competition.
Different anti-trust cases - you are talking about search engine monopoly, the others are talking about browser monopoly.
I'm talking about how the search engine monopoly is far more important than the browser one.
> Firefox is an antitrust litigation sponge, but you have to keep it rudderless and ineffective.
I don't know what makes you believe Firefox is ineffective. It's by far the best browser around. What do you think is missing?
1. A marketing department that can get it more than 2% market share
2. A legal and advocacy department that can work with governments to stop monopolists like Google and Apple privileging their own browsers on platforms they control
3. To use its seat on standards boards to stop abhorrent practises like the W3C endorsing DRM, or Google dropping effective web-blocking APIs from extensions.
I wish mozilla would focus on developing decentralized/p2p features, from messaging to maybe tor-browsing.
I think this independence is much needed in the future to come.
Firefox should focus on not hemorrhaging users, they're about to reach the cutoff (1%) where the US government will no longer even support their browser.
No normal person will switch to Firefox for tor, despite us nerds thinking it's cool. And if they can't get actual users to switch, the browser has no future.
And if you want a browser that can do Tor, Brave has you covered.
All Firefox needs to do is make adblocking an integral part of the browser, but that would cut the Google money off.
I'm trying to use it right on mac right now. It's still slow with many tabs (even with autosleep enabled), visibly slower than both Safari or any Chromium based browser.
Also they killed visual tab expose, and any extensions that could replace it, so all I have for managing the tabs is a vertical list.
In addition to what everyone else said, comments like yours confirm that it would be a waste for me to check out Firefox for the hundredth time. You are among a sea of comments enumerating the specific reasons why it sucks, and you're here insisting with zero substantiation that it is "effective" and "by far the best browser around". A better approach would be to acknowledge the issues that users have had with it and explain how it has improved.
On the other hand, if your definition of "effective" and "best" describes Firefox the last time I checked it out, then our definitions do not match, and I don't need to check it out again.
The people using it.
> The people using it.
I'm not sure if you are serious. I mean, look at Chrome and Edge and Safari. They are managed by corporations that control their own platform. I get Chrome, Edge, and Safari because it is actively pushed onto me.
What does Firefox have?
The ugly truth is that browsers like Chrome and Edge and Safari are just as good as Firefox, and a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.
What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
Edge and Safari yes, but Chrome doesn't come pre-installed in both Windows and MacOS. You and every Chrome user actively goes out of their way to download and install it.
> What does Firefox have?
Every single nontrivial Linux distribution out there comes packaged with Firefox as the default browser.
> a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.
Clearly then all Chrome users on laptops/desktops are software militants..
> What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
Firefox had at least half a decade of a headstart against Chrome and did jack shit with it.
Google have at times used quite forceful messaging to push users of their search product to download Chrome.
Who else? I wonder what other companies play such role?
This here is a single comment that explains everything. Firefox is kept clueless.
Sorry to all the devs grinding inside the machine - you are doing great work, and while it is not your fault the ship is going in the wrong direction, you are providing the fuel for it to keep going there by keeping your heads down and not revolting.
VGR's "Gervais principle" is a great series about recognizing the psychopaths at the helm and their power games. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
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.
> 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.
Every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that enables them to better sabotage Firefox development actually. If they were starved like cancerous tumour the body might heal and survive.
"If we destroy the organization responsible for this thing I like, then only the bad parts of the organization will die and the thing I prefer will become better!"
No, if you destroy the flawed-but-sometimes-okay organization you just wind up with something worse. There is no magic save-the-thing-you-like fairy.
Large bureaucracies don't "learn their lesson" from being torn down.
Vote against increased taxes because the road department already has "such a large budget" and "maybe this will teach them to cut the administrative fat"? No, you'll just wind up with more potholes.
Vote for Donald Trump because you think the Federal Government is wasteful and the Democrats need to be taught a lesson? No, you'll just get billionaire tax cuts, erosion of civil liberties, and absolutely no behavior change from the people you wanted to "punish". Everything just gets worse.
And eventually, out of the blue sky, Kali will reach with her crimson palms.
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?
People get annoyed at them for their massive banners begging for money making it seem like wikipedia is on the verge of being closed down unless you donate despite the fact they have a ton of money they have saved away which could keep wikipedia running for decades. Even long running wiki editors and donators get pissed off with the behavior of the wikimedia foundation as not enough of this money actually seems to get spent on Wikipedia. Kinda similar to the whole Firefox situation now I come to think about it.
> I don't really understand the angst against the Wikimedia Foundation.
> No one's being conned into donating.
These statements are consistent but they are what's getting in your way of understanding.
For a lot of people, what the Wikimedia does to raise donations does constitute conning people into donating. Hence the angst.
If the donation is given on the false belief that the donations are necessary to keep Wikipedia running, I'd argue donors are being conned into donating. And that is exactly the message the donation banners convey.
> No one's being conned into donating
You've never seen the banners asking for money to cover the costs of the servers?
They're saying its not a con because they agree with it and its a good thing. It's doublespeak, maybe even to themself.
Sophists railing against Socrates seems about right.
> No one's being conned into donating
They are. The banners are dishonest every year, making it seem like they can barely keep the lights on.
> 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
wikipedia still being around after all this time and still maintaining links to just download the entire thing and having no ads makes whatever they're doing good to me, ha.
I love other wikimedia projects like Wiktionary and wiki commons too.
And they do experiment and i think the passion for the society upholding project that is the encyclopedia is still there. Its the same wirh web archive.
Wikimedia is run transparently which is great but I dont really believe they need the money when you see their financial statement (link below) and think about what they need to run. Plenty of really deserving charities running on the sniff of an oily rag not paying 100m in salaries plus travel, conferences etc.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f6/Wikim...
Keep in mind that the community aka the editors etc are all volunteers so the foundation organizes conferences, hackathons, grants etc for them (not as a compensation, but to help strengthen the community). Keeping "servers running" is only a small aspect of the whole. There's a lot of maintenance work necessary and there are also sister projects as well, like commons, wikidata, etc.
They have 82 million dollars in cash and 116 million in short term investment, why do they need to run giant screen sized popup banners a few times every year begging for money and making it seem like everything will be gone tomorrow unless you donate now? They don't even run these adverts by the wiki editors themselves, just impose them from on top. They are very controversial in the wiki community and always cause pages of arguing every year.
Because you don't have to pay and most people don't, + the reasons from my previous comment.
On the other point: Discussions are at the core the movement, and how to do fundraising "right" and how to use funds is worth discussing and gets discussed. But that it is needed in general is obvious I think. What else should be done? Let all the projects run out of funds and call it a day? That would mean the end - and today Wikipedia is more needed than ever.
As a liberal I've always had to fight the tendency we have to not see legitimacy sinks in the name of politeness. Lately I think people are willing to listen and I'm working on ways to explain this to people who don't bellyfeel them already.
Since I was a kid I thought that the endless fundraising drives destroy the legitimacy of public television. At the bellyfeel level it is visible moneygrubbing, but at a political science level these run side by side with ads promoting the sponsorship of the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation. ADM is notably the prime beneficiary of ethanol subsidies in the U.S. that wreck the environment and make farmers go broke spending money on nitrogen fertilizers that kill off life in the ocean off the mouth of the Mississippi River.
The trouble is that small donations don't give voice, but large donations do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
I can logically justify how I feel about fundraising drives on PBS, but I feel a resonance that causes me to feel the same way for Wikipedia -- I don't know what the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation of Wikipedia is, but it probably exists. Finding out that they don't really the money confirms this feeling.
Retching from drops of com in the aguaclara of edu (or sci or org) is possibly a biological reflex by now. Debt, but 10,000 years?
Top of my idea stack is: should gov disintermediate the debt transfer?
"There be no middleman but Gov", translated for the nirvana of all
(In a sense, the Fed does exactly this, but the procedure needs to be orders of magnitude sharper/faster before it should be thought safe for bellies)
a lot of engineering positions at WMF don't pay particularly competitively - you do take a pay cut working there to run/manage k8s clusters than you would elsewhere (even some public sector gigs pay better in big cities).
Mozilla's setup feels more like a shell game
Wow, I could run a brand into the ground for far less than $6.9mm.
But could you do it while convincing yourself and everyone you're beholden to that you're not?
Isn't that most software devs?
And that's why you're unqualified to be a CEO: Never offer to do something for less money.
$6.9M just seems like overkill
i dont know, the way they have managed to consistently roll down a hill that seemingly is the wrong one, despite how obviously it could have been done better, is frankly quite impressive
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I mean it could take longer sure, but the funding would still be there ;)
No, not really. It's just not even in the same order of magnitude in terms of level of effort.
Makes it hard to justify chipping in as a user. Transparency is great, but alignment with mission matters more.
She's not the ceo anymore.
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"
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.
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.
But that's the whole point: they did pay their medical bills. It's not like they didn't pay their medical bills and instead bought a ps5. They did both.
Mozilla develops Firefox, and they also pay their CEO a lot. Their CEO may be overpaid, the company may be mismanaged, but at least they are still upholding their commitment to maintaining Firefox. Picking out one expense that you don't like and saying "all the donations go to this, see!" is just disingenuous.
Whether donating is worthwhile is another question, and it seems like the answer would be no. But it is a very different thing to say "All the donations just go to the CEO" instead of "I think the CEO is paid too much".
We could also cherry-pick in the other direction and say the CEO is negotiating deals to bring in the 90% of non-donation revenue of Mozilla, in which case you could easily say that his pay is a result of that revenue creation.
I think the key here is that they didn't have money to do both.
If they had money enough for medicine, then why beg for donation?
I'm not trying to defend Mozilla begging for donations when they really don't need them. My point is that cherry-picking one expense that you don't like, and then saying all the donations go to that, is cherry-picking the financials, and is misleading.
> I'm not trying to defend Mozilla begging for donations when they really don't need them.
They essentially do. The problem is they have a greedy, self-obsessed CEO taking it.
You're arguing that money isn't fungible. It's absurd.
This is absolute nonsense. I am arguing that cherry-picking one expense is ridiculous. A much more reasonable approach would be to say that your donation is spread out over the entirety of the spend of Mozilla. That would suggest 1% of your donation is going to the CEO, not 100% of it like earlier commenters suggest.
It is dishonest to pick out one expense you don't like and equate that to all of the donation money being spent on just that. That's all. I don't know how you got from that to "this guy thinks money isn't fungible."
> much more reasonable approach would be to say that your donation is spread out over the entirety of the spend of Mozilla
Transactions happen at the margin. If a junkie spends every dollar of a bonus on dope, it’s fair to say the bonus is being burned on dope. Even if they also pay rent with their base salary.
From another user:
If donations doubled, would CEO pay double?
If donations halved, would CEO pay halve?
I suspect the answer is "no" to both of those.
You gift me $100 on Venmo or cashapp or whatever to go dinner with my partner. I transfer it to my bank. It’s in the same bank account as all my other liquid cash. How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?
Mozilla/FF has a pot of money that donations go in to, which is the same pot they use to operate as well as pay people, which includes their CEO.
> How can either of us ever say whether or not I spent that specific $100 on dinner?
there's no such thing as a specific $100.
The donation of the $100 was contingent on you not having $100 for dinner. If it turns out you _did_ have $100 for dinner, but now that you received $100 in donations, you can choose to also spend the extra $100 on something else (which the donor may or may not like).
It is on the donor to figure out whether donating the $100 is worth it - at least the recipient needs to declare all their financials, so they'd have the info to make a judgement on future donations.
You’re making this a very strict, binary situation. Either you’re broke and every single dollar you are gifted or requesting is specifically earmarked for a specific thing, or you have all the money you need and you can’t ever receive a gift or request a donation. Nothing is that simplistic. Charities doing well and able to meet all their goals/payroll still keep asking for money because they need it to be sustained for more than months or a year.
Also at the end of the day, they are requesting donations to keep things operating. And that means paying people to run things, including CEOs. Every charity has somebody at the top, so your donations are also paying for those people as well. Unless you’re willing to say that all charities are therefore fraudulent because you are paying executive personnel, I just don’t see how this argument can really be put forth in earnest.
It isn't binary in general but in this case it is. The money from mozilla corporation is close enough in quantity to the donations to make it so. Someone used the example of a medical bill and a ps5, but a better example is that you gave someone enough money to live on entirely, and the spent it on that as they said, but then took their income which could have paid for it and purchased something unnecessary. That wouldn't be ok. Furthermore one of the key pieces of research before donating to a charity is executive compensation. This level of compensation is a red flag in any non profit and means it won't be getting good ratings from the watchdog groups. That in turn hurts future donations.
I gave the PS5 example fyi. Not that it changes anything it just felt weird to not clarify that haha
>but a better example is that you gave someone enough money to live on entirely, and the spent it on that as they said, but then took their income which could have paid for it and purchased something unnecessary.
But that doesn’t really apply here, it’s not parallel to the Mozilla/Firefox situation. And if we want to arbitrarily decide that all donations go to the CEO strictly because the numbers are kind of similar, why can’t I just say “no all that money goes towards staff and operating“? Why is my assertion any less valid? The numbers being similar doesn’t tell us anything about how it’s being spent. It’s just a coincidence.
I mean that’s what this all hinges on right? That the two numbers are kind of close? I can’t really think of how that tells us where the money is going. I don’t understand how that follows.
If donations 10x tomorrow can we no longer claim the donations are going into the CEO’s pocket? Or if they cut to 1/10th? Would we be having this conversation if either was currently the case?
If it was the head of the foundation making that much no one would donate. It would be a matter of opportunity cost. A non profit that size would normally have a leader compensated on the level of a software developer. I'd argue the ceo of the corporation is also wildly overcompensated too, but that normally wouldn't be relevant to the decision to donate. The issue arises because of the close financial ties between the corporation and the foundation, which is enough to prevent my donations by itself, those ties though create the perception that fewer donations would increase transfers from the corporation. If that is in fact true, then the question of opportunity cost does extend to all of the corporations expenses and someone considering donating sgould absolutely consider all of those expenses and decide if they are doing good with their donation or not.
> A non profit that size would normally have a leader compensated on the level of a software developer.
I hate doing the “source?” thing but this is not obviously the case to me so can you explain your reasoning here or show me a source?
Charitynavigator and guidestar have datasets. Most websites have you pick a charity and then give you metrics to judge by rather than picking a metric. But they indicate for a non profit with revenue between 10-50M (mozilla foundation is 30M I think?) usually has compensation for the leader between 180k and 350k.
Their annual revenue is over 10x that. It usually is around 500mill annually, currently down to around 400mill.
That is the corporation, not the foundation right? Over 100M it should be less than 1% so as much as 4M if it is 400M.
If donations doubled, would CEO pay double?
If donations halved, would CEO pay halve?
I suspect the answer is "no" to both of those.
Exactly, so the donations are not being funneled to the CEO, and suggesting that they are would be silly.
If you split up your donation by how Mozilla actually spends its money, then most goes to operating Mozilla, and a small amount (~1%) goes to paying the CEO.
I agree but your tone suggests you’re disagreeing with me? That’s the point I am driving at. Directly linking every donated dollar to the CEO’s pay simply because they’re close in number does not make sense.
[flagged]
Mismanagement or waste isn't the same as corruption. Corruption means deliberately lying, cheating, or acting unethically for personal gain, not just spending money poorly.
Paying their CEO $7 million is generous, but not particularly unusual for a corporation with $650m in revenue (as of 2023).
Income they make from revenue from doing what? What is the revenue generating activity Mozilla/Firefox is doing?
Calling it mismanagement IS corruption. What we are discussing here is known by Mozilla high-ups and board. They know their current and past CEOs are getting a huge prize for destroying Firefox and they couldn't care less. That's clearly corruption.
> whatever we want to call it
Fungibility [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
Thanks that’s the word I was fishing for
> 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.
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.
> the only advantage
Have you seen how much data Chrome collects for Google? Especially on Android. That's another massive advantage of Firefox.
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.
Firefox ships with google analytics built in. And you can't use extensions like uBlock Origin to block them.
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.
Firefox recently changed their privacy policy. This is no longer the advantage it used to be.
Strong disagree. Firefox gives you more options to configure things, and I am using the Containers Extensions (sandboxed tabs based on domains).
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.
I use it every single day. It helps open the same website in "Cognito" instead of opening it in Cognito mode. Plus, as a developer, it makes it easy to run tests using multiple accounts.
I use them every day to separate my SSO sessions and keep cookie hungry websites in check. I could not imagine not having them anymore.
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.
The UX is horrible but works once you got your head around it. I also use temporary account container extension so ever new tab is a throw away (and i use ms copilot for AI search in those throwaway as they don't require a login to use their AI)
I am using the official one. Works fine.
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
> 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I honestly believe Firefox is better off just ripping off Chrome's minimalist design. This overengineered bloat is just putting me off.
People have been raging about Mozilla copying Chrome's minimalist design for many, many years.
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.
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
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.
The "market" doesn't care about Firefox at all. It has already chosen Chrome and making a second Chrome won't change that.
"The market has already chosen Internet Explorer and making a second Internet Explorer won't change that."
- This was probably said by someone in a meeting at Google in 2006
Chrome is an obvious win for Google.
Rather than paying browser makers for every search, they can make one time payments to convert users to Chrome, and then get the searches for free.
And now with their dominant position they can choke off competing ad networks by removing 3rd party cookies.
Maybe the one where they decided not to make a second Internet Explorer and create a different browser? But I doubt they even considered it.
Sure, but Google didn't make a second Internet Explorer, they made a new thing.
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?
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.
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".
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.
And advertising, if I had to guess. The Chrome ads were very pervasive for a few years there.
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...
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.
One man's "useless UI redesigns" is another man's feature.
Every person I talk to has a completely different idea of what Mozilla should be doing. Keep pocket, or pocket is stupid, or pocket is the second coming of Christ, or the VPN is stupid, or the VPN is a revenue stream not dependent on Google, or whatever fucking bullshit.
Firefox does not "suck" - this is a legitimate psyop. It has all the features of Chrome minus the horrendous privacy violations. It has all the performance of Chrome, too.
I mean, what are we missing? Web USB? Give me a fucking break.
If you really, really need Web USB then fine - use Google Chrome. You win. 99.99% of people I've ever talked to don't even know what Web USB is, let alone do they rely on it.
The only thing Mozilla has right now better than Chrome is that the APIs needed for uBlock Origin to work as intented exist.
chrome doesn't have container and having to manage tens or hundreds of profiles would be impossible.
.. and about a thousand less privacy violations. Plus significantly less ties to Google.
Even chromium-based web browsers are tightly coupled to Google. They rely on them for 99.99% of their source code. Mozilla just uses Google as the default search engine.
If I had to estimate, the developer time required for Mozilla to change the default search engine is ~.5 hours. In order for, say, Brave to not be dependent on Google, they'd have to spend ~100,000 dev hours. Because, you know, they'd have to completely develop a new web browser.
> 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?
> > 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?
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.
Asking the same questions, and getting the same answers over and over again doesn't really seem like listening to me.
Read the comments from Lio and skywal_l, both replies to your comment <- that's what I mean.
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.
Their job was to rake in millions while keeping the benefactor happy with no real competition. Mission accomplished.
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.
The idea behind the parent comment is not that they can't compete, but they are specifically made not to.
Sort of a puppet browser made only for proving the court that the giants are not technically a monopoly, while ranking a bare minimum number of users for them to count.
While that's not entirely unreasonable, I don't think that's the doom of Mozilla. Puppet or not, their tangled codebase makes it a pita to contribute anything if you're not being paid a salary for it.
Despite having a high expectation for the "free browser", deep down we know that it's the same "Free in theory" software, not unlike Java or Vscode. Software that's made by a company and once they stop pouring money on corporate development and support the project will become a zombie in no time.
It is completely unreasonable and (willfully) ignores the long, long list of places where Mozilla has fought against the other vendors including (especially) Google on privacy grounds.
It's the sort of thing people say mostly for their own self-satisfaction, without actually thinking about it or trying to figure out the answer. Like: "both parties are the same" or "what have the Romans ever done for us"
Mozilla can do a lot more to fight on privacy grounds. I realize it isn't going to happen since even enabling a lot of the existing privacy features by default is going to break many websites (which, in the minds of most people, would reflect a broken web browser), so they are stuck talking about it while end users have to jump through a bunch of hoops if they want to get the browser as it is advertised.
Yes, I agree completely. You cannot even compare Chrome and Firefox because the sheer privacy violations of Chrome make it not a worthy competitor. The difference is, nobody cares.
Google develops Chrome and Chrome relies entirely on Google's money. Google is the default search engine. They are much, much, MUCH more tightly coupled to Google than Firefox could ever be.
But nobody says anything. And yet, Firefox makes Google the default search engine, and everyone has a think piece on it. Firefox is dead, they say, they're just Google's puppet. Then what is Chrome?
Chrome is Darth Vader. Firefox is Lando Calrissian. I’ll let you guess who Palpatine is.
>Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents
Please get real. Comparing real output money measure in an annual basis with market capitalization is ridiculous. It's like someone comparing your annual salary with their net worth.
They don't need alternative revenue streams. Just take the millions they receive from Google and spend it on tech. Cut out all the warm and fuzzy political marketing bullshit and all the management that have promoted it.
It is not so clear cut now, is it? The often silly wannabe social justice stuff does cost money, and their management does get record high payments, even though they don't do a particularly good job, and even though important engineering projects were cut. Mozilla's behavior is not a culture of engineering, that fosters trust in the browser product.
This is such a nonsense argument. Nobody is upset that that more people use Chrome than Firefox. That has never been the case. In fact, historically, Firefox users tend to like being on the outside.
The "kneejerk Mozilla hate" isn't about marketshare, it's about ineffective leadership bringing features nobody wants while ignoring problems users currently have.
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)
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.
Most would be search engine agreements I presume, which is still proportional to the user counts.
A single Google antitrust case can lose $500,000,000 of annual revenue.
You can't donate to the Mozilla Corporation. The Foundation is where donations go.
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.
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.)
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?!
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.
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.
Chrome has uBlock Origin Lite. It blocks ads even on YouTube.
There are quite a few browser that don't ever need extensions to block ads. There's thus no reason for me to use Firefox (and I don't want to, until it's managed by Mozilla).
[flagged]
I didn't downvote you, but your vague mentioning of some browsers "that don't ever need extensions to block ads" is not helpful at all and sounds wrong to me. There are only three major browser engines in the world, and only Firefox's one blocks ads reliably.
Well, I dont see ads in my non-FF browser. Don't know what else I could say. And, to be precise, FF doesn't block anything by itself. It just relies on an the job of unpaid volunteers to block ads.
Which "non-FF" browser? Ladybird? Lynx?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41871873
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43240477
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43240845
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43241306
There are quite a few Chromium browsers with an inbuilt adblocker. Mine is one of these. My world isn't going to end with UBo.
Which ones?
Ok, now I'm pretty sure you're trolling. Bye.
Your're just not giving enough details for a refute, so I had to dig links about all browsers I could find. You're trolling, since you only give vague, general statements, which don't move the discussion.
Brave ships with an ad blocker built in i believe.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43240477
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43349506
I don't need any MV2 extension, so I don't really care.
So, you're fine with the ads and tracking.
Brave has built in ad / tracking blocking without using MV2. If MV2 vanished in Brave you could still have blocking without using uBlock Origin
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43349506
Almost nobody cares about anything other than ad blocking and to top it off the reply to the comment you linked is even mentioning that they were only talking about ad block...
You may be right, but I have no trust in Brave. Not just due to their shady decisions in the past but also because they would have to fight a huge ad industry on a tiny budget with their built-in ad blocker. At least if it's an add-on, the community would be able to help easier.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=EbNar#44578751
Besides, using that together with a DNS blocker does a wonderful job, whether you believe it or not.
The discontinued support of MV2 means that all ads will eventually adapt and your anti-ad measures stop working.
I think you don't understand the difference between an extension (for which manifest version matters) and an intrinsic feature (for which the manifest means nothing). It's either that, or you want to convince people that FF the only way. No, it isn't. Deal with it.
> 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.
Floorp is basically Firefox without the memory issues.
You might want to check it out.
> 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.
I tried to be clear about how Chrome is fine in most respects except for the incentives conflict, and you've simply pointed out symptoms stemming from that fundamental issue. Are we actually disagreeing or do you just dislike how I phrased it?
You were very clear. PP seems to be in agreement with you in spite of objecting to the first line and ignoring the rest.
"ublock origin lite" works well
Not on Google's own websites such as Youtube.
It blocks Youtube's ads just fine.
You might've tried it during an arms race moment. YT is constantly changing it's anti-blocking measures, and uBO and uBO Lite are constantly responding. uBO had the same issue.
uBO Lite does lack custom filters and custom filter lists. It also doesn't have sync, but uBO didn't do sync well anyway. Also sync is far less useful without custom filters.
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.
Reading mode is awesome! Especially on mobile. Yes to everything else you said too.
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.
*and fixing bugs.
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.
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.
Firefox Android:
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...
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.
It is also available on stable though you have to enter the more verbose `chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml` to get there.
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
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"...?
People approach browsers in the same way they approach sex or basically anything else - whatever can be done will be done.
Lmao most people don't approach sex like that.
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.
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.
See the first picture.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/android-translation
They move things in mobile UI a lot, so the docs might not reflect that. I know it used to look like on this screenshot, but I haven't had it in my Nightly for a while.
The reader view and translation buttons aren’t shown on all pages, just pages for which they are relevant.
I've tried German and French pages, languages for which translation is supported, but haven't seen the translate icon in the toolbar. I had to go through the menu each time.
this honestly sounds unhinged. except the part about abou:config
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.
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.
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.
How about per-window private sessions?
That would be limiting if I can't have multiple windows of one private session. (Although admittedly this is something I do quite rarely)
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).
A "private tab" feature in addition to "private window" could be a useful, if potentially confusing
If you're on desktop, the "temporary containers" extension does this.
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.
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?
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
> It's very handy for sites where you may have more than account
For that Firefox's container tabs are a much handier option as you can stay logged in and also open new tabs that are already logged in. It has colours to tell apart which tab is part of which container
> 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.
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...
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)
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
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.
They have to ask for sign ups, otherwise they'd get blasted by bots spewing whatever.
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.
I’d forgotten about this. What a banging feature that was.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Sounds like an extension issue. Firefox by itself uses way way less memory than Chromium-base browsers.
I had a few extensions, I don't think anything especially unusual. Regardless, Chromium with a few similar extensions (ublock is the most notable) performs far better.
Running latest Firefox on latest MacOS on Intel.
Hundreds of tabs open, memory usage is ~3GB for main process, 2-3GB for isolated content (ie the tabs).
Really not sure what the problem is.
Are you on Linux, Windows or macOS ?
Linux
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.
> - may be other under the table agreements? (Request for comments)
Google access to Firefox telemetry data?
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.
hn would seriously benefit from a system to display user "contributions" like this as the ai rage bait and lies that they are.
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.
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?
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.
Except that you are giving some random software access to your computer, and it's not even software you can decided when to install and update.
I use Linux so I do have a great deal of control over the version of Chrome I occasionally use.
The software is downloaded from a web server.
But you just did give some random software access to your computer.
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.
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/
Python is also easy and accessible. In fact that's its whole thing.
We should not poke holes into the browser sandbox to satisfy the needs of amateur programmers.
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.
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.
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)
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.)
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.)
I use Firefox as my main browser on both Linux and Windows and have no problems.
I suspect you have an Ubuntu problem.
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.
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.
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.
Does computer B ever finish?
Do you see any disk i/o spikes when this is happening?
> 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.
yeah the download thing was a corrupted profile when i had it.
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!
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.
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.
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?
inb4 "We've simplified and streamlined the firefox experience by removing confusing control knobs and options."
It really seems to me like they've been intentionally adding friction to the configuration.
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.
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)
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.
I kind of prefer TST since it's tree style. The native vertical tabs is flat, but I would like to organize my tabs more hierarchically.
yeah i'm hoping it can be enhanced with nesting.
What do you like about the native vertical tabs which was not present in tree style tabs or Sidebery?
To me, what they shipped seemed lacking in features to both, with no real improvements.
Back when I tried sidebery, there was some weird issue where either shift-click or right clicking didn't work on mac, and that turned me off. I just tried it again, and both work fine now.
One other feature that is nice for me is the ability to collapse the sidebar to just the tab icons. It's a nice middle ground between being able to see what I have open and getting a full screen experience.
TST and Sidebery are both fantastic extensions, I don't think they do anything wrong. For whatever reason though, the FF native implementation worked for me where they didn't
The biggest benefit I've seen is that it automatically hides the old tab bar at the top. Before that, you had to dig into some hidden profile directory and modify some userchrome CSS file and modify the CSS directly hoping it would work.
I use this method personally and it works great on GNOME and KDE. First set `toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets` to true in `about:config` then find your profile directory in `about:profiles`.
The contents of userChrome.css should be: Then restart the browser. If anything breaks the repository will likely be updated soon and you just have to pull the changes.Collapsed icon view is a major improvement over Sidebery and the reason I've switched for now.
what happened with sidebery? I've used it a couple of years now with zero problems.
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.
I'll wager most users are happy with primitive over advanced.
For example, I sometimes run with hundreds of tabs and my wife has many thousands, at all times. My needs and hers are very different from typical users who have single digits numbers of tabs open, heavily biased toward the low end.
Of course I would prefer TST or Sideberry, but I'm not like most users. For most users, the Firefox experience is superior to Sideberry for its ease of use and fewer failure modes.
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.
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.
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.)
It should also be pointed out that the Firefox devs spent years and countless dev hours trying to keep the old extension system and solve the problems wrt. multi-process, security, performance, and compatibility. They removed the extension system only after they tried everything else, and mostly failed.
They also spent tons of effort explaining the background of these choices and why they felt they had no choice and this was the only path forward. It's disappointing people are still coming up with this "oh, why don't they just [..]?!" type stuff.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
Mozilla is a founder of WHATWG and they have, historically, had opinionated takes on standards.
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions
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.
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.
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.
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.
This sort of used to be true and mostly isn't today. Firefox and Edge both have reasonably good tracking prevention features. They rival Privacy Badger in effectiveness (it's largely moot these days), and the only thing between tracking prevention and ad blocking is that the latter also focuses on protecting your poor innocent eyes from advertising, which I mostly couldn't care less about if the tracking is being defeated.
I think if you are extremely narrowly scoping well-trusted ad blockers, you may be okay, as long as you understand you are trusting the ad blocker with your banking info. But it would be far better for a browser to include capabilities in first-party and eradicate extensions altogether.
A Pihole is also far safer than an adblock extension, because it can't see your decrypted your web traffic the way a browser extension can.
PB is another layer of protection on top of Firefox and Edge. Totally different list generation approach, widget replacement, etc.
Installing PB is easier (and more powerful) than configuring the browser for better protection. For example, Firefox doesn't block much by default.
https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
Do you have an opinion or information that using ublock/ublock origin isn't safe or is a security issue?
No strong opinion on it specifically, but you are trusting the author of that extension to never abuse access to your banking info, so as long as you trust them with all your money, you're golden!
Any extension with post-decryption ability to read and modify everything on all websites could, if they choose, see any sensitive info you do, and subtly even change it without your knowledge.
And I'm not saying uBlock would, or that as a super popular extension it likely wouldn't be discovered quickly, but arguably they can because you've given the extension the ability to see and rewrite your entire reality.
I only stick with the "recommended" extensions that are reviewed by Firefox.
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?
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.
> 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
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.
X11 can also do remote window forwarding, not just desktops which is super handy. Your windows appear in the remote computer with its own window manager just like you run them locally. One of the reasons I still use X.
For barebones window forwarding (no input) I use something like gpu-screen-recorder with SRT streaming output and play the result on the other end with mpv / ffplay.
Haven't looked into it, but FreeRDP might support specific window forwarding too rather than the whole desktop.
If you need something fancier there is Sunshine / Moonlight, but they still have an issue with not using Pipewire for window / screen capturing (and kmsgrab is not really the proper way to do it).
Anyway, X11 is a complete dead end in general so it's not really a viable option for anything serious.
These look like kludges more than anything.
X11 may be a dead end but Wayland sucks as a replacement, so for now, I see no other option than supporting them both.
It may be technically possible to do the equivalent do X11 forwarding with Wayland, that is connecting to a server with a ssh terminal (no remote desktop, headless server), run a GUI app, and have it display its windows on my own desktop as if it was running locally. The problem is that Wayland is 17 years old and I still can't.
FreeRDP is pretty feature rich, so I wouldn't call it a kludge.
For any kind decent remote desktop access you need good performance, specifically low latency. X11 just isn't there.
Headless server is headless server - you can't have anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's already not headless.
Instead of X server you can have any Wayland compositor (Wayland server) and whatever part that provides streaming (FreeRDP or what not).
So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge for such scenario if anything.
> Headless server is headless server - you can't have anything in such case there with X11 either. If you want to forward X11, you need X server, which means it's already not headless.
To me this reads a bit confused, but perhaps I'm misreading it? In X11 terminology the server is sitting in front of you (the one that draws to the screen), so no, you don't need need the remote host to be running X11 server.
You do need the program that draws to the screen, but I think it's fair to say the remote host is headless if it doesn't have a GPU nor a program to interface with the GPU at all. All the remote host needs is code to interact with such a server over TCP or Unix domain sockets. And that code is tiny, even small computers without memory for frame buffer can do it.
> So I don't see how X11 is any better - it's just worse due to having abysmal performance. X11 was never designed for real world remote desktop usage - it just happens to have network transparency. So it's X11 that's a kludge for such scenario if anything.
I think X11 was actually pretty great at the time it was created, i.e. clients can create ids and use them in their requests (no round-trip to the server) and server can contain large client bitmaps that the client can operate on, but sometimes poor client coding can kill the performance over the network. As worst offender I once noticed VirtualBox did a looooot of synchronous property requests during its startup instead of doing them in concurrently, stretching the startup time from seconds to minute or more. (Whether it truly needed those properties in the first place is another question.)
Sending the complete interaction as a video stream? That's what I'd call a hack—though X11 should be modernized in various aspects, for example to support more advanced encodings for media, controlled by the client.
In some sense the web is the direction where I would have liked to see X11 going: still controlled by the client, but some light server-side code could be used to render and interact with the widgets. This way clicks would react immediately, but you would still be interacting with the actual service running on the remote host, not just a local program.
(Another reason why I consider X11 better is the separation of the server and the compositor.)
> but I think it's fair to say the remote host is headless if it doesn't have a GPU nor a program to interface with the GPU at all
You can use software rendering for Wayland cases too. There are even OpenGL / Vulkan software implementations.
> All the remote host needs is code to interact with such a server over TCP or Unix domain sockets. And that code is tiny, even small computers without memory for frame buffer can do it
I don't really see much value in such use case. Thin client (the reverse) makes more sense (i.e. where your side is a weak computer and remote server is something more powerful).
But either way, running a compositor even with software rendering should be doable even on low end hardware.
> Sending the complete interaction as a video stream? That's what I'd call a hack
Why not? Video by the mere nature or modern codecs is already very optimized on focusing only on changes to the encoded image, so it's the best option. You render things were they run, then send the video.
It works even for such intense (changes wise) cases as gaming and actual video media. Surely it works for GUIs too.
> You can use software rendering for Wayland cases too. There are even OpenGL / Vulkan software implementations.
That's actually besides the point I intended, which was to provide an example how little code the X11 client actually needs. OpenGL/Vulkan software implementations are the opposite of little.
> I don't really see much value in such use case. Thin client (the reverse) makes more sense (i.e. where your side is a weak computer and remote server is something more powerful).
Yes, I can see that, e.g. remotely using a super computer. However, I think GPU-capability wise the devices people use to interact with graphical systems are quite sufficient to most any interaction task and if X11 was able to video stream just the important bits (I imagine the important bits would be large updated bitmap areas within the user interface, so video encoded server side bitmap transport would do it), it would be just as suitable for that kind of asymmetric case; while being still usable for IoT scenarios, where you have those tiny computers providing sensor data, of which there are probably hundreds of millions if not billions by now.
In principle it's also trivial to convert an X11 style display interaction with video transport (just run the X11 server in the remote end), while the inverse is impossible. So with X11 style you could choose either or, depending on your devices and needs.
> But either way, running a compositor even with software rendering should be doable even on low end hardware.
And how about video-encoding that data on low end hardware without help from hardware? And even with the help of hardware, i.e. NVidia has limited number of video encoding sessions (so number of distinct video streams) to five and not all hardware can even do that. So it's CPU time if you have multiple such sessions, and running high-quality video encoders are not a walk in the park for them.
Because the streams would be between two end points, multiple streams could be packed inside the same stream to save encoders, but I don't think anyone's doing that..
Alternatively to the number of encoders limitation it helps if you run a single stream (stream the desktop), but personally I consider per application remote use a much more flexible system, and the default provided by X11.
> Video by the mere nature or modern codecs is already very optimized on focusing only on changes to the encoded image, so it's the best option. You render things were they run, then send the video.
Surely scrolling a document by instructing the server to render a different part of the server-side bitmap to its own screen is going to be way more effective than encoding+decoding video, i.e. when considering latency, quality, energy consumption, memory usage and bandwidth?
I still find it a very questionable idea to run some GUI stuff on IoT device streaming the GUI to you. I just don't get why you would want to do that, vs let's say having an HTTP access.
I have an HTTP server running on my printer and I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a powerful CPU. The web page it provides is more than adequate for controlling it.
Remote interface in streaming fashion only makes sense to me when remote computer is strong enough to do all that's needed for GUI to work. Like thin client idea above, game streaming and so on.
Look into NX. I used some kind of free NX package with Ubuntu about 10 years ago and it was about as fast as RDP.
Yeah, I've seen it in action (nomachine/nx) It's not bad. But problem is that it's not open source, so it's sort of DOA, unlike all the open options. They should have opened it from the start for it to be relevant.
FreeNX is open source.
Interesting, hasn't heard of it. Is it the same in features?
It doesn't seem to support Wayland though.
Yes it is a direct clone from the earlier NoMachine NX. That was open source, and later they moved to a new closed-source protocol. FreeNX took the earlier one over.
And no it doesn't support Wayland of course. It's an X11 accelerator, the design is heavily connected to the X11 design. It doesn't replace X11's remote display support, it just augments it. Wayland doesn't have that at all so there is no point there.
It basically removes the many round-trips in the protocol that increase latency, by caching values locally. And it can also keep the session alive when disconnected, similar to what termux or screen do for SSH.
> 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?
> Isn't https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe supposed to cover that?
The correct repository for Waypipe is https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe, but yes it does what you said and works well.
> 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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
YouTube, Netflix are the most common sites I have had issues with.
Which site don't work on Firefox ?
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.
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.
Home Depot. They never test against Firefox, so most of their pages are a dumpster fire.
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.
Mozilla is the problem, not FireFox.
I just don't really feel like using FireFox while Mozilla has a hand in it.
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.
I was wrong, Brendan Eich would have been better.
Eich should be installed as a change agent, with absolute power to hire and fire. Until then Mozilla will continue to circle the drain.
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.
This is the Great Man Theory. It’s a child’s view of history.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
As of 2024Q1, Brave had a market share of 1.27% vs Firefox's 3.97% (via Cloudflare, here: https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20... ). As of 2025, 1.05% vs 4.10% ( https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20... ).
Interestingly enough, right, we can see that the same CEO left Mozilla and then started Brave, and we can see the growth of Brave and the decline of Mozilla.
You can argue, sure, that market conditions are responsible for Mozilla's plight--the decreasing value as antitrust insurance for GOOG and so forth. But, Brave managed to do well in spite of that, and to my knowledge if you look at the pay, at his peak at Mozilla Eich was making in the 800-900K range while Baker made over 6M a year from 2022 to 2023 (and just a bit under 6M in 2021). So, for around 8x the price, you had worse leadership.
To restate again: the dude started a new browser company and grew it to a quarter the size of Firefox--and this without having GOOG as a sugardaddy.
It's an incredibly mid take to assume that individual competence in business is somehow not actually relevant.
Nah, that's the "less worse man" in this case, nothing as grand.
idk, get more people to use it? Release a standalone password manager that integrates nicely? Buy some ads on instagram or something?
Lockwise? They killed it.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...
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.
We might be able to get you up to a whole dollar, just listing off the various chat/messaging apps Google has killed off over the years. I take it as an opportunity to move to FOSS/self-hosted substitutes when that happens.
How you would benefit from FF having more users?
Sites would not mark my session as suspicious so much which causes me so many evil captchas
More developers would test for Firefox again.
I do all my dev in Firefox and rarely test in Chrome. I've been made aware of maybe a handful of issues over many many years doing it this way. If it works in Firefox, 99.9% of the time, it's also working in Chrome.
That's because, with a few exceptions, everything Firefox implements is a subset of what Chrome, and increasingly Safari support
> 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.
(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"
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.
> 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.
Ive used firefox for a decade, theres only two features I want: uBlock origin on iOS (hard?) and PWA support on Desktop
> uBlock origin on iOS
that is the fault of apple. Firefox on iOS is not really firefox.
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.
it is true that iphones itself isn't a monopoly (yet), but i reckon consumer protection should extend to the ability to install arbitrary software on a device they purchased, regardless of the intent of the company selling the device.
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/
being able to block ads, vs being able to install extensions, are two separate requirements with different difficulties. In the past, apple was anti-extensions - your app weren't allowed to be able to load remote (and thus unreviewed) extensions that executed code and changed app behaviour.
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.
i like where firefox is going but stop paying the executives so much, get leaner
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.
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.
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.
add 50% more and have them work on nothing but bugs and performance.
The animal thing's cute, but maybe focus less on branding exercises
>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.
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.
How about fix copy and paste on Linux?
I cant think of a single time ctrl-v or middle click didnt work
Hm. Are you referring to the bracketed paste weirdness? This is fixable.
https://superuser.com/questions/1532688/pasting-required-tex...
no sometimes paste does not work for discord and messenger.com especially when the clipboard is a picture
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.
If firefox implemented WebSerial and WebUsb, I'd lose a lot of trust in it. I say this as an embedded developer.
WebSerial and WebUsb can be implemented as separate plugins in the same way as support for H264 and DRM was added.
Care to elaborate?
Plenty of takes on this
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webusb
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34564119
https://nullrequest.com/posts/thecaseagainstwebusb
and on and on...
What arrogance. Why it is their job to gatekeep this?
It literally is their job. One of Mozilla's roles is to give their opinion on proposed web standards. It's one of the factors that determines what actually becomes a standard. WebUSB is Chrome (and derivatives) only at the moment. You can not like where they landed, perfectly valid, but they were asked.
Yes, but instead of saying "this spec is shit and full of vulnerabilities. Let's work on improving it", they just refused to participate in the discussion. What a childish POV.
I don't think that's a fair summary of Mozillas Position on the WebBluetooth/WebSerial/WebUSB specs. Interacting with arbitary devices has arbitrary consequences, mozilla seems to assume users are not able to understand these consequences and therefore cannot consent to it.
No improvment to the spec can fix users.
Well, the reason is in the links I provided, and the reasoning doesn't scream arrogance to me.
Personally, I think choice is great. Why be upset when you can download chromium (it is supported by pretty much any platform FF is) and use it to do all sorts of stuff with WebUSB, if you are into that?
Still, I would like to see FF disable these features by default and allow opt-in. I don't see a great reason to avoid implementing them behind some "wall" (other than to avoid an increase in a concealed attack surface).
You are completely missing the point just like Mozilla.
This is the same a surgeon saying they refused to perform life-saving surgery on you because they don't believe you understand the consequences of the possibility of dying in surgery.
The average person cannot be an expert on surgery or on browser security it's up to the people that have the education and work experience in there to make those decisions and handle them. Mozilla as another poster said has taken their toys home because they didn't get what they want.
So, basically, they noticed some potential insecurities in the implementation proposed by Google. Instead of negotiating modifications to the spec like adults, they threw their toys out of the stroller and refused to participate.
What a bunch of idiots. They seem to have a completely misguided concept of what a browser is. They still have a 1990s mindset of the browser being a window into the Internet, instead of the universal UI that it has become today.
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
>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.....
Firefox should fork Chromium so they can spend more time on differentiation instead of re-creation of Chrome feature.
i am kind of surprised that no one has mentioned ladybird (https://ladybird.org/) here. it seems to be progressing quite nicely along.
The only feature a browser needs is speed. Anything else should be an extension.
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).
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?
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!
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.
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)?
The further we go, the more I want old web back
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.
I guess OpenAI's browser does have a real chance to get a big bite of the browser market?
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:
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...> 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
Can you run a different Firefox via flatpak? (Or x11docker or plain docker, or nix, or I guess Snap)
Yes. Thanks for the reminder.
Before reading, I'm going to say "AI". I'll ad-fundum a beer if I'm right.
Nope.
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.
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
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.
Not going compute-bound for two minutes after launch, while not displaying pages?
Android?
No, Linux. I don't know what it's doing in there. Lots of disk I/O. Clearing the "startup cache" can help.
My guess: something is seriously borked in your profile. Easy to test.
I have run Firefox on Linux for decades (and a few extensions, and metric gobs of tabs), with zero cases of the behaviour you describe.
Same here, vanilla Firefox snap on Ubuntu. If anything, Firefox with hundreds (literally) of tabs starts way faster than Chrome with 10, thanks to lazy its loading. RAM usage has always been stellar in Firefox, in my experience.
Maybe their distro has a broken Firefox package, they messed with the default installation, have too many extensions, or malware? A slow mechanical disk?
Maybe try creating a new profile? I've had cases where a profile can cause Weird Shit™ to happen. Kind of annoying though. Probably something in a SQLite database or some such, but I didn't have the interest to track it down.
I've experienced this since 2018 across all versions of linux mint since 2018.
The problem appeared to be a lot of unnecessary disk io coupled with DNA lookup that only get done after every single read request is complete. This means that when tab #10 is taking long to read whatever from disk it blocks every other tab.
Noticeable only when using spinning rust disks.
I'm noticing it on a fast SSD, though it's more like 5-10s after launching. No issues once it's running. I'd guess it's related to my very old and large profile.
Not sure if it will help but about:processes might give some more info about what is causing the activity.
Dude, I have literally 4,000 tabs (not a joke), and my Firefox is fully loaded on boot after only a couple of seconds.
Something is wrong with your system.
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 ).
What's wrong with Firefox on Android? I have been using it for ages and I have no issue with it.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
/dev/null
Pretty much.
All I want today is Chrome-style profiles in Firefox. None of this about:profiles nonsense.
As a non Chrome user, can you explain the features of Google Chrome's profiles, that Mozilla Firefox doesn't have?
The same place the author should go.
now that I think about it its not just firefox that has reach zombie states, its the whole web browser ecosystem.
> Where's Firefox going next?
Spending donations on C-levels bonuses?
/s
Would you please __try__ paying attention to the top 10+ years old issues in the FF bug tracker?
TL;DR: nowhere good.
[flagged]
Built in fact checker would be nice.
I guess another one would be a political news filter given so much polarization online.
Change your name to Rust Foundation and give up on browser market
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Firefox does have recommended and promotional websites in the default new tab/startview, what is missing for you?
Please tell me this is sarcasm. That is exactly the kind of terrible idea that Mozilla would come up with and force on users.
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.
The last thing Mozilla should be spending time and money on is some kind of hosted algorithmic discovery feed. There are a ton of those out there, so if you want that you can get it anywhere you like.
RSS feeds were great because you could choose what you wanted and opt in to them; using algorithmic analysis would require not only a lot of infrastructure and dev time but also a lot of data collection and all the privacy concerns that comes with it.
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.
I very much do not want AI slop added to the browser. That would be such a negative feature.
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.)
think it as an adblock to the slop