29 ms·

What’s up with Firefox?

• sambe 10y ago
  This all seems a bit sensationalist. Mozilla tried a few other things, mostly didn't work out, maybe a bit distracted from Firefox. The decline from 2010 was about Chrome, not neglect (& maybe mobile, where they lacked a device). I wouldn't say Firefox was leading the way or the biggest innovator in the last few years, but for me it's kept up-to-date enough not to feel at all neglected.
  • homulilly 10y ago
    the poor state of e10s feels like neglect to me
    • 0x4a42 10y ago
      What's the problem with e10s?
      • jsight 10y ago
        I assume the problem is just that it seems to be moving towards completion at a snail's pace. It certainly feels like I have been hearing about it for a LONG time without a stable release.
        • KingMob 10y ago
          Yeah, but it's a massive reworking of the FF internals, so it took a long time to complete. But I'm using it now, and it works pretty well. My only hitch was needing to turn off some older add-ons. While Mozilla is still doing a slow roll-out, it disables E10s if it can't ensure your plugins will work. (One of mine was a HN add-on, amusingly.) Most of the opoular add-ons are ready, though. To check, see: https://www.arewee10syet.com/ https://www.arewee10syet.com/
          • jsight 10y ago
            Of course, the reasons for it taking a while to get done are completely reasonable. :)
          • Aldo_MX 10y ago
            I would recommend the following add-on to know which add-ons are incompatible with e10s: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...
        • oconnore 10y ago
          It might be because it's running without you knowing about it? Preferences > Enable multi-process is checked for me.
          • jsight 10y ago
            I don't believe that I have that option at all here (Firefox 51.0 on Fedora 25).
            • sp332 10y ago
              This is kinda confusing, but that button only exists in Nightly and Developer builds. Here's how to check, enable, and force-enable it for regular builds: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Testing https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Testing
          • homulilly 10y ago
            Still doesn't work in a number of situations like if you have a touch screen.
            • oconnore 10y ago
              (I just clicked the reply button to you using my touch screen on e10s. This is Fedora 25, on Wayland -- Firefox is using XWayland.)
              • sp332 10y ago
                I think this is a Win8 problem. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule
            • dblohm7 10y ago
              You must be running Windows. I'm the Mozilla developer who is responsible for that. You'll get e10s on touchscreen in version 52.
              • 10y ago
        • sp332 10y ago
          But e10s launched in Firefox 48 https://asadotzler.com/2016/06/06/firefox-48-beta-release-and-e10s/ https://asadotzler.com/2016/06/06/firefox-48-beta-release-an... and hit 35% of all Firefox users by November. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule
        • djsumdog 10y ago
          I did have to force enable it as a few plugins didn't official support it yet. So far it's been amazingly stable though and had sped up my browser considerably.
        • cpeterso 10y ago
          The e10s project actually stated back in 2009. The project was put on hold in 2011 because the architectural changes and add-on compatibility breakage was deemed insurmountable. In 2013, the project resumed and has been chugging away since. You can see 2011-2013 pause in the revision history of Mozilla's Electrolysis wiki page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Electrolysis&offset=&limit=500&action=history https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Electrolysis&offset... I made a burndown chart of the e10s bugs in Bugzilla that shows the development progress. The bug high water mark was in 2016 and today at least 2,495 bugs (specifically tagged as e10s related) have been fixed: https://people-mozilla.org/~cpeterson/burndown/burndown.html?tracking-e10s=+&since=2013-01-01 https://people-mozilla.org/~cpeterson/burndown/burndown.html...
      • Nas808 10y ago
        It's not process-per-tab like Chrome, it's just 2 or 3 processes.
        • kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
          By default. You can have a process per tab if you want.
        • chimeracoder 10y ago
          > It's not process-per-tab like Chrome, it's just 2 or 3 processes. Chrome is not process-per-tab - it's process per domain. (Even that's not true - sometimes tabs from multiple domains will still share the same process). Firefox currently uses two processes (one for the UI, and one for rendering pages), but from a technical standpoint, that's the hard part, and that's what took so many years to develop. Once you have separated UI and rendering processes, going from 1 rendering process to multiple is relatively easy - you can already configure Nightly to do this, and Mozilla is basically just waiting for (a) e10s itself to rolled out more broadly, and (b) empirical evidence on what the right number of processes is, as (a) happens. There are some downsides to doing true process-per-tab (the main one is that it's absurdly inefficient with memory), so ultimately Firefox will probably land on something in between (like Chrome and IE do).
          • orthecreedence 10y ago
            What does IE do?
            • chimeracoder 10y ago
              IE groups tabs into processes, so the number of processes scales sub-linearly with the number of open tabs, and hits a cap after a certain point: https://superuser.com/questions/586622/force-ie-to-use-one-process-per-tab https://superuser.com/questions/586622/force-ie-to-use-one-p...
          • cpeterso 10y ago
            Multiple content processes (two plus the browser UI process) are now enabled in Firefox Nightly (54).
    • ZenoArrow 10y ago
      What's wrong with e10s?
      • TeMPOraL 10y ago
        A better question would be: what is e10s?
        • sp332 10y ago
          Multi-process Firefox. One process for browser chrome and one or more for content. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Overview https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Overview
        • ZenoArrow 10y ago
          I know what it is, so why would that be a better question for me? If you want to ask what e10s is for your own information, that's fine.
    • throwaway2016a 10y ago
      To save some Googling if you're like me and have no idea what e10s is: Electrolysis: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/11/the-why-of-electrolysis/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/11/the-why-of-electr...
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • ddt_Osprey 10y ago
        Seriously. These "enumeronyms" drive me batty.
        • pc2g4d 10y ago
          I love this word, enumeronym, though. It seems you may have coined it, as the only Google search result is your comment. The second may well be this comment. I hope it catches on!
          • Mindless2112 10y ago
            Google suggests that the correct term is "numeronym" [1]. > According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was "S12n", the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. By 1985, colleagues who found Jan's name unpronounceable often referred to him verbally as "S12n" (ess-twelve-en). The use of such numeronyms became part of DEC corporate culture. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym
  • ashark 10y ago
    I do miss loving Firefox, which hasn't been the case since the 1.x days. Then again, I think these days what I dislike is the Web itself. You can't have a lean, responsive browser like that and support enough of the "advances" of modern CSS and Javascript to render 99.9+% of the Web more or less correctly.
    • jerf 10y ago
      If you look at the cutting edge of browser tech lately, and you read between the lines as to why the browser makers are doing this, you can see that there's a pretty significant trend now towards browsers actually fighting the web itself, because once multiprocess is done and modulo a 2 or 3x rendering speedup that Servo may be able to bring (which will probably be the last advance of that size), the only way for a browser to feel "less klunky" or "speedier" than its competition will be for it to render less of the web. That is, the classic optimization of doing less work. Which in this case means trashing all the shitty ads and plugins from 15 different sites and synchronous JS trackers, since that happens to be what's klunking up the web. Which, fortunately for the browsers, gives them cover to do this under the guise of working for the user, because there's a lot of truth there, but in some sense it's still just cover, too. It is in some sense a change of an era; browsers are moving out of a phase of enabling and empowering content creators and slowly moving into active conflict with them. As slowly as possible in some sense, because it's scary for them, but it's something they're being forced to do. It's the same effect where computer users will blame "Microsoft" or "Dell" for the computer being slow, when the problem is actually a slow hard drive or something; eventually it stops mattering that it isn't "your" fault and you have to do something about it. Big changes in the browser space in the next five years here, I think. Content producers so far have only tepidly fired back at ad blockers and stuff because they're still very niche, but they are getting less niche very fast now.
      • gbersac 10y ago
        > once multiprocess is done and modulo a 2 or 3x rendering speedup that Servo may be able to bring (which will probably be the last advance of that size) That's what we said for years about computing power and the Moor law's : "transistor can't get tynier than xxx nm". It happened anyway because there used to be that much economic incensitive to improve computer. Now research in micro processor is so expensive that the gain in computationnal power are found elsewhere. But there is always ways to improve things. The question is : "is there people eager to fund research". As long as the answer is yes, we'll find ways to improve web browser. In the web there is so much money involved that the answer will still be yes long after servo shipped.
  • myowncrapulence 10y ago
    I've been using Firefox for years without any problems and find it much better (just as fast, more privacy-minded) than chrome. I honestly don't understand (from a consumer standpoint) why people complain about Firefox. I can understand devs having browser preferences, but to say that "time forgot" firefox is ridiculous as a general user.
    • ZenoArrow 10y ago
      Agreed. I prefer Firefox, but I recognise there's really not that much difference between Firefox and Chrome in terms of usability and features, they both seem about on par to me (some areas Firefox is slightly ahead, some areas Chrome is slightly ahead). The suggestion that Firefox is something "time forgot" is basically just trolling, someone looking for a reaction rather than something substantial.
      • komali2 10y ago
        The numbers don't back either of your claims, though - significantly more people use Safari and Chrome than use Firefox. I for one appreciate chrome for the fact that it syncs with my google everything, across all devices, google accounts, etc. I'm probably going to hate myself for my blase attitude towards security when I inevitably end up on some massive dump of hacked accounts, but I've kind of given up on privacy/security. It's just so convenient to be able to pull up on my phone the tab I had open on my browser when I'm in the kitchen cooking, or whatever.
        • ZenoArrow 10y ago
          >"The numbers don't back either of your claims, though - significantly more people use Safari and Chrome than use Firefox." The reason we're in disagreement is we're picking different forms of comparison. You're looking at popularity, I'm looking at technology. I don't dispute more people use Chrome, but that doesn't make it automatically better from a technical point of view. As I said before, technically Firefox and Chrome are fairly equal, and there are benchmarks and feature comparisons that back this up.
        • 10y ago
  • yellowapple 10y ago
    "I wouldn't say Firefox was leading the way or the biggest innovator in the last few years" That's the thing for me. Before Chrome, Firefox was the big innovator (trailing only behind Opera, and even then). Then Chrome happened, Firefox took a bit of a backseat (not as bad as IE or Safari, but enough of one to let Chrome become the big innovator), and Opera became a reskinned Chrome. It'll be interesting to see how Mozilla approaches the next few years. Firefox still offers features that the other major browsers do not (for example, and critically to my own use case, it's the only major browser that supports any semblance of an equivalent to Tree Style Tabs), and the emphasis on an open and standards-compliant web could reinforce the historical reason why practically every user agent under the sun includes the word "Mozilla".
• KingMob 10y ago
  After disabling a couple old add-ons that were blocking Firefox's multiprocess architecture (Electrolysis), Firefox now feels as fast as Chrome for me.
  • offa 10y ago
    What add-ons were those? Just curious, since Firefox feels sort of slow on MacOS for me.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • rhelmer 10y ago
      I find it's easiest to restart with add-ons disabled (under Help) and confirm that add-ons are the problem first. To narrow it down to the add-on(s) causing the problem, disabling all of them under about:addons then re-enabling one at a time is a good approach, although can be time-consuming if you have a lot of add-ons installed. Also - about:performance might give you some clues.
    • Aldo_MX 10y ago
      Just install this add-on to know which ones are incompatible with e10s. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...
    • amlib 10y ago
      Install this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat... And on the add-on screen you will be able to tell which addons are compatible with multiprocess and weather it is enabled or disabled. You may need to change a few extra things for multiprocess to work, like, accessibility features can block it from enabling. (my post is now a bit redundant since I didn't refresh it to look for any new comments)
• edgarvaldes 10y ago
  Maybe the direction taken is not what some users wanted, but Firefox development is not stagnant. In general, it feels that there is little more to offer in the browser space, but that is not only Firefox. ¿What are the big new features (from all vendors) in the last few years?
• m3rc 10y ago
  With the state of internet privacy today it's more important than ever to evangelize about Firefox and Mozilla's efforts.
  • allemagne 10y ago
    That Firefox can remain a modern and relevant browser while at least paying attention to those principles and not being owned by a tech giant is amazing to me. No one entity should provide my phone OS, phone hardware, browser, search history, and internet service. It's very worrying that Google is becoming the best, default, or even a competitive option for all of those things. Hopefully, the dev/privacy niche that Firefox seems to compete well in today will incentivize good decisions on that front in the future. I also hope that the allure of Yahoo/Verizon money and a single-minded fixation on increasing market share won't corrupt Mozilla too much.
• lossolo 10y ago
  I've issues with firefox on linux, a lot of them, it gets dark and unresponsive sometimes without any reason and then just get back 15 sec later to normal state. On one of the sites where there is a lot of text content when I close the tab whole browser gets unresponsive for seconds, on youtube most of the time video get looped in couple of frames while sound is playing normally. I use chrome on linux also, no problems there..
  • chillingeffect 10y ago
    probably memory swapping. on one of my inherited PCs, I recently realized I had been running with only 2 GB for over a year! I get the same black out from the OS (Ubuntu) with massive amounts of swaps seen from vmstat 1.
    • lossolo 10y ago
      Machine that I have this issues on have 8 GB of ram, it's not that.
  • spangry 10y ago
    The unresponsiveness might be memory related, though it's impossible to know for sure. Have you tried altering the 'swappiness' sysctl setting? The default it 60 out of 100, where higher means earlier swapping to disk. Another culprit might be too high dirty page thresholds. There's also the drastic step of deleting your firefox profile folder and starting over... Here's some links that might help: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Swap#Performance_Tuning https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Swap#Performance_Tuning https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sysctl#Virtual_memory https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sysctl#Virtual_memory https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks#Performance https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks#Performa... EDIT: and one more... https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Profile_on_RAM https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Profile_on_RAM
• jwtadvice 10y ago
  Firefox remains one of the browsers I use. I sideload Chrome, Safari and Firefox on my work machine because we work with mTLS with smartcards and honestly none of the browsers work reliably (it's not a very high use case). The biggest difference I notice to my browsing experience is when I switch over to Safari (Webkit). It's not that it's slow - it just renders pages slightly differently, whereas Firefox and Chrome seem to have aligned over the years very well on how to interpret stylesheets. I'm never doing anything intense enough in the browser (besides maybe streaming a single video?) to notice significant performance differences.
• webkike 10y ago
  Firefox is still great, and I actually appreciate their focus on a single useful product.
• shmerl 10y ago
  > And it has been paying more attention to mobile browsing. In late 2015, it finally brought out Firefox for iOS, after years of refusing to do so because Apple requires all iPhone and iPad browsers to use its own Safari engine under the hood. Apple should be legally stopped from doing this monopolistic garbage. > In my experience, Firefox today is still only a meh product. I wouldn't say that, but I do admit that Firefox on Linux is moving pretty slowly. Since it's not the highest priority for Mozilla in general I assume, it feels like it lags behind development wise.
  • chrisan 10y ago
    > Apple should be legally stopped from doing this monopolistic garbage. IANAL but couldn't the MS case be relevant/provide precedent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
    • jahnu 10y ago
      From a legal standpoint Apple don't have a monopoly in the phone market comparable to what Ms had on the desktop.
      • shmerl 10y ago
        It causes enough damage to browsers market however, which shows that their influence is sufficient to hinder competition. This should be a subject to Sherman Act or something similar. But I'm NAL either.
      • disordinary 10y ago
        On the other hand Microsoft wasn't preventing people from installing an alternative browser, Apple is.
        • gnicholas 10y ago
          Apple lets you install alternatives, you just can't set them as default for opening links from other apps.
• DigitalJack 10y ago
  On my mac I avoid chrome and firefox, mainly because the the zoomable interface in safari is so nice. Maybe if I had better eye sight it wouldn't be a big deal, but I find I miss it immediately when I'm using an alternative browser.
  • DavideNL 10y ago
    I assume you are talking about "pinch to zoom" ? Chromium has smooth pinch to zoom also just like Safari. Firefox however, does not. It's basically the 1 reason i stopped using Firefox, zooming (pinch to zoom) absolutely sucks as opposed to Safari/Chromium. Pinch to zoom in Firefox feels like going 20 years back in time...
    • DigitalJack 10y ago
      Is chromium different than chrome?
      • DavideNL 10y ago
        uhh yes, [sarcastic] for one, Chromium has a little less spyware as opposed to Google Chrome :-) [/sarcastic] just google "chrome vs chromium", here's the first hit: http://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what%E2%80%99s-the-difference-between-chromium-and-chrome/ http://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what%E2%80%99s-the-differenc...
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• janwillemb 10y ago
  I'm on Firefox for Android, it works fine in most cases.
• kdamken 10y ago
  It's awfulllllllllll. Doing web dev work for it is a nightmare. There are always weird issues that pop up for it that don't occur on other browsers.
  • pawelk 10y ago
    Firefox is my main development browser on personal laptop (Ubuntu) and Chrome on the PC (Win10) at work. When I develop (HTML, CSS, ES6+babel) on Chrome, then test in Firefox there are some inconsistencies that require minor fixing. The same is true the other way around: develop with Firefox, then some fixes are needed for Chrome. These fixes are usually quite easy, make sense in retrospect and make thigs work in the second browser without breaking the first one. What I find strange, after years of hacking around IE bugs, is that everything usually just works in MS Edge.
  • i80and 10y ago
    Interesting --- my experience is generally that Chrome has odd eccentricities and missing features, while Firefox Just Works. What it boils down to is that a person perceives the browser that they develop on as being "right" and the other browsers as "wrong".
• timcederman 10y ago
  I've stuck with Firefox because it works the way I want it to work and is extremely customizable. I've been doing more front-end development lately though and Chrome and Safari have been a lot nicer, and given the incredible slowness of Firefox, I've been thinking of making the switch. However, the new multithreading engine (Electrolysis) has given it a new lease on life for me.
• cylinder714 10y ago
  Regarding FirefoxOS, Mozilla erred in focusing their efforts on cheap, crappy phones¹ that were only available in places like Spain or India, and not getting first-tier phones into the hands of as many hackers as possible, as quickly as possible. By focusing on low-end phones and not Nexus- or Galaxy-class handsets, they lost sight of the fact that smartphones are aspirational devices. People want the best phones they can get, with high performance and high-resolution screens. They don't care about libre software or the Open Web if the devices on which it runs are perceived as inferior. (Everyone I know uses either an iPhone or a reasonably performant Android phone, and I don't run in wealthy or tech circles much these days.) Look at the runaway success of the iPhone. It wasn't cheap, but because it was clearly a quality device, both regular people and developers clamored for them. (Remember the hue and cry when Apple initially said they wouldn't provide a market for third-party apps?) If Mozilla really wanted to spur interest in FirefoxOS among developers, they should have set up kiosks at every Fry's Electronics in the greater S.F. Bay area (on the doorsteps of Apple, Google, Facebook) to sell decent, unlocked phones directly. People would have lined up to buy them just to hack on them. I would have seriously considered buying one as an alternative to a Nexus phone, if one had been available. 1: Ars Technical eviscerates a $35 FirefoxOS phone: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-3 http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-3
  • filmgirlcw 10y ago
    They could only get carrier support in select countries and that was what was helping pay for development of the platform. And trust me, even if they had had them available for developers in the Bay area, I don't think developers would have cared. The hard truth is the APIs just weren't robust enough to do anything beyond the same HTML5 apps we already saw across Android and iOS, and it ran like dogshit. The main problem with Firefox OS and also Canonical's Ubuntu phone was that they treated the lowend market of certain countries like second or third class citizens, assuming the cheap price would make up for the fact that there were no apps and the performance was terrible. What those companies didn't count on (but frankly should have), was that Android would just get cheaper and cheaper and the those countries would be fine with running two or three year old hardware (especially since apps frequently support old versions), rather than running a second-class OS. I would always ask Mozilla what they would do when Android simply got as cheap, and I never got an answer that was in any way encouraging. And the answer was, they would accept defeat and give up.
• hannob 10y ago
  So someone managed to write an article about the state and future of Firefox - and didn't mention rust a single time? That's quite something.
  • steveklabnik 10y ago
    They did in passing; that's what Quantum is about.
• no_gravity 10y ago
  My Firefox wishlist: 1) Make background tabs completely frozen by default. No intelligent guessing. Simply assign zero CPU time to them. But give the user an easy to use switch to toggle the activity of a tab. So I can activate background tabs and freeze foreground tabs just as I like. 2) One process per tab. Even with e10s, all javascript in all tabs runs on a single core. So at the moment, using Firefox on an 8 core computer is like using Chromium on a single core machine. 3) Make the url bar functional immediately on startup. Right now, every time I start Firefox, it takes several seconds until I can start typing the url I want to go to. In Chromium, I can start typing right away. 4) Don't set a bookmark every time I press CTRL+d. Only set it after I clicked "done" in the bookmark dialog that pops up on CTRL+d.
  • bgirard 10y ago
    RE 2: Firefox uses a lot of threads for image decoding, GC, compositing, running the UI. So it's nothing like running on a single core machine. Threads != processes.
  • fabrice_d 10y ago
    For 2), go to about:config and search for the "dom.ipc.processCount" preferences. Set it to the number of cores you wish and enjoy.
    • no_gravity 10y ago
      Interesting. I am trying it out right now.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • krzyk 10y ago
    For 2), you would get what Chrome has - memory hungry browser. I tried using it for a month, but for my workflow (>100 tabs open) it ate my whole memory.
  • mintplant 10y ago
    > 2) One process per tab. Even with e10s, all javascript in all tabs runs on a single core. So at the moment, using Firefox on an 8 core computer is like using Chromium on a single core machine. Multiple content processes (e10s-multi) is in the works, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_processes https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_proce...
• chrissnell 10y ago
  I'm calling it today: 2017 will be the year of the Firefox come-back. I recently started using it again after switching to Chrome when Chrome was initially released in beta. I'm more of a second-wave of adopters--not among the very first but before the masses jump on board. I predict that tech-savvy business users will start jumping back later this year and that by 2018, we'll start to see non-technical people (like my parents and in-laws) start to use it as family and friends begin to recommend it. Why? Battery life and speed. Chrome is just a mess these days. Absolutely terrible on laptops.
  • baby 10y ago
    This plus Firefox has Tree Style Tabs, which is the killer plugin Chrome doesn't have.
    • hbt 10y ago
      checkout "tabs outliner" on chrome.
      • baby 10y ago
        I've tried it and it's just so clumsy I couldn't really use it.
    • tapoxi 10y ago
      I've been using Mozilla's own Tab Center, which looks a bit nicer than TST and is e10s friendly: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center I hope they just make it part of the standard release.
      • baby 10y ago
        no nested tabs :/ it looks like a toy plugin compared to TST
      • flukus 10y ago
        I've been pretty happy with Tab Center too. Tab handling is the one thing a browser has to nail for me and yet so many (including base firefox) do such a poor job of it.
• gdulli 10y ago
  When Firefox started to forbid unsigned extensions it was a dealbreaker and I switched to Pale Moon. I've been happier with it. I think there's a pattern where products first get into a great state for power users/hackers but then pivot to evolve to be the lowest common denominator for mass adoption.
  • sp332 10y ago
    They are very protective of the Firefox trademark. They don't even put it on their own nightly builds. If you want to sideload unsigned extensions, there are first-party unbranded builds that let you do that. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded_Builds https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...
  • cpeterso 10y ago
    What are the unsigned extensions that you would like to use? Developers can automate the signing of the extensions, using a Mozilla service, that doesn't require the extensions be public on addons.mozilla.org.
    • acemarke 10y ago
      My personal daily workflow is heavily dependent on the old Pocket addon. That addon was deprecated a long time ago, I think even before Mozilla tried to integrate Pocket into FF. I think what I'm actually using now is a tweaked version of the addon that bumped some of the compat flag and signed it (per http://hemenkapadia.blogspot.com/2015/12/get-old-pocket-experience-on-firefox.html http://hemenkapadia.blogspot.com/2015/12/get-old-pocket-expe... ). Because of that, I'm actually way behind on the FF update curve, and holding out as long as I can. (If anyone has a pointer to an equivalent modern addon, I'd be interested.) For that matter, I'm also a die-hard TreeStyleTabs user, and I'm still not clear on whether that's going to work properly as things go forward.
      • hendersoon 10y ago
        I use a simple bookmarklet to add to pocket in Firefox. No extension needed at all! https://pastebin.mozilla.org/8969368 https://pastebin.mozilla.org/8969368
• HemanHeartYou 10y ago
  I favor Firefox on mobile due to the excellent add on support. I favor Chrome on desktop when doing webdev.
• simula67 10y ago
  I used to use Firefox, but now I use Chrome. This means I can't use DownThemAll. I can't use Tab Wheel Scroll. On Windows I use an AutoHotkey script to simulate Tab Wheel Scroll. On Linux, it seems to work somehow. On Mac I have learned to live without it. On my phone, I get bombarded with useless ads all the time on Chrome since it has no uBlock. I have learned to live without it. Firefox seems to be better than Chrome at recognizing password fields for 'Save Password' feature. I have learned to live without it in Chrome. Why ? Firefox still feels slower in loading and showing web pages. It seems to freeze up occasionally. The new tab opening and scrolls have occasional jitters, sometimes sufficient to bring me out of my "flow". Firefox mobile is a disaster. It sometimes loads desktop versions on some sites. Once it failed to load a favorite site of mine completely, due to uBlock ( that has never happened on the desktop, on any browser ) I want to use Firefox, I do. But, I spend an extra-ordinary amount of my time on my browser. Only the best browser is 'good enough' for me
  • akjainaj 10y ago
    >Why ? Firefox still feels slower in loading and showing web pages. It seems to freeze up occasionally. The new tab opening and scrolls have occasional jitters, sometimes sufficient to bring me out of my "flow". And what's even better if you point that out here they'll come with their completely artificial benchmarks to show you how Firefox is x1337 faster than the rest of browsers. Only that it isn't. And what really worries me is that they actually believe what they say, which would mean they are refusing to work on making Firefox faster, because they think Firefox is fast already.
    • _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
      Funny thing, this could be -exactly- posted as a comment in the Scala to Go thread, where Scala developers insists it got so much faster, but "Only that it isn't." These two threads converging here feels like a collision of parallel universes :-)
    • Ar-Curunir 10y ago
      Yes, because things like Electrolysis and Servo and Project Quantum are all imaginary...
• imaginenore 10y ago
  I know why I personally stopped using FF, and switched to Chrome. Because FF has been ridiculously slow compared to Chrome. Because FF crashed when one tab crashed. Because I didn't care about higher RAM usage - RAM is cheap. Because I used so many Google services, and Chrome is (obviously) better integrated. Because Google's update cycle has been faster. So even if FF fixed all these issues (it didn't), the only argument that remains is privacy. And I don't care. I just don't give out the information that I want private.
• brandon272 10y ago
  I have used Chrome since it's inception. Before that I used Firefox. After feeling some nostalgia recently and having some romantic feelings about using and supporting OSS, I decided to install Firefox (on MacOS) and give it a try as my primary browser again. I had three primary complaints that caused me to go back to Chrome after a couple days: - The UI feels old and clunky compared to Chrome, although this is likely just a personal preference issue for me. - Performance felt lacking. Pages seemed to take longer to render. The browser UI itself felt slower. - Stability. On a few occasions within a couple day period, it seemed like one tab would lock up the entire browser. Firefox would pop up a vague message telling me that "one of your tabs" is causing an issue (not telling me which one) and then I would need to randomly close tabs to try and get things working properly again. This seems insane and archaic and is not something I ever deal with on Chrome.
  • djsumdog 10y ago
    Are you using the Firefox with e10 enabled (go to about:support and look for "Multi-Processor Windows"). That makes a substantial difference in performance!
    • brandon272 10y ago
      Yes, e10 is enabled. :)
  • cygned 10y ago
    Oh, the Firefox UI for macOS is horrible. The Developer version looks way better.
    • cpeterso 10y ago
      The compact theme from Firefox Developer Edition is coming to the Firefox release channel in 53 or so. The new compact theme will be optional and available in both dark and light versions.
  • zamalek 10y ago
    Agree entirely. > The UI feels old and clunky compared to Chrome Firefox needs to adopt the omnibar, yesterday. The plugin works well enough, but simply isn't as well-rounded as the Chrome omnibar for reasons that are hard to nail down. > Performance felt lacking. Pages seemed to take longer to render. The browser UI itself felt slower. Agreed. This is the main reason that I switched to Chrome late last year (after painfully using FF for two years). I'll probably only have another look at FF when Servo drops.
• vegabook 10y ago
  It's difficult for browser makers to differentiate themselves due to web standards. Thus it becomes a money-takes-all game where the diminishing returns on performance investment can be afforded only by the richest (Chrome). Maybe Mozilla should differentiate itself in another way - politically? It already fired Eich on progressive grounds. Why not go all in and become the explicitly-progressive browser? See women's march/trump protests for market share potential. Nurture add-ins that do stuff that stock-price obsessed corporations are too scared to do. Skate to where the puck is going....the anti-capitalist browser.... supporting things that corpos can't. As an aside, as a Linux-all-day dev I use Firefox almost exclusively. I can do Chrome, but something stops me. One of those things is the idea that we need browser diversity. Also chrome just isn't "better enough" than Firefox for me - in fact I find the difference very marginal now.
• Touche 10y ago
  I'm not sure it's true that Mozilla has rebounded. Only a few years ago it used to be a neck and neck race between Chrome and Firefox to see how quickly new browser features get developed. Now it seems that Chrome has pulled far ahead, and Firefox is often in 3rd place. I can't think of too many recent features that FF has been a leader on. SW kinda, I guess, but that's it. Often either Edge or Safari is also faster to adopt (Safari with web components, for example), depending on the feature.
  • scholia 10y ago
    Chrome gets free advertising on the world's most valuable website where you can't buy advertising for any price: the Google Search home page. Google also spends tons of money paying companies to stealth-install Chrome when users think they're installing something else from, for example, Adobe. I'm not saying Chrome is a bad browser but it sure as heck ain't a level playing field....
    • Touche 10y ago
      Very true, and it was just as true a few years ago when Firefox was able to keep pace. So I think it's fair to say they are slipping.
      • scholia 10y ago
        Firefox was out four or five years before Chrome appeared. When it started, it was competing against an aging IE6. I don't think it has never kept pace with Chrome. Or if so, not for very long. Even if the products had been equally good, which they weren't, Google just has far more market power.
        • Touche 10y ago
          It kept pace with Chrome up until a few years ago, probably around the time that Eich left. Not saying that's causal, I don't know if it is.
    • cpeterso 10y ago
• tbrock 10y ago
  I'm glad we are finally coming to terms with the fact that Firefox has been a second tier browser since Chrome was released. Everyone has love and good will for Mozilla and Firefox because Firefox showed the world what a browser and the web could be if designed correctly to some open standard. However, the developer tools, JS performance, and overall browser tech have languished. So while we all are cheering for them to catch up, we do it sadly from a Chrome. Debugging a modern SPA on Firefox is painful. What should have been an "oh crap, we need to up our game" moment for them was a whoosh just like the iPhone reveal was for Balmer.
  • ZenoArrow 10y ago
    >"overall browser tech have languished" Au contraire... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u0hYIRQRiws https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u0hYIRQRiws https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum
  • jamesgeck0 10y ago
    Firefox wasn't a second-tier browser immediately after the Chrome release, though. In my anecdotical experience, Firefox seemed faster, was more stable, and used less memory than Chrome at the time. Firebug was also easier to use than Chrome's dev tools. At the time. It's a much different story today.
• scholia 10y ago
  What’s up with Mossberg, the pundit that time forgot? Until about four years ago, he used to get all these exclusives based on his position at the Wall Street Journal. But those days seem long ago. Mossberg is hardly discussed today, and his page views have cratered... ;-)
• ProfessorLayton 10y ago
  Firefox really needs to get it together. I use Chrome for work, Firefox for my personal gmail, and Safari for battery-conscious use. Firefox is the browser I have to restart the most frequently, because otherwise it slows to a crawl, or hogs so much memory (Despite only having 1-2 open tabs) that I'm constantly paging on my MBP with 16GB of ram. There's also little UI quirks, such as not being able to natively look up a word in OSX dictionary, that make browsing less pleasant.
  • nachtigall 10y ago
    Did you try to "refresh"? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227658
    • Delfofthebla 10y ago
      Long time Firefox user here. I use a metric shit-ton of addons, and customize everything drastically. "Refreshing" is a massive pain in the ass, as re-configuring everything while also maintaining the "clean settings" is just a difficult combination. Despite this, I've completely wiped out both my settings and firefox install on several occasions in an attempt to keep things stable. It doesn't help. I'm aware that my addons are likely a big contributor to the memory-hogging and eventual crashes, but if I didn't want to use these addons, I'd just use fucking chrome. The ENTIRE point of Firefox is for the customizability. Dropping addons to improve stability just isn't an option for me.
      • nachtigall 10y ago
        about:performance gives no insights? It could be just one add-on that spoils it all, unfortunately.
        • Aldo_MX 10y ago
          A thousand thanks for this, I didn't even know this existed.
        • 10y ago
• nachtigall 10y ago
  I think the concept of "Context Graph" in the sense of crowd-sourced indexing and recommendation system might the best approach to taggle Google search - in the long run. We all parse (our browser) the web all time, this could be a basis for site recommendation (and search).
• guelo 10y ago
  On Android Firefox is much faster than Chrome because of uBlock. I don't understand why it's not more popular there. On the other hand, Mozilla has always been reluctant to fully embrace ad blocking, there's no reason they couldn't have a built-in ad blocker and tout that loudly in their marketing. Which is probably part of the raison d'etre for Brave.
  • DanCarvajal 10y ago
    I was curious and installed Firefox on android with adblockers and everything on my Pixel XL. I was decidedly underwhelmed. It's performance was far below my expectations.
    • mintplant 10y ago
      Maybe try Firefox Beta, I find it faster than the current release version of Firefox for Android and just as stable.
• _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  Using Firefox since the beginning, with year long deviations to Chrome and Opera, I'm a hostage now. Firefox is slow, memory consuming to the point I hate to use it. But it has addons for good vertical tree tabs and the Chrome plugins are all way inferior. And I just can't go back to horizontal tabs.
• b1gtuna 10y ago
  There were days when Firefox was my go-to browser. It was years ago. Right now Chrome is my #1 choice for daily driver. Opera seems to be doing pretty interesting stuff with Neon, so I keep an eye out for it and actually use it from time to time. Heck, I even don't mind using the Edge browser at work just because I actually really like the Microsoft Windows 10. Now, Mozilla/Firefox has faltered in too many product deliveries in the past 5 years (I am mostly disappointed in their Firefox OS effort) while neglecting the browser. So the brand name no longer inspires me, whether or not the browser itself is good.
• Corrado 10y ago
  I think one thing they could focus on is adding new security features (like FIDO U2F) or making TLS client certs usable by normal humans. This would be a great step forward and could drive adoption by security conscious users.
  • hellcow 10y ago
    I begrudgingly left Firefox for Chrome because Chrome supports U2F and Firefox doesn't. It's just too much of a pain to log into my U2F-protected accounts on Firefox. I even tried the U2F Firefox extension, but that doesn't work on all websites (some of which I need).
• soVeryTired 10y ago
  I honestly don't notice the difference between chrome and firefox. What do I want my browser to do? Block ads and stay out of my way. Both browsers do that just fine.
• niftich 10y ago
  Despite failing at execution (let's run gobs of JS on barebones, circa ~2008-equivalent hardware), the Firefox OS project brought light to the problem that a mobile OS increasingly a portal to the Web and a parallel set of proprietary services. Both the Free Software Foundation [1] and the EFF [2] consider mobile OS as a crucial frontier. It's little comfort for desktop-users to be able to dodge Google's browser logged into Google's services and serving Google ads, or Microsoft's browser on Microsoft's OS-and-apps-as-a-Service which surfaces Microsoft ads, when one can only meaningfully avoid it on mobile by switching to the premium devices offered by Apple, who runs an equivalent walled ecosystem, with the sole exception of not monetizing your browsing habits and content. That being said, it's a hard problem, and if Firefox the Desktop Browser sinks into irrelevance the battle will be completely lost. On the desktop, Firefox faces mounting challenges from having to appeal to distinct demographics [3][4] who have conflicting needs and wants, and having to simultaneously compete and cooperate [5][6][7][8] with Google, an entity that uses its position in controlling both the client and the server to rapidly further its goals and advance the Web in a way that promotes their interest [9][10][11][12][13]. [1] http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/ http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/ [2] https://www.eff.org/mobile-devices https://www.eff.org/mobile-devices [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425956 [4] https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2013/08/firefox-user-types-in-north-america/ https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2013/08/firefox-user-types-in-no... [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12338170#12338445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12338170#12338445 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12042767#12044962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12042767#12044962 [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13390846#13392833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13390846#13392833 [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12131403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12131403 [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12296616#12299230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12296616#12299230 [10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453646#12454524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453646#12454524 [11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13383006#13386719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13383006#13386719 [12] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12174503#12175561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12174503#12175561 [13] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493
• pmontra 10y ago
  A suggestion for FF Android (no idea of what they can do on ios) Go to this page http://pastebin.com/FFSQUML9 http://pastebin.com/FFSQUML9 (on HN now) with FF. Zoom. See what happens to the text. Go there with Opera. Much much better. Tldr: text reflow. And it's not even that useful there. Go to http://darkf.github.io/posts/problems-i-have-with-python.html http://darkf.github.io/posts/problems-i-have-with-python.htm... also on HN now and repeat. You can't read it with any browser but Opera. My suggestion: implement text reflow and some people will start using it and tell to friends.
  • moosingin3space 10y ago
    FF Mobile has text reflow in Reader Mode, which I think is an acceptable tradeoff. Next step: make Reader Mode's content detection better.
    • pmontra 10y ago
      I never thought about reader mode, maybe because I don't use it on the desktop. I checked it and it works on the second link. For some reason its icon doesn't show on the pastebin page. I'll give it a try systematically. Thanks! Next suggestion: save for offline, another feature from Opera.
      • funnyfacts365 10y ago
        On pages where the reader mode ícone doesn't show you can try prefixing the URL in the address bar with about:reader?url= and it will probably work ;)
        • pmontra 10y ago
          No way, at least not on about:reader?url=http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=13083 http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=13083 Failed to load (or something). And the Url field displays an Android icon instead of reader mode. I tap the icon and it just reloads the page. I wonder what it's for? I wish I'd be able to write an Open with Opera extension.
• taf2 10y ago
  The value of a diverse browser rendering engine market only existed when we had dominate closed source browser IE6. Those days are behind us. Focusing on a common shared browser platform would benefit the internet and every business on the web platform. Google is an excellent leader in this space because their revenue and expense is directly tied to the quality of the browser platform. Firefox, as well as Microsoft would help everyone if we all got behind a single open source browser engine. I believe blink is the best and the architecture underlying Chrome is the best. Opera has shown you can innovate on the browser UI while still providing excellent content rendering. I get there is value in competition, I just don't see a lot of value in creating competing engines. Even within Mozilla they are innovating on the rendering engine and that is great news - why shouldn't Google and MS consider this engine as the next engine to power the web... I believe Mozilla's resources would be better served if they focused on UX as Opera has done. I also believe the same is true of Microsoft. Why compete on browser engines when we can make the same engine better. It's in Google interest as well as many others. It's the same model that works for Linux and why so many companies contribute to Linux is to improve their own capabilities and bottom lines. (awaiting the downvotes - but would love to have a discussion ;))
• _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  Just like Wikimedia they have been kidnapped by political activist (e.g. for a free web etc.) I'm not saying this isn't important, but they confused this to be their core mission and forgot where the money really is coming from. Go to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ now and see where the browser ranks on that page. Political activism (free internet) is first. "Introducing Our New Mozilla Identity." takes the second most screen estate. Scrolling two pages down there is Firefox. If it's like many companies, then the people who made these decisions and are responsible for the sad state have already moved on. (I'm currently a Firefox user and have been a user since the Netscape/Mosaic days with some Chrome usage over the years)
  • pestaa 10y ago
    It's not unexpected that a political view is formed around a project once it outgrows the state of "only software or content". Though it's a first time I hear about their abuse. Where can I learn more about the impact of activist agenda on these two projects?
    • _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
      1. The impact on Wikipedia is widely discussed: Huge donation drives with only the smallest amount of money going to Wikipedia development and evolution. Wikipedia could be much much more if the money would have been spend on Wikipedia instead of a myriad of other things. 2. The impact to Firefox: Slow browser that is way behind Chrome concerning features, or as in numbers: Lost the leading position in browser market share with no plan to regain the leading position again.
  • kbrosnan 10y ago
    Mozilla is a non-profit. Mozilla has been publicly committed to an open and free internet since 2007 when the Mozilla Manifesto was introduced. Here is the earliest version captured by Archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20080812000547/http://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto https://web.archive.org/web/20080812000547/http://www.mozill... There is a download button on the upper right corner of the page.
• spraak 10y ago
  I've been a user of Firefox for mobile since I first got a 'smartphone'. Just last night I reluctantly installed Chrome as Firefox kept crashing on my new favorite note taking app (dynalist.io if you're curious). While I know that the app should fix their code, so many modern apps seem to be almost entirely focused on developing for Chrome and don't care about Firefox, so it was the 'last straw' so to speak. I'd love to keep using Firefox, but it was just getting in the way of my day to day too much.
• apatters 10y ago
  Great to see Mozilla backing off from quixotic tasks like building a phone OS but I still feel like they don't understand what we need them for. They are the organization that we need to keep the client side of the Internet free and open. Here's what that will take: - Make Firefox the best browser in the world at the fundamentals: speed, stability, standards support. - Become the free, open, OS agnostic app platform of choice: don't cede this frontier to Chrome and Electron. Make the open web platform the best platform for more and more apps. (MAYBE take a shot at a phone OS after the Firefox App ecosystem rivals Android and iOS.) - Following from the previous bullet, quit wasting resources on browser UX experiments - browser UX matters less every year as web apps get freed from the browser. - Be the absolute gold standard in user privacy and freedom - the stuff Brave is doing is the trail Mozilla was supposed to blaze. - Invest in Thunderbird again and fix the client side of email - because messaging is just as important as the web and we are losing to closed competitors hard and fast there. Mozilla's supposed to be our champion of an open web client platform. For too long they've just been a browser in decline and a bunch of random side projects. Cleaning up the browser is a good start but we need more. From a passionate Firefox user (even though Chrome runs faster on Linux).
  • kbd 10y ago
    > Invest in Thunderbird again and fix the client side of email - because messaging is just as important as the web and we are losing to closed competitors hard and fast there. I was right with you until Thunderbird. I look at Thunderbird as one of Mozilla's many distractions. We don't need another open source desktop email client at the expense of the browser. So long as we have a secure browser, there are others who can provide secure email services with a web client.
    • pjmlp 10y ago
      > web client. No thanks. I will keep using Thunderbird as long as I can.
      • kbd 10y ago
        To each their own. The point remains that this is not a necessary project for Mozilla to take on, nor was it a good use of resources for them.
• UweSchmidt 10y ago
  It is very important to use Firefox: For Microsoft, Apple or Google their "free" browser MUST eventually be a pawn in their corporate strategy. It's one thing to use a service from a company, but conceding this crucial puzzle piece to any one company? I don't know about that. Mozilla takes money from Google and others, but ultimately depends 100% on a free internet. One could argue which browser is a little ahead in any area, and which one needs "revitalization", to use a word from the article, but Firefox would have to seriously fall behind before I would switch browsers. Do you think ad-blockers would be a thing if it was between Chrome, Safari and IE? A lot depends on a single number: Firefox' market share.
  • blencdr 10y ago
    I agree with you. Have confidence in a international company whose main revenue is internet advertisement is not the best way to grantee people to have the Internet freedom. Browsing with a Google browser make me feel like riding an Exxon car.
    • cpeterso 10y ago
      How many people would still use Chrome if Google rebranded it as "DoubleClick Chrome"? :)
      • etherealG 10y ago
        That's genius, you can do the same for any Google service and double check your own response. :)
  • PKop 10y ago
    Content blockers would exist for Safari, yes. Apple doesn't depend on ad revenue or tracking and therefore this differentiates them from Google. Seeing as Firefox has terrible market share on iOS, and Apple still offered Content blocking... I think it's clear Firefox has no impact on the matter.
  • tornadoboy55 10y ago
    For most people (at least on Macbooks) the logic is this: this extension isn't on Safari.. -> Chrome. Hey, my battery life is cut in half -> Firefox. Battery life still cut in half, but now scrolling sucks too.. -> Safari with substitute extension
• bryanlarsen 10y ago
  Pretty much everybody I know using Android has switched to Firefox so that they can use plugins, primarily ad blockers.
  • hendersoon 10y ago
    I use Adaway [1] on rooted Android, and set my DNS to Adguard's servers [2] without root. This takes cares of all the ads. Adblocking aside, Chrome is far superior to Firefox on Android. You do unfortunately lose the ability to whitelist sites you want to support with Adguard DNS, and addons like uBlock offer much more granular control. But they both work well enough. [1] https://adaway.org/ https://adaway.org/ [2] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html
    • bryanlarsen 10y ago
      "Chrome is far superior to Firefox on Android." Not my experience. I'm happy I switched, I find Firefox to be faster and it has several features I like, like the ability to stay in your current app when clicking on links.
• emodendroket 10y ago
  I wish the Mozilla Foundation would lavish attention to Thunderbird, which remains a best-in-class product despite the reduced attention.
• hbt 10y ago
  Firefox is trying to be chrome where as chrome is leading the way. Chrome dev tools are superior to firefox where I remember a time nothing could compete with firebug. The chrome extension API is now better than the upcoming "Web extensions" which removes extensions access to XUL and dumbs down the API to make it compatible with chrome extensions. They've been trying to replicate the chrome sandbox for years and it still hasn't made it to production. It goes on and on. They are catching up and doing it poorly, not leading nor innovating.
  • lucb1e 10y ago
    > Firefox is trying to be chrome where as chrome is leading the way. Firefox also does stuff that Chrome doesn't. I like having about:config, I like having some things from Test Drive, and a bunch of other things. But let's not make this a "which is better" thread. Let's assume that Chrome is indeed leading the way. I'm quite okay with that. Firefox is still very clearly ahead of MSIE and Safari -- and even if it wasn't! Even if it was the worst popular browser. Someone has to be last, right? If it is being maintained and kept current (and it definitely is), I'd still use Firefox for not being tied to some big corp. That's what it's really about for me: independence, open source, free (as in freedom).
    • hbt 10y ago
      chromium is open source and you can create a google account and add each API you want. There are no ties to big corp unless you want to. You don't get features from giant cluster of computers for free. When firefox implements voice recognition, translation etc., I will look forward to how they decide to monetize it. Regarding "about:config", that's a great feature. Let's see if it still exists in the future versions. After all, wouldn't it confuse the mainstream masses they are so desperate to appeal to? When they start caring about power users again, I will switch. Until then, they can keep dumbing it down til it's garbage.
      • ngokevin 10y ago
        Firefox has speech recognition.
• 007lva 10y ago
  As a web developer I find Firefox(Developer Edition) more useful, I mean sometimes I see Chrome/Chromium fix some HTML/CSS "bugs" automatically, but Firefox seems stricter and force me to catch bugs earlier. Also is easy to install on Linux unlike Chrome Canary that still doesn't support it.
• twblalock 10y ago
  I understand that Mozilla changed focus in 2013, but the problems started before then. According to all of the browser usage share data I've seen, Firefox's share began to decline around the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011, about two years before Mozilla shifted focus to Firefox OS. So, what went wrong between 2011 and 2013, when Mozilla was still focused on the Firefox product but its market share declined from more than 30% of the market to less than 20%? That's what really went wrong. The change of focus made a bad situation worse.
  • pizzapill 10y ago
    I remember that Google started to push Chrome on people with massive amounts of money. The paid for downloads, ads etc. I think thats what brought most people over from Firefox and/or Internet Explorer.
• c0ffe 10y ago
  Firefox OS development as an alternative to Android AOSP would not be good for the community? I mean, in the desktop world, we have many Linux distributions, BSD derivates, many desktop environments, etc. May Firefox OS fit some use case that Android could not?
• hubert123 10y ago
  I have known on day 1 of using Chrome that it was superior and I switched completely the next day without ever looking back. I assumed that Firefox would do everything in its power to catch up as soon as possible, both GUI wise and in general feel. 9 years later still nothing. Quite a surprise.
• lstroud 10y ago
  They allowed politics to interfere with progress and ran off Brendan Eich.
• lstroud 10y ago
  They allowed politics to interfere with progress and ran off Brendan Eich.
• hendersoon 10y ago
  I never switched from Firefox to Chrome, even though Chrome was (and is) very clearly superior in _almost_ every way-- more secure, faster, and a superior UI. Unfortunately, Chrome mouse gesture addons are all terrible, none work perfectly, all have inconsistent performance, and most are spyware to boot! Firefox has Firegestures, the gold standard. With 20 years of muscle memory mouse gestures are non-negotiable for me. So, I stuck with Firefox.
• sli 10y ago
  I've been a die hard Firefox user since Phoenix was released, and after a (relatively) brief stint with Chrome, I switched back after a series of Chrome releases would randomly up and refuse to load websites while Firefox worked fine (tested frequently, using all three Chrome release channels). I see a lot of people around the internet (not here, HN users are much better about this kinda thing) say things like "Firefox just keeps getting worse" but not once is that statement ever qualified. It almost seems like Firefox's slow decline in use is tied in some small way to this memetic catchphrase. "Firefox just keeps getting worse." I simply don't believe that most folks are even capable of qualifying that statement, and a good bit likely don't have the technical qualifications to even gather supporting arguments for it. If that sounds a bit familiar... It's almost identical to what is said by people that clearly believe that Java and the JVM are the same thing, and will rag on the JVM as Java, the former or which is definitely not the problem. There's even at least one troll account on Reddit that is heavily dedicated to screaming about non-Java JVM languages, both on Reddit and on Medium, including posting their own Medium articles in JVM language subreddits (usually /r/scala). It's a bit surreal, honestly. I assume there's at least one similar account, but for Firefox. I don't visit browser-centric discussion boards or subreddits, though, so I can't say for sure, and won't. I suppose I don't have much of value to contribute to this thread, I apologize for that. I just felt like sharing some casual observations of mine.
• woranl 10y ago
  Firefox failed to innovate and alienate developers. Refusing to implement File System API is a perfect example.
• jay_kyburz 10y ago
  I would be interested to know, of those people that love Firefox, how many are on Windows and how many on OSX. I love firefox on Windows, and really don't like the font rendering of Chrome on standard DPI screen. Firefox feels snappy and responsive. On my Mac the opposite is true. Firefox feels significantly slower, and the font rendering is horrible, especially light text on dark backgrounds.
• adl 10y ago
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• adl 10y ago
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• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• beezischillin 10y ago
  Reading this makes me so happy. I abandoned FF shortly after Chrome became popular due to severe performance issues, haven't looked back since. I've gotten into web development professionally since and Firefox always seemed to be that block IE used to be, it just always rendered random stuff differently than every other browser... I switched from Chrome to Safari when I switched to macOS and I'm relatively happy with it, even though it is not as fast, but recent trends have me so worried about the future. With all the BS going on at Google, I have kinda began not to trust companies who develop browsers with closed source to keep their customers' interests in line with their own goals. Now I appreciate Firefox a lot more, I have great respect for it. If these improvements turn out to be completely accurate and FF can at least approximate Chrome on performance, I would happily switch back and stay with Mozilla.
• homulilly 10y ago
  Firefox still suffers from a lot of minor quality of life issues compared to other browsers, I don't know if it's neglect or weird internal politics but they add up to making firefox less attractive than the competition. A few off the top of my head: * Firefox doesn't respect Windows 10's titlebar accent colors * No option to set a default zoom level for web pages * Firefox for android ignores intent filters The first two have addon or userstyle workarounds which makes it even more baffling that they have remain unsolved issues for years.
  • klez 10y ago
    I know it sound condescending and all, but have you tried opening a bug about these issues? They seem very clear cut and actionable.
    • homulilly 10y ago
      They all already have bug reports that have either been open for multiple years or were closed without actually fixing the issue which is why I suspect this may be a problem with internal politics or misguided design philosophy.
• ReganKoopmans 10y ago
  I'm personally extremely excited for Servo, the new Mozilla browser experiment/project.
• ReganKoopmans 10y ago
  I'm personally extremely excited for Servo, the new Mozilla browser experiment/project.
• jhoechtl 10y ago
  Many seem not to be aware of https://testpilot.firefox.com/ https://testpilot.firefox.com/