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> Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. Mozilla have put a tremendous amount of effort into the "ugly on

by flukus 8y ago

> Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. Mozilla have put a tremendous amount of effort into the "ugly on every platform" cross platform tools over the years, from XUL to whatever the current one is. Developing a native UI for each platform would have been less effort and given much better results than continuing with this tried and failed approach. Their latest attempt at theme support is just laughable and was very obviously not QA'd. In text areas I get the dark background theme from my desktop and the dark text foreground from the website css and it's made firefox unusable for me. This is on top of things like their recent breakages to extensions so things that used to work (vertical tabs) still don't. And this only broke so they could go multi-threaded and then quickly had to add throttles so random sites couldn't hog every core. But it seems mozilla are more concerned with re-writing things in rust, tying users into various web services and god knows what other side projects while they continue to avoid improving their core product. I'd love to see firefox regain market share, we need an open source browser that's not controlled by a spyware company, but on their current trajectory firefox will dissapear into history and mozilla themselves will be the primary cause.

pcwalton 8y ago
Every single rewrite of a Gecko component in Rust has been accompanied with architectural improvements, most notably Stylo. Nobody is rewriting things just because Rust.
- flukus 8y ago
  And those architectural improvements broke things that worked for me previously, from my point of view they aren't improvements at all. I'm a user, we should I care that they are making architectural improvements while they rewrite things in a different language when there are so many obvious issues preventing me from using it? At this rate they will be rewriting it for no one.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    I'm sorry you had a bad experience. But architectural improvements are done to improve performance and stability. I can't think of a single Rust component that shipped without extensive performance measurement to demonstrate improvements in the important metrics that users care about.
    - flukus 8y ago
      > demonstrate improvements in the important metrics that users care about And yet market share is plummeting, doesn't that indicated that your metrics for what users care about are completely wrong? It's hardly me alone having this experience, most firefox users had there extensions break for no visible benefit. Anyone with the non-default ubuntu theme has the same issue with text boxes, which indicates a complete lack of QA. I also have a 15 year long emotional attachment to firefox and a desire to see it succeed, if you can't convince me these changes are for the better then good luck with the rest of the world.
      - fabrice_d 8y ago
        Unfortunately market share is more about being about to efficiently distribute your product than just the quality of said product. Mozilla is suffering from not having its own platform - they could have done so by keeping FirefoxOS alive and use the growing success of KaiOS today. Looks like they are not ready to come back because... reasons.
        jabl 8y ago
        FirefoxOS never had a snowball's chance in hell against Android and iOS. I wish it were otherwise, but it's not, and never was. But yes, I agree that FF market share problems are not due to problems with the product itself.
        ittgsv 8y ago
        Firefox OS was a terrible idea. Gecko is horribly slow as it is, and they put it on low-end, under-powered mobile phones. As it was expected, using it for a few minutes made you want to hang yourself. I know they met with bosses from telecos, I wonder what faces they made when they showed them how the mobile behaved.
littlestymaar 8y ago
> This is on top of things like their recent breakages to extensions so things that used to work (vertical tabs) still don't. The breakage in question is more than one year old now, and most things has been restored since then (including vertical tabs).
- flukus 8y ago
  Has it? I've got a vertical tab extension that was made not long after but the tab bar along the top is still there. It broke something that worked great for the better part of a decade.

by flukus 8y ago

pcwalton 8y ago

Every single rewrite of a Gecko component in Rust has been accompanied with architectural improvements, most notably Stylo. Nobody is rewriting things just because Rust.

flukus 8y ago
And those architectural improvements broke things that worked for me previously, from my point of view they aren't improvements at all. I'm a user, we should I care that they are making architectural improvements while they rewrite things in a different language when there are so many obvious issues preventing me from using it? At this rate they will be rewriting it for no one.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  I'm sorry you had a bad experience. But architectural improvements are done to improve performance and stability. I can't think of a single Rust component that shipped without extensive performance measurement to demonstrate improvements in the important metrics that users care about.
  - flukus 8y ago
    > demonstrate improvements in the important metrics that users care about And yet market share is plummeting, doesn't that indicated that your metrics for what users care about are completely wrong? It's hardly me alone having this experience, most firefox users had there extensions break for no visible benefit. Anyone with the non-default ubuntu theme has the same issue with text boxes, which indicates a complete lack of QA. I also have a 15 year long emotional attachment to firefox and a desire to see it succeed, if you can't convince me these changes are for the better then good luck with the rest of the world.
    - fabrice_d 8y ago
      Unfortunately market share is more about being about to efficiently distribute your product than just the quality of said product. Mozilla is suffering from not having its own platform - they could have done so by keeping FirefoxOS alive and use the growing success of KaiOS today. Looks like they are not ready to come back because... reasons.
      - jabl 8y ago
        FirefoxOS never had a snowball's chance in hell against Android and iOS. I wish it were otherwise, but it's not, and never was. But yes, I agree that FF market share problems are not due to problems with the product itself.
        ittgsv 8y ago
        Firefox OS was a terrible idea. Gecko is horribly slow as it is, and they put it on low-end, under-powered mobile phones. As it was expected, using it for a few minutes made you want to hang yourself. I know they met with bosses from telecos, I wonder what faces they made when they showed them how the mobile behaved.

littlestymaar 8y ago

> This is on top of things like their recent breakages to extensions so things that used to work (vertical tabs) still don't. The breakage in question is more than one year old now, and most things has been restored since then (including vertical tabs).

flukus 8y ago
Has it? I've got a vertical tab extension that was made not long after but the tab bar along the top is still there. It broke something that worked great for the better part of a decade.