11 ms·

The Firefox Dilemma

175 points by tannhaeuser 8y ago

TAForObvReasons 8y ago
Out of curiosity, before Chrome came along, why didn't Firefox eat IE's lunch? The Microsoft anti-trust case was 1999-2001 but Chrome came out in 2008.
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  There was basically no marketing of browsers in 2000... I found opera and Firefox on a cd from pc world. But never saw anything on the internet about it... Google pushes chrome easily by plastering it in front of you every time you go to Google or gmail...
- llampx 8y ago
  In the right circles, Mozilla Browser/Phoenix (and then Firefox) did eat IE's lunch until Chrome launched and Firefox started becoming slower and more bloaty. The only time I used IE from IE 5.5/6 onwards was to download Mozilla Browser and/or Opera after a fresh install. It was common knowledge to disable ActiveX and download Mozilla.
- lmm 8y ago
  Firefox was always slow - the GUI felt slower than IE to me - and while it theoretically had better standards support, there were no websites that didn't work in IE. (Personally I was using Konqueror in that era - even then it felt like a much better browser - and wish the open-source community had rallied behind it. But the US open-source folks never seemed to pay much attention to anything that had been implemented in Europe)
  - eddieh 8y ago
    Did Konqueror conquer the browser? It was based on KHTML which became WebKit and eventually Blink which is Chrome.
  - toyg 8y ago
    Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple picked it up to make WebKit. The truth is that working on browser engines is hard and unfashionable work, nobody in opensource really wants to do it. Every desktop environment made its crappy half-baked reimplementation when it looked like deep desktop integration was inevitable and Netscape was a black-box (the IE 4/5 era), then dropped it when Firefox came about - it was good enough, and the integration fashion had passed. I do agree that KDE was (still is) ridiculously ignored in the US. The licence schism generated a certain tribalism that is now difficult to overcome. Which is funny, considering GPL is now The Devil in the US.
    - lmm 8y ago
      > Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple picked it up to make WebKit. How so? The browser kept working nicely the whole time. Eventually Webkit was offered as a rendering engine option when development overtook mainline KHTML, but that was long after Apple first adopted it.
      - toyg 8y ago
        It was basically deprecated as a file manager, in favour of Dolphin, and all-around de-emphasized. It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project.
        lmm 8y ago
        > It was basically deprecated as a file manager, in favour of Dolphin Well sure, but I saw that more as splitting out the file manager and browser into separate apps, which seems perfectly sensible. > It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project. Shrug. It was always a shoestring project in terms of how many developers they had, but the browser kept working well, was my experience.
- adontz 8y ago
  It kinda did, see 2010 https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp Google pushed Chrome a lot. We need another antitrust for Google honestly. They are promoting Chrome everywhere they can.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  Web standards weren’t a thing. You had to be bug compatible with IE or websites wouldn’t work. Firefox was slowly catching up. It was up to some 30 something percent after the big operations at the grassroots to popularize It. Mozilla was making web standards a thing. When Chrome arrived, though, the paradigm shifted. Chrome was blazing fast. You double clicked it and it opened instantly. You closed it and it was gone. When you typed somrthing into the bar, it searched it or it went to the url. When you opened a new tab it opened instantly. It was amazing. And everyone knew who Google were - they’d made real search, they’d given us Gmail (upending all of webmail).
- dTal 8y ago
  It was on its way. Most people just shrugged and used the default browser (IE) and there wasn't much mindset that browsers were meant to be power tools - IE didn't even have tabs, it was just a window that held a webpage with a couple of back buttons. And IE felt clean after AOL, which was many people's first browsing experience. Among those who did switch, most switched to Firefox (and a small few switched to Opera). By the time Chrome was released, Firefox's market share was 20-25%, entirely through grassroots evangelism. It felt like a steady race that we were winning. Then Chrome came along with its minimalist interface, hyper-optimised JS engine, extreme attention to latency, and aggressive marketing from the front page of the internet (which was also growing more JS-heavy by the day), which contributed to Chrome not just feeling faster, but amazingly futuristic. Whereas Firefox was "you really shouldn't be using that crufty old IE, try this new hotness - it has tabs!", Chrome was more "OMG you have to try this, it makes your internet twice as fast". It didn't help that Chrome's strength was Firefox's weakness - for all its merits, its XUL-based interface sometimes made it feel a mite sluggish.
  - lewisjoe 8y ago
    This is true. I wasn't much tech savvy back then. I switched to Chrome because it made my internet fast. Of course it might not really have, but the sleek look, the circular loader instead of a progress bar kind of a loader that Firefox had at that time, faster JS engine – all this combined to give me a wow factor in terms of browsing speed. Remember, this was at the time when 250kbps of broadband speed was the "normal". And speed was easily a critical factor.
- Tomte 8y ago
  In Germany it kind of did. "Everyone" was using Firefox. It's still bigger here than elsewhere, but Chrome has overtaken it here, as well.
- ordu 8y ago
  Firefox ate IE's lunch. Really, it was Firefox who begun a revolution in a web-space. At some point Mozilla rebranded their browser suite named 'Mozilla' into Seamonkey, and started Firefox as a separate product (not a part of suite of apps like mail client, IRC client, web browser, and calendar). It was around 2005, though I believe wikipedia can tell the precise date. The result was a rapidly growing market share, I remember celebrating this as the end of IE domination. I was linux-user then and IE domination and IE-only sites was a pain in the ass. Then in a couple of years Chrome emerged. It was a way simplier than FF, it had no firefox's complex dialogs to customize a lot of things. Chrome helped Firefox to eat the rest of IE market share, and then started to eat into Firefox market share. It was like this. Funnily that people doesn't remember that, believing instead that it was Chrome who overthrown IE. It was Firefox who changed web to a point when web-developers couldn't ignore non-IE users, and had to check compliance with standards, not just check whether their sites works with IE.
cyberjunkie 8y ago
I wonder if there is a term to describe the sheer ignorance of the (tech-aware) masses. Sadly, Firefox is fighting a hard battle that it's possibly, and slowly losing.
- blowski 8y ago
  Why are they ignorant?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- interfixus 8y ago
  There is a term for describing the attitude of if not the masses then at least a large subset of the very much tech-aware HN crowd - a subset never too many wristflicks away from the downvote button if anyone dares question the necessity of the Google empire and all its attendant blessings. That term is 'complacency'.
- Delmania 8y ago
  Perhaps Firefox should research why Chrome is so successful and adopt that? I use Edge, Safari, FF Dev Edition, and Chrome, and I consistently return to Chrome because of the smooth user experience. In my uninformed opinion, FF is losing for the same reason the FSF's products never went mainstream, which is they're focusing too much on their message than delivering a solid product. Which is sad, because I do remember when Firefox was released just how good it was.
  - toyg 8y ago
    They could have the best browser on the planet and they would still be a bit player. Google owns mobile and webmail like MS owned the desktop, and most people will use what the platform owner tells them to use. As long as the ruler doesn't fall asleep at the wheel, like MS did with IE, everyone else will be a bit player. I think market share is the wrong metric to fixate on. FF market share has never been particularly big, that shouldn't be the target and it never really was. The target used to be improving the web and being the most innovative and reliable engine for web standards. This is what Mozilla was good at, before they started thinking like your run-of-the-mill big company ("we need to find the Next Big Thing! Market share! Leverage! Competitive advantage!"...) and wasted years in pointless side-bets.
AndrewDucker 8y ago
My main reasons for using Firefox are side tabs and being able to prevent tab reuse when searching or using the address bar. Chrome simply isn't configurable enough to make it nice to use for me.
- onion2k 8y ago
  I suspect this is partly why Firefox is losing the battle. By concentrating resources on nice-to-have user functionality rather than implementing core technologies that web developers actually build sites with, we end up with more and more websites that only work in Chrome. Far fewer users care about browser config than "does my internet banking site work?". Firefox probably needs to work on that, even if it means making the browser work with Chrome's non-standard implementations of things, to retain users. I suspect that would be easier than persuading web developers to target more browsers unfortunately.
  - chupasaurus 8y ago
    > rather than implementing core technologies that web developers actually build sites with Like a Shadowdom API v0 (v1 is standartized by W3C) used by Google in Polyfill so Youtube is way slower? > even if it means making the browser work with Chrome's non-standard implementations of things How good the compatibility between Internet Exploder's features and FF/Chrome was?
  - olejorgenb 8y ago
    Yes, I use Firefox for browsing, but Chrome for developing. I should probably give Firefox's tools another chance, but last time I checked Chrome's dev tools was alot better.
baybal2 8y ago
Mozilla directors are wholly responsible for turning Firefox into what it became now. They have no moral right whatsoever to plead for mercy now.
- llampx 8y ago
  So we should just let the Google hegemony control the web and suck up all our data along with doing the same to our phones?
  - baybal2 8y ago
    No, but you can't move Mozilla forward without firing incompetent directors flying chartered jets and getting $1M USD remuneration for nothing. All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers who pulled out Firefox, and all the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years. P.S. There is a whisper going around that Google's only reason to keep paying Mozilla so generously is just to keep them down, and quiet — a kind of unwritten non-aggression pact
    - metildaa 8y ago
      Could I get some citations? What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO. Mozilla's intentions and fears seem to be very reasonable, driving what they do from AV1 to fighting DRM, though they have hit dead ends with Firefox OS (now Kai OS) and other side projects, the organization is still doing work that is in the best interest of the common person, unlike what the tech giants have been doing.
      - baybal2 8y ago
        > What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO. Many things been coming out of their house, but not a usable browser — a raison d'etre stated in their charter.
dTal 8y ago
>I think about Chrome’s usurping of Internet Explorer (IE), and I wonder (antitrust and all aside) would Chrome have usurped IE if it wasn’t for IE stagnating? I remember when I was younger and jumped ship to Chrome - personally, it wasn’t about using Chrome because it wasn’t IE, it was about Chrome beating IE in a foot race and offering me a clean user experience. Chrome ate Firefox's lunch, not IE's. Firefox was the first browser to take a chunk out of IE, in large part because of the stagnation of IE6. People were switching away from IE at a fairly consistent rate. When Chrome came along, the rate remained the same, but people started switching to Chrome instead of Firefox. This graph shows it clearly (starts a little late to catch Firefox's initial bump but you can see the trend): http://i.imgur.com/7bP2pmj.png http://i.imgur.com/7bP2pmj.png
- jeremyjh 8y ago
  That graph begins with IE at 60% share and ends with it at 20% share. It indicates pretty clearly that most of Chrome's growth came from IE, I'm not sure how you can interpret it another way.
  - dTal 8y ago
    Look at the slope in the beginning. People would have switched away from IE anyway. The release of Chrome didn't change the number of people switching away from IE, but it stopped Firefox's growth dead in its tracks.
  - zhte415 8y ago
    IE6 stagnation was hated by developers and users alike. Growth of any browser came from something-must-be-better-than-this. FF had the upper hand against Opera, who were still quite the serious contender. I'm sure someone has done a PhD thesis on this, and if not well worth doing on multi-factor influences on market share for web browsers. Very multi-disciplinary too, covering tech, consumer understanding, embedded incumbents, marketing (a big part in Chrome's boom in my opinion). Chrome's growth came from IE, yet. But at the time, anyone's growth could have come from IE. Chrome did it better and faster. * I was still using IE6 in a corporate enviornment in 2013. I have friends that still require IE6 on XP in a company because funding for the system upgrade can't be made. The system's not internet facing, not explicitly. IE6 tried to define the internet, thankfully the internet moved on, and would have moved on. FF was at their tails, Chrome sped that.
hugh4life 8y ago
I wouldn't rush into it, but with webassembly I can't help but think that a browser rendered mobile OS is a concept worth reviving at some point. And google is unlikely to pursue that since they have Android.
- Yoric 8y ago
  A new Firefox OS? I'd love to see this happen.
zecg 8y ago
Firefox would do well to remove Pocket integration and stop placing ads.
- alex_duf 8y ago
  People need to be paid at some point, unless everyone magically starts to donate that's a reality. I don't like it either, that's why I give to Mozilla once in a while.
- vinay427 8y ago
  Regrading Pocket, why? I was ready to pull my torch out for Mozilla when I realized that Firefox included first-party Pocket support, until I learned that Mozilla now owns Read It Later (the developers of Pocket). I see no problem with Firefox including support for a product that Mozilla has complete control over, especially as a browser extension is a natural use case for Pocket.
- PurpleRamen 8y ago
  They need that to make money in the dark future when they are not getting enough money anymore from Google because of their low marketshare. They call it "becoming independant".
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  a.) Mozilla owns Pocket. b.) The ads are entirely local and do not track you. They're an attempt to diversify revenue sources away from Google. Chrome doesn't have to do that, since Google tracks you.
rlv-dan 8y ago
A big problem is that the web standard is too complicated. Browsers are pretty much a virtual os that can do almost everything. For anyone to make a browser from scratch today is not feasible. We will move towards a monoculture, because there is no alternative unless we make a drastic shift in rethinking how the web should work.
- dmos62 8y ago
  Yeah. In the early days of internet, web won, because of its relative expressiveness and lack of -rigidity- structure, compared to gopher for example. Now we see that the same unbounded expressiveness led to a monolithic system within a system, that is only feasibly maintainable by large organizations. One program should do one thing, (and do it well): that's what leads to healthy systems. For me, it's not the bloated browser centric computing experience that's the biggest problem. In my eyes, it's eclipsed by the armies of web developers whose only professional purpose is to work with this technological mishap. If our only document delivery system, i.e. web, wasn't such a mess, the same could be accomplished by a fraction of the current workforce.
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    But the web has also allowed for things which are way more than document delivery; imageboards, for instance, weren't around before the web, and the fact of carrying images made them unsuitable for previous technology.
    - dmos62 8y ago
      Yeah, it became hard to define. That's pretty cool for users in the short run, but pretty bad in the long run, from a systems point of view. In other words, web surely had its moments, but unfortunately the biggest one is this peak-web thing we're talking about.
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  Maybe Chrome can compete with itself by swapping out the rendering and Javascript vms.
jerrre 8y ago
A strange differences between OSes and Browsers, is that Browsers need/want to conform to standards. No-one expects Windows programs to work on macOS or Linux. But with the web that's different.
- codezero 8y ago
  This is indeed what people expect but it’s still pretty far from true. There are still a bunch of CSS quirks that are vendor specific. Also if you want to have fun read about the history of the innerText API - it even works different in different versions of IE! And wasn’t adopted by Firefox until about two years ago. These are only a few of the myriad mines you dodge when developing a library for the web at large. Have a look at caniuse.com for a journey down a compatibility rabbit hole. :)
baybal2 8y ago
Mozilla Corporation put foundation stones for WhatWG, and was betting to use it to bury W3C, but instead Google took WhatWG and buried Mozilla.
fogetti 8y ago
Chrome is full of bugs and getting slower by each release. Also regarding how they force people to log in just to use profiles it's pretty clear that we need good alternatives.
fimdomeio 8y ago
Crazy idea. what would happen if firefox would also become chromium based? You would now have a browser as fast as chrome but with better privacy features that chrome will never compete against. If chromium is open source other companies could share the control over code right? I suspect this is a terrible idea but still trying to find out why.
- oAlbe 8y ago
  Firefox as it is now is much faster than Chrome already.
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    Not even close. I wrote a comment [0] with my examples recently. I like FF (though besides Containers, most reasons boil down to "it's not Chrome"), but fast is a word I'd only use in comparison to IE/Edge. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18620671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18620671
- pjc50 8y ago
  Having different rendering engines means that at least theoretically the W3C are in control of web standards; having only one rendering engine, Chromium, means the W3C is irrelevant and the standard is "what Chomium does".
- ajvs 8y ago
  You'd lose out on the WebRender and all the other Quantum/Servo-related improvements, their influence over web standards, their extended extension APIs and pretty much all respect they've built up over the years.
- Yoric 8y ago
  I know it's a tempting thought. Mozilla has certainly evaluated (and discarded) this possibility – as you mention, it's not a good idea. I posted a few reasons for this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655028 Also > If chromium is open source other companies could share the control over code right? The sole governing body for Chromium is Google. Other companies get exactly as much control as Google decides. That's the opposite of, say, the Linux Kernel or Rust. It is my understanding that Firefox is also heading in the same direction as these, i.e. towards shared control by all stakeholders.
sydd 8y ago
I'd love to use Firefox, but always go back to Chrome because couple of small issues: - Pinch zoom using the trackpad or the touchscreen is not smooth, it doesnt zoom the whole page just elements. Chrome/Safari/Edge does it well. - Tab tearing is clunky compared to Chrome. - The UI for bookmarks/history is awkward. For example it takes 4 clicks to reopen a recently closed tab compared to 2 in Chrome. When I add the history button its still 3 clicks...
- efraim 8y ago
  Right click the tab bar and click "undo close tab" to reopen it with two clicks, or use ctrl-shift-t to reopen it without the mouse.
artificialidiot 8y ago
Mozilla lacks the financial strength to shove their merchandise down people's throats. Microsoft used OS market share, Opera used small device market share and Google used web search market share to promote their offerings. Mozilla never had a similar advantage, only technical superiority for a while, which others caught up in a few years and average users didn't care about that anyway.
- bugmen0t 8y ago
  Of all people, the folks here on hacker news, are in the best situation to change that. Be vocal! Use your influence! And if you have the means: donate!
  - bfrydl 8y ago
    > Be vocal! Use your influence! When I tell people to use Firefox they just laugh like it's a quirky personality trait that I use the underdog browser instead of the one everyone knows is best.
fireattack 8y ago
I fully agree with this article. I respect people choosing products based on ideality, but I personally will just use what suits my demand/preference best. When I first switched from IE to Firefox 1.5, it's because it has tabs. And I loved it more and more once I figured out how well-built it is and how powerful addons can be. When Chrome firstly came, it was pretty bad in term of functionality. The extension system is weak (compared to what Firefox can offer at the time), it lack TONS of what I personally consider as "essential features" (font settings for different languages is a big one for me as a non-Latin character user, for example), so I continued to use Firefox. But Chrome catched up very quickly. Today, the features of two browsers are basically on par in my user case, especially after Firefox switched to WebExt (which I think is the right direction, by the way). I started to use Chrome more and more due to some small details, like better sync experience etc. Again, purely personal choice based on my heavy use of both. Another thing that pushed me away from Firefox is my personal experience in bug reporting. I'm not a software developer, but I do report bugs semi-frequently. I feel like I was treated better in Chromium project than Firefox's one. I have lots of unhappy experiences there (the one that I still can't get over is that they won't fix a video playback bug that affects all Win7 + nVidia GPU users [1]). I think in Chromium everytime you report a bug with clear repro steps, there will at least an employee (or volunteer? Not sure) that will attempt to repeat your steps and attach a screencat of that in 1-2 days. It feels good. [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1410693 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1410693
- sametmax 8y ago
  People always say "we can't do anything about it" when some bad situation happen. Except it happens because it emerges from the collective behavior. Now, one can't fight a all the fights, and I don't think somebody that decides to avoid this one is a bad person. But one should definitly pick up some fights. Choose some things to pay for, decide some things to consume or be part of, not just by the nature of it, but by the consequences of doing so. Although I do think like in the article that it's better to fight _for_ something than _against_ something. Anyway, if one doesn't makes, on daily basis, regular, endless, conscious choices, one is not taking part of the world but is just passively living in it. And that's how we fail to build a society.
mjlee 8y ago
I'm not sure even technical users care what engine their browser is using. I think most web devs would prefer a smaller number of engines. I use Firefox mainly for privacy and containers. Is there a good reason Firefox couldn't provide features based on Chromium/Blink too (like Brave)?
- Yoric 8y ago
  Yes, there are many reasons. I'll give a few examples. If Firefox adopts Chromium, there becomes effectively no way for Mozilla to shape the futures in manners that are not blessed by Google. For instance, Google doesn't seem to be interested in WebVR/WebAR, so there is no way to bring a Chromium-based browser in this direction until Google says so. The same thing happens with compression formats, for instance. Also, as Google controls Chromium, a monopoly of Chromium also means that Google can decide to deprecate and/or customize web features without any counter-power. For instance, Google could decide to restrict WebPay to GooglePay, effectively leveraging their monopoly against PayPal and credit cards. There are also a number of manners in which Google could, in theory, make Netflix or Facebook or any competitor less usable or entirely unusable on the web. No Chromium-based browser can do anything against this. Don't forget that Mozilla is also working on a next-gen rendering engine, Servo, that is expected to kick the ass of both Gecko and Blink on recent platforms, in terms of both performance, battery use and security. Making Chromium the only web browser means abandoning any hope to switch to this new architecture, as everything would need to be bug-for-bug compatible with Chromium, instead of following the standard. (edit) typos
  - mjlee 8y ago
    All good points, thank you! I think I underestimated the level of control Google holds over Chromium.
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  One of the reasons I use Firefox is because Gecko is simply better than Blink, which becomes completely unusable when having many tabs open on a PC with 8GB RAM.
Konryan 8y ago
I think there's another factor at play that isn't often mentioned: Google uses the dominant position of its services, as well as the strength of their brands, to promote Chrome as the better browser, in not-so-subtle ways. One is often repeatedly prompted to install Chrome when visiting Google on other browsers[1][2]. Most normal users would just give up and install just to get rid of the pop up. Microsoft has been doing the same (e.g. trying to trick you into keeping Edge when trying to select another browser as default on Windows 10), but their product wasn't good enough for it to work, it seems. [1] https://superuser.com/questions/1192441/is-it-possible-to-tell-google-to-stop-nagging-me-about-chrome https://superuser.com/questions/1192441/is-it-possible-to-te... [2] https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/922025 https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/922025
- Jonnax 8y ago
  Also Firefox for Android gets a shit version of Google search. But if you spoof your user agent it works perfectly. That definitely is using their dominance in search to make people.use their web browser.
  - EwanToo 8y ago
    That's recently (and silently as far as I can tell) changed for me, I now get a fairly good google search on Firefox on Android. However you're right in general Google are using the position to enforce Chrome
  - simfoo 8y ago
    Can you give more details?
    - dessant 8y ago
      https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444
  - hkt 8y ago
    Doesn't surprise me. The EU should fine Google for a lot of things, including that. There's always duckduckgo, though.
Sahhaese 8y ago
Given that web usage stats typically come from third party tracking and firefox is better at tracking protection, is there a 'hidden' market share?
- simfoo 8y ago
  Good question! Looking at https://netmarketshare.com/methodology https://netmarketshare.com/methodology (the source of the 9% figure), you seem to be mostly right
olejorgenb 8y ago
1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Firefox have a built-in reader-mode. I don't use it much on desktop, but on on mobile it's very useful for pages that doesn't reflow. 6. There's an ad-block extension for firefox-mobile. [1] Could of course be because I'm more used to it and have more history in firefox :) [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-firefox-bookmarks-history-tabs#w_changing-results-on-the-fly_2 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire... [3] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1193670 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1193670
- sametmax 8y ago
  Also tab containers are fantastic.
  - sebazzz 8y ago
    Not fantastic, but necessary in any web development activity. Being logged in as different users in the same browser, while at the same time not suffering from the limitations private mode has. Makes testing and developing very easy and saved me a lot of time.
    - em-bee 8y ago
      if only i could open a container without automatically loading all tabs inside it, but lazy loaded like when you restart the browser and only the active tab is loaded.
- mouldysammich 8y ago
  Firefoxs omnibar history search is significantly better than chromes; although i imagine that is down to them having no stake in sending google searches which google obviously does
m4r35n357 8y ago
Why not try Seamonkey https://www.seamonkey-project.org/ https://www.seamonkey-project.org/. Since Mozilla split the old application into the "lean & mean" Firefox and Thunderbird, they have both become so bloated that the old navigator combo is looking svelte by comparison!
kodablah 8y ago
> I think this kind of conversation is naturally fatiguing, and creates a particularly negative means of ushering new users into the platform - almost as hostages, rather than excited participants. Definitely true. Asking users to respect certain principles is tantamount to guilting them which doesn't work. > It’s time we analyse what Firefox does better than Chrome, and sing those praises. From the perspective of a non-technical user, the differences are not noticeable. Firefox and Chrome have continued to converge (...er...maybe one following the other) to the point that the differences listed are not real differentiators. Oddly enough, you could argue that telemetry and the constant push for user happiness and adoption is what is hurting FF. FF looks like Chrome. I'm not saying stop listening to your users, but in general it's ok to differentiate yourself in ways that don't appear to be immediately beneficial to adoption. The primary way this can be done is in the UI. We can all recognize that there are still lots of efficiencies to be gained around the current state of internet navigation. Other approaches may not be better, and I understand the maintainability fear of multiple UI paradigms in the same software, but at least it's a way of differentiating yourself.
austincheney 8y ago
Hands down there is one objective thing that Firefox does well and nobody else comes remotely close. DOM access. For some reason Firefox is thousands of times faster than other browsers when it comes to executing the standard DOM API methods. I know that is a bold statement but it is easily verified with numbers using a perf tool. Chrome is faster at executing JavaScript than Firefox, but even still Firefox leaves everybody completely in the dust when executing the DOM API. DOM access is so incredibly important to how the web works and nobody really talks about. For some unknown reason most developers are deathly afraid of the DOM and will do everything possible to hide from it. It is common in every job I have worked to see mountains of querySelectors and 10mb of supporting framework code so that developers don't have to fear the DOM buggy man. I could sympathize if the DOM were complicated, but it isn't. I really believe if Firefox goes away and that competition is gone the web will get fundamentally slower. Everybody will see this slowness and yet very few people be able to diagnose why, and that is tragic.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  My understanding is that DOM manipulation and queries will always be far far slower than the logical equivalent in JavaScript. Does "thousands of times faster" challenge that? Ie. React's virtual DOM is a phenomenal idea because it greatly reduces actual DOM interaction. Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?
  - austincheney 8y ago
    The DOM is a structured API to markup (HTML/XML). That means DOM instructions are access to something outside the language. Leaving the language, for any reason, is slower than executing within the language. That said the execution speed of DOM instructions is orthogonal to the execution speed of JavaScript alone. > Is it not really saving us much in Firefox? The DOM is the standard technology the browsers use to communicate from JavaScript to markup. QuerySelectors are strings, so they have to be parsed into DOM instructions by the browser using a native code engine. Since the DOM is a well defined standard and it is the standard that all browsers use DOM instruction performance can be directly compared between the different browsers.
olejorgenb 8y ago
One thing Chrome does better than Firefox is third-party coookie blocking: It's MUCH simpler to whitelist certain cookies in chrome - simply go to the site's cookies dialog, open the blocked tab and whitelist the cookie.. Somewhat ironically since many people say Firefox is better at blocking tracking. When it's hard to whitelist the cookies I need, I might cave and simply allow all third-party cookies.
thomasedwards 8y ago
Firefox Multi-Account Containers
rl3 8y ago
An incredibly interesting alternate reality would have been one where Microsoft used Quantum/Servo to power Edge instead of Chromium.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  As much as I would have liked them to, it doesn’t fix the problem of people not testing in Edge, which is why they’ve gone for Chromium in the first place.
  - nikbackm 8y ago
    They also want to have synergy with Electron.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
chrismorgan 8y ago
I’ve been using Firefox since about 0.93, with about a year in the middle when I used Chrome as my primary browser, because it ran from a USB disk much better than Firefox did at the time, and that was what I needed at the time. (I am glad that Chrome came along, because by showing how bad Firefox was in some areas it spurred Mozilla on to improve it, so that it’s no longer bad like that.) I look at the sessions of people that use Chrome, and I wonder how they ever manage to get anything done: tab management is uniformly hopeless. Firefox, on the other hand, copes with hundreds of tabs with perfect equanimity. (I currently have 165 tabs spread across three windows—one for personal stuff, one for work stuff, and one for a particular work project; this is a fairly typical number; I might have less than twenty once a year or so, and I’ve had as many as 450 before.) I use the Tree Style Tab extension for a vertical tab bar with hierarchy. I’ve suggested it to family members once or twice each, and my dad and two of my sisters use vertical tabs (two via Tree Style Tab, one via some other extension) and wouldn’t be without ’em. Most of the rest of the family uses Firefox too, and I believe Firefox is the leading browser used by my coworkers at FastMail by quite a margin. Firefox’s awesome bar is aptly named. It’s way more useful than Chrome’s. I am an idealist and not fond of Google, and while that’s a factor, it’s not the primary reason I use Firefox. I use Firefox because I find it simply better. (Same deal with using DuckDuckGo over Google. It’s more usable with keyboard shortcuts and bangs, and finds results every bit as good as Google’s.) I also use Firefox on my phone; there, it’s more of a mixed bag: it’s markedly slower than Chrome in general, but I can install regular extensions like uBlock Origin and Stylus. There, my dislike of Google is more of a factor.
- tarruda 8y ago
  > I currently have 165 tabs spread across three windows How do you manage this setup? I'm specifically interested in how you can assign tabs to different windows and have this information persist across restarts.
  - chrismorgan 8y ago
    It’s all purely done manually. There’s almost no overlap between things that could go in my general personal and general work windows (exceptions: HN threads where FastMail comes up and I respond, or the very occasional article from HN or RSS feeds that is directly tied to something I’m doing for work). I store them on different virtual desktops, too, so when Firefox starts I just move the windows to the appropriate desktops, and then keeping it all separate is straightforward. I do also use container tabs a little with some automatic assignment (automatic assignment to container, that is, not to window, useful as that would be), but I don’t think I actually need them any more; I think that FastMail is now the only thing where I need actively different sessions for personal and work, and it supports multiple logins just fine. Then sometimes there’s a particular project that I want to focus on, and so I create a new window just for it, and shift it and any other related stuff into another new virtual desktop. P.S. I just closed 50 tabs because I had finished something and deferred another thing.
daliusd 8y ago
I like idea to list what Firefox does better. My addition to the list: Firefox has better kerning support while Chromium team ignores the problem (e.g. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=888374#c_ts1544002305 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=888374... and https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=912052 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=912052). For the context: I'm software developer working in printing.
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  My experience with reporting these sorts of things: in Edge, fixed in about a month; in Firefox, normally fairly quickly, but sometimes months and occasionally never; in Chromium, I don’t even know why I bother filing bugs sometimes. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=639223 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=639223 is a good example of my experience there: a fancy typography thing that is just completely broken in an uncommon but by no means unreasonable situation, and it just sits for years untouched. But Firefox is still definitely not perfect: as an example that has sat unfixed for ten years, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479829 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479829 is about hyphenation and ligatures not mixing well (you can get half your ﬀ ligature on one line and half on the next). I tend to see the effects of that once or twice a year.
Jnr 8y ago
I use Firefox not because I am scared of Chrome or Chromium. I mainly use it because it has Tree Style Tab extension and it's mobile version allows installing Ublock Origin adblocker. And then to get sync and all the nice things across the board, I use it on all my devices. I don't see the bad power consumption on my MacBook as some have mentioned and it doesn't feel slower than Chrome.
hpaavola 8y ago
1. Send tab to device 2. Reader mode 3. Addons on mobile (pretty much just for blocking unwanted requests to make things way faster on slow connection and to protect my privacy) 4. Facebook container (same for Google would be nice) 5. Taking screenshots 6. Always enable zoom on mobile [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/send-tab-firefox-ios-your-computer https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/send-tab-firefox-ios-yo... [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu... [4] https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extension/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extensio... [5] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-screenshots https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-screenshots
- Kovah 8y ago
  4. Container for Google? Here you go bud: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
- Vinnl 8y ago
  > (same for Google would be nice) There's a third-party one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
- andrewl-hn 8y ago
  There's one for Google and one for Twitter, too. Both are not maintained by Mozilla, but by third-party devs, but the code changes are straight-forward (replace domains, make Google container tabs red by default instead of blue, use different icon). I use them for several months, and I'm pretty happy about them.
ubercow13 8y ago
After enabling webrender, Firefox is the smoothest scrolling and most responsive browser on android that I have used
- asituop 8y ago
  Webrender hasn't shipped on Android yet did it ?
  - Yoric 8y ago
    Not yet, no.
    - ubercow13 8y ago
      Ah yep you're right. It has definitely become much much smoother at some point recently, but apparently for other reasons.
hkt 8y ago
Reader mode is awesome. I haven't used chrome for years, so actually don't know. Maybe I'd prefer it but I make a policy of not using google software and services (where the choice still exists).
pvinis 8y ago
Imagine if Firefox used webkit/chromium underneath. Would that allow Mozilla to make Firefox more awesome by freeing up dev time that was taken by servo and gecko, and now can be used to make great UI and extensions and features?
- hkt 8y ago
  No, they'd spend their time pruning all the google telemetry crud out of chromium. The fact is that Mozilla's next gen stuff is going to be streets ahead of Chrome, and I suspect their efforts will be rewarded in the end.
  - pvinis 8y ago
    I know and I agree. I was more of a thought exercise. I would prefer for Mozilla to keep doing their thing. If they were to put webkit on Firefox, and after the initial de-googling, they would start working on webkit and contribute there, or somehow merge some servo things in webkit. I guess in the end it would still take a few years until it's complete, but it is an interesting thought to me.
Queenie_15 8y ago
The only reason I use Firefox is because it allows me to automatically delete all browsing history after I close it. Does Chrome allow this as well?
amelius 8y ago
> By making people excited to use Firefox rather than wary of using Chrome, I believe we can more effectively galvanise support for Firefox, and improve the health of the browser ‘market’ all round. No, because Google can just copy those features (except for the privacy respecting ones; but almost nobody cares about them)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
soniman 8y ago
The best thing about Firefox is that the browser is separate from your Google account so you don't have to worry about your bookmarks/extensions getting synced behind your back by Google and messing everything up. Google requiring browser/Google account to be the same is a nuisance that you don't have to worry about with Firefox.
- bugmen0t 8y ago
  What's also amazing, is that if you sign up for a Firefox Account you get privacy preserving sync: The data is encrypted & decrypted on your devices. Mozilla doesn't get to see your data.
  - nallerooth 8y ago
    This. I get the whole "You are the product" thing when using Google services for free, but it still bugs me that anything I bookmark might/will end up in a profile somewhere.
  - unsignedint 8y ago
    It's only fair to say that Chrome also offers this feature. You can set optional (mandatory for passwords) sync passphrase so your sync data is encrypted. In fact I liked way Firefox Sync did this same way (when it was called Weave) -- actually allowing to use a passphrase. They got rid of passphrase and they are now using username/password pair to handle encryption.
josteink 8y ago
> With the news about Edge switching to a foundation using Chromium a lot of the conversation has centered on browser engines slipping into something of a monoculture. Not to come of as dismissive, but if this is the first time you picked up this conversation, you simply haven't been paying attention the last half decade. If we've addressed things properly back then (with web developers using more than the Ad-company's browser), we wouldn't be in the situation where we are now with only 2 real engines remaining, down from 4, and mobile more crippled than ever. And now it's going to be much, much worse encouraging web developers to actually adhere to the standards for a diverse browser-market.
TuringTest 8y ago
AFAIK, Firefox is positioning itself as the only open source, standards compliant web browser for Virtual Reality, including 3D support (not just 2D floating windows). Chrome is neither there, nor expected.
bad_user 8y ago
For what is worth I think Firefox is the best browser for reasons already discussed here, but here’s the list of what I like ... Sync, awesome bar, tab management, multi-account containers, trustworthiness in the add-ons I install (better reviews by humans) and resource usage especially with many tabs. Firefox went through a very painful transition with Quantum due to invalidating many old extensions that people liked. However they managed to do the impossible imo, Firefox being better than ever and the ecosystem of add-ons is not in a bad shape either. I also believe it was the right thing to do, because technically speaking it was inferior to Chrome’s multi-process architecture. The old add-ons system also had a big problem from the user's point of view ... Firefox had no permissions system in place and I like their review-based approach, but it doesn’t scale well. So now after Quantum, I'm pretty sure Firefox will move on to innovate in its internals way past Chrome or Safari. As a software developer I'm super psyched about what they are doing with Rust. Having a browser with components built in Rust, a super safe language, doesn't mean much for regular users, but it should translate in a more stable, safer and performant product. And I don't know how many people appreciate this, but building a better language than C/C++ and then re-building components with it in an old and popular product, without breaking it, is super hard.

175 points by tannhaeuser 8y ago

Out of curiosity, before Chrome came along, why didn't Firefox eat IE's lunch? The Microsoft anti-trust case was 1999-2001 but Chrome came out in 2008.

philliphaydon 8y ago
There was basically no marketing of browsers in 2000... I found opera and Firefox on a cd from pc world. But never saw anything on the internet about it... Google pushes chrome easily by plastering it in front of you every time you go to Google or gmail...
llampx 8y ago
In the right circles, Mozilla Browser/Phoenix (and then Firefox) did eat IE's lunch until Chrome launched and Firefox started becoming slower and more bloaty. The only time I used IE from IE 5.5/6 onwards was to download Mozilla Browser and/or Opera after a fresh install. It was common knowledge to disable ActiveX and download Mozilla.
lmm 8y ago
Firefox was always slow - the GUI felt slower than IE to me - and while it theoretically had better standards support, there were no websites that didn't work in IE. (Personally I was using Konqueror in that era - even then it felt like a much better browser - and wish the open-source community had rallied behind it. But the US open-source folks never seemed to pay much attention to anything that had been implemented in Europe)
- eddieh 8y ago
  Did Konqueror conquer the browser? It was based on KHTML which became WebKit and eventually Blink which is Chrome.
- toyg 8y ago
  Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple picked it up to make WebKit. The truth is that working on browser engines is hard and unfashionable work, nobody in opensource really wants to do it. Every desktop environment made its crappy half-baked reimplementation when it looked like deep desktop integration was inevitable and Netscape was a black-box (the IE 4/5 era), then dropped it when Firefox came about - it was good enough, and the integration fashion had passed. I do agree that KDE was (still is) ridiculously ignored in the US. The licence schism generated a certain tribalism that is now difficult to overcome. Which is funny, considering GPL is now The Devil in the US.
  - lmm 8y ago
    > Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple picked it up to make WebKit. How so? The browser kept working nicely the whole time. Eventually Webkit was offered as a rendering engine option when development overtook mainline KHTML, but that was long after Apple first adopted it.
    - toyg 8y ago
      It was basically deprecated as a file manager, in favour of Dolphin, and all-around de-emphasized. It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project.
      - lmm 8y ago
        > It was basically deprecated as a file manager, in favour of Dolphin Well sure, but I saw that more as splitting out the file manager and browser into separate apps, which seems perfectly sensible. > It started lagging in development efforts. I have not really followed after about 4.2 (iirc), but at that time it already looked fairly dead in the water, at least in the attitudes emanating from the project. Shrug. It was always a shoestring project in terms of how many developers they had, but the browser kept working well, was my experience.
adontz 8y ago
It kinda did, see 2010 https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp Google pushed Chrome a lot. We need another antitrust for Google honestly. They are promoting Chrome everywhere they can.
scarejunba 8y ago
Web standards weren’t a thing. You had to be bug compatible with IE or websites wouldn’t work. Firefox was slowly catching up. It was up to some 30 something percent after the big operations at the grassroots to popularize It. Mozilla was making web standards a thing. When Chrome arrived, though, the paradigm shifted. Chrome was blazing fast. You double clicked it and it opened instantly. You closed it and it was gone. When you typed somrthing into the bar, it searched it or it went to the url. When you opened a new tab it opened instantly. It was amazing. And everyone knew who Google were - they’d made real search, they’d given us Gmail (upending all of webmail).
dTal 8y ago
It was on its way. Most people just shrugged and used the default browser (IE) and there wasn't much mindset that browsers were meant to be power tools - IE didn't even have tabs, it was just a window that held a webpage with a couple of back buttons. And IE felt clean after AOL, which was many people's first browsing experience. Among those who did switch, most switched to Firefox (and a small few switched to Opera). By the time Chrome was released, Firefox's market share was 20-25%, entirely through grassroots evangelism. It felt like a steady race that we were winning. Then Chrome came along with its minimalist interface, hyper-optimised JS engine, extreme attention to latency, and aggressive marketing from the front page of the internet (which was also growing more JS-heavy by the day), which contributed to Chrome not just feeling faster, but amazingly futuristic. Whereas Firefox was "you really shouldn't be using that crufty old IE, try this new hotness - it has tabs!", Chrome was more "OMG you have to try this, it makes your internet twice as fast". It didn't help that Chrome's strength was Firefox's weakness - for all its merits, its XUL-based interface sometimes made it feel a mite sluggish.
- lewisjoe 8y ago
  This is true. I wasn't much tech savvy back then. I switched to Chrome because it made my internet fast. Of course it might not really have, but the sleek look, the circular loader instead of a progress bar kind of a loader that Firefox had at that time, faster JS engine – all this combined to give me a wow factor in terms of browsing speed. Remember, this was at the time when 250kbps of broadband speed was the "normal". And speed was easily a critical factor.
Tomte 8y ago
In Germany it kind of did. "Everyone" was using Firefox. It's still bigger here than elsewhere, but Chrome has overtaken it here, as well.
ordu 8y ago
Firefox ate IE's lunch. Really, it was Firefox who begun a revolution in a web-space. At some point Mozilla rebranded their browser suite named 'Mozilla' into Seamonkey, and started Firefox as a separate product (not a part of suite of apps like mail client, IRC client, web browser, and calendar). It was around 2005, though I believe wikipedia can tell the precise date. The result was a rapidly growing market share, I remember celebrating this as the end of IE domination. I was linux-user then and IE domination and IE-only sites was a pain in the ass. Then in a couple of years Chrome emerged. It was a way simplier than FF, it had no firefox's complex dialogs to customize a lot of things. Chrome helped Firefox to eat the rest of IE market share, and then started to eat into Firefox market share. It was like this. Funnily that people doesn't remember that, believing instead that it was Chrome who overthrown IE. It was Firefox who changed web to a point when web-developers couldn't ignore non-IE users, and had to check compliance with standards, not just check whether their sites works with IE.

cyberjunkie 8y ago

I wonder if there is a term to describe the sheer ignorance of the (tech-aware) masses. Sadly, Firefox is fighting a hard battle that it's possibly, and slowly losing.

blowski 8y ago
Why are they ignorant?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
interfixus 8y ago
There is a term for describing the attitude of if not the masses then at least a large subset of the very much tech-aware HN crowd - a subset never too many wristflicks away from the downvote button if anyone dares question the necessity of the Google empire and all its attendant blessings. That term is 'complacency'.
Delmania 8y ago
Perhaps Firefox should research why Chrome is so successful and adopt that? I use Edge, Safari, FF Dev Edition, and Chrome, and I consistently return to Chrome because of the smooth user experience. In my uninformed opinion, FF is losing for the same reason the FSF's products never went mainstream, which is they're focusing too much on their message than delivering a solid product. Which is sad, because I do remember when Firefox was released just how good it was.
- toyg 8y ago
  They could have the best browser on the planet and they would still be a bit player. Google owns mobile and webmail like MS owned the desktop, and most people will use what the platform owner tells them to use. As long as the ruler doesn't fall asleep at the wheel, like MS did with IE, everyone else will be a bit player. I think market share is the wrong metric to fixate on. FF market share has never been particularly big, that shouldn't be the target and it never really was. The target used to be improving the web and being the most innovative and reliable engine for web standards. This is what Mozilla was good at, before they started thinking like your run-of-the-mill big company ("we need to find the Next Big Thing! Market share! Leverage! Competitive advantage!"...) and wasted years in pointless side-bets.

AndrewDucker 8y ago

My main reasons for using Firefox are side tabs and being able to prevent tab reuse when searching or using the address bar. Chrome simply isn't configurable enough to make it nice to use for me.

onion2k 8y ago
I suspect this is partly why Firefox is losing the battle. By concentrating resources on nice-to-have user functionality rather than implementing core technologies that web developers actually build sites with, we end up with more and more websites that only work in Chrome. Far fewer users care about browser config than "does my internet banking site work?". Firefox probably needs to work on that, even if it means making the browser work with Chrome's non-standard implementations of things, to retain users. I suspect that would be easier than persuading web developers to target more browsers unfortunately.
- chupasaurus 8y ago
  > rather than implementing core technologies that web developers actually build sites with Like a Shadowdom API v0 (v1 is standartized by W3C) used by Google in Polyfill so Youtube is way slower? > even if it means making the browser work with Chrome's non-standard implementations of things How good the compatibility between Internet Exploder's features and FF/Chrome was?
- olejorgenb 8y ago
  Yes, I use Firefox for browsing, but Chrome for developing. I should probably give Firefox's tools another chance, but last time I checked Chrome's dev tools was alot better.

baybal2 8y ago

Mozilla directors are wholly responsible for turning Firefox into what it became now. They have no moral right whatsoever to plead for mercy now.

llampx 8y ago
So we should just let the Google hegemony control the web and suck up all our data along with doing the same to our phones?
- baybal2 8y ago
  No, but you can't move Mozilla forward without firing incompetent directors flying chartered jets and getting $1M USD remuneration for nothing. All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers who pulled out Firefox, and all the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years. P.S. There is a whisper going around that Google's only reason to keep paying Mozilla so generously is just to keep them down, and quiet — a kind of unwritten non-aggression pact
  - metildaa 8y ago
    Could I get some citations? What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO. Mozilla's intentions and fears seem to be very reasonable, driving what they do from AV1 to fighting DRM, though they have hit dead ends with Firefox OS (now Kai OS) and other side projects, the organization is still doing work that is in the best interest of the common person, unlike what the tech giants have been doing.
    - baybal2 8y ago
      > What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO. Many things been coming out of their house, but not a usable browser — a raison d'etre stated in their charter.

dTal 8y ago

>I think about Chrome’s usurping of Internet Explorer (IE), and I wonder (antitrust and all aside) would Chrome have usurped IE if it wasn’t for IE stagnating? I remember when I was younger and jumped ship to Chrome - personally, it wasn’t about using Chrome because it wasn’t IE, it was about Chrome beating IE in a foot race and offering me a clean user experience. Chrome ate Firefox's lunch, not IE's. Firefox was the first browser to take a chunk out of IE, in large part because of the stagnation of IE6. People were switching away from IE at a fairly consistent rate. When Chrome came along, the rate remained the same, but people started switching to Chrome instead of Firefox. This graph shows it clearly (starts a little late to catch Firefox's initial bump but you can see the trend): http://i.imgur.com/7bP2pmj.png http://i.imgur.com/7bP2pmj.png

jeremyjh 8y ago
That graph begins with IE at 60% share and ends with it at 20% share. It indicates pretty clearly that most of Chrome's growth came from IE, I'm not sure how you can interpret it another way.
- dTal 8y ago
  Look at the slope in the beginning. People would have switched away from IE anyway. The release of Chrome didn't change the number of people switching away from IE, but it stopped Firefox's growth dead in its tracks.
- zhte415 8y ago
  IE6 stagnation was hated by developers and users alike. Growth of any browser came from something-must-be-better-than-this. FF had the upper hand against Opera, who were still quite the serious contender. I'm sure someone has done a PhD thesis on this, and if not well worth doing on multi-factor influences on market share for web browsers. Very multi-disciplinary too, covering tech, consumer understanding, embedded incumbents, marketing (a big part in Chrome's boom in my opinion). Chrome's growth came from IE, yet. But at the time, anyone's growth could have come from IE. Chrome did it better and faster. * I was still using IE6 in a corporate enviornment in 2013. I have friends that still require IE6 on XP in a company because funding for the system upgrade can't be made. The system's not internet facing, not explicitly. IE6 tried to define the internet, thankfully the internet moved on, and would have moved on. FF was at their tails, Chrome sped that.

hugh4life 8y ago

I wouldn't rush into it, but with webassembly I can't help but think that a browser rendered mobile OS is a concept worth reviving at some point. And google is unlikely to pursue that since they have Android.

Yoric 8y ago
A new Firefox OS? I'd love to see this happen.

zecg 8y ago

Firefox would do well to remove Pocket integration and stop placing ads.

alex_duf 8y ago
People need to be paid at some point, unless everyone magically starts to donate that's a reality. I don't like it either, that's why I give to Mozilla once in a while.
vinay427 8y ago
Regrading Pocket, why? I was ready to pull my torch out for Mozilla when I realized that Firefox included first-party Pocket support, until I learned that Mozilla now owns Read It Later (the developers of Pocket). I see no problem with Firefox including support for a product that Mozilla has complete control over, especially as a browser extension is a natural use case for Pocket.
PurpleRamen 8y ago
They need that to make money in the dark future when they are not getting enough money anymore from Google because of their low marketshare. They call it "becoming independant".
AsyncAwait 8y ago
a.) Mozilla owns Pocket. b.) The ads are entirely local and do not track you. They're an attempt to diversify revenue sources away from Google. Chrome doesn't have to do that, since Google tracks you.

rlv-dan 8y ago

A big problem is that the web standard is too complicated. Browsers are pretty much a virtual os that can do almost everything. For anyone to make a browser from scratch today is not feasible. We will move towards a monoculture, because there is no alternative unless we make a drastic shift in rethinking how the web should work.

dmos62 8y ago
Yeah. In the early days of internet, web won, because of its relative expressiveness and lack of -rigidity- structure, compared to gopher for example. Now we see that the same unbounded expressiveness led to a monolithic system within a system, that is only feasibly maintainable by large organizations. One program should do one thing, (and do it well): that's what leads to healthy systems. For me, it's not the bloated browser centric computing experience that's the biggest problem. In my eyes, it's eclipsed by the armies of web developers whose only professional purpose is to work with this technological mishap. If our only document delivery system, i.e. web, wasn't such a mess, the same could be accomplished by a fraction of the current workforce.
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  But the web has also allowed for things which are way more than document delivery; imageboards, for instance, weren't around before the web, and the fact of carrying images made them unsuitable for previous technology.
  - dmos62 8y ago
    Yeah, it became hard to define. That's pretty cool for users in the short run, but pretty bad in the long run, from a systems point of view. In other words, web surely had its moments, but unfortunately the biggest one is this peak-web thing we're talking about.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
Maybe Chrome can compete with itself by swapping out the rendering and Javascript vms.

jerrre 8y ago

A strange differences between OSes and Browsers, is that Browsers need/want to conform to standards. No-one expects Windows programs to work on macOS or Linux. But with the web that's different.

codezero 8y ago
This is indeed what people expect but it’s still pretty far from true. There are still a bunch of CSS quirks that are vendor specific. Also if you want to have fun read about the history of the innerText API - it even works different in different versions of IE! And wasn’t adopted by Firefox until about two years ago. These are only a few of the myriad mines you dodge when developing a library for the web at large. Have a look at caniuse.com for a journey down a compatibility rabbit hole. :)

baybal2 8y ago

Mozilla Corporation put foundation stones for WhatWG, and was betting to use it to bury W3C, but instead Google took WhatWG and buried Mozilla.

fogetti 8y ago

Chrome is full of bugs and getting slower by each release. Also regarding how they force people to log in just to use profiles it's pretty clear that we need good alternatives.

fimdomeio 8y ago

Crazy idea. what would happen if firefox would also become chromium based? You would now have a browser as fast as chrome but with better privacy features that chrome will never compete against. If chromium is open source other companies could share the control over code right? I suspect this is a terrible idea but still trying to find out why.

oAlbe 8y ago
Firefox as it is now is much faster than Chrome already.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  Not even close. I wrote a comment [0] with my examples recently. I like FF (though besides Containers, most reasons boil down to "it's not Chrome"), but fast is a word I'd only use in comparison to IE/Edge. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18620671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18620671
pjc50 8y ago
Having different rendering engines means that at least theoretically the W3C are in control of web standards; having only one rendering engine, Chromium, means the W3C is irrelevant and the standard is "what Chomium does".
ajvs 8y ago
You'd lose out on the WebRender and all the other Quantum/Servo-related improvements, their influence over web standards, their extended extension APIs and pretty much all respect they've built up over the years.
Yoric 8y ago
I know it's a tempting thought. Mozilla has certainly evaluated (and discarded) this possibility – as you mention, it's not a good idea. I posted a few reasons for this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655028 Also > If chromium is open source other companies could share the control over code right? The sole governing body for Chromium is Google. Other companies get exactly as much control as Google decides. That's the opposite of, say, the Linux Kernel or Rust. It is my understanding that Firefox is also heading in the same direction as these, i.e. towards shared control by all stakeholders.

sydd 8y ago

I'd love to use Firefox, but always go back to Chrome because couple of small issues: - Pinch zoom using the trackpad or the touchscreen is not smooth, it doesnt zoom the whole page just elements. Chrome/Safari/Edge does it well. - Tab tearing is clunky compared to Chrome. - The UI for bookmarks/history is awkward. For example it takes 4 clicks to reopen a recently closed tab compared to 2 in Chrome. When I add the history button its still 3 clicks...

efraim 8y ago
Right click the tab bar and click "undo close tab" to reopen it with two clicks, or use ctrl-shift-t to reopen it without the mouse.

artificialidiot 8y ago

Mozilla lacks the financial strength to shove their merchandise down people's throats. Microsoft used OS market share, Opera used small device market share and Google used web search market share to promote their offerings. Mozilla never had a similar advantage, only technical superiority for a while, which others caught up in a few years and average users didn't care about that anyway.

bugmen0t 8y ago
Of all people, the folks here on hacker news, are in the best situation to change that. Be vocal! Use your influence! And if you have the means: donate!
- bfrydl 8y ago
  > Be vocal! Use your influence! When I tell people to use Firefox they just laugh like it's a quirky personality trait that I use the underdog browser instead of the one everyone knows is best.

fireattack 8y ago

I fully agree with this article. I respect people choosing products based on ideality, but I personally will just use what suits my demand/preference best. When I first switched from IE to Firefox 1.5, it's because it has tabs. And I loved it more and more once I figured out how well-built it is and how powerful addons can be. When Chrome firstly came, it was pretty bad in term of functionality. The extension system is weak (compared to what Firefox can offer at the time), it lack TONS of what I personally consider as "essential features" (font settings for different languages is a big one for me as a non-Latin character user, for example), so I continued to use Firefox. But Chrome catched up very quickly. Today, the features of two browsers are basically on par in my user case, especially after Firefox switched to WebExt (which I think is the right direction, by the way). I started to use Chrome more and more due to some small details, like better sync experience etc. Again, purely personal choice based on my heavy use of both. Another thing that pushed me away from Firefox is my personal experience in bug reporting. I'm not a software developer, but I do report bugs semi-frequently. I feel like I was treated better in Chromium project than Firefox's one. I have lots of unhappy experiences there (the one that I still can't get over is that they won't fix a video playback bug that affects all Win7 + nVidia GPU users [1]). I think in Chromium everytime you report a bug with clear repro steps, there will at least an employee (or volunteer? Not sure) that will attempt to repeat your steps and attach a screencat of that in 1-2 days. It feels good. [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1410693 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1410693

sametmax 8y ago
People always say "we can't do anything about it" when some bad situation happen. Except it happens because it emerges from the collective behavior. Now, one can't fight a all the fights, and I don't think somebody that decides to avoid this one is a bad person. But one should definitly pick up some fights. Choose some things to pay for, decide some things to consume or be part of, not just by the nature of it, but by the consequences of doing so. Although I do think like in the article that it's better to fight _for_ something than _against_ something. Anyway, if one doesn't makes, on daily basis, regular, endless, conscious choices, one is not taking part of the world but is just passively living in it. And that's how we fail to build a society.

mjlee 8y ago

I'm not sure even technical users care what engine their browser is using. I think most web devs would prefer a smaller number of engines. I use Firefox mainly for privacy and containers. Is there a good reason Firefox couldn't provide features based on Chromium/Blink too (like Brave)?

Yoric 8y ago
Yes, there are many reasons. I'll give a few examples. If Firefox adopts Chromium, there becomes effectively no way for Mozilla to shape the futures in manners that are not blessed by Google. For instance, Google doesn't seem to be interested in WebVR/WebAR, so there is no way to bring a Chromium-based browser in this direction until Google says so. The same thing happens with compression formats, for instance. Also, as Google controls Chromium, a monopoly of Chromium also means that Google can decide to deprecate and/or customize web features without any counter-power. For instance, Google could decide to restrict WebPay to GooglePay, effectively leveraging their monopoly against PayPal and credit cards. There are also a number of manners in which Google could, in theory, make Netflix or Facebook or any competitor less usable or entirely unusable on the web. No Chromium-based browser can do anything against this. Don't forget that Mozilla is also working on a next-gen rendering engine, Servo, that is expected to kick the ass of both Gecko and Blink on recent platforms, in terms of both performance, battery use and security. Making Chromium the only web browser means abandoning any hope to switch to this new architecture, as everything would need to be bug-for-bug compatible with Chromium, instead of following the standard. (edit) typos
- mjlee 8y ago
  All good points, thank you! I think I underestimated the level of control Google holds over Chromium.
seba_dos1 8y ago
One of the reasons I use Firefox is because Gecko is simply better than Blink, which becomes completely unusable when having many tabs open on a PC with 8GB RAM.

Konryan 8y ago

I think there's another factor at play that isn't often mentioned: Google uses the dominant position of its services, as well as the strength of their brands, to promote Chrome as the better browser, in not-so-subtle ways. One is often repeatedly prompted to install Chrome when visiting Google on other browsers[1][2]. Most normal users would just give up and install just to get rid of the pop up. Microsoft has been doing the same (e.g. trying to trick you into keeping Edge when trying to select another browser as default on Windows 10), but their product wasn't good enough for it to work, it seems. [1] https://superuser.com/questions/1192441/is-it-possible-to-tell-google-to-stop-nagging-me-about-chrome https://superuser.com/questions/1192441/is-it-possible-to-te... [2] https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/922025 https://support.mozilla.org/it/questions/922025

Jonnax 8y ago
Also Firefox for Android gets a shit version of Google search. But if you spoof your user agent it works perfectly. That definitely is using their dominance in search to make people.use their web browser.
- EwanToo 8y ago
  That's recently (and silently as far as I can tell) changed for me, I now get a fairly good google search on Firefox on Android. However you're right in general Google are using the position to enforce Chrome
- simfoo 8y ago
  Can you give more details?
  - dessant 8y ago
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444
- hkt 8y ago
  Doesn't surprise me. The EU should fine Google for a lot of things, including that. There's always duckduckgo, though.

Sahhaese 8y ago

Given that web usage stats typically come from third party tracking and firefox is better at tracking protection, is there a 'hidden' market share?

simfoo 8y ago
Good question! Looking at https://netmarketshare.com/methodology https://netmarketshare.com/methodology (the source of the 9% figure), you seem to be mostly right

olejorgenb 8y ago

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Firefox have a built-in reader-mode. I don't use it much on desktop, but on on mobile it's very useful for pages that doesn't reflow. 6. There's an ad-block extension for firefox-mobile. [1] Could of course be because I'm more used to it and have more history in firefox :) [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-firefox-bookmarks-history-tabs#w_changing-results-on-the-fly_2 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire... [3] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1193670 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1193670

sametmax 8y ago
Also tab containers are fantastic.
- sebazzz 8y ago
  Not fantastic, but necessary in any web development activity. Being logged in as different users in the same browser, while at the same time not suffering from the limitations private mode has. Makes testing and developing very easy and saved me a lot of time.
  - em-bee 8y ago
    if only i could open a container without automatically loading all tabs inside it, but lazy loaded like when you restart the browser and only the active tab is loaded.
mouldysammich 8y ago
Firefoxs omnibar history search is significantly better than chromes; although i imagine that is down to them having no stake in sending google searches which google obviously does

m4r35n357 8y ago

Why not try Seamonkey https://www.seamonkey-project.org/ https://www.seamonkey-project.org/. Since Mozilla split the old application into the "lean & mean" Firefox and Thunderbird, they have both become so bloated that the old navigator combo is looking svelte by comparison!

kodablah 8y ago

> I think this kind of conversation is naturally fatiguing, and creates a particularly negative means of ushering new users into the platform - almost as hostages, rather than excited participants. Definitely true. Asking users to respect certain principles is tantamount to guilting them which doesn't work. > It’s time we analyse what Firefox does better than Chrome, and sing those praises. From the perspective of a non-technical user, the differences are not noticeable. Firefox and Chrome have continued to converge (...er...maybe one following the other) to the point that the differences listed are not real differentiators. Oddly enough, you could argue that telemetry and the constant push for user happiness and adoption is what is hurting FF. FF looks like Chrome. I'm not saying stop listening to your users, but in general it's ok to differentiate yourself in ways that don't appear to be immediately beneficial to adoption. The primary way this can be done is in the UI. We can all recognize that there are still lots of efficiencies to be gained around the current state of internet navigation. Other approaches may not be better, and I understand the maintainability fear of multiple UI paradigms in the same software, but at least it's a way of differentiating yourself.

austincheney 8y ago

Hands down there is one objective thing that Firefox does well and nobody else comes remotely close. DOM access. For some reason Firefox is thousands of times faster than other browsers when it comes to executing the standard DOM API methods. I know that is a bold statement but it is easily verified with numbers using a perf tool. Chrome is faster at executing JavaScript than Firefox, but even still Firefox leaves everybody completely in the dust when executing the DOM API. DOM access is so incredibly important to how the web works and nobody really talks about. For some unknown reason most developers are deathly afraid of the DOM and will do everything possible to hide from it. It is common in every job I have worked to see mountains of querySelectors and 10mb of supporting framework code so that developers don't have to fear the DOM buggy man. I could sympathize if the DOM were complicated, but it isn't. I really believe if Firefox goes away and that competition is gone the web will get fundamentally slower. Everybody will see this slowness and yet very few people be able to diagnose why, and that is tragic.

Waterluvian 8y ago
My understanding is that DOM manipulation and queries will always be far far slower than the logical equivalent in JavaScript. Does "thousands of times faster" challenge that? Ie. React's virtual DOM is a phenomenal idea because it greatly reduces actual DOM interaction. Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?
- austincheney 8y ago
  The DOM is a structured API to markup (HTML/XML). That means DOM instructions are access to something outside the language. Leaving the language, for any reason, is slower than executing within the language. That said the execution speed of DOM instructions is orthogonal to the execution speed of JavaScript alone. > Is it not really saving us much in Firefox? The DOM is the standard technology the browsers use to communicate from JavaScript to markup. QuerySelectors are strings, so they have to be parsed into DOM instructions by the browser using a native code engine. Since the DOM is a well defined standard and it is the standard that all browsers use DOM instruction performance can be directly compared between the different browsers.

olejorgenb 8y ago

One thing Chrome does better than Firefox is third-party coookie blocking: It's MUCH simpler to whitelist certain cookies in chrome - simply go to the site's cookies dialog, open the blocked tab and whitelist the cookie.. Somewhat ironically since many people say Firefox is better at blocking tracking. When it's hard to whitelist the cookies I need, I might cave and simply allow all third-party cookies.

thomasedwards 8y ago

Firefox Multi-Account Containers

rl3 8y ago

An incredibly interesting alternate reality would have been one where Microsoft used Quantum/Servo to power Edge instead of Chromium.

robin_reala 8y ago
As much as I would have liked them to, it doesn’t fix the problem of people not testing in Edge, which is why they’ve gone for Chromium in the first place.
- nikbackm 8y ago
  They also want to have synergy with Electron.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

chrismorgan 8y ago

I’ve been using Firefox since about 0.93, with about a year in the middle when I used Chrome as my primary browser, because it ran from a USB disk much better than Firefox did at the time, and that was what I needed at the time. (I am glad that Chrome came along, because by showing how bad Firefox was in some areas it spurred Mozilla on to improve it, so that it’s no longer bad like that.) I look at the sessions of people that use Chrome, and I wonder how they ever manage to get anything done: tab management is uniformly hopeless. Firefox, on the other hand, copes with hundreds of tabs with perfect equanimity. (I currently have 165 tabs spread across three windows—one for personal stuff, one for work stuff, and one for a particular work project; this is a fairly typical number; I might have less than twenty once a year or so, and I’ve had as many as 450 before.) I use the Tree Style Tab extension for a vertical tab bar with hierarchy. I’ve suggested it to family members once or twice each, and my dad and two of my sisters use vertical tabs (two via Tree Style Tab, one via some other extension) and wouldn’t be without ’em. Most of the rest of the family uses Firefox too, and I believe Firefox is the leading browser used by my coworkers at FastMail by quite a margin. Firefox’s awesome bar is aptly named. It’s way more useful than Chrome’s. I am an idealist and not fond of Google, and while that’s a factor, it’s not the primary reason I use Firefox. I use Firefox because I find it simply better. (Same deal with using DuckDuckGo over Google. It’s more usable with keyboard shortcuts and bangs, and finds results every bit as good as Google’s.) I also use Firefox on my phone; there, it’s more of a mixed bag: it’s markedly slower than Chrome in general, but I can install regular extensions like uBlock Origin and Stylus. There, my dislike of Google is more of a factor.

tarruda 8y ago
> I currently have 165 tabs spread across three windows How do you manage this setup? I'm specifically interested in how you can assign tabs to different windows and have this information persist across restarts.
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  It’s all purely done manually. There’s almost no overlap between things that could go in my general personal and general work windows (exceptions: HN threads where FastMail comes up and I respond, or the very occasional article from HN or RSS feeds that is directly tied to something I’m doing for work). I store them on different virtual desktops, too, so when Firefox starts I just move the windows to the appropriate desktops, and then keeping it all separate is straightforward. I do also use container tabs a little with some automatic assignment (automatic assignment to container, that is, not to window, useful as that would be), but I don’t think I actually need them any more; I think that FastMail is now the only thing where I need actively different sessions for personal and work, and it supports multiple logins just fine. Then sometimes there’s a particular project that I want to focus on, and so I create a new window just for it, and shift it and any other related stuff into another new virtual desktop. P.S. I just closed 50 tabs because I had finished something and deferred another thing.

daliusd 8y ago

I like idea to list what Firefox does better. My addition to the list: Firefox has better kerning support while Chromium team ignores the problem (e.g. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=888374#c_ts1544002305 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=888374... and https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=912052 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=912052). For the context: I'm software developer working in printing.

chrismorgan 8y ago
My experience with reporting these sorts of things: in Edge, fixed in about a month; in Firefox, normally fairly quickly, but sometimes months and occasionally never; in Chromium, I don’t even know why I bother filing bugs sometimes. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=639223 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=639223 is a good example of my experience there: a fancy typography thing that is just completely broken in an uncommon but by no means unreasonable situation, and it just sits for years untouched. But Firefox is still definitely not perfect: as an example that has sat unfixed for ten years, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479829 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479829 is about hyphenation and ligatures not mixing well (you can get half your ﬀ ligature on one line and half on the next). I tend to see the effects of that once or twice a year.

Jnr 8y ago

I use Firefox not because I am scared of Chrome or Chromium. I mainly use it because it has Tree Style Tab extension and it's mobile version allows installing Ublock Origin adblocker. And then to get sync and all the nice things across the board, I use it on all my devices. I don't see the bad power consumption on my MacBook as some have mentioned and it doesn't feel slower than Chrome.

hpaavola 8y ago

1. Send tab to device 2. Reader mode 3. Addons on mobile (pretty much just for blocking unwanted requests to make things way faster on slow connection and to protect my privacy) 4. Facebook container (same for Google would be nice) 5. Taking screenshots 6. Always enable zoom on mobile [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/send-tab-firefox-ios-your-computer https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/send-tab-firefox-ios-yo... [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu... [4] https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extension/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extensio... [5] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-screenshots https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-screenshots

Kovah 8y ago
4. Container for Google? Here you go bud: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
Vinnl 8y ago
> (same for Google would be nice) There's a third-party one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
andrewl-hn 8y ago
There's one for Google and one for Twitter, too. Both are not maintained by Mozilla, but by third-party devs, but the code changes are straight-forward (replace domains, make Google container tabs red by default instead of blue, use different icon). I use them for several months, and I'm pretty happy about them.

ubercow13 8y ago

After enabling webrender, Firefox is the smoothest scrolling and most responsive browser on android that I have used

asituop 8y ago
Webrender hasn't shipped on Android yet did it ?
- Yoric 8y ago
  Not yet, no.
  - ubercow13 8y ago
    Ah yep you're right. It has definitely become much much smoother at some point recently, but apparently for other reasons.

hkt 8y ago

Reader mode is awesome. I haven't used chrome for years, so actually don't know. Maybe I'd prefer it but I make a policy of not using google software and services (where the choice still exists).

pvinis 8y ago

Imagine if Firefox used webkit/chromium underneath. Would that allow Mozilla to make Firefox more awesome by freeing up dev time that was taken by servo and gecko, and now can be used to make great UI and extensions and features?

hkt 8y ago
No, they'd spend their time pruning all the google telemetry crud out of chromium. The fact is that Mozilla's next gen stuff is going to be streets ahead of Chrome, and I suspect their efforts will be rewarded in the end.
- pvinis 8y ago
  I know and I agree. I was more of a thought exercise. I would prefer for Mozilla to keep doing their thing. If they were to put webkit on Firefox, and after the initial de-googling, they would start working on webkit and contribute there, or somehow merge some servo things in webkit. I guess in the end it would still take a few years until it's complete, but it is an interesting thought to me.

Queenie_15 8y ago

The only reason I use Firefox is because it allows me to automatically delete all browsing history after I close it. Does Chrome allow this as well?

amelius 8y ago

> By making people excited to use Firefox rather than wary of using Chrome, I believe we can more effectively galvanise support for Firefox, and improve the health of the browser ‘market’ all round. No, because Google can just copy those features (except for the privacy respecting ones; but almost nobody cares about them)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

soniman 8y ago

The best thing about Firefox is that the browser is separate from your Google account so you don't have to worry about your bookmarks/extensions getting synced behind your back by Google and messing everything up. Google requiring browser/Google account to be the same is a nuisance that you don't have to worry about with Firefox.

bugmen0t 8y ago
What's also amazing, is that if you sign up for a Firefox Account you get privacy preserving sync: The data is encrypted & decrypted on your devices. Mozilla doesn't get to see your data.
- nallerooth 8y ago
  This. I get the whole "You are the product" thing when using Google services for free, but it still bugs me that anything I bookmark might/will end up in a profile somewhere.
- unsignedint 8y ago
  It's only fair to say that Chrome also offers this feature. You can set optional (mandatory for passwords) sync passphrase so your sync data is encrypted. In fact I liked way Firefox Sync did this same way (when it was called Weave) -- actually allowing to use a passphrase. They got rid of passphrase and they are now using username/password pair to handle encryption.

josteink 8y ago

> With the news about Edge switching to a foundation using Chromium a lot of the conversation has centered on browser engines slipping into something of a monoculture. Not to come of as dismissive, but if this is the first time you picked up this conversation, you simply haven't been paying attention the last half decade. If we've addressed things properly back then (with web developers using more than the Ad-company's browser), we wouldn't be in the situation where we are now with only 2 real engines remaining, down from 4, and mobile more crippled than ever. And now it's going to be much, much worse encouraging web developers to actually adhere to the standards for a diverse browser-market.

TuringTest 8y ago

AFAIK, Firefox is positioning itself as the only open source, standards compliant web browser for Virtual Reality, including 3D support (not just 2D floating windows). Chrome is neither there, nor expected.

bad_user 8y ago

For what is worth I think Firefox is the best browser for reasons already discussed here, but here’s the list of what I like ... Sync, awesome bar, tab management, multi-account containers, trustworthiness in the add-ons I install (better reviews by humans) and resource usage especially with many tabs. Firefox went through a very painful transition with Quantum due to invalidating many old extensions that people liked. However they managed to do the impossible imo, Firefox being better than ever and the ecosystem of add-ons is not in a bad shape either. I also believe it was the right thing to do, because technically speaking it was inferior to Chrome’s multi-process architecture. The old add-ons system also had a big problem from the user's point of view ... Firefox had no permissions system in place and I like their review-based approach, but it doesn’t scale well. So now after Quantum, I'm pretty sure Firefox will move on to innovate in its internals way past Chrome or Safari. As a software developer I'm super psyched about what they are doing with Rust. Having a browser with components built in Rust, a super safe language, doesn't mean much for regular users, but it should translate in a more stable, safer and performant product. And I don't know how many people appreciate this, but building a better language than C/C++ and then re-building components with it in an old and popular product, without breaking it, is super hard.