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> Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes. I just use Firefox with some extensio

> Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes. I just use Firefox with some extensions and have seen nothing like this. I also used Thunderbird briefly (like a month). What am I missing? Do you have specific examples? If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it? The browser starts, I get to work, end of story. I get that Firefox has made some decisions people don’t like (Pocket and the suggested links on new tab) but that doesn’t mean they are annoying users on every chance or breaking my ability to work.

narag 6y ago
If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it? People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here. Perception is Mozilla is not ran as an open source organization, but as an advertisement company with similar tricks to make users "engage with the product".
- skinkestek 6y ago
  > People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here. As someone who is annoyed now: Partially true I'd say. I've also been surprised once or twice before by people who were oh so critical about Mozilla and then recommended using Chrome/Chromium or a derivative instead. There's always been someone to hate on Firefox, at least since they introduced the awesomebar a long time ago. And here I sit, wondering if - it finally catched up with me what others had seen a long time - if I changed - if Mozilla changed - or if I am the target of a successful smear campaign against Mozilla I don't know. Right now however I want I want Google to work like in 2009 and my old Firefox extensions to work with the new supposedly (I think so, honestly, but I don't know) safer API, I want corona gone and I want my insanely powerful laptop to feel insanely powerful instead of sitting here waiting for a double digit GB more RAM to arrive :-/
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. No, everyone cared. Firefox went from market dominance to a rounding error usershare and consistently dropping. HN users aren't a significant enough portion of browser traffic to account for more than 0.001% of that. People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall. A browser that sold itself on its openness and extensibility is only slightly more open than Chromium, and explicitly limits its possible extensibility to wherever Chrome chooses to set it. Firefox has relegated itself to being a wonky Chrome that isn't connected to Google services. Nobody would choose that over Chrome except out of nostalgia or stubbornness. This is why Google pays all of Firefox's bills.
  - mapgrep 6y ago
    > People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall. Personally I think the decline of Firefox usage had a lot more to do with Chrome’s performance superiority and objectively better stability for close to a decade. For close to 10 years, until the release of Firefox Quantum in late 2017, Firefox was stuck on a model where browser processes were shared between tabs. Chrome was the first browser to go process-per-tab with its release in 2008. Process per tab was huge. Flash was still everywhere but tabs had just become a thing and people’s browsers were crashing more and more due to this combination. Mobile was barely a thing. Chrome grew and grew. If a tab crashed it didn’t take down the whole browser session. It was isolated. It’s comparable, for heavy web surfers, to when operating systems got protected memory, multithreading, and preemptive multitasking. A new world of performance. Today the web is more stable because Flash is gone, mobile has helped push websites to be less piggish on memory use (I mean, obviously they are still pretty bad), ad blockers are more common, and so it’s easy to forget the history. But I switched from FF to Chrome in this period and then came back after FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab, and after Chrome got tied in ever closer to Google’s tracking business.
    - Izkata 6y ago
- spanhandler 6y ago
  It's a very "loud" piece of software. Messages about various things they want me to try (ads), tabs popping up with a fancy page telling me the browser updated (this might be OK if it happened like twice a year, but it's more like every week or two), and a busy, distracting default page. This stuff bugs power users, but if you watch people who aren't in the power-user set, it's pure usability poison to them. Ditto UI elements moving around after an auto-update. Confuses the living hell out of them. It's about as far from good UX as you can get—a mediocre UI that never changes is far better UX than a good one that behaves unpredictably, and I mean from the perspective of normal people, not HN nerds.
clum 6y ago
When they broke almost all existing Addons (some are gone to this day, like Classic Theme Restorer) with the Quantum Update for instance. Or when they decided to ditch Thunderbird for no reason at all. And then sort of undecided.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  AIUI, Classic Theme Restorer has become redundant since Quantum brought back the "classic" look anyway. Of course there are many other examples of broken extensions.
rstuart4133 6y ago
I've used Firefox for decades now, and I have never understood the shear amount of vitriol that gets thrown at Mozilla when they change Firefox. Sure, workflows I'm used to change, and sure they add in the odd experiment from time to time that is later abandoned, but it's at nowhere near the frequency Google does the same thing. Yes, Google cops a lot of criticism for this, but language used to criticise Google pales compared to level of vindictiveness I see thrown at Mozilla just in the comments here. It's like they been betrayed by their own mother. It's even harder to explain given Firefox has clearly gotten better over the years. It's a bumpy ride like all software changes, but it's faster, more reliable, and more standards compliant than ever before. Yes, addon compatibility has been sacrificed to make that happen, but happened for a pretty good reason unlike say Google removing the interfaces that allow ad blockers to work effectively. In the process they've made some hard core advances in the art, like Rust, and like WASM. From where I sit they've been more effective at this recently than Google. And yet what we hear about here is how Pocket doesn't work as they like. Really - does it matter, compared to the amount of good work that comes out of Mozilla?
- tweetstorss 6y ago
  Mozilla broke features that did not need fixing. They also removed features such as RSS support. RSS supports anonymity and does not add dollars to Google's kitty. So, Mozilla's policy was lockstep with Google's.

narag 6y ago

If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it? People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here. Perception is Mozilla is not ran as an open source organization, but as an advertisement company with similar tricks to make users "engage with the product".

skinkestek 6y ago
> People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here. As someone who is annoyed now: Partially true I'd say. I've also been surprised once or twice before by people who were oh so critical about Mozilla and then recommended using Chrome/Chromium or a derivative instead. There's always been someone to hate on Firefox, at least since they introduced the awesomebar a long time ago. And here I sit, wondering if - it finally catched up with me what others had seen a long time - if I changed - if Mozilla changed - or if I am the target of a successful smear campaign against Mozilla I don't know. Right now however I want I want Google to work like in 2009 and my old Firefox extensions to work with the new supposedly (I think so, honestly, but I don't know) safer API, I want corona gone and I want my insanely powerful laptop to feel insanely powerful instead of sitting here waiting for a double digit GB more RAM to arrive :-/
pessimizer 6y ago
> People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. No, everyone cared. Firefox went from market dominance to a rounding error usershare and consistently dropping. HN users aren't a significant enough portion of browser traffic to account for more than 0.001% of that. People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall. A browser that sold itself on its openness and extensibility is only slightly more open than Chromium, and explicitly limits its possible extensibility to wherever Chrome chooses to set it. Firefox has relegated itself to being a wonky Chrome that isn't connected to Google services. Nobody would choose that over Chrome except out of nostalgia or stubbornness. This is why Google pays all of Firefox's bills.
- mapgrep 6y ago
  > People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall. Personally I think the decline of Firefox usage had a lot more to do with Chrome’s performance superiority and objectively better stability for close to a decade. For close to 10 years, until the release of Firefox Quantum in late 2017, Firefox was stuck on a model where browser processes were shared between tabs. Chrome was the first browser to go process-per-tab with its release in 2008. Process per tab was huge. Flash was still everywhere but tabs had just become a thing and people’s browsers were crashing more and more due to this combination. Mobile was barely a thing. Chrome grew and grew. If a tab crashed it didn’t take down the whole browser session. It was isolated. It’s comparable, for heavy web surfers, to when operating systems got protected memory, multithreading, and preemptive multitasking. A new world of performance. Today the web is more stable because Flash is gone, mobile has helped push websites to be less piggish on memory use (I mean, obviously they are still pretty bad), ad blockers are more common, and so it’s easy to forget the history. But I switched from FF to Chrome in this period and then came back after FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab, and after Chrome got tied in ever closer to Google’s tracking business.
  - Izkata 6y ago
spanhandler 6y ago
It's a very "loud" piece of software. Messages about various things they want me to try (ads), tabs popping up with a fancy page telling me the browser updated (this might be OK if it happened like twice a year, but it's more like every week or two), and a busy, distracting default page. This stuff bugs power users, but if you watch people who aren't in the power-user set, it's pure usability poison to them. Ditto UI elements moving around after an auto-update. Confuses the living hell out of them. It's about as far from good UX as you can get—a mediocre UI that never changes is far better UX than a good one that behaves unpredictably, and I mean from the perspective of normal people, not HN nerds.

clum 6y ago

When they broke almost all existing Addons (some are gone to this day, like Classic Theme Restorer) with the Quantum Update for instance. Or when they decided to ditch Thunderbird for no reason at all. And then sort of undecided.

zozbot234 6y ago
AIUI, Classic Theme Restorer has become redundant since Quantum brought back the "classic" look anyway. Of course there are many other examples of broken extensions.

rstuart4133 6y ago

I've used Firefox for decades now, and I have never understood the shear amount of vitriol that gets thrown at Mozilla when they change Firefox. Sure, workflows I'm used to change, and sure they add in the odd experiment from time to time that is later abandoned, but it's at nowhere near the frequency Google does the same thing. Yes, Google cops a lot of criticism for this, but language used to criticise Google pales compared to level of vindictiveness I see thrown at Mozilla just in the comments here. It's like they been betrayed by their own mother. It's even harder to explain given Firefox has clearly gotten better over the years. It's a bumpy ride like all software changes, but it's faster, more reliable, and more standards compliant than ever before. Yes, addon compatibility has been sacrificed to make that happen, but happened for a pretty good reason unlike say Google removing the interfaces that allow ad blockers to work effectively. In the process they've made some hard core advances in the art, like Rust, and like WASM. From where I sit they've been more effective at this recently than Google. And yet what we hear about here is how Pocket doesn't work as they like. Really - does it matter, compared to the amount of good work that comes out of Mozilla?

tweetstorss 6y ago
Mozilla broke features that did not need fixing. They also removed features such as RSS support. RSS supports anonymity and does not add dollars to Google's kitty. So, Mozilla's policy was lockstep with Google's.