11 ms·

25% seems like much too high a number for the group you’re talking about. I’d be interested to see some data on level of technical engagement and knowledge, but

25% seems like much too high a number for the group you’re talking about. I’d be interested to see some data on level of technical engagement and knowledge, but in my experience a large percentage of users don’t even have a clear idea of what a browser is. The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: i) Chrome is pushed by Google.com, which has a near monopoly on search ii) Chrome was bundled and installed alongside other software iii) Chrome is built into Android and Chromebook iv) Chrome has a huge advertising budget And all of these factors combine to make Chrome feel like the default portal to the web. Also for a period of time Chrome was undeniably a better, more stable browser. It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable. But Firefox Quantum only exists because of Servo, and vital parts of Servo (parallel layout in particular) have not been integrated into Firefox. It’s bizarre to see Mozilla sabotaging its long term chance at technical leadership not only by scrapping Servo but firing the engineers who built it. I had an untechnical family member say unprompted last week they want to move away from Chrome but couldn’t use Firefox Mobile because it’s too slow. At the same moment Mozilla leadership was sacking its staff working on parallelising the browser engine.

KingOfCoders 6y ago
I left FF several times for being slow, being a memory hog, dropping extensions, not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) and come back from Chrome for ideological reasons. I might not be the core audience or user group, but I have not left because of i.) - iv.).
- ohgodplsno 6y ago
  > not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ ?
  - stekern 6y ago
    I assume the parent means native support for vertical tabs in the browser as opposed to through a third party extension.
    - KingOfCoders 6y ago
      a.) Yes b.) With changing their extension API several times it was not clear the plugin would make it.
- Brakenshire 6y ago
  I just don’t think there are enough users who care about deep customisation through extensions compared to those who care about speed and stability, and Firefox traded one for the other in adopting a standardised Extensions API, and the changes that allowed in the browser architecture.
- forgotpwd16 6y ago
  One of the reasons I'm still on Fox is tree-style tabs (with "Tree Style Tab" extension) and being able to hide top tabs (using userChrome.css).
  - bishalb 6y ago
    The best things about tabs in Firefoxia the scrollable tab bar. I am not sure why chrome doesn't add this.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      Can you imagine having to respond to all these "chrome ate my tabs" tickets?
      - majewsky 6y ago
        As if Google ever replies to tickets.
  - aldanor 6y ago
    Same here. If TreeStyleTab existed on Chrome (or, hell, even in Safari), I wouldn't care that much which browser to use.
  - KingOfCoders 6y ago
    I recently switched to "Simple Tab Groups" after years with "Tree Style Tab" and I do prefer it.
- Lammy 6y ago
  > not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) They made a pretty huge deal about the Tab Groups (aka Panorama) feature of Firefox 4 in 2010; designed by Aza Raskin! https://web.archive.org/web/20101105212333/http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/designing-tab-candy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101105212333/http://www.azaras... But then it was removed in 2016 because few people really used it (or few people who had telemetry enabled, at least): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-removal https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-removal
  - fartcannon 6y ago
    Oh jees, is that what's happening? If they're only building for telemetry data, theyre screwed. Gonna end up with a browser for people who think the internet is a series of tubes.
    - chowells 6y ago
      You believe developers don't understand telemetry and leave it enabled because it helps development of the tools they use? This whole anti-telemetry outrage is so manufactured and boring.
      - csande17 6y ago
        I'm a developer, and I disable telemetry whenever possible, including in Firefox. I do this because I value my privacy (the same reason I use Firefox), and I don't want my system to make network requests unnecessarily. The way I see it, there are two possibilities: (1) A significant portion of Firefox users think like me. In this case, Mozilla should not rely on telemetry because it excludes a sizeable portion of their userbase, and one that likely correlates with things like "believes in Mozilla's stated core philosophy" and "is passionate enough about browsers to recommend them to people". (2) Not many Firefox users think like me. In this case, it's pointless for me to enable telemetry because they'll just ignore my needs anyway. "It is not worth supporting this feature, the data shows that 99% of people do not use it!" won't change if the number is actually 98.99%.
kinleyd 6y ago
<But Firefox Quantum only exists because of Servo> Which is why, for the life of me, I just can't see the logic of firing the Servo team.
- HugoDaniel 6y ago
  Money and hierarchy
- tarkin2 6y ago
  Hasn’t the quantum project been successful? It seemed like project accomplished to me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24164058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24164058 It’s not like they binned servo and decided not to use it improve ff. It did improve ff. They seem to have decided that’s done and finished now. And there’s no longer any need to work on it - whether that’s a wise move or not is obviously up for debate.
  - kinleyd 6y ago
    Quantum was just one of the milestones, albeit an important one. Servo continues to develop and pass on many more features to Firefox. Shutting it down is basically shutting the major pipeline of progress that has gotten so many of us excited over Mozilla in the past several years. The decision does not augur well for Firefox and Mozilla.
    - gruturo 6y ago
      I concur, it’s quite insane. All their initiatives brought back tiny, tiny figures compared to the google search deal. And that deal is so profitable because Firefox still has a decent market share. Torpedoing the technological future of their browser is bound to reduce that share, at which point Google will likely offer much less money. They are basically shooting their one trick pony in a leg, deliberately. It’s.... not smart.
      - anonymousab 6y ago
        It makes a ton of sense if you look at it from the perspective of what leadership has been seeing: All this effort on maintaining their own browser engine, met with continued decline and further irrelevancy. Despite best efforts, a likely trend towards disaster. In the face of that, it would be reasonable to think that the cost is nowhere near worth the effort, compared to just adopting Chromium. I think it'd be very easy for them to think that their goals for the modern web are not intrinsically tied to having their own, completely separate software.
danieldk 6y ago
I think this hits the nail on its head, but I would add v. Intentionally breaking other browsers subtly on Google properties. i, ii, and v are directly from Microsoft’s 90ies/00s playbook and the regulators are sleeping.
- m-p-3 6y ago
  It's disgusting that the search UI for Google in Chrome is different in Firefox. You can even see that it works fine if you switch Firefox user-agent to Chrome, so there's not even a compatibility reason behind it (and why should there be, we have web standards for a reason).
- RonanTheGrey 6y ago
  Google Calendar regularly breaks on Firefox. Switch to chrome? Nope not a bad deploy. Switch the user agent? Works fine. Hard to say if incidents like that are intentional, passive aggressive, or accidental, but they happen pretty frequently. Same with Youtube. Firebase console. GCP.
ksec 6y ago
>The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: My opinion is that none of those actually matters. The "one" single reason Chrome won market share was the same playbook how Google Search Engine Started. Speed. I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. It was faster. The user experience was far better. You could advertise the heck out of your product, but if it wasn't any good it wouldn't matter. For nearly 10 years Google Chrome was undoubtedly the fastest browser on the planet. It wasn't until Quantum landed on Firefox before you could at least have a few metric of performance wins going to Mozilla, and that is also partly because Chrome has slowed down a lot in recent years.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster. Really the parent commenter is right: Chrome is dominant only because of its huge marketing budget. P.S. Chrome is also buggy as hell and crashes pages all the time, which Firefox doesn't do.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    > I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster Are you comparing current Chrome to current Firefox? Relatively recently, compared to the overall trend we're seeing here, Firefox got much faster than it had been: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox-quantum/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox... The discussion above, however, is about how Chrome came to grow so much while Firefox shrank so much, and for that the question is how did Firefox and Chrome compare historically. There was ~10y from Chrome's release until Quantum came out. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
    - mirthflat83 6y ago
      Yes. I remember when I first tried Chrome. It launched within 10 seconds while Firefox 3? 4?, my default browser back then, took almost half a minute to launch. It was fast.
neverminder 6y ago
> I had an untechnical family member say unprompted last week they want to move away from Chrome but couldn’t use Firefox Mobile because it’s too slow. At the same moment Mozilla leadership was sacking its staff working on parallelising the browser engine. That's because Firefox is slow. I'm saying this as someone who's been using it as the main browser for at least a decade. My latest personal anecdote. Firefox trackpad scrolling is lagging on my brand new Precision 7750 with vanilla Ubuntu 20.04 installed. Chrome doesn't have the same issue, especially considering Google's unfriendliness towards Linux.
- alcoholic_byte 6y ago
  Cannot verify and I am on Linux for a couple of years and on different hardware during those years. Arch-distribution, so maybe the defaults are what is different here?? Browsing, scrolling(with trackpad and without) startup time, etc. all fine. One thing that I find interesting to always ask: Performance under what circumstances? There are users who have literally 200 tabs+ open and then they complain that everything is slow.
  - gregors 6y ago
    If users have 200+ tabs open and are experiencing slowness, I'd suggest that altering the users behavior isn't a fix. To me that's pure failure from Product designers to realize that "they shouldn't do that" doesn't cut it. Fix it. Spending time and money on solving these issues isn't going to generate new revenue. I find it hard to believe engineers wouldn't want to try fix performance issues. I find it easy to believe leadership at Mozilla would find it unimportant. edit: clarification
    - alcoholic_byte 6y ago
      I think you are wrong there. As a product designer one never caters to edge-cases. Besides having 200+ tabs open is very impractical, the way Chrome minifies all the tabs instead of making them slidable is just one prime example where the designers chose not to cater to the extreme. Even with a tab-behaviour like Firefox's it is a very unmanageable situation. Also note that one might encounter a tradeoff in system-design where you could choose a very memory/resource-efficient design over a very performant one. You cannot always get both. Unfortunately, because Google is "In" just because it delivers mind-numbing ease via Youtube etc., this very vocal minority, claiming technical expertise scew impressions for the general population. Similar to absolute views like :They do not care... I think they care, not about the particular problem, but the product and how it meets the requirements of a general audience swiftly and reliable. So the problem crossed their desk, they triaged it and closed it because it is an extreme use case which will not meet general requirements. The same goes for all the multitudinous problems in that area.
rndgermandude 6y ago
>It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable. No, they did not. Electrolysis was around before WebExtensions. Sure, Electrolysis wasn't backwards compatible and a lot of existing extensions had to rewrite part of their code to be compatible, and abandoned extensions were broken forever - or would have been once mozilla removed compat shims (unless somebody picked up the slack, which people quite often did). This was still a lot better than breaking every extension and forcing a new extremely restricted WebExtensions API that was a clone of the Chrome APIs but came with their own bugs and a lot of "TODO: implement actual API". Quantum is just a PR term. The impact of Quantum-related changes to extensions was tiny if present at all (if the extension already survived Electrolysis). The only reason that old non-webext extensions do not work anymore in Firefox at all is that they helpfully removed the actually code that would run the extension (but not really last I checked, it's still around to support mozilla-owned sideloaded/builtin extensions such as pocket). comm-central (Thunderbird, Seamonkey) even implemented their own implementation of what was removed to get (restartless) old-style extensions working again, falsifying the claim that forcing a WebExtensions-only change was a requirement to get e10s/Quantum going. Underneath it all, to this day most of Firefox is still javascript + XUL/HTML on the frontend with bridges (XPCOM, etc) to expose the C components. PS: e10s shipped in v53, "old" extensions were only removed in Quantum, which was v57 (but not really removed, as I noted, just disabled for everybody except mozilla's own stuff). I ran (and sometimes still run) a personal fork of 60esr (aka >57 ;) where I added back "old" extension support by git-reverting a few hundreds of lines of code that they removed.. That thing was Quantum too, all the Quantum perf/speed improvements were still present, and yet magically still supported all the old extensions I cared about.
- causality0 6y ago
  but not really removed, as I noted, just disabled for everybody except mozilla's own stuff That's fucking infuriating. You should write up a blog post about how easily you were able to turn them back on in Quantum.
  - 6y ago
stjohnswarts 6y ago
the current mobile firefox browser works great and it's not "too slow". They just simply didn't like their experience and told you it was "too slow" because they're biased again new things. Benchmarks (real ones on real web pages prove it) I agree with you though that Chrome engines are just everywhere and it's going to take some big sea change for that to not be the case.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  It is a bit slow. It loads some stuff it thinks I want to see before letting me type into the one input box, which isn't even focused, so I have to tap in it to summon the keyboard), and only then can I type something.
anonymousab 6y ago
>which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable. That was the big one that cost a lot of users, but it was a jusitifiable big leap for them to take. But they have also been suffering papercut after papercut power user losses with various regressions and removal of functionality since then. The actual users lost are minimal, but I suspect the overall perception of Mozilla's priorities, among those kinds of users, has suffered much more.

KingOfCoders 6y ago

I left FF several times for being slow, being a memory hog, dropping extensions, not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) and come back from Chrome for ideological reasons. I might not be the core audience or user group, but I have not left because of i.) - iv.).

ohgodplsno 6y ago
> not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ ?
- stekern 6y ago
  I assume the parent means native support for vertical tabs in the browser as opposed to through a third party extension.
  - KingOfCoders 6y ago
    a.) Yes b.) With changing their extension API several times it was not clear the plugin would make it.
Brakenshire 6y ago
I just don’t think there are enough users who care about deep customisation through extensions compared to those who care about speed and stability, and Firefox traded one for the other in adopting a standardised Extensions API, and the changes that allowed in the browser architecture.
forgotpwd16 6y ago
One of the reasons I'm still on Fox is tree-style tabs (with "Tree Style Tab" extension) and being able to hide top tabs (using userChrome.css).
- bishalb 6y ago
  The best things about tabs in Firefoxia the scrollable tab bar. I am not sure why chrome doesn't add this.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    Can you imagine having to respond to all these "chrome ate my tabs" tickets?
    - majewsky 6y ago
      As if Google ever replies to tickets.
- aldanor 6y ago
  Same here. If TreeStyleTab existed on Chrome (or, hell, even in Safari), I wouldn't care that much which browser to use.
- KingOfCoders 6y ago
  I recently switched to "Simple Tab Groups" after years with "Tree Style Tab" and I do prefer it.
Lammy 6y ago
> not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) They made a pretty huge deal about the Tab Groups (aka Panorama) feature of Firefox 4 in 2010; designed by Aza Raskin! https://web.archive.org/web/20101105212333/http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/designing-tab-candy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101105212333/http://www.azaras... But then it was removed in 2016 because few people really used it (or few people who had telemetry enabled, at least): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-removal https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-removal
- fartcannon 6y ago
  Oh jees, is that what's happening? If they're only building for telemetry data, theyre screwed. Gonna end up with a browser for people who think the internet is a series of tubes.
  - chowells 6y ago
    You believe developers don't understand telemetry and leave it enabled because it helps development of the tools they use? This whole anti-telemetry outrage is so manufactured and boring.
    - csande17 6y ago
      I'm a developer, and I disable telemetry whenever possible, including in Firefox. I do this because I value my privacy (the same reason I use Firefox), and I don't want my system to make network requests unnecessarily. The way I see it, there are two possibilities: (1) A significant portion of Firefox users think like me. In this case, Mozilla should not rely on telemetry because it excludes a sizeable portion of their userbase, and one that likely correlates with things like "believes in Mozilla's stated core philosophy" and "is passionate enough about browsers to recommend them to people". (2) Not many Firefox users think like me. In this case, it's pointless for me to enable telemetry because they'll just ignore my needs anyway. "It is not worth supporting this feature, the data shows that 99% of people do not use it!" won't change if the number is actually 98.99%.

kinleyd 6y ago

<But Firefox Quantum only exists because of Servo> Which is why, for the life of me, I just can't see the logic of firing the Servo team.

HugoDaniel 6y ago
Money and hierarchy
tarkin2 6y ago
Hasn’t the quantum project been successful? It seemed like project accomplished to me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24164058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24164058 It’s not like they binned servo and decided not to use it improve ff. It did improve ff. They seem to have decided that’s done and finished now. And there’s no longer any need to work on it - whether that’s a wise move or not is obviously up for debate.
- kinleyd 6y ago
  Quantum was just one of the milestones, albeit an important one. Servo continues to develop and pass on many more features to Firefox. Shutting it down is basically shutting the major pipeline of progress that has gotten so many of us excited over Mozilla in the past several years. The decision does not augur well for Firefox and Mozilla.
  - gruturo 6y ago
    I concur, it’s quite insane. All their initiatives brought back tiny, tiny figures compared to the google search deal. And that deal is so profitable because Firefox still has a decent market share. Torpedoing the technological future of their browser is bound to reduce that share, at which point Google will likely offer much less money. They are basically shooting their one trick pony in a leg, deliberately. It’s.... not smart.
    - anonymousab 6y ago
      It makes a ton of sense if you look at it from the perspective of what leadership has been seeing: All this effort on maintaining their own browser engine, met with continued decline and further irrelevancy. Despite best efforts, a likely trend towards disaster. In the face of that, it would be reasonable to think that the cost is nowhere near worth the effort, compared to just adopting Chromium. I think it'd be very easy for them to think that their goals for the modern web are not intrinsically tied to having their own, completely separate software.

danieldk 6y ago

I think this hits the nail on its head, but I would add v. Intentionally breaking other browsers subtly on Google properties. i, ii, and v are directly from Microsoft’s 90ies/00s playbook and the regulators are sleeping.

m-p-3 6y ago
It's disgusting that the search UI for Google in Chrome is different in Firefox. You can even see that it works fine if you switch Firefox user-agent to Chrome, so there's not even a compatibility reason behind it (and why should there be, we have web standards for a reason).
RonanTheGrey 6y ago
Google Calendar regularly breaks on Firefox. Switch to chrome? Nope not a bad deploy. Switch the user agent? Works fine. Hard to say if incidents like that are intentional, passive aggressive, or accidental, but they happen pretty frequently. Same with Youtube. Firebase console. GCP.

ksec 6y ago

>The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: My opinion is that none of those actually matters. The "one" single reason Chrome won market share was the same playbook how Google Search Engine Started. Speed. I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. It was faster. The user experience was far better. You could advertise the heck out of your product, but if it wasn't any good it wouldn't matter. For nearly 10 years Google Chrome was undoubtedly the fastest browser on the planet. It wasn't until Quantum landed on Firefox before you could at least have a few metric of performance wins going to Mozilla, and that is also partly because Chrome has slowed down a lot in recent years.

otabdeveloper4 6y ago
I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster. Really the parent commenter is right: Chrome is dominant only because of its huge marketing budget. P.S. Chrome is also buggy as hell and crashes pages all the time, which Firefox doesn't do.
- jefftk 6y ago
  > I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster Are you comparing current Chrome to current Firefox? Relatively recently, compared to the overall trend we're seeing here, Firefox got much faster than it had been: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox-quantum/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox... The discussion above, however, is about how Chrome came to grow so much while Firefox shrank so much, and for that the question is how did Firefox and Chrome compare historically. There was ~10y from Chrome's release until Quantum came out. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
  - mirthflat83 6y ago
    Yes. I remember when I first tried Chrome. It launched within 10 seconds while Firefox 3? 4?, my default browser back then, took almost half a minute to launch. It was fast.

neverminder 6y ago

> I had an untechnical family member say unprompted last week they want to move away from Chrome but couldn’t use Firefox Mobile because it’s too slow. At the same moment Mozilla leadership was sacking its staff working on parallelising the browser engine. That's because Firefox is slow. I'm saying this as someone who's been using it as the main browser for at least a decade. My latest personal anecdote. Firefox trackpad scrolling is lagging on my brand new Precision 7750 with vanilla Ubuntu 20.04 installed. Chrome doesn't have the same issue, especially considering Google's unfriendliness towards Linux.

alcoholic_byte 6y ago
Cannot verify and I am on Linux for a couple of years and on different hardware during those years. Arch-distribution, so maybe the defaults are what is different here?? Browsing, scrolling(with trackpad and without) startup time, etc. all fine. One thing that I find interesting to always ask: Performance under what circumstances? There are users who have literally 200 tabs+ open and then they complain that everything is slow.
- gregors 6y ago
  If users have 200+ tabs open and are experiencing slowness, I'd suggest that altering the users behavior isn't a fix. To me that's pure failure from Product designers to realize that "they shouldn't do that" doesn't cut it. Fix it. Spending time and money on solving these issues isn't going to generate new revenue. I find it hard to believe engineers wouldn't want to try fix performance issues. I find it easy to believe leadership at Mozilla would find it unimportant. edit: clarification
  - alcoholic_byte 6y ago
    I think you are wrong there. As a product designer one never caters to edge-cases. Besides having 200+ tabs open is very impractical, the way Chrome minifies all the tabs instead of making them slidable is just one prime example where the designers chose not to cater to the extreme. Even with a tab-behaviour like Firefox's it is a very unmanageable situation. Also note that one might encounter a tradeoff in system-design where you could choose a very memory/resource-efficient design over a very performant one. You cannot always get both. Unfortunately, because Google is "In" just because it delivers mind-numbing ease via Youtube etc., this very vocal minority, claiming technical expertise scew impressions for the general population. Similar to absolute views like :They do not care... I think they care, not about the particular problem, but the product and how it meets the requirements of a general audience swiftly and reliable. So the problem crossed their desk, they triaged it and closed it because it is an extreme use case which will not meet general requirements. The same goes for all the multitudinous problems in that area.

rndgermandude 6y ago

>It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable. No, they did not. Electrolysis was around before WebExtensions. Sure, Electrolysis wasn't backwards compatible and a lot of existing extensions had to rewrite part of their code to be compatible, and abandoned extensions were broken forever - or would have been once mozilla removed compat shims (unless somebody picked up the slack, which people quite often did). This was still a lot better than breaking every extension and forcing a new extremely restricted WebExtensions API that was a clone of the Chrome APIs but came with their own bugs and a lot of "TODO: implement actual API". Quantum is just a PR term. The impact of Quantum-related changes to extensions was tiny if present at all (if the extension already survived Electrolysis). The only reason that old non-webext extensions do not work anymore in Firefox at all is that they helpfully removed the actually code that would run the extension (but not really last I checked, it's still around to support mozilla-owned sideloaded/builtin extensions such as pocket). comm-central (Thunderbird, Seamonkey) even implemented their own implementation of what was removed to get (restartless) old-style extensions working again, falsifying the claim that forcing a WebExtensions-only change was a requirement to get e10s/Quantum going. Underneath it all, to this day most of Firefox is still javascript + XUL/HTML on the frontend with bridges (XPCOM, etc) to expose the C components. PS: e10s shipped in v53, "old" extensions were only removed in Quantum, which was v57 (but not really removed, as I noted, just disabled for everybody except mozilla's own stuff). I ran (and sometimes still run) a personal fork of 60esr (aka >57 ;) where I added back "old" extension support by git-reverting a few hundreds of lines of code that they removed.. That thing was Quantum too, all the Quantum perf/speed improvements were still present, and yet magically still supported all the old extensions I cared about.

causality0 6y ago
but not really removed, as I noted, just disabled for everybody except mozilla's own stuff That's fucking infuriating. You should write up a blog post about how easily you were able to turn them back on in Quantum.
- 6y ago

stjohnswarts 6y ago

the current mobile firefox browser works great and it's not "too slow". They just simply didn't like their experience and told you it was "too slow" because they're biased again new things. Benchmarks (real ones on real web pages prove it) I agree with you though that Chrome engines are just everywhere and it's going to take some big sea change for that to not be the case.

robertlagrant 6y ago
It is a bit slow. It loads some stuff it thinks I want to see before letting me type into the one input box, which isn't even focused, so I have to tap in it to summon the keyboard), and only then can I type something.

anonymousab 6y ago

>which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable. That was the big one that cost a lot of users, but it was a jusitifiable big leap for them to take. But they have also been suffering papercut after papercut power user losses with various regressions and removal of functionality since then. The actual users lost are minimal, but I suspect the overall perception of Mozilla's priorities, among those kinds of users, has suffered much more.