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I have recently gone from a Mozilla fanboy to a Mozilla hater in the span of under a year. I'm sure this won't be popular, but I refuse to use Firefox particula

I have recently gone from a Mozilla fanboy to a Mozilla hater in the span of under a year. I'm sure this won't be popular, but I refuse to use Firefox particularly, and would rather use chromium at this point, which, if you'd heard the way I trash google, you'd ask me what on earth was going through my head. It has gotten that bad. They keep progressively crippling the browser. There isn't a single Firefox major update, either software wise or news wise, that amounts to good news. They try to dress it up but the substance is always bad for the user. Recently, they artificially limited the extensions available in Firefox mobile. I uninstalled Firefox immediately on all my machines. Now they're firing the Rust team? Are these people stupid? Rust is pretty much the only thing Mozilla has going for it. I guess it's time for Thunderbird to go as well. The idea that Mozilla is somehow the only thing standing between Google and control of web standards is laughable. I used to buy it. But Firefox is funded by Google, and they'll get what they want. And you can see plain as day that they're getting what they want. At this point you're more disconnected from Google's influence using ungoogled-chromium than using Firefox. So that's what I do. I feel more free online using a fork of a Google product than I do using Firefox. Imagine that.

SkyPuncher 6y ago
I feel like we're in a very interesting place for main stream computing. The technology has matured enough that it's nearly impossible to add novel, valuable features. It feels like everything is just starting to break for no good reason. At the same time, companies have hard data about what works and what doesn't work so they're starting to trim excess.
- betwixthewires 6y ago
  > At the same time, companies have hard data about what works and what doesn't work so they're starting to trim excess. What works for whom? Every place I go on the internet where technical people discuss things, there's a common thread: competing interests have incentivized companies to put user needs second and it has resulted in a broken web that does not work and does not serve the users. The most cynical of us say that the web is irreparable. It seems to me, from a user perspective, that they haven't found what works at all. It also seems to me that they don't care about finding what works anymore, they're happy to rest on their megalithic laurels the way Blockbuster and Radio Shack thought they could ad infinitum. I think you're right about novel features and things breaking for no good reason, and I think the next phase in innovation of communication and networking technologies are already beginning to adopt some new axioms: less is more, and the idea that there will be one place to do everything online is flawed and cannot be achieved.
dralley 6y ago
>Recently, they artificially limited the extensions available in Firefox mobile. I uninstalled Firefox immediately on all my machines. They did not "artificially limit" the extensions available, you are misinformed. They rewrote the engine of their mobile browser, and swapped the old engine for the new one before the new one had 100% support for all of the extension APIs. They have been working on this, and over the past few months I've seen several of my extensions which were previously disabled start re-enabling themselves as support for those APIs has been added. The eventual goal is to support all of the extensions that were supported before. You can track that progress here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Browser_support_for_JavaScript_APIs https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... It sucks that, for the span of a couple months, I lost a couple of my addons, but as someone whose team has struggled for years supporting two very different versions of a piece of software simultaneously, I understand why they did it. And the new browser is so much faster and more responsive that my annoyance about the addons was tempered somewhat. >Now they're firing the Rust team? Are these people stupid? Rust is pretty much the only thing Mozilla has going for it. I guess it's time for Thunderbird to go as well. They did not fire the Rust team. They laid off a few of the people who had been working primarily on Rust, and retained several others. But significant components of Firefox are written in Rust, and the people who are working on those components are still employed. And significant amounts of new code is being written in Rust - but essentially they can't swapping out hundreds of thousands of lines of code at a time anymore.
- betwixthewires 6y ago
  I am going to quote directly from the following blog post from Mozilla.org https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/firefox-recommended-extensions/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/firefox-recommended-extensi... "Extensions can add powerful customization features to Firefox. However, we have noticed that the number of add-ons available for Firefox today can be overwhelming for some users. And even though our policy provides clear guidelines for the behavior of add-ons, they sometimes find it difficult to decide which tools and developers they consider most trustworthy. That's why we established the ‘recommended extensions’ program: a collection of curated extensions that meet our highest standards for security, functionality and usability, which we are now bringing to another platform with the new Firefox for Android." If what you're saying is true, it is backtracking. They made a deliberate decision, as I have demonstrated with the link above, to restricted access to extensions on their mobile browser. And in the quote, they provide what I consider to be a phony bologna excuse plainly evident on its face. I don't trust Mozilla anymore and I do not want to use their products because of if this, and any time the topic comes up I will continue to talk about it.

SkyPuncher 6y ago

I feel like we're in a very interesting place for main stream computing. The technology has matured enough that it's nearly impossible to add novel, valuable features. It feels like everything is just starting to break for no good reason. At the same time, companies have hard data about what works and what doesn't work so they're starting to trim excess.

betwixthewires 6y ago
> At the same time, companies have hard data about what works and what doesn't work so they're starting to trim excess. What works for whom? Every place I go on the internet where technical people discuss things, there's a common thread: competing interests have incentivized companies to put user needs second and it has resulted in a broken web that does not work and does not serve the users. The most cynical of us say that the web is irreparable. It seems to me, from a user perspective, that they haven't found what works at all. It also seems to me that they don't care about finding what works anymore, they're happy to rest on their megalithic laurels the way Blockbuster and Radio Shack thought they could ad infinitum. I think you're right about novel features and things breaking for no good reason, and I think the next phase in innovation of communication and networking technologies are already beginning to adopt some new axioms: less is more, and the idea that there will be one place to do everything online is flawed and cannot be achieved.

dralley 6y ago

>Recently, they artificially limited the extensions available in Firefox mobile. I uninstalled Firefox immediately on all my machines. They did not "artificially limit" the extensions available, you are misinformed. They rewrote the engine of their mobile browser, and swapped the old engine for the new one before the new one had 100% support for all of the extension APIs. They have been working on this, and over the past few months I've seen several of my extensions which were previously disabled start re-enabling themselves as support for those APIs has been added. The eventual goal is to support all of the extensions that were supported before. You can track that progress here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Browser_support_for_JavaScript_APIs https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... It sucks that, for the span of a couple months, I lost a couple of my addons, but as someone whose team has struggled for years supporting two very different versions of a piece of software simultaneously, I understand why they did it. And the new browser is so much faster and more responsive that my annoyance about the addons was tempered somewhat. >Now they're firing the Rust team? Are these people stupid? Rust is pretty much the only thing Mozilla has going for it. I guess it's time for Thunderbird to go as well. They did not fire the Rust team. They laid off a few of the people who had been working primarily on Rust, and retained several others. But significant components of Firefox are written in Rust, and the people who are working on those components are still employed. And significant amounts of new code is being written in Rust - but essentially they can't swapping out hundreds of thousands of lines of code at a time anymore.

betwixthewires 6y ago
I am going to quote directly from the following blog post from Mozilla.org https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/firefox-recommended-extensions/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/firefox-recommended-extensi... "Extensions can add powerful customization features to Firefox. However, we have noticed that the number of add-ons available for Firefox today can be overwhelming for some users. And even though our policy provides clear guidelines for the behavior of add-ons, they sometimes find it difficult to decide which tools and developers they consider most trustworthy. That's why we established the ‘recommended extensions’ program: a collection of curated extensions that meet our highest standards for security, functionality and usability, which we are now bringing to another platform with the new Firefox for Android." If what you're saying is true, it is backtracking. They made a deliberate decision, as I have demonstrated with the link above, to restricted access to extensions on their mobile browser. And in the quote, they provide what I consider to be a phony bologna excuse plainly evident on its face. I don't trust Mozilla anymore and I do not want to use their products because of if this, and any time the topic comes up I will continue to talk about it.