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I agree with this opinion piece. Firefox is a product strangely hostile to its core userbase. It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage them

• Torwald 5y ago
  > I don't use it because I approve of all their stupid pigheaded UI choices I don't use Ff because I can't approve with exactly one of their UI choices: tab closing button on the wrong side. I am on Mac and this just messes with my muscle memory too much. (It used to be that the buttons where on the right side, which is to say the left side.) However, other than that I see a lot of UI love in both the macOs and iOS Ff interfaces. One can feel the team works from their hearts. I wish they would use their brains more. Painful irony. EDIT: Anybody an idea why this got downvoted?
  • Tagbert 5y ago
    Perhaps people think that basing your choice of browser on a minor point like the arbitrary location of tab close buttons is questionable. On second thought, that is a very HN type of reasoning so… I can’t explain it.
• greypowerOz 5y ago
  i use ffox on android because (for some reason) it's the only one I'm aware of that has ublock origin addon...( happy to be proven wrong :) I also used to use reader mode once in a while...
  • znpy 5y ago
    Firefox on Android used to just freeze for me. I'm happily on brave mobile, which does block ads.
    • junon 5y ago
      ... and replaces them with more ads directly in the user interface (e.g. the new tab screen).
      • anotherhue 5y ago
        a) can be disabled b) not in any way like the ads you would encounter on businessinsider or similar.
        • junon 5y ago
          a) not when I last used it, there was an ongoing issue on GitHub, b) so?
      • lostmsu 5y ago
        Firefox just started doing that on desktop too :(
      • fistynuts 5y ago
        It replaces the millions of ads and trackers on the web with exactly one ad, which is as you say on the new tab screen, that you can turn off in the settings. There is also Brave Rewards, something that pays you for viewing ads but is disabled by default and can be totally hidden through another setting. This straightforward set-up isn't something I feel deserves the number of negative comments I see on here. The benefits far outweigh the minor inconvenience of changing two settings.
        • junon 5y ago
          Because it took lots of fights to get the Brave team to 1) allow disabling ads and 2) allow disabling Brave Rewards, neither of which anyone wanted and went against the whole concept of "Brave, the ad-free browser" to begin with.
          • jonathansampson 5y ago
  • caoilte 5y ago
    Me too. Bit I also haven't updated it in over a year in order to avoid the awful rewrite.
    • libeclipse 5y ago
      The new updated Firefox on Android is better than the old one
      • Koshkin 5y ago
        I don't know about that, it feels weird now. I don't appreciate gratuitous changes to the UI.
      • wellthisishn 5y ago
        Totally agree. It's not intrusive, gives lots of options organized well, it's fast... great browser. I assume it's still safer than Chrome as well, seems like the best option for now
        • stjohnswarts 5y ago
          I'm not sure why anyone would use chrome on android when brave, vivaldi, firefox are all better.
          • flaburgan 5y ago
            Same old answer, and actually the real reason why Firefox marketshare is dropping: people don't change the default application.
    • adtac 5y ago
      not updating browsers is a huge security risk
      • stjohnswarts 5y ago
        Exactly, unless you turn off javascript and limit yourself to a very limited subset of sites you are a sitting duck. I would have thought HN general consensus would be that this is a very very bad idea.
  • Xevi 5y ago
    I switched from Firefox on Android to Brave. Not because I like Brave, but because I disliked the new UI in Firefox. Brave also had much better performance for JavaScript and CSS animations.
    • mithusingh32 5y ago
      I tried brave. But I constantly had ads on it. It would block trackers and ads on websites but if I was to open a few tab it would have crypto ads or some other nonsense.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • Xevi 5y ago
        I don't see any ads when using Brave. What kind of crypto ads are you talking about?
        • christophilus 5y ago
          He’s talking about the empty tab screen. You can control what’s on it, but by default it does show ads.
          • Xevi 5y ago
            Okey, maybe I changed that a long time ago and forgot about it. Mine just shows my most visited sites.
    • wellthisishn 5y ago
      I think the UI on FF mobile is more than fine.. what did you not like about it?
      • gbil 5y ago
        UI is fine but 1. Battery consumption is at least twice the one of Brave 2. There is no option to always get the desktop site which makes it useless for tablets Main reasons I also moved to Brave on all my devices. If these are fixed and Mac battery consumption is fixed I'd go back asap
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • The_rationalist 5y ago
    no, kiwi broser is chromium based and supports ublock origin
  • betwixthewires 5y ago
    Kiwi Browser is a chromium based mobile browser with support for extensions. It is FOSS.
  • stereoradonc 5y ago
    I use Adguard and Vivladi. You can also switch in built in adblocker in Vivaldi. There's no reason to use Firefox. In AdGuard, you can add "extensions" that extend the functionality of the browser. Its simple. For example, playing youtube in background or bypassing paywalls. Extensions are little javascripts.
• crawsome 5y ago
  this is my bit, too. they dropped an update that arbitrarily spaced out the area in between your bookmarks folders. You can you fit less on your screen now because of the stupid spacers
  • elpocko 5y ago
    I'm more and more wary of Firefox updates because they keep pulling shit like that. Why are they doing this? How many users are there saying "I wish my bookmarks would suddenly take up double the space as before, so I have to scroll more?" I don't get it. At least there's a workaround for the bookmark issue. There's no workaround for renamed menu items and changed shortcut keys.
  • dralley 5y ago
    You can remove the spacers with 3 clicks.
    • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      Until you can't, because Mozilla deems that only X% of users use that feature and maintaining its configurability consumes too much organizational resources. First the GUI to edit the GUI disappears, then the about:config option follows later. That's what's been steadily happening. Less and less customizability for power users, more and more streamlining for new users.
      • arglebarglegar 5y ago
        more like “low skilled” users rather than new, and most people (by a large margin) are low skilled users… power users were the market early on, and that’s just not the case anymore… power users have been spoiled for a long time online, most things outside of tech have never been built for us
      • lavabiopsy 5y ago
        I don't see how that's a problem, you can just modify the CSS. If you too decide that's too much work and consumes too much of your resources for not enough gain, well then now you know why Mozilla made the decision.
• bjt2n3904 5y ago
  I mean, isn't this a bit like saying, "I left Windows for Ubuntu because of the invasive privacy concerns I had... But man Unity is terrible, I'm going back to Windows!" If privacy is the ultimate concern, I can suffer usability. I think the real issue is we've stopped advocating for privacy loudly and publicly. All the users know is convenience.
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    But the privacy isn't the ultimate concern for everyone, so perhaps it isn't one for GP. It isn't for me. I stick to Firefox because of combination of being best at privacy and least shitty overall, but I'm by no means happy. I'm very much unhappy about the mobile version - their recent (~year ago?) UI revamp turned a perfectly good browser into a bloated piece of garbage, that gets slower and more annoying to use over time. The only reason I use it instead of Chrome is because I can install an ad blocker in it.
    • soundnote 5y ago
      Brave and Vivaldi have ad blockers built in on Android and desktop both.
  • corty 5y ago
    The thing is, if you do not like the UI of unity, maybe you'll like Gnome, KDE, LXDE, fluxbox, i3 or ratpoison or .... With most Linux distros, you can have both privacy and your favourite UI paradigm. You usually do not need to suffer in the usability department (or at least not too much). But with Firefox, all the UI choices are gone now, intentionally sacrificed on the altair of rewrites, UI changes, branding and some dubious security claims. You used to get the choice of vertical tabs (better on todays widescreen laptops), tree-style tabs, Buttons where you liked them, user-provided CSS customization for pages and the UI. Not anymore, all gone (they paid some lip service to some of the above concerns, but nothing relevant, and overall a massive downturn). Now you only get the take-it-or-leave-it of one crappy and worsening Chrome clone UI.
    • dTal 5y ago
• agumonkey 5y ago
  I'll be understanding with mozilla, their challenge is difficult, and they've been going hard surprisingly long. I think they folded under the many new trends in the space, UI being one. I wish they could find a stronger inner core to work on, something more utilitarian than user-drafting. There's a lot of people saying chrome wins because websites are better with it, sites with high requirements like zoom IIRC, but in my experience it's not common nor impactful enough (these sites work fine enough on my old laptop) whoever has the solution i hope it comes fast
• temphnaccount 5y ago
  I'd say other way around is true. HN crowd won't like this but it's very hard to continuously update a product for the core userbase that Firefox has. (small sample size but I maintain a small privacy focused app and from my experience, most of the reviews I get are how it's missing features which competitors have or how it's unusable because it can't handle stuff without jeopardizing privacy focused nature of the app.) Judging by the HN and Reddit comments with each Firefox/Signal/Matrix releases, it seems most of the customers of privacy focused products want all the other features of competitors; most of the times without paying any money (or they think donations should cover for everything because they once donated, so all hundreds of thousand users would). And they dislike/have negative sentiments towards any UI changes or breaking functionality for new features. So core userbase for these products becomes hostile towards the product growth by definition. In this environment, either the product stops growing and simply becomes a niche product for those set of users or it dies.
  • wellthisishn 5y ago
    But reviews about missing feature, or reviews in general... that might not give you a good idea of why people are using it, if they don't leave a review at all
    • floatingatoll 5y ago
      I have never written a review of anything in twenty years, I think. Consider that reviews are inherently biased towards people who are accustomed to speaking up, either because they like reviewing things (not many people) or because they’re upset and have a problem (many people). It becomes evident in practice that reviews generally aren’t productive to consider.
  • freediver 5y ago
    > it seems most of the customers of privacy focused products want all the other features of competitors; most of the times without paying any money This is a business model question, right? Nothing prevents someone from making a great privacy focused browser and actually charging for it vs being directly (Brave?) or indirectly (Chrome, Firefox?) ad-monetized. Also in this context, referring to "customers of privacy focus products" is technically incorrect, they are actually users. Definition of a customer is "someone who pays for goods or services" thus Mozilla's main customer is Google (accounting for close to 90% of its revenue). Maybe looking through this lens, relation of Firefox product direction and what its "customers" want becomes more clear. edit: simplified for clarity
• baybal2 5y ago
  > Firefox is a product strangely hostile to its core userbase. It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage themselves for years. Easily explainable Mozilla been captured by "aspirational" MBA types who think they don't really need that userbase, instead they want to chase "what big boys do", and copy lame features in hopes that monkeying Apple will score them iDevices users — the type of people they psychologically want to associate themselves with.
  • hypothesis 5y ago
    People were commenting about acquisitions in other thread: some wouod be unexplainable ones, until you realize that management just wanted to hang out with hip/stylish/trendy people…
    • AwaAwa 5y ago
      Judging from management's increased comp, while disappearing 25% of their staff, they can hang out with the Big Tech hispters without batting an eyelid.
• webmobdev 5y ago
  > It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage themselves for years. I believe it to be corporate sabotage by Google ... due to the 100's of millions of dollars that Google gives to the Mozilla Foundation, they have a lot of influence over Firefox.
• s17n 5y ago
  Firefox was/is trying to be a top browser in global market share. The "core userbase" is irrelevant to this mission. You wouldn't really even talk about Chrome's "core userbase" because they aren't trying to make a niche community happy, they are trying to best serve their billions of users, something that the author of this piece clearly knows nothing about - eg, when your userbase is this large, the only meaningful form of feedback is statistical analysis. Telemetry is of course the best option but if you wanted to know what "people were saying" you wouldn't be operating at the level of reading individual posts, you'd be looking for trends on social media platforms.
  • thayne 5y ago
    Well, they are doing a terrible job. The more they become like chrome, the less people have a reason to use it instead of chrome. And most people probably don't make a conscious decision about which browser to use. A lot of Firefox's momentum comes from tech saavy users who recommend it to friends, family, coworkers, etc. So losing "core" users cause a chain effect of losing non "core" users.
    • mmis1000 5y ago
      Yes. How on the earth should I recommend Firefox to other? By saying firefox will `constantly remove functions you use and change the UI in random way that make it less useful`? I am a firefox user since firefox 3. But If a non tech user ask me about it today, I will probably recommend `edge` instead. At least it don't do so many offending changes and cause so many frustrations.
  • GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Even so, the huge decline shows they're not interpreting those statistics correctly, or not appealing to whatever their userbase is
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    They don't have billions of users though. They are down to 200-300 million users, depending on who you ask. It's going down steadily every year.
• rastafang 5y ago
  Exact same thought here... Otter browser seems promising.
• oliwarner 5y ago
  This would be funnier if Chrome for Android wasn't trying to shove tab groups down my throat for the ninth time. This time without an obscure flag to disable it. Looking at why established users complain about Firefox isn't why billions of people moved to Chrome, from many sources. It was the default on our phone and that makes it an obvious desktop choice. (Not to mention it does do some things nicely, I just much prefer FF for webdev)
• Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  > It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage themselves for years. I just hope it's not Nokia level deliberate sabotage. > That might not go on for much longer, though. I will use it till the end and will use what ever the FOSS community forks from it or existing forks. Because, I'm guilty that me not using FF and FOSS alternatives for Operating Systems, Browsers, Software has led to rise of the Mono/Duo/Oligopolies in-spite of possessing the skills to understand the outcome, In-spite of having access to the warnings for smart people who said exactly this would happen.
• ikerdanzel 5y ago
  Have been using Firefox since the day Marc as Netscape and Mosaic. I think Firefox has a mole or a couple like the movie The Departed (or original trilogy Infernal Affairs). Think about it, Google pay Firefox a lot. It makes sense to put in moles to sabotage FF not to grow as big as Chrome. Over the years you can see Firefox goin down while so many other browsers growing. Now, FF seems to be very antiquated when compared to Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, etc. Heck even Yandex browser perform better than FF with built in ocr. FF is so badly in need of a shake up of their lead developers.