10 ms·

Not the first time I say this but I have to say it again: Firefox: the last remaining mostly independent, maintained and reasonably popular browser. Even if it

Not the first time I say this but I have to say it again: Firefox: the last remaining mostly independent, maintained and reasonably popular browser. Even if it were inferior in any aspect to other options, I'd still use it for the above mentioned reasons.

jjtheblunt 5y ago
isn't Safari also mostly independent and popular?
thesuitonym 5y ago
>Even if it were inferior in any aspect to other options, I'd still use it for the above mentioned reasons. I agree with you, but luckily, it's not inferior!
- egeozcan 5y ago
  I hope I will never have to use Chrome again and I love Firefox but sometimes it's a PITA. It surely isn't generally "inferior" but let's say it has character. I always thought it just needs a bit more attention, and I'm willing to donate, but I don't trust Mozilla for routing what we give towards Firefox development.
  - dorfsmay 5y ago
    Agreed. I wish they created a dedicated fund for Firefox the way it was done for Thunderbird. Let's not forget the ridiculous pay for the executives which has been shown to not correlate with revenue (or anything else): https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html I give to the Thunderbird fund every year but have not given to Mozilla for a long time!
    - throwoutway 5y ago
      $2.5M?!
      - coldpie 5y ago
        How does that compare to executives in similar roles at similarly-sized software companies?
        casralad 5y ago
        Similarly-sized software companies are also overpaying their executives at the expense of worker wages, so Mozilla is right on track.
        coldpie 5y ago
        Bingo. And so you hit the dilemma of trying to be an ethical company in an unethical environment. If Mozilla decreases their executive compensation, then they can't compete for the same executives that less-ethical companies who don't care about worker wages can. People complaining about Mozilla's executive compensation are asking for Mozilla to hobble themselves.
        dorfsmay 5y ago
        Have you looked at the chart in the link I provided? Mozilla was doing better and had more revenue with previous management who's compensation was a fraction of current management's.
        fleddr 5y ago
        What ethics are we talking about here? Mozilla leadership carried out two large layoffs rounds whilst drastically increasing their own salaries. They already have unethical leaders. For countless years they've been handed some 400-500 million(!) for "free", just by keeping Google the default search engine. For a conventional company, this kind of money requires a massive operation, customer base, etc. Mozilla just gets a check. Half a billion for free. And then pisses away this money on projects where most are questionable, have no impact, etc. All the while the user base shrinking further and further, for over a decade now. If that is the situation, it seems pretty reasonable to me to just get rid of leadership altogether. Let the tech people figure it out, it's not like they can do worse.
    - addicted 5y ago
      Executive pay does not follow the product's success. It follows the broader market for executives. If it followed the product's success, products that are going through a bad patch, or are going downwards, would not be able to attract good executives, when arguably they are the ones who need the best executives, relative to products that are doing well, which on many occasions can sustain themselves purely on momentum. This is further complicated for non profits which cannot use ownership stakes as an incentive either.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        So why do executives bother doing anything if they get paid no matter if they succeed or not?
        GreenWatermelon 5y ago
        If the executives are bad they will be removed, and their reputation will suffer.
        beebeepka 5y ago
        Does that happen, though? We've been hearing about golden parachutes for a while but are there cases supporting the logic that you just laid out?
        mmastrac 5y ago
        In fairness, some executives are there just to fill a seat and not rock the boat when a company needs a face.
    - gspr 5y ago
      > Let's not forget the ridiculous pay for the executives which has been shown to not correlate with revenue (or anything else) I may be a naive person who generally detests the organization chart gymnasts, but I honestly believe Mozilla would be better off if they just got rid of all C-suites and handed that cash to their developers to do whatever they want. So many open source projects are hugely successful without a CEO. Why would Mozilla be different? Keep the cash for the devs, and it's already miles ahead of any other big open source project financially!
  - throwoutway 5y ago
    > I always thought it just needs a bit more attention, and I'm willing to donate, but I don't trust Mozilla for routing what we give towards Firefox development +1 A whole back I wanted to give to Firefox but I wanted to specify which projects it goes to. Many other orgs do this but last I checked Mozilla does not
  - eitland 5y ago
    > I always thought it just needs a bit more attention, and I'm willing to donate, but I don't trust Mozilla for routing what we give towards Firefox development. In fact if they cannot avoid answering their answer is that donations are not even allowed to go to the browser. Something about Mozilla being a non-profit and Firefox being a fully owned commercial company. To which I have to say that this is weird: 1. non-profits are allowed to do maintenance of their buildings and machinery, why not something that keeps generating income 2. even if the above doesn't work because of tax reasons they could just stop bleeding it dry. Firefox alone without Mozilla is very cash positive. Summary: Donating to Firefox goes to Mozilla, the organization that keeps taking away all the money that Firefox generates. Update: Firefox VPN and maybe Pocket too goes through Mozilla Corporation I think, but verify this before buying 1000 subscriptions :-)
  - lkbm 5y ago
    I'm skeptical of some of Mozilla's focus, but Firefox is over 20 years old and over 20MM lines of code. They've been putting a lot of attention to it for a long time (and some incredible work has come from it, including within the past five years). I'd love to see them pour more resources into it, but it's a huge project, so I think moving the needle likely is never as simple as "a bit" more attention. It would be neat if Mozilla added a "where do you want your money to go to" option in donations. The bulk of their funding would likely continue be from partnerships, but it would make it so much more tangible that the users really care about browser development. We're not just noisy people in the HN comments--we'll put money into it given the option.
- rei_ayanami 5y ago
  Well it crashes my computer like 3 times a day on Linux, I now know its because of hardware acceleration, but I don't expect average users to keep using Firefox. I'm just getting tired of all the things that is happening to Firefox. Although I've been using it for the past 10 years, I might have to look for alternatives.
  - olvy0 5y ago
    I've been using Firefox almost exclusively as my browser on Windows and Linux for the last 18 years, switched to it from Netscape Navigator and Opera. I can't remember a single time when it last crashed on me in the last 2 years on both operating systems.
  - sovnade 5y ago
    I use it on ios, macos, and windows with zero issues. I can't remember the last time it crashed on me.
  - PenguinCoder 5y ago
    Firefox is my main and only GUI browser on Debian. I use to daily and it's up/on constantly. Even with nightly builds, I haven't had Firefox crash let alone crash the entire computer. I don't view very many resource intensive sites or SPAs trying be desktop apps. The worst performance I get is usually Slack in a tab. Hasn't crashed though.
    - jimmygrapes 5y ago
      Same here. Worst thing that's happened is when it refuses to load a site until I restart it after a background update, which kinda kills my flow for a second, but at least it restores the session immediately. I have noticed something on some of the more sketchy sites in which resource usage spikes, which I am guessing is some new abuse of workers or something. The uneducated conspiracy theorist in me assumes some magic crypto mining background thing that uBlock hasn't identified yet, but I haven't been bothered to investigate since it's rare and brief.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
- tester34 5y ago
  idk Google Maps performance seems to be way worse I do wonder how's the WASM performance
  - moritonal 5y ago
    Given Google Photos is broken on Firefox I wonder how much the conflict of interest plays into this. More fuel to the breakup argument.
    - maccard 5y ago
      It is? I use google photos regularly on Firefox on Windows, Mac and Android.
- ape4 5y ago
  The developer section (or whatever its called, F12) is the best
- mulmen 5y ago
  Mozilla is working as hard as they can to regress though! I haven’t been excited for a browser upgrade in years. I see these announcements and I know I’ll lose time re-learning something or just missing old functionality that has been removed. The Mozilla of 2022 is very much only the least evil option.
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago
  I love Firefox over Chrome in almost every single aspect....except, I cannot shake the feel it still leaks memory like crazy. Open several tabs, then a couple of youtube tabs (you know how people are), eventually the machine is slow as molasses, you close 50% of the tabs (including the youtube ones) and you get back like 10% of the memory, so you need to restart the browser. That gets old, fast.
  - frenchyatwork 5y ago
    IIRC, Firefox doesn't always give back memory when the machine has free memory. If you start running other high memory processes, then Firefox might dump some memory. The reason for this is 1) there's not much point in freeing memory if it will be unused and 2) switching web pages is something browsers do a lot, and freeing and then reallocating large chunks of memory is a significant performance hit.
    - Ostrogodsky 5y ago
      That's fantastic in theory, not so much in practice. Visual studio code crawls into a halt and the only way to "get it back" it is restarting Firefox, even if it had just one tab opened.
jl6 5y ago
I agree, but when you say last remaining, were there ever any other contenders in the “mostly independent, maintained and reasonably popular” category? Konqueror (ancestor of WebKit) is the closest I can think of.
- jfk13 5y ago
  There was Opera, before it moved to the Blink world. Whether it was popular enough to count, I don't know.
- chriswarbo 5y ago
  Perhaps Opera, before it became another Chrome wrapper? I still have a soft spot for Netsurf, Dillo, w3m and Lynx :)
  - PenguinCoder 5y ago
    I loved what Opera was. It used to be my main browser, before Firefox. These days though, Firefox wins for various reasons and not being a blink rebrand.
  - seanw444 5y ago
    I still hope for Gemini to get bigger. At least in the hacker community, so I can stop having to visit the web often.
    - jug 5y ago
      Yes, I think it's interesting! Preemptively tackling two common criticisms: "We already have HTML". Yes, but with Gemini, you know the entire "Geminispace" is going to be like that. It's nice for the state of mind! It also ensures sites on the network won't track you, as the wealth of HTTP headers can kindly assist with. "We already have Gopher". Yes, but Gemini comes with some very useful, almost essential, additions for broader adoption like mandated TLS encryption and things that should have been solved decades ago like defining character encodings, use of MIME types to define binaries, and well supported links to non-Gopher protocols.
- deleted 5y ago
micromacrofoot 5y ago
Same here. Firefox and Mozilla aren't perfect (Firefox is fantastic), but I'm not going to give in to the Chrome dominance.
causality0 5y ago
You know, there used to be good things about Firefox *other* than them not being run by Google or based on Chrome. That's been a while though.
- the_duke 5y ago
  On Linux + Wayland Firefox very notably has the best performance for me ( except certain very JS heavy/Chrome optimized sites)
- asabla 5y ago
  Kind of, their multi-account stuff is truly a game changer in my day to day workflows. I just wish handling profiles were a bit better
  - commoner 5y ago
    Have you tried the Profile Switcher for Firefox add-on? It works just like the profile switcher on Chrome. - Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc... - Connector (required for add-on): https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher-connector https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher-connect... - Source: https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher
- wongarsu 5y ago
  All browsers have gotten kind of sameish. I don't feel much difference between Edge, Chrome and Firefox (on Windows). A couple minor differences like Edge having native vertical tabs, where I have to go to a more powerful but less performant and less stable extension in Firefox, or Firefox having the sync feature I trust more. But overall it feels hard to find good reasons to use one browser over another. Firefox's multi-account containers are the only major feature I could name that makes a major difference.
  - 2ion 5y ago
    > multi-account containers are the only major feature I could name that makes a major difference. And for me, that's a key difference. Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, all garbage --- staying logged into several AWS SSM sessions in different accounts at the same time w/ full features, logged into several paypal accounts at once etc etc etc. The containers fix so much of web dumbness that they've become indespensable in my workflow, both at work and at home. Unless the other browsers have feature parity regarding MAC, they are not even among the competition.
agumonkey 5y ago
Same. And I still wish Mozilla the best even though I'd like less focus on branding and appearances and more on solid work. But they'll do as they can. -- sent from firefox nightly
melling 5y ago
I’ve been using the Nightly for years. Help with the testing so they build a better product.
Someone1234 5y ago
The only reason we cannot have a single browser engine that everyone uses is governance and ownership. That's the key problem with Chromium, it is largely under Google's thumb. If control of Chromium could be fairly split between Apple/Google/Microsoft/Mozilla/et al within a nonprofit, with no one party having ownership or override, Firefox could be Chromium based. The thing a lot of people ignore is that having one OSS engine that everyone uses is the most efficient way for all parties. You just have to solve governance and ownership, which aren't technical problems (they're about power). And, yes, standards would largely be dictated via this one monopoly-engine but again if governance and ownership were healthy that too wouldn't be problematic within itself (you could even include standards orgs/committees within the structure). User choice would largely be the add-ins, unique settings, niche features, and UI (see Chrome Vs. Edge Vs. Brave, for example).
- ethbr0 5y ago
  The failure mode of a single shared engine is extremely brittle. What would happen if that engine decided to ignore standards bodies? (coughMicrosoftAppleGooglecough) What would happen if a single party managed to upsurp governance and obtain de facto single party control? Better to have 2+ options, so there's always a "What if..." life raft.
  - 323 5y ago
    Does this criticism also apply to the Linux kernel? Which is as widely used as Chrome on servers?
    - samwillis 5y ago
      There are other OSs available though. Including other POSIX compliant OSs
    - addicted 5y ago
      There's at least Windows, macOS, FreeBSD as popular and fairly used alternatives. Also, the Linux kernel itself is just one small part of a Linux distro, which means everyone from kernel maintainers, to distro creators/maintainers, to particular app makers have some direct to indirect sway on the kernel development.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rvz 5y ago
> mostly independent Not exactly 'independent' if >85% of all revenues is directly from Google in which when that funding was threatened by them, Mozilla caved and let go most of its staff and rushed to get that contract renewed. They can't live without the money from their worst competitor. I don't even think Mozilla takes itself seriously to be 'independent' or free from Google's money which that was promised by the Mozilla CEO 14 years ago. So that was complete lies from them, wasn't it? Everyone knows they don't care about privacy at this point.
- sfink 5y ago
  > Not exactly 'independent' if >85% of all revenues is directly from Google in which when that funding was threatened by them, Mozilla caved and let go most of its staff and rushed to get that contract renewed. That's not at all what happened. Source? > They can't live without the money from their worst competitor. Probably true. We could switch to a different search engine (again), but I'd imagine it wouldn't be pretty. > I don't even think Mozilla takes itself seriously to be 'independent' or free from Google's money which that was promised by the Mozilla CEO 14 years ago. False. (Source: I work for Mozilla.) I won't attempt a further argument here; it doesn't seem worth the attempt. I'll just say that in my daily experience, it's very very hard to detect any "evil Google overlord influence". > So that was complete lies from them, wasn't it? Everyone knows they don't care about privacy at this point. ... I think you might be reading too much into specific complaints. I agree that you can construct a narrative out of a bunch of events that makes Mozilla look bad. Or, you know, you could construct a different narrative. I guess people are drawn to what they want to believe.
  - rvz 5y ago
    > That's not at all what happened. Source? So this is not true, and it is all lies? [0] So Mozilla can survive without Google's money and be free from the demand to be the default search engine by their own competitor? That isn't taking privacy seriously is it? Either way, Google seems to have Mozilla on life support and Mozilla will do anything to keep itself alive whilst falsely preaching their mission on 'privacy'. What else are they hiding? > False. (Source: I work for Mozilla.) I won't attempt a further argument here; it doesn't seem worth the attempt. It is true. Don't bother denying or arguing it because everyone knows it's true. [2] Even from the title in 2007: > "Mozilla can live without Google's Money, Baker says" > "Mozilla Corp. will walk away from Google Inc. and the millions it collects from the search company each year, if that's what it takes to stay independent, the open-source developer's CEO promised" I expect Mozilla employees to continuously deny it. Even when 14 years later, Mozilla still has no significant revenue sources or any plans on being independent and still wants to be heavily reliant on Google's money despite promising to 'walk away' a decade ago. They know that they cannot live without Google's money and call itself 'independent' or 'privacy-first'. There is no significant revenue source other than Google is there? [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/13/mozilla-extends-critical-firefox-search-deal-with-google/#7dc07d8b6ea2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/13/mozilla... [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays-off-250-employees-while-it-refocuses-on-commercial-products/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays-off-250-employees... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9044160/Mozilla_can_live_without_Google_s_money_Baker_says_ https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
duxup 5y ago
It’s my go to personal browser. My admittedly anecdotal experience is that I find Firefox way more performant.
lenocinor 5y ago
I know this is painful to say and to hear, but below 4 percent is not reasonably popular anymore. It doesn’t mean Firefox isn’t a good browser or that you shouldn’t use it. But we shouldn’t pretend it is even semi-popular anymore. (Except among geeks where I think you can reasonably say it is popular.)
- cartesius13 5y ago
  Less than 4 percent is still a lot. You need 9 digits to represent the number of users Firefox has
willfiveash 5y ago
I've been using Firefox for a looong time. What convinced me to choose that over any other browser is the following: A. It ran on macOS AND Solaris (which I worked on for a looong time). B. It took awhile for the feature to arrive but eventually I was able to sync my bookmarks across both platforms (this made me so happy). At this point, even though I'm not using Solaris anymore (sniff) I'm so used to it I don't feel the need to try anything else.
freediver 5y ago
>Firefox: the last remaining mostly independent ~90% revenue coming from its main "competitor", Google. (not sure whether to put quotes there or not, the relationship is more akin of 'sponsorship') https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-2020-short-form-0926.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-202... >maintained over 10,000 bugs, some going as far back as 2007 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&classification=Client%20Software&classification=Developer%20Infrastructure&classification=Components&classification=Server%20Software&classification=Other&product=Firefox&product=Firefox%20Build%20System&product=Firefox%20for%20Echo%20Show&product=Firefox%20for%20iOS&product=Firefox%20Friends&product=Firefox%20Private%20Network&query_format=advanced&resolution=---&order=bug_status%2Cpriority%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_id&limit=0 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIR... >reasonably popular browser. 3.91% market share. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share Firefox may be the first love for many of us, but this description is a stretch of reality. And stretching reality for the last 10 years is what may have gotten Firefox in the downward spiral it is in. Time for a wake up call maybe?

jjtheblunt 5y ago

isn't Safari also mostly independent and popular?

thesuitonym 5y ago

>Even if it were inferior in any aspect to other options, I'd still use it for the above mentioned reasons. I agree with you, but luckily, it's not inferior!

egeozcan 5y ago
I hope I will never have to use Chrome again and I love Firefox but sometimes it's a PITA. It surely isn't generally "inferior" but let's say it has character. I always thought it just needs a bit more attention, and I'm willing to donate, but I don't trust Mozilla for routing what we give towards Firefox development.
- dorfsmay 5y ago
  Agreed. I wish they created a dedicated fund for Firefox the way it was done for Thunderbird. Let's not forget the ridiculous pay for the executives which has been shown to not correlate with revenue (or anything else): https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html I give to the Thunderbird fund every year but have not given to Mozilla for a long time!
  - throwoutway 5y ago
    $2.5M?!
    - coldpie 5y ago
      How does that compare to executives in similar roles at similarly-sized software companies?
      - casralad 5y ago
        Similarly-sized software companies are also overpaying their executives at the expense of worker wages, so Mozilla is right on track.
        coldpie 5y ago
        Bingo. And so you hit the dilemma of trying to be an ethical company in an unethical environment. If Mozilla decreases their executive compensation, then they can't compete for the same executives that less-ethical companies who don't care about worker wages can. People complaining about Mozilla's executive compensation are asking for Mozilla to hobble themselves.
        dorfsmay 5y ago
        Have you looked at the chart in the link I provided? Mozilla was doing better and had more revenue with previous management who's compensation was a fraction of current management's.
        fleddr 5y ago
        What ethics are we talking about here? Mozilla leadership carried out two large layoffs rounds whilst drastically increasing their own salaries. They already have unethical leaders. For countless years they've been handed some 400-500 million(!) for "free", just by keeping Google the default search engine. For a conventional company, this kind of money requires a massive operation, customer base, etc. Mozilla just gets a check. Half a billion for free. And then pisses away this money on projects where most are questionable, have no impact, etc. All the while the user base shrinking further and further, for over a decade now. If that is the situation, it seems pretty reasonable to me to just get rid of leadership altogether. Let the tech people figure it out, it's not like they can do worse.
  - addicted 5y ago
    Executive pay does not follow the product's success. It follows the broader market for executives. If it followed the product's success, products that are going through a bad patch, or are going downwards, would not be able to attract good executives, when arguably they are the ones who need the best executives, relative to products that are doing well, which on many occasions can sustain themselves purely on momentum. This is further complicated for non profits which cannot use ownership stakes as an incentive either.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      So why do executives bother doing anything if they get paid no matter if they succeed or not?
      - GreenWatermelon 5y ago
        If the executives are bad they will be removed, and their reputation will suffer.
        beebeepka 5y ago
        Does that happen, though? We've been hearing about golden parachutes for a while but are there cases supporting the logic that you just laid out?
      - mmastrac 5y ago
        In fairness, some executives are there just to fill a seat and not rock the boat when a company needs a face.
  - gspr 5y ago
    > Let's not forget the ridiculous pay for the executives which has been shown to not correlate with revenue (or anything else) I may be a naive person who generally detests the organization chart gymnasts, but I honestly believe Mozilla would be better off if they just got rid of all C-suites and handed that cash to their developers to do whatever they want. So many open source projects are hugely successful without a CEO. Why would Mozilla be different? Keep the cash for the devs, and it's already miles ahead of any other big open source project financially!
- throwoutway 5y ago
  > I always thought it just needs a bit more attention, and I'm willing to donate, but I don't trust Mozilla for routing what we give towards Firefox development +1 A whole back I wanted to give to Firefox but I wanted to specify which projects it goes to. Many other orgs do this but last I checked Mozilla does not
- eitland 5y ago
  > I always thought it just needs a bit more attention, and I'm willing to donate, but I don't trust Mozilla for routing what we give towards Firefox development. In fact if they cannot avoid answering their answer is that donations are not even allowed to go to the browser. Something about Mozilla being a non-profit and Firefox being a fully owned commercial company. To which I have to say that this is weird: 1. non-profits are allowed to do maintenance of their buildings and machinery, why not something that keeps generating income 2. even if the above doesn't work because of tax reasons they could just stop bleeding it dry. Firefox alone without Mozilla is very cash positive. Summary: Donating to Firefox goes to Mozilla, the organization that keeps taking away all the money that Firefox generates. Update: Firefox VPN and maybe Pocket too goes through Mozilla Corporation I think, but verify this before buying 1000 subscriptions :-)
- lkbm 5y ago
  I'm skeptical of some of Mozilla's focus, but Firefox is over 20 years old and over 20MM lines of code. They've been putting a lot of attention to it for a long time (and some incredible work has come from it, including within the past five years). I'd love to see them pour more resources into it, but it's a huge project, so I think moving the needle likely is never as simple as "a bit" more attention. It would be neat if Mozilla added a "where do you want your money to go to" option in donations. The bulk of their funding would likely continue be from partnerships, but it would make it so much more tangible that the users really care about browser development. We're not just noisy people in the HN comments--we'll put money into it given the option.
rei_ayanami 5y ago
Well it crashes my computer like 3 times a day on Linux, I now know its because of hardware acceleration, but I don't expect average users to keep using Firefox. I'm just getting tired of all the things that is happening to Firefox. Although I've been using it for the past 10 years, I might have to look for alternatives.
- olvy0 5y ago
  I've been using Firefox almost exclusively as my browser on Windows and Linux for the last 18 years, switched to it from Netscape Navigator and Opera. I can't remember a single time when it last crashed on me in the last 2 years on both operating systems.
- sovnade 5y ago
  I use it on ios, macos, and windows with zero issues. I can't remember the last time it crashed on me.
- PenguinCoder 5y ago
  Firefox is my main and only GUI browser on Debian. I use to daily and it's up/on constantly. Even with nightly builds, I haven't had Firefox crash let alone crash the entire computer. I don't view very many resource intensive sites or SPAs trying be desktop apps. The worst performance I get is usually Slack in a tab. Hasn't crashed though.
  - jimmygrapes 5y ago
    Same here. Worst thing that's happened is when it refuses to load a site until I restart it after a background update, which kinda kills my flow for a second, but at least it restores the session immediately. I have noticed something on some of the more sketchy sites in which resource usage spikes, which I am guessing is some new abuse of workers or something. The uneducated conspiracy theorist in me assumes some magic crypto mining background thing that uBlock hasn't identified yet, but I haven't been bothered to investigate since it's rare and brief.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
tester34 5y ago
idk Google Maps performance seems to be way worse I do wonder how's the WASM performance
- moritonal 5y ago
  Given Google Photos is broken on Firefox I wonder how much the conflict of interest plays into this. More fuel to the breakup argument.
  - maccard 5y ago
    It is? I use google photos regularly on Firefox on Windows, Mac and Android.
ape4 5y ago
The developer section (or whatever its called, F12) is the best
mulmen 5y ago
Mozilla is working as hard as they can to regress though! I haven’t been excited for a browser upgrade in years. I see these announcements and I know I’ll lose time re-learning something or just missing old functionality that has been removed. The Mozilla of 2022 is very much only the least evil option.
Ostrogodsky 5y ago
I love Firefox over Chrome in almost every single aspect....except, I cannot shake the feel it still leaks memory like crazy. Open several tabs, then a couple of youtube tabs (you know how people are), eventually the machine is slow as molasses, you close 50% of the tabs (including the youtube ones) and you get back like 10% of the memory, so you need to restart the browser. That gets old, fast.
- frenchyatwork 5y ago
  IIRC, Firefox doesn't always give back memory when the machine has free memory. If you start running other high memory processes, then Firefox might dump some memory. The reason for this is 1) there's not much point in freeing memory if it will be unused and 2) switching web pages is something browsers do a lot, and freeing and then reallocating large chunks of memory is a significant performance hit.
  - Ostrogodsky 5y ago
    That's fantastic in theory, not so much in practice. Visual studio code crawls into a halt and the only way to "get it back" it is restarting Firefox, even if it had just one tab opened.

jl6 5y ago

I agree, but when you say last remaining, were there ever any other contenders in the “mostly independent, maintained and reasonably popular” category? Konqueror (ancestor of WebKit) is the closest I can think of.

jfk13 5y ago
There was Opera, before it moved to the Blink world. Whether it was popular enough to count, I don't know.
chriswarbo 5y ago
Perhaps Opera, before it became another Chrome wrapper? I still have a soft spot for Netsurf, Dillo, w3m and Lynx :)
- PenguinCoder 5y ago
  I loved what Opera was. It used to be my main browser, before Firefox. These days though, Firefox wins for various reasons and not being a blink rebrand.
- seanw444 5y ago
  I still hope for Gemini to get bigger. At least in the hacker community, so I can stop having to visit the web often.
  - jug 5y ago
    Yes, I think it's interesting! Preemptively tackling two common criticisms: "We already have HTML". Yes, but with Gemini, you know the entire "Geminispace" is going to be like that. It's nice for the state of mind! It also ensures sites on the network won't track you, as the wealth of HTTP headers can kindly assist with. "We already have Gopher". Yes, but Gemini comes with some very useful, almost essential, additions for broader adoption like mandated TLS encryption and things that should have been solved decades ago like defining character encodings, use of MIME types to define binaries, and well supported links to non-Gopher protocols.
deleted 5y ago

micromacrofoot 5y ago

Same here. Firefox and Mozilla aren't perfect (Firefox is fantastic), but I'm not going to give in to the Chrome dominance.

causality0 5y ago

You know, there used to be good things about Firefox *other* than them not being run by Google or based on Chrome. That's been a while though.

the_duke 5y ago
On Linux + Wayland Firefox very notably has the best performance for me ( except certain very JS heavy/Chrome optimized sites)
asabla 5y ago
Kind of, their multi-account stuff is truly a game changer in my day to day workflows. I just wish handling profiles were a bit better
- commoner 5y ago
  Have you tried the Profile Switcher for Firefox add-on? It works just like the profile switcher on Chrome. - Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc... - Connector (required for add-on): https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher-connector https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher-connect... - Source: https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher
wongarsu 5y ago
All browsers have gotten kind of sameish. I don't feel much difference between Edge, Chrome and Firefox (on Windows). A couple minor differences like Edge having native vertical tabs, where I have to go to a more powerful but less performant and less stable extension in Firefox, or Firefox having the sync feature I trust more. But overall it feels hard to find good reasons to use one browser over another. Firefox's multi-account containers are the only major feature I could name that makes a major difference.
- 2ion 5y ago
  > multi-account containers are the only major feature I could name that makes a major difference. And for me, that's a key difference. Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, all garbage --- staying logged into several AWS SSM sessions in different accounts at the same time w/ full features, logged into several paypal accounts at once etc etc etc. The containers fix so much of web dumbness that they've become indespensable in my workflow, both at work and at home. Unless the other browsers have feature parity regarding MAC, they are not even among the competition.

agumonkey 5y ago

Same. And I still wish Mozilla the best even though I'd like less focus on branding and appearances and more on solid work. But they'll do as they can. -- sent from firefox nightly

melling 5y ago

I’ve been using the Nightly for years. Help with the testing so they build a better product.

Someone1234 5y ago

The only reason we cannot have a single browser engine that everyone uses is governance and ownership. That's the key problem with Chromium, it is largely under Google's thumb. If control of Chromium could be fairly split between Apple/Google/Microsoft/Mozilla/et al within a nonprofit, with no one party having ownership or override, Firefox could be Chromium based. The thing a lot of people ignore is that having one OSS engine that everyone uses is the most efficient way for all parties. You just have to solve governance and ownership, which aren't technical problems (they're about power). And, yes, standards would largely be dictated via this one monopoly-engine but again if governance and ownership were healthy that too wouldn't be problematic within itself (you could even include standards orgs/committees within the structure). User choice would largely be the add-ins, unique settings, niche features, and UI (see Chrome Vs. Edge Vs. Brave, for example).

ethbr0 5y ago
The failure mode of a single shared engine is extremely brittle. What would happen if that engine decided to ignore standards bodies? (coughMicrosoftAppleGooglecough) What would happen if a single party managed to upsurp governance and obtain de facto single party control? Better to have 2+ options, so there's always a "What if..." life raft.
- 323 5y ago
  Does this criticism also apply to the Linux kernel? Which is as widely used as Chrome on servers?
  - samwillis 5y ago
    There are other OSs available though. Including other POSIX compliant OSs
  - addicted 5y ago
    There's at least Windows, macOS, FreeBSD as popular and fairly used alternatives. Also, the Linux kernel itself is just one small part of a Linux distro, which means everyone from kernel maintainers, to distro creators/maintainers, to particular app makers have some direct to indirect sway on the kernel development.

deleted 5y ago

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rvz 5y ago

> mostly independent Not exactly 'independent' if >85% of all revenues is directly from Google in which when that funding was threatened by them, Mozilla caved and let go most of its staff and rushed to get that contract renewed. They can't live without the money from their worst competitor. I don't even think Mozilla takes itself seriously to be 'independent' or free from Google's money which that was promised by the Mozilla CEO 14 years ago. So that was complete lies from them, wasn't it? Everyone knows they don't care about privacy at this point.

sfink 5y ago
> Not exactly 'independent' if >85% of all revenues is directly from Google in which when that funding was threatened by them, Mozilla caved and let go most of its staff and rushed to get that contract renewed. That's not at all what happened. Source? > They can't live without the money from their worst competitor. Probably true. We could switch to a different search engine (again), but I'd imagine it wouldn't be pretty. > I don't even think Mozilla takes itself seriously to be 'independent' or free from Google's money which that was promised by the Mozilla CEO 14 years ago. False. (Source: I work for Mozilla.) I won't attempt a further argument here; it doesn't seem worth the attempt. I'll just say that in my daily experience, it's very very hard to detect any "evil Google overlord influence". > So that was complete lies from them, wasn't it? Everyone knows they don't care about privacy at this point. ... I think you might be reading too much into specific complaints. I agree that you can construct a narrative out of a bunch of events that makes Mozilla look bad. Or, you know, you could construct a different narrative. I guess people are drawn to what they want to believe.
- rvz 5y ago
  > That's not at all what happened. Source? So this is not true, and it is all lies? [0] So Mozilla can survive without Google's money and be free from the demand to be the default search engine by their own competitor? That isn't taking privacy seriously is it? Either way, Google seems to have Mozilla on life support and Mozilla will do anything to keep itself alive whilst falsely preaching their mission on 'privacy'. What else are they hiding? > False. (Source: I work for Mozilla.) I won't attempt a further argument here; it doesn't seem worth the attempt. It is true. Don't bother denying or arguing it because everyone knows it's true. [2] Even from the title in 2007: > "Mozilla can live without Google's Money, Baker says" > "Mozilla Corp. will walk away from Google Inc. and the millions it collects from the search company each year, if that's what it takes to stay independent, the open-source developer's CEO promised" I expect Mozilla employees to continuously deny it. Even when 14 years later, Mozilla still has no significant revenue sources or any plans on being independent and still wants to be heavily reliant on Google's money despite promising to 'walk away' a decade ago. They know that they cannot live without Google's money and call itself 'independent' or 'privacy-first'. There is no significant revenue source other than Google is there? [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/13/mozilla-extends-critical-firefox-search-deal-with-google/#7dc07d8b6ea2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/13/mozilla... [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays-off-250-employees-while-it-refocuses-on-commercial-products/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays-off-250-employees... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9044160/Mozilla_can_live_without_Google_s_money_Baker_says_ https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

duxup 5y ago

It’s my go to personal browser. My admittedly anecdotal experience is that I find Firefox way more performant.

lenocinor 5y ago

I know this is painful to say and to hear, but below 4 percent is not reasonably popular anymore. It doesn’t mean Firefox isn’t a good browser or that you shouldn’t use it. But we shouldn’t pretend it is even semi-popular anymore. (Except among geeks where I think you can reasonably say it is popular.)

cartesius13 5y ago
Less than 4 percent is still a lot. You need 9 digits to represent the number of users Firefox has

willfiveash 5y ago

I've been using Firefox for a looong time. What convinced me to choose that over any other browser is the following: A. It ran on macOS AND Solaris (which I worked on for a looong time). B. It took awhile for the feature to arrive but eventually I was able to sync my bookmarks across both platforms (this made me so happy). At this point, even though I'm not using Solaris anymore (sniff) I'm so used to it I don't feel the need to try anything else.

freediver 5y ago

>Firefox: the last remaining mostly independent ~90% revenue coming from its main "competitor", Google. (not sure whether to put quotes there or not, the relationship is more akin of 'sponsorship') https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-2020-short-form-0926.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-202... >maintained over 10,000 bugs, some going as far back as 2007 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&classification=Client%20Software&classification=Developer%20Infrastructure&classification=Components&classification=Server%20Software&classification=Other&product=Firefox&product=Firefox%20Build%20System&product=Firefox%20for%20Echo%20Show&product=Firefox%20for%20iOS&product=Firefox%20Friends&product=Firefox%20Private%20Network&query_format=advanced&resolution=---&order=bug_status%2Cpriority%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_id&limit=0 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIR... >reasonably popular browser. 3.91% market share. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share Firefox may be the first love for many of us, but this description is a stretch of reality. And stretching reality for the last 10 years is what may have gotten Firefox in the downward spiral it is in. Time for a wake up call maybe?