6 ms·

>> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent br

>> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight. There are a lot of people oh HN who agree with that but then use a different browser for whatever reason. I feel like these people are being very hypocritical and should use what they want to succeed. Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see. That's not to say Mozilla doesn't need to get their shit together, but if market share drops too low they will not be able to get money to do the things they need to do.

perryizgr8 5y ago
I want Firefox to succeed. But that doesn't mean I will use an inferior browser, especially when I feel the decision makers at Mozilla are out of sync.
garciasn 5y ago
They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch. When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set. Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.
- bentcorner 5y ago
  Take a look at tree-style tabs. I started using them in FF and have looked several times at chromium-based add-ins and absolutely nothing comes close. Edge vertical tabs is your best choice if you must use a chromium browser, however it is a weak imitation of TST.
  - yeeeloit 5y ago
    What are you talking about exactly? Is this an extension for FF?
    - bentcorner 5y ago
      It's this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
    - sgc 5y ago
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
  - garciasn 5y ago
    I'm glad this exists (although it appears there are extensions in other browsers that do the same thing) but I never have more than 10 tabs open, so it's not something that would make me switch.
    - bentcorner 5y ago
      I'm glad it exists too. If you ever have a need to juggle tabs this extension is a godsend. Believe me, I've tried finding similar functionality for Chrome/Edge and aside from Edge vertical tabs, the rest are a kludge at best.
    - subsection1h 5y ago
      > I never have more than 10 tabs open How is that possible? Do you never compare things? Or do you only compare things for which there are fewer than 10 alternatives?
      - garciasn 5y ago
        I cannot tell if you're kidding or not.
  - 3371 5y ago
    I've been using Firefox straight for 10+ years and tried all major vertical tabs extensions and now I recommend Sidebery to everyone.
    - subsection1h 5y ago
      Sidebery is great, but I had to switch back to Tree Style Tab because I hate animations, and while Sidebery is impressively configurable, not all animations can be disabled (https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues/517 https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues/517).
  - freediver 5y ago
    > Edge vertical tabs is your best choice if you must use a chromium browser, however it is a weak imitation of TST. What makes it weak?
  - Brakenshire 5y ago
    Multi Account Containers is also good.
    - hn-52 5y ago
      Temporary Containers as well. An entire throwaway container by default. I can just accept all the cookies and closing the tab deletes them all. No management. Nothing else comes close.
    - Volundr 5y ago
      Multi Account Containers is the key reason I use Firefox. I have to juggle multiple accounts for the same services for work. Containers makes this trivial. The closest chrome has is profiles which require a separate window and are just generally far more painful to use.
- captn3m0 5y ago
  On Desktop, I can agree. But uBlock Origin on Android is only possible on Firefox afaik (and one of the major ways Google uses Android for Ad revenue leverage)
- godelski 5y ago
  For an average person, I think this argument is fine. But we're on HN where we can discuss something with a bit more nuance. There's two major things that I see that FF offers that Chrome doesn't, including chromium alternatives. 1) More privacy. Chrome tracks you substantially more than alternative browsers. In addition to that, is simply the chrome ecosystem, see next point. 2) Chrome's dominance defines the web. A decentralized service doesn't become centralized once one player takes 100% of the users. It happens long before because a big player can throw their weight around and force others to do what they want. Chrome already acts this way. We talk about this extensively several times a year here, so I'll let others state this argument better. But the short is that Google can define protocols, more tracking analytics, etc. It really comes down to two things. - Do you want to encourage more privacy across the web? - Do you want the web to be more decentralized? If you want more privacy and less centralization, you should use FF. I don't think it is just about the services that they offer. I think we can go deeper and talk about the future of the web in general and how our choices affect that.
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
    Legislation is the answer for privacy. The tech ship has long sailed to the point that invasive stalking is 'too cheap to meter'.
    - godelski 5y ago
      You're right, but neither can we wait for legislation to be passed. So attack this problem from multiple fronts. And even after legislation is passed that doesn't solve the second problem of centralization.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    Firefox promises all these things, but I think that by and large the problem is that it just doesn't deliver on them for the average person. And average person is how we get the market share and safety in numbers.
    - godelski 5y ago
- Delk 5y ago
  > They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch. I'm not going to tell anybody else what their reasons are or should be, but for me voting against the browser monoculture was a reason to switch. Most people won't care enough, of course, but to me it's not that different than voting for a candidate in an election who might not be the absolute best fit for my personal interests but who seems better for an overall political culture, or some other similar compromise.
sockaddr 5y ago
Recently switched to Linux and only installed Firefox. When you force yourself to use it, it's doable. I think only once in the last 6 months did a website not work (my dumb HOA website). Other than that, it's more than sufficient. It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  I can't remember Firefox crashing in recent years and that includes times I approached 2000 open tabs. Though after using the same profile for over 5 years now it has trouble remembering the color scheme for whatever reason.
  - antod 5y ago
    I never had Firefox crashes until Ubuntu 21.10 which I think made Firefox a snap, now I get crashes when it tries to load fonts. And I get that colour scheme thing now too.
    - voidlogic 5y ago
      You can still run firefox as normal app, and it's rock solid.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    "Soft" crashes where websites simply don't load or function properly in FF, but do in Chrome, are far more common.
    - alpaca128 5y ago
      I'd say that's usually a problem with websites and not the browser. Many websites are just designed with the 80% of most frequent configurations. And when autoplay is disabled, the browser window is too narrow, a special font isn't loaded or a cookie is blocked all bets are off.
- 5y ago
paulcole 5y ago
> Firefox is very usable Are you intentionally underselling it or is this what I can expect of Firefox? Because it's not a super awe-inspiring endorsement.
- BossingAround 5y ago
  I don't understand what you need. Go and try Firefox. As a person that uses Firefox as a daily driver, both at work and at home usage, I can't recall when I had to switch to Chrome. In 2010, maybe. I don't know what other "awe-inspiring endorsement" you need. Firefox did not save my marriage nor did it make me a million dollars, no.
  - paulcole 5y ago
    Do you use Firefox because it’s a better browser or because of philosophical reasons? If it’s the former, then I want to know that somebody thinks it’s the best way to browse the web. If it’s the latter, then tell me it’s worse but the politics of supporting Google are distasteful to you. Don’t tell me it’s “very usable” because I’m going to interpret it as the latter which may or may not be correct.
    - na85 5y ago
      >I want to know that somebody thinks it’s the best way to browse the web I think it's the best way to browse the web. Chrome on Android, at least, doesn't allow ad blocking. Who the fuck in The Year of Our Lord 2022 doesn't use ad blocking?
      - paulcole 5y ago
        I actually don't use ad blocking. If there are ads and I don't want to see them, then I don't visit that site again. The site has chosen their business model and I can choose which sites I want to visit. I also like buying things that I might like, so seeing ads (and ads that are targeted to me) isn't necessarily a bad thing to me.
selfhoster11 5y ago
I use Firefox. Not exclusively, but most of the time, on principle. I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. For power users, Vivaldi is a far better choice despite the Chromium browser engine. And for both of these groups, Firefox UX worsens and improves seemingly at random. Quite frankly, I'm conflicted whether I should recommend Firefox at all. If I say "look, here's Firefox! It's more private than Chrome, and almost as fast and error-free!", and then Mozilla goes on to ruin that perception 6 months later (as they are wont to do), then it's my reputation and credibility at stake. Not only is that an unnecessary ego hit, but also makes me look like a liar (or at best, like an ivory tower dweller divorced from reality).
- feanaro 5y ago
  > I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. I can't imagine why you would say this. Could you point out some concrete examples of better UX?
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    The hamburger menu, for one. It's extremely unintuitive. Not the fact that it uses a hamburger icon, but that even simple things like accessing the full list of my bookmarks involve multiple clicks. If you know the keyboard shortcuts then it's not a problem, but I want common UI items to be accessible from the UI. Besides that, the UI is just sluggish a lot of the time. It feels that Chrome(ium) has a far better latency response.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - feanaro 5y ago
      But isn't accessing bookmarks exactly the same in Chrome(ium)? Firefox: 1. Hamburger menu > 2. Bookmarks > 3. Manage bookmarks Chrome(ium): 1. Three-dot menu > 2. Bookmarks > 3. Bookmark manager In both cases you get a list of bookmarks on step 2 and you get a full, searchable, editable view in step 3. The global shortcut for the third step is the same in both (ctrl + shift + o).
com2kid 5y ago
> Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see. I use Firefox despite long standing bugs. Somehow a browser that aggressively throttles background tabs is still able to leak memory to background tabs. For the longest time Firefox messed with my wireless headset, they finally added proper support for web audio APIs and things are better now. CPU usage is still all over the place. Some inactive tab will cause FF to spin CPU usage up to 100%. Firefox still leaks resources, I can shut down all tabs and still have the media playback process using up tons of CPU and RAM. WebGL performance is worse than Chrome. TBF it has been getting steadily better over the last year, I have noticed a marked improvement. I'd say a year or so ago it was noticeably bad on a regular basis, now it is an occasional annoyance. But it should never have gotten that bad. More to the point of the question, Google spent a LONG time pushing Chrome, hard. They paid lots of # to bundle it with app updates years ago. Visiting Google properties causes banner ads "Download Chrome!" to appear. A few years back YouTube videos would occasionally just stop working in Firefox. And now days with Node development, well, Node developer tools are built into Chrome. React developer tools run in Chrome.
heurist 5y ago
A while back I spent a few weeks figuring out how to configure Firefox to work exactly how I want a browser to work, then months happily using it. Then a big update was released and everything broke. I never bothered to get it working again. And despite claims of performance improvements that came with the release, it still chugged slower than Chrome. I would love to use a browser that I can actually configure how I want without things breaking every week, even if it's slower in general. But if I can't configure reliably and it's slower -- what's the point?
- chasil 5y ago
  From this perspective, the RPM from one of RedHat's derivatives would be the ideal answer - a long term support release. As far as I know, such lengthy support terms do not exist for any Windows releases. Firefox on RedHat 8 will stay as it is until 2029.
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    Actually there is a fairly secret long term version of windows 10 that also does without all the bullshit. No store, no constant massive feature updates, etc. Windows 10 LTSB / LTSC. They try to make it seem like its only for embedded machines but its basically just stripped down windows 10 with a lot more similarities (feature wise) to what windows 7 was.
  - kasabali 5y ago
    This claim is totally fiction. RedHat has no magic Mozilla sauce, they simply ship Firefox ESR and upgrade it every year. You'll have the same breakage in the end, just yearly instead of monthly.
    - chasil 5y ago
      Yes, because "big updates" regularly trash Firefox in Red Hat. This happens all the time. What a fiction indeed.
      - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

perryizgr8 5y ago

I want Firefox to succeed. But that doesn't mean I will use an inferior browser, especially when I feel the decision makers at Mozilla are out of sync.

garciasn 5y ago

They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch. When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set. Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.

bentcorner 5y ago
Take a look at tree-style tabs. I started using them in FF and have looked several times at chromium-based add-ins and absolutely nothing comes close. Edge vertical tabs is your best choice if you must use a chromium browser, however it is a weak imitation of TST.
- yeeeloit 5y ago
  What are you talking about exactly? Is this an extension for FF?
  - bentcorner 5y ago
    It's this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
  - sgc 5y ago
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
- garciasn 5y ago
  I'm glad this exists (although it appears there are extensions in other browsers that do the same thing) but I never have more than 10 tabs open, so it's not something that would make me switch.
  - bentcorner 5y ago
    I'm glad it exists too. If you ever have a need to juggle tabs this extension is a godsend. Believe me, I've tried finding similar functionality for Chrome/Edge and aside from Edge vertical tabs, the rest are a kludge at best.
  - subsection1h 5y ago
    > I never have more than 10 tabs open How is that possible? Do you never compare things? Or do you only compare things for which there are fewer than 10 alternatives?
    - garciasn 5y ago
      I cannot tell if you're kidding or not.
- 3371 5y ago
  I've been using Firefox straight for 10+ years and tried all major vertical tabs extensions and now I recommend Sidebery to everyone.
  - subsection1h 5y ago
    Sidebery is great, but I had to switch back to Tree Style Tab because I hate animations, and while Sidebery is impressively configurable, not all animations can be disabled (https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues/517 https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues/517).
- freediver 5y ago
  > Edge vertical tabs is your best choice if you must use a chromium browser, however it is a weak imitation of TST. What makes it weak?
- Brakenshire 5y ago
  Multi Account Containers is also good.
  - hn-52 5y ago
    Temporary Containers as well. An entire throwaway container by default. I can just accept all the cookies and closing the tab deletes them all. No management. Nothing else comes close.
  - Volundr 5y ago
    Multi Account Containers is the key reason I use Firefox. I have to juggle multiple accounts for the same services for work. Containers makes this trivial. The closest chrome has is profiles which require a separate window and are just generally far more painful to use.
captn3m0 5y ago
On Desktop, I can agree. But uBlock Origin on Android is only possible on Firefox afaik (and one of the major ways Google uses Android for Ad revenue leverage)
godelski 5y ago
For an average person, I think this argument is fine. But we're on HN where we can discuss something with a bit more nuance. There's two major things that I see that FF offers that Chrome doesn't, including chromium alternatives. 1) More privacy. Chrome tracks you substantially more than alternative browsers. In addition to that, is simply the chrome ecosystem, see next point. 2) Chrome's dominance defines the web. A decentralized service doesn't become centralized once one player takes 100% of the users. It happens long before because a big player can throw their weight around and force others to do what they want. Chrome already acts this way. We talk about this extensively several times a year here, so I'll let others state this argument better. But the short is that Google can define protocols, more tracking analytics, etc. It really comes down to two things. - Do you want to encourage more privacy across the web? - Do you want the web to be more decentralized? If you want more privacy and less centralization, you should use FF. I don't think it is just about the services that they offer. I think we can go deeper and talk about the future of the web in general and how our choices affect that.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  Legislation is the answer for privacy. The tech ship has long sailed to the point that invasive stalking is 'too cheap to meter'.
  - godelski 5y ago
    You're right, but neither can we wait for legislation to be passed. So attack this problem from multiple fronts. And even after legislation is passed that doesn't solve the second problem of centralization.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Firefox promises all these things, but I think that by and large the problem is that it just doesn't deliver on them for the average person. And average person is how we get the market share and safety in numbers.
  - godelski 5y ago
Delk 5y ago
> They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch. I'm not going to tell anybody else what their reasons are or should be, but for me voting against the browser monoculture was a reason to switch. Most people won't care enough, of course, but to me it's not that different than voting for a candidate in an election who might not be the absolute best fit for my personal interests but who seems better for an overall political culture, or some other similar compromise.

sockaddr 5y ago

Recently switched to Linux and only installed Firefox. When you force yourself to use it, it's doable. I think only once in the last 6 months did a website not work (my dumb HOA website). Other than that, it's more than sufficient. It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.

alpaca128 5y ago
I can't remember Firefox crashing in recent years and that includes times I approached 2000 open tabs. Though after using the same profile for over 5 years now it has trouble remembering the color scheme for whatever reason.
- antod 5y ago
  I never had Firefox crashes until Ubuntu 21.10 which I think made Firefox a snap, now I get crashes when it tries to load fonts. And I get that colour scheme thing now too.
  - voidlogic 5y ago
    You can still run firefox as normal app, and it's rock solid.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  "Soft" crashes where websites simply don't load or function properly in FF, but do in Chrome, are far more common.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    I'd say that's usually a problem with websites and not the browser. Many websites are just designed with the 80% of most frequent configurations. And when autoplay is disabled, the browser window is too narrow, a special font isn't loaded or a cookie is blocked all bets are off.
5y ago

paulcole 5y ago

> Firefox is very usable Are you intentionally underselling it or is this what I can expect of Firefox? Because it's not a super awe-inspiring endorsement.

BossingAround 5y ago
I don't understand what you need. Go and try Firefox. As a person that uses Firefox as a daily driver, both at work and at home usage, I can't recall when I had to switch to Chrome. In 2010, maybe. I don't know what other "awe-inspiring endorsement" you need. Firefox did not save my marriage nor did it make me a million dollars, no.
- paulcole 5y ago
  Do you use Firefox because it’s a better browser or because of philosophical reasons? If it’s the former, then I want to know that somebody thinks it’s the best way to browse the web. If it’s the latter, then tell me it’s worse but the politics of supporting Google are distasteful to you. Don’t tell me it’s “very usable” because I’m going to interpret it as the latter which may or may not be correct.
  - na85 5y ago
    >I want to know that somebody thinks it’s the best way to browse the web I think it's the best way to browse the web. Chrome on Android, at least, doesn't allow ad blocking. Who the fuck in The Year of Our Lord 2022 doesn't use ad blocking?
    - paulcole 5y ago
      I actually don't use ad blocking. If there are ads and I don't want to see them, then I don't visit that site again. The site has chosen their business model and I can choose which sites I want to visit. I also like buying things that I might like, so seeing ads (and ads that are targeted to me) isn't necessarily a bad thing to me.

selfhoster11 5y ago

I use Firefox. Not exclusively, but most of the time, on principle. I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. For power users, Vivaldi is a far better choice despite the Chromium browser engine. And for both of these groups, Firefox UX worsens and improves seemingly at random. Quite frankly, I'm conflicted whether I should recommend Firefox at all. If I say "look, here's Firefox! It's more private than Chrome, and almost as fast and error-free!", and then Mozilla goes on to ruin that perception 6 months later (as they are wont to do), then it's my reputation and credibility at stake. Not only is that an unnecessary ego hit, but also makes me look like a liar (or at best, like an ivory tower dweller divorced from reality).

feanaro 5y ago
> I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. I can't imagine why you would say this. Could you point out some concrete examples of better UX?
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  The hamburger menu, for one. It's extremely unintuitive. Not the fact that it uses a hamburger icon, but that even simple things like accessing the full list of my bookmarks involve multiple clicks. If you know the keyboard shortcuts then it's not a problem, but I want common UI items to be accessible from the UI. Besides that, the UI is just sluggish a lot of the time. It feels that Chrome(ium) has a far better latency response.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - feanaro 5y ago
    But isn't accessing bookmarks exactly the same in Chrome(ium)? Firefox: 1. Hamburger menu > 2. Bookmarks > 3. Manage bookmarks Chrome(ium): 1. Three-dot menu > 2. Bookmarks > 3. Bookmark manager In both cases you get a list of bookmarks on step 2 and you get a full, searchable, editable view in step 3. The global shortcut for the third step is the same in both (ctrl + shift + o).

com2kid 5y ago

> Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see. I use Firefox despite long standing bugs. Somehow a browser that aggressively throttles background tabs is still able to leak memory to background tabs. For the longest time Firefox messed with my wireless headset, they finally added proper support for web audio APIs and things are better now. CPU usage is still all over the place. Some inactive tab will cause FF to spin CPU usage up to 100%. Firefox still leaks resources, I can shut down all tabs and still have the media playback process using up tons of CPU and RAM. WebGL performance is worse than Chrome. TBF it has been getting steadily better over the last year, I have noticed a marked improvement. I'd say a year or so ago it was noticeably bad on a regular basis, now it is an occasional annoyance. But it should never have gotten that bad. More to the point of the question, Google spent a LONG time pushing Chrome, hard. They paid lots of # to bundle it with app updates years ago. Visiting Google properties causes banner ads "Download Chrome!" to appear. A few years back YouTube videos would occasionally just stop working in Firefox. And now days with Node development, well, Node developer tools are built into Chrome. React developer tools run in Chrome.

heurist 5y ago

A while back I spent a few weeks figuring out how to configure Firefox to work exactly how I want a browser to work, then months happily using it. Then a big update was released and everything broke. I never bothered to get it working again. And despite claims of performance improvements that came with the release, it still chugged slower than Chrome. I would love to use a browser that I can actually configure how I want without things breaking every week, even if it's slower in general. But if I can't configure reliably and it's slower -- what's the point?

chasil 5y ago
From this perspective, the RPM from one of RedHat's derivatives would be the ideal answer - a long term support release. As far as I know, such lengthy support terms do not exist for any Windows releases. Firefox on RedHat 8 will stay as it is until 2029.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Actually there is a fairly secret long term version of windows 10 that also does without all the bullshit. No store, no constant massive feature updates, etc. Windows 10 LTSB / LTSC. They try to make it seem like its only for embedded machines but its basically just stripped down windows 10 with a lot more similarities (feature wise) to what windows 7 was.
- kasabali 5y ago
  This claim is totally fiction. RedHat has no magic Mozilla sauce, they simply ship Firefox ESR and upgrade it every year. You'll have the same breakage in the end, just yearly instead of monthly.
  - chasil 5y ago
    Yes, because "big updates" regularly trash Firefox in Red Hat. This happens all the time. What a fiction indeed.
    - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]