8 ms·

I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time on an acquisition is not the reason

I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time on an acquisition is not the reason they haven't integrated gnome-keyring.

notatoad 3y ago
the general state of firefox suggests that they are not large enough to do more than one thing.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  What state is that? I’ve been very satisfied with FF over the past 5 years.
  - cma 3y ago
    Basic keyboard shortcuts that worked in the 90s don't work on Firefox Android.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      Android is a touch-first OS, keyboard shortcut support is woeful in general in most apps. '90s desktop browsers didn't work well with touchscreens.
      - wiseowise 3y ago
        > Android is a touch-first OS Android has native support for keyboards since API 1.
        hammyhavoc 3y ago
        The word "first" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and has jackshit to do with it supporting it. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of Android users aren't using a keyboard and are using a touchscreen. You could even extrapolate the woeful state of Android tablet UX, because there's far more Android tablet users than there will be keyboard users because hey, most Android devices only ship with a touchscreen and are cellphones. An iPad can support a keyboard too. It's a touch-first device. A Mac can support a touchscreen with a third-party driver, but it's a KBM-first UX and support of the touchscreen is horrible in most apps that only accept one input at a time.
        wiseowise 3y ago
        While I understand your point, I disagree that just because majority is using touch, you shouldn’t care about minority using keyboard.
        hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Why? It's not an accessibility feature, and desktop OS versions of Firefox still exist. Choosing a hobbled Android device and expecting desktop-class experience is a user issue. Will it drive worthwhile value? No. Are there more pressing matters? Yes. With that said, it's open source. Why don't you implement it yourself? Meanwhile the rest of us have long since moved on from Firefox.
        cma 3y ago
        Samsung phones can do things like wireless beam a desktop over to a TV. You can then use a bluetooth keyboard with it fine with Chrome, but not Firefox.
      - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
        Android was a keyboard-only Blackberry clone before it gained touch support. This is why soft keyboards have always been modular since they are a bolted on substitute for physical keys.
  - ysavir 3y ago
    Same here. I've been using Firefox as my main browser for 20 years now. There was a period where it would have some issues, but it's been run great and smooth for the past few years. I don't get the hate.
    - ihaveajob 3y ago
      Since the engine was ported to Rust, it's been fantastic as a user. Sure, the app ecosystem favors Chrome due to market trends, but that's minor.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Same here very rarely I have issues. Even the fully local translation is really usable now <3. I don't use chrome for anything and it's not even installed on my daily driver anymore. Ironically, the only time I have had issues, overriding the user agent to look like chrome or edge fixed it. So those websites were deliberately broken with Firefox, not Mozilla's fault but pure malice and dark patterns. Office 365 is one of these sites by the way.
  - pissedoff1 3y ago
    no print feature in over 5 years. How can a browser not implement print? (on android) They removed it, then claimed they were working on it, and shut down every single github issue about it
    - saghm 3y ago
      Sample size of one, but it's also probably been able five years since I've physically printed something.
    - aimor 3y ago
      This one got me recently, and the workaround that saved me was the save-as-pdf option hidden behind the "share" icon. Thankfully it uses the print stylesheet specified by the website.
  - lucideer 3y ago
    Not sure how much of this is living in a bubble or selection bias of negative experiences in common but my own impression of the firefox userbase is that a significant portion of it are using firefox as a "least worst" browser, rather than one they are actually very happy with.
    - sgc 3y ago
      That nails me. But that is also the impetus behind my use of almost every single product I use, from my house, to my car, to my food, to my computers, to the os and other software on them. I don't think that is indicative of anything very specific to FF.
      - lucideer 3y ago
        I get what you're saying: I'm the same for most products, though I do go out of my way to find and use things that are exceptional and in some cases I've actually kinda succeeded in finding that. The issue here is that this wasn't always the case, or at least wasn't always this bad. While Firefox has always been far from perfect, there was a time when mozillazine consisted mostly of praise and evangelism, and not all of it naive fandom. Also, as a former Opera user, there was also a time when the landscape as a whole contained a higher quality set of options in general. There were numerous browsers then better than the current least worst. Even recently, Firefox has inspired hope & interest with Servo, Quantum, and even things like the amazing webextension migration effort: controversial and unpopular with many it was nonetheless a greatly successful engineering effort, and has borne fruit in the recent furore over v3 manifests, with Firefox coming out ahead. It's also got cool added APIs that makes sense for the traditional Firefox community but are still standards compliant and interoperable. But all that progress is now already waning with Servo dev cut, progressive popular distinguishing features like MAC being relegated to APIs & UI removed from core. There's precious little left to distinguish Firefox from Chrome, and nothing new on the horizon.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      This was me for a few years after the revamp, even after the loss of important functionality after extensions were neutered. But eventually, I couldn't take it anymore and bailed on FF entirely. I'm pleased to see others have good experience with FF performance, but for me, the performance simply became unacceptable.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Imo out of the box it needs extensions to get it to be worthwhile. Its generally worse on battery than say safari, only being comparable when you factor the savings not having to render ads with ublock origin. I catch firefox processes all the time using 15% cpu with no tabs left open, restart it and it drops back to 3% like safari, so something weird is certainly going on. Sometimes I use firefox over an x11 connection and its like a new circle of hell (not what x11 is really for but its uniquely bad for a gui app on that imo, considering some full on gui ides are useable).
    - pmontra 3y ago
      about:performance gives you a list of tabs with energy and memory usage. You can find which tab is misbehaving. It works on Android too.
  - notatoad 3y ago
    every year i try using firefox again, because the dominance of chrome bothers me and i want there to be a good competitor. and every year i inevitably run into some issue that makes me give up and go back to chrome. I think last time it was a themeing issue with ubuntu's default built-in dark theme. a previous year it was a sync issue. with their continued slide in marketshare to what is essentially an irrelevant portion of the market, i'm guessing this isn't just me.
- Entinel 3y ago
  This is a thing that has just become a thing to say with no substance. I use FF everyday and have since the Quantum release and have few complaints.
  - krono 3y ago
    Its great that everything just magically seems to work so well for you, but behind the curtains it took additional effort from the developers of websites you visit to make it so. Same goes for Safari and some of the less popular browsers.
    - JohnBooty 3y ago
      I mean, this is a broad topic and I am more of a backend engineer than frontend these days. However, I did do a lot of frontend back in the old IE6/IE7/IE8 days when you essentially had to code a whole separate front end for Microsoft's standards-flaunting mess. So this is definitely an issue I care about. but behind the curtains it took additional effort from the developers of websites you visit to make it so This is true, but in my (limited recent) experience often it's because Chrome implements some rando de facto new "standard" thing they cooked up so of course they are out in front of the other browsers. So yes, you often can't run your Chrome-specific shit elsewhere without workarounds and polyfills, but this doesn't automatically mean everybody except Google is screwing up. In some cases, complaints such as yours sound like folks in 2004 complaining that their ActiveX controls work in IE but not Firefox.
      - krono 3y ago
        Yes absolutely! Also why I tagged on that call-out of Safari and other browsers. And not to forget that Google has even shipped several early-days standards track features to production of which the API was still in flux. In a few cases the API later changed in - for Chrome, at least - breaking ways. Fun times.
      - notatoad 3y ago
        >your chrome-specific shit okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not supporting that stuff other than "we have limited resources to implement these things"? a lot of that chrome-specific shit is really really nice. like CSS nesting - that would be amazing. firefox has a bug for tracking the implementation, and supported the standardization of it. but there's no sign of any progress towards an implementation. meanwhile safari and chrome have both shipped it.
wslh 3y ago
Yes, they can work on many things simultaneously but it is worrisome when the execution of their core product fails [1] it shows a big management failure. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+market+share&oq=firefox+market+share+&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i512l5j69i60l2.4206j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+market+share&oq=fire...
- slg 3y ago
  Market share is not always indicative of execution. There is a reasonable argument that their browser market share decreasing or not growing should prompt diversification of their business rather than doubling down on something that is not showing great returns on investment.
  - wslh 3y ago
    I am not saying that is always indicative of execution but I don't think Mozilla has any indicative of good execution? Hey, they invented a new programming language to reengineer the browser. The programming language is very succesful and it is growing in market share but Firefox continues to be written in C++. IMHO there is a room for innovation in this space, long term but you can see if this happenning observing the project. Currently browser engines are one of the most complex pieces of software. There are new ways to attack these mammoths.
    - jfk13 3y ago
      > Firefox continues to be written in C++ The amount of Rust code in Firefox is pretty substantial, and growing. Did you expect an instant rewrite?
      - wslh 3y ago
        Rust is from 2015, one year ago the Rust code in Firefox was 10%. What is now?
- waboremo 3y ago
pjmlp 3y ago
I still use Firefox, however it has long stop being relevant in browser support matrixes for project acceptance delivery.
smsm42 3y ago
> I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once Maybe that's the problem. Why Mozilla should be large enough to do those things? I'd rather have one good browser than 20 mediocre side projects.
- nine_k 3y ago
  If Firefox and Thunderbird development were financed from money collected from the VPN profits and / or donations, I'd happily pay. But I'd like it to be directed exactly there, or into other clearly stated initiatives I can understand and approve of, like Rust back in the day.
- criddell 3y ago
  I have the exact opposite opinion. They should get out of the rendering engine business and start using Blink like just about everybody else. Take Blink and make a better browser from it using those 20 side projects. Pour resources into them and move them from mediocre to great. Take what Google gives away and spend resources on what Google ignores. Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes no sense to me. If Apple allows third party browsers and Chrome is adopted by enough iOS / iPadOS users, everything other than Blink will be non-standard in a de facto sense. This is a fairly new opinion for me. On Windows I've started using Edge alongside Firefox and I find myself using Firefox less and less often. On my machine doing the things I need to do, Edge is significantly faster.
  - smsm42 3y ago
    Having an independent rendering engine has a lot of value, in both diversity and control aspects. Having another chrome layer around he same engine is kinda meh. I mean not that a good chrome can't improve things - it very well may - but the importance of having it is less. > Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes no sense to me. And that's exactly why we need a strong independent org to do this. Because it is hard and it doesn't make sense for most people. Anyone can get an idea of a chrome improvement, get a VC to sign up and start yet another "same browser as 50 others but with this little twist" thing. This is not a huge breakthrough that has any fundamental importance. Having the whole web rendering infrastructure not owned by a single entity sounds kinda important though. Yes, it's hard to pull off - that's exactly why it is valuable, as opposed to make another quick buck by doing a quick tweak over somebody else's work. Quick buck things are valuable too - but they are not fundamental. It's like developing a new theme for Windows as opposed to developing Linux. I think having Linux is much more important than having one more Windows theme.
miragecraft 3y ago
If you’re a browser user you won’t notice, but as someone who build websites Firefox is noticeably behind other browsers and is the lone holdout that have not rolled out the CSS `:has()`, `@property` and nesting features.
jeroenhd 3y ago
Firefox is behind on general web support compared to any other browser. That's not just weird APIs like WebUSB and WebSerial and WebGPU, but also CSS things. It's almost as bad as Safari, except it's broken in very different areas. There's plenty to improve. On Android there's the whole extension mess (and tons of other quality of life improvements), on desktop Firefox could use some proper PWA support (even Safari has that implemented well now), Spidermonkey is still the slowest mainstream Javascript engine out there, and Chrome's process sandboxing has some features that Firefox is yet to implement if at all. Firefox users on Gnome on Linux are a subset of a subset of a subset, that's hardly important, but "Firefox is slower than all the other browsers" is. Mozilla cares more about their charity programs than they do about their browser (that's why you can't directly donate to Firefox, only to Mozilla). Maybe this acquisition is a way to add a new revenue stream, though I doubt it'll matter much because I've never seen AI detection that actually works. I hope this was a smart move, but I fear this will end up as one of those buttons everyone disables in the default toolbar, like Pocket has become. Mozilla has also fired 250 people during the pandemic, so somehow coming up with the money to buy a company feels a little jarring when dev capacity still hasn't recovered.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  "Firefox is slower than all the other browsers" Wow, absolutely not my experience. I use both Chrome and FF regularly on Mac and PC desktops and laptops with vintages ranging from 2011-2023. There is no perceptible difference to me. Admittedly all of my machines are relatively comfortably specced. Desktop-class CPUs, 16GB+ of RAM, SSDs. Perhaps the difference is more pronounced when the computing environment is more constrained. Moving from my subjective opinion to hard benchmarks, Firefox wins some and loses others. Overall they're close. I don't use Android so I don't know the FF situation there. It certainly sounds like a mess. I will take your word for it.
  - eimrine 3y ago
    Don't you have an experience that Chrome works better on old-end hardware? I have in an active use some 2005-2013 hardware and I describe Firefox as significant worse (freezes and consumes more memory per tab), I do not like Chrome but I use it because I use that hardware sometimes. Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB. Than Firefox unleashes its ability to work just fine even with a lot of extensions.

I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time on an acquisition is not the reason they haven't integrated gnome-keyring.

notatoad 3y ago

the general state of firefox suggests that they are not large enough to do more than one thing.

Aeolun 3y ago
What state is that? I’ve been very satisfied with FF over the past 5 years.
- cma 3y ago
  Basic keyboard shortcuts that worked in the 90s don't work on Firefox Android.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    Android is a touch-first OS, keyboard shortcut support is woeful in general in most apps. '90s desktop browsers didn't work well with touchscreens.
    - wiseowise 3y ago
      > Android is a touch-first OS Android has native support for keyboards since API 1.
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        The word "first" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and has jackshit to do with it supporting it. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of Android users aren't using a keyboard and are using a touchscreen. You could even extrapolate the woeful state of Android tablet UX, because there's far more Android tablet users than there will be keyboard users because hey, most Android devices only ship with a touchscreen and are cellphones. An iPad can support a keyboard too. It's a touch-first device. A Mac can support a touchscreen with a third-party driver, but it's a KBM-first UX and support of the touchscreen is horrible in most apps that only accept one input at a time.
        wiseowise 3y ago
        While I understand your point, I disagree that just because majority is using touch, you shouldn’t care about minority using keyboard.
        hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Why? It's not an accessibility feature, and desktop OS versions of Firefox still exist. Choosing a hobbled Android device and expecting desktop-class experience is a user issue. Will it drive worthwhile value? No. Are there more pressing matters? Yes. With that said, it's open source. Why don't you implement it yourself? Meanwhile the rest of us have long since moved on from Firefox.
        cma 3y ago
        Samsung phones can do things like wireless beam a desktop over to a TV. You can then use a bluetooth keyboard with it fine with Chrome, but not Firefox.
    - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
      Android was a keyboard-only Blackberry clone before it gained touch support. This is why soft keyboards have always been modular since they are a bolted on substitute for physical keys.
- ysavir 3y ago
  Same here. I've been using Firefox as my main browser for 20 years now. There was a period where it would have some issues, but it's been run great and smooth for the past few years. I don't get the hate.
  - ihaveajob 3y ago
    Since the engine was ported to Rust, it's been fantastic as a user. Sure, the app ecosystem favors Chrome due to market trends, but that's minor.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Same here very rarely I have issues. Even the fully local translation is really usable now <3. I don't use chrome for anything and it's not even installed on my daily driver anymore. Ironically, the only time I have had issues, overriding the user agent to look like chrome or edge fixed it. So those websites were deliberately broken with Firefox, not Mozilla's fault but pure malice and dark patterns. Office 365 is one of these sites by the way.
- pissedoff1 3y ago
  no print feature in over 5 years. How can a browser not implement print? (on android) They removed it, then claimed they were working on it, and shut down every single github issue about it
  - saghm 3y ago
    Sample size of one, but it's also probably been able five years since I've physically printed something.
  - aimor 3y ago
    This one got me recently, and the workaround that saved me was the save-as-pdf option hidden behind the "share" icon. Thankfully it uses the print stylesheet specified by the website.
- lucideer 3y ago
  Not sure how much of this is living in a bubble or selection bias of negative experiences in common but my own impression of the firefox userbase is that a significant portion of it are using firefox as a "least worst" browser, rather than one they are actually very happy with.
  - sgc 3y ago
    That nails me. But that is also the impetus behind my use of almost every single product I use, from my house, to my car, to my food, to my computers, to the os and other software on them. I don't think that is indicative of anything very specific to FF.
    - lucideer 3y ago
      I get what you're saying: I'm the same for most products, though I do go out of my way to find and use things that are exceptional and in some cases I've actually kinda succeeded in finding that. The issue here is that this wasn't always the case, or at least wasn't always this bad. While Firefox has always been far from perfect, there was a time when mozillazine consisted mostly of praise and evangelism, and not all of it naive fandom. Also, as a former Opera user, there was also a time when the landscape as a whole contained a higher quality set of options in general. There were numerous browsers then better than the current least worst. Even recently, Firefox has inspired hope & interest with Servo, Quantum, and even things like the amazing webextension migration effort: controversial and unpopular with many it was nonetheless a greatly successful engineering effort, and has borne fruit in the recent furore over v3 manifests, with Firefox coming out ahead. It's also got cool added APIs that makes sense for the traditional Firefox community but are still standards compliant and interoperable. But all that progress is now already waning with Servo dev cut, progressive popular distinguishing features like MAC being relegated to APIs & UI removed from core. There's precious little left to distinguish Firefox from Chrome, and nothing new on the horizon.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    This was me for a few years after the revamp, even after the loss of important functionality after extensions were neutered. But eventually, I couldn't take it anymore and bailed on FF entirely. I'm pleased to see others have good experience with FF performance, but for me, the performance simply became unacceptable.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Imo out of the box it needs extensions to get it to be worthwhile. Its generally worse on battery than say safari, only being comparable when you factor the savings not having to render ads with ublock origin. I catch firefox processes all the time using 15% cpu with no tabs left open, restart it and it drops back to 3% like safari, so something weird is certainly going on. Sometimes I use firefox over an x11 connection and its like a new circle of hell (not what x11 is really for but its uniquely bad for a gui app on that imo, considering some full on gui ides are useable).
  - pmontra 3y ago
    about:performance gives you a list of tabs with energy and memory usage. You can find which tab is misbehaving. It works on Android too.
- notatoad 3y ago
  every year i try using firefox again, because the dominance of chrome bothers me and i want there to be a good competitor. and every year i inevitably run into some issue that makes me give up and go back to chrome. I think last time it was a themeing issue with ubuntu's default built-in dark theme. a previous year it was a sync issue. with their continued slide in marketshare to what is essentially an irrelevant portion of the market, i'm guessing this isn't just me.
Entinel 3y ago
This is a thing that has just become a thing to say with no substance. I use FF everyday and have since the Quantum release and have few complaints.
- krono 3y ago
  Its great that everything just magically seems to work so well for you, but behind the curtains it took additional effort from the developers of websites you visit to make it so. Same goes for Safari and some of the less popular browsers.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    I mean, this is a broad topic and I am more of a backend engineer than frontend these days. However, I did do a lot of frontend back in the old IE6/IE7/IE8 days when you essentially had to code a whole separate front end for Microsoft's standards-flaunting mess. So this is definitely an issue I care about. but behind the curtains it took additional effort from the developers of websites you visit to make it so This is true, but in my (limited recent) experience often it's because Chrome implements some rando de facto new "standard" thing they cooked up so of course they are out in front of the other browsers. So yes, you often can't run your Chrome-specific shit elsewhere without workarounds and polyfills, but this doesn't automatically mean everybody except Google is screwing up. In some cases, complaints such as yours sound like folks in 2004 complaining that their ActiveX controls work in IE but not Firefox.
    - krono 3y ago
      Yes absolutely! Also why I tagged on that call-out of Safari and other browsers. And not to forget that Google has even shipped several early-days standards track features to production of which the API was still in flux. In a few cases the API later changed in - for Chrome, at least - breaking ways. Fun times.
    - notatoad 3y ago
      >your chrome-specific shit okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not supporting that stuff other than "we have limited resources to implement these things"? a lot of that chrome-specific shit is really really nice. like CSS nesting - that would be amazing. firefox has a bug for tracking the implementation, and supported the standardization of it. but there's no sign of any progress towards an implementation. meanwhile safari and chrome have both shipped it.

wslh 3y ago

Yes, they can work on many things simultaneously but it is worrisome when the execution of their core product fails [1] it shows a big management failure. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+market+share&oq=firefox+market+share+&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i512l5j69i60l2.4206j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+market+share&oq=fire...

slg 3y ago
Market share is not always indicative of execution. There is a reasonable argument that their browser market share decreasing or not growing should prompt diversification of their business rather than doubling down on something that is not showing great returns on investment.
- wslh 3y ago
  I am not saying that is always indicative of execution but I don't think Mozilla has any indicative of good execution? Hey, they invented a new programming language to reengineer the browser. The programming language is very succesful and it is growing in market share but Firefox continues to be written in C++. IMHO there is a room for innovation in this space, long term but you can see if this happenning observing the project. Currently browser engines are one of the most complex pieces of software. There are new ways to attack these mammoths.
  - jfk13 3y ago
    > Firefox continues to be written in C++ The amount of Rust code in Firefox is pretty substantial, and growing. Did you expect an instant rewrite?
    - wslh 3y ago
      Rust is from 2015, one year ago the Rust code in Firefox was 10%. What is now?
waboremo 3y ago

pjmlp 3y ago

I still use Firefox, however it has long stop being relevant in browser support matrixes for project acceptance delivery.

smsm42 3y ago

> I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once Maybe that's the problem. Why Mozilla should be large enough to do those things? I'd rather have one good browser than 20 mediocre side projects.

nine_k 3y ago
If Firefox and Thunderbird development were financed from money collected from the VPN profits and / or donations, I'd happily pay. But I'd like it to be directed exactly there, or into other clearly stated initiatives I can understand and approve of, like Rust back in the day.
criddell 3y ago
I have the exact opposite opinion. They should get out of the rendering engine business and start using Blink like just about everybody else. Take Blink and make a better browser from it using those 20 side projects. Pour resources into them and move them from mediocre to great. Take what Google gives away and spend resources on what Google ignores. Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes no sense to me. If Apple allows third party browsers and Chrome is adopted by enough iOS / iPadOS users, everything other than Blink will be non-standard in a de facto sense. This is a fairly new opinion for me. On Windows I've started using Edge alongside Firefox and I find myself using Firefox less and less often. On my machine doing the things I need to do, Edge is significantly faster.
- smsm42 3y ago
  Having an independent rendering engine has a lot of value, in both diversity and control aspects. Having another chrome layer around he same engine is kinda meh. I mean not that a good chrome can't improve things - it very well may - but the importance of having it is less. > Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes no sense to me. And that's exactly why we need a strong independent org to do this. Because it is hard and it doesn't make sense for most people. Anyone can get an idea of a chrome improvement, get a VC to sign up and start yet another "same browser as 50 others but with this little twist" thing. This is not a huge breakthrough that has any fundamental importance. Having the whole web rendering infrastructure not owned by a single entity sounds kinda important though. Yes, it's hard to pull off - that's exactly why it is valuable, as opposed to make another quick buck by doing a quick tweak over somebody else's work. Quick buck things are valuable too - but they are not fundamental. It's like developing a new theme for Windows as opposed to developing Linux. I think having Linux is much more important than having one more Windows theme.

miragecraft 3y ago

If you’re a browser user you won’t notice, but as someone who build websites Firefox is noticeably behind other browsers and is the lone holdout that have not rolled out the CSS `:has()`, `@property` and nesting features.

jeroenhd 3y ago

Firefox is behind on general web support compared to any other browser. That's not just weird APIs like WebUSB and WebSerial and WebGPU, but also CSS things. It's almost as bad as Safari, except it's broken in very different areas. There's plenty to improve. On Android there's the whole extension mess (and tons of other quality of life improvements), on desktop Firefox could use some proper PWA support (even Safari has that implemented well now), Spidermonkey is still the slowest mainstream Javascript engine out there, and Chrome's process sandboxing has some features that Firefox is yet to implement if at all. Firefox users on Gnome on Linux are a subset of a subset of a subset, that's hardly important, but "Firefox is slower than all the other browsers" is. Mozilla cares more about their charity programs than they do about their browser (that's why you can't directly donate to Firefox, only to Mozilla). Maybe this acquisition is a way to add a new revenue stream, though I doubt it'll matter much because I've never seen AI detection that actually works. I hope this was a smart move, but I fear this will end up as one of those buttons everyone disables in the default toolbar, like Pocket has become. Mozilla has also fired 250 people during the pandemic, so somehow coming up with the money to buy a company feels a little jarring when dev capacity still hasn't recovered.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
JohnBooty 3y ago
"Firefox is slower than all the other browsers" Wow, absolutely not my experience. I use both Chrome and FF regularly on Mac and PC desktops and laptops with vintages ranging from 2011-2023. There is no perceptible difference to me. Admittedly all of my machines are relatively comfortably specced. Desktop-class CPUs, 16GB+ of RAM, SSDs. Perhaps the difference is more pronounced when the computing environment is more constrained. Moving from my subjective opinion to hard benchmarks, Firefox wins some and loses others. Overall they're close. I don't use Android so I don't know the FF situation there. It certainly sounds like a mess. I will take your word for it.
- eimrine 3y ago
  Don't you have an experience that Chrome works better on old-end hardware? I have in an active use some 2005-2013 hardware and I describe Firefox as significant worse (freezes and consumes more memory per tab), I do not like Chrome but I use it because I use that hardware sometimes. Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB. Than Firefox unleashes its ability to work just fine even with a lot of extensions.