4 ms·

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

by notatoad 4y ago

Aeolun 4y ago
What state is that? I’ve been very satisfied with FF over the past 5 years.
- cma 4y ago
  Basic keyboard shortcuts that worked in the 90s don't work on Firefox Android.
  - hammyhavoc 4y 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 4y ago
      > Android is a touch-first OS Android has native support for keyboards since API 1.
      - hammyhavoc 4y 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 4y ago
        While I understand your point, I disagree that just because majority is using touch, you shouldn’t care about minority using keyboard.
        hammyhavoc 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
    Sample size of one, but it's also probably been able five years since I've physically printed something.
  - aimor 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.

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

Aeolun 4y ago

What state is that? I’ve been very satisfied with FF over the past 5 years.

cma 4y ago
Basic keyboard shortcuts that worked in the 90s don't work on Firefox Android.
- hammyhavoc 4y 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 4y ago
    > Android is a touch-first OS Android has native support for keyboards since API 1.
    - hammyhavoc 4y 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 4y ago
        While I understand your point, I disagree that just because majority is using touch, you shouldn’t care about minority using keyboard.
        hammyhavoc 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  Sample size of one, but it's also probably been able five years since I've physically printed something.
- aimor 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.