23 ms·

Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first. If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then pe

by jdlyga 3y ago

Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first. If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. Mozilla focus way too much of their attention on privacy and non-browser related projects. Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and making an excellent browser for their users. What has Firefox been doing with all their money and time?

sp332 3y ago
Firefox is fast though.
- trealira 3y ago
  Yeah. Although I'm not trying to discount what others experience, I'm always confused to hear that Firefox is slow, because it seems just as fast as Chromium on my computer.
  - Filligree 3y ago
    It uses a lot more CPU on Youtube than chrome/safari, and seems laggy there.
    - mrinterweb 3y ago
      There was some recent concern that Youtube may be slowing down FF https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
      - Filligree 3y ago
        I believe that. But the simple fact they're cheating, doesn't make FF viable for watching youtube on my laptop.
- HackerThemAll 3y ago
  It used to be slow, and many people who then switched, won't be looking back until Chrome stops working.
  - sleepybrett 3y ago
    chrome by way of google is making sure it's the only thing that youtube still properly works in. When MS tried this shit they got slapped with anti-trust. What google is doing is worse in every dimension.
    - vkou 3y ago
      When MS tried this shit, there weren't companies that were selling you locked-down hardware running a locked-down OS running a locked-down App Store, while taking a 30% cut of every economic transaction on that store...
      - sleepybrett 3y ago
        Game consoles existed (maybe not 30%) but the cell phone industry was already a nightmare.
        vkou 3y ago
        When cell phones were first getting off-the-ground, they were more like garage door openers - specialized tools for specialized settings. There is a lot of academic debate that the FSF and the EFF can spill on the subject of interop and software freedom for garage door openers, but practically, it wasn't a big social problem. Nowadays, cellphones are primary computing devices for a lot of people, with a large number of supporting and symbiotic industries around them. The various platform owners have drawn particular lines around their products, and have largely defended them in anti-trust courts - but there's no reason that those lines should be allowed to be where they are, or won't expand in the future. What stops a platform from, in addition to exerting full control over the software that runs on it, also choosing to exert similar control over the packets that are sent or received by it?
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
I don't really get what you're on about. I switched from Chrome to Firefox a couple months ago and... it's great. I don't notice any differences in performance (if anything, snappier) and the only thing that's "missing" that I had in Chrome is that Chrome had all my credit-card and password data associated with my Google account, which, well, that's not something I want Firefox to have. TLDR: Firefox is a good web browser. It's not failing in the market because it's not a good browser. It's failing because consumers don't seem to actually care one way or the other.
- sleepybrett 3y ago
  The pig doesn't have any problem with the farmer until he shows up with the axe. Thus it is with chrome users.
  - deepspace 3y ago
    That axe may just be Chrome's war on ad blockers.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      I'd like to believe this, but what percentage of Chrome users actually use an ad blocker? My general feeling is that we on HN think ad blocking is a lot more common than it actually is.
      - digging 3y ago
        It can't be that niche, or else why would they spend so much effort fighting ad blockers? They've surely done some research that uncovers a decent userbase of people who do use an ad blocker but will turn it off at a prompt.
      - nottorp 3y ago
        No the question is how can you trust an ad blocker will be allowed to do its job in Chrome? Even without Manifest v33333 or whatever.
encom 3y ago
In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time, or what bone-headed UI design change they'd make. And every time there'd be a Bugzilla bug with a of horde users who just had their favorite feature removed, and every time, without fail, it would get arrogantly WONTFIXed and eventually locked. This cycle has repeated for most of Firefox's existence, but it has accelerated. Vivaldi can customise damn near every aspect of its user interface. I can set up every menu how I want it. Remove things I done use, and move the most used item to the top. I can dock my tab-bar wherever I want. I can have a proper status bar. The list goes on. It's what Firefox should have been.
- orbital223 3y ago
  This has been my exact journey, been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox, finally got fed up a couple of years ago and switched to Vivaldi. It's such a breath of fresh air not having to dread update notifications anymore.
- signaru 3y ago
  I still use FF, but I do miss how customizable its UI used to be. I even made it look like Chrome back then!
- eviks 3y ago
  Indeed, the level of customization in Vivaldi is awesome and what Firefox should've done instead of going the other way (that would counter the lame excuse you link to elsewhere that "view image" makes the menu too long - just make the menu editable, duh!), even though their UI is unfortunately not very petformant
- int_19h 3y ago
  Feature-wise, Vivaldi is great indeed. But every time I actually try to switch to it as a primary for any prolonged amount of time, I inevitably run into major perf issues and/or deal-breaking bugs. In fact, my most recent attempt was just about a week ago, and vertical tabs w/grouping had numerous visual glitches for me, with tab buttons occasionally becoming taller than the screen, white rectangles that are supposed to go around tab groups having half the width that the tabs inside do etc. I "solved" this by using the Windows pane instead, and all was fine, until the browser just started randomly lagging to the point where everything slowed to the crawl. And yes, I did report it to their bug tracker - which is private, by the way, so there's no way to know who else is having those problems, or how work on them is proceeding. I will say that the bugs I reported on the last attempt are fixed, but it's little consolation when new equally bad bugs show up in their place. And as for perf issues, there are numerous active threads on Vivaldi forums about them. I'd love to use Vivaldi as my primary, esp. now that they also have an iOS offering, so tab & history sync across all of my devices is possible. But it really needs to be more stable.
jen20 3y ago
Privacy must be a tier 1 feature of a web browser. The fact the market leader goes out of their way to shit all over privacy concerns says more about their marketing pull than the quality of their browser.
- aembleton 3y ago
  That privacy prevents organisations such as USWDS from seeing that it is in use as analytics are blocked.
  - jen20 3y ago
    That means that using telemetry to determine browser market share is a flawed approach.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    Nobody has a right to research you or your behavior. We shouldn't be leaving holes in our software because the methods chosen rely on leaky and chatty protocols to gleam info. The user agent string shouldn't exist to begin with. It was a boneheaded decision to allow that sort of easy discrimination baked right into the protocol.
whakim 3y ago
I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to understand why. Firefox is plenty fast. Its interface is extremely similar to most of its competitors. It works well. What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll suddenly change their fortunes? It's a browser, after all. And why do you think that such features aren't being implemented due to lack of resources or muddled priorities - surely Mozilla can walk and chew gum?
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  Every time I launch Firefox (rare) it gives me a popup telling me it needs to install an update and to please relaunch. Come on man. It's not 2006 anymore, that kind of update prompt doesn't fly anymore.
  - batiudrami 3y ago
    It doesn’t run a background process on your computer 24/7 to ensure you’re up to date like Chrome. Weird objection; I prefer it this way.
    - mvdtnz 3y ago
      I prefer it when software does the tedious stuff for me.
- luuurker 3y ago
  I'm typing this on Firefox. It works, I'm not going to stop using it, but it's not as polished as other browsers. I'll give you an example that annoys me because I look at it every day: the bookmarks bar still uses the same margins as it did in Firefox 3, even after 2 major UI redesigns. Then we have things like windows from Firefox 3 for some stuff with pages that open on tabs and have a different UI. Like, pick one and stick with it. CTRL/CMD+Click on a bookmark has a different behaviour than CTRL/CMD+Click on a link. No other browser does this. Profiles are there, but there's no user friendly UI... and no, containers can't do the same things as profiles. Then you have things like battery use on platforms like macOS, which is still worse for me than Chrome or Safari. So yeah... it works, but it's not the best browser. I tolerate it mostly because of extensions like uBlock Origin.
yonatan8070 3y ago
I daily drive Firefox, it's fast, responsive, and works well for everything I do on the web
r00fus 3y ago
Firefox on my Macs is more feature-complete and faster than Chrome for me. And the Aweseomebar is truly a replacement for bookmarks for me (full text search showing URLs and titles from years ago with a few keywords is truly amazing). Once manifestv3 starts really making waves, Firefox will be the best place to go for ublock origin and other adblockers.
marricks 3y ago
That would be my personal preference, laser focus on their browser, but Perhaps they didn't because it's already good and the reason they're falling is combating monopolies. Safari/Edge are defaults in their space and have OS's that can nudge. Google owns huge swaths of the internet and can nudge people as well and break other OS's on whim. Mozilla probably felt the need to have other offerings and leadership to winback something when "being a great browser" wasn't enough in the past 14 years.
dralley 3y ago
>Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first. If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. People don't use one browser over another because of performance, full stop. Certainly not over 10% to 20% differences. Even years ago when Chrome did have an advantage, they would never have gained marketshare so quickly if they hadn't spammed Firefox users visiting google.com with Chrome ads. Even features don't matter. People use Safari, Safari is severely lacking in "features". 99% of users aren't power users.

by jdlyga 3y ago

sp332 3y ago

Firefox is fast though.

trealira 3y ago
Yeah. Although I'm not trying to discount what others experience, I'm always confused to hear that Firefox is slow, because it seems just as fast as Chromium on my computer.
- Filligree 3y ago
  It uses a lot more CPU on Youtube than chrome/safari, and seems laggy there.
  - mrinterweb 3y ago
    There was some recent concern that Youtube may be slowing down FF https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
    - Filligree 3y ago
      I believe that. But the simple fact they're cheating, doesn't make FF viable for watching youtube on my laptop.
HackerThemAll 3y ago
It used to be slow, and many people who then switched, won't be looking back until Chrome stops working.
- sleepybrett 3y ago
  chrome by way of google is making sure it's the only thing that youtube still properly works in. When MS tried this shit they got slapped with anti-trust. What google is doing is worse in every dimension.
  - vkou 3y ago
    When MS tried this shit, there weren't companies that were selling you locked-down hardware running a locked-down OS running a locked-down App Store, while taking a 30% cut of every economic transaction on that store...
    - sleepybrett 3y ago
      Game consoles existed (maybe not 30%) but the cell phone industry was already a nightmare.
      - vkou 3y ago
        When cell phones were first getting off-the-ground, they were more like garage door openers - specialized tools for specialized settings. There is a lot of academic debate that the FSF and the EFF can spill on the subject of interop and software freedom for garage door openers, but practically, it wasn't a big social problem. Nowadays, cellphones are primary computing devices for a lot of people, with a large number of supporting and symbiotic industries around them. The various platform owners have drawn particular lines around their products, and have largely defended them in anti-trust courts - but there's no reason that those lines should be allowed to be where they are, or won't expand in the future. What stops a platform from, in addition to exerting full control over the software that runs on it, also choosing to exert similar control over the packets that are sent or received by it?

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

I don't really get what you're on about. I switched from Chrome to Firefox a couple months ago and... it's great. I don't notice any differences in performance (if anything, snappier) and the only thing that's "missing" that I had in Chrome is that Chrome had all my credit-card and password data associated with my Google account, which, well, that's not something I want Firefox to have. TLDR: Firefox is a good web browser. It's not failing in the market because it's not a good browser. It's failing because consumers don't seem to actually care one way or the other.

sleepybrett 3y ago
The pig doesn't have any problem with the farmer until he shows up with the axe. Thus it is with chrome users.
- deepspace 3y ago
  That axe may just be Chrome's war on ad blockers.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    I'd like to believe this, but what percentage of Chrome users actually use an ad blocker? My general feeling is that we on HN think ad blocking is a lot more common than it actually is.
    - digging 3y ago
      It can't be that niche, or else why would they spend so much effort fighting ad blockers? They've surely done some research that uncovers a decent userbase of people who do use an ad blocker but will turn it off at a prompt.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      No the question is how can you trust an ad blocker will be allowed to do its job in Chrome? Even without Manifest v33333 or whatever.

encom 3y ago

In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time, or what bone-headed UI design change they'd make. And every time there'd be a Bugzilla bug with a of horde users who just had their favorite feature removed, and every time, without fail, it would get arrogantly WONTFIXed and eventually locked. This cycle has repeated for most of Firefox's existence, but it has accelerated. Vivaldi can customise damn near every aspect of its user interface. I can set up every menu how I want it. Remove things I done use, and move the most used item to the top. I can dock my tab-bar wherever I want. I can have a proper status bar. The list goes on. It's what Firefox should have been.

orbital223 3y ago
This has been my exact journey, been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox, finally got fed up a couple of years ago and switched to Vivaldi. It's such a breath of fresh air not having to dread update notifications anymore.
signaru 3y ago
I still use FF, but I do miss how customizable its UI used to be. I even made it look like Chrome back then!
eviks 3y ago
Indeed, the level of customization in Vivaldi is awesome and what Firefox should've done instead of going the other way (that would counter the lame excuse you link to elsewhere that "view image" makes the menu too long - just make the menu editable, duh!), even though their UI is unfortunately not very petformant
int_19h 3y ago
Feature-wise, Vivaldi is great indeed. But every time I actually try to switch to it as a primary for any prolonged amount of time, I inevitably run into major perf issues and/or deal-breaking bugs. In fact, my most recent attempt was just about a week ago, and vertical tabs w/grouping had numerous visual glitches for me, with tab buttons occasionally becoming taller than the screen, white rectangles that are supposed to go around tab groups having half the width that the tabs inside do etc. I "solved" this by using the Windows pane instead, and all was fine, until the browser just started randomly lagging to the point where everything slowed to the crawl. And yes, I did report it to their bug tracker - which is private, by the way, so there's no way to know who else is having those problems, or how work on them is proceeding. I will say that the bugs I reported on the last attempt are fixed, but it's little consolation when new equally bad bugs show up in their place. And as for perf issues, there are numerous active threads on Vivaldi forums about them. I'd love to use Vivaldi as my primary, esp. now that they also have an iOS offering, so tab & history sync across all of my devices is possible. But it really needs to be more stable.

jen20 3y ago

Privacy must be a tier 1 feature of a web browser. The fact the market leader goes out of their way to shit all over privacy concerns says more about their marketing pull than the quality of their browser.

aembleton 3y ago
That privacy prevents organisations such as USWDS from seeing that it is in use as analytics are blocked.
- jen20 3y ago
  That means that using telemetry to determine browser market share is a flawed approach.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  Nobody has a right to research you or your behavior. We shouldn't be leaving holes in our software because the methods chosen rely on leaky and chatty protocols to gleam info. The user agent string shouldn't exist to begin with. It was a boneheaded decision to allow that sort of easy discrimination baked right into the protocol.

whakim 3y ago

I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to understand why. Firefox is plenty fast. Its interface is extremely similar to most of its competitors. It works well. What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll suddenly change their fortunes? It's a browser, after all. And why do you think that such features aren't being implemented due to lack of resources or muddled priorities - surely Mozilla can walk and chew gum?

mvdtnz 3y ago
Every time I launch Firefox (rare) it gives me a popup telling me it needs to install an update and to please relaunch. Come on man. It's not 2006 anymore, that kind of update prompt doesn't fly anymore.
- batiudrami 3y ago
  It doesn’t run a background process on your computer 24/7 to ensure you’re up to date like Chrome. Weird objection; I prefer it this way.
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    I prefer it when software does the tedious stuff for me.
luuurker 3y ago
I'm typing this on Firefox. It works, I'm not going to stop using it, but it's not as polished as other browsers. I'll give you an example that annoys me because I look at it every day: the bookmarks bar still uses the same margins as it did in Firefox 3, even after 2 major UI redesigns. Then we have things like windows from Firefox 3 for some stuff with pages that open on tabs and have a different UI. Like, pick one and stick with it. CTRL/CMD+Click on a bookmark has a different behaviour than CTRL/CMD+Click on a link. No other browser does this. Profiles are there, but there's no user friendly UI... and no, containers can't do the same things as profiles. Then you have things like battery use on platforms like macOS, which is still worse for me than Chrome or Safari. So yeah... it works, but it's not the best browser. I tolerate it mostly because of extensions like uBlock Origin.

yonatan8070 3y ago

I daily drive Firefox, it's fast, responsive, and works well for everything I do on the web

r00fus 3y ago

Firefox on my Macs is more feature-complete and faster than Chrome for me. And the Aweseomebar is truly a replacement for bookmarks for me (full text search showing URLs and titles from years ago with a few keywords is truly amazing). Once manifestv3 starts really making waves, Firefox will be the best place to go for ublock origin and other adblockers.

marricks 3y ago

That would be my personal preference, laser focus on their browser, but Perhaps they didn't because it's already good and the reason they're falling is combating monopolies. Safari/Edge are defaults in their space and have OS's that can nudge. Google owns huge swaths of the internet and can nudge people as well and break other OS's on whim. Mozilla probably felt the need to have other offerings and leadership to winback something when "being a great browser" wasn't enough in the past 14 years.

dralley 3y ago

>Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first. If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. People don't use one browser over another because of performance, full stop. Certainly not over 10% to 20% differences. Even years ago when Chrome did have an advantage, they would never have gained marketshare so quickly if they hadn't spammed Firefox users visiting google.com with Chrome ads. Even features don't matter. People use Safari, Safari is severely lacking in "features". 99% of users aren't power users.