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What We're Working on in Firefox

mateusz_ 2y ago
Priority feature could be, well... Catching up with the standards? It hurts my meow meow when i have to run chrome to use bt or usb api
- finack 2y ago
  Those web APIs aren't actually standard (WebUSB, for example, is still in draft status), and they have some gnarly privacy implications. Google steamrolls over standards bodies, and then somehow people believe their browser is the standard. I'm not sure if this is a concerted marketing effort by Google, or simply intellectual laziness. Either way, though, Firefox is not at fault for not supporting non-standard Web APIs.
  - stqism 2y ago
    While I’d never personally use Chrome, you can describe this in another way too. “Chrome supports draft standards like webUSB, which more and more hardware tools and platforms have started to adopt to enable being able to support users regardless of platform, without needing to design native apps for them.” You can argue this is good in other ways too, it means that instead of a potentially invasive hardware application for something you might configure or update once, you are using something heavily sandboxed that has to request permissions for anything outside the normal. Another benefit is that depending on what the hardware device is, suddenly these hardware devices can be configured on platforms like Linux and FreeBSD, where vendors are much less inclined to support or cater to natively. Say what you want about draft standards, but Firefox not playing ball and adopting commonly used ones is a massive miss on its part that hurts its ability to be competitive.
willywanker 2y ago
And this is why I stick with Pale Moon. The desktop UX reached maturity years ago, Pale Moon in the spirit of pre 2011 Firefox (which introduced version 4 with many of the controversial Chrome imitating changes beginning from then) offers a powerful and fully customizable browser out of the box with no telemetry or third party bullshit needing 'hardening' tweaks to get rid of. You get the separate search bar, tabs below addressbar and other features that can be changed to your liking directly from the preferences without having to go near about:config. And goes without saying, full support for powerful XUL extensions and full themes that actually extend the browser's functionality and change its appearance the way it used to be on Firefox back in the day.
kome 2y ago
Nice! Firefox is in a good place, because the browser, at this stage (version 126), is really good and fast. And this post seems to point that the development is going in a good direction.
Night_Thastus 2y ago
I still remember the launch of Firefox 3 back in the day. I'm so glad it's still around, and they keep working on it. I don't think there's a single piece of software I've gotten more utility out of in all that time. It's definitely not perfect, but we'd be in a worse world without it.
- i80and 2y ago
  It's funny to think about in retrospect how exciting Firefox 3 was. Planning began in 2006, and release was 2008. Acid2! Cairo! Better Linux theming! It was just such a different release cadence.
- OtomotO 2y ago
  I have fond memories of 3 and 4... Started using it somewhen around 2 :)
  - sli 2y ago
    I have fond memories of discovering Phoenix ~v0.1 during high school and mostly never looking back. Had a short stint with Chrome until it intermittently stopped even attempting to load pages. Switched back and couldn't imagine daily driving Chrome.
  - dochtman 2y ago
    I remember when it was still called Phoenix — the lean pure-browser reborn “from the ashes” of the Mozilla Suite (SeaMonkey). Amazing run…
OtomotO 2y ago
I am looking forward to synced tab groups. Currently using an addon, but that's not synced among PC and Laptop (or phones, but there I don't need it)
blizdiddy 2y ago
> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker Oh no, more of this. What about less used options? How much slower? How much less discoverable? Desktop applications are already for power users almost by definition, let’s not slow them down for the sake of reducing “clutter”. Absolutely annoying trend of the last 15 years or so.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  The dumbing down of applications, including FF, is incredibly annoying and off-putting. I get it, though. FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person. I just wish that it (and other applications) would at least have an "expert mode" that isn't aimed just at the casual user.
  - Teever 2y ago
    The implication of what you're saying is that it somehow isn't friendly and approachable to your average non-techie person, which doesn't make sense because the UI paradigm of browsers hasn't really changed for 20+ years and Firefox has been just fine for technies to switch their parents/grandparents over to for years now. The problem with Firefox isn't the UI, the problem with Firefox is mismanagement by the board that has been captured by Google and the lack of proper antitrust action against Google by the US and EU.
    - nindalf 2y ago
      First time I’ve heard Google being blamed for Mozilla’s self inflicted problems. Google is highly incentivised to make sure Mozilla survives with some reasonable market share. Without Mozilla antitrust enforcement becomes much more likely. That’s why Google pays Mozilla for being the default search engine provider. That’s the main source of revenue for Mozilla. If Mozilla could maintain 10% market share in perpetuity and also keep signing search licensing agreements with Google that works just fine for Google. Sadly it has a lot less than that.
dbg31415 2y ago
For me, the big thing Firefox needs is better power management. Mac user here, and streaming video or doing a video call just kills my battery compared to Chrome or Safari. Would love to see more focus on energy consumption optimization.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > Mac user here, and streaming video or doing a video call just kills my battery compared to Chrome or Safari. Is it not using hardware acceleration or something?
  - stqism 2y ago
    Probably need to check on this, but I’ve heard of issues around video decode and Firefox.
- switch007 2y ago
  Is this a comment from 2018? I thought FF on MacOS was pretty good these days. And are you suggesting Chrome is similar to Safari in terms of power usage? That would surprise me Safari will of course always be better. It's no competition
  - dsego 2y ago
    My experience as well, it used to be bad, it's okay now.
    - dbg31415 2y ago
      I don't actively monitor it every day, but I feel it! Intel MacBook from 2021. My laptop gets so hot when running Firefox -- almost instantly (certainly after 3-4 minutes). But I can do a call for an hour on Chrome and it doesn't get nearly as warm. And the battery just drops accordingly as the fans struggle to keep up. I like to use Firefox, but I end up doing all my calls when I'm not plugged in on Chrome as a result of the power use / heating issues.
- 2y ago
slobiwan 2y ago
Is anybody currently using Sidebery who could comment on how the Firefox "Tab grouping, Vertical tabs, and sidebar" compare?
- cassianoleal 2y ago
  Given that they seem to have only prioritised those features, I doubt anyone can since there's nothing material to compare to.
- babypuncher 2y ago
  They haven't actually shown off their vertical tabs yet, so there isn't much to say. I am a Sideberry user though, and this excites me because a native implementation will likely look a lot cleaner, integrate better with your chosen theme, and actually allow the removal of the regular tab bar (you have to keep it with Sideberry because there is some functionality that cannot be replicated through an extension). Theming in particular might be a big one, I had to spend a couple hours tweaking the Sideberry CSS to make it look nice with the skin I use in Firefox. Not having to do that sure would be convenient, especially for the average user who doesn't know what a stylesheet is.
torstenvl 2y ago
> Intuitive privacy settings that deliver all the power of our world-class anti-tracking technologies in a simplified, easy-to-understand way. > More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker. Stop it. Gnome-ification is incredibly user hostile. Almost every time folks "simplify" a UI, they actually make it far more complicated instead. If your users now have to use dconf or userChrome.css to do the things they are accustomed to doing, you have not simplified anything.
- illiac786 2y ago
  It sounds like in your view simplifying a UI is not possible or has never been successfully implemented. I think it is very much possible, very much needed by lots of software out there, but indeed it’s hard. The hardest part is not alienating existing users when messing with muscle memory.
resource_waste 2y ago
I wonder how much money they get from their ads and spammy home menu. (Oh you can turn it off! /apologists) I boot up a fresh Linux install and everything looks A+ nice, then you open up firefox and it feels like I'm on M$ Windows 11 + Edge. Chromium doesnt have ads! I'll be happy when something replaces Firefox, they are a legacy company that might only exist due to anti-trust purposes. Something that is merit based would be an improvement.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> We’ve been listening to your feedback, and we’re prioritizing the features you want most. > Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500. > Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible. Wow, that ... actually is what users have been asking for, for ages. Nice. > More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker. Oh, there's the other foot dropping. I wonder how SeaMonkey is doing...
- tresclow 2y ago
  I remember around 2012 Firefox did use to have tab grouping, and they dropped the functionality after. I remember a friend of mine being annoyed for that, although I myself didn't appreciate much the functionality.
  - Kye 2y ago
    I could never figure out how it worked.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    Oh, it's better than that: They had tab grouping as a native feature, and it was great, then they factored it out into an extension... and then they changed the way extensions worked, and didn't bother porting it. Kind of an insulting way to kill a feature IMO.
- morsch 2y ago
  I'll take the "streamlined" menus if it gets me first party vertical tabs and auto segregation of profiles. The latter especially, I'm excited about whatever they come up with. The former, I think it'll take a long time to reach feature parity with existing add-ons, if they ever get there, seeing how they tend to keep novice users in mind.
- raffraffraff 2y ago
  honestly, container tabs are way more useful to me than profiles every were. I can have 3 different Gmail accounts and a bunch of AWS accounts open in the same browser, with different colours for each so that I can figure out which is which. How about it they continued to iterate on container tabs and make it possible to pattern match urls to containers without a 3rd party addon.
gamepsys 2y ago
As a Firefox daily user, this list makes me better understand why Firefox has such a low market share. Reorganizing menus or adding alt text to PDFs won't make any impact on user adoption/churn because users don't care. The alt text specifically sounds like resume engineering for some developers that want "on device generative ai" as a bullet point on this LinkedIn. Bullet points like this wouldn't be a problem if Firefox had more resources, but the list of actually pretty small and doesn't have a lot of space for fluff. I think they should pick 2-5 things and focus on those, such as multi-device sync, privacy, speed, battery life performance, customization, etc.
- em500 2y ago
  How are they stretched for resources? Mozilla's revenue is around a half billion USD per year.
  - luyu_wu 2y ago
    It's important to note here that Mozilla spends the majority of that money on non-Firefox projects (something that has pissed off people who have wanted to donate to Firefox specifically for ages). Firefox itself gets a sliver of that.
    - fabrice_d 2y ago
      Like many you are likely confused by the Foundation (MoFo) vs. Corp (MoCo) finances. You can only donate to MoFo, and indeed it doesn't spend much (if anything) paying Firefox staff. This is because Firefox staff is on the MoCo payroll, which gets its revenue mostly from their search engine deal with Google. MoCo actually pays MoFo to use the trademarks that are owned by MoFo.
      - pseudalopex 2y ago
        Specifically Mozilla Corporation paid Mozilla Foundation in 2022 under $20 million from over $585 million in revenue. The relationship between Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation can make some details confusing. But most people who claim what they did never looked at Mozilla finances in my experience.
some_furry 2y ago
I just hope there's an option to totally disable the AI junk. I'd just like a simple, secure browser that gets the hell out of my way and let's me extend it however I want (i.e., with an adblocker). I don't need or want AI models involved in the process.
- eesmith 2y ago
  I like Firefox's built-in language translation feature. Does that count as "AI" these days?
  - palata 2y ago
    I don't think it counts as the modern "AI" buzz: it was there before and it is useful. The modern AI stuff is typically useless crap that was thrown there because... I don't know... FOMO?
meiraleal 2y ago
What about catching up with PWA?
bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
I'm still upset that theyve removed the "compact" style. Granted, between ublock origin and tree style tabs Firefox is still my favorite browser, but why are they changing this stuff... Can someone please ELI5 - what does "more streamlined menus" mean?
- deleted 2y ago
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behnamoh 2y ago
Looking at the comments, I'm not surprised about FF's low market share. They chose to target geeks and nerds, and let's face it, we tend to be whiny about almost everything and complain about any new change. Meanwhile, Google Chrome doesn't even need to pretend like they care about privacy, so they automatically target the other "ordinary" people who are not so picky about every new release note. This kinda teaches you something about the importance of product positioning.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  No, it's worse than that - they chose to target geeks, then decided to throw out the geeks in an attempt to target a more mainstream audience[0] and then failed to actually get the mainstream userbase, leaving them with neither the nerds nor the normies. [0] Firefox has always been at its strongest as a power-user's browser, chock-full of extensions and tweaks. Mozilla met this advantage with... two extinction events for extensions, and removal of customization options.
  - rurp 2y ago
    Yes, exactly. Google and Microsoft have huge anti-competitive advantages that they have been able to use to target casual users. As long as that continues Firefox will be facing an uphill battle to get casual downloads, but neither of those large companies care at all about power users. That gives Mozilla a big opening to get a niche of users that will heavily evangelize their browser and install it on friend and family devices. Unfortunately Mozilla's leadership does not see it that way and have steadily pissed off a huge number of former fans, without making inroads with any other groups. They are in a tough position regardless, but combining that with terrible product and organization management has gotten them into the state they're in now.
  - 14113 2y ago
    No, Firefox never targeted geeks. It's just that, when it came out, the only people who used a browser other than Internet Explorer happened to be geeks. The audience came to them, rather than them going to the audience.
ghostpepper 2y ago
I am happy it's nothing to do with Pocket, VPN or Colorways. Those are examples of visual clutter that I would love to see removed entirely.
seba_dos1 2y ago
Somewhere in the last two months Firefox Nightly got a massive performance boost on GNU/Linux. Thanks! Nice that vertical tabs are officially coming back, although I've been using them in a DIY manner for years already; sidebar extension with a bit of userChrome.css can do wonders: https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif
- privacyking 2y ago
  What do you mean coming back? I don't recall it ever having vertical tabs. Most people have just used treestyletabs for the past decade or two
  - seba_dos1 2y ago
    It used to be a part of their Test Pilot program as "Tab Center", somewhere around 2016, but got discontinued. What's on the GIF above is a WebExtension-based reimplementation of that called "Tab Center Reborn" plus a bit of custom CSS that reimplements the original auto-hide behavior and makes it blend nicer with Plasma.
gilgamesh3 2y ago
>Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500. Finally. Chrome has this feature for a while and it's really handy when working with lots of tabs, but I use Firefox on my main machine so I couldn't take advantage of this feature (and I don't like vertical tabs).
FounderBurr 2y ago
I stopped donating when they declared ‘rss is too complex to be maintained and is also old and gross and stuff, so we removed it’. Oh by the way totally unrelated here is Pocket(tm)!
- yownie 2y ago
  Yes I agree that was some straight up bullshit
kwanbix 2y ago
I really love Firefox. I even organized events for them on my home country, so don't get me wrong, wouldn't it be best for the web/devs that they switched to chrome's engine? They can still implement whatever changes to privacy and their changes just like MS does, and devs will only have to target one engine. Or am I missing something? Please discuss it if you agree or disagree, do not downvote. Thanks.
- diroussel 2y ago
  I would prefer it if Mozilla continued is great rust rewrite, and innovate the core technologies. Just adopting Chrome's crumbs will mean giving up control and voice in stearing the web technologies.
- Kye 2y ago
  Monoculture in software rarely goes well. Right now Safari and Firefox exist to push back on Google completely controlling the fate of the web. You do not want Google to have the same unquestioned power Microsoft did in the IE6 era.
  - kwanbix 2y ago
    But that wouldn't be the same. Everybody can work on the engine. Worst case, if google wants to take over, the others can push their own version of the engine, compatible whenever they feel like, and different otherwise. IE was different because was totally closed and only MS could add features.
    - pseudalopex 2y ago
      What do you mean if Google want to take over? They control Chromium now. And maintaining a fork is harder than you think. Even harder when the fork maintainers have different agendas. Even harder when the upstream maintainers are hostile. Look at Manifest V3. Microsoft said the harm to extensions would be acceptable. Opera hedged and echoed Google's FUD about the removed APIs. Brave acknowledged the problem, recommended their integrated blocker, said they would support MV2 until Google removed the code, and declined to promise more. Vivaldi said similar.
deleted 2y ago
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Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
Are you bringing back XUL? No? Then please cease operation.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- thisislife2 2y ago
  PaleMoon - http://www.palemoon.org/ http://www.palemoon.org/ - is a hard fork of Firefox that still supports XUL.
  - guilhas 2y ago
    Although PaleMoon is great, it creates a brain split Firefox had very advanced addons for the time, and very good developer community. XUL removal just gave everyone PTSD Don't know how good is the continuous fragmentation of the community
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
    Which I already use. Thanks though.
neilv 2y ago
Prioritization that I'd like to suggest for Firefox, driven by needs of society (from high to low): 1. Representing the public interest wrt Web -- especially fervent respect for privacy in the browser, almost as much emphasis on security, fighting commercial excesses around de jure and defacto standards, and social equity within the scope of what Mozilla does (e.g., software accessibility, encouraging all volunteers). 2. Competitive browser compliance and performance. To be viable as a daily driver, to have impact. 3. Forward-looking R&D on Internet public interest things not currently considered "browser", but potentially big in near term. 4. Fancy browser features that actually increase uptake and retention. (Much lower than the first 3.) 5. Designer's opinion/portfolio UX changes. (Could be improvements, and there's value in an appealing and moving-target modern appearance, but misalignment is a risk to be careful of.) 6. Necessary-evil money-making compromises. (Very, very carefully. Many past ones were negatives. And we still see arguable dark patterns around some of those, such as as Firefox updates sometimes reverting users' express Search-related preferences.) A marketing challenge of these priorities would be that even most techies can't assess how well you're doing #1. But that mix of things you do can include things understandable to your typical user, such as superior blocking of abusive ads. (But don't drop the ball on things that your typical user can't understand -- they're entrusting you as an expert to act in their interests.) Educational outreaches can also help. And if you get to the point that you're generating an order of magnitude fewer security vulnerabilities than your competitor, then marketing people can run with that. But be careful with positioning, so that communications about smart, hard activities don't get conflated in people's minds with confusing mission drift and fluffy PR.
- deleted 2y ago
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- glenstein 2y ago
  >4. Fancy browser features that actually increase uptake and retention. Yeah, I would say I think these are actually a good thing as long as the cost-benefit ratio is acceptable and it doesn't compromise core efforts (people have asserted this kind of compromise has been happening, but rarely with any coherence or substantiation). I would consider the example of Opera in its heyday - whether it was Turbo, "widgets", extensions, or Unite, which in my opinion was a triumph of originality and innovation that went unsung. Those are good when done right.
amluto 2y ago
I have a suggestion for Mozilla: find use cases that benefit your users and are not possible in other browsers. For example: Browsers are terrible at accessing devices on a local network. Make this work well in Firefox, extending protocols as needed. Browsers are terrible at configuring IoT devices. It device makers are terrible at making apps for this purpose that don’t suck. Make Firefox (on desktop and mobile!) be the premier way to usable and securely configure IoT devices. Get device vendors to sign on: someone could (and probably would) sell a gadget where the instructions suggest installing Firefox to set up the device. Leverage the same technology to go after enterprise users. Ever seen a piece of high-end, expensive networking gear with a web UI? Ever contemplated how pathetically insecure this is? Ever contemplated how unpleasant it to provision certificates to make it secure? Make this work, easily and securely, on Firefox, using new protocols as needed. Make everyone else play catch-up. Heck, start small. Allow setting domain constraints on imported root certificates. The moral: do something new and better.
- palata 2y ago
  Please, no.
- finack 2y ago
  None of these things are in scope for a program that is supposed to browse the web (by fetching web pages and rendering them).
  - stqism 2y ago
    It sounds dumb, but honestly modern browsers feel way closer to the JRE than they did things designed to fetch and render sites.
  - amluto 2y ago
    How is securely connecting to a device that isn’t, itself, connected to the cloud, fetching a webpage from it, and rendering it out of scope for a web browser? Certainly URLs like http://192.168.1.1 http://192.168.1.1 have been in scope for decades — why can’t a web browser figure out how to support that use case well?
speckx 2y ago
I would like Firefox to be able to set extensions to run only on click or allow me to provide a list of domains, like Chrome does, so every extension is not running on every page. See https://support.google.com/chrome?p=enable_extensions https://support.google.com/chrome?p=enable_extensions and https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/option-to-allow-extensions-to-run-only-on-specific-websites/idc-p/18212#M9287 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/option-to-allow-extensi....
- willywanker 2y ago
  You're describing userscripts, which is what site focused web extensions essentially are anyway. Install the Grease/Tamper/Violet monkey extension and you can find scripts from Greasyfork.org, or author your own. Each script defines a scope listing the sites it's allowed to run on.
drewg123 2y ago
One thing I wish they'd work on is making saved credit card information work correctly and reliably. I use FF on Macos laptop and FreeBSD desktop, with multiple profiles on each. I have different profiles where CC saving work fine, and others that don't across both OSes. I'm so annoyed at having to pull out my CC that I've gone back to chrome a lot of the time when I need to buy things...
no-dr-onboard 2y ago
After using FF for the past 7 years, every day at work I switched to Arc. It's been __okay__. I'm not a fan of them trying to nix the bookmark system and much prefer FF's implementation of just good old fashioned, indexable bookmarks. If FF can manage a good implementation of vertical tabs, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
- diroussel 2y ago
  Try TreeStyleTabs plugin, it's great. It also works well with Firefox Multi Account Containers, so you can keep peronal, work, research, shopping in different containers, so cookies aren't shared. I love that I can start a web search open a bunch of links, each in a new tab, then once I have what I need, I can close the parent tab and all the child tabs are closed automatically.
gsuuon 2y ago
Lack of PWA / installable apps is why I switched back to chrome after trying to daily drive firefox for a while. Really wish they'd reconsider the decision to drop it.
- fabrice_d 2y ago
  Untested, but I think this Firefox fork added support back: https://floorp.app/en https://floorp.app/en
  - MrAlex94 2y ago
    I believe a lot of the work comes from: https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox P.S. the project you linked is no longer FOSS.
  - gsuuon 2y ago
    Interesting, thanks!
worksonmine 2y ago
Great, now please give me back the option to set my new tab page without resorting to extensions.
- jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
  Does setting it in about:config do it for you? I see what you mean though, since the option right above that in the menu lets you set custom url(s) for your start page.
  - worksonmine 2y ago
    That would help a lot yes, what option am I looking for? A custom URL used to be a setting in all browsers back in the days.
michael9423 2y ago
The way I see it, there was a time when FF had the chance to not accept the google contracts and go 100% independent with their own search engine or something similar. This would have resulted in FF actually siding with users. It would have resulted in FF radically rejecting ads, and this would have changed the entire web because people would have flocked to Firefox. But Mozilla leadership did not have an interest in this, in light of endless google money. Google essentially captured Mozilla back in the day. Now people have got used to ads because they only could chose between browsers that don't protect them. Brave is trying to correct the mistake of FF and is attracting a small userbase, but not large enough to make a big difference, because the times have changed a lot. Now with the new management at Mozilla and the dim outlook for the next 5 years, the realization is kicking in that listening to users is actually important. But the elephant in the room is the contracts with large ad-based search engines.
- palata 2y ago
  > This would have resulted in FF actually siding with users Sure, but would the users have sided with FF? I'm not convinced. The users use whatever BigTech tells them to use, that's how I see it. > Brave is trying to correct the mistake of FF Brave is Chromium. I don't see how this would even begin correcting the mistakes of FF. The one thing FF does right is that it is not Chromium.
  - michael9423 2y ago
    End users do not care about the browser engine. But as I said, Brave is trying. It won't be successful in the way FF could have been.
    - palata 2y ago
      > End users do not care about the browser engine. But that's the problem, isn't it? Google controls Chromium, everybody uses Chromium, so Google controls the web.
      - 2y ago
Ciantic 2y ago
I switched to Firefox about 3 weeks ago, what is killing me is dragging the tabs. It is so much worse with Firefox. Someone has made a video of this if one can't remember how they differ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRuBDH32hPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRuBDH32hPI With Chrome I can drag a tab and it moves with me, with Firefox the tab being dragged blocks the view. Also since with Chrome, the tab moves with the mouse I can with one drag move a tab and use Windows' snap-to-edge feature. This is a two-step process with Firefox. Firefox is an underdog, it should focus on making the UI familiar and fast, but keep customizability. Another thing I noticed is that Firefox doesn't allow to keep unpacked extensions loaded as Chrome does, there is no good reason why not, luckily I fixed that with some userChrome scripts.
xchip 2y ago
Not very exciting, to be honest. I would like certain apps to open always in private browsing.
mrinterweb 2y ago
I love that Firefox continues to be been focused on performance. There was a while where FF perf was looking kind of bleak compared to Chrome. These days FF and Chrome have similar performance. FF might have the edge now.
amanzi 2y ago
Mozilla asks people to contribute ideas on "Mozilla Connect", but then chooses to ignore most of the top-rated ideas. To be fair, better tab management is first and third of the list, so they are looking to improve that one. But PWAs is second on the list, and there's no mention of this in their announcement. Bringing back proper PWA support seems to align perfectly with Mozilla's mission, so it blows me away why they aren't actively working on it or talking about it. The other things mentioned are just features that I would expect to keep improving over time, but are nothing groundbreaking.
- altairprime 2y ago
  PWAs, as in "File > Save Website As... > website.exe" on a PC?
  - cpeterso 2y ago
    The "PWA support" that people are clamoring for is the option to open a web page shortcut in a browser window without an address bar.
    - tredre3 2y ago
      That's a big part of it, but PWA offers more than that! For example it has facilities for caching the web application so that it can work offline. They can also register URL handlers on the system, which is very useful.
      - finack 2y ago
        Programs that don't require an entire web browser to run can already do all of those things.
        gsuuon 2y ago
        They can also do a lot of other things that a browser's sandbox would not allow
benatkin 2y ago
Only 81% of revenue from Google, who has a competing browser that they beg you to switch to... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
qwertox 2y ago
That site needs a dark mode. I'm surprised it hasn't. Multiple rows of tabs, even more through mouse-wheel scrolling, and fixed width tabs for easy closing. Like Tab Mix Plus.
roesel 2y ago
I still miss the icons for items in the hamburger menu, this was one of the worst changes ever for me personally. > More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter If this means the same as for Thunderbird, I'm going to have to switch after 20 years...
difosfor 2y ago
I wish they'd finish up their webcodecs implementation. Even Safari at least supports VideoDecoder.
justinclift 2y ago
This is the crowd that "listened to user feedback" then decided to add a button (that can't be removed) to the taskbar whose only purpose in life is to open the Extensions page. An action that's used once when setting up a browser, and never again. And you're not allowed to remove it to put something else there instead that's actually important. Fucking Arseholes. :( :( :(
surfcao 2y ago
As long as I can hide the address bar to have more screen real estate and vim extensions work, I am happy..
aldanor 2y ago
If Firefox natively integrated TreeStyle tab or Sidebery and made it lightning fast, searchable and syncable, I would probably return to FF on that day. Definitely not yet another "reduction of visual clutter".
causality0 2y ago
How about making it so all those stupid purple pop-up messages on mobile that tell me what I already damn know can be swiped away instead of sitting on my screen blocking the UI for an eternity every time I dismiss a tab or full-screen a video?
up6w6 2y ago
Related news: Servo Web Engine Continues Advancing But Seeing Just $1.6k In Monthly Donations https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-Engine-May-2024 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-Engine-May-2024
throw7 2y ago
AI generated text should always have a way that identifies/tells the user that it's fake.
m463 2y ago
I wish there was an open way to save all your settings across devices - you could host them yourself. maybe webdav? The current firefox sync where they are probably the only folks who can host it is not that good. (there's an old sync server but it requires a non-local account) Also, I wish firefox would stop uncontrollably phoning home.
wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
Some time in the last few years firefox changed the new boommark poput to be unresizable and very small. If you have more than twenty bookmark folders it is very difficult to use. Ive been forced to use sideberry, which I dont like.
mvdtnz 2y ago
Why can I not auto fill credit cards in Firefox mobile even though I know this is a feature offered in other countries?
deleted 2y ago
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cultureulterior 2y ago
Bring back xul or keep your promise on supporting tab tree, please.
joshka 2y ago
> Customizable new tab wallpapers that will let you choose from a diverse range of photography, colors, and abstract images that suits you most. Can we just make this include some sort of dark mode. There is an addon that kinda works, but not all the time. That bright white flash is pretty annoying.
cooloo 2y ago
When will Firefox will support webrtc encoding/ decoding offload on Linux?
domysee 2y ago
I didn't think I'll ever get to see native vertical tabs in FF.
14113 2y ago
> More streamlined menus For everyone here complaining about this, have you ever looked at how many ways there are to access your history on Firefox? At my last count, there were 4 different ways to do it, depending on which menu you picked first. Cutting down this kind of inconsistent, and repetitive flow is something that we should be applauding.
sebazzz 2y ago
Subtle reminder that ManifestV2 phase out now has a timeline at Chrome[0]. The best moment to switch to Firefox is now. [0]: https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/manifest-v2-phase-out-begins.html https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/manifest-v2-phase-out-begi...
butz 2y ago
Hear me out, I know this might sound crazy, but, how about letting users to customize menus to their own liking and workflow. Link UI customization to profiles and you will have many happy users. In example, I would remove most development related options (hey there, "Inspect Accessibility Properties") from my "leisure" profile, but would move those to more accessible places in my "work" profile.
tim333 2y ago
As a recent newbie attempter as switching to Firefox Vertical Tabs and Profile Management system - seem good. I was a bit shocked that to get the tree style tabs working properly I had to go typing code (to stop the old tabs being there too). The thing that got me back to Chrome this time was I started getting out of memory errors which I have not had in any other software in a couple of years of using the M1 macbook. Maybe they'll fix that under the "speed, performance" stuff?

Priority feature could be, well... Catching up with the standards? It hurts my meow meow when i have to run chrome to use bt or usb api

finack 2y ago
Those web APIs aren't actually standard (WebUSB, for example, is still in draft status), and they have some gnarly privacy implications. Google steamrolls over standards bodies, and then somehow people believe their browser is the standard. I'm not sure if this is a concerted marketing effort by Google, or simply intellectual laziness. Either way, though, Firefox is not at fault for not supporting non-standard Web APIs.
- stqism 2y ago
  While I’d never personally use Chrome, you can describe this in another way too. “Chrome supports draft standards like webUSB, which more and more hardware tools and platforms have started to adopt to enable being able to support users regardless of platform, without needing to design native apps for them.” You can argue this is good in other ways too, it means that instead of a potentially invasive hardware application for something you might configure or update once, you are using something heavily sandboxed that has to request permissions for anything outside the normal. Another benefit is that depending on what the hardware device is, suddenly these hardware devices can be configured on platforms like Linux and FreeBSD, where vendors are much less inclined to support or cater to natively. Say what you want about draft standards, but Firefox not playing ball and adopting commonly used ones is a massive miss on its part that hurts its ability to be competitive.

willywanker 2y ago

And this is why I stick with Pale Moon. The desktop UX reached maturity years ago, Pale Moon in the spirit of pre 2011 Firefox (which introduced version 4 with many of the controversial Chrome imitating changes beginning from then) offers a powerful and fully customizable browser out of the box with no telemetry or third party bullshit needing 'hardening' tweaks to get rid of. You get the separate search bar, tabs below addressbar and other features that can be changed to your liking directly from the preferences without having to go near about:config. And goes without saying, full support for powerful XUL extensions and full themes that actually extend the browser's functionality and change its appearance the way it used to be on Firefox back in the day.

kome 2y ago

Nice! Firefox is in a good place, because the browser, at this stage (version 126), is really good and fast. And this post seems to point that the development is going in a good direction.

Night_Thastus 2y ago

I still remember the launch of Firefox 3 back in the day. I'm so glad it's still around, and they keep working on it. I don't think there's a single piece of software I've gotten more utility out of in all that time. It's definitely not perfect, but we'd be in a worse world without it.

i80and 2y ago
It's funny to think about in retrospect how exciting Firefox 3 was. Planning began in 2006, and release was 2008. Acid2! Cairo! Better Linux theming! It was just such a different release cadence.
OtomotO 2y ago
I have fond memories of 3 and 4... Started using it somewhen around 2 :)
- sli 2y ago
  I have fond memories of discovering Phoenix ~v0.1 during high school and mostly never looking back. Had a short stint with Chrome until it intermittently stopped even attempting to load pages. Switched back and couldn't imagine daily driving Chrome.
- dochtman 2y ago
  I remember when it was still called Phoenix — the lean pure-browser reborn “from the ashes” of the Mozilla Suite (SeaMonkey). Amazing run…

OtomotO 2y ago

I am looking forward to synced tab groups. Currently using an addon, but that's not synced among PC and Laptop (or phones, but there I don't need it)

blizdiddy 2y ago

> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker Oh no, more of this. What about less used options? How much slower? How much less discoverable? Desktop applications are already for power users almost by definition, let’s not slow them down for the sake of reducing “clutter”. Absolutely annoying trend of the last 15 years or so.

JohnFen 2y ago
The dumbing down of applications, including FF, is incredibly annoying and off-putting. I get it, though. FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person. I just wish that it (and other applications) would at least have an "expert mode" that isn't aimed just at the casual user.
- Teever 2y ago
  The implication of what you're saying is that it somehow isn't friendly and approachable to your average non-techie person, which doesn't make sense because the UI paradigm of browsers hasn't really changed for 20+ years and Firefox has been just fine for technies to switch their parents/grandparents over to for years now. The problem with Firefox isn't the UI, the problem with Firefox is mismanagement by the board that has been captured by Google and the lack of proper antitrust action against Google by the US and EU.
  - nindalf 2y ago
    First time I’ve heard Google being blamed for Mozilla’s self inflicted problems. Google is highly incentivised to make sure Mozilla survives with some reasonable market share. Without Mozilla antitrust enforcement becomes much more likely. That’s why Google pays Mozilla for being the default search engine provider. That’s the main source of revenue for Mozilla. If Mozilla could maintain 10% market share in perpetuity and also keep signing search licensing agreements with Google that works just fine for Google. Sadly it has a lot less than that.

dbg31415 2y ago

For me, the big thing Firefox needs is better power management. Mac user here, and streaming video or doing a video call just kills my battery compared to Chrome or Safari. Would love to see more focus on energy consumption optimization.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> Mac user here, and streaming video or doing a video call just kills my battery compared to Chrome or Safari. Is it not using hardware acceleration or something?
- stqism 2y ago
  Probably need to check on this, but I’ve heard of issues around video decode and Firefox.
switch007 2y ago
Is this a comment from 2018? I thought FF on MacOS was pretty good these days. And are you suggesting Chrome is similar to Safari in terms of power usage? That would surprise me Safari will of course always be better. It's no competition
- dsego 2y ago
  My experience as well, it used to be bad, it's okay now.
  - dbg31415 2y ago
    I don't actively monitor it every day, but I feel it! Intel MacBook from 2021. My laptop gets so hot when running Firefox -- almost instantly (certainly after 3-4 minutes). But I can do a call for an hour on Chrome and it doesn't get nearly as warm. And the battery just drops accordingly as the fans struggle to keep up. I like to use Firefox, but I end up doing all my calls when I'm not plugged in on Chrome as a result of the power use / heating issues.
2y ago

slobiwan 2y ago

Is anybody currently using Sidebery who could comment on how the Firefox "Tab grouping, Vertical tabs, and sidebar" compare?

cassianoleal 2y ago
Given that they seem to have only prioritised those features, I doubt anyone can since there's nothing material to compare to.
babypuncher 2y ago
They haven't actually shown off their vertical tabs yet, so there isn't much to say. I am a Sideberry user though, and this excites me because a native implementation will likely look a lot cleaner, integrate better with your chosen theme, and actually allow the removal of the regular tab bar (you have to keep it with Sideberry because there is some functionality that cannot be replicated through an extension). Theming in particular might be a big one, I had to spend a couple hours tweaking the Sideberry CSS to make it look nice with the skin I use in Firefox. Not having to do that sure would be convenient, especially for the average user who doesn't know what a stylesheet is.

torstenvl 2y ago

> Intuitive privacy settings that deliver all the power of our world-class anti-tracking technologies in a simplified, easy-to-understand way. > More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker. Stop it. Gnome-ification is incredibly user hostile. Almost every time folks "simplify" a UI, they actually make it far more complicated instead. If your users now have to use dconf or userChrome.css to do the things they are accustomed to doing, you have not simplified anything.

illiac786 2y ago
It sounds like in your view simplifying a UI is not possible or has never been successfully implemented. I think it is very much possible, very much needed by lots of software out there, but indeed it’s hard. The hardest part is not alienating existing users when messing with muscle memory.

resource_waste 2y ago

I wonder how much money they get from their ads and spammy home menu. (Oh you can turn it off! /apologists) I boot up a fresh Linux install and everything looks A+ nice, then you open up firefox and it feels like I'm on M$ Windows 11 + Edge. Chromium doesnt have ads! I'll be happy when something replaces Firefox, they are a legacy company that might only exist due to anti-trust purposes. Something that is merit based would be an improvement.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

> We’ve been listening to your feedback, and we’re prioritizing the features you want most. > Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500. > Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible. Wow, that ... actually is what users have been asking for, for ages. Nice. > More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker. Oh, there's the other foot dropping. I wonder how SeaMonkey is doing...

tresclow 2y ago
I remember around 2012 Firefox did use to have tab grouping, and they dropped the functionality after. I remember a friend of mine being annoyed for that, although I myself didn't appreciate much the functionality.
- Kye 2y ago
  I could never figure out how it worked.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Oh, it's better than that: They had tab grouping as a native feature, and it was great, then they factored it out into an extension... and then they changed the way extensions worked, and didn't bother porting it. Kind of an insulting way to kill a feature IMO.
morsch 2y ago
I'll take the "streamlined" menus if it gets me first party vertical tabs and auto segregation of profiles. The latter especially, I'm excited about whatever they come up with. The former, I think it'll take a long time to reach feature parity with existing add-ons, if they ever get there, seeing how they tend to keep novice users in mind.
raffraffraff 2y ago
honestly, container tabs are way more useful to me than profiles every were. I can have 3 different Gmail accounts and a bunch of AWS accounts open in the same browser, with different colours for each so that I can figure out which is which. How about it they continued to iterate on container tabs and make it possible to pattern match urls to containers without a 3rd party addon.

gamepsys 2y ago

As a Firefox daily user, this list makes me better understand why Firefox has such a low market share. Reorganizing menus or adding alt text to PDFs won't make any impact on user adoption/churn because users don't care. The alt text specifically sounds like resume engineering for some developers that want "on device generative ai" as a bullet point on this LinkedIn. Bullet points like this wouldn't be a problem if Firefox had more resources, but the list of actually pretty small and doesn't have a lot of space for fluff. I think they should pick 2-5 things and focus on those, such as multi-device sync, privacy, speed, battery life performance, customization, etc.

em500 2y ago
How are they stretched for resources? Mozilla's revenue is around a half billion USD per year.
- luyu_wu 2y ago
  It's important to note here that Mozilla spends the majority of that money on non-Firefox projects (something that has pissed off people who have wanted to donate to Firefox specifically for ages). Firefox itself gets a sliver of that.
  - fabrice_d 2y ago
    Like many you are likely confused by the Foundation (MoFo) vs. Corp (MoCo) finances. You can only donate to MoFo, and indeed it doesn't spend much (if anything) paying Firefox staff. This is because Firefox staff is on the MoCo payroll, which gets its revenue mostly from their search engine deal with Google. MoCo actually pays MoFo to use the trademarks that are owned by MoFo.
    - pseudalopex 2y ago
      Specifically Mozilla Corporation paid Mozilla Foundation in 2022 under $20 million from over $585 million in revenue. The relationship between Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation can make some details confusing. But most people who claim what they did never looked at Mozilla finances in my experience.

some_furry 2y ago

I just hope there's an option to totally disable the AI junk. I'd just like a simple, secure browser that gets the hell out of my way and let's me extend it however I want (i.e., with an adblocker). I don't need or want AI models involved in the process.

eesmith 2y ago
I like Firefox's built-in language translation feature. Does that count as "AI" these days?
- palata 2y ago
  I don't think it counts as the modern "AI" buzz: it was there before and it is useful. The modern AI stuff is typically useless crap that was thrown there because... I don't know... FOMO?

meiraleal 2y ago

What about catching up with PWA?

bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago

I'm still upset that theyve removed the "compact" style. Granted, between ublock origin and tree style tabs Firefox is still my favorite browser, but why are they changing this stuff... Can someone please ELI5 - what does "more streamlined menus" mean?

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behnamoh 2y ago

Looking at the comments, I'm not surprised about FF's low market share. They chose to target geeks and nerds, and let's face it, we tend to be whiny about almost everything and complain about any new change. Meanwhile, Google Chrome doesn't even need to pretend like they care about privacy, so they automatically target the other "ordinary" people who are not so picky about every new release note. This kinda teaches you something about the importance of product positioning.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
No, it's worse than that - they chose to target geeks, then decided to throw out the geeks in an attempt to target a more mainstream audience[0] and then failed to actually get the mainstream userbase, leaving them with neither the nerds nor the normies. [0] Firefox has always been at its strongest as a power-user's browser, chock-full of extensions and tweaks. Mozilla met this advantage with... two extinction events for extensions, and removal of customization options.
- rurp 2y ago
  Yes, exactly. Google and Microsoft have huge anti-competitive advantages that they have been able to use to target casual users. As long as that continues Firefox will be facing an uphill battle to get casual downloads, but neither of those large companies care at all about power users. That gives Mozilla a big opening to get a niche of users that will heavily evangelize their browser and install it on friend and family devices. Unfortunately Mozilla's leadership does not see it that way and have steadily pissed off a huge number of former fans, without making inroads with any other groups. They are in a tough position regardless, but combining that with terrible product and organization management has gotten them into the state they're in now.
- 14113 2y ago
  No, Firefox never targeted geeks. It's just that, when it came out, the only people who used a browser other than Internet Explorer happened to be geeks. The audience came to them, rather than them going to the audience.

ghostpepper 2y ago

I am happy it's nothing to do with Pocket, VPN or Colorways. Those are examples of visual clutter that I would love to see removed entirely.

seba_dos1 2y ago

Somewhere in the last two months Firefox Nightly got a massive performance boost on GNU/Linux. Thanks! Nice that vertical tabs are officially coming back, although I've been using them in a DIY manner for years already; sidebar extension with a bit of userChrome.css can do wonders: https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif

privacyking 2y ago
What do you mean coming back? I don't recall it ever having vertical tabs. Most people have just used treestyletabs for the past decade or two
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  It used to be a part of their Test Pilot program as "Tab Center", somewhere around 2016, but got discontinued. What's on the GIF above is a WebExtension-based reimplementation of that called "Tab Center Reborn" plus a bit of custom CSS that reimplements the original auto-hide behavior and makes it blend nicer with Plasma.

gilgamesh3 2y ago

>Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500. Finally. Chrome has this feature for a while and it's really handy when working with lots of tabs, but I use Firefox on my main machine so I couldn't take advantage of this feature (and I don't like vertical tabs).

FounderBurr 2y ago

I stopped donating when they declared ‘rss is too complex to be maintained and is also old and gross and stuff, so we removed it’. Oh by the way totally unrelated here is Pocket(tm)!

yownie 2y ago
Yes I agree that was some straight up bullshit

kwanbix 2y ago

I really love Firefox. I even organized events for them on my home country, so don't get me wrong, wouldn't it be best for the web/devs that they switched to chrome's engine? They can still implement whatever changes to privacy and their changes just like MS does, and devs will only have to target one engine. Or am I missing something? Please discuss it if you agree or disagree, do not downvote. Thanks.

diroussel 2y ago
I would prefer it if Mozilla continued is great rust rewrite, and innovate the core technologies. Just adopting Chrome's crumbs will mean giving up control and voice in stearing the web technologies.
Kye 2y ago
Monoculture in software rarely goes well. Right now Safari and Firefox exist to push back on Google completely controlling the fate of the web. You do not want Google to have the same unquestioned power Microsoft did in the IE6 era.
- kwanbix 2y ago
  But that wouldn't be the same. Everybody can work on the engine. Worst case, if google wants to take over, the others can push their own version of the engine, compatible whenever they feel like, and different otherwise. IE was different because was totally closed and only MS could add features.
  - pseudalopex 2y ago
    What do you mean if Google want to take over? They control Chromium now. And maintaining a fork is harder than you think. Even harder when the fork maintainers have different agendas. Even harder when the upstream maintainers are hostile. Look at Manifest V3. Microsoft said the harm to extensions would be acceptable. Opera hedged and echoed Google's FUD about the removed APIs. Brave acknowledged the problem, recommended their integrated blocker, said they would support MV2 until Google removed the code, and declined to promise more. Vivaldi said similar.

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Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago

Are you bringing back XUL? No? Then please cease operation.

deleted 2y ago
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thisislife2 2y ago
PaleMoon - http://www.palemoon.org/ http://www.palemoon.org/ - is a hard fork of Firefox that still supports XUL.
- guilhas 2y ago
  Although PaleMoon is great, it creates a brain split Firefox had very advanced addons for the time, and very good developer community. XUL removal just gave everyone PTSD Don't know how good is the continuous fragmentation of the community
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
  Which I already use. Thanks though.

neilv 2y ago

Prioritization that I'd like to suggest for Firefox, driven by needs of society (from high to low): 1. Representing the public interest wrt Web -- especially fervent respect for privacy in the browser, almost as much emphasis on security, fighting commercial excesses around de jure and defacto standards, and social equity within the scope of what Mozilla does (e.g., software accessibility, encouraging all volunteers). 2. Competitive browser compliance and performance. To be viable as a daily driver, to have impact. 3. Forward-looking R&D on Internet public interest things not currently considered "browser", but potentially big in near term. 4. Fancy browser features that actually increase uptake and retention. (Much lower than the first 3.) 5. Designer's opinion/portfolio UX changes. (Could be improvements, and there's value in an appealing and moving-target modern appearance, but misalignment is a risk to be careful of.) 6. Necessary-evil money-making compromises. (Very, very carefully. Many past ones were negatives. And we still see arguable dark patterns around some of those, such as as Firefox updates sometimes reverting users' express Search-related preferences.) A marketing challenge of these priorities would be that even most techies can't assess how well you're doing #1. But that mix of things you do can include things understandable to your typical user, such as superior blocking of abusive ads. (But don't drop the ball on things that your typical user can't understand -- they're entrusting you as an expert to act in their interests.) Educational outreaches can also help. And if you get to the point that you're generating an order of magnitude fewer security vulnerabilities than your competitor, then marketing people can run with that. But be careful with positioning, so that communications about smart, hard activities don't get conflated in people's minds with confusing mission drift and fluffy PR.

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glenstein 2y ago
>4. Fancy browser features that actually increase uptake and retention. Yeah, I would say I think these are actually a good thing as long as the cost-benefit ratio is acceptable and it doesn't compromise core efforts (people have asserted this kind of compromise has been happening, but rarely with any coherence or substantiation). I would consider the example of Opera in its heyday - whether it was Turbo, "widgets", extensions, or Unite, which in my opinion was a triumph of originality and innovation that went unsung. Those are good when done right.

amluto 2y ago

I have a suggestion for Mozilla: find use cases that benefit your users and are not possible in other browsers. For example: Browsers are terrible at accessing devices on a local network. Make this work well in Firefox, extending protocols as needed. Browsers are terrible at configuring IoT devices. It device makers are terrible at making apps for this purpose that don’t suck. Make Firefox (on desktop and mobile!) be the premier way to usable and securely configure IoT devices. Get device vendors to sign on: someone could (and probably would) sell a gadget where the instructions suggest installing Firefox to set up the device. Leverage the same technology to go after enterprise users. Ever seen a piece of high-end, expensive networking gear with a web UI? Ever contemplated how pathetically insecure this is? Ever contemplated how unpleasant it to provision certificates to make it secure? Make this work, easily and securely, on Firefox, using new protocols as needed. Make everyone else play catch-up. Heck, start small. Allow setting domain constraints on imported root certificates. The moral: do something new and better.

palata 2y ago
Please, no.
finack 2y ago
None of these things are in scope for a program that is supposed to browse the web (by fetching web pages and rendering them).
- stqism 2y ago
  It sounds dumb, but honestly modern browsers feel way closer to the JRE than they did things designed to fetch and render sites.
- amluto 2y ago
  How is securely connecting to a device that isn’t, itself, connected to the cloud, fetching a webpage from it, and rendering it out of scope for a web browser? Certainly URLs like http://192.168.1.1 http://192.168.1.1 have been in scope for decades — why can’t a web browser figure out how to support that use case well?

speckx 2y ago

I would like Firefox to be able to set extensions to run only on click or allow me to provide a list of domains, like Chrome does, so every extension is not running on every page. See https://support.google.com/chrome?p=enable_extensions https://support.google.com/chrome?p=enable_extensions and https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/option-to-allow-extensions-to-run-only-on-specific-websites/idc-p/18212#M9287 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/option-to-allow-extensi....

willywanker 2y ago
You're describing userscripts, which is what site focused web extensions essentially are anyway. Install the Grease/Tamper/Violet monkey extension and you can find scripts from Greasyfork.org, or author your own. Each script defines a scope listing the sites it's allowed to run on.

drewg123 2y ago

One thing I wish they'd work on is making saved credit card information work correctly and reliably. I use FF on Macos laptop and FreeBSD desktop, with multiple profiles on each. I have different profiles where CC saving work fine, and others that don't across both OSes. I'm so annoyed at having to pull out my CC that I've gone back to chrome a lot of the time when I need to buy things...

no-dr-onboard 2y ago

After using FF for the past 7 years, every day at work I switched to Arc. It's been __okay__. I'm not a fan of them trying to nix the bookmark system and much prefer FF's implementation of just good old fashioned, indexable bookmarks. If FF can manage a good implementation of vertical tabs, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

diroussel 2y ago
Try TreeStyleTabs plugin, it's great. It also works well with Firefox Multi Account Containers, so you can keep peronal, work, research, shopping in different containers, so cookies aren't shared. I love that I can start a web search open a bunch of links, each in a new tab, then once I have what I need, I can close the parent tab and all the child tabs are closed automatically.

gsuuon 2y ago

Lack of PWA / installable apps is why I switched back to chrome after trying to daily drive firefox for a while. Really wish they'd reconsider the decision to drop it.

fabrice_d 2y ago
Untested, but I think this Firefox fork added support back: https://floorp.app/en https://floorp.app/en
- MrAlex94 2y ago
  I believe a lot of the work comes from: https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox P.S. the project you linked is no longer FOSS.
- gsuuon 2y ago
  Interesting, thanks!

worksonmine 2y ago

Great, now please give me back the option to set my new tab page without resorting to extensions.

jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
Does setting it in about:config do it for you? I see what you mean though, since the option right above that in the menu lets you set custom url(s) for your start page.
- worksonmine 2y ago
  That would help a lot yes, what option am I looking for? A custom URL used to be a setting in all browsers back in the days.

michael9423 2y ago

The way I see it, there was a time when FF had the chance to not accept the google contracts and go 100% independent with their own search engine or something similar. This would have resulted in FF actually siding with users. It would have resulted in FF radically rejecting ads, and this would have changed the entire web because people would have flocked to Firefox. But Mozilla leadership did not have an interest in this, in light of endless google money. Google essentially captured Mozilla back in the day. Now people have got used to ads because they only could chose between browsers that don't protect them. Brave is trying to correct the mistake of FF and is attracting a small userbase, but not large enough to make a big difference, because the times have changed a lot. Now with the new management at Mozilla and the dim outlook for the next 5 years, the realization is kicking in that listening to users is actually important. But the elephant in the room is the contracts with large ad-based search engines.

palata 2y ago
> This would have resulted in FF actually siding with users Sure, but would the users have sided with FF? I'm not convinced. The users use whatever BigTech tells them to use, that's how I see it. > Brave is trying to correct the mistake of FF Brave is Chromium. I don't see how this would even begin correcting the mistakes of FF. The one thing FF does right is that it is not Chromium.
- michael9423 2y ago
  End users do not care about the browser engine. But as I said, Brave is trying. It won't be successful in the way FF could have been.
  - palata 2y ago
    > End users do not care about the browser engine. But that's the problem, isn't it? Google controls Chromium, everybody uses Chromium, so Google controls the web.
    - 2y ago

Ciantic 2y ago

I switched to Firefox about 3 weeks ago, what is killing me is dragging the tabs. It is so much worse with Firefox. Someone has made a video of this if one can't remember how they differ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRuBDH32hPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRuBDH32hPI With Chrome I can drag a tab and it moves with me, with Firefox the tab being dragged blocks the view. Also since with Chrome, the tab moves with the mouse I can with one drag move a tab and use Windows' snap-to-edge feature. This is a two-step process with Firefox. Firefox is an underdog, it should focus on making the UI familiar and fast, but keep customizability. Another thing I noticed is that Firefox doesn't allow to keep unpacked extensions loaded as Chrome does, there is no good reason why not, luckily I fixed that with some userChrome scripts.

xchip 2y ago

Not very exciting, to be honest. I would like certain apps to open always in private browsing.

mrinterweb 2y ago

I love that Firefox continues to be been focused on performance. There was a while where FF perf was looking kind of bleak compared to Chrome. These days FF and Chrome have similar performance. FF might have the edge now.

amanzi 2y ago

Mozilla asks people to contribute ideas on "Mozilla Connect", but then chooses to ignore most of the top-rated ideas. To be fair, better tab management is first and third of the list, so they are looking to improve that one. But PWAs is second on the list, and there's no mention of this in their announcement. Bringing back proper PWA support seems to align perfectly with Mozilla's mission, so it blows me away why they aren't actively working on it or talking about it. The other things mentioned are just features that I would expect to keep improving over time, but are nothing groundbreaking.

altairprime 2y ago
PWAs, as in "File > Save Website As... > website.exe" on a PC?
- cpeterso 2y ago
  The "PWA support" that people are clamoring for is the option to open a web page shortcut in a browser window without an address bar.
  - tredre3 2y ago
    That's a big part of it, but PWA offers more than that! For example it has facilities for caching the web application so that it can work offline. They can also register URL handlers on the system, which is very useful.
    - finack 2y ago
      Programs that don't require an entire web browser to run can already do all of those things.
      - gsuuon 2y ago
        They can also do a lot of other things that a browser's sandbox would not allow

benatkin 2y ago

Only 81% of revenue from Google, who has a competing browser that they beg you to switch to... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances

qwertox 2y ago

That site needs a dark mode. I'm surprised it hasn't. Multiple rows of tabs, even more through mouse-wheel scrolling, and fixed width tabs for easy closing. Like Tab Mix Plus.

roesel 2y ago

I still miss the icons for items in the hamburger menu, this was one of the worst changes ever for me personally. > More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter If this means the same as for Thunderbird, I'm going to have to switch after 20 years...

difosfor 2y ago

I wish they'd finish up their webcodecs implementation. Even Safari at least supports VideoDecoder.

justinclift 2y ago

This is the crowd that "listened to user feedback" then decided to add a button (that can't be removed) to the taskbar whose only purpose in life is to open the Extensions page. An action that's used once when setting up a browser, and never again. And you're not allowed to remove it to put something else there instead that's actually important. Fucking Arseholes. :( :( :(

surfcao 2y ago

As long as I can hide the address bar to have more screen real estate and vim extensions work, I am happy..

aldanor 2y ago

If Firefox natively integrated TreeStyle tab or Sidebery and made it lightning fast, searchable and syncable, I would probably return to FF on that day. Definitely not yet another "reduction of visual clutter".

causality0 2y ago

How about making it so all those stupid purple pop-up messages on mobile that tell me what I already damn know can be swiped away instead of sitting on my screen blocking the UI for an eternity every time I dismiss a tab or full-screen a video?

up6w6 2y ago

Related news: Servo Web Engine Continues Advancing But Seeing Just $1.6k In Monthly Donations https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-Engine-May-2024 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-Engine-May-2024

throw7 2y ago

AI generated text should always have a way that identifies/tells the user that it's fake.

m463 2y ago

I wish there was an open way to save all your settings across devices - you could host them yourself. maybe webdav? The current firefox sync where they are probably the only folks who can host it is not that good. (there's an old sync server but it requires a non-local account) Also, I wish firefox would stop uncontrollably phoning home.

wegfawefgawefg 2y ago

Some time in the last few years firefox changed the new boommark poput to be unresizable and very small. If you have more than twenty bookmark folders it is very difficult to use. Ive been forced to use sideberry, which I dont like.

mvdtnz 2y ago

Why can I not auto fill credit cards in Firefox mobile even though I know this is a feature offered in other countries?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cultureulterior 2y ago

Bring back xul or keep your promise on supporting tab tree, please.

joshka 2y ago

> Customizable new tab wallpapers that will let you choose from a diverse range of photography, colors, and abstract images that suits you most. Can we just make this include some sort of dark mode. There is an addon that kinda works, but not all the time. That bright white flash is pretty annoying.

cooloo 2y ago

When will Firefox will support webrtc encoding/ decoding offload on Linux?

domysee 2y ago

I didn't think I'll ever get to see native vertical tabs in FF.

14113 2y ago

> More streamlined menus For everyone here complaining about this, have you ever looked at how many ways there are to access your history on Firefox? At my last count, there were 4 different ways to do it, depending on which menu you picked first. Cutting down this kind of inconsistent, and repetitive flow is something that we should be applauding.

sebazzz 2y ago

Subtle reminder that ManifestV2 phase out now has a timeline at Chrome[0]. The best moment to switch to Firefox is now. [0]: https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/manifest-v2-phase-out-begins.html https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/manifest-v2-phase-out-begi...

butz 2y ago

Hear me out, I know this might sound crazy, but, how about letting users to customize menus to their own liking and workflow. Link UI customization to profiles and you will have many happy users. In example, I would remove most development related options (hey there, "Inspect Accessibility Properties") from my "leisure" profile, but would move those to more accessible places in my "work" profile.

tim333 2y ago

As a recent newbie attempter as switching to Firefox Vertical Tabs and Profile Management system - seem good. I was a bit shocked that to get the tree style tabs working properly I had to go typing code (to stop the old tabs being there too). The thing that got me back to Chrome this time was I started getting out of memory errors which I have not had in any other software in a couple of years of using the M1 macbook. Maybe they'll fix that under the "speed, performance" stuff?