8 ms·

Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day for a decade and it pretty much just works, supports a rich collection

Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day for a decade and it pretty much just works, supports a rich collection of (vetted!) extensions, and performs exceptionally well with sometimes hundreds of tabs. Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they’ve done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.

WhyNotHugo 1y ago
Firefox works, but it’s got thousands of annoying issues (many of them just paper cuts, but still). The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs. Imagine how many of those issues could have been ironed out over the years.
- sealeck 1y ago
  The issue with the salary is not that it costs the same as 30 developers – good leadership can make a difference worth >30 developers over the same timespan (especially in an organisation with 1000s of staff). The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend. It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
  - bell-cot 1y ago
    This. Unfortunately, in our current "Greed is God" late-stage capitalist world, it's virtually impossible to find a competent tech CEO who is willing to work for mere honest wages. And (evidently) too difficult to even find one who's willing to work for 30X.
    - Aeolun 1y ago
      I think if you are paying 30x engineer salary you are always going to find CEO’s that optimize for money.
      - shswkna 1y ago
        This should be the top comment.
      - bell-cot 1y ago
        Pretty much. But if you do need to have a CEO, and offering 2-3X gets you zero qualified applicants...then you are forced into strategies which have undesirable side-effects.
        cogman10 1y ago
        What does it mean to be qualified? The issue I have is a lot of CEOs appear to be wholly unqualified for their positions and their salaries are completely unjustifiable. So many of them don't even have a glancing understanding of the product or company that they are in charge of. Their primary role is getting a higher stock valuation so the board can be happy. A good example of this is how many tech CEOs have dumped ungodly amounts of money on "AI" because that's what the market demands. Or how many CEOs hire and fire based on what other companies are doing, not what their company needs. The fact is, "qualified" is often at odds with "competent". Most of the 30x CEOs are only qualified in chasing stock prices, not competently running a company for the long term.
        Aeolun 1y ago
        That’s a problem with your selection process, not the lack of qualified applicants. It’s funny that the qualification that people require often seems to be ‘has done this thing to no great success elsewhere’.
  - afavour 1y ago
    > It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense. By objective measure I’d agree with you but you can’t deny the reality of the job market. If someone is a truly effective CEO they’d be able to get many, many times more than 2-3x staff engineer salary at pretty much any other company out there.
    - Groxx 1y ago
      If they're in it for the money, instead of the mission, then I say good riddance. That's how we get where we are now. 2-3x staff engineer pay is a LOT of money. More than enough.
      - afavour 1y ago
        I disagree, hiring a CEO for well below market pay because they believe in the mission is a recipe for disaster. Very likely you’ll end up with someone whose heart is in the right place but can’t execute. 2-3x staff engineer salary is a lot of money. But no matter how much I believed in a mission if I could make 10-20x that and set myself up for life financially I’d have a very hard time turning it down.
        Groxx 1y ago
        As opposed to now, where you've got someone who is willing and able to tank the entire project, but it looks good on paper? Is that the kind of person you want to be competing for? I get what you're saying, but I really can't agree. The mission is important in a non-profit. It's part of what makes them work.
        MangoToupe 1y ago
        It's not clear CEO pay is driven my market forces at all. Pay seems almost completely divorced from competency.
        bobbob27 1y ago
        There's people in the FOSS realm running VERY competent operations for simple living wage, or less. Take KDE for example. It's easy to argue they've accomplished MORE than Mozilla has in the last decade. Their desktop ships with every Steam Deck (along with some niche laptop manufacturers) and they have a vast ecosystem of applications. Albeit some more rapidly developed than others. Their structure is entirely different than Mozilla so it's hardly a direct comparison. But the main point is that Mozilla's traditional corporate structure seems to be a millstone. They could have stashed most of their Google funding and kept a solid team of passionate maintainers paid in perpetuity. Goodwill could have volunteers contributing directly to Firefox, instead of forking it.
  - BeetleB 1y ago
    > It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense. It's unclear to me that you need to pay more than $150K total compensation for a good SW engineer. Yet many over here are getting paid double that. Salaries are rarely based on value created. They are based on what others pay.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      I think that factors in cost of living in silicon valley. I don't think devs even in other areas of the US make that much. I was offered a job at a big tech but I'd have had to move to the US to their campus because they hate remote work. And they offered only 120k (they probably figured that sounded like a ton of money to a European). But I started looking at the cost of living there and it was insane. I'd have had to share a flat and it would have to be far away, not a few km from the office like I'm used to. No way. Of course then Trump started happening and I was so glad I didn't move there. I'm kinda LGBTQ too so I'd be royally screwed if I'd been there now
      - dmoy 1y ago
        > I think that factors in cost of living in silicon valley. I don't think devs even in other areas of the US make that much. Depends on the specific job, company (big tech vs not), and city. Seattle, NYC and a handful of others may pay on par with bay area. For a senior at random faang or equivalent, that might mean $300k-$500k / yr. More for some NYC positions in the finance industry.
        wkat4242 1y ago
        Wow that's almost 10 times as much as me :) Still wouldn't live there though, especially now.
      - eloisant 1y ago
        That's the other way around - life in SV is expensive because of all those high salary workers.
  - Gentil 1y ago
    > Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers is just an interim CEO. I am not sure how Mozill Foundation/Corporation is exactly linked in the decision making. But the key people are still Mark Surman and Mitchell Baker who is the Chairwomen of Mozilla Corporation. If Laura is getting paid lots like Mitchell Baker, it is still an issue. But, wouldn't she be just a scapegoat? I am pretty sure as Chairwomen, Mitchell Baker still has more power than Laura the CEO when it comes to Mozilla Corporation. I have felt this is just to chill the uproar against Mitchell Baker. Now everyone will blame the next CEO. But I wonder how much power she has. I could be wrong of course.
    - atlasunshrugged 1y ago
      Baker left the board in early 2025 https://www.theverge.com/business/615977/m https://www.theverge.com/business/615977/m
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmazzoni 1y ago
    Has it been good leadership, though? They invested BILLIONS of dollars on things like: * Firefox OS * Mozilla Persona * Mozilla VPN * Firefox for TV (e.g. Amazon Fire) * Lockwise * Mozilla Hubs Did anyone ask for those things? What a huge waste for all of that to be built and abandoned.
    - sealeck 1y ago
      Did you read my comment? > The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend.
- rs186 1y ago
  > The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places. Just like you want to pay more for highly skilled developers, you want executive pay to be competitive to hire someone capable of the job. Put it this way, you could pay me $1m in annual compensation to be Mozilla's CEO (sounds like a good deal?), but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company and cannot even run the company properly at a daily basis.
  - thoroughburro 1y ago
    > I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places. If the “bad” CEOs don’t take pay cuts or subsequently struggle to find work, then that thinking is obviously not as “incredibly” incorrect as you claim.
    - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
      Real talk: what are the issues with Mozilla's? I hate plenty of CEOs so I'm familiar but I've never heard... really anything, good or bad, about Mozilla's.
      - alternatex 1y ago
        Raking in 100s of millions and not improving Firefox is one thing. Another is spending those millions on acquiring companies that produce no revenue, aka setting money on fire. Zen Browser has been producing the features people have been asking for from Firefox with $0. I can't imagine what motivated devs like those could produce with just 1% of the money Mozilla burns. It's not that they haven't done great things for the web. It's just that we expect more from their most popular product considering the money that they're rolling in.
        1y ago
- madeofpalk 1y ago
  So like every other piece of software!
- EdwardKrayer 1y ago
  I've had this conversation at least three times on HN. I'm convinced anyone who says that Firefox has a thousand issues simply doesn't use Firefox. But, I'm always open to being wrong. Can you point out the specific issues Firefox has that make it a second rate experience?
  - bmn__ 1y ago
    Fx user here since it was called Phoenix and cookies were called delicious delicacies in the options, and Mozilla browser before that. IMO as a power user, it is a second-rate browser. The bar is set by [Opera v12](https://get.geo.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/1216/ https://get.geo.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/1216/). * no spatial browsing, not even as an extension. This feature alone I would use literally thousands of times a week. * no fit to width * no cycle display images enable/disable/cached * cannot edit menus or icons as simple configuration file * no tab thumbnails * reader mode that actually always works every single time, not just when the browser feels like it * no editable key bindings * no shortcuts for highlighting next/prev URL, next/prev heading, next/prev element * no presentation mode * no panelise web page * no navigation bar
    - EdwardKrayer 1y ago
      My argument is primarily against commenters on HN who claim Firefox to be unusable, bug-filled, and then blame Mozilla for the current Blink-based browser apocalypse. You feel that Firefox doesn't have a bunch of features that you would use - but those are not bugs. I recognize this is HN - where there will definitely be a higher percentage of power users, but an open source project not having the features you want doesn't make it a second-rate browser, it just means it would take more work for you to customize. Listing cred of having used FF in the Mozilla days is the same as saying Linux is second rate because you installed Caldera back when people were still scared of Y2K. As a daily FF user - Firefox is great. And more users should give it a whirl, especially ones that haven't used it in a decade.
      - bmn__ 1y ago
        You cheated me out of a sincere and genuine conversation. I resent that behaviour.
tomalbrc 1y ago
lol market share doesn’t lie
- Brian_K_White 1y ago
  lol of course it does? Every day at every scale of every category of every product or service.
- vehemenz 1y ago
  I think you're going to have trouble defending this position. Chrome hasn't been the best browser for most of its market share lead. Internet Explorer 6 was never the best browser despite leading market share more than any browser in history.
Cloudef 1y ago
I feel like the only people who hate firefox are frontend devs
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  I’m more of a full-stack but I develop “Firefox first” on my projects if I can and leave it to my tester to see that it works on Chrome. X-browser issues turn up rarely, I wind up having more trouble with Safari than anything. I know Mozilla does worse on benchmarks, but I never complain about performance. Recently I tried some sites from one of the spammiest sectors on the web and found I couldn’t move the mouse without my Chrome lighting up like a Christmas tree and navigating me to crap sites, but the Firefox experience was that I had to click on something for all hell break loose. We have an internal app that has screen with a JavaScript table thingie with 40,000 rows loaded locally. Crazy? Yeah. It performs great on Chrome and lags pretty bad on the fox. That’s the only bad screen, and we have a lot of screens. Personally I don’t like it that they have an office in San Francisco. Emotionally I think, “the only thing anybody should be building in San Francisco is a homeless shelter.” Practically though, I think a browser company can’t “think different” if is steeped in the Bay Area culture, not least if they can get in a car and go visit people at Google and Facebook. If they were someplace else they might have a little more empathy for users.
  - MegaDeKay 1y ago
    Like you I have found Firefox to work pretty well in real world applications. The one place I found it did fall over was Microsoft Office Online. FF runs like molasses in a large online Excel spreadsheet vs Chrome.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      Microsoft is absolutely terrible at Firefox support. I feel like they do it in purpose. In fact when I set my user agent to Edge half the issues in O365 disappear! Suddenly things actually work. The latest crap is that it now requires me to sign in every single day on Firefox. And often after I sign in it immediately goes to "hang on while we're signing you out". Meanwhile they're pushing edge heavily as a vehicle of copilot promotion. So I'm pretty sure this is just intentional breakage..
ksec 1y ago
It is strange because the hate on Firefox does not fall in sync with the quality of Firefox. As if the product itself dont matter. Had it been Pre 2020 it may have made more sense. Apart from a few years between IE 7 and Chrome, the past few years is the only time where I would rate Firefox as the best browser, especially for Multi Tab usage. Chrome back on top since 2024 after spending years working on memory efficiency as well as multi tab ( meaning tens to hundreds ) optimisation. So while Mozilla in terms of management and their strategy ( or lack of ) has been the same, they get much of the hate because people now dislike Google and Chrome and needs a competitor. It is as if they dislike Google so they also dislike the Google sponsored Mozilla Firefox. For all the site I visit, I have never had problem with Chrome, mostly because I guess everyone tested their website with it, much like old IE days. Where I used to have problems with Safari pre version 18, Firefox has always worked. I remember I have only encounter rendering issues once or twice in the past 3-4 years on Firefox. There are lots of Webkit fixes landing in Safari 26. So 2025 may finally be the year where browser rendering difference is now at an acceptable minimum. Partly thanks to Interop. At least for the past 6 months I have yet to ran into issues on any of the three major browser. And this is progress.
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
  > As if the product itself dont matter. That's sort of the point. Firefox is an excellent, even amazing browser. But because of the way Mozilla has handled it, it's become largely an also-ran, and its continued existence seems highly dependent on its primary competitor in the browser space. That's just incompetent given the quality of Firefox.
  - dralley 1y ago
    Chrome's marketing budget is nearly as large as Mozilla's entire budget. They spent a couple of years actively targeting Firefox users with Chrome ads on the frontpage of google.com, and got Adobe Flash and Java and most of the free antivirus solutions to auto-install Chrome and make it the default browser. I have yet to hear anyone on HN present an argument for how Mozilla could effectively counter that onslaught. Certainly not without using methods that they would also have complained about. (Though nobody seems to hold Chrome's bloatware tactics against them for some reason).
cmcaleer 1y ago
There are making mistakes as an organization, and there is taking exorbitant sums of money from advertising partners and having your costs inflate to match these donations, rather than something, anything to help the sustainability of Mozilla. Imagine if at any point in the last 2 decades leadership in Mozilla had started an endowment[0] instead of them spending many billions of dollars on ineffective programs, harebrained acquisitions, and executive salaries. They could have had a sustainable, long-lasting model that would have kept Mozilla relevant and strong for decades to come. Instead, Mozilla sold itself out to become a shield for Google while being grossly mismanaged to the point that it is entirely reliant on a deal that at any point could be rugged from them. At no point in the last two decades has resolving this ever been a meaningful focus beyond panhandling for donations that barely cover executive compensation. I still try to use Firefox and I desperately want to be proven wrong in my opinion that Mozilla's leadership is incompetent, or malicious, or both, but I've been hoping for this since Chrome was released. I want them to succeed and be who they were before, but Mozilla leadership does not. [0] Wikimedia did this nearly a decade ago and it's been a huge success and makes Wikimedia more resilient! There's a model for this!
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
  Mozilla is making my cost inflate? That's weird. I started using Firefox a decade ago paying 0 and I'm still paying 0. I guess 10x0 is still 0.
  - cmcaleer 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you
    - ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
      How is Firefox making cost inflate at all? That is not explained.
matteoraso 1y ago
I'm in the same boat as you. Even if there's slight issues with Firefox, being able to synchronize my profile with my phone using the Firefox app outweighs all of that. AFAIK, Chrome doesn't have that.
amy214 1y ago
>Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day Completely agree, Mozilla and Chrom is a lot like a president election, they both suck hard, you're kinda stuck choosing the lesser of two evils. I mean Kamala isn't great, but me, as a dainty woman who happens to have a penis and does not happen to have documentation surrounding my residency in the US, Kamala isn't so bad in comparison! Kamala is firefox.
ivell 1y ago
In the past I was annoyed with Firefox due to sluggishness and propensity to defects. But since 2 years I have been using Firefox daily and I am quite happy with it. They are doing at least somethings right.

WhyNotHugo 1y ago

Firefox works, but it’s got thousands of annoying issues (many of them just paper cuts, but still). The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs. Imagine how many of those issues could have been ironed out over the years.

sealeck 1y ago
The issue with the salary is not that it costs the same as 30 developers – good leadership can make a difference worth >30 developers over the same timespan (especially in an organisation with 1000s of staff). The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend. It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
- bell-cot 1y ago
  This. Unfortunately, in our current "Greed is God" late-stage capitalist world, it's virtually impossible to find a competent tech CEO who is willing to work for mere honest wages. And (evidently) too difficult to even find one who's willing to work for 30X.
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    I think if you are paying 30x engineer salary you are always going to find CEO’s that optimize for money.
    - shswkna 1y ago
      This should be the top comment.
    - bell-cot 1y ago
      Pretty much. But if you do need to have a CEO, and offering 2-3X gets you zero qualified applicants...then you are forced into strategies which have undesirable side-effects.
      - cogman10 1y ago
        What does it mean to be qualified? The issue I have is a lot of CEOs appear to be wholly unqualified for their positions and their salaries are completely unjustifiable. So many of them don't even have a glancing understanding of the product or company that they are in charge of. Their primary role is getting a higher stock valuation so the board can be happy. A good example of this is how many tech CEOs have dumped ungodly amounts of money on "AI" because that's what the market demands. Or how many CEOs hire and fire based on what other companies are doing, not what their company needs. The fact is, "qualified" is often at odds with "competent". Most of the 30x CEOs are only qualified in chasing stock prices, not competently running a company for the long term.
      - Aeolun 1y ago
        That’s a problem with your selection process, not the lack of qualified applicants. It’s funny that the qualification that people require often seems to be ‘has done this thing to no great success elsewhere’.
- afavour 1y ago
  > It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense. By objective measure I’d agree with you but you can’t deny the reality of the job market. If someone is a truly effective CEO they’d be able to get many, many times more than 2-3x staff engineer salary at pretty much any other company out there.
  - Groxx 1y ago
    If they're in it for the money, instead of the mission, then I say good riddance. That's how we get where we are now. 2-3x staff engineer pay is a LOT of money. More than enough.
    - afavour 1y ago
      I disagree, hiring a CEO for well below market pay because they believe in the mission is a recipe for disaster. Very likely you’ll end up with someone whose heart is in the right place but can’t execute. 2-3x staff engineer salary is a lot of money. But no matter how much I believed in a mission if I could make 10-20x that and set myself up for life financially I’d have a very hard time turning it down.
      - Groxx 1y ago
        As opposed to now, where you've got someone who is willing and able to tank the entire project, but it looks good on paper? Is that the kind of person you want to be competing for? I get what you're saying, but I really can't agree. The mission is important in a non-profit. It's part of what makes them work.
      - MangoToupe 1y ago
        It's not clear CEO pay is driven my market forces at all. Pay seems almost completely divorced from competency.
      - bobbob27 1y ago
        There's people in the FOSS realm running VERY competent operations for simple living wage, or less. Take KDE for example. It's easy to argue they've accomplished MORE than Mozilla has in the last decade. Their desktop ships with every Steam Deck (along with some niche laptop manufacturers) and they have a vast ecosystem of applications. Albeit some more rapidly developed than others. Their structure is entirely different than Mozilla so it's hardly a direct comparison. But the main point is that Mozilla's traditional corporate structure seems to be a millstone. They could have stashed most of their Google funding and kept a solid team of passionate maintainers paid in perpetuity. Goodwill could have volunteers contributing directly to Firefox, instead of forking it.
- BeetleB 1y ago
  > It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense. It's unclear to me that you need to pay more than $150K total compensation for a good SW engineer. Yet many over here are getting paid double that. Salaries are rarely based on value created. They are based on what others pay.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    I think that factors in cost of living in silicon valley. I don't think devs even in other areas of the US make that much. I was offered a job at a big tech but I'd have had to move to the US to their campus because they hate remote work. And they offered only 120k (they probably figured that sounded like a ton of money to a European). But I started looking at the cost of living there and it was insane. I'd have had to share a flat and it would have to be far away, not a few km from the office like I'm used to. No way. Of course then Trump started happening and I was so glad I didn't move there. I'm kinda LGBTQ too so I'd be royally screwed if I'd been there now
    - dmoy 1y ago
      > I think that factors in cost of living in silicon valley. I don't think devs even in other areas of the US make that much. Depends on the specific job, company (big tech vs not), and city. Seattle, NYC and a handful of others may pay on par with bay area. For a senior at random faang or equivalent, that might mean $300k-$500k / yr. More for some NYC positions in the finance industry.
      - wkat4242 1y ago
        Wow that's almost 10 times as much as me :) Still wouldn't live there though, especially now.
    - eloisant 1y ago
      That's the other way around - life in SV is expensive because of all those high salary workers.
- Gentil 1y ago
  > Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers is just an interim CEO. I am not sure how Mozill Foundation/Corporation is exactly linked in the decision making. But the key people are still Mark Surman and Mitchell Baker who is the Chairwomen of Mozilla Corporation. If Laura is getting paid lots like Mitchell Baker, it is still an issue. But, wouldn't she be just a scapegoat? I am pretty sure as Chairwomen, Mitchell Baker still has more power than Laura the CEO when it comes to Mozilla Corporation. I have felt this is just to chill the uproar against Mitchell Baker. Now everyone will blame the next CEO. But I wonder how much power she has. I could be wrong of course.
  - atlasunshrugged 1y ago
    Baker left the board in early 2025 https://www.theverge.com/business/615977/m https://www.theverge.com/business/615977/m
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dmazzoni 1y ago
  Has it been good leadership, though? They invested BILLIONS of dollars on things like: * Firefox OS * Mozilla Persona * Mozilla VPN * Firefox for TV (e.g. Amazon Fire) * Lockwise * Mozilla Hubs Did anyone ask for those things? What a huge waste for all of that to be built and abandoned.
  - sealeck 1y ago
    Did you read my comment? > The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend.
rs186 1y ago
> The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places. Just like you want to pay more for highly skilled developers, you want executive pay to be competitive to hire someone capable of the job. Put it this way, you could pay me $1m in annual compensation to be Mozilla's CEO (sounds like a good deal?), but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company and cannot even run the company properly at a daily basis.
- thoroughburro 1y ago
  > I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places. If the “bad” CEOs don’t take pay cuts or subsequently struggle to find work, then that thinking is obviously not as “incredibly” incorrect as you claim.
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    Real talk: what are the issues with Mozilla's? I hate plenty of CEOs so I'm familiar but I've never heard... really anything, good or bad, about Mozilla's.
    - alternatex 1y ago
      Raking in 100s of millions and not improving Firefox is one thing. Another is spending those millions on acquiring companies that produce no revenue, aka setting money on fire. Zen Browser has been producing the features people have been asking for from Firefox with $0. I can't imagine what motivated devs like those could produce with just 1% of the money Mozilla burns. It's not that they haven't done great things for the web. It's just that we expect more from their most popular product considering the money that they're rolling in.
      - 1y ago
madeofpalk 1y ago
So like every other piece of software!
EdwardKrayer 1y ago
I've had this conversation at least three times on HN. I'm convinced anyone who says that Firefox has a thousand issues simply doesn't use Firefox. But, I'm always open to being wrong. Can you point out the specific issues Firefox has that make it a second rate experience?
- bmn__ 1y ago
  Fx user here since it was called Phoenix and cookies were called delicious delicacies in the options, and Mozilla browser before that. IMO as a power user, it is a second-rate browser. The bar is set by [Opera v12](https://get.geo.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/1216/ https://get.geo.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/1216/). * no spatial browsing, not even as an extension. This feature alone I would use literally thousands of times a week. * no fit to width * no cycle display images enable/disable/cached * cannot edit menus or icons as simple configuration file * no tab thumbnails * reader mode that actually always works every single time, not just when the browser feels like it * no editable key bindings * no shortcuts for highlighting next/prev URL, next/prev heading, next/prev element * no presentation mode * no panelise web page * no navigation bar
  - EdwardKrayer 1y ago
    My argument is primarily against commenters on HN who claim Firefox to be unusable, bug-filled, and then blame Mozilla for the current Blink-based browser apocalypse. You feel that Firefox doesn't have a bunch of features that you would use - but those are not bugs. I recognize this is HN - where there will definitely be a higher percentage of power users, but an open source project not having the features you want doesn't make it a second-rate browser, it just means it would take more work for you to customize. Listing cred of having used FF in the Mozilla days is the same as saying Linux is second rate because you installed Caldera back when people were still scared of Y2K. As a daily FF user - Firefox is great. And more users should give it a whirl, especially ones that haven't used it in a decade.
    - bmn__ 1y ago
      You cheated me out of a sincere and genuine conversation. I resent that behaviour.

tomalbrc 1y ago

lol market share doesn’t lie

Brian_K_White 1y ago
lol of course it does? Every day at every scale of every category of every product or service.
vehemenz 1y ago
I think you're going to have trouble defending this position. Chrome hasn't been the best browser for most of its market share lead. Internet Explorer 6 was never the best browser despite leading market share more than any browser in history.

Cloudef 1y ago

I feel like the only people who hate firefox are frontend devs

PaulHoule 1y ago
I’m more of a full-stack but I develop “Firefox first” on my projects if I can and leave it to my tester to see that it works on Chrome. X-browser issues turn up rarely, I wind up having more trouble with Safari than anything. I know Mozilla does worse on benchmarks, but I never complain about performance. Recently I tried some sites from one of the spammiest sectors on the web and found I couldn’t move the mouse without my Chrome lighting up like a Christmas tree and navigating me to crap sites, but the Firefox experience was that I had to click on something for all hell break loose. We have an internal app that has screen with a JavaScript table thingie with 40,000 rows loaded locally. Crazy? Yeah. It performs great on Chrome and lags pretty bad on the fox. That’s the only bad screen, and we have a lot of screens. Personally I don’t like it that they have an office in San Francisco. Emotionally I think, “the only thing anybody should be building in San Francisco is a homeless shelter.” Practically though, I think a browser company can’t “think different” if is steeped in the Bay Area culture, not least if they can get in a car and go visit people at Google and Facebook. If they were someplace else they might have a little more empathy for users.
- MegaDeKay 1y ago
  Like you I have found Firefox to work pretty well in real world applications. The one place I found it did fall over was Microsoft Office Online. FF runs like molasses in a large online Excel spreadsheet vs Chrome.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    Microsoft is absolutely terrible at Firefox support. I feel like they do it in purpose. In fact when I set my user agent to Edge half the issues in O365 disappear! Suddenly things actually work. The latest crap is that it now requires me to sign in every single day on Firefox. And often after I sign in it immediately goes to "hang on while we're signing you out". Meanwhile they're pushing edge heavily as a vehicle of copilot promotion. So I'm pretty sure this is just intentional breakage..

ksec 1y ago

It is strange because the hate on Firefox does not fall in sync with the quality of Firefox. As if the product itself dont matter. Had it been Pre 2020 it may have made more sense. Apart from a few years between IE 7 and Chrome, the past few years is the only time where I would rate Firefox as the best browser, especially for Multi Tab usage. Chrome back on top since 2024 after spending years working on memory efficiency as well as multi tab ( meaning tens to hundreds ) optimisation. So while Mozilla in terms of management and their strategy ( or lack of ) has been the same, they get much of the hate because people now dislike Google and Chrome and needs a competitor. It is as if they dislike Google so they also dislike the Google sponsored Mozilla Firefox. For all the site I visit, I have never had problem with Chrome, mostly because I guess everyone tested their website with it, much like old IE days. Where I used to have problems with Safari pre version 18, Firefox has always worked. I remember I have only encounter rendering issues once or twice in the past 3-4 years on Firefox. There are lots of Webkit fixes landing in Safari 26. So 2025 may finally be the year where browser rendering difference is now at an acceptable minimum. Partly thanks to Interop. At least for the past 6 months I have yet to ran into issues on any of the three major browser. And this is progress.

PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
> As if the product itself dont matter. That's sort of the point. Firefox is an excellent, even amazing browser. But because of the way Mozilla has handled it, it's become largely an also-ran, and its continued existence seems highly dependent on its primary competitor in the browser space. That's just incompetent given the quality of Firefox.
- dralley 1y ago
  Chrome's marketing budget is nearly as large as Mozilla's entire budget. They spent a couple of years actively targeting Firefox users with Chrome ads on the frontpage of google.com, and got Adobe Flash and Java and most of the free antivirus solutions to auto-install Chrome and make it the default browser. I have yet to hear anyone on HN present an argument for how Mozilla could effectively counter that onslaught. Certainly not without using methods that they would also have complained about. (Though nobody seems to hold Chrome's bloatware tactics against them for some reason).

cmcaleer 1y ago

There are making mistakes as an organization, and there is taking exorbitant sums of money from advertising partners and having your costs inflate to match these donations, rather than something, anything to help the sustainability of Mozilla. Imagine if at any point in the last 2 decades leadership in Mozilla had started an endowment[0] instead of them spending many billions of dollars on ineffective programs, harebrained acquisitions, and executive salaries. They could have had a sustainable, long-lasting model that would have kept Mozilla relevant and strong for decades to come. Instead, Mozilla sold itself out to become a shield for Google while being grossly mismanaged to the point that it is entirely reliant on a deal that at any point could be rugged from them. At no point in the last two decades has resolving this ever been a meaningful focus beyond panhandling for donations that barely cover executive compensation. I still try to use Firefox and I desperately want to be proven wrong in my opinion that Mozilla's leadership is incompetent, or malicious, or both, but I've been hoping for this since Chrome was released. I want them to succeed and be who they were before, but Mozilla leadership does not. [0] Wikimedia did this nearly a decade ago and it's been a huge success and makes Wikimedia more resilient! There's a model for this!

ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
Mozilla is making my cost inflate? That's weird. I started using Firefox a decade ago paying 0 and I'm still paying 0. I guess 10x0 is still 0.
- cmcaleer 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you
  - ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
    How is Firefox making cost inflate at all? That is not explained.

matteoraso 1y ago

I'm in the same boat as you. Even if there's slight issues with Firefox, being able to synchronize my profile with my phone using the Firefox app outweighs all of that. AFAIK, Chrome doesn't have that.

amy214 1y ago

>Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day Completely agree, Mozilla and Chrom is a lot like a president election, they both suck hard, you're kinda stuck choosing the lesser of two evils. I mean Kamala isn't great, but me, as a dainty woman who happens to have a penis and does not happen to have documentation surrounding my residency in the US, Kamala isn't so bad in comparison! Kamala is firefox.

ivell 1y ago

In the past I was annoyed with Firefox due to sluggishness and propensity to defects. But since 2 years I have been using Firefox daily and I am quite happy with it. They are doing at least somethings right.