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> Meanwhile, the over thinkers on Hacker News come up with convoluted reasons to hate on Firefox every time the subject arises...Firefox is our last best hope f

> Meanwhile, the over thinkers on Hacker News come up with convoluted reasons to hate on Firefox every time the subject arises...Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition. It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings in about:config and make edits to userChrome.css It isn't bots complaining about Firefox here, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into. Users who are seriously concerned about what Mozilla is prioritizing, and who are genuinely worried about what is at stake. I hope people here never stop bitching about Firefox. Refusing to talk about Firefox's problems wont help make them go away. Keep discussing what you'd like to see in Firefox and what things you hope they'll focus on and prioritize. There are Firefox devs and mozilla employees around here. If we're lucky, a few of them might see and listen to some of what we say. It's the most tech savvy users who disable all the telemetry and data collection, so our feedback isn't really going to be seen any other way.

nubinetwork 1mo ago
> I hope people here never stop bitching about Firefox. Its getting harder and harder, at some point they'll deprecate their last sane ESR, and we'll all get stuck with all their junk.
- jaggederest 1mo ago
  This is exactly and precisely why open source exists, for both the "never upgrade frozen version" case, and the extension into "fork it and make your own" case
  - bluGill 1mo ago
    Something like Firefox is so complex that I could not fork it and make my own. I mean, I could, but the amount of changes I could put in would be trivial unless I'm getting paid full time. Even if I was paid full time, realistically, one person paid full time, no matter how good, just can't make an impact in the browser today. I'm not paid full time to work on a web browser. As a volunteer, I can't find the time to dedicate to that. I could do a few lines here and there if I really got dedicated, but like most people, I have a life. I have kids and such. My retirement account won't fund my midlife crisis to quit my job and work on a web browser, so I depend on something to build a good browser. And that is assuming I even would work on a web browser if I could afford to do whatever I want full time. There are a ton of other activities in my community that need volunteer help, some of which I'm helping a little bit, but I could do more for. I, like many here, have wished that we could donate a small amount to Firefox every month to fun development, however it turns out that the Mozilla Foundation does not fund development of Firefox and so any money would go not to Firefox but to other causes of which I may or may not support but are not a web browser which is what I want to support.
    - wlesieutre 1mo ago
      Other people do fork Firefox though, like Zen browser https://zen-browser.app/ https://zen-browser.app/ https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop
      - p-e-w 1mo ago
        There are a lot of good community forks of Chromium also. And no, a fork of Chromium isn’t “the same as Chrome”.
        nik282000 1mo ago
        Chromium forks are not the same as Chrome but it does help Alphabet keep a strangle hold on the render engine ecology. And eithr way, monocultures are bad, a surprise vulnerability could nuke 70% of users overnight, which could be partiularly bad with features like WebSerial and WebUSB.
        unloader6118 1mo ago
        What does "keep a strangle hold on the render engine ecology" even meant? Does "make Firefox compatible with more web site" make chrome stronger? A thought experiment: if Firefox can use all chrome extension, does this make chrome stronger? I guess yes, right? What makes a website different from extension? [ I am trying to show the "chrome ecology" argument is ridiculous, not saying we show stop supporting website ]
        wlesieutre 1mo ago
        It's like IE6 was - whatever Google/Chrome wants to do effectively becomes mandatory because nearly everyone is using it. Firefox has to follow along because of all the web developers who only test things in Chrome and expect all browsers to work exactly like Chrome does. If anything about your browser is different, a website doesn't work, and if you complain the response will be "We don't support Firefox, you should use Chrome or Edge instead."
  - zamadatix 1mo ago
    The moment it comes to that level of complexity is well past the moment it matters for browser diversity anymore. There is no shortage of open source browser codebases or random forks using them, there is a shortage of development paid in some form other than selling out the users.
  - okanat 1mo ago
    For a browser, that's not really possible without a significant team of over-the-average and paid developers. There are a lot of complexities in a browser. It has to have its own GPU driver, JIT compiler, optimized scheduler to pull page components, another scheduler to run JS, a cross-platform rendering abstraction, hacks for 30+ years of WWW. All of that should be fast. Because everything else is extremely slow and wasteful on Web. People who can handle this complexity are extremely mobile in the industry. They can always find employment in a much better paying place than Mozilla. And a competitive browser has to have such developers on generous payroll. One of the issues with Firefox is its codebase. Some parts of it are slowly rotting and it has its own fair share of 20-year-old bugs. Mozilla is slowly failing to keep up with the ever changing landscape and dealing with the age of their codebase. There is a reason why Electron could be developed with Chromium but not Firefox. Mozilla really tried this as well, it just didn't work. If you're forking, Chromium or Safari are a better start point than Firefox.
    - tornado134 1mo ago
      [dead]
    - jaggederest 28d ago
      I'm pretty sure firefox itself is a direct contradiction to this, but ok...
      - okanat 20d ago
        How so? Firefox isn't a small, raggedy development project. Mozilla developers are well-paid and Mozilla has offices in a premium location and it can afford paying millions to their CEO, despite losing significant marketshare.
  - throwatdem12311 1mo ago
    You don’t want a “never upgrade frozen version” for a web browser that is terrifying. Also without Mozilla (and Google’s funding), “just fork it and make your own” isn’t reasonable either. If Mozilla/Firefox goes away, so do all those ragequit forks maintained by a group of people I can count on one hand. It would be up to companies like Redhat, Suse and/or Canonical (preferably AND) to step in but realistically I don’t see that happening either.
- autoexec 1mo ago
  There are forks which will keep the sanity alive, but I worry about how long Firefox will survive if everyone moves to them, and I have doubts about how well those forks will be maintained after Firefox is gone.
  - flir 1mo ago
    On the bright side, there will finally be a compelling reason to move to an alternative protocol like Gemini.
    - okanat 1mo ago
      If 99.9999% is on WWW, nobody will move to Gemini. There is no business to build on Gemini, no publicly accessible, culturally broad community exists on it and none will exist. You'll only find programmers on Gemini. No authors, philosophers, non-IT engineers/makers with their projects. WWW has organically grown. Gemini has to be equally or more capable and more user and business friendly to have a significant contributor base.
      - flir 1mo ago
        Sounds peaceful. But seriously, web is asymptotically approaching zero usefulness precisely because of all those "capabilities". In those circumstances, can't you see a million nerds muttering "we'll build our own interweb! with blackjack and hookers!" And one of them might even get lucky, and get a tipping point. Gemini's just an example. I don't think web's ever going away for corporate stuff, but I can imagine the cultural party moving next door, to a less capable protocol.
        nik282000 1mo ago
        It's like Reddit and Lemmy. The majority of users did not switch to Lemmy but the ones that did seem to engage more and share cooler stuff. They are there on purpose, not because it's the default platform.
        1mo ago
- nosioptar 1mo ago
  There's still seamonkey, lynx, and I think emacs has a browser built in somewhere. Konqueror could be an option.
  - autoexec 1mo ago
    Eventually we'll have ladybird too
    - glenstein 1mo ago
      "When Ladybird comes out" is starting to sound like "when Star Citizen is released"
    - account42 1mo ago
      I expect we'll se at least five more language switches before that happens.
    - nosioptar 1mo ago
      Ever screenshot I've seen of ladybird makes me not want to use it. It's too "modern". I need functional software where the text and background aren't the same color.
trueno 1mo ago
i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain. my opinion doesn't matter more then the next guys. but when you see where this is headed because you've seen it countless times, there is always the "it works fine for me" guy and that is the most infuriating thing ever. a great example is microsoft teams, which is by every metric the shittiest application on my computer and there is always a "i don't have a problem with it" guy somewhere. the frustration i have with that is the "i don't have a problem with it" crowd is the poster child for lower standards and shittier software experiences. there seems to be no meaningful way to convey "hey, you should care about this". firefox fumbled super hard earlier this year trying to push their on-by-default AI. it took entirely too long to get them to backtrack a little. you could feel the insulation between customer feedback and their teams working it, they already have the operating models in place to try and force an enshittified offering and you can tell their new MO means they are hungry to do it and i expect more bullshit from firefox up ahead. hopefully we have other options locked and loaded before we get there because they're playing with fire considering how much user share they don't have. mozilla has completely shifted its priorities and structure, i do not expect them to move independently in a direction that benefits us anymore. no one should be surprised if/when they resume shipping some real bullshit up ahead
- cindyllm 1mo ago
  [dead]
- autoexec 1mo ago
  > i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain. That's fair. In this case though, the divide is pretty massive and also important. A lot of people couldn't tell you what a browser is. They just know what button to hit to make Facebook appear on their screen. A few would know what a browser is, but couldn't tell you what engine it used or why that would even matter. Many of the folks around here know about browsers in a way that goes far beyond what is typical. We've sought out and experimented with several. We've written websites, extensions, and applications for them. We understand how browsers work, and the standards and protocols involved in what they do. The result is that we tend to hold stronger opinions about web browsers than many others would. Our knowledge matters especially to Mozilla because the user who couldn't tell you what a browser is isn't going to bother going to their app store and searching for a new one. We are the ones who go to our friends and family and tell them about Firefox. We encourage them to install a new program on their devices and to learn to recognize and use an unfamiliar icon whenever they want to search "The Google". The more users like that Firefox pushes away, the more they'll miss out on the benefits of that kind of evangelism. It used to be a whole lot easier to recommend Firefox. I could tell a moderately skilled person to download it and install it. If someone weren't comfortable with downloading and installing software I could install it for them plus an extension or two in just a few minutes. I knew firefox would work for them, and not try to exploit them. That's no longer the case. Now firefox provides an enshittified product out of the box, and every update threatens more harm. While I might be willing and able to keep an eye on whatever new bullshit Mozilla pushes and make a bunch of config changes and customizations to work around it, I can't expect my less technical or passionate friends and family to do that.
bpbp-mango 1mo ago
> Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads oh ok I'll change to Chrome then surely they would never do stuff like this
- trueno 1mo ago
  i missed the part where op you're replying to said switching to chrome was the alternative to pursue over holding firefoxes nuts to the fire.
  - glenstein 1mo ago
    I mean people do sincerely argue that (edit: they're literally doing it in this same tree of replies as yours), and I think they do it precisely because it hasn't occurred to them to think in comparative terms. So I think if you're going to be ambiguous on a point where ambiguity is inexcusable you deserve to get nailed for it every time.
- p-e-w 1mo ago
  Firefox has indeed done things that are worse than anything Chrome has done, such as abusing a privileged update channel to push content advertising a TV show to user’s browsers without their knowledge or consent.
  - usernomdeguerre 1mo ago
    Chrome and Google have not done worse than a nearly-10-year-old incident that was walked back 3 days later and hasn't resurfaced since? That's truly your position? I'm sorry but I don't take you seriously.
  - Larrikin 1mo ago
    Have you ever used stock Android TV? They push out updates daily about TV shows and even snack food ads.
  - ragequittah 1mo ago
GuB-42 1mo ago
I will go further and say that people hate on Firefox because they care. We don't see many people here hating on Edge for instance, they may hate the fact that it always wants to force itself in, but not the browser itself. And that's simply because they don't use it, they don't even bother trying, they don't know what to hate about it and they don't care. Occasionally, some people say it is actually good, they get ignored. Compared to this, hate is a good thing.
- eahm 1mo ago
  > hate is a good thing. Hate more if you care. The more you hate, the more you care. Support hate. Relax people it's a joke, if I have to say it it's not funny anymore.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
- culi 1mo ago
  I'm not sure about that. I think there's plenty of people who shit on Firefox to justify to their own ethical standards their preference for some Chromium-based browser.
  - kraken_cult 1mo ago
    I'm failing to parse the "own ethical standards" as it relates to chromium-based browsers and this conversation about firefox..can you maybe explain, does removing the ability for users to block adds seem more ethical than not?
    - yndoendo 1mo ago
      People often will tell lies to themselves and other to support their personal ideology. Product A is bad and so is product B. So why should I move from A to B? They are try to rationalize their belief system versus looking at realty. Reality is that non-tech people to know what surfing the web is like with Ad-Block vs non-Ad-Block browsing. Once you teach some one it becomes night and day. Without teaching someone very few people will step out of their comfort-zone to self educate.
BenFranklin100 1mo ago
This rant reminds me why Linux has limited penetration. Its user base is made up of opinionated users who view compromise along the way to something larger as a moral failure.
- Avicebron 1mo ago
  People saw what happened when you compromise with the ad companies. Remember when Google was good?
- autoexec 1mo ago
  Some things are absolutely worth refusing to compromise on.
- account42 1mo ago
  If other users are happy with Windows then theirs not the culture I want Linux to ever adopt.
Forgeties79 1mo ago
Normally I'd agree but at this point it's basically "Firefox is mismanaged, updoots to the left my 1337zors" behavior. It's basically a meme. It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted. Yes they make mistakes. Yes they can be frustrating. But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged. People whine about the features every time. Guess what? I like sync. I like having a dedicated container for the rare times I must log in to google. I like some of these "useless" things they "tack on." Not every change must be met with "nobody asked for it." I actually don't want a super basic, boring browser - that's what I have mullvad browser for! FF is my daily driver, sometimes they roll out stuff I legitimately want and expect.
- wtallis 1mo ago
  Sync and container tabs aren't on the list of features I recall seeing people complain about.
  - Forgeties79 29d ago
    Everyone complains about something is the point.
- p-e-w 1mo ago
  > It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted. That’s because this mismanagement has been going on for nearly 10 years now, nothing is being done to address it, and if anything, it seems to be getting progressively worse.
- autoexec 1mo ago
  > But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged. As much as Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of Good, the existence of Worse shouldn't make anyone stop demanding Better. Generally, while I know it can take time away from working on other things, I don't mind if firefox adds optional features like Sync, FlyWeb, Pocket, or Hello as long as they can be easily and permanently disabled. Ideally they wouldn't be installed by default and users would be informed about what the features are, told what the risks of installing/using them are, and given an option to enable them or not first.
giancarlostoro 1mo ago
At this point I will gladly take an announcement where CloudFlare buys them out and frees the Fox from annoying corporate interests, they just give everyone a decent free browser, bring back the oxidation effort and overhaul Firefox to be all our Rust as Quantum was aiming towards. Someone needs to take Firefox from Mozilla itself and provide it better funding under the understanding no more shennanigans.
- autoexec 1mo ago
  > At this point I will gladly take an announcement where CloudFlare buys them out and frees the Fox from annoying corporate interests I don't see how cloudflare buying firefox would keep it from being a victim of corporate interests. That'd just make them subject to the corporate interests of cloudflare instead.
  - arvid-lind 1mo ago
    Unless they mean Cloudflare is actually a political entity, as it was created, but that doesn't make their claim any better.
  - giancarlostoro 29d ago
    They could basically re-form Firefox as a non-profit where they provide funding, but control the non-profit org enough to sway it from wasting funds, not to mention Mozilla's war chest is insane, its no wonder they have bought up some startups before.
- nosioptar 1mo ago
  Scumsuckers at cloudflare buying Firefox would be the final nail for me. Cloudflare is every bit as evil as google or Microsoft.
- jasonlotito 1mo ago
  > CloudFlare buys them out That's even worse.
- pibaker 1mo ago
Telaneo 1mo ago
I love Firefox. It just doesn't always feel like it loves me back.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 1mo ago
  Same. I want to love Firefox, but it does not have the polish on Android compared to Chrome-based browsers.
  - connicpu 1mo ago
    On Android I use Firefox despite the rough edges simply because the usability gain of the mobile web with ublock Origin is insane. Also it's nice sending tabs between desktop and mobile.
  - kxrm 1mo ago
    > polish on Android Would you care to expand? I've been using Firefox on Android for years and haven't noticed a lack of polish. However, I am genuinely curious what I am missing out on.
    - glenstein 1mo ago
      Same, especially with the recent redesign I think it's actually super polished.
    - PennRobotics 1mo ago
      I'll reinstall now for a fresh opinion vs Kiwi (my current least hated mobile browser; Chrome with Extensions minus tab groups or AI junk) Prefaced: I respect Mozilla's mission. All of these criticisms ARE overly harsh. At the same time, app UI should be as invisible as possible to the user, and Mozilla's apps are... "loud" My last installs of Firefox Klar and Developer a year or two ago had the APKs at over 200 MB, no ability to block sound per-site, confusing UI icons (e.g. I couldn't find the forward button after clicking back, abstract shapes for everything), reader mode that doesn't place you at the same place where you were on the original page, annoying gestures that can't be disabled (swiping tabs away UGGGHHHH), Collections which were really quite silly/not my thing, no toolbar customizability like in the desktop app, no WebHID, and data collection on by default. Today, Firefox is under 100 MB. It has very much bought into Android's overrounded/inproperly-whitespaced/shadow-heavy/unintuitively-animated Material 3 Expressive. Like most Material Design apps, this Firefox is ugly in a way that offers zero usability benefit: Despite the excessive margins nearly everywhere the three dot menu and menu search icon are still too close to the screen edge. I would place extra emphasis on the unused 8 mm above and 6 mm below the URL text, which SHOULD be 2% rather than 9% of my screen real estate. I have always felt that Mozilla could join Canonical in dumping the Nickelodeon color scheme. (Did the founders of all these plus FedEx go to Clemson or something??) At least respect my device theme (grey) rather than Grimace purple everywhere! It's particularly strange to me that they have 23 different icons to choose from as well as a "Device Theme" setting but no method of deamethysting all the UI elements. Tab overview and tabs. Holding a tab selects its checkbox, holding it longer does "something" but it's not clear what, I guess "show full URL" and then eventually "Share"? The "swipe tab away" gesture is still there. Closing multiple tabs creates a sequence of "Closed tab (Undo)" toasts, so you aren't actually sure which toast to click that will undo a specific closure. (Coupled with the swipe detail, it becomes annoying accidentally swiping a tab away while deliberately closing others.) Per-tab disabling of Sound is still missing; this is not the same as Autoplay! There are prominent features that I'd never use: private mode icon, "grab tabs from any device", "search your tabs", the giant "FIREFOX IS ON GUARD" reminder, a home screen. New Tab is across the entire screen from the tab overview button, so you either need to enable the New Tab shortcut (which encroaches on URL space) or just live with "tap top-right, tap bottom-right" for every new tab you'll create in your lifetime which is DEFINITELY not nice for one-handed navigation. There was enough space in the tab overview top bar for a "New Tab" button, but then they'd have to ditch the default Jetpack Compose floating action button. Everything else. The shortcut to get to Settings is in a different place on each View. I couldn't find Reader Mode at first. It only shows up on supported pages and is not as customizable as desktop Firefox. Good enough. Collections still seem dumb as hell. Maybe I need to use them to appreciate them. I still have to change just about every default setting to match my personal preferences. WebHID will never be added. There are a lot of passionate opinions on HID/USB in the browser with solid moral stances against its adoption. I get this and generally agree. However. If I want to reprogram a Gen 1 Shure MVX2U with a cellphone---and I often do---my options are writing my own APK or some very quick/dirty Javascript that I can edit/host anywhere. Mozilla takes away the convenient option and leaves only the labor intensive Google-approved technique. Oh, and I guess there's no about:config unless you re-enable it at chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml which is not-at-all memorable. :( about:config doesn't matter much anyway, since I can't find any flag that will improve any one complaint I've listed. I liken Firefox to mediocre toilet paper. It gets its job done and is certainly better than nothing but can get irritating to use day after day.
Barrin92 1mo ago
>It isn't bots complaining about Firefox here, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into The problem isn't that they're frustrated it's that they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about. They don't just complain for themselves, they think this is the causal explanation for Firefox declining market share. Which it isn't because what they complain about 99% of people have never heard of. Nobody out there cares about who the CEO of Mozilla is or what detail of their Term of Service for telemetry they've changed. Power users is the only thing Firefox doesn't lack.
- autoexec 1mo ago
  > they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about. The average user doesn't really understand what a browser is, or how it works, and will never bother to look for an alternative to whatever default browser shipped with their OS. If Firefox plans on surviving by appealing to that audience they're doomed to fail. Firefox got what success it's had by appealing to the people who care about browsers. They installed Firefox and then convinced the other people in their lives who couldn't care less about what a web browser is to install and use Firefox. It was easy for power users to recommend Firefox because it was a good product that offered clear advantages and didn't exploit its userbase. Alienating the people who know and care about browsers by enshittifying is probably not going to work out for Mozilla, and that means we all lose.
  - glenstein 1mo ago
    This is complete revisionist history. Mozilla actually did the dang thing with project Quantum which was a massive overhaul of performance and stability when the browser was arguably at its lowest point in terms of a performance gap with Google Chrome They completely revitalized the browser and... kept losing market share. Because it's 99% about distribution and Chrome was distributed by the world's most visited website and the pre installed default on over a billion devices. In fact, we have a perfect natural experiment for what it looks like to execute on features perfectly, listen to core user concerns, getting first to market on mobile devices, and outcompeting on customizability and features as well as experiment with every imaginable fundraising model you could imagine. Opera was that company, and to this day I maintain that nobody has a better browser engine than Presto at its peak, I still think even now, in terms of features, innovation, customizability. Opera was the best browser company that ever existed. If being a perfect browser company was rewarded with market share we would all be using Presto right now. But browser economics just don't work that way. Also, there's a history of curbing browser monopoly dominance by giving users choice (antitrust case against Microsoft in the '90s), and Mozilla's market share issues would be solved overnight if Android users had to choose from a list of browsers. The narrative that market share change has anything to do with feature development is a hallucination born in the backwaters of internet comment sections and completely ignores the actual drivers, which are the flexing of monopoly power and pre-installed defaults.
linuxhansl 1mo ago
> when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company What would you have them do? Somehow they have to make some money somehow. Alternatively they have to live purely from donations, which means that people like you and I have to part with of our money. Or they could be purely open source, in which case people like and I donate our time.
- autoexec 1mo ago
  It's not an either/or situation. For many years now people have been begging Mozilla to allow them to give money to help fund firefox (and only firefox) but Mozilla has refused. I can't promise that allowing it would provide all the funds they need, but certainly every little bit helps. People could continue to contribute code to the project, but that requires a lot more time, effort, and no small amount of skill compared to the time it takes to enter your credit card number and submit and an online form. Contributing code to Firefox is still a good thing, but it's a process (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contribution_quickref.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contrib...) that won't be for everyone.
  - glenstein 1mo ago
    There is no precedent for donations on the scale of what Mozilla gets from search licensing. The best online fundraising drive on the planet is Wikipedia with orders of magnitude more users and they don't raise half of what Mozilla spends on keeping up with Google. It's not the panacea people keep assuming it is, it's just one of many accusations that gets flung at the wall.
    - aragilar 1mo ago
      Except Thunderbird now does run on donations (though is looking a relevant additional funding sources, e.g. providing hosted email: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/ https://www.tb.pro/en-US/). This is not to say Mozilla can't seek out other sources of money, or develop appropriate ancillary services, but the absence of an option to just give money for Firefox (and Firefox only) is noticeable.
fjcururuvy7 1mo ago
Can we donate a portion of our Claude subscription to open source yet? Just fork it and have the agents maintain security patches moving forward.
_dark_matter_ 1mo ago
I worked at Mozilla for quite a long time. I can tell you that MANY employees will be reading every comment in this thread. Hello mozillians! Don't forget to do something good for the web tomorrow!
- mmooss 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mplanchard 1mo ago
    Seriously, I’m with the person who says people hating on Firefox are often just trying to justify sticking with Chrome due to the inertia. I’ve been exclusively using Firefox for many years. I don’t even have a Chromium browser installed! (I just nix-shell it if I need to test anything.) I love the raft of new features that have been coming through recently! I heavily use tab groups, profiles, split view, and the baked in VPN. The loud ones are always the complainers, which is a problem for adoption, which is exactly what TFA is getting at.
  - shooly 1mo ago
    > abuse and ignorance Toxic positivity is what's abusive and ignorant.
  - account42 1mo ago
    Are you seriously suggesting that developers isolating themselves into a yes-man bubble ever gets good results?
    - mmooss 1mo ago
      I'm sure you can think of alternatives.
  - Vinnl 1mo ago
    I mean, there are plenty of reasonable takes (some of which are criticism) too. Generally, working at Mozilla doesn't make it much more torturous than before, when I was merely an unpaid open web advocate :) (Reading every comment is a bit much though.)
binkHN 1mo ago
Hate that they recently implemented PWAs, but didn't bother making sure the icon for the site worked, so all PWAs have the genetic Firefox icon. The most valuable feature of PWAs is to identify a tab as a standalone app and there's no fix for this in sight.
- Vinnl 1mo ago
  I just tried it out with this page, and it gets the HN icon for me. I am on Nightly and on Linux, so possibly this is an actual bug you're running into, but no fix in sight might be too pessimistic. But definitely worth reporting otherewise.
  - binkHN 1mo ago
    Wonderful to hear this is fixed in Nightly on Linux; thanks for the heads up. I reported this several months ago.
    - Vinnl 1mo ago
      Keep in mind that just because it works for me, that doesn't mean that you're not running into a bug that I'm not, so I can't make any promises about it actually being fixed for you :)
Eji1700 1mo ago
> It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings in about:config and make edits to userChrome.css On the one hand, you're totally right. Pushback should exist. On the other hand, I have seen some seriously lazy and wild justifications for sticking in the chrome universe because tech users aren't immune to justifying a bad product through inertia (and, honestly, are probably champions at it). I have seen and heard plenty of firefox "can't handle all the sites they need" and I have always been curious as to what these people are doing because I've been on FF for decades and the ONLY time I switch to a chrome browser is for VIA (and that's a whole google did a standard no one else wants to do situation). To be fair, I suspect some of that has to do with major web dev stuff that I don't have to do, so it is very possible I'm actually just missing the mark here and the tooling/use case is really that much better in chrome (although I know that's its own issue since that's kinda the problem), and there are those who've found some major feature on a chrome spinoff that they just love and FF doesn't do well. Still accounting from those, I'd safely bet money a lot of people who claim firefox just cannot work for them haven't really bothered to try to adopt. It's functionally identical to me outside of the whole "better adblock" and "arguably better bookmarks i forget to use".
- f3b5 1mo ago
  For what it's worth, I use Firefox for 10+ years now for web development, and in my opinion their tooling is actually superior to Chrome. Small example: if I just want to test visual responsiveness of a page at different breakpoints, Firefox lets me close the bottom toolbar and just play around with the top window. In Chrome I need to keep the bottom toolbar open the whole time, cluttering my screen, because if I close it the whole devtools closes too.
- ghthor 1mo ago
  Tree style tabs, can never go back to a browser without them; Firefox only place with them (via extension).
- 29d ago
deleted 1mo ago
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phyzix5761 1mo ago
How does Mozilla fund Firefox right now? I'm genuinely curious for a free product, how can they generate revenue without doing shady ad and data collection stuff?
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- account42 1mo ago
  How does Doctors Without Borders generate revenue?? How does the EFF??? How is the FSF able to fund GCC development?????
  - phyzix5761 29d ago
    All of those are non profit organizations that receive donations. It seems Firefox is owned by Mozilla Corporation which is the for profit branch of the Mozilla Foundation. So again, how do they fund Firefox as a for profit company?
deleted 1mo ago
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0dayz 1mo ago
It's one thing to criticize clearly malicious or incompetent actions Mozilla makes, the majority of the complaints are when Firefox release a new version and people on HN bring up their personal pet peeves every single time instead of anything positive about said release or news. I'm very sick in general of "the criticism will continue until moral improve" attitude that has become more and more common.
- account42 1mo ago
  And we are very sick of the enshittification will continue no matter what attitude from Mozilla. Sorry not sorry that you feel bad about people keep telling Mozilla off for the things where they keep being bad actors. Criticism will continue until there is no more reason for it. This frog will not be boiled.
  - 0dayz 29d ago
    [dead]
HackerThemAll 1mo ago
You'd want this browser for free, wouldn't you? Have you donated to Mozilla Foundation? So you're bitching because the free product that you don't support finds ways to sustain economically the hordes of developers that are trying to improve it for you. And no, Chrome never "bought an ad-tech company, collected data on users, and used chrome to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force users to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings". NEVER IN THE WORLD. That's why you use it.
- account42 1mo ago
  Donating to the Mozilla Foundation does NOT pay for Firefox development. Mozilla Corporation does not get to do whatever they want to get funds for something that should be a project run for the public benefit. Google/Chrome being worse is irrelevant to criticism of Mozilla/Firefox.
wolvoleo 29d ago
Yes Mozilla keeps trying to make it a glossy mainstream product, a userbase which they've long and irrevocably lost. And I hate them trying to push the ethical ads angle. For my there is zero ethics in advertising anymore.

nubinetwork 1mo ago

> I hope people here never stop bitching about Firefox. Its getting harder and harder, at some point they'll deprecate their last sane ESR, and we'll all get stuck with all their junk.

jaggederest 1mo ago
This is exactly and precisely why open source exists, for both the "never upgrade frozen version" case, and the extension into "fork it and make your own" case
- bluGill 1mo ago
  Something like Firefox is so complex that I could not fork it and make my own. I mean, I could, but the amount of changes I could put in would be trivial unless I'm getting paid full time. Even if I was paid full time, realistically, one person paid full time, no matter how good, just can't make an impact in the browser today. I'm not paid full time to work on a web browser. As a volunteer, I can't find the time to dedicate to that. I could do a few lines here and there if I really got dedicated, but like most people, I have a life. I have kids and such. My retirement account won't fund my midlife crisis to quit my job and work on a web browser, so I depend on something to build a good browser. And that is assuming I even would work on a web browser if I could afford to do whatever I want full time. There are a ton of other activities in my community that need volunteer help, some of which I'm helping a little bit, but I could do more for. I, like many here, have wished that we could donate a small amount to Firefox every month to fun development, however it turns out that the Mozilla Foundation does not fund development of Firefox and so any money would go not to Firefox but to other causes of which I may or may not support but are not a web browser which is what I want to support.
  - wlesieutre 1mo ago
    Other people do fork Firefox though, like Zen browser https://zen-browser.app/ https://zen-browser.app/ https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop
    - p-e-w 1mo ago
      There are a lot of good community forks of Chromium also. And no, a fork of Chromium isn’t “the same as Chrome”.
      - nik282000 1mo ago
        Chromium forks are not the same as Chrome but it does help Alphabet keep a strangle hold on the render engine ecology. And eithr way, monocultures are bad, a surprise vulnerability could nuke 70% of users overnight, which could be partiularly bad with features like WebSerial and WebUSB.
        unloader6118 1mo ago
        What does "keep a strangle hold on the render engine ecology" even meant? Does "make Firefox compatible with more web site" make chrome stronger? A thought experiment: if Firefox can use all chrome extension, does this make chrome stronger? I guess yes, right? What makes a website different from extension? [ I am trying to show the "chrome ecology" argument is ridiculous, not saying we show stop supporting website ]
        wlesieutre 1mo ago
        It's like IE6 was - whatever Google/Chrome wants to do effectively becomes mandatory because nearly everyone is using it. Firefox has to follow along because of all the web developers who only test things in Chrome and expect all browsers to work exactly like Chrome does. If anything about your browser is different, a website doesn't work, and if you complain the response will be "We don't support Firefox, you should use Chrome or Edge instead."
- zamadatix 1mo ago
  The moment it comes to that level of complexity is well past the moment it matters for browser diversity anymore. There is no shortage of open source browser codebases or random forks using them, there is a shortage of development paid in some form other than selling out the users.
- okanat 1mo ago
  For a browser, that's not really possible without a significant team of over-the-average and paid developers. There are a lot of complexities in a browser. It has to have its own GPU driver, JIT compiler, optimized scheduler to pull page components, another scheduler to run JS, a cross-platform rendering abstraction, hacks for 30+ years of WWW. All of that should be fast. Because everything else is extremely slow and wasteful on Web. People who can handle this complexity are extremely mobile in the industry. They can always find employment in a much better paying place than Mozilla. And a competitive browser has to have such developers on generous payroll. One of the issues with Firefox is its codebase. Some parts of it are slowly rotting and it has its own fair share of 20-year-old bugs. Mozilla is slowly failing to keep up with the ever changing landscape and dealing with the age of their codebase. There is a reason why Electron could be developed with Chromium but not Firefox. Mozilla really tried this as well, it just didn't work. If you're forking, Chromium or Safari are a better start point than Firefox.
  - tornado134 1mo ago
    [dead]
  - jaggederest 28d ago
    I'm pretty sure firefox itself is a direct contradiction to this, but ok...
    - okanat 20d ago
      How so? Firefox isn't a small, raggedy development project. Mozilla developers are well-paid and Mozilla has offices in a premium location and it can afford paying millions to their CEO, despite losing significant marketshare.
- throwatdem12311 1mo ago
  You don’t want a “never upgrade frozen version” for a web browser that is terrifying. Also without Mozilla (and Google’s funding), “just fork it and make your own” isn’t reasonable either. If Mozilla/Firefox goes away, so do all those ragequit forks maintained by a group of people I can count on one hand. It would be up to companies like Redhat, Suse and/or Canonical (preferably AND) to step in but realistically I don’t see that happening either.
autoexec 1mo ago
There are forks which will keep the sanity alive, but I worry about how long Firefox will survive if everyone moves to them, and I have doubts about how well those forks will be maintained after Firefox is gone.
- flir 1mo ago
  On the bright side, there will finally be a compelling reason to move to an alternative protocol like Gemini.
  - okanat 1mo ago
    If 99.9999% is on WWW, nobody will move to Gemini. There is no business to build on Gemini, no publicly accessible, culturally broad community exists on it and none will exist. You'll only find programmers on Gemini. No authors, philosophers, non-IT engineers/makers with their projects. WWW has organically grown. Gemini has to be equally or more capable and more user and business friendly to have a significant contributor base.
    - flir 1mo ago
      Sounds peaceful. But seriously, web is asymptotically approaching zero usefulness precisely because of all those "capabilities". In those circumstances, can't you see a million nerds muttering "we'll build our own interweb! with blackjack and hookers!" And one of them might even get lucky, and get a tipping point. Gemini's just an example. I don't think web's ever going away for corporate stuff, but I can imagine the cultural party moving next door, to a less capable protocol.
      - nik282000 1mo ago
        It's like Reddit and Lemmy. The majority of users did not switch to Lemmy but the ones that did seem to engage more and share cooler stuff. They are there on purpose, not because it's the default platform.
        1mo ago
nosioptar 1mo ago
There's still seamonkey, lynx, and I think emacs has a browser built in somewhere. Konqueror could be an option.
- autoexec 1mo ago
  Eventually we'll have ladybird too
  - glenstein 1mo ago
    "When Ladybird comes out" is starting to sound like "when Star Citizen is released"
  - account42 1mo ago
    I expect we'll se at least five more language switches before that happens.
  - nosioptar 1mo ago
    Ever screenshot I've seen of ladybird makes me not want to use it. It's too "modern". I need functional software where the text and background aren't the same color.

trueno 1mo ago

i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain. my opinion doesn't matter more then the next guys. but when you see where this is headed because you've seen it countless times, there is always the "it works fine for me" guy and that is the most infuriating thing ever. a great example is microsoft teams, which is by every metric the shittiest application on my computer and there is always a "i don't have a problem with it" guy somewhere. the frustration i have with that is the "i don't have a problem with it" crowd is the poster child for lower standards and shittier software experiences. there seems to be no meaningful way to convey "hey, you should care about this". firefox fumbled super hard earlier this year trying to push their on-by-default AI. it took entirely too long to get them to backtrack a little. you could feel the insulation between customer feedback and their teams working it, they already have the operating models in place to try and force an enshittified offering and you can tell their new MO means they are hungry to do it and i expect more bullshit from firefox up ahead. hopefully we have other options locked and loaded before we get there because they're playing with fire considering how much user share they don't have. mozilla has completely shifted its priorities and structure, i do not expect them to move independently in a direction that benefits us anymore. no one should be surprised if/when they resume shipping some real bullshit up ahead

cindyllm 1mo ago
[dead]
autoexec 1mo ago
> i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain. That's fair. In this case though, the divide is pretty massive and also important. A lot of people couldn't tell you what a browser is. They just know what button to hit to make Facebook appear on their screen. A few would know what a browser is, but couldn't tell you what engine it used or why that would even matter. Many of the folks around here know about browsers in a way that goes far beyond what is typical. We've sought out and experimented with several. We've written websites, extensions, and applications for them. We understand how browsers work, and the standards and protocols involved in what they do. The result is that we tend to hold stronger opinions about web browsers than many others would. Our knowledge matters especially to Mozilla because the user who couldn't tell you what a browser is isn't going to bother going to their app store and searching for a new one. We are the ones who go to our friends and family and tell them about Firefox. We encourage them to install a new program on their devices and to learn to recognize and use an unfamiliar icon whenever they want to search "The Google". The more users like that Firefox pushes away, the more they'll miss out on the benefits of that kind of evangelism. It used to be a whole lot easier to recommend Firefox. I could tell a moderately skilled person to download it and install it. If someone weren't comfortable with downloading and installing software I could install it for them plus an extension or two in just a few minutes. I knew firefox would work for them, and not try to exploit them. That's no longer the case. Now firefox provides an enshittified product out of the box, and every update threatens more harm. While I might be willing and able to keep an eye on whatever new bullshit Mozilla pushes and make a bunch of config changes and customizations to work around it, I can't expect my less technical or passionate friends and family to do that.

bpbp-mango 1mo ago

> Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads oh ok I'll change to Chrome then surely they would never do stuff like this

trueno 1mo ago
i missed the part where op you're replying to said switching to chrome was the alternative to pursue over holding firefoxes nuts to the fire.
- glenstein 1mo ago
  I mean people do sincerely argue that (edit: they're literally doing it in this same tree of replies as yours), and I think they do it precisely because it hasn't occurred to them to think in comparative terms. So I think if you're going to be ambiguous on a point where ambiguity is inexcusable you deserve to get nailed for it every time.
p-e-w 1mo ago
Firefox has indeed done things that are worse than anything Chrome has done, such as abusing a privileged update channel to push content advertising a TV show to user’s browsers without their knowledge or consent.
- usernomdeguerre 1mo ago
  Chrome and Google have not done worse than a nearly-10-year-old incident that was walked back 3 days later and hasn't resurfaced since? That's truly your position? I'm sorry but I don't take you seriously.
- Larrikin 1mo ago
  Have you ever used stock Android TV? They push out updates daily about TV shows and even snack food ads.
- ragequittah 1mo ago

GuB-42 1mo ago

I will go further and say that people hate on Firefox because they care. We don't see many people here hating on Edge for instance, they may hate the fact that it always wants to force itself in, but not the browser itself. And that's simply because they don't use it, they don't even bother trying, they don't know what to hate about it and they don't care. Occasionally, some people say it is actually good, they get ignored. Compared to this, hate is a good thing.

eahm 1mo ago
> hate is a good thing. Hate more if you care. The more you hate, the more you care. Support hate. Relax people it's a joke, if I have to say it it's not funny anymore.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
culi 1mo ago
I'm not sure about that. I think there's plenty of people who shit on Firefox to justify to their own ethical standards their preference for some Chromium-based browser.
- kraken_cult 1mo ago
  I'm failing to parse the "own ethical standards" as it relates to chromium-based browsers and this conversation about firefox..can you maybe explain, does removing the ability for users to block adds seem more ethical than not?
  - yndoendo 1mo ago
    People often will tell lies to themselves and other to support their personal ideology. Product A is bad and so is product B. So why should I move from A to B? They are try to rationalize their belief system versus looking at realty. Reality is that non-tech people to know what surfing the web is like with Ad-Block vs non-Ad-Block browsing. Once you teach some one it becomes night and day. Without teaching someone very few people will step out of their comfort-zone to self educate.

BenFranklin100 1mo ago

This rant reminds me why Linux has limited penetration. Its user base is made up of opinionated users who view compromise along the way to something larger as a moral failure.

Avicebron 1mo ago
People saw what happened when you compromise with the ad companies. Remember when Google was good?
autoexec 1mo ago
Some things are absolutely worth refusing to compromise on.
account42 1mo ago
If other users are happy with Windows then theirs not the culture I want Linux to ever adopt.

Forgeties79 1mo ago

Normally I'd agree but at this point it's basically "Firefox is mismanaged, updoots to the left my 1337zors" behavior. It's basically a meme. It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted. Yes they make mistakes. Yes they can be frustrating. But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged. People whine about the features every time. Guess what? I like sync. I like having a dedicated container for the rare times I must log in to google. I like some of these "useless" things they "tack on." Not every change must be met with "nobody asked for it." I actually don't want a super basic, boring browser - that's what I have mullvad browser for! FF is my daily driver, sometimes they roll out stuff I legitimately want and expect.

wtallis 1mo ago
Sync and container tabs aren't on the list of features I recall seeing people complain about.
- Forgeties79 29d ago
  Everyone complains about something is the point.
p-e-w 1mo ago
> It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted. That’s because this mismanagement has been going on for nearly 10 years now, nothing is being done to address it, and if anything, it seems to be getting progressively worse.
autoexec 1mo ago
> But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged. As much as Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of Good, the existence of Worse shouldn't make anyone stop demanding Better. Generally, while I know it can take time away from working on other things, I don't mind if firefox adds optional features like Sync, FlyWeb, Pocket, or Hello as long as they can be easily and permanently disabled. Ideally they wouldn't be installed by default and users would be informed about what the features are, told what the risks of installing/using them are, and given an option to enable them or not first.

giancarlostoro 1mo ago

At this point I will gladly take an announcement where CloudFlare buys them out and frees the Fox from annoying corporate interests, they just give everyone a decent free browser, bring back the oxidation effort and overhaul Firefox to be all our Rust as Quantum was aiming towards. Someone needs to take Firefox from Mozilla itself and provide it better funding under the understanding no more shennanigans.

autoexec 1mo ago
> At this point I will gladly take an announcement where CloudFlare buys them out and frees the Fox from annoying corporate interests I don't see how cloudflare buying firefox would keep it from being a victim of corporate interests. That'd just make them subject to the corporate interests of cloudflare instead.
- arvid-lind 1mo ago
  Unless they mean Cloudflare is actually a political entity, as it was created, but that doesn't make their claim any better.
- giancarlostoro 29d ago
  They could basically re-form Firefox as a non-profit where they provide funding, but control the non-profit org enough to sway it from wasting funds, not to mention Mozilla's war chest is insane, its no wonder they have bought up some startups before.
nosioptar 1mo ago
Scumsuckers at cloudflare buying Firefox would be the final nail for me. Cloudflare is every bit as evil as google or Microsoft.
jasonlotito 1mo ago
> CloudFlare buys them out That's even worse.
pibaker 1mo ago

Telaneo 1mo ago

I love Firefox. It just doesn't always feel like it loves me back.

8cvor6j844qw_d6 1mo ago
Same. I want to love Firefox, but it does not have the polish on Android compared to Chrome-based browsers.
- connicpu 1mo ago
  On Android I use Firefox despite the rough edges simply because the usability gain of the mobile web with ublock Origin is insane. Also it's nice sending tabs between desktop and mobile.
- kxrm 1mo ago
  > polish on Android Would you care to expand? I've been using Firefox on Android for years and haven't noticed a lack of polish. However, I am genuinely curious what I am missing out on.
  - glenstein 1mo ago
    Same, especially with the recent redesign I think it's actually super polished.
  - PennRobotics 1mo ago
    I'll reinstall now for a fresh opinion vs Kiwi (my current least hated mobile browser; Chrome with Extensions minus tab groups or AI junk) Prefaced: I respect Mozilla's mission. All of these criticisms ARE overly harsh. At the same time, app UI should be as invisible as possible to the user, and Mozilla's apps are... "loud" My last installs of Firefox Klar and Developer a year or two ago had the APKs at over 200 MB, no ability to block sound per-site, confusing UI icons (e.g. I couldn't find the forward button after clicking back, abstract shapes for everything), reader mode that doesn't place you at the same place where you were on the original page, annoying gestures that can't be disabled (swiping tabs away UGGGHHHH), Collections which were really quite silly/not my thing, no toolbar customizability like in the desktop app, no WebHID, and data collection on by default. Today, Firefox is under 100 MB. It has very much bought into Android's overrounded/inproperly-whitespaced/shadow-heavy/unintuitively-animated Material 3 Expressive. Like most Material Design apps, this Firefox is ugly in a way that offers zero usability benefit: Despite the excessive margins nearly everywhere the three dot menu and menu search icon are still too close to the screen edge. I would place extra emphasis on the unused 8 mm above and 6 mm below the URL text, which SHOULD be 2% rather than 9% of my screen real estate. I have always felt that Mozilla could join Canonical in dumping the Nickelodeon color scheme. (Did the founders of all these plus FedEx go to Clemson or something??) At least respect my device theme (grey) rather than Grimace purple everywhere! It's particularly strange to me that they have 23 different icons to choose from as well as a "Device Theme" setting but no method of deamethysting all the UI elements. Tab overview and tabs. Holding a tab selects its checkbox, holding it longer does "something" but it's not clear what, I guess "show full URL" and then eventually "Share"? The "swipe tab away" gesture is still there. Closing multiple tabs creates a sequence of "Closed tab (Undo)" toasts, so you aren't actually sure which toast to click that will undo a specific closure. (Coupled with the swipe detail, it becomes annoying accidentally swiping a tab away while deliberately closing others.) Per-tab disabling of Sound is still missing; this is not the same as Autoplay! There are prominent features that I'd never use: private mode icon, "grab tabs from any device", "search your tabs", the giant "FIREFOX IS ON GUARD" reminder, a home screen. New Tab is across the entire screen from the tab overview button, so you either need to enable the New Tab shortcut (which encroaches on URL space) or just live with "tap top-right, tap bottom-right" for every new tab you'll create in your lifetime which is DEFINITELY not nice for one-handed navigation. There was enough space in the tab overview top bar for a "New Tab" button, but then they'd have to ditch the default Jetpack Compose floating action button. Everything else. The shortcut to get to Settings is in a different place on each View. I couldn't find Reader Mode at first. It only shows up on supported pages and is not as customizable as desktop Firefox. Good enough. Collections still seem dumb as hell. Maybe I need to use them to appreciate them. I still have to change just about every default setting to match my personal preferences. WebHID will never be added. There are a lot of passionate opinions on HID/USB in the browser with solid moral stances against its adoption. I get this and generally agree. However. If I want to reprogram a Gen 1 Shure MVX2U with a cellphone---and I often do---my options are writing my own APK or some very quick/dirty Javascript that I can edit/host anywhere. Mozilla takes away the convenient option and leaves only the labor intensive Google-approved technique. Oh, and I guess there's no about:config unless you re-enable it at chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml which is not-at-all memorable. :( about:config doesn't matter much anyway, since I can't find any flag that will improve any one complaint I've listed. I liken Firefox to mediocre toilet paper. It gets its job done and is certainly better than nothing but can get irritating to use day after day.

Barrin92 1mo ago

>It isn't bots complaining about Firefox here, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into The problem isn't that they're frustrated it's that they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about. They don't just complain for themselves, they think this is the causal explanation for Firefox declining market share. Which it isn't because what they complain about 99% of people have never heard of. Nobody out there cares about who the CEO of Mozilla is or what detail of their Term of Service for telemetry they've changed. Power users is the only thing Firefox doesn't lack.

autoexec 1mo ago
> they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about. The average user doesn't really understand what a browser is, or how it works, and will never bother to look for an alternative to whatever default browser shipped with their OS. If Firefox plans on surviving by appealing to that audience they're doomed to fail. Firefox got what success it's had by appealing to the people who care about browsers. They installed Firefox and then convinced the other people in their lives who couldn't care less about what a web browser is to install and use Firefox. It was easy for power users to recommend Firefox because it was a good product that offered clear advantages and didn't exploit its userbase. Alienating the people who know and care about browsers by enshittifying is probably not going to work out for Mozilla, and that means we all lose.
- glenstein 1mo ago
  This is complete revisionist history. Mozilla actually did the dang thing with project Quantum which was a massive overhaul of performance and stability when the browser was arguably at its lowest point in terms of a performance gap with Google Chrome They completely revitalized the browser and... kept losing market share. Because it's 99% about distribution and Chrome was distributed by the world's most visited website and the pre installed default on over a billion devices. In fact, we have a perfect natural experiment for what it looks like to execute on features perfectly, listen to core user concerns, getting first to market on mobile devices, and outcompeting on customizability and features as well as experiment with every imaginable fundraising model you could imagine. Opera was that company, and to this day I maintain that nobody has a better browser engine than Presto at its peak, I still think even now, in terms of features, innovation, customizability. Opera was the best browser company that ever existed. If being a perfect browser company was rewarded with market share we would all be using Presto right now. But browser economics just don't work that way. Also, there's a history of curbing browser monopoly dominance by giving users choice (antitrust case against Microsoft in the '90s), and Mozilla's market share issues would be solved overnight if Android users had to choose from a list of browsers. The narrative that market share change has anything to do with feature development is a hallucination born in the backwaters of internet comment sections and completely ignores the actual drivers, which are the flexing of monopoly power and pre-installed defaults.

linuxhansl 1mo ago

> when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company What would you have them do? Somehow they have to make some money somehow. Alternatively they have to live purely from donations, which means that people like you and I have to part with of our money. Or they could be purely open source, in which case people like and I donate our time.

autoexec 1mo ago
It's not an either/or situation. For many years now people have been begging Mozilla to allow them to give money to help fund firefox (and only firefox) but Mozilla has refused. I can't promise that allowing it would provide all the funds they need, but certainly every little bit helps. People could continue to contribute code to the project, but that requires a lot more time, effort, and no small amount of skill compared to the time it takes to enter your credit card number and submit and an online form. Contributing code to Firefox is still a good thing, but it's a process (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contribution_quickref.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contrib...) that won't be for everyone.
- glenstein 1mo ago
  There is no precedent for donations on the scale of what Mozilla gets from search licensing. The best online fundraising drive on the planet is Wikipedia with orders of magnitude more users and they don't raise half of what Mozilla spends on keeping up with Google. It's not the panacea people keep assuming it is, it's just one of many accusations that gets flung at the wall.
  - aragilar 1mo ago
    Except Thunderbird now does run on donations (though is looking a relevant additional funding sources, e.g. providing hosted email: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/ https://www.tb.pro/en-US/). This is not to say Mozilla can't seek out other sources of money, or develop appropriate ancillary services, but the absence of an option to just give money for Firefox (and Firefox only) is noticeable.

fjcururuvy7 1mo ago

Can we donate a portion of our Claude subscription to open source yet? Just fork it and have the agents maintain security patches moving forward.

_dark_matter_ 1mo ago

I worked at Mozilla for quite a long time. I can tell you that MANY employees will be reading every comment in this thread. Hello mozillians! Don't forget to do something good for the web tomorrow!

mmooss 1mo ago
[flagged]
- mplanchard 1mo ago
  Seriously, I’m with the person who says people hating on Firefox are often just trying to justify sticking with Chrome due to the inertia. I’ve been exclusively using Firefox for many years. I don’t even have a Chromium browser installed! (I just nix-shell it if I need to test anything.) I love the raft of new features that have been coming through recently! I heavily use tab groups, profiles, split view, and the baked in VPN. The loud ones are always the complainers, which is a problem for adoption, which is exactly what TFA is getting at.
- shooly 1mo ago
  > abuse and ignorance Toxic positivity is what's abusive and ignorant.
- account42 1mo ago
  Are you seriously suggesting that developers isolating themselves into a yes-man bubble ever gets good results?
  - mmooss 1mo ago
    I'm sure you can think of alternatives.
- Vinnl 1mo ago
  I mean, there are plenty of reasonable takes (some of which are criticism) too. Generally, working at Mozilla doesn't make it much more torturous than before, when I was merely an unpaid open web advocate :) (Reading every comment is a bit much though.)

binkHN 1mo ago

Hate that they recently implemented PWAs, but didn't bother making sure the icon for the site worked, so all PWAs have the genetic Firefox icon. The most valuable feature of PWAs is to identify a tab as a standalone app and there's no fix for this in sight.

Vinnl 1mo ago
I just tried it out with this page, and it gets the HN icon for me. I am on Nightly and on Linux, so possibly this is an actual bug you're running into, but no fix in sight might be too pessimistic. But definitely worth reporting otherewise.
- binkHN 1mo ago
  Wonderful to hear this is fixed in Nightly on Linux; thanks for the heads up. I reported this several months ago.
  - Vinnl 1mo ago
    Keep in mind that just because it works for me, that doesn't mean that you're not running into a bug that I'm not, so I can't make any promises about it actually being fixed for you :)

Eji1700 1mo ago

> It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings in about:config and make edits to userChrome.css On the one hand, you're totally right. Pushback should exist. On the other hand, I have seen some seriously lazy and wild justifications for sticking in the chrome universe because tech users aren't immune to justifying a bad product through inertia (and, honestly, are probably champions at it). I have seen and heard plenty of firefox "can't handle all the sites they need" and I have always been curious as to what these people are doing because I've been on FF for decades and the ONLY time I switch to a chrome browser is for VIA (and that's a whole google did a standard no one else wants to do situation). To be fair, I suspect some of that has to do with major web dev stuff that I don't have to do, so it is very possible I'm actually just missing the mark here and the tooling/use case is really that much better in chrome (although I know that's its own issue since that's kinda the problem), and there are those who've found some major feature on a chrome spinoff that they just love and FF doesn't do well. Still accounting from those, I'd safely bet money a lot of people who claim firefox just cannot work for them haven't really bothered to try to adopt. It's functionally identical to me outside of the whole "better adblock" and "arguably better bookmarks i forget to use".

f3b5 1mo ago
For what it's worth, I use Firefox for 10+ years now for web development, and in my opinion their tooling is actually superior to Chrome. Small example: if I just want to test visual responsiveness of a page at different breakpoints, Firefox lets me close the bottom toolbar and just play around with the top window. In Chrome I need to keep the bottom toolbar open the whole time, cluttering my screen, because if I close it the whole devtools closes too.
ghthor 1mo ago
Tree style tabs, can never go back to a browser without them; Firefox only place with them (via extension).
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phyzix5761 1mo ago

How does Mozilla fund Firefox right now? I'm genuinely curious for a free product, how can they generate revenue without doing shady ad and data collection stuff?

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account42 1mo ago
How does Doctors Without Borders generate revenue?? How does the EFF??? How is the FSF able to fund GCC development?????
- phyzix5761 29d ago
  All of those are non profit organizations that receive donations. It seems Firefox is owned by Mozilla Corporation which is the for profit branch of the Mozilla Foundation. So again, how do they fund Firefox as a for profit company?

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0dayz 1mo ago

It's one thing to criticize clearly malicious or incompetent actions Mozilla makes, the majority of the complaints are when Firefox release a new version and people on HN bring up their personal pet peeves every single time instead of anything positive about said release or news. I'm very sick in general of "the criticism will continue until moral improve" attitude that has become more and more common.

account42 1mo ago
And we are very sick of the enshittification will continue no matter what attitude from Mozilla. Sorry not sorry that you feel bad about people keep telling Mozilla off for the things where they keep being bad actors. Criticism will continue until there is no more reason for it. This frog will not be boiled.
- 0dayz 29d ago
  [dead]

HackerThemAll 1mo ago

You'd want this browser for free, wouldn't you? Have you donated to Mozilla Foundation? So you're bitching because the free product that you don't support finds ways to sustain economically the hordes of developers that are trying to improve it for you. And no, Chrome never "bought an ad-tech company, collected data on users, and used chrome to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force users to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings". NEVER IN THE WORLD. That's why you use it.

account42 1mo ago
Donating to the Mozilla Foundation does NOT pay for Firefox development. Mozilla Corporation does not get to do whatever they want to get funds for something that should be a project run for the public benefit. Google/Chrome being worse is irrelevant to criticism of Mozilla/Firefox.

wolvoleo 29d ago

Yes Mozilla keeps trying to make it a glossy mainstream product, a userbase which they've long and irrevocably lost. And I hate them trying to push the ethical ads angle. For my there is zero ethics in advertising anymore.