Comment by nusl
2 days ago
I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
2 days ago
I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security.
I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is right, but the bad will of the tech crowd is a bit exhausting.
Writing this as a former Firefox contributor.
I never worked on Firefox, and am often critical of Mozilla, but I can second this sentiment. It's seemed like everything Mozilla does makes everyone mad, all the time. It's frustrating.
Also, compared to the scale of harm that Google does and the risk of it de facto controlling the web with the chromium engine, all the things that Mozilla does to piss people off should be small potatoes.
I'm still happy with mozilla. Keep it up!
It's the "vocal minority", right? Sure it's not fun to receive threats but it's a known fact that communicating over the Internet makes people unhinged. Maybe there's stuff to complain about but I am a happy Firefox user for .. what? over two decades! :) so, thanks for that.
If no one is sending you stupid threats online, are you even alive?
As a former Firefox user, I got fed up with the constant change for the sake of change. Why change the tabs? They were fine the way they were. People got mad about the addon situation since it broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons. And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned.
At least that's how it looked from this side. I switched to Vivaldi some 4-5 years ago, and it looks and works pretty much the same since I started using it. New features and changes have happened, but they've been able to be ignored/disabled/hidden without doing CSS brain surgery.
If/when the Google Adblockerblocker changes trickles down to Vivaldi I may have to crawl back to Firefox, but I dread the prospect.
> And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned.
When I worked on Firefox, most of the changes happened exactly because user research determined that users wanted them and/or that not having them hurt the product. We changed the tabs at least once because users thought that the old shape of tabs made the browser feel slow (true story, sadly). We changed the add-on API (after having warned add-on developers for at least 6 years) because the old API was incompatible with multi-threading, multi-process, sandboxing, which in turn was really bad for both performance and security.
I'll absolutely grant you that Mozilla hasn't been very good at communicating these choices, but again, the sheer hostility of tech crowds is exhausting.
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> broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons
> I switched to Vivaldi
You refer to important security improvements as "vague technical reasons" and you switched to Vivaldi, a browser that is based[1] on extended stable Chromium, which is not "recommended for any team where security is a primary concern"[2].
It seems you don't care about security.
[1] https://help.vivaldi.com/android/android-privacy/security-fa...
[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/p...
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I don't know but I've been using Firefox since forever and I can't even recall the tabs changing at all. Of course they have changed many times over the course of years, but that happens in every browser. I don't know what happened to tabs that affected you so badly? I feel like it's an excuse for some people sometime that if some little thing in the UI changes that they claim their whole flow is now compromised so that is the reason they are now using this other software, where the same stuff happens as far as I can see.
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In the latest version they changed something AGAIN, when you drag a tab too far to the left it's pinned automatically. Literally nobody asked for it and it makes me so angry, god I hate Mozilla. I only use Fiefox because it's the last browser with Manifest V2 (I have a lot of these add-ons) and as an add-on dev they made me even more angry with having double standards regarding their shitty add-on review system.
There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect. Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the browser and ignore the noise about anything else
There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on Chrome
As someone that uses Firefox as my main browser on desktop and mobile, I am curious here - what exactly are the complaints with Firefox?
I'm using 3+ year old hardware that was mid-range even when it was new and it seems to do everything I would want with reasonable performance.
> what exactly are the complaints with Firefox?
If you are a (the) leading browser like Firefox once was, the "what are the complaints?" is the right question.
If you are a minor browser like Firefox currently is (~2.5% market share), the "what is it doing better?" is the correct question.
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My primary complaint is that they have a bunch of ad placements on the product out of the box when it's opened for the first time and any time I set up a new system I have to go configure Firefox to not be annoying by default. It makes the Firefox experience feel subversive and untrustworthy because this freshly installed application is obviously bedfellows with advertisers. I know I can't trust advertisers with my data or browser behavior, so why should I trust Firefox with it? If I stop using Firefox for a little while, they _so helpfully_ offer to reset my configuration back to default so those ads will get shown again. It's a hostile experience.
Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for.
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Major problems with Firefox include:
...Okay, okay, I’m being too cheeky.
The common wisdom is that overall Firefox can feel bottlenecked at render and draw times (“less snappy”). That could be a result of a slower JavaScript engine (takes longer to get to drawing), or a result of poorer hardware acceleration (slower drawing), or a less optimized multiprocessing/multithreading model (more resource contention when drawing).
I honestly can't see it in the real world, but synthetic benchmark are pretty clear on that front.
Hum.
I have at home 13 year old hardware running Firefox and no performance complaints.
Including everyone that ships Chrome with their application as "native" app.
VSCode gets a pass, because apparently it is the only programmer's editor that many only care about providing plugins nowadays.
The ubiquity of their plugin model is why. Near all editors have a VS code plugin compatible layer
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It really seems like all the complaints about firefox are mostly ego-deflection.
People know it is wrong to stay on Chrome and empower Google to the extent that it is, but they're stuck on that workflow and don't want to change, so they find nits to pick about firefox and get very LOUD about that. Then it becomes Mozill's fault that they're still using Chrome, and you can't blame them for anything.
> all the complaints about firefox are mostly ego-deflection.
Sorry this is too handwavy for me.
According to this logic, Mozilla is likely going to die believing it did nothing wrong.
I use Firefox almost exclusively on desktop and android and I'm still pretty critical of it.
Especially because I know I'm one of very few people that uses it that much.
> There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.
I don't have a problem w/ Firefox not being perfect. I have a problem with the Mozilla Foundation spending money on seemingly random other stuff and not on Firefox.
> There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.
Nobody has ever complained about anything not being perfect. That's just something dishonest people say when they want to avoid mentioning specific criticisms.
> But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome
Pure cope
> I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
That reverses cause and effect to a great degree. Many are very skeptical because they read everyone slamming it. It's a mob psychology.
The other problem is, they will eventually axe this initiative if it doesn't produce anything meaningful to them, and will have been wasted resources that could have gone to Firefox itself.
I'm hopeful. The open source AI ecosystem could benefit from large players like Mozilla making moves.
In what world is Mozilla large?
Maybe influential would be a better word choice. Firefox has 100M+ users.