Comment by Larrikin
2 days ago
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dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason.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.
Supporting a proper ad blocker makes it automatically superior than any of the more popular browsers. The fact most people don't mind being fuel for the machine is another issue.
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The Firefox market share was eaten largely by the enormous and legally dubious marketing campaigns by Google and Microsoft. Hard to see how Mozilla could compete with constant forced nags and defaults in the most widely used websites and operating systems.
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> what is it doing better
adblock is the single most important feature of a web browser to me. Firefox has the best adblock support.
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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.
> 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.
Last time I checked, Mozilla received 90%+ of its funding from Google. This is a situation that nobody likes (except Google, of course). These ads are an attempt to diversify income streams.
People are really unhappy that Mozilla gets money from Google, but also extremely vocally unhappy whenever Mozilla attempts to find other sources.
I haven't seen anyone suggest alternate solutions yet.
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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
Yeah, and with it Eclipse wins a second time, especially on embedded where Eclipse CDT forks were replaced by VSCode forks.
"Project Ticino: Microsoft's Erich Gamma on Visual Studio Code past, present, and future"
https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/28/erich_gamma_on_vs_cod...
> Near all editors have a VS code plugin compatible layer
Huh, never heard about this before, and took a look at emacs and vim/neovim as those are the two most popular editors I know of, neither can run VS code plugins, that'd be crazy if true.
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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