One more Firefox release, one more long list of people on HN who:
* have switched from Chrome because <...> reasons why Chrome is worse or has become worse
* have always used Firefox and never left it
* have used Firefox but have faced issues and would want to try it if <...>
What I, as a long time Firefox user and evangelist, would like to know is how we can have Firefox thrive and grow, what Mozilla Corporation is doing (or not doing) to get more funding for Firefox, and why we aren't seeing all those services that they wanted to sell to generate revenue. The Firefox team has reduced in size recently, and more money might probably help avoid such situations (or postpone them).
P.S.: Donations on mozilla.org go to Mozilla Foundation, which is the non-profit parent of Mozilla Corporation (the maker of Firefox). I do not know of any direct way for end users/supporters to fund Firefox development.
Not that anyone is asking me, but I think the mobile browser is a limiter. No matter how much I like a given desktop browser, I like bookmark & password syncing more. Unfortunately for me I find the Firefox desktop browser is first class, but the mobile browser is not. As a result it's almost immediately ruled out.
I've never seen anyone else mention this so I might be a tiny minority.
You're not alone, Firefox mobile is practically unusable. But! For a while now, Mozilla has been putting all their development effort into Fenix (Firefox Preview on the Play Store), which has all the speed and responsiveness main Firefox doesn't, plus a better UI and general slickness. It even has limited extension support in the alpha, which should make it to the release version very soon. I've been using it as my main mobile browser for a few months now and it's great. There are still occasional bugs, but it's finally a legitimate Chrome alternative.
I was using Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin, and I found that Chrome with no adblocking was a better experience. Page loads, scrolling, zooming, and the other interactions were so slow they counteracted the advantage.
That said, new Firefox mobile is way faster and the nightly build already has uBlock support. Best of both worlds.
I had extreme response time issue on my old phone. I recorded my screen, and I measured a reliable 3-5 60Hz frames between the touch indicator and the page scrolling. Chrome reliably had just 1.
Things got a bit better over time, but unfortunately the thing that eventually fixed it was when I got a new phone. Now I get around 2-3 90Hz frames, which is still worse than chrome, but far less noticeable. I have not measured "New Firefox"/Fenix/Preview yet, but it does feel like it's a bit closer to chrome.
I'm not too bothered about ublock - I already run blokada so the worst adverts are already blocked at the network level - but being in Europe I can't manage without the I don't care about cookies add-on.
Whenever I've tried other browsers - Chrome, Brave, DDG - having to click "I accept" on every single webpage to remove the "This site uses cookies!" pop-up is really tedious. I hope the Firefox on Mobile add-ons support doesn't just start and end at ublock origin.
I tried it on a Galaxy Tab s5e and an LG v35, which have last year's mid-range Qualcomm chip and 2018's high-end chip respectively. On the v35 loading was slow, and sometimes it would crash or make all my tabs blank until restarted. On the tablet it couldn't even scroll down a page without lagging. I haven't run into any other apps that do this on either device. Zooming was always laggy and a bit off--bad acceleration curves or something--enough that they've redone it from scratch for other platforms instead of trying to fix the code.
There's a reason Mozilla is rewriting the whole thing.
That LG v35 outspecs my BlackBerry KEYone by a good margin, and Firefox is just as fast as Chrome for me. Which is to say, snappy.
I read more details about your performance problems in another comment, and it sounds horrible; I can't imagine anyone using that. Sounds like a nasty bug, I guess..?
Sadly you're right. This is Apple's fault: they refuse to allow alternate browser engines on iOS, so iOS "Firefox" is really a Safari web view with some Firefox buttons on it. Chrome and other browsers have the same problem.
Say what? It's the only browser I use on mobile for years, can't say I have faced any issue, not major issue, didn't face any issue, apart from very rare stuff that were fixed, can't even remember which.
Really? Huh. I'm surprised other people's experiences have been so different. There are tons of forum complaints about the problems I've had. There's even an official faq about all the tabs going blank [1], which tells you to restart the browser and hope it goes away. Mozilla themselves gave up on the whole codebase two and a half years ago and started work on Firefox Preview/Fenix instead [2].
FWIW, my experience is exactly the same. Zero problems, snappy, supports uBlock Origin, does not contain Google spyware and I therefore vastly prefer it to Chrome.
When I first heard of people complaining that it is atrocious, it was as much news to me as it is to you that it is excellent in my experience. I agree it's a weird phenomenon.
I've been using firefox preview for a few months now and love it. My only complaint is that even though it is set up as my default browser android still insists on using chrome to open some things, such as results from google assistant. But that's hardly Mozilla's fault.
With Preview or with stable?
Preview has a couple of minor bugs, like radio button popups that don't go away when I switch tabs, or the "undo close tab" toast not disappearing, or downloads resulting in empty files sometimes. Annoying, but not dealbreakers and I'm confident they'll be fixed soon.
My issue with stable is that it's slow. Everything about it is slow. Pages that load immediately in Chrome take double digit seconds in Firefox. When they do load, scrolling lags my finger and jerks around, and zooming is noticeable unresponsive. The acceleration curves feel off too. On my mid-range tablet performance is so bad it gives me a headache.
My biggest issue with FF mobile (android) is sometimes when you open a link from a different app, it opens in an existing tab navigating away from a page you already had open. It should always open a new tab.
So I might open a link in my email app, then when I tap the back button on the phone, the expected behaviour is it will close the tab and return to the email app. Instead I'm finding it navigating back to the page that was open previously on the tab that was already open.
On heavier sites it's inevitable that it will crash. Years ago Chrome/Chrome Beta also had this problem (the root cause is with the phone hardware/android) but somehow they managed to catch it and not bring down the whole browser app.
I still use it despite the other main drawback (being slower than chrome beta on heavy sites, like say twitter) because I like my uBlock and tab-sync, but every so often I get so annoyed at it that I avoid it for about a month until Chrome even with basic adblocking via Blokada makes me mad enough to switch back.
You're not alone. No matter how much I hate chrome, I've never been more displeased by an app as I am with Firefox's mobile app. We might see a new one though based off firefox preview so hopefully I can make the complete switch soon
Actually the equal-and-opposite thing was more true. They picked up the ball so hard that they believed they could compete with Android with an entire Mozilla mobile operating system. A lot of effort was wasted.
Firefox Mobile came out in 2010 for Maemo. There were more mobile operating systems at the time, and it was less clear which one was going to win out. Mozilla lead with support for the most open option.
The Android version was released a year later, three years after (the frankly pretty unappealing) Android 1.0 release. It was within months of Opera's Android launch. Hardly "very late."
Fortunately/unfortunately (hard to tell which), the answer for 'how to get Firefox to thrive and grow' might basically be to spend more money on ads, since Google Chrome was advertised everywhere in its early days. At one point, they were running TV commercials and putting ads on billboards at stations here in the UK.
A few people might have heard of the parent company too, like from their mobile OS, or from the search engine where they type their addresses in when browsing.
> have used Firefox but have faced issues and would want to try it if <...>
You’re right that every time there’s a Firefox release, it rises to the top of HN with the same comments. I’ve stopped commenting, but I’ll do so now since you asked.
Gripes with Firefox I’ve seen on HN include bad midi support and lack of (or broken) support for macOS features such as the Keychain.
My reason for not using Firefox (and I inadvertently get people out of it) is that it’s atrocious for automation on macOS. It’s the only major browser without AppleScript support, and the bug report open for it is old enough to vote.
When I’ve talked to people from Mozilla about it, I’ve gotten the reply that AppleScript is a power user feature that regular users don’t care for. What they fail to understand is that power users build features for others. I have several tools that interact with web browsers that are relatively popular with non-power users. Every time they ask “can you add support for Firefox?” my answer needs to be “I’d like to, but they don’t provide the functionality”. You can be certain that several of those abandon Firefox, because they’d rather have the convenience of the tool.
You can have Firefox “thrive and grow” by giving its users what they need. It doesn’t matter how “private” Firefox is (and Mozilla has done plenty to not be trusted blindly on that regard) if people can’t use it as their daily browser.
What I, as a long time Firefox user and evangelist, would like to know is how we can have Firefox thrive and grow
Probably the same as anything else: find a USP that resonates with a large number of potential users.
It used to be customisation and extensions, but it's been more than 2 years since Quantum and there are still numerous ways that my everyday browsing experience is worse now than it was before. I suspect that for a lot of people, Firefox is no longer particularly associated with being more customisable than any other browser, even if it was before.
Today I suspect the best shot for a solid USP is the privacy/security angle, which is what kept me on Firefox as my default browser in the end despite it being much inferior after 57. But the marketing for that is inconsistent and gets drowned out in all the who-cares features that Firefox keeps introducing.
Ironically, the breakage of extensions has probably contributed significantly to the loss of confidence in the security/privacy side, since it took out a lot of useful enhancements in those areas. Normal people don't understand tools like uBlock Origin, which are powerful but have UIs that make Git's look intuitive and well-designed, and in 2020 a simple, effective ad-blocker is entry-level for a decent browsing experience.
AdGuard offers a simpler interface than uBlock Origin for users who prefer one. It's also free and open source, and includes most of the same filter lists.
I think it might have been the first case you described. I have only recently switched over to Firefox and that was my first debugging experience with it, so I didn't realise it was a specific case and a known bug. Thank you.
I don't like to say this but Mozilla leadership sucks. In the light of previous layoffs, there was a discussion that the CEO, who doesn't even have a proper technical background, is getting too high of compensation. I have also heard Mozilla has become a Suits-first company lately.
A self-hostable Firefox Accounts server + sync server would be great. AFAIK the FXA server is not self-hostable yet, only the sync which leaves a bad taste in owning your privacy.
Fascinating (and disappointing..) comment thread about implementing the WebMIDI API in Firefox.
The issue was reported (7 years ago) by Chris Wilson, who's been at Google working on WebAudio stuff for years and has published lots of related articles and repos. I'm a big fan. https://github.com/cwilso
There's even a comment from someone at Ableton, expressing interest and support ("testing with preliminary builds as well as providing hardware for implementers to test with"). That was 2 years ago, and no one from Firefox engaged them?! Sounds like a huge missed opportunity.
Sadly, the last comment a year ago was from a person no longer at Mozilla, saying the issue is stalled and that it's "very low priority work".
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Edit: Aah, now I'm imagining what might have been, a collaboration between Firefox and Ableton, would have been so cool..
Most people don’t want to keep changing web browsers for every task. In particular if you do a lot of work (be it paid or a hobby) in a technology your web browser lacks, it’s less frustrating to use for everything the one that has the feature.
* have switched from Chrome because <...> reasons why Chrome is worse or has become worse
* have always used Firefox and never left it
* have used Firefox but have faced issues and would want to try it if <...>
What I, as a long time Firefox user and evangelist, would like to know is how we can have Firefox thrive and grow, what Mozilla Corporation is doing (or not doing) to get more funding for Firefox, and why we aren't seeing all those services that they wanted to sell to generate revenue. The Firefox team has reduced in size recently, and more money might probably help avoid such situations (or postpone them).
P.S.: Donations on mozilla.org go to Mozilla Foundation, which is the non-profit parent of Mozilla Corporation (the maker of Firefox). I do not know of any direct way for end users/supporters to fund Firefox development.