I think Firefox news is what I comment most on here. I don't know why. Well I guess I do. Web browsers, javascript etc is front and center here - which somewhat means the digital world. All my friends use Chrome, and think I'm weird. I think _they_ are. They care about human rights, at least I think they do. But, having Google, an ad company, dictate how our window to the digital world looks like, is now _way worse_ than what Microsoft with IE6 ever did. They had their share, but nothing compared to this. At least Microsoft was just a software company.
If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I really don't see how any other part of our species could. "Chromium scrolls 5% better on my machine so who cares about Firefox". I see these comments all the time here. Even in this thread.
Firefox. Linux. Postgresql. Wikipedia. Xmms! The WORLD WIDE WEB! Imaging if Google invented hypertext and not CERN (funny how Google made their initial fortunes). AMP would be the least of your worries. Imagine if Amazon "invented" Wikipedia. All of these open source projects are just mindblowingly awesome. They help people. Me. You.
But who cares right? Certainly not the lot with money in the 80/90s that didn't understand how or why this would be important. Which is why all these amazing things happened. Now they do of course. So none of this anymore.
Which is why I think humanity is doomed to succumb to our newfound overlords. The Big Four. Five? Six? Seven? Who cares really. A handful.
I wish people, especially like what this place definitely represents, would stand up more (including me!). Teach people, politicians, your parents, your siblings, your kids. We understand tech and it's implications. We understand how big tech is now stifling everything. Good luck training a neural network that competes with 50 billion uploaded photos. Facebook, Amazon. Google. Microsoft.
But noone will - "it doesn't matter". But make no mistake. It does matter. And humanity is just sitting here. It's like we're heading for this High Class Great Filter.
Good thing I'll be dead before all this comes to full fruition.
(Sorry for the rant - hope it was still relevant and on point, and I really encourage discussion here!)
The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy. To the extent that wide social change ever happens, it only happens because the path of least resistance shifted from one thing to another. If you despair for the actions of the masses, never try to reason with them. Skip straight to assembling a good marketing campaign. I admire the spirit, but nobody's going to "stand up" and fight the good fight. Most people are only capable of being consumers. If you want them to change, give them something more attractive to consume. These are the rules of the game.
Also, Firefox isn't some beacon on a hill. Its creators/owners are intensely corrupted at this point: politically, ethically, and pragmatically. They stopped building a tool to serve ordinary people a long time ago, and pivoted to attempting to build the most stylish and trendy browser instead. IE, a browser that looks as much like Chrome as possible without being Chrome. Firefox is still better than Chrome, but the differences become more superficial with each release, and I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually just becomes a shell for Chromium like everything else has, a way for a certain crowd to signal how ethical they are while still being tapped in to the Gooogle ad hivemind like everyone else.
I sense some cognitive dissonance between your two paragraphs. In the first you argue for a focus on consumerism and marketing, in the second you criticize Firefox for competing by appealing to styles and trends.
I do not see these two as being in opposite to each other, or more specifically i do not see the second contradicting the first.
Firefox's owners can be corrupted and focused on the wrong things (i'm not saying they are, btw - actually i do not exactly agree with the idea of Firefox having "owners" in the first place, at least not the same way as Microsoft owns Windows) and have the wrong priorities. If you consider that Firefox needs to do things right, you may want to prioritize making Firefox "good" (whatever that means, e.g. making it the fastest and/or most secure browser and/or giving the most control to the user, etc) and then (in terms of priority) try to promote and create a marketing campaign that focuses on those aspects of Firefox. It isn't like marketing is all about style. And even if it focused on the style, one might disagree that the proper way to go about it is to copy Chrome.
There are many ways to interpret these two paragraphs as not being contradicting.
Do you feel that this dissonance should change how we readers interpret this argument in some way, or is this meant solely as a typo-fix kind of comment? It’s unusual to see a new HN user offering proofreading comments, so I’m hesitant to accept that interpretation without checking first.
Not sure what the meaning behind your comment, but I found /u/downWidOutaFite's reply to be thought provoking.
Specifically, the original poster's paragraphs seem to contradict each other: the first suggests 'not fighting the good fight' because you have to appeal to consumerism, and the second blames Mozilla for not fighting the good fight and appealing to consumerism.
I also don't know why the account age has anything to do with this -- they're not pointing out a typo, they're pointing out a logical contradiction.
I don't think Firefox is even better than Chromium overall. There's a lot of good stuff in Chromium that just doesn't exist in Firefox like a great tab groups implementation and PWA support.
Some of the Firefox-only things I like are it suggesting Reader more more often, and the Page Info view. They're the kind of small conveniences Chrome is missing.
[EDIT]
Oh, and being able to use bookmarks to sync custom searches across devices was AMAZING. Of course, that had to die.
[/EDIT]
And of course zero knowledge sync and uBlock on mobile are huge, which Chrome itself has a less excellent record on. But some of the Chromium forks like Brave and Vivaldi not only offer those, but also good tab groups.
The big thing with Firefox is that its enthusiast userbase is moronically hostile to Firefox gaining financial independence of some kind. They bought Pocket and integrated it and people were just about ready to lynch the Firefox/Mozilla team. A lot of them are more motivated by the kind of purity that makes people install gNewSense and complain about companies doing business than any desire to have an actually useful tool with independent revenue streams.
> The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy.
Already in 1947, Georges Bernanos wrote: "it's always more profitable to satisfy man's vices than his needs" in his essay "France against Robots" (La France contre les robots, no idea if there's a good English translation though). Slightly off-topic but I can't recommend this book enough, it's quite forward-thinking and the chapters on freedom and privacy in an increasingly technological society might interest some of you here. I especially remember a brilliant rebuttal of the 'nothing to hide' argument that is still relevant nowadays.
So yes, I agree with you, good ideas by themselves rarely happen to actually change how things work. Like you said "a good marketing campaign" might be more impactful. Is there still hope? I've had this question for quite some time now: how do you efficiently implement some change in a system that won't cooperate? Seems to me that it requires some hacker mindset to find how you can exploit the rules of the game to trick the system into working towards your goals.
I've been given a great book full off details about what should be done if we are to improve our world in the coming decades, but it's a bit of a let down for me: what should be done is rarely a secret, how you actually manage to pull it off at scale is the real issue.
If you want to see a counterpoint to this, watch Goebbels' Total War speech. You can absolutely mobilize a great mass of people by promising them pain and hardship. Similar idea with JFK's moonshot speech.
The Nazis didn't promise pain, they promised a better world and told people they'd have to be prepared to go through pain and suffering to reach that goal. They also claimed the war was forced on them, that they had no choice. The speech was basically asking the people if they were going to bend the knee or stand up and fight to the last man. It was the Nazi version of the Braveheart speech, whatever we may think of that.
Well, not exactly. The ideological trick is to package pain and hardship and to sell it as something wonderful. It's not really even about promising good things in the future. That only works for part of the population (essentially the marshmallow experiment). What Goebbels did is much more immediate. If you identify with Goebbels, then the hardship itself registers as something that's good, and not merely as a promise of a delayed reward.
Not sure I understand what you mean. It's a motivational speech like many others. Goebbels was a brilliant public speaker, no doubt. But he wasn't a social wizard who cast an evil spell on the German population, the way people who like to mysticize Nazism often portray him as. Such speakers still exist today, the same old populism still works great. The dangerous part about fascism is exactly that it wasn't a one off terrible mishap, it's a regular occurrence. The Nazis most certainly made all kinds of positive promises, they were the whole reason they got elected. They promised to fix the economy, fight unemployment, fight back against the unjust Versailles Treaty, support families, bring political stability and make other countries respect Germany again, etc... Just look at their campaigns and posters.
> They promised to fix the economy, fight unemployment, fight back against the unjust Versailles Treaty, support families, bring political stability and make other countries respect Germany again, etc.
You're missing one component, which is that the Nazis took all of these (more or less) legitimate grievances and redirected them into the figure of the Jew. You're right in that this wasn't a result of some supernatural ability of Hitler and Goebbels, and that's the whole point. There doesn't need to be. I'm sure individual Nazis had similar thoughts as you do (this is just another motivational speech, these are decent campaign promises, etc). The precondition to repeating Nazi ideology is already present in normal psychology.
You're just rephrasing what I wrote now, so I guess we agree. Will you admit your original point was misinformed then? We can look at actual Nazi election posters if you like, they never told the people it's going to be suffering and hell, obviously. They made tons of grand promises and that's how they got to power. Denying this fact is dangerous, if we don't understand how totalitarian regimes come about, history is bound to repeat itself.
What? No. I specifically referred to the Total War speech, not to election posters. You seem fixated on making your own point unrelated to what I was saying.
I completely agree about the owners being corrupted. Under the semblance of "open source", the owners are only increasing their take-home salaries while firing away all the lower -level staff.
The time I lost my faith in Firefox was when the CEO of Mozilla got a huge pay increase, whilst firing many technical people at the same time. How can a tech company improve their product without those technical people? Oh, never mention the ever-decreasing number of Firefox users. Weren't the C-level people responsible for that?
Anyway, that was the moment when I realized Mozilla was just another company, not a flagship open source advocator or something. They're not even pretending anymore. Look at the sneaky attempts to integrate ads on Firefox. Look at the user experience being degraded every year. They are not listening to me, so I decided to not listen to them.
I was really rooting for Edge back before they switched to Chromium. Now it's just worse Chrome. I do use it as my default PDF viewer though as I don't know of any other free tool for linux that lets you annotate PDFs. (there's Master PDF but it's a bit overkill when I just want some multicolored highlighters.)
That's still Chromium. I care more about avoiding a browser monoculture than I care about dick-measuring the corporate ethics of the three remaining companies which actually maintain actual browser engines.
People might hate Safari but with Firefox slowly retreating into obscurity, Safari looks to be the final vanguard against a total Chromium monoculture. Yet many on HN absolutely abhor Safari because it doesn't currently support some bleeding edge feature which end users probably don't care about.
Platform availability isn't the operative metric when concerned about browser monoculture. The only metric of concern is browser market share. Safari represents approximately 20 percent of browsers.
I agree (and of course I know of the Mozilla things).
I remember years ago when things began to really go off the rails. I saw a Nike commercial which for the first time did not say "nike.com", but: "facebook.com/Nike". Man I was bummed.
If companies like that have to resort to this, it's over.
Pity we couldn't (again, myself included) protect the free internet.
Anyone remember AOL and its entirely contained ecosystem? I think the first two searches my 12 year old brain came up with were Superman (took me to DCs AOL listing) and Playboy (which took to long to load for me to risk someone walking in).
Everything is terrible, but everyone knows this and hates it. Eventually something will happen (and this feels more likely as facebook takes put these insane “we support regulation” ads) that will make things marginally better. Governments are designed to move VERY slowly, and they’re the only things capable of taking on megacorps.
It's not a matter of it being faster for me. It's a matter of it being more stable. I used Firefox for years, but when my extensions started breaking with FF updates I switched. I tried again recently, but now it's the extensions.
So if I was a dominating business, and you're an opensource more ethical solution, all I need to do is make a generous donation to you and publicize that I did, then people like you will say what you just said in every public comparative discussion to try to lower the value of my competitor for me. Investment well spent I say.
Just remember that HN loves to criticize every external revenue source they have. Pocket, Mozilla VPN, etc. "why don't they just focus on the browser".
People would criticize Pocket less if it lived up to Mozilla's principles of privacy and open source. Or if Mozilla hadn't tried to conceal it was about revenue.
That doesn’t mean anything. It’s a tired attack that gets repeated over and over, but has nothing to do with the values and goals Mozilla/ Firefox represent.
I think this a logic fallacy. It’s a false/ incomplete comparison.
Mozilla is not an advertising company. They have no incentive to track users or invade privacy. Their whole ethos as a company is pro-privacy obviously.
Yes, they take take money from Google to make them the default search engine on a fresh Firefox install. They are a big company with lots of employees (less as of recently) that need to be paid, and they don’t really have any products that generate large amount of income.
Seems like a small price to pay if you ask me. I’ve never heard anyone who throws out the ‘Mozilla takes Google money’ criticism back it up with why that somehow compromises Firefox as a browser.
Pragmatically speaking, you're right. Something needs to keep the lights on. Further, even if they did not set Google as the default search engine, surely many users would configure Firefox as such.
The browser isn't compromised, but their principles are. When you compromise your principles or apply them very selectively, you lose credibility and authenticity.
A fitting example of this is their Facebook container. They have poured a lot of resources into minimizing the potential harm Facebook can do to its users. They totally can, as they have no dependency on Facebook at all. Yet no similar effort is made to isolate Google services.
Again, we know why. Most users are unlikely to care, but it demonstrates that principles are for sale. If we were to focus on privacy only, both Brave and Apple take a far more principled approach in protecting privacy consistently. So where does this leave Mozilla on this matter?
Brave is basically the result of the firing of Brendan Eich, for his private donation to a cause rejecting gay marriage. You can think of that what you want, but there is zero evidence of him ever projecting this private belief in the workplace in any way harmful to anybody at all.
But I get it, it looks bad for a progressive organization like Mozilla. A PR disaster.
Their progressive image indeed largely seems PR. For example, they've had a series of large layoff rounds, whilst at the same time drastically increasing executive compensation. You have to wonder where this compensation is based on, as leadership is running Mozilla into the ground. Market share keeps bleeding and there's zero alternative successful revenue streams.
That's classic neoliberalism. Firing workers whilst enriching yourself. At the same time, they are involved in "equity" projects to address the issue of some people unable to afford internet access.
This is all very confusing. Principles are sold out, contradicted, and only seem to apply to others. That's why to me, Mozilla's "values" have little value.
A Firefox user does not need to care about any of this, but here comes the problem: Mozilla is downscaling on Firefox engineering whilst increasing their more activist/political projects.
How is that strategy not a disaster? They're great at engineering yet terrible at activism.
You make good points, I don’t necessarily disagree. But at a certain point I just don’t have the time or energy to analyze and stress over every detail of every company’s business practices.
When it comes down to it and I’m presented with the choice of opening Chrome or Firefox, I’m taking Firefox every time and it’s not close.
I'm with you. None of the above affects my choice for using Firefox.
It does affect my choice of offering any help, such as a donation. They won't get a cent out of me, given the above.
It's indeed a Mozilla problem, not a user problem. Yet the user base is shrinking, so I'd be curious to know how this will end. I suppose Google will keep Mozilla in a zombie state for a while just to avoid regulation pressure.
> but there is zero evidence of him ever projecting this private belief in the workplace in any way harmful to anybody at all
Materially supporting a public, political campaign intended to remove my civil rights is NOT private behavior and IS harmful to me. I agree with the rest of your post.
I understand where you're coming from, and agree it's a morally questionable stance. Not only that, also a foolish one, as the legalization of gay marriage seems an inevitability, like a domino-effect.
I too am puzzled by how denying somebody this right that in no way negatively affects him, is something to put your weight behind.
That said, it is private behavior. He didn't use company funds, express the belief publicly or acted in any negative way towards the LGBT community in the workplace, this is confirmed by Mozilla leadership, so not my take on it.
People are free to have any private belief or donate to any campaign privately, as in, this is well within the law.
It can mean many things, depending on their actions.
If they were just taking Exxon's money to do good things and Exxon thought it was a great PR move but still completely failed at building a good image that would be a massive win for Greenpeace in my view.
Not OP, but my understanding is that the browsers 'compete' much less than the public thinks they do. The developers attend conferences together, they co-fund initiatives like the MDN, they ultimately collaborate on a common spec. Google wins as long as people are encouraged to spend more of their time online. Firefox needs market share to sell homepage defaults. Apple wins as long as desktop and mobile capabilities converge so that they can sell iPhones but remains hard to monetize so they can sell apps. No one wins if antitrust regulation gets involved.
This tells you how dire the situation is at this moment. If you would view the open web as an ecosystem, we might be on the verge of a total collapse of it.
Maybe we should create and broadcast documentaries about it, think BBC Earth style, and watch ourselves and the governments ignore the lessons of it.
> Chromium scrolls 5% better on my machine so who cares about Firefox
For the longest time this was actually the other way around. Firefox decoupled rendering from scrolling, which made it a far better option in many cases (there are some disadvantages, but FF just was further from the technical side).
Chrome cannot render nice pictures. It neglects quality for speed. I think it still does. Isn't visible in every image and you can disable this with tuned CSS tricks, but the issue remains.
But of course you are correct that all this is completely secondary...
Any serious developer that doesn't at least appreciate freedom and open source is an idiot in my opinion. Please excuse my strong language.
This is ridiculous and hyperbolic on a few points, namely that Chrome's position is way worse than Microsoft's. Even if we ignore the fact that Chromium is open-source, that Chrome is heavily extensible, that Google has demonstrably shown commitment to developing the web in an open manner (eg WebRTC) - ignoring these and other facts, when Microsoft was 'in charge' of the Web (via IE's power) they locked IE down, killed their competition, and literally single-handedly stalled the progress of the Web.
The fact that you say IE at it's peak was worse than Chrome shows incredible ignorance on the matter.
Your anecdote about your friends reminds me of this odd joke from school
There's a senior citizen driving on the highway. His wife calls him on his cell phone and in a worried voice says, Herman, be careful! I just heard on the radio that there is a madman driving the wrong way on Route 280! Herman says, I know, but there isn't just one, there are hundreds!
> If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I really don't see how any other part of our species could.
Not sure how that is relevant to Firefox vs Chromium debate. Both Firefox and Chromium are open source.
For a project as massive as a browser, being open source is vastly irrelevant. Only major companies are able to truly maintain a browser these days. You can fork Chrome, sure, but you won't get anywhere with it. Chromium is Google.
I’m guessing 99% of the users of this site use Chrome…Dev Tools. The real question is what people use for personal browsing after hours. I wish Mozilla would just import Chrome’s Dev Tools because they’re just undeniably better than anything else on the market.
I have been a long time user of Firefox, but as a web developer I use Chromium occasionally to test a web application I develop. I would like to know, what kind of feature that Chrome/Chromium dev tools offer that Firefox doesn't?
> bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values
It does, but Mozilla is not representative of those values to my opinion. They represent the values on the left of humanism, but are opposed to right values, and therefore it doesn’t embody neutrality or democracy.
They go as far as thinking everyone should share their opinion on gay marriage, and a private donation in that matter is grounds to fire someone. Given their clear left leaning on other public stances, I think activists on the right should be wary of sudden account deletion if they store data with Mozilla (e.g. the password vault).
Not that they could trust Google either, of course. But neutrality would be much better if we mention democracy.
There's no reason to dig up every opinion on Earth just so you can maintain neutrality between all of them.
Brendan Eich is surprisingly un-cancelled for a guy who thinks his employees shouldn't be able to visit their spouses dying in hospitals[1]. He's literally still around.
[1] Which happened a lot during the AIDS pandemic and was essentially the purpose of the gay marriage campaign. It was actually relatively culturally conservative; super-liberal SF gay people wouldn't want nuclear families after all, they'd want to live in communes or something.
I think Eich's view on gay marriage was stupid, irrational and selfish. But I support his right to have that view. Why? Because not supporting his right to hold that view isn't going to change it. If I want any hope of changing his mind, history has shown that silencing and cancelling the views you don't like is ultimately unproductive.
Sadly, people like Eich have been forced to become so defensive on this topic that there's no real hope of reaching them intellectually. This is how humans work: when we feel forced to defend something, most of us will defend it far beyond the point that it's rational.
The broader gay marriage movement is, in my view, a canonical demonstration about how effective positivity can be. Truly inspiring. Some more contemporaneous social movements could learn a thing or two from the cultural normalisation of homosexuality. Rather than learning from success, what I see it a whole lot of hateful negativity on Twitter... and little else.
Too bad he contributed to a campaign that wasn't for them then.
And of course, CA did introduce something like "marriage with a different name" afterwards, but it didn't seem like the Prop 8 defenders liked that either, and the courts still found it unconstitutional.
California domestic partnerships included hospital visitation rights from 1999.[1] And most marriage rights from 2005.[2] They weren't fully equal. And separate but equal is nonsense anyway. But they came before Proposition 8.
I doubt any of this is true. If that was the reason, why not demonstrate for the right to visit?
It is often a negative stereotype that gay people want to live in communes.
> Brendan Eich is surprisingly un-cancelled
No, he was cancelled by Mozilla for something that has nothing to do with his work. The company lost a lot of goodwill because of that. Liberals too btw. If you preach tolerance and pull stuff like this, your statements won't have much weight further on.
I’m tribeless, just an American in the age old traditional sense, willing to walk away from any tribe, my only issue is worker's rights, and I also think it was a bad look on Mozilla's part.
Feel free to agree or disagree with Mozilla, obviously.
However, I suggest skipping the extra and disingenous step of pretending there's some objective universal standard of "neutrality."
Your "neutral" may be somebody else's idea of "left" or "right."
What you're doing here makes as much sense as inventing some arbitrary personal definition of "rock and roll music" and then criticizing some performer for not hewing closely enough to it.
1: democracy isn't neutral, it tends to follow the will of the people
2: Why should I care about the politics of the software company I use, as long as they abide by the stances they say they have regarding my privacy and making the best product possible?
It depends on whether the topic is divisive or not.
Protecting privacy, holding big tech accountable, etc are not divisive topics. Any internet user wants that.
Yet if you tread in more divisive topics, you may lose part of your audience. Examples: women in tech, trans rights, advancing the black community with special projects.
Each of these are politically divisive. It doesn't matter where you stand on these issues, I'm just commenting on how they are divisive topics in an extremely polarized political landscape.
If these issues are central to your belief and mission, one should go for it. Yet you then need to accept the risk of abandoning part of the potential user base.
Which for a browser maker is dumb. But I wonder what Mozilla really is these days.
Why should I care about the politics of the
software company I use
One obvious reason would be if the company in question is directly supporting various causes that you like or dislike.
You might also choose to care about the people working at that company. Suppose they support and/or practice policies that are harmful (or beneficial) to their employees. You might choose to discourage (or encourage) such policies by voting with your money.
Really, your question is disingenuous -- surely you understand? It seems like you simply don't want to care or don't feel that giving or witholding your support will make a sufficient difference. That's your call. Just be honest with yourself and others.
How is big tech "stifling everything". Big tech has provided the amazing hardware advances over the last few decades. Amazon Google and Microsoft provide amazing platforms that make it way easier for anyone to boostrap a scalable business.
I no longer use Chrome, I just prefer Firefox but at the very least chrome gave browsers the kick up the back side they needed, mainly through V8 giving us JavaScript that runs fast. Also I'm pretty certain Google fund a lot of Firefox Dev.
Actually much of the "hardware advances" were engineered with public money: internet, GPS, GSM, GPRS, battery, touchscreen etc. Big tech certainly takes more than it gives back in taxes. Even worse, some are polluting the planet with their unrepairable e-waste.
I am pretty much as anti-big-tech as it can get, but I can't lie to myself: YouTube has improved the world tremendously and provided me with tens of thousands of dollars of value. I cannot even fathom.
Yes, I like YouTube, but it was great even before Google bought it. Now it does come with privacy concerns. Luckily, there are other similar offerings.
It's not at all uncommon for monopolies to provide benefit to the public. They're uniquely capable of doing so, given their vast wealth and power. The problem is that they ALSO cause harm, and that benefit ends up not being worth the harm.
What harm has Big Tech caused? We don't have an Internet anymore thanks to them. Not a real Internet. Seven or eight major sites and a smattering of others you occasionally visit is not the Internet. The Internet is supposed to be a vast sea of individual sites, small communities and small businesses each discoverable, each doing their own thing. Instead we have a few walled gardens you barely even need two hands to count.
It hasn't gotten any more difficult to host your own website - the reason nobody does it is they don't want to. It's hard to keep up with spambots and things like that, but it's not like Facebook is running the spambots.
I noticed in the comments below how somebody mentioning Firefox's limited market share was heavily downvoted.
I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers whom are trying to make the best of it.
That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There is no good in do-good software without reach.
Based on statcounter, Firefox's market share went from a 2009 peak (32%) to a mere 3.29% as we speak. Just in the last year alone, it bleeds market share from 4.25% to 3.29%.
So it keeps bleeding market share, 12 years in a row. The reason it's still losing market share likely is due to the mobile market still growing in size, whilst Firefox has no presence there: 0.48%.
I have access to a handful of web properties, one of which very large and global (billions of page views). In our dashboards, Firefox does not even exist. It's not in the top 10. Above it are Chromium clones most have never heard of.
So to the "ordinary" world, those without a particular stake in open source, it's a dead browser. It's even smaller than weird regional browsers that most businesses wouldn't explicitly support.
(note that "support" is overstated as most web tech works just fine out of the box in Firefox)
Besides the ordinary world, the grip on the developer community is also lost. Increasingly, I'm seeing developers coding up demos and experiments that break in Firefox, it's not even considered at all, where just a few years ago it was a developer-default browser.
It's an extremely harsh reality check. Effectively Apple, an enemy of the open web, is our only savior against a full Chromium monopoly. Apple actively sabotaging and blocking the progress of the web, is our "hope". How bad can it get?
Anyway, I'm sorry to bring this up, in particular in a release announcement. I bring it up because I believe impact is central to the discussion and trumps any feature and any engineering. If the crash is not reversed somehow, it is inevitable that very hard questions have to be answered.
It's not what I would want. I hope an independent implementation will keep existing forever.
FF market share isn't a technical or ideological issue - it's marketing and platform capture. Chrome is the new IE and has the entire Google ecosystem tied in with it to make it a compelling platform. They were also smart to push the Chromebook into schools so a couple of generations of kids grew up with The Web = Google Chrome. Microsoft installs Edge by default on Windows. These two companies alone have hundreds of times the resources of Mozilla. And the resources they do have they apply to things like Mitchell Baker's compensation. Without any effort to gain mindshare, the technical an social merits of Firefox are irrelevant.
This isn't something you can grass-roots with a 3% share, you need influencers to broadcast, and that pretty much means you have to lay out some money. Unless maybe you can get Elon to shill Firefox in a tweet or something...
Agree with most of what you said, but want to add some nuance to some statements.
The IE comparison in dominance would be accurate, but it's worthwhile to point out that Google aggressively pushes web tech forward, whilst IE largely stagnated it. I think that's a meaningful difference, at least to developers.
And it's not just a passing note either. Firefox' once strong position was made possible by the gap left behind by IE. There is no gap now. The dominant party is speeding ahead.
Edge is an interesting case, as it shows the vast power of Google. Edge's market share is an embarrassing 3.4% in total, and on mobile about zero.
This shows that even with a desktop monopoly, they can't push it effectively. Supposedly, desktop users still keep using Chrome. Why wouldn't they? Edge is Chromium. Further, Microsoft does not have a single mass consumer service (like gmail, youtube, etc) to push it either. On mobile, Edge has no meaningful presence, and if mobile is some 70% of traffic these days, one can only conclude that all powerful Microsoft is completely unable to push a browser.
You are right that Google is aggressively pushing the web forward, but it's debatable whether it's a good thing; if you look at recent initiatives like FLoC, Web Packaging and Manifest v3.
Depends on the individual feature/standard. I'd say the vast majority of their work is not controversial or extremely beneficial to just Google, minus a minority of exceptions like the ones you mentioned.
Google wants the web to succeed, whereas Microsoft saw it as a threat. In addition, in the case of stagnation it would be relatively easy for a Chromium clone to fill the gap.
As a side note, I don't understand why nobody uses Firefox on Android. It's an excellent browser, has ublock which is fairly rare on mobile. Why not use it?
Not an Android user, but I can speculate about reasons.
Most people don't install browsers. They barely know what a browser is. So they use the one pushed to them, or the one familiar with. In the case of Android, I believe Google Chrome is typically shipped as the default browser.
And as it works fine, there's no incentive to install anything else. I doubt young/new internet users would even know about Firefox.
If not set as default browser already, Google pushes it from widely popular services like Youtube.
Bottom line, Google can reach billions of people, Mozilla none.
Please remember this: people do NOT chose browsers, compare them, pick their favorite. They do none of these things. It's a collective illusion by us tech folks.
I still do for ideological reasons, but I used to recommend it -- now I can't really since their rewrite of it last year -- every single time I tab out or briefly switch apps it reloads the page:
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/19291
I've lost days of my life waiting for these reloads. It's ashame because it used to reliably out-perform chrome on my phone.
I used to use Firefox on Android but had to stop because of this issue. Too many times filling out a form, grabbing a password from a password manager, and returning to find the form blanked. When it's resolved I'll go back and try again.
I briefly used it on Android. The scrolling momentum was all wonky, totally different from the rest of the system, and using it was unbearably unpleasant for me. I resorted to digging into developer menus and manually tweaking parameters, trying to get it to feel remotely good, and eventually I gave up.
I don't understand why they would make it so, but that's the sole reason I stopped using it, despite being otherwise willing to go out of my way to support them
> I briefly used it on Android. The scrolling momentum was all wonky, totally different from the rest of the system, and using it was unbearably unpleasant for me.
That was fixed a while ago, I recommend you give it another shot.
With great sadness I've started switching to Vivaldi, which also has ad blocking on Android.
The combination of the big Android update and now the proton UI on desktop has finally pushed me over the edge. I've been a loyal Firefox defender since the mid-2000s but I don't understand what Mozilla are doing any more.
To add to the comments not mentioned any UX reasons, I wanted to use Firefox on my phone as I do on my desktop and laptop but when using it I disliked the tab organisation compared to Chrome, and that's pretty much all I need the Web browser to be good for on my phone, where I'll often have up to 100 tabs open. Maybe it's changed now but Firefox had an impractical 3D scroll through tabs showing only the top IIRC, whereas Chrome has a much more practical grid of page previews that allowed for easy navigation. It also now allows one to group tabs very nicely.
I hope Firefox has changed, or that there's a setting hidden away somewhere for these.
Firefox has never had a 3d tab view on Android. It has had a grid or list view. Pretty sure the same is true on iOS but I don't use it as often as Android.
I'm wondering as well. Back when I used Android, I did use FF all the time, with uBO saving big time on traffic. Now on the iPhone I use Safari because I think it has power efficiency nailed, but maybe I should use FF for iOS instead?
The lead developer has open contempt for the users, for one thing. Also, anyone with a few neurons to rub together can tell the UI is absolutely terrible from a functional perspective. Form over function, on a browser whose target demographic was supposed to be power users (long ago, in the misty past).
> Effectively Apple, an enemy of the open web, is our only savior against a full Chromium monopoly. Apple actively sabotaging and blocking the progress of the web, is our "hope".
Caution: the following is a controversial opinion.
You could see it another way—which is that Google, through Chrome, is trying to define what "progress" is by unilaterally pushing new web features into Chromium as quickly as they can. If "progress" is whatever Google wants it to be, then I commend Apple from doing all of the blocking and sabotage they can. In my opinion, the web doesn't need such a rapid pace of change. It's great already. There's no need to agonise over the rate of progress—especially when progress is being dictated by so few.
This assumes that Google is actively pushing improvements to the web that are largely useless or solely beneficial to Google itself.
I believe that to be far from the truth, minus a handful of exceptions. I believe a better and more capable web is the only still "open" platform developers have if they don't want to submit to app stores.
You could of course support the idea of a more conservative pace, as dictated by Apple. I don't buy that. For that they need to be a stand-up citizen on the web. They are not. Apple doesn't document things, has no working feedback loop, actively hampers or obscures things important to the web.
I’m not saying the changes themselves are necessarily bad, I’m saying the rate of change and the rapid increase in complexity benefits Google at the expense of anyone who dares to compete with them.
The web used to be more like the Linux kernel; today it is a fully captured corporate-led platform where only billion dollar companies can play. The problem isn’t that Apple isn’t keeping up with Google; the problem is there aren’t more entities like Apple pushing back.
That may be true that dashboards are under-counting Firefox, but the ultimate impact is the same. Without some kind of evidence that more than a trivial number of hits come from Firefox why would any small business pour time into catering to an audience that might exist instead of pursuing one that does?
From Adobe analytics and sometimes Google analytics.
You're right that ad blockers are on the rise, but that's also true for Chrome.
Note that the points I made regarding market share seem to be consistent across the board. Whether you check Statcounter, an alternative to that, or the analytics of large websites. The story is the same: Firefox is tiny, lost in a see of dozens of equally tiny browsers.
I wish Firefox had a better mobile experience, which might help entice new users through word of mouth. Their biggest issue (on mobile at least) isn't speed, it's the UX.
Obviously, they'll always be gimped on iOS unless something changes there. But the latest Android version still doesn't have feature parity to Firefox 68. And Firefox 68 wasn't perfect either. Some simple UX issues with current versions come to mind: All basic browser functionality is hidden behind a kebab menu, pull-to-refresh isn't live yet, if the toolbar is at the top then the new tab button is still at the bottom, the length of a drag to dismiss a tab is too long, tab management in general, etc.
General users just won't bother with a browser that has an inferior UX to Chrome. Mozilla really needs to analyze browser affordances, specifically Chrome's, and look at how they can make it better, because Chrome isn't perfect either. It needs to be a top priority, so they can use mobile as a gateway for desktop installs. Ad-blocking is all it's got going for it on mobile, and that's not good enough for general users to convert.
All that being said, I love the desktop experience. But they're hurting their brand on mobile, and they don't even know it.
I'm not sure if you've used FF on mobile recently but the last update was good change to UX. Personally I prefer FF over Chrome on mobile. It's all I use now on mobile and rarely do I notice a difference.
I think FF is relegated in people's minds to being broken on mobile. Which it was a while ago but now it's solid.
How much do these market share numbers change when filtering for desktop users? My assumptions: 1) most users are on their phones, and 2) most phone users just use the default browser (safari and chrome). Whilst desktop users are more likely to install a browser of choice.
Firefox seems to be at 7% desktop market share. Chrome on desktop has almost 10 times more market share. So I guess that's the browser of choice.
OSX, an operating system with a market share of only 15%, delivers desktop Safari, which still has a larger market share than Firefox across ALL desktops.
Thanks! Sure, it’s low and all, but that does seem to backup my assumptions.
Personally, I think FF is great. I use it on desktop and I used to use it on Android. Now that I’m using an iPhone, I stick with Safari because there doesn’t seem to be any point in using Firefox for iOS (no addons!).
Microsoft is murdering Firefox on desktop with the new Edge. And rightfully so, it's a damn good browser apart from some privacy issues like hardware ID and sync not being zero knowledge. Overall user experience wise it's probably straight up the best browser atm.
That's a crude way to put it, but yes, I can't see how this can go on. With limited resources, trying to keep up with giants speeding away from you, whilst market share keeps shrinking.
I'm trying to think of a good exit plan, but I don't see any.
Switching to Chromium, which would be a humiliating defeat, solves nothing. Chromium + privacy is Brave.
Donating the entire project to the larger open source community won't do miracles either. It's highly questionable how many contributions will be made, but that's not the real problem.
The real problem is that there's no reach. It's not an engineering problem. If you can't push a browser as a default or plug it from a billion user platform, you're out of the game.
Firefox needs to become the default browser for web developers.
They need to go all-in on developer tooling.
The manifest v3 issue may help by poaching technical users from chrome.
They also need to stop being so "principled" about features such as WebMidi. If I have to keep another browser around certain websites that Firefox is too principled to support then why bother using Firefox at all.
They can't out engineer Google on dev tooling, or the dev ecosystem. They just don't have the resources.
Chrome dev tools is vast and very rapidly evolving. Google has large evangelists teams dedicated to explaining dev tools or web tech in general. They are everywhere, on Twitter, Youtube, blogs, conferences, in web standards proposals.
It's Google all the way down. If I'm not mistaken, Mozilla doesn't even have any evangelists anymore.
Background updates! Hooray! That may sound like a basic table stakes feature but honestly it's a huge improvement. And a lot of other apps do a terrible job of it, particularly on Windows. It's remarkable how many apps require 8, 10 mouse clicks and a restart to install a minor update. Firefox didn't require any clicks but the nag / need to restart was a nuisance.
Actually now that I type that I wonder what has changed. I guess the upgrade appears to happen faster because it was done before the restart? I assume Firefox itself still has to be restarted for the update to be effective.
(No problem on a Windows system; the OS reboots itself so often Firefox is guaranteed to before too long :-P)
The only problem is their god awful "welcome to the new version! we care about privacy!" screen that comes up every other time you open the browser. I don't think anybody has ever seen one of those and thought it was delightful.
The maintenance service is not checking for updates. It is still Firefox itself that checks for updates, but instead of launching the updater.exe (which triggers the UAC dialog), Firefox will start the maintenance service and tell the service there is a new update. The service will stop Firefox, run the updater to install the new version of Firefox (which does not require a UAC because the service already has elevated permissions), restart Firefox (updated version), and then stop itself. So this is not your typical update service such as Java or Adobe have which continuously runs in the background, but rather an interesting trick to run executables with elevated on-demand of a non-elevated executable.
> The service will stop Firefox, run the updater to install the new version of Firefox (which does not require a UAC because the service already has elevated permissions), restart Firefox (updated version), and then stop itself.
The service asks before stopping Firefox? Also, what if I have private tabs open, does it retain those in the session when it restarts?
Several years ago, I had to use this trick to automate an MSSQL install via powershell remoting. One of the operations the installer performed was disallowed for powershell remoting sessions. So I set up my script to create a service and then invoke the installer from the service, which worked perfectly. Whatever security checks they had on powershell remoting sessions weren't much more than security theater. Not sure if this is still the case, but it seems that this is still a useful trick.
> Now, SmartBlock 2.0 in Firefox 90 eliminates this login problem. Initially, Facebook scripts are all blocked, just as before, ensuring your privacy is preserved. But when you click on the “Continue with Facebook” button to sign in, SmartBlock reacts by quickly unblocking the Facebook login script just in time for the sign-in to proceed smoothly.
I wonder how it does that, and if it's open to exploitation by a malicious website like Facebook.
Basically, if a site uses the Facebook SDK to start the authenticaion flow, it will be broken because it's blocked.
SmartBlock just stands in for that blocked script, acting just enough like the real API to prevent some common site breakage.
This lets it detect when sites try to open the popup-based authenticaion flow, unload the stand-in script, load the real one, and continue the login flow.
It only unblocks it for that specific website (the domain in the tab URL), and only until Firefox is closed. Other trackers continue to be blocked, and other tracking protections stay in place (as opposed to turning off ETP for the site entirely).
> This lets it detect when sites try to open the popup-based authenticaion flow, unload the stand-in script, load the real one, and continue the login flow.
I guess how it detects the "when sites try to open the popup-based authenticaion flow" is the attack vector. If it's Javascript, it's likely to be easily exploitable. If it's in the browser's chrome I suppose it would take a malicious add-on or similar device.
I'm not too sure why that would be worthwhile as an attack, though. If you have anything in mind that would make it so, please let me know.
In the meantime, I'm working on a way to further tighten this a bit so the unblocking will only happen if a popup is successfully opened (so that at least if the popup blocker kicks in, nothing will happen unless the user intentionally allows that popup). I'm not 100% sure if that will work well, but I hope so.
Thanks for your response! Also thanks very much for your efforts! I've been using Firefox exclusively for quite some time, and it's by far the best browser for me. The focus on privacy and user protections (like this one) has also already helped me convince a few people to switch over.
I think the main attack vector I'd be worried about is if the SDK itself implemented a way around this protection, rendering it relatively useless. If that's not a feasible exploit, then I wouldn't be overly worried about as it would take effort on each website maintainer to implement and maintain the exploit.
The "real popup" detection sounds like a great addition if it works well!
Right. We'll just have to see if and how Facebook reacts, but I would hope they prefer this kind of opt-in to their login buttons simply being broken in strict/private mode on many sites. In fact I think they're already getting sites to use an alternative login method which doesn't have to be blocked in the same way.
Yes, though in this case it's for sites relying on Facebook's login authenticator, not really Facebook itself.
SmartBlock also contains special logic for Google Analytics, Google Publisher Tags, and other trackers that cause sites to break when blocked. It's not meant for their benefit, but the user's.
In fact all browsers have special web-compatibility interventions for sites which don't work correctly in them. Even Chrome. And sometimes even for major sites and services, especially when it comes to anti-tracking features.
The default was the same tab until Firefox 88. They changed it to a new tab to match Chrome. And removed the same tab option because they couldn't imagine why anyone would want it.[1]
Yeah I did that all the time and the recent change was a regression to me. Now with Firefox 90 I can finally comfortably open things in a background tab again.
Thanks for the Bugzilla link. It’s making me think that I should log in to my Bugzilla account more often and look out for issues/requests such as this one.
It’s not uncommon for image-hosting sites to use width and height attributes or max-height/max-width styles to get browsers to display high resolution images at a smaller size than the native image (I can often tell by how long it takes for the images to load in the browser). I liked being able to right-click on a image and click the “View image” option from the context menu to open the image in the same tab – at its native resolution. On the much rarer occasion, where there were multiple images on the same page, it was useful to be able to middle-click to open the image in a new background tab.
I was annoyed that they removed this ability in Firefox 88 but now I’m doubly disappointed to discover that the reason was to be more like Chrome. It seems kind of pointless to break decades old functionality just so that there’s even less to differentiate Firefox from competing browsers. I understand that it’s good to maintain consistent UI but just because other mainstream browsers change decades-old behaviour in a particular way doesn’t mean that all browsers should do so. Having said that, Mike Hoye provides a reasoned rationale¹ for many of the recent Firefox UI changes that have annoyed and frustrated long-time Firefox users.
At least now, with Firefox 90, they’ve changed the new image tab from being a foreground tab to a background tab: this should be less annoying.
On a related note, I’ve now had enough time to get used to automatically selecting ‘L’ (instead of ‘A’) when I want to copy a URL into the clipboard (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701324). I can live with – and adapt to – such changes if the original functionality isn’t completely removed.
Also, I ensure that telemetry is switched on so developers are aware that that users make use of such functionality. Though, in this case, they can’t tell the difference between users right-clicking and choosing “View image” because they explicitly wanted the image in the same tab or because it was the default behaviour. Unfortunately, the UX experts seem to have simply divined that the users who were selecting the “View image” option didn’t really want the pre-existing, long-standing behaviour (open in the same tab.
So based on the Learn more link it basically now follows what links do. It'll have been better if images and links had a different option. (And it'll have been much better if View image hadn't been removed.)
Chromium isn't out of choice it's out of necessity.
Unfortunately the newest generation of engineers just see no point in even testing anything but Chrome on a MacBook.
This drives me up the wall as someone who's first job required writing CSS that could work in IE6, IE7, Safari, FireFox and Opera and even sometimes IE5.5. To hear devs paid way more than I was back then tell me "can't we just tell them to install Chrome" when something is misaligned or broken in Firefox or Safari.
I wish I could say it's the project managers, sys admins or the executives who are to blame like in the IE6 days. But painfully it's just lazy or incompetent engineers who don't understand or care about the importance of open and standard tech.
When asked to build something they all treat cross browser as an extra and not-essential step and then inflate their estimates or claim it will be quicker if we don't bother.
Wish this was isolated to a few people but I feel I'm like 80 young engineers deep who are like this and I think maybe 2 I've worked with in the past 7 years cared about cross browser.
If your experience in the industry is different from this, I'm extremely envious.
I'm old school like you are, and morally agree with you.
Yet I did change my mind over time regarding this issue. for the sake of argument, assume we do use web standards.
It makes absolutely no sense for when using such standards, that results differ per browser. In our time, resolving all those differences cost a huge amount of time. Now browsers behave better, but there still may be issues.
We've long seen this as some diversity feature of the web, but it's a bug instead. It means millions of developers are spending time on the same non-value added activity every single time. It's a massive and ongoing waste of resources for everybody.
(browser makers agree with the above, they all have a compatibility program addressing this)
Second, "progressive enhancement" too has been embraced by the careful web developer as the right thing to do. It is. Yet it effectively means building the same thing twice. We've normalized doing that, but it's quite an unnatural approach not seen in any other tech platform I know of.
(the above can be solved by browsers coordinating important standards in time, but generally they won't...often)
Both issues above are time wasters and technical shortcomings. They still are the right thing to do, but an unwanted thing to do when adding pressure.
And pressure we have. We're no longer in the cute web, this is the business web. Developers are very expensive and need to deliver more than ever. Time to market is shorter than ever.
Any activity not directly contributing to time to market, is under severe pressure.
Note that I still agree with your point about some/many engineers being lazy, indifferent. But I hope you appreciate this view still.
> It makes absolutely no sense for when using such standards, that results differ per browser. In our time, resolving all those differences cost a huge amount of time. Now browsers behave better, but there still may be issues.
Regardless of the technology, UNIX, C, TCP/IP, Web,.... either you get standards and differences across vendors, or monoculture.
And we all know what monoculture brings into the party.
I could use a similar argumentation to defend we should all be writing Windows applications, or Red-Hat Enterprise Linux and be done with it.
> But painfully it’s just lazy or incompetent engineers
There are good arguments in favor of testing and developing for Firefox, but that is not one of them.
Representing the interests of the end-user, in a typical SCRUM-ish development house, is supposed to be the product owner’s job, not the job of individual devs. If management isn’t rewarding cross-browser development, then that’s on management, or maybe even on the end-users. Not the devs. Expecting devs to put work into stuff that won’t be rewarded by their bosses if they succeed, and will likely be punished if something goes wrong, is kinda silly.
It probably doesn’t matter that much, anyway. Firefox is being killed because some of the most popular websites on the internet are made by a competitor, the vertical monopoly between YouTube and Chrome. Everything else is just a distraction.
If it doesn't work right in Firefox and Chrome, it's probably not standards-conformant and thus at a high probability of breaking when Chrome updates its layout engine. That's how I'd present the argument - making sure it works right across browsers makes your code robust against future changes in behaviour.
As someone who has worked in quite a lot of web projects for the last few years I noticed the big difference in requirements.
Back when I started it was all about supporting IE7/IE8+, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari (with an old iPad as a test device).
A lot of polyfills were used to ease development and keeping older browsers alive. Testing on IE was quite painful (missing proper devtools, weird "Unknown Error!" alerts, slow scripts crashing the whole browser, browser implementation bugs, headaches with library conflicts, etc).
I remember testing against hobby browsers like Pale Moon because things already worked fine.
Nowadays it's just all about testing in Chrome and with less priority, Safari (mostly on iPad, iPhone). The requirement of testing against other browsers were dropped by most of clients. If a project has spare time fixes for those browsers are an extra. Most analytics tools don't even show anything else of Chrome/Chromiums and Safaris (desktop and mobile).
So, even older engineers are slowly moving along with the newest generation and just test on Chrome and sometimes Safari.
This days I just use a Chromium derivative, Vivaldi. It does the job and the UI speed has been improving quite a lot (but still lags a bit behind). If the project has some spare time I like to do some cross browser checks (most times, things just work fine). Sometimes I find an engineer using Firefox but most of the time they have a Chrome browser opened to test their work.
One of the problems is that it isn't a choice between Good and Evil. (That's Mozilla and Google, if it wasn't clear...)
When you look at Mozilla's leadership, it is not hard to be turned off by their actions. It certainly bothers me. But, returning to Chrome seems even worse. It's like a choice between 60% evil and (20% evil + 40% nuts).
So I'm doing a trifecta. Chrome at work. A mix of Firefox and Brave at home... increasingly Brave, especially on mobile.
The feature I'm most looking forward to is JPEG XL or .jxl (pronounced "jixel") - the new image format that will replace JPEG in 2022.
It's in Firefox nightly: https://caniuse.com/jpegxl but the sooner it's in the regular release, the sooner we can all start experimenting with it and using it.
A great codec but a terrible and unmemorable name—from the group that gave us JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, JPEG XS and JPEG XT. Why take a great codec and name it "XL" which is the Euro/English moniker for extra large? What's so extra large about JPEG XL?
Jixel is a great name though. My advice would be for them to quietly rename it Jixel, Jixl or Jxl.
Its media type is image/jxl, the suggested filename extension is .jxl, and the reference implementation is called libjxl. You might notice a pattern :)
This might get lost but figure if someone knows about it it's here. Old Firefox allowed to double-click between two words and both would get highlighted. This has been removed in the newer versions. Does anybody know if it's possible to manually configure this?
Not an answer but you can double-click on a single word, keep the button pressed and drag-select whole words. When you get used to it it's quite useful.
Just tried it on Firefox on MacOS. Double-clicking between two words (maybe a little closer to the left word), highlights both words. Not sure what else to say.
Excited that there's more progress being done in implementing proper site isolation. Would be great to not feel like I'm losing something in sticking with FF over Chromium-based browsers.
Any article/guide on how big open source projects like firefox, Linux kernel are released? I believe developers around world contribute to code. What's testing, release process like? How to they manage it?
Hi. Firefox developer speaking here. Feel free to take a look at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Release_Process and https://aosabook.org/en/ffreleng.html. The latter is quite outdated but some core assumptions are still valid. Our CI is hosted at https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=autoland . Every patch that is uploaded will be tested before and after it goes into a branch. Firefox Nightly ships directly from that branch. The changes will be "promoted" to Beta (and subsequently Release) every four weeks. Our community hangs out on Matrix and is very Open to newcomer questions and other contributors. In fact, we Vene have an introduction channel and list good first bugs on bugzilla (searchable through something called "Codetribute")
It's my initial reaction too, but if I stop to think of Firefox as a huge, difficult-to-manage project where each feature costs dev resources and increases security risk, FTP support is probably the feature I wouldn't mind removed right next to the Pocket integration.
On the one hand I'm OK with removing features to keep the browser slim. OTOH Firefox is vastly fatter than it was in its early versions, which supported FTP (and Gopher!), so it doesn't seem like FTP or other minor protocols are an actual cause of complexity- and bloat-creep.
[EDIT] I'd actually be a lot happier with this if FF were more aggressively adding new Internet or alternative-Web protocols, or trying to use their platform to give things like federated social networks more visibility and better prominence (via, say, optional but tastefully promoted integration with the browser). That might also, you know, differentiate them and give me a reason to recommend it to non-nerds again, despite "it's way, way faster than anything else, and lighter on resources, and blocks pop-ups and has tabs and doesn't have an ad banner!" no longer being enough (or even true, for some of those qualities) like it was in the early days.
> OTOH Firefox is vastly fatter than it was in its early versions, which supported FTP (and Gopher!), so it doesn't seem like FTP or other minor protocols are an actual cause of complexity- and bloat-creep.
I’m sure someone will correct me, but without looking at the source code, I suspect the following will have played a role in increasing code size since the earliest days of Phoenix:
* support for newer media formats, from MP4 through AVIF
Much, much bigger JS engine/sandbox, probably. Backwards compat with an ever-growing set of HTML, CSS, and JS. I'd guess a modern CSS engine is several times (dozens of times?) larger than what Phoenix shipped with. I expect their internal UI-drawing code/framework is a lot larger than in the Phoenix days. Webassembly. Canvas. And yeah, several of the other things you mentioned—video used to be the responsibility of plugins, for example.
[EDIT] in fact, some things browsers do now were seen as terrible ideas when Phoenix was released, because they would kill performance, since they're so much more expensive than alternatives. Vector graphics were regarded as to-be-avoided for a long time, because they're so much more taxing on the client than raster. CSS doing animations would have been considered insane, fit only for "look how I can bring your machine to a crawl with a web page" demos. Maintaining an entire "shadow DOM" of Javascript objects would have been regarded as parody-levels of resource wasting for all but very niche use-cases. No wonder the modern web is so slow and resource-hungry....
Mine would be somewhere between 0.5FTE assuming the bare minimum of keep-the-lights-on QA testing for each release and ongoing bug triage up to maybe 3FTE if it requires periodic security and design updates to keep up with changing standards/platforms/protocols.
IMO browser should focus on HTTP/HTML support. There are plenty of protocols and there are plenty of programs with proper support for those protocols. I don't see nothing wrong with using transmission for torrents, WinSCP for FTP, etc.
I can see where you're coming from - having a browser support all these protocols seems like poor design. Let everything do what they're good at, and all that. But usability suffers when users need to install and open different applications for every protocol they want to use. I think it might be good if there was some robust way to provide low-level browser extensions (that would probably be loaded in as shared objects).
That way Firefox could drop (or never add) support for FTP, bittorrent, etc., but those could still be access within the browser by installing the extensions through your package manager. I'd love it if I could send files to friends using bittorrent through the browser without having to rely on sites like instant.io or file.pizza. I do love those sites, but they're no replacement for a proper torrent client.
In a perfect world we wouldn't have to move everything into the browser for users to consider using it. Alas, we do not live in a perfect world. On that note, this probably couldn't be done because of security concerns. Making it easy for people to hand over low-level control of their browser would be problematic.
Don't know why this comment is being downvoted. I'd prefer to use another client like Transmit or Cyberduck. Having it all in one browser introduces complexity I don't think the team at Mozilla wants.
Honestly, I'm more than happy to see older/niche protocols removed from web browsers. God knows the average browser contains way, way too much stuff anyway[0], not to mention there are FTP clients that are likely far better for that use case than Firefox would ever be. I wouldn't mind if FF (or other browsers) tightened their scope a little more often and adhered to the Unix philosophy a little more closely.
Obviously not as much as HTTP(s) but still there are FTP links which show up after a google search from time to time...I guess now I have to context switch to the file explorer...Thunar is OK but does Windows Explorer even support FTP?
Windows' File Explorer briefly flirted with WebDAV (and still sort of supports it for backward compatibility reasons, but using it is harder than ever for new things and the buggy WebDAV implementation is mostly frozen with its early oughts idea of WebDAV quirks). It never supported FTP, because it skipped FTP for WebDAV.
Now that File Explorer has a 9p file server (from Plan 9) built in for WSL1/2 support, I wonder if you could hack together good Plan 9 style FTP support for File Explorer. I don't think the 9p server is that easy to talk to directly, though. (You could of course just do a Linux mount to FTP in WSL and maybe accomplish that through two step indirection, but I'd imagine doing something more directly in 9p would be preferable.)
It's insecure by default, the TLS-enabled version has never been widely adopted, never been supported by browsers and has some horrible security problems of its own (see alpaca attack).
Removing FTP thus fits into the strategy of browser to prefer HTTPS.
Honestly I'm still not used to the new tab style that was introduced last time. 90 seems fine, but not much to get excited about from the user perspective.
The tab bar is functionally useless if you have > 10 tabs open, so I don't even know why I'd notice. Aesthetically, it's fine for me.
Option to hide it completely (replacing with a mobile-style full-screen modal view with properly sized previews and keyboard navigation / fuzzy finding if you allow me to dream) would be nice.
Yeah, I'm fine with them taking up more vertical space, but it's the reduction in horizontal space that most hurts usability, especially with more icons that show up now next to the favicons, further reducing available space. It's still better/preferable than Chromium/Chrome's awful shrinking tabs horizontally down all the way to just favicons when you have a lot of tabs, but it's getting close to feeling that cramped.
(I also though have moved a lot of my day-to-day tab switching to Tree Style Tabs, though. I'd probably be angrier if I was already using an add-on like that.)
Sounds a bit like you'd like Tab Groups. I used Tab Groups extensively until that functionality was ripped out and put into a shitty, poorly maintained, broken add-on. A quick Ctrl+Shift+E and I could organize everything into work/research/gaming/wikis/whatever and quickly search all tabs or within a specific tab group to switch tabs. The add-on kind of works but isn't as feature complete and from my experience was pretty buggy and wouldn't properly maintain my groups between sessions sometimes.
Honestly web browsers have been in a steady decline for me ever since FF34~ish with the exception of better modern CSS/JS support. They kill features and functionality I use extensively and rarely provide any alternatives. Few of my browser extensions even work since FF killed off all old addons. It forced me to use Chrome and now Chrome is looking like they'll be killing off a good number of extensions I use in the near future. Can't have a browser for power-users because power-users don't make up enough market share. sigh
> until that functionality was ripped out and put into a shitty, poorly maintained, broken add-on.
Since you didn't quite say it explicitly: The real insult was that they factored it out into an extension, and then promptly broke the extension by ripping out the API surface it needed.
I didn't say it explicitly because I never bothered digging deeply into why it became so terrible - after being burned enough times by FF during that time period I decided to bite the bullet and switch over to Chrome since at my experience was at least more stable/had less breakage every update. Ironically enough it seems Chrome may be pushing some Extension API changes that will break things and force me to go back to Firefox.
It's gotten to a point where I'd gladly use an old, insecure browser with features I like that enables a workflow I'm comfortable with than being force to use a more secure browser with all the features gutted or gimped. But I can't even do that because then every other site refuses to serve me content unless I update my browser to a supported version.
Window management is still horrible in Firefox, meaning if I want to close all Hacker news tabs in all open windows no add on seems to handle it properly.
Chrome has added built in search of tabs across windows though, would love the same for Firefox
The missing partition between tabs irritates me greatly. Especially as the label of the tab fades out to the right, there is no indication for the exact x-space taken up by a tab. The only fixed thing is the favicon. Furthermore, the fading out of the text is greatly irritating me. My vision is the best and I constantly try to focus on those parts but they are not out of focus, but faded out. Just a vertical separator of some sorts would help with visibility in my eyes (literally! :p)
Personally, very very personally, I don't like the look, I prefer all my apps to be themed by the OS and to use the underlying widgets. That's not how FF is built though but that's okay since when they do bring change like that I still can user userchrome (I still can user userChrome, right ?) /meme.
I also didn't like the change. I prefer a clearer separation between tabs, but I don't notice it anymore. I'm not a great tab user, though: just a handful at a time, but perhaps an extra window or two for different tasks (e.g. general browsing, keeping an eye on our websites, and some standard library/stack overflow/AWS/etc. pages).
Just searched the release notes for the last 25 releases (from 80.0 to 90.0) and there seems to be not much work done on battery life / power consumption ..
Apart from restoring a browser session on Mac from minimised windows, or a video playback improvement on Windows (fair enough) there hasn't been anything done here, and there are people in this thread that still confirm that battery usage isn't great. That's the main reason holding me back (in fact I'm even considering switching from Brave to Safari with all the privacy improvements they've done over time). Shame really.
Safari's great, and IMO it still counts as supporting the open web because you're supporting standards. No company is going to support "just Chrome and Safari"; it's going to be either "just Chrome" or "everything but IE". Put in your vote for the second.
I guess this is as good a place as any to ask about a certain question regarding extensions.
With Chrome, I can control whether extensions update automatically and also have extensions disabled until I activate them for a certain page, and then they remain activated for that session.
Do I have such control for Firefox? With it being so difficult to trust extension developers, yet with some extensions being quite necessary for me, I find especially the ability to have extensions deactivated until I explicitly want them for each session very important.
im not sure whether you can disable them for certain pages but there is a checkbox setting in the extensions page that stops anything from auto-updating. i have this set in my user.js file with this line:
user_pref("extensions.update.enabled", "false");
i have nearly 20-25 extensions myself and im pretty sure they are all open source. when i was using chrome (a long time ago) i only had one or two open source and the rest were closed. its helps when you find some extension that does something really basic but you dont know if its trustworthy or not. usually theres not a whole lot of code to look through
the version of firefox previous to Firefox 90.0.1 (90.0.0) worked with Google Meet and my company's firefox profile.
I was very excited about not needing to use Chrome anymore.
I'm using Firefox 90.0.1 now... I get no sound or video in Google Meet. I had the same problem with recent versions of firefox.
What does native tab search do exactly? Does it search the content of all tabs or does it allow to jump to a tab by typing part of the address or title?
Firefox can do the latter by using the % search shortcut in the address bar.
For tab search in firefox do Ctrl-l (to go to the URL bar) then type %xyz will list tabs with xyz in it, select the tab you want and done. Eg to list your HN tabs and go quicky to one of them:
Saw in the patch notes today for Firefox Android that it now supports storing CC details. I was a bit surprised to not see it mentioned in the desktop version's release notes though.
Does any browser these days support multi-row tabs? I used to use Tab Mix Plus on Firefox but it seems like everyone (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) has adopted WebExtensions which are incapable of this.
Vivaldi's tab groups have some problem with things like fiddliness (moving tabs between groups etc. is a pain) and grouping tabs doesn't properly update the tab cycling order so Ctrl+Tab can get really unintuitive since the internal structure won't match what is shown.
Last time I used FF on my Macbook (about 2 or 3 years ago) it had a big issue with battery drain (IIRC it was because of high GPU load even when idle). Did they ever fix that?
I don’t know about Chrome tab groups, but I use the Panorama FF plugin for tab groups.
I gives a virtual page that you can add group containers and put tabs in them. When you switch groups, the tabs in the window switch to those tabs. I setup groups for each of my projects and this lets me switch project contexts quickly.
The alternative to Google, ads, monopolies and crony capitalism is not blindly supporting Firefox, Postgres etc. I think the HN crowd have to invest in learning macroeconomics, philosophy and politics. And a visit to small and medium enterprises in developing countries who rely on these ads for increasing their reach for the lack of better marketplace presence or bad governments. Travel a bit. Meet a few more people. Perhaps a few courses and then use that to lobby local politics and contribute to value driven education at the grassroots level. Support economic reforms. The problem is deeper. If you’re throwing frustration at Google by recommending people to use Firefox, you’re doing it wrong.
on seeing Firefox Release news these days, I am more anxious to know "what have they killed / spoiled now" than I am excited about "what new features have they added now". sad.
I think Firefox has ~5% of our user base. It's hard to justify running separate tests for it anymore. I wish they'd just become a privacy-focused Chromium fork because I don't see them crawling back to a meaningful marketshare at this rate.
(Yeah I know multiple implementations and all that, but we don't have many people running FreeBSD just to give Linux some competition.)
It's a two horse race, and its Chrome vs Safari. Firefox is non-existent in this race and is so behind that Google pays hundreds of millions to its creator Mozilla, which contributes a significant amount to their entire revenue source.
I hate to be the one to bring in 'the facts' but Firefox itself is becoming more irrelevant and there is no question on that. Microsoft Edge (using Chromium) is used more than Firefox [0] and global Firefox usage has been declining ever since. [1]
As I said before [2] the Chrome ecosystem has given Google the dominance of more than just the web standards and the web developers were happy to live with this.
I'd say the so called 'open web' just exchanged from one behemoth to another.
To Downvoters: So 'Firefox is the most used and dominant browser and Chrome is in second place'? So 'Google is not paying Firefox in the millions'? I strongly disagree and can confidently say that Firefox usage is dying. Change my mind.
I have just given credible sources to substantiate my claims yet no counter arguments or disproving the facts are presented towards my comment.
Safari is only available on one platform (that internationally has a small market share) and isn't all that great about implementing web standards in a timely manner. To me, Firefox is the far better alternative. But really, why should there be only one?
> isn't all that great about implementing web standards in a timely manner.
It's not good at implementing standards in timely manner which Chrome implements before they're even standards (and then become standards when Google pushes them to become so). Interesting isn't it. That literally goes back to what I said.
Without Firefox and Safari, Google can declare anything it wants a standard and implement it LITERALLY yesterday.
Among standards Safari is slow to implement in "timely manner" is web pages connecting to USB devices, Bluetooth and a plethora of other nonsense which Google keeps pushing through because they want the web to be the application OS for everyone, and then slap ads on it.
Safari is used by rich people who can afford iPhones and Macs. Those people are valuable visitors for many websites. And Safari marketshare (with iOS) is not tiny. So plenty of websites do care about Safari compatibility.
"Implementing web standards" is Chrome's strategy for becoming a browser monopoly. They just constantly make up things like USB in web browsers faster than anyone else could implement it.
Just because they standardize it doesn't mean anyone should be forced to keep up with them.
Unless there's a mathematical definition of "ethical" that we can rely on for objective assessment, that's basically everyone and no one based on how you feel any particular day.
> made by a unethical company is keeping the web open?
There are no angels with the known contenders of "keeping the web open" unless you want to use SerenityOS's web browser that they made themselves.
Unless you are using a very exotic OS that has a browser, I'm not sure how you can begin to defend a chromium variant still derived by an unethical company (Because you have to update that fork) and then attack another unethical company for giving your data to them.
I mean sure, but realistically speaking, how can we afford to continue supporting Firefox? I can't make a plea to the CTO of "Please let us keep investing money in compatibility because it may have a minor impact on the open web."
Firefox is in a downward trajectory for marketshare and mindshare. I would love to hear a realistic solution to this problem. Maybe switching to WebKit?
Given how many discussions I had in the past about people insisting to support legacy, unsupported browsers I'm surprised "5% of our users use it" isn't enough to convince almost everyone to support it.
If you mean Internet Explorer, it's because the deprecation of that is starting now because Edge supports IE mode for legacy apps and is otherwise Chromium.
In my experience, Firefox actually has better performance than Chrome nowadays — particularly on Apple Silicon, where the difference is stark and dramatic. And with the new "Proton" interface, IMO Firefox finally looks at least as nice as Chrome out of the box.
Firefox mobile still has some catching up to do on the overall UI/UX, but it's not too far off, and the fact that it allows extensions is nice.
this is interesting - i've had the opposite experience on both x86 and ARM Macs to the extent that it's not really a viable browser for me :/ purely anecdotal of course, and i haven't found a lot of information supporting my experience...
But chrome uses the GPU a lot more, thus making everything faster.
Firefox right now is like Linux a few years back: better CPU performance but little to no GPU acceleration
Safari and, especially, its iOS monopoly (for the engine, at least) are the only thing keeping Google from dominating and nearly everyone from only testing against Chrome, now that MS switched to using Chrome's engine and IE is finally nearing the end even in the important niches where it had been hanging on. FF doesn't have enough "normies" using it, isn't the default anywhere, and its trend-line is heading the wrong direction.
Firefox is more like 8-9% of the desktop market. It’s hard for alternative browsers to hold share on mobile where the defaults are set by the platform owners.
Ironically, as much as I love FreeBSD, I am being forced to migrate to Linux because the USB mass storage support on FreeBSD is broken on Dell rack servers. I recently migrated to a newer generation Dell server w/ 16TB disks to replace my aging fleet of R710s and cut my power usage considerably, and found I could no longer reliably keep a server online if I boot from USB. There's several threads about this on the FreeBSD forums, including one I started, and the general consensus of the community is "don't do that thing you're doing that works perfectly fine on every other OS, even Windows." not "FreeBSD is broken and this bug should be fixed."
I've fought the good fight for FreeBSD for more than a decade, and my last system running it is getting Debian installed on it in the near-term future.
This myth needs to die. Yes, somebody would fork it but it would very, very quickly become stale as well. It costs tens of millions to develop a browser engine nowadays, it's not something a few hobbyists can develop in the evening after their day job.
Microsoft didn't choose Chromium for their new Edge engine because they love Google, they chose it purely from an economic point of view. Even Microsoft doesn't want to develop a browser engine. Microsoft.
I would be very sad if Firefox switched to Chromium. Not just for standards-reasons, but because Firefox, with some userstyles tweaking, supports multiple rows of tabs, which Chromium-based browsers cannot do. Also keyboard-based navigation shortcuts are much better, unclear to how much that has to do with Chromium or not.
Also I'm not sure if Chromium-based browsers support the full extent of uBlock Origin.
If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I really don't see how any other part of our species could. "Chromium scrolls 5% better on my machine so who cares about Firefox". I see these comments all the time here. Even in this thread.
Firefox. Linux. Postgresql. Wikipedia. Xmms! The WORLD WIDE WEB! Imaging if Google invented hypertext and not CERN (funny how Google made their initial fortunes). AMP would be the least of your worries. Imagine if Amazon "invented" Wikipedia. All of these open source projects are just mindblowingly awesome. They help people. Me. You.
But who cares right? Certainly not the lot with money in the 80/90s that didn't understand how or why this would be important. Which is why all these amazing things happened. Now they do of course. So none of this anymore.
Which is why I think humanity is doomed to succumb to our newfound overlords. The Big Four. Five? Six? Seven? Who cares really. A handful.
I wish people, especially like what this place definitely represents, would stand up more (including me!). Teach people, politicians, your parents, your siblings, your kids. We understand tech and it's implications. We understand how big tech is now stifling everything. Good luck training a neural network that competes with 50 billion uploaded photos. Facebook, Amazon. Google. Microsoft.
But noone will - "it doesn't matter". But make no mistake. It does matter. And humanity is just sitting here. It's like we're heading for this High Class Great Filter.
Good thing I'll be dead before all this comes to full fruition.
(Sorry for the rant - hope it was still relevant and on point, and I really encourage discussion here!)