I know there are plenty of more serious issues people have with Mozilla's direction and focus, but patronizing stuff like this really grinds my gears.
> Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style? [List of emoji animals]
The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting. This is the most egregious part but the whole post has a similar tone.
I'll note that I'm not saying outreach should necessarily be professional or devoid of fun/humor. There's just a sterile, saccharine way about Mozilla's community engagement that evokes artificiality.
That's insane :/. But, maybe, "on the bright side", The Mozilla Foundation is unrelated in some sense to Firefox? AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway.
The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.
There is another interesting detail from your reference that makes it seem even worse to me: it says the CEO's salary is "paid only by a related for-profit"; at first, I was thinking "ok, at least the Foundation in fact is spending the money it is being donated (though, not on Firefox)"... but then I realized that means the Corporation is, in fact, spending $7m that it could have spent on Firefox.
It says "PAID ONLY BY A RELATED FOR-PROFIT", which looks to be the Mozilla Corporation. Donations are not directly paying the CEO, although I agree more of the profits from the Corporation could flow into the non-profit.
If you cut that compensation in half you could have funded a small team of devs to have finished Oxidation of Firefox and have a really interesting browser, and potentially a really rich GUI stack, JavaScript Engine and who knows what else for Rust itself as a result, on top of it all being production ready and proven because of the nature of Firefox's reach.
There were major noticeable speed differences in Firefox when they implemented key component in Rust. I say this having used Firefox since 2004.
I mean if you reduce something enough you can say “x pays for y” in almost any case for anything since it’s all technically one big pot for one group. Even earmarked money.
If I give you $500 to help pay for your medical bills and a few months later (bills have been paid by then) I see you bought a PS5, can I say, “not cool you used my money to buy a PS5”?
Don’t get me wrong I think Mozilla/FF has been very poorly managed. But I have just never liked these kinds of “transitive property” arguments or whatever we want to call it. Unless they’re straight up funneling donations into the CEO’s bank account I just don’t see it that way.
Let’s be honest, the only advantage Firefox has over other browser and especially chrome is its extension support. And it’s not even Mozilla merit, it’s Google who removed MV2 support.
Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.
They hang on by a thread.
The web need Firefox to be thriving but it’s been a sinking ship since a while.
They know perfectly what users want, what makes a good browser : speed, good user interface, low on energy, block ads,..
These are universal things.
Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.
And it’s not even that I want to see the url every second, but it just looks and feel bad.
On computer, there are 4 different browser history. The traditional one that opens in an outdated window, the « recent one » that shows only the 10 or something last links , a better looking browser history when you go in the top left button where there are synced browser tabs, synced history ,.. and an history in the sidebar.
They have legacy extensions. Mozilla is very hostile to new extensions. When Gorhil - creator of the most popular Firefox extension uBlock Origin (honestly the main reason Firefox still has users) wanted to add his manifest 3 extension uBlock Origin Lite to firefox Mozilla told him to get bent. Same with "Enhancer to Youtube" (number 11 extension by user count) it is stuck on old version because of Mozilla
> Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface
So I opened the same page on both, my comments page on HN.
Firefox Android UI:
Home button, SSL padlock, URL, reader mode, tabs, hamburger menu. URL displays extends from 20% of the screen to 70% of the screen. I see news.ycombinator.com/thre(a) [the a is partially faded].
Chrome Android UI:
Home button, settings icon (shows cert details), URL, new tab button, tab list, hamburger menu. Icons have like 50% more padding that firefox icons, so URL extends from 20% to 60% of the screen. I see "news.ycombinator.com/t"
The only difference in icon count is firefox gives reader mode a dedicated button while Chrome gives new tab a dedicated button. Given how often I use reader mode (as a paywall bypass, or poorly formatted sites) that's... fine?
There is a stylistic difference where the coloured area for the address bar encompasses the reader mode icon so it looks like it's deducting space for the URL but it appears that Firefox actually has more URL space. By like... 3 characters, so it's not a huge difference.
---
As for the desktop history example:
Firefox history views:
- Firefox View: Full page view of your account including history, synced tabs, etc.
- Sidebar history: Useful to see with less disruption to browser
- Overflow menu recent items
- Legacy "Manage history" popup
Chrome history views:
- chrome://history as a full page modal (with sync and other stuff, so closest to Firefox view)
- recent history in the overflow menu
- "grouped history" which is a sidebar history with way too much padding.
So the only extra view of history that Firefox has is the legacy one, which is buried in the UI for power users who don't want to let it go (or more likely the bookmark manager that it lives with).
Firefox's WebExtensions implementation still has service workers disabled and no File System API. MV3 requires service workers, so Firefox extension ecosystem is on a countdown.
> Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.
At least on my phone, an Poco X3, Firefox for Android url box it's BIGGER that Chrome for Android. Chrome shows 4 buttons on my phone.
That update that added the unremovable share button to the address bar on Android really pissed me off. I was hoping an update would come that would allow the stupid home button to be toggled on/off, but instead they add yet another unremovable button. Like wtf, I can't even see the URL now on any sites.
So... Here's an idea: stop wasting time and money on things like that, listen to the community, hire engineers, and make a browser that can be at the same level as Chrome. We already told you what we want and need, no need to keep asking.
Mozilla and the story on "How to waste money and resources" is getting tiresome at this point.
It's wild how often Mozilla asks for feedback, gets clear answers (less bloat, better performance, fix regressions), and then drops something like another random experiment no one asked for
Mozilla develops a better browser than Chrome in a lot of ways, and they do it with a tiny fraction of their budget. I would not describe that as "money wasting".
Straight to under 0.5% usage no doubt. Making a mockery of all the unpaid people who have committed code over the years. The Mozilla foundation have shirked their responsibility as a bastion against commercial interests.
Keeping up with web standards, and dropping the advertising rubbish that's making them somehow atrophy users faster than they were before.
Otherwise, they'll be gone. Thunderbird has proven people are willing to donate millions if they know their money will go directly to the software. In 2022, Thunderbird collected ~6 million in donations (~20 million users) compared to Mozilla's ~9 million (from >200 million users)
Sadly "I'd like Firefox to not be owned by an advertising/surveillance company" is unlikely to be considered in that forum (even if I were prepared to sign up to comment).
Everything else is minor details compared to that.
(Yes, this was posted using LibreWolf, but I often wonder if I can even trust that, having the vast majority of it's code written and managed by Mozilla.)
Firefox should focus on privacy, keeping extensions viable, and implementing standards, so they don't get swamped by competition.
No one really cares about a majority of the UX sugar, IMO.
I personally find the LLM context menu useful and reading mode awesome, but these are not features that by themselves would drive me to use the browser.
The address bar has become cluttered with buttons THAT SHOULDN'T BE THERE: "home" (useless), "translate" (won't go away no matter the setting), and now "share" (for real!?), "reading mode"; remove them from there, I can barely see the first few letters of the address! Also way too much spacing around them
I always have to manually close the previous tab when tapping on a link, let us reuse them instead, you may call us owls or wharever, but we don't like having zillions of tabs open to be closed automatically after x time
Improve speed, it's currently the slowest browser out there
Allow more customization (like about:config) and extensions, and for ex. to be able to remove the useless buttons from the address bar
It would be great if they restored the `Smart Bookmarks` feature they removed a number of years ago. Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality, but it's not quite the same as having native support for them.
WebUSB. The only time I open chrome nowadays is to flash an ESPHome device. I'd like to drop that dependency.
I wish the extension API supported favicons in a better way. I use vimium and due to a recent change it's nice and easy to have a key binding to select bookmarks. It can't have the visual favicon which would it easier to distinguish things at a glance.
Apparently it’s getting dumbed down since the url bar on iOS* no longer shows anything but the domain. What subreddit am I in again? Hell if I know, apparently “Reddit.com” should be the only thing I see about my current site.
*(yes I know on iOS it’s fake Firefox but this is still a profoundly stupid change that shows they think their users are idiots)
Sometimes I cannot close tabs by clicking the X, or refresh/go-forward/go-back using the buttons next to the address bar.
Computer B:
Sometimes I get downloads that have "Unknown time left" (0 bytes/sec) when the X of X KB/MB is 100% and you can't remove it from the downloads dropdown.
I just discovered a new bug on Computer B, clicking the hamburger menu doesn't do anything.
Both are Ubuntu.
(I'm not a fan of the new menu in Firefox Beta for Android. I guess it looks nicer due to the greater whitespace, it just break muscle memory and has less options/selections.)
I wonder, if these problems aren't Ubuntu fault, since it forces snap version of Firefox on you. I had Firefox crashing repeatedly on me with the snap version. Maybe switching to Firefox apt repo would help? (I tried the repo, but before I had chance to test it properly, I found I could use Debian instead of Ubuntu and reinstalled immediately.)
I just made the switch to ubuntu as my main os from windows. Firefox on windows never seemed to have any problems. Now I keep getting the same problem as your computer a. It doesnt happen every time, and i havent figured out the pattern.
But clicking the x to close a tab does nothing, middle clicking the tab still closes it. Any time this problem starts I also have issues using the mouse middle button to scroll (on all apps, not just ff) Very, very annoying. Since these issues seem linked it seems bigger than just ff.
Never experienced those with Firefox on Windows, macOS or a myriad of Linux distros along the years. Not using Ubuntu anymore, but when I did, I did not use flatpaks. That might be the origin of your issues.
At the end of the day, if you want to see these types of bugs fixed then by far the fastest way is to report them, which will probably mean you'll have to spend some time to track down what's causing that on your system. I have generally found reporting bugs to Firefox to be a reasonably positive experience.
Firefox has this really unsolved issue for me where firefox and firefox based forks basically first load through all of my cache which after months of using will take literal minutes and then and only then would my search queries / network requests by browser take place.
That means, to use my browser I have to wait literally minutes and yesterday, it was so long somehow on Zen (I created an issue there but they linked me to the firefox (downstream?) issue which wasn't solved in like sooo many years)
I basically just use a password manager and just create a new profile and start afresh most of the times but still its a little inconvenient I guess.
I was reading a couple of days ago the Frank Miller's Robocop comic series. I laughed so hard at the comment/response of "Dr. Love" when asked "have you sold out?" and the response was "I'm reposisioned Lilac to where I can more efficaciously relate values of cooperation and participation to our children. Where I can infuse a spirit of caring and sharing to marketing and media."
Then she (Dr. Love) continues to say... "I welcome this change to dialogue. To relate to you OCP's commitment...."
So when I read the FF's post, Dr. Love and the beginning of a big spin came to mind!
I want nothing more now from Firefox than iterative performance improvements across all platforms and adherence to web standards. That’s it. Let extensions handle all the other crap.
[+] [-] idle_zealot|8 months ago|reply
> Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style? [List of emoji animals]
The marketing/PR trend of speaking to communities as though they're kindergartners is distracting and off-putting. This is the most egregious part but the whole post has a similar tone.
I'll note that I'm not saying outreach should necessarily be professional or devoid of fun/humor. There's just a sterile, saccharine way about Mozilla's community engagement that evokes artificiality.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 months ago|reply
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
[+] [-] ramsj|8 months ago|reply
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
[+] [-] saurik|8 months ago|reply
The whole Mozilla situation is even more of a scam than how the Wikimedia Foundation uses sob stories about paying for Wikipedia to get people to donate money to an entity which spends almost no money on Wikipedia... but, at least it does run Wikipedia! lol :/.
There is another interesting detail from your reference that makes it seem even worse to me: it says the CEO's salary is "paid only by a related for-profit"; at first, I was thinking "ok, at least the Foundation in fact is spending the money it is being donated (though, not on Firefox)"... but then I realized that means the Corporation is, in fact, spending $7m that it could have spent on Firefox.
[+] [-] c0nducktr|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nick0garvey|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|8 months ago|reply
There were major noticeable speed differences in Firefox when they implemented key component in Rust. I say this having used Firefox since 2004.
[+] [-] KurSix|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Forgeties79|8 months ago|reply
If I give you $500 to help pay for your medical bills and a few months later (bills have been paid by then) I see you bought a PS5, can I say, “not cool you used my money to buy a PS5”?
Don’t get me wrong I think Mozilla/FF has been very poorly managed. But I have just never liked these kinds of “transitive property” arguments or whatever we want to call it. Unless they’re straight up funneling donations into the CEO’s bank account I just don’t see it that way.
[+] [-] aucisson_masque|8 months ago|reply
Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.
They hang on by a thread.
The web need Firefox to be thriving but it’s been a sinking ship since a while.
They know perfectly what users want, what makes a good browser : speed, good user interface, low on energy, block ads,.. These are universal things.
Have you taken a look at Android Firefox user interface ? It’s horrendous, the url box for instance is already small but now there is 3 buttons (share, reading mode, translate) on top of it. I got to put the phone on landscape mode to see the url.
And it’s not even that I want to see the url every second, but it just looks and feel bad.
On computer, there are 4 different browser history. The traditional one that opens in an outdated window, the « recent one » that shows only the 10 or something last links , a better looking browser history when you go in the top left button where there are synced browser tabs, synced history ,.. and an history in the sidebar.
Seriously ? 4 different history.
There need to be one clear, working history.
[+] [-] tgv|8 months ago|reply
Have you seen how much data Chrome collects for Google? Especially on Android. That's another massive advantage of Firefox.
[+] [-] littlecranky67|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] TiredOfLife|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Macha|8 months ago|reply
So I opened the same page on both, my comments page on HN.
Firefox Android UI:
Home button, SSL padlock, URL, reader mode, tabs, hamburger menu. URL displays extends from 20% of the screen to 70% of the screen. I see news.ycombinator.com/thre(a) [the a is partially faded].
Chrome Android UI:
Home button, settings icon (shows cert details), URL, new tab button, tab list, hamburger menu. Icons have like 50% more padding that firefox icons, so URL extends from 20% to 60% of the screen. I see "news.ycombinator.com/t"
The only difference in icon count is firefox gives reader mode a dedicated button while Chrome gives new tab a dedicated button. Given how often I use reader mode (as a paywall bypass, or poorly formatted sites) that's... fine?
There is a stylistic difference where the coloured area for the address bar encompasses the reader mode icon so it looks like it's deducting space for the URL but it appears that Firefox actually has more URL space. By like... 3 characters, so it's not a huge difference.
---
As for the desktop history example:
Firefox history views:
- Firefox View: Full page view of your account including history, synced tabs, etc.
- Sidebar history: Useful to see with less disruption to browser
- Overflow menu recent items
- Legacy "Manage history" popup
Chrome history views:
- chrome://history as a full page modal (with sync and other stuff, so closest to Firefox view)
- recent history in the overflow menu
- "grouped history" which is a sidebar history with way too much padding.
So the only extra view of history that Firefox has is the legacy one, which is buried in the UI for power users who don't want to let it go (or more likely the bookmark manager that it lives with).
[+] [-] acephal|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Zardoz84|8 months ago|reply
At least on my phone, an Poco X3, Firefox for Android url box it's BIGGER that Chrome for Android. Chrome shows 4 buttons on my phone.
[+] [-] fiverz|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] captainepoch|8 months ago|reply
Mozilla and the story on "How to waste money and resources" is getting tiresome at this point.
[+] [-] KurSix|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] const_cast|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lblume|8 months ago|reply
What do you mean? The AMA?
> listen to the community
Huh? Isn't that exactly what they are doing with this?
[+] [-] scubadude|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] promiseofbeans|8 months ago|reply
Otherwise, they'll be gone. Thunderbird has proven people are willing to donate millions if they know their money will go directly to the software. In 2022, Thunderbird collected ~6 million in donations (~20 million users) compared to Mozilla's ~9 million (from >200 million users)
[+] [-] bigiain|8 months ago|reply
Everything else is minor details compared to that.
(Yes, this was posted using LibreWolf, but I often wonder if I can even trust that, having the vast majority of it's code written and managed by Mozilla.)
[+] [-] ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7|8 months ago|reply
No one really cares about a majority of the UX sugar, IMO.
I personally find the LLM context menu useful and reading mode awesome, but these are not features that by themselves would drive me to use the browser.
[+] [-] gfdjghd|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] v5v3|8 months ago|reply
The comment was: make the Firefox containers work in private mode.
In Safari private mode. Each tab has no knowledge of another (e.g. log into Gmail and then open a new tab and go to Gmail and you won't be signed in).
Firefox doesn't have this tab level isolation.
Also offer equivalent of safari's lockdown mode. So images and site features capable of loading malware etc are blocked by default.
[+] [-] jjordan|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dwayne_dibley|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tsoukase|8 months ago|reply
- Firefox is alive, so that they are a theoretical competitor to avoid anti-trust measures
- Firefox has the lowest market share that remains that said competitor without distracting many users from G engagement
- Firefox emains of few steps behind in features and perforfance so that it remains in this pesky market share
- of course Firefox keeps Google search the default
- may be other under the table agreements? (Request for comments)
I cannot foresay what will happen next with the state of MV3.
[+] [-] allthedatas|8 months ago|reply
I knew people at mozilla at that time and complained loudly to them about breaking my extensions with their constant releases.
And then there's all the dark pattern default config values which are totally unethical
The list of user hating behavior is long.
There is no saving anything there now. The good people have left and been replaced by the author of that awful article.
[+] [-] kuschkufan|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mijoharas|8 months ago|reply
WebUSB. The only time I open chrome nowadays is to flash an ESPHome device. I'd like to drop that dependency.
I wish the extension API supported favicons in a better way. I use vimium and due to a recent change it's nice and easy to have a key binding to select bookmarks. It can't have the visual favicon which would it easier to distinguish things at a glance.
[+] [-] CalRobert|8 months ago|reply
*(yes I know on iOS it’s fake Firefox but this is still a profoundly stupid change that shows they think their users are idiots)
[+] [-] RandomBacon|8 months ago|reply
Computer A:
Sometimes I cannot close tabs by clicking the X, or refresh/go-forward/go-back using the buttons next to the address bar.
Computer B:
Sometimes I get downloads that have "Unknown time left" (0 bytes/sec) when the X of X KB/MB is 100% and you can't remove it from the downloads dropdown.
I just discovered a new bug on Computer B, clicking the hamburger menu doesn't do anything.
Both are Ubuntu.
(I'm not a fan of the new menu in Firefox Beta for Android. I guess it looks nicer due to the greater whitespace, it just break muscle memory and has less options/selections.)
[+] [-] denzil|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] BeetleB|8 months ago|reply
I suspect you have an Ubuntu problem.
[+] [-] TrueSlacker0|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dordoka|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] arp242|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ImPostingOnHN|8 months ago|reply
Do you see any disk i/o spikes when this is happening?
[+] [-] nicman23|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] radley|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] musicale|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] krackers|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] msgodel|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Imustaskforhelp|8 months ago|reply
That means, to use my browser I have to wait literally minutes and yesterday, it was so long somehow on Zen (I created an issue there but they linked me to the firefox (downstream?) issue which wasn't solved in like sooo many years)
I basically just use a password manager and just create a new profile and start afresh most of the times but still its a little inconvenient I guess.
[+] [-] HenryBemis|8 months ago|reply
Then she (Dr. Love) continues to say... "I welcome this change to dialogue. To relate to you OCP's commitment...."
So when I read the FF's post, Dr. Love and the beginning of a big spin came to mind!
[+] [-] deanc|8 months ago|reply