[morcus]

As someone that uses Firefox as my main browser on desktop and mobile, I am curious here - what exactly are the complaints with Firefox?

I'm using 3+ year old hardware that was mid-range even when it was new and it seems to do everything I would want with reasonable performance.

[LunaSea]

> what exactly are the complaints with Firefox?

If you are a (the) leading browser like Firefox once was, the "what are the complaints?" is the right question.

If you are a minor browser like Firefox currently is (~2.5% market share), the "what is it doing better?" is the correct question.

[pluralmonad]

Supporting a proper ad blocker makes it automatically superior than any of the more popular browsers. The fact most people don't mind being fuel for the machine is another issue.

[jampekka]

The Firefox market share was eaten largely by the enormous and legally dubious marketing campaigns by Google and Microsoft. Hard to see how Mozilla could compete with constant forced nags and defaults in the most widely used websites and operating systems.

[duped]

> what is it doing better

adblock is the single most important feature of a web browser to me. Firefox has the best adblock support.

[evilduck]

My primary complaint is that they have a bunch of ad placements on the product out of the box when it's opened for the first time and any time I set up a new system I have to go configure Firefox to not be annoying by default. It makes the Firefox experience feel subversive and untrustworthy because this freshly installed application is obviously bedfellows with advertisers. I know I can't trust advertisers with my data or browser behavior, so why should I trust Firefox with it? If I stop using Firefox for a little while, they _so helpfully_ offer to reset my configuration back to default so those ads will get shown again. It's a hostile experience.

Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for.

[Yoric]

> Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for.

Last time I checked, Mozilla received 90%+ of its funding from Google. This is a situation that nobody likes (except Google, of course). These ads are an attempt to diversify income streams.

People are really unhappy that Mozilla gets money from Google, but also extremely vocally unhappy whenever Mozilla attempts to find other sources.

I haven't seen anyone suggest alternate solutions yet.

[soganess]

Major problems with Firefox include:

  - full uBlock support

  - the ability to still be themed

  - first-party isolation

...Okay, okay, I’m being too cheeky.

The common wisdom is that overall Firefox can feel bottlenecked at render and draw times (“less snappy”). That could be a result of a slower JavaScript engine (takes longer to get to drawing), or a result of poorer hardware acceleration (slower drawing), or a less optimized multiprocessing/multithreading model (more resource contention when drawing).

I honestly can't see it in the real world, but synthetic benchmark are pretty clear on that front.

[Yoric]

Hum.

I have at home 13 year old hardware running Firefox and no performance complaints.