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Firefox Was Always Enough

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Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#151

Post by cheeze »

Yaggo wrote: post #109
celsoazevedo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Windows or Linux, but on Mac it's far from the best browser. It uses more resources (power/battery, memory, etc) than Safari (and sometimes Chrome[ium]), the UI is a mix of old and new code, and system integration is worse than Safari and Chrome. I use it, but both Chromium and Safari are better on this platform.

It's not that Firefox isn't an excellent browser on its own, but on macOS Safari rises the bar very high if you care about details (most people don't).

I disagree with this. Safari and Chrome are both noticeably better than Firefox on OSX.

I'm a Firefox fanboy, still use it on OSX because it's important to me, but the amount of random pauses, crashes, etc is just painful on OSX. It's like none of the Firefox developers use it on OSX or something.

And before someone says "oh it's your extensions", that IMO leads to two talking points

1. It's 2020 and major extensions still cause memory leaks in Firefox. Debugging them isn't easy at all. Almost all of the resources say something like "Run in safe mode and see if it fixes things" and then lots of posts of "post your about:memory here and I'll analyze it." I'm a software engineer by trade and it's been difficult for me to diagnose...

2. Nah because I don't run any extensions on my OSX firefox install

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#152

Post by kd913 »

als0 wrote: post #104
kd913 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any of this fundamentally beats the main problem. That being platform control and advertising. Google advertises chrome with it's services and is the incumbent. It's also preloaded and unremovable on Android. Microsoft advertises edgium on Windows and makes it unremovable. Apple only allows webkit and safari clones on their platform. Firefox even if it's the best browser in the world would have the same…

> Apple only allows webkit and safari clones on their platform. Firefox runs on macOS

Yea from the old MacOS sure. However, now that iOS apps are looking to be pushed to desktop, do you really think that is gonna continue in the future?

As soon as universal binaries/iOS apps becomes fully fledged on ARM Mac I can imagine Apple just removing support completely. It's almost inevitable the way Apple is progressing to basically move to the iOS style platform control to OS X.

Even from Mozilla's economics perspective, it doesn't make sense for Mozilla to be spending engineering effort maintaining both the iOS and OS X variants for something like 4% of desktop. If it was up to me, I would have just migrated/maintained the Firefox Wrapper iOS and called it a day.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#153

Post by Yaggo »

recursive wrote: post #141
Yaggo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that Firefox isn't an excellent browser on its own, but on macOS Safari rises the bar very high if you care about details (most people don't).

How's that? It seems to be the least standards-compliant browser with any significant user share.

It's somewhat a myth that Safari is less standard-compliant. True, Safari's release cycle is slower and Apple has the motivation to prevent PWAs to become too good, but in many things Safari has always been very innovative browser.

Built on top of KHTML foundation, it then became webkit and later the most successfull engine. It was the first to implement full ES6 support, and basically invented CSS transformations/transitions (really amazing stuff back then but not really used until all major browsers caught up years later), was the first to ditch Flash support, has argueably the best privacy policy, has superb font rendering, etc.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#154

Post by takluyver »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #133

I'm a happy Firefox user. IMHO the thing that needs sorting out is the relation between Mozilla the company and Mozilla the Foundation. I just browsed the website of the Mozilla Foundation and to my surprise learned that Firefox development is not one of its responsibilities. I was assuming that that was in fact its primary mission. It's not apparently. Maybe I'm wrong and it's just a vague website but it reads to me…

The Mozilla foundation owns the corporation, so it's not 'run by shareholders' in the normal sense. Any profit it makes stays in Mozilla. I think they set it up like this because some things are legally easier to do as a for-profit corporation than as a non-profit.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#155

Post by djsumdog »

SmokeyHamster wrote: post #54

>The problem? Firefox’s founders are all long, long gone. Brendan and Mitchell are Mozilla’s founders. Well then, you should have thought about that before you forcibly kicked out founder Brendan Eich because you disliked his unrelated politics. You can be a woke company that belittles everyone who doesn't share your narrow ideology or a company that makes a good web browser with a sound business model. You can't be…

From the article:

> I remember when Brendan Eich was briefly the Mozilla CEO. It was noted that a founder has a special place and ability as a leader. We never got to find out, but there was some sense to it: a founder has particular authority, without getting that authority through consensus-building. If you bring in a decisive outsider they will probably fail, lacking the authority (and probably the wisdom) to guide the company. If you bring in or promote someone appropriate for a more mature company, then the company may be operated well but the choices made will be more conservative.

When FireFox Quantum first came out, I was amazed. All the speed and performance problems started to fade and I was so happy to use Firefox again, switching back from Vivaldi. I also noticed a lot of bad information going on about Eich at the time. People were claiming he wasn't very competent, that he didn't put priority on multi-thread/cpu/quantum support (he did) .. lot's of stuff to discredit him.

I do think it was sad that Mozilla forced him out. Diversity of ideas? Not at Mozilla. Diversity based on identity and not thought has become the focus at many companies and it feels insane.

I will not use Brave. Their crypto stuff and ad injection and privacy concerns bother me. However, Firefox has continually gotten more and more unstable. I may switch back to Vivaldi, which I do not really want to do. Diversity in the browser eco system is pretty critical to an open web.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#156

Post by deadbunny »

RealityVoid wrote: post #18
Scarbutt wrote: post #9

Firefox lacks in the default UX area, just from the top of my head: Print to PDF is better in Chrome, comes with a preview. Search marks matches in the scroll bar. Opening a recently closed tab opens a new tab in Chrome instead of replacing the existing one. There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrom…

I just switched a bit on mobile from Firefox to Chrome. I was annoyed by the fact that the address bar is at top in there and I think it's unfair to say at all points that the UX is better on Chrome.

Pretty sure there is an option to move the addressbar to the bottom in FF on Android.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#157

Post by Yaggo »

cheeze wrote: post #151
Yaggo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that Firefox isn't an excellent browser on its own, but on macOS Safari rises the bar very high if you care about details (most people don't).

I disagree with this. Safari and Chrome are both noticeably better than Firefox on OSX. I'm a Firefox fanboy, still use it on OSX because it's important to me, but the amount of random pauses, crashes, etc is just painful on OSX. It's like none of the Firefox developers use it on OSX or something. And before someone says "oh it's your extensions", that IMO leads to two talking points 1. It's 2020 and major extensions…

Sorry for nitpicking, but it's 2020 and OS X has been called macOS since 2015 ;)

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#158

Post by mbesto »

etempleton wrote: post #2

I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla: a few tips from from no one: 1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards. 2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox n…

> It is the thing that makes the company money

Sort of. Google basically is what makes the company money, which is more or less indentured servitude. If it were to break away and find another way to monetize I think it becomes a very different browser.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#159

Post by dkarl »

GordonS wrote: post #33
Miraste wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses. I know Mozilla's non-Firefox projects aren't popular here, but if Thunderbird really wanted a niche in the business world Mozilla would need to start an email service to go with it. The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.

I think you're spot on here. The only people using desktop mail clients are techies with multiple accounts (such as us HN users), and business users (who all use Outlook).

As a counterpoint, the non-techies in my family have become so used to the iPhone and iPad mail client that they look for (and find, and use) the desktop mail client on their Macs. Even my mom knows she has to "find the mail and give it my GMail" when she gets a new device.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#160

Post by chipotle_coyote »

recursive wrote: post #141
Yaggo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that Firefox isn't an excellent browser on its own, but on macOS Safari rises the bar very high if you care about details (most people don't).

How's that? It seems to be the least standards-compliant browser with any significant user share.

Well, at least for me, Safari is often still the fastest browser and has long been the best at power management (important when you're running on battery power). And I like its UI a little more; its tabs, for instance, are native macOS tabs. Firefox and Chrome both make up their own stuff.

As far as "least standards-compliant," I understand that when it comes to supporting progressive web apps, Safari has largely dropped the ball, but in day-to-day practice there just aren't many sites that I have trouble with on Safari. (The biggest one seems to be new Reddit, and I am not entirely convinced that issue is on Safari's end.)

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