Mozilla is kept alive by the money from Google, which is happy to keep Firefox on life support as a shield against anti-trust investigations and as an excuse for developers that there is not a browser monopoly now.
Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
41–50 of 455 posts
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#42Isn't FF the only major browser that allows good adblocking extensions (uBlock origin etc) on mobile? I can't see how most people would live without that (or maybe i'm wrong about other browsers adblocking)
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#43I use Firefox exclusively, but the only thing I can think of to write in this box are all the unneccessary frustrations they are putting me through. The list is long . Item one: Why does Mozilla have so many ways to file bugs* ? Which is a pity, because, besides the fact that Chrome has almost all of the marketshare, they also basically own Mozilla financially (is this still correct ?) and technologically Firefox use…
How is HarfBuzz heavily dependent on Google? It's been around forever, spawn of FreeType.
It is owned and maintained by Google and Facebook.
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#44I use firefox as my daily. For several reasons I've started to also use Brave and Edge. And I am quite happy with them, I have to report!
And I use Chrome to keep it logged in to my gmail only there, I'm logged out of Google (with blocked cookies) everywhere else.
Firefox only on mobile, and I'm quite happy. I haven't tried the others yet.
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#45Firefox is great and all, but its consistently buggy with its clipboard on Gnome/Wayland for the past year.
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly disagree regarding Windows. I use Firefox on Windows as a primary browser and occasionally Chrome, - Firefox offers much better performance even having some extensions installed while Chrome is in vanilla state. The only issue with FF for me is exactly as the other commenter said - Mozilla likes to piss off its core userbase.
I strongly disagree. I have it installed on Windows 7, Windows 10 and the performance has gone so far down in the last few years I've had to switch to chrome.
What kind of performance are you talking about? I've been using it as my only browser at home (Win10) for years and I haven't noticed much.
edit: Really just curious, I'm assuming I'm using it differently.
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox on Android used to just freeze for me. I'm happily on brave mobile, which does block ads.
... and replaces them with more ads directly in the user interface (e.g. the new tab screen).
a) can be disabled b) not in any way like the ads you would encounter on businessinsider or similar.
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#48There's a theory in the Free Software community that BigTech sponsorship of Mozilla was intended to bring about the current state of affairs.
The idea is that MS, Google, and others really have no reason to donate to a direct competitor. Perhaps they did so because they knew it would give them control. That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy organization than a foundation that develops a web browser. The sorry state of FF was the inevitable result.
Whether you buy this narrative or not, the fact is there remains no effective threat whatsoever to the massive data collection that occurs whenever you use Chrome or Edge. 10 years ago, MS/Google had no ability to spy on the web surfing of the vast majority of computer users. Now they do.
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#49I agree with this opinion piece. Firefox is a product strangely hostile to its core userbase. It's almost like they've been deliberately trying to sabotage themselves for years. I don't use it because I approve of all their stupid pigheaded UI choices, I use it because it has been the least bad option despite those choices. That might not go on for much longer, though.
I mean, isn't this a bit like saying, "I left Windows for Ubuntu because of the invasive privacy concerns I had... But man Unity is terrible, I'm going back to Windows!" If privacy is the ultimate concern, I can suffer usability. I think the real issue is we've stopped advocating for privacy loudly and publicly. All the users know is convenience.
The thing is, if you do not like the UI of unity, maybe you'll like Gnome, KDE, LXDE, fluxbox, i3 or ratpoison or .... With most Linux distros, you can have both privacy and your favourite UI paradigm. You usually do not need to suffer in the usability department (or at least not too much).
But with Firefox, all the UI choices are gone now, intentionally sacrificed on the altair of rewrites, UI changes, branding and some dubious security claims. You used to get the choice of vertical tabs (better on todays widescreen laptops), tree-style tabs, Buttons where you liked them, user-provided CSS customization for pages and the UI. Not anymore, all gone (they paid some lip service to some of the above concerns, but nothing relevant, and overall a massive downturn).
Now you only get the take-it-or-leave-it of one crappy and worsening Chrome clone UI.
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#50Idk about 12 years but I know about last two years - many companies and workers had to switch to WFH. So that means using some sort of chat&video&audio software/website. What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams? That should've been the highest priority. Instead, it took them years to get at least the GPOs right, autoupdate is the same story... so many things in corprote env were or still are PITA…
> What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams?
I think that's the wrong way around. Why would Firefox need to change their browser for a specific web application?
Microsoft chose not to support Firefox, not the other way around. It's still choosing not to support smaller platforms (the Linux application is simply garbage, lacking basic features that have been available on other platforms for months).
When I ran into this problem, Teams didn't work because Firefox didn't allow the application to enumerate the audio devices hooked up to my computer, only exposing a "default" one. I don't even understand why that would be a problem, my browser already asked which input and output to use, why would Teams need to care?
Jitsi and Google Meet worked fine, so the problem was clearly with Microsoft's developers. They managed to fix the problem eventually, so Microsoft should take 100% of the blame here in my opinion.
I don't know about the sysadmin stuff. Honestly, with modern Chrome-clone Edge, I'd expect most business that roll out a browser to now simply stick to the built-in browser.