Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#121

Post by dralley » Sat, Sep 11, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

footlose_3815 wrote: post #25

pteraspidomorph wrote: post #6

I 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.

this is my bit, too. they dropped an update that arbitrarily spaced out the area in between your bookmarks folders. You can you fit less on your screen now because of the stupid spacers

You can remove the spacers with 3 clicks.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#122

Post by treis » Sat, Sep 11, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #94

dTal wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>many properties that don't/didn't work or work correctly with Firefox could be made to magically work if you changed your user agent to Chrome. Pretty damning that Google was never slammed with a huge fine for anti-competitive behavior for that.

Chrome is just the new IE. I've been saying this for over a decade, and facts like just continue to make this clear.

Except that chromium is open source. Plenty of alternate browsers exist and at least one has big backing (Edge).

It's not a bad thing for there to be only one HTML & JavaScript engine that you have to deal with. In fact it's the opposite. The dominance of Chrome has made development much easier.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#123

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Sat, Sep 11, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

I would pay money for a browser that was more like the first Firefox. Not insanely bloated and slow, virtually no features to speak of, simple, small, functional. Even if it only works on 80% of the web, fine with me. I want to browse text and pictures, not run an entire second operating system just to browse text and pictures. And add back the options and user functionality they removed over the years so it's less of a pain in the ass to use.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#124

Post by Infinitesimus » Sat, Sep 11, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

will4274 wrote: post #119

dralley wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were an LGBT employee at Mozilla, I would be pretty pissed and demoralized that my "leader" was actively trying to remove my rights. Because that's what Proposition 8 was, an attempt to constitutionally remove marriage rights from gay people after the California courts ruled that it was allowed. I think I'd be pretty uncomfortable making money for a person who would turn around and it to take away my / my family…

And the result is that Mozilla is a zombie company, filled with LGBT employees who would rather work for a company that is useless than one that has a leader who opposes gay marriage. That's fine for the U25s, but as people get older, they usually want to work for a company that is accomplishing something. I understand the folks who wanted that and why they wanted that. But it still turned Mozilla and Firefox into wa…

You're making a lot of assumptions about Mozilla's employee base here...

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#125

Post by eitland » Sat, Sep 11, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #71

corty wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Huh? Happy Tree Style Tabs user here, and another addon (Sidebery) seems to be growing in popularity as well. You can disable the built-in tabs with userChrome.css. What am I missing?

How do you disable the top tabs these days?

I activated browser debugging, pressed ctrl + alt + shift + i and then hunted down the offending tab bar and put in "display: none" for it.

It gets harder and harder year by year though and on the tabstrip issue in Bugzilla there's at least one person who was annoyed and told me to not question peoples motives after I asked a simple question about it.

Anyone here working for Mozilla, I ask the same question here: are you overcomplicating it? I managed to get rid of that tab bar using a CSS hack, why can't we just get a function to apply that css, at least in developer edition?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#126

Post by dralley » Sat, Sep 11, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

will4274 wrote: post #119

dralley wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were an LGBT employee at Mozilla, I would be pretty pissed and demoralized that my "leader" was actively trying to remove my rights. Because that's what Proposition 8 was, an attempt to constitutionally remove marriage rights from gay people after the California courts ruled that it was allowed. I think I'd be pretty uncomfortable making money for a person who would turn around and it to take away my / my family…

And the result is that Mozilla is a zombie company, filled with LGBT employees who would rather work for a company that is useless than one that has a leader who opposes gay marriage. That's fine for the U25s, but as people get older, they usually want to work for a company that is accomplishing something. I understand the folks who wanted that and why they wanted that. But it still turned Mozilla and Firefox into wa…

You're making a stupendously massive, unjustified assumption that Brendan Eich would somehow have prevented Mozilla from being in this position.

They're competing against Apple, Google, and Microsoft simultaneously. It is entirely possible that could have been the best CEO in the world and Firefox could still be in the same exact position right now, or one that is only marginally better.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#127

Post by dralley » Sat, Sep 11, 2021, 3:41 PM UTC

Rijek33 wrote: post #2

Less ideology more technology

Mozilla / Firefox isn't lacking in new technology. Firefox has made far more aggressive under-the-hood improvements than Chrome over the past 5 years.

Rust, WebRender, Stylo, Pathfinder, wgpu, Dav1d, asm.js (which resulted in WebAssembly) etc.

And they helped bootstrap a lot of efforts that benefited everyone massively. Take the list above and add: LetsEncrypt, Cranelift, AV1, Opus, WebGPU, Wasmtime

Plus tooling like the reverse debugger (https://rr-project.org/) and sccache and Bors

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#128

Post by 8eye » Sat, Sep 11, 2021, 3:41 PM UTC

they should look into making an AI browser, that helps users cross reference sources to articles, that would help curb misinformation campaigns, have site details listed, age of domain, score, possible sources, reddit and other sites opinions of that site, also they should create a decentralized app store that is like a mixture of the app store with the github app, it can be used like tor but harness the open source community. there’s a lot of things they could do

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#129

Post by will4274 » Sat, Sep 11, 2021, 3:42 PM UTC

Infinitesimus wrote: post #124

will4274 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the result is that Mozilla is a zombie company, filled with LGBT employees who would rather work for a company that is useless than one that has a leader who opposes gay marriage. That's fine for the U25s, but as people get older, they usually want to work for a company that is accomplishing something. I understand the folks who wanted that and why they wanted that. But it still turned Mozilla and Firefox into wa…

You're making a lot of assumptions about Mozilla's employee base here...

As TFA says, it's about Mozilla's employees. "Thinking you know best" is an attitude that leads you to fire people for out-of-work disagreements, and also remove features that "no one uses", and also divert money from useful products (Firefox) to products that they are "just sure" will be a huge hit (Firefox OS) but then turn out to be total flops.

Mozilla's problem is that its organization (the collective outcome of its employees) is extremely arrogant. Arrogant about technical choices, arrogant about product design choices, arrogant about the way they do PR (including shaming a developer after he died), and arrogant about political/ethical choices as well. That's not to say they aren't ever right, but an organization that approached political topics where Americans are evenly divided with a bit of humility might have an easier time hiring just as an organization that approached product design topic where it's users are evenly divided with a bit of humility might have an easier time finding a good design. Humility helps, and Mozilla has none of it.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#130

Post by christophilus » Sat, Sep 11, 2021, 3:44 PM UTC

Xevi wrote: post #72

mithusingh32 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried brave. But I constantly had ads on it. It would block trackers and ads on websites but if I was to open a few tab it would have crypto ads or some other nonsense.

I don't see any ads when using Brave. What kind of crypto ads are you talking about?

He’s talking about the empty tab screen. You can control what’s on it, but by default it does show ads.