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Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

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Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#131

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 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.

You've misread me. Eich wouldn't have saved Mozilla. Having many fewer ideological employees who insisted on conformity would have saved Mozilla.

Conformity is not just a problem for politics. Read TFA - these are all conformity problems - Mozilla gets angry at people who disagree with their point of view - whether it is that tabs belong on top or that Eich is an evil abusive person or that Proton is surely better than XUL. A company that better tolerated diversity in their employees would be better set up to tolerate diversity in their users.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#132
post #60

I have an alternative set of explanations regarding why Firefox is seeing a continuous decline for the last 12 years. 1. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are not public but I would be surprised if Google didn't have 10x more people working on Chrome vs. the number of people working on Firefox. 2. Mozilla is competing against Google. Numbers are again not public but I remember reading estimates that the eq…

To points 1-4, where would FF be without $400m a year from Google?

Your point is also true.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#133
post #53

My Firefox has become adware. Adware for Mozilla, but still: Every new tab I open, there is a “WE CARE FOR YOUR PRIVACY” message awaiting for me. Every restart, “LOOK AT HOW WE HAVE FEWER ADS, MORE PRIVACY”. And from time to time, if I don’t open a tab by myself, it will install Pocket and/or open two tabs at startup, one for the release notes and one for browsing, but still with the little mention “Firefox has been…

Also, in my mind, exchanging Chrome's insistence on Google logins is just the same as Firefox's insistence on their proprietary sync and pocket. I'll say no to every one of those things, because I do value my privacy and none of them provide proper self-hosted options.

Sync is optional, and you can use a custom server and self host it.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#134
post #32
post #17

Earlier 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.

Disagree here. Thinkpad P52 (16GB Ram and i7-8750H) running Windows 10 Pro. Absolutely no issues with Firefox. I always find it strange when people talk about FF issues. I never had any on Linux, MacOS or Windows. Always worked for me. Rarely do I run Chrome. I do use Edge a lot though as all my 'work' stuff resides there - Mail, Slack. It works pretty well.

I run Steam on the same machine (AoE III) with Firefox, LibreOffice Calc open as well and it's just smooth. No overheating or anything.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#135

Go to the dev tools and then to console. You need to approve pasting by typing out the words. This is one of the examples. The browser itself is not bad, better than Safari, but Chrome does everything better, bookmarks, history, the list never ends.

Why can't Chrom(e/ium) drag tabs to bookmarks or toolbars in 2021?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um. A "hapless victim" of the US culture wars? Mozilla quite deliberately committed suicide - they bought a fucking fireworks show to announce to the world that if you had views as conservative or more conservative that the average American, you had a permanent glass ceiling for your employment at Mozilla. Now they struggle to hire developers over the age of 25 - who would have guessed? Describing the prosecutors of…

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…

What did "marriage rights" actually change? I know taxes changed, and I assume there were some property implications beyond just sticking it to bigoted Christians, but that last part seemed to be the major feature.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#137

Longtime Firefox user here. Oddly I have no problem with Tabs on top (I prefer that UI design), low contrast between tabs (there are favicons and text which clearly indicate the tabs, I am not lacking anything to make out where a tab is), removing XUL (only using few add-ons and those transitioned), performance (is fine for me on a macbook pro). Sometimes it feels to me as if there is a trend to bash on weaker projec…

The last version messed up macos dark mode completely. It ignores much css including including add-ons like tree style tabs which is the main reason I use firefox. So I am stuck on v90

The bug says fixed but the nightlies show it hasn't

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#138

Longtime Firefox user here. Oddly I have no problem with Tabs on top (I prefer that UI design), low contrast between tabs (there are favicons and text which clearly indicate the tabs, I am not lacking anything to make out where a tab is), removing XUL (only using few add-ons and those transitioned), performance (is fine for me on a macbook pro). Sometimes it feels to me as if there is a trend to bash on weaker projec…

I'm with you. Applications change. I have no objections with what they've been doing and I'm always surprised by the vitriol. Then I remember the people taking the time to comment about Firefox are predominantly the ones complaining. Squeaky wheels and all that...

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#139
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

The CSS "hack" is the official way. That's sort of the point of using CSS to display the UI. It's editable.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#140
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. Bit I also haven't updated it in over a year in order to avoid the awful rewrite.

The new updated Firefox on Android is better than the old one

I don't know about that, it feels weird now. I don't appreciate gratuitous changes to the UI.
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