I see parallels to the Gnome desktop. Users are patronized in the same way and features are crippled, because the developers know best what users actually want! I stopped using Gnome and although I like Firefox for being the last free browser, I fear that sooner or later I'll have to switch to chrome or one of its descendants.
Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
271–280 of 455 posts
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#272Earlier 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…
Eich wasn't a good leader even if you ignore his political views. Brave isn't exactly successful, it's a sham to inject their own ads into pages and to sell a worthless scamcoin.
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#273My personal pet peeve is that the Chrome's different User Profiles is so easy to use. I'm aware of the different plugins that can offer similar functionality but the setup Chrome is offering is so simple and intuitive that switching feels annoyingly too complicated. Otherwise I've been really surprised how much better Firefox has gotten in the last two years. Good to see old giant still alive.
Have you tried firefox containers? They basically do the same thing as chrome but you can run tabs from different contains right next to each other.
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Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#274Look at Mozilla’s leadership page. Why would you expect a tech company run by HR and D&I to be successful? It would appear that Mozilla has become captive to a single person as their personal hustle to enrich themself and a few others to the organization’s detriment.
I got as far as what looks to my apparently naïve analysis like a qualified CEO who's been there from the start and realized I have no idea what you're talking about. A random sampling shows people who've been there since the 2000s, or come with what passes for solid engineering credentials in tech.
Maybe you could expand this out a little for people who aren't In The Know. Specifics on why each person on the page isn't qualified to lead a browser company will help a ton. Thanks in advance.
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say other way around is true. HN crowd won't like this but it's very hard to continuously update a product for the core userbase that Firefox has. (small sample size but I maintain a small privacy focused app and from my experience, most of the reviews I get are how it's missing features which competitors have or how it's unusable because it can't handle stuff without jeopardizing privacy focused nature of the ap…
How can anyone call firefox privacy focused when they use telemetry so fucking heavily? Per default telemetry is active, disable it and you still got telemetry/pings whatever. You have to opt out of everything. It's not even limited to the user side look at this https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460678#c20
Correct. An easy win for Firefox is to become a zero telemetry browser by default. All that telemetry is giving them wrong data anyway as users they should be most interested in disable telemetry and are not represented in usage data.
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most logical tab position is on the left or right, on desktop, because most of the space on a wide screen display is on the horrizontal axis, and you want to reserve as much vertical space as possible for scrolling websites (which happens vertically, and pretty much cannot be changed at this point, as it is baked into the web). There's an addon for that, but you no longer can hide the default tab bar! So now it j…
So now my tab names are...? Written vertically? I don't think that's the best UI choice.
Of course not, they're written horizontally as usual. Where did you even get the idea they would be written vertically? BTW, even on a laptop screen with vertical tabs I see 31 tab names with ~20 characters in each name. With horizontal tabs, I see 15 tabs with ~5 characters in each name. 9x more information, now that's UI/UX!
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#277Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#278There'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 foun…
Well, once upon a time, Microsoft invested quite a bit of money in Apple to keep them alive. Allegedly, they did this so they could tell the DoJ with a straight face that they were not a monopolist, after all they had a competitor. I would not be surprised if Google's support for Mozilla is based on similar reasoning.
But Apple and Microsoft weren't competitors then. Apple was a hardware manufacturer. Microsoft was a software manufacturer. While there was some overlap in their product offerings, they were in different businesses and so weren't really competitors.
Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#279Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years
#280I 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.
Firefox was/is trying to be a top browser in global market share. The "core userbase" is irrelevant to this mission. You wouldn't really even talk about Chrome's "core userbase" because they aren't trying to make a niche community happy, they are trying to best serve their billions of users, something that the author of this piece clearly knows nothing about - eg, when your userbase is this large, the only meaningful…
Well, they are doing a terrible job. The more they become like chrome, the less people have a reason to use it instead of chrome.
And most people probably don't make a conscious decision about which browser to use. A lot of Firefox's momentum comes from tech saavy users who recommend it to friends, family, coworkers, etc. So losing "core" users cause a chain effect of losing non "core" users.