Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

news.itsfoss.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 455 posts

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#281

Post by JohnFen »

ianbicking wrote: post #203

I think in each step the choices Firefox made usually made sense. As Firefox removed or changed features at each juncture they really tried to choose what would work for the most people. A kind of utilitarian product design. And yet it declined, and the critique here isn't entirely wrong (but I think it's mostly wrong). Neither the path Firefox took, nor the path described here, would be enough to stop that decline.…

My problem with what happened to Firefox is really simple -- the changes that they've made have made the browser dramatically less usable for me.

I've been using an older version of Waterfox for years now because it kept the things that made Firefox great for me. However, as more and more websites are unusable with an old browser, I finally reached a tipping point that forced me to switch to something more recent.

I investigated every (as near as I can tell) offering on the market today. Sadly, the modern Firefox was the least bad option after all, so I'm now using that.

I despair for the state of web browsers these days.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#282

Post by JohnFen »

lousken wrote: post #12

Idk 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? That should've been the highest priority.

Why use a browser for Teams at all?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#283

Post by jwond »

cco wrote: post #210
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #155

Earlier 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.

Take a look at Tree Style Tabs [1] or Sidebery [2].

After using tree style tabs it’s very frustrating for me to go back to using other tab styles in other browsers.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#284

Post by junon »

payamb wrote: post #234
junon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is owned and maintained by Google and Facebook. https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/blob/main/COPYING

HarfBuzz is maintained by Behdad Eafahbod who _used_ to work in Google and Facebook.

Doesn't matter who maintains it. It matters who owns copyrights.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#285

Post by junon »

fistynuts wrote: post #153
junon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and replaces them with more ads directly in the user interface (e.g. the new tab screen).

It replaces the millions of ads and trackers on the web with exactly one ad, which is as you say on the new tab screen, that you can turn off in the settings. There is also Brave Rewards, something that pays you for viewing ads but is disabled by default and can be totally hidden through another setting. This straightforward set-up isn't something I feel deserves the number of negative comments I see on here. The ben…

Because it took lots of fights to get the Brave team to 1) allow disabling ads and 2) allow disabling Brave Rewards, neither of which anyone wanted and went against the whole concept of "Brave, the ad-free browser" to begin with.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#286

Post by JohnFen »

avh02 wrote: post #69
drunkpotato wrote: post #20

Not a direct response to this piece, but the two things keeping me on Firefox these days, besides it being a decent browser generally, are container tabs and tree style tabs. They’re both very convenient for my workflow. I think all the browsers are pretty good, but those two features are great.

I'm always amazed at people's resistance to the concept of tree style tabs (or even just tabbing vertically instead)... The horizontal space is far less valuable on widescreens (most websites are just a column down the middle anyway) and top/horizontal tabbing systems are worthless when you have a non-trivial number of tabs.

It's just a matter of taste, is all. I personally hate vertical tabs (or vertical tasks bars, etc). They're just a pain the butt for me. But clearly there are others who love them. Vive la différence!

But, with tabs specifically, I very rarely have more than two going at a time. That probably matters.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#287

Post by JohnFen »

cryptos wrote: post #271

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.

That's another good point -- Mozilla was (maybe still is, I don't know -- I pretty much stopped listening to Mozillians) very condescending and dismissive of any opinion that they didn't already agree with. I'd rarely seen a company put so much effort into alienating their fan base.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#288

Post by nonbirithm »

wellthisishn wrote: post #167
Xevi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from Firefox on Android to Brave. Not because I like Brave, but because I disliked the new UI in Firefox. Brave also had much better performance for JavaScript and CSS animations.

I think the UI on FF mobile is more than fine.. what did you not like about it?

I copied the following from one of my other comments since it's a lot of text, but these are the reasons I moved off Firefox for Android (Fenix) to Brave. Also, Chromium-based browsers for Android have none of the following issues.

---

- Scrolling up on Google search's results page and some other pages is not registered half the time, and sometimes triggers pull-to-refresh instead

- Scrolling up inside an input box while the page is at the top of the screen causes unintentional pull-to-refresh

- Bitwarden autofill is not registered unless you kill and restart the app after logging in

- You can't save images that require cookies to be passed to the request, such as under DDoS protected pages

- Links will sometimes redirect to about:blank unless you go back and click them again

- Most recently visited page is not restored when closing and reopening the app, even though it's saved to the history (closed as wontfix)

- Uses large amounts of memory, causing Android share actions to be silently killed due to OOM unless you quickly kill the app right after sending them

- Closing a tab and clicking "Undo" in the popup sends the tab all the way to the top of the list, instead of its original position (inconvenient if you have a large number of tabs open)

- Frequently loses open tabs in memory, even within ten seconds of navigating to another tab

- Startup time is noticably slower than Brave, taking at least a few seconds to show the UI and begin loading the page. It isn't much, but it impacts the user experience every time you start the app again.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#289

Post by JohnFen »

wopwops wrote: post #33

I nearly stopped using it with the terrible color changes to the tabs (no contrast) in v92. I mean, I thought, this is finally the last straw. But I found that I could customize some colors, especially the active tab, with an add on called Firefox Color. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-color... Maybe it will help someone who has the same problem. I really miss the old and customizable Firefox.

> I really miss the old and customizable Firefox.

This is really the largest beef I have with Firefox. Firefox had been making poor (IMHO) UI decisions for a very long time -- but it didn't matter, because it was customizable enough that you could fix them.

Now that it's much less customizable, though, there is so much that can no longer be fixed.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#290

Post by charles-m-knox »

the_duke wrote: post #255
charles-m-knox wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, self-hosted Firefox sync uses Python 2.7, with dead GitHub activity. Not quite the best state for Firefox sync.

I believe they have shifted to a Rust implementation. https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

Ok, I'm relieved to see that this exists. Thank you.
Post reply on HN