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

291–300 of 455 posts

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#291

Post by iknowSFR »

peakaboo wrote: post #270
temphnaccount wrote: post #151

Earlier 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…

People are dumb, specially the tech community. I've been watching for at least 10 years how everyone switched to chrome because it's faster. Now we have one mega corporation in charge of both most of the search and most of the browser usage. That's literally controlling the internet. And you made it happen by your choices.

People are dumb or certain companies are smart?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#292

Post by thayne »

lavabiopsy wrote: post #171
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you can't, because Mozilla deems that only X% of users use that feature and maintaining its configurability consumes too much organizational resources. First the GUI to edit the GUI disappears, then the about:config option follows later. That's what's been steadily happening. Less and less customizability for power users, more and more streamlining for new users.

I don't see how that's a problem, you can just modify the CSS. If you too decide that's too much work and consumes too much of your resources for not enough gain, well then now you know why Mozilla made the decision.

The ability to change that css is another one of those things that has been moved to enabling options in about:config that will probably get removed int the future.

And any firefox update could potentially break your css fix.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#293

Post by lousken »

JohnFen wrote: post #282
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?

If you wanna join a meeting from another company and you dont have teams licence, you can only use browser or mobile app (not sure if this was changed later or not, because by winter every company I manage had bought ms 365 business. Though teams licence is still an extra item in MS365 admin so I'd assume it hasn't changed)

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#295

Post by dvdkon »

junon wrote: post #284
payamb wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't matter, since it's FLOSS with an irrevocable licence. That's the great thing about free software.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#296

Post by eitland »

dTal wrote: post #139
eitland wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except I don't think it is even documented anymore?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#297

Post by throwaway81523 »

Yoric wrote: 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…

Of course Eich becoming a Mozilla higher-up (even before becoming CEO) is why browsers became so complicated and expensive to develop. We would have been better off staying with HTML3 and no javascript.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#298

Post by betwixthewires »

greypowerOz wrote: post #16
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.

i use ffox on android because (for some reason) it's the only one I'm aware of that has ublock origin addon...( happy to be proven wrong :) I also used to use reader mode once in a while...

Kiwi Browser is a chromium based mobile browser with support for extensions. It is FOSS.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#299

Post by [deleted] »

thayne wrote: post #292
lavabiopsy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how that's a problem, you can just modify the CSS. If you too decide that's too much work and consumes too much of your resources for not enough gain, well then now you know why Mozilla made the decision.

The ability to change that css is another one of those things that has been moved to enabling options in about:config that will probably get removed int the future. And any firefox update could potentially break your css fix.

[deleted]

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#300

Post by oliwarner »

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 would be funnier if Chrome for Android wasn't trying to shove tab groups down my throat for the ninth time. This time without an obscure flag to disable it.

Looking at why established users complain about Firefox isn't why billions of people moved to Chrome, from many sources. It was the default on our phone and that makes it an obvious desktop choice.

(Not to mention it does do some things nicely, I just much prefer FF for webdev)

Post reply on HN