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

321–330 of 455 posts

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#321

Post by GekkePrutser »

s17n wrote: post #232
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.

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…

Even so, the huge decline shows they're not interpreting those statistics correctly, or not appealing to whatever their userbase is

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#322

Post by stereoradonc »

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...

I use Adguard and Vivladi.

You can also switch in built in adblocker in Vivaldi. There's no reason to use Firefox.

In AdGuard, you can add "extensions" that extend the functionality of the browser. Its simple. For example, playing youtube in background or bypassing paywalls. Extensions are little javascripts.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#323

Post by GekkePrutser »

nonbirithm wrote: post #288
wellthisishn wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Are you sure you're talking about Firefox? For example it doesn't even have pull to refresh so you can't trigger it unintentionally :)

I use it all the time now because it supports uBlock Origin and Dark Reader and I think it's good. And I have all my bookmarks on Firefox sync. I have some minor issues with it like the tab list that doesn't always scroll right but they're not deal-breakers.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#324

Post by drunkpotato »

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.

Chrome's tab groups are pretty good. Not quite as useful to me as tree style tabs, but better than nothing. I use Firefox as my primary browser, Chrome for some things, and Safari for others. It's good to have the variety, I think.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#325

Post by GekkePrutser »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #150
dralley wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can remove the spacers with 3 clicks.

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.

Yes the same now with the compact mode which is even more needed now than ever with the new UI. The compact mode now has the same density as the regular mode had before.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#326

Post by BrendanEich »

betwixthewires wrote: post #302
GekkePrutser wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is a decent browser but I won't use anything from Brendan Eich. I also don't really agree with their BAT token stuff. I just want adtech to die at this stage, not to find an alternative model. Direct payments to sites I do support however and I'm a member of several. I guess both opinions aren't popular :) But that's my reasons to use Firefox despite not being fully happy with it.

I'm trying to use brave search as an alternative to google, since it is an actual search engine that does indexing as opposed to DDG, and I don't want to use bing either. What upsets me is that there's no way to add it as default search in a browser, on purpose, because they want you to have to install brave browser to do that. Nothing upsets me more than when someone deliberately makes their product less useful. I d…

We do not prevent you from adding Brave as default search to other browsers. I'm not sure why you think we would, so please tell me more. Thanks.

To make Brave Search default in another browser, please load https://search.brave.com/help/default. In Safari, there's no way we know of to add an alternative default. Apple controls the dropdown list's contents. But try this link in Firefox or Chrome.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#327

Post by makeitdouble »

basilgohar wrote: post #141
makeitdouble wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I think there is no way to heavily use Google properties (in particular drive, docs and meet) without Chrome. I tried through the years, and always ended up with a main browser (Safari or now Firefox) and Chrome as a Google dedicated browser, because the experience would be miserable otherwise. At this point I stopped blaming the other browsers.

While Google apps definitely perform less than ideally for me on Firefox, I think that falls far short of unusable. I use Google Docs, Drive, YouTube, and other Google properties in 4K on my old (5+ year old AMD Ryzen 2400G) system. I definitely don't relish using their apps, but I definitely can and don't feel hindered.

I always use somewhat recent laptops, but with middle range specs (e.g. the current 13” M1), so the effect is more visible than on your system I think.

I can/could use any of the properties in a pinch, but something would give after a while. The worst offender for me was Meet, a few hours of here and there meetings would trigger weird interface scaling effects, or it just wouldn’t join any new meeting with the screen staying stale. On firefox Bluejeans or Zoom wouldn’t do it, just Meet.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#328

Post by hakfoo »

temphnaccount wrote: post #151
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'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…

Firefox's user base is made up of customization enthusiasts, privacy advocates, and people who remember when "web standards" meant "doesn't work in IE6."

If they pivot towards "mainstream appeal", it usually comes to the expense of that user community. Their alternative is to be the best Firefox they can possibly be, and wait for users to join their audience organically.

It feels like Vivaldi has done a better job of sticking to a clear user persona model. They are clearly targeting power users and Opera 12 refugees, and it feels like that still informs what they do. Unfortunately, the one thing they can't do is make a browser that doesn't run like cold treacle.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#329

Post by seba_dos1 »

ivanche wrote: post #276
cco wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

You can also shrink the tab bar to just favicons and expand it on hover, similar to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rTY8tTAO8

This is exactly how I'm using Firefox right now: https://framagit.org/ariasuni/tabcenter-reborn/-/wikis/theme...

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#330

Post by GekkePrutser »

the_duke wrote: post #133
corty wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it's end to end encrypted unlike Google and Microsoft's offerings
Post reply on HN