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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

#441

Post by davidebaldini »

eplanit wrote: post #422
davidebaldini wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you wish the outcomes of these legal enforcements to be like? An authority with the effective power to cripple the finances and business practices of Google for the purpose of reducing its market share to an arbitrarily lower percentage would be immediately detrimental to furthering the development of Google's products, and consequently detrimental to the utility of its users, while in the longer term it would…

Who says anything about crippling or destroying anything? One approach is to split up the company in to separate entities. Search, YouTube, advertising, technology products and OSs, etc...

...and prohibit these newly-formed entities to cooperate too much with each other toward holistic objectives, therefore reducing the efficiency of capital allocation to their detriment. If this new arrangement wouldn't be less efficient, less productive or crippling in any way, it would rationally be attained voluntarily without political imposition. Unless the intervention manifests in a hindrance so expensive to cause the market share to shrink in one or more service segments, and give smaller competitors the opportunity to collect unsatisfied customers who seek alternatives to the reduced quality of services offered by the former monopoly, what would the alleged benefit be for society?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#442

Post by betwixthewires »

BrendanEich wrote: post #326
betwixthewires wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So I tried. The link you give just gives you a link that says "read instructions specific to your browser" and when I click that link I just get "instructions not available for such and such browser." The instructions do not have to be specific to the browser. Why doesn't brave just implement OpenSearch?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#443

Post by ikerdanzel »

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.

Have been using Firefox since the day Marc as Netscape and Mosaic. I think Firefox has a mole or a couple like the movie The Departed (or original trilogy Infernal Affairs). Think about it, Google pay Firefox a lot. It makes sense to put in moles to sabotage FF not to grow as big as Chrome. Over the years you can see Firefox goin down while so many other browsers growing. Now, FF seems to be very antiquated when compared to Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, etc. Heck even Yandex browser perform better than FF with built in ocr. FF is so badly in need of a shake up of their lead developers.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#444

Post by flaburgan »

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #431
kaba0 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And again, you throw out the baby with the bathwater and go back to Big Google that does worse on every privacy-related issue by a mile. Like, no matter what, telemetry is useful to the product, and defaults matter. Like the infamous “the opt-ot organ donor vs opt-in countries have a staggering difference of 90% difference”. Should firefox throw away 90% of its userbase’s useful telemetry, most of who would have no p…

Oh no I still use firefox and like everyone I make bug reports or follow the existing once. But it's hard to recommend it to friends/family if you have to say "you only need to change these settings and install these addons" and I get responses like "I would rather use brave. It just works" or something like that. I want firefox to be good. I don't even need to have the newest features I just wamt a stable browser I…

>Removing features I actually use and adding things I don't need is counterproductive and I don't know which part of their telemetry helped them make those choices, but many I didn't like.

Well, this is exactly the point. If you disable telemetry, how do you expect them to know that you are using that feature and they shouldn't remove it?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#445

Post by flaburgan »

freediver wrote: post #408
lavabiopsy wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Telemetry is not a vote From the developer point of view, this is incorrect, the developers are using it to decide which features to prioritize. If you are aware that it's happening and you leave it on, then I don't see what the problem is. Resource and bandwidth usage should be very minimal, if it's not then I would urge you to actually measure it and report bugs. It should be possible to compress it so that it doe…

> If you are aware that it's happening and you leave it on, then I don't see what the problem is. Most people are not aware of telemetry. Most of those that are, disable it. So you end up getting what you call 'votes' from the people who are not aware they are 'voting'. That is not voting (for which a person need to be consciously doing it) but rather extraction of information. Imagine in an election, the votes of th…

>Most people are not aware of telemetry.

This isn't true, Mozilla is making it very clear the first time you are launching Firefox and you have a button just next to the message to disable it easily without having to go to the settings. I don't know how they could be better about it.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#446

Post by flaburgan »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #369
wellthisishn wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. It's not intrusive, gives lots of options organized well, it's fast... great browser. I assume it's still safer than Chrome as well, seems like the best option for now

I'm not sure why anyone would use chrome on android when brave, vivaldi, firefox are all better.

Same old answer, and actually the real reason why Firefox marketshare is dropping: people don't change the default application.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#447

Post by lavabiopsy »

greatgib wrote: post #38

Really great piece this article. Very good idea to have mapped the rants that have accumulated over time to the historical evolution of Firefox. It is often that you hear that a minority of complainers are just adverse to change and that the majority agree with the stupid changes. But, in fact, the majority of person will disagree in silence and just switch to alternative solutions without a vocal complaint. So, it i…

>So, it is important to listen to vocal complainers, even in minority,

Maybe in some cases this is true, but I can't agree with that in terms of taking product direction from social media. In my (anecdotal) experience with areas where I have expertise, the loud and vocal complainers are almost always completely wrong about something or missing some key piece of information. In fact the angrier and more emotional the complaining, the more likely it seems to me that the complaint is based on false information. Maybe I'll have to do a comprehensive study on this at some point.

If you meant "listen" only in terms of hear what they have to say in order to educate them then sure, that can be important for marketing to explain product changes, but it's not a way to drive product changes.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#448

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #244
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…

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

Maybe some people can but I question their commitment to privacy. Mozilla is heavily conflicted, being almost 100% supported by Google in exchange for sending searches to the Chocoloate Factory by default, yet they refuse to openly acknowledge or address the issue. What really gets me is they constantly use privacy as a selling point. Then they try to convince the public that web advertising is a necessity. Its like robbing Peter to pay Paul. You cant borrow your way out of debt.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#449

Post by BlackLotus89 »

flaburgan wrote: post #444
BlackLotus89 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no I still use firefox and like everyone I make bug reports or follow the existing once. But it's hard to recommend it to friends/family if you have to say "you only need to change these settings and install these addons" and I get responses like "I would rather use brave. It just works" or something like that. I want firefox to be good. I don't even need to have the newest features I just wamt a stable browser I…

>Removing features I actually use and adding things I don't need is counterproductive and I don't know which part of their telemetry helped them make those choices, but many I didn't like. Well, this is exactly the point. If you disable telemetry, how do you expect them to know that you are using that feature and they shouldn't remove it?

I tell them directly. I actually took a look at what they send about:telemetry and as far as I can tell NONE of the features they removed that I used was captures through this. It's good to collect not too much, but removing features based on imagined data is bad. Maybe I overlooked something, but the only data that could interest them is my addon selection...

Anyway for the longest time I send detailed information with all my crash reports and similar, but not only could I never find out where they collected the crashes I send in no no error (even the reproducible once) got fixed. The only times my problems got fixed where when I actively filed a bug report myself or fixed the cause of the issue manually.

After a few years I began to wonder if anybody even reads those crash reports and added a request for a quick pingback something like "empty message is fine. I just want to know if anybody is actually reading this". Did this _multiple_ times, never got any response. Either they don't read or they don't care. Anyway I'm over giving my data for aggregations that probably never get used.

If someone from mozilla could tell me that they actually matter maybe I would change my mind, but for now I'll drive my privacy is important for me train, because it really is and if the people that collect my data don't or misuse it I don't see the point in sending it.

Maybe I was expecting too much, but if this is too much of a response then I don't want to contribute anything (at least like this).

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#450

Post by basilgohar »

Allypost wrote: post #301
basilgohar wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 2400G came out in February 2018 so your system is 3.5 years old at max?

You're right. I don't know how old my desktop is, I confused it for my laptop, which I remember I bought in 2016.
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