Firefox on the brink? • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#461

Post by llimllib » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 6:03 PM UTC

Miraste wrote: post #267

mardifoufs wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the USDS makes all or even most of the current federal gov websites.

No, they don't. But they did create the VA site: https://www.usds.gov/projects/va-dot-gov And they're involved with the Department of Education, although I couldn't find out exactly what they built.

the va site is vast, to say any one team created the VA site would not be even close to correct.

They did help change over the old va.gov to the new va.gov (which was built as vets.gov), which imo has been a huge improvement.

(There are still many, many problems with the VA and its website. Just saying that 1. the new va.gov is a big improvement and 2. the USDS is far from being a single point of responsibility for it, or even _the_ major point of responsibility)

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#462

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 6:04 PM UTC

sleepybrett wrote: post #420

encom wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time, or what bone-headed UI design change they'd make. And every time there'd be a Bugzilla bug with a of horde users who just had their favorite feature removed, and every time, without fai…

> In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. citation fucking needed.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#463

Post by jeromenerf » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #229

fishpen0 wrote: post #63

The main issue is every startup and small business ties themselves to the gsuite apps and ultimately falls down the path of using and then requiring gsuite auth and often chrome as a whole for all work browsing. It is quintessentially the new IE. almost all my browsing during the day has to be chrome whether I like it or not and that has been true at my last 4 organizations. Three of which are multi billion dollar co…

We're pretty GSuite/GAuth-oriented too but the parts we use work just fine on Firefox. What parts of that are forcing you guys to be Chrome exclusive?

Some google meet features are chrome only (background blur, picture in picture).

I can't say I have noticed much else, so I use chrome for gsuite and firefox for everything else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#464

Post by crazygringo » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #388

crazygringo wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking government websites to run differently from 99.9% of commercial websites out there. First of all, that's just not going to happen for all sorts of practical reasons. But secondly, you're totally ignoring UX and design. "Specifying semantics, and let the rendering engine do what it will" might work for developers who are used to interacting with API's. It will not work for regular users. Regular users ne…

The things you describe aren't prevented by focusing on semantics, and are in fact enabled by it. Every modern app looks different for branding purposes, so users don't know what the buttons do. Things are complicated because we abandoned standard UIs that used to use the same widgets across every application. And government stuff should work differently from 99.9% of commercial websites. Again, the goal should be fo…

> so users don't know what the buttons do.

They do, though. People are able to figure out commercial websites orders of magnitude more easily than figuring out how to fill out their 1040.

> They need to just make their stuff reliably work

Which is what UX and design help with.

> Basic HTML with minimal optional styles checks all of those boxes.

It doesn't. Layout and design are tools that help with clarify and ease-of-use.

> you see that you really just need most websites to be a more convenient version of paper forms.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Do you similarly think that your iPhone or desktop interface would be improved if the UX was "a more convenient version of paper forms"?

Paper forms are an extremely limiting form of UX. Why would you ever want to throw out all of the progress we've made with usability?

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#465

Post by jen20 » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

jdlyga wrote: post #90

Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first . If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. Mozilla focus way too much of their attention on privacy and non-browser related projects. Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and making an excellent b…

Privacy must be a tier 1 feature of a web browser.

The fact the market leader goes out of their way to shit all over privacy concerns says more about their marketing pull than the quality of their browser.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#466

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

TheGRS wrote: post #412

JohnFen wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has support I could not disagree more. Subscriptions for software are a deeply unfair approach. Great for the companies, of course, but not for users. A more fair approach is to charge for upgrades and support instead. At least that way, users only pay if/when they choose to obtain additional value.

This model gets implemented, and then the comments section is littered with "I prefer when I didn't need to pay for software upgrades and backward compatibility!"

Yeah, people can get irrational about such things (like ignoring that they're only paying when they choose to rather than paying every month automatically).

But the solution to this is to offer both forms, as several companies do.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#467

Post by aembleton » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #388

crazygringo wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking government websites to run differently from 99.9% of commercial websites out there. First of all, that's just not going to happen for all sorts of practical reasons. But secondly, you're totally ignoring UX and design. "Specifying semantics, and let the rendering engine do what it will" might work for developers who are used to interacting with API's. It will not work for regular users. Regular users ne…

The things you describe aren't prevented by focusing on semantics, and are in fact enabled by it. Every modern app looks different for branding purposes, so users don't know what the buttons do. Things are complicated because we abandoned standard UIs that used to use the same widgets across every application. And government stuff should work differently from 99.9% of commercial websites. Again, the goal should be fo…

> It needs some boxes to type information

Would an address lookup service be acceptable? One of those where you start typing your address into a box and it fills in all of the address fields based on which address you select.

If a new version of this is created, shouldn't it be tested on browsers? Which browsers should it be tested on?

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#468

Post by mrinterweb » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

Filligree wrote: post #452

trealira wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Although I'm not trying to discount what others experience, I'm always confused to hear that Firefox is slow, because it seems just as fast as Chromium on my computer.

It uses a lot more CPU on Youtube than chrome/safari, and seems laggy there.

There was some recent concern that Youtube may be slowing down FF https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#469

Post by lotsofpulp » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #2

Yes, the Web has turned into ChromeOS, with the help of many folks that used to bash IE.

The only time I use Chrome is for Chrome Remote Desktop. Otherwise, Safari on macOS and iOS seems to do what I need it to do for at least 8 years.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#470

Post by athrowaway3z » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

slig wrote: post #314

K0nserv wrote: post #77

Two things about this: 1. Firefox blocks various analytics and tracking quite aggressively by default. Additionally, users of Firefox are, by and large, privacy minded and will have further mitigations. Any count of Firefox users is likely to be undercounting. 2. For the kind of basic web stuff(simple pages, forms etc) that USWDS supports it shouldn't matter greatly if Firefox is not supported. Theses standards are m…

FF is at 4% usage on Cloudflare Radar [1] which doesn't use JavaScript to measure usage. [1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage

I use Random User-Agent (Switcher).

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But i doubt that will drive the numbers. On a side note, I think percentages will overstate firfox's decline. The number of devices with browsers per person will influence it heavily and that number is ever increasing.

I think the average person in my circle has more than 3 and many have more than 4 devices with they use to visit .gov sites (i.e. ipads, phones, laptops, but not including the fridge, car, tv, etc)