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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#511

Post by dheera »

freedomben wrote: post #322
bcrl wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance of Firefox has steadily gotten worse lately. My bank's website has massive lag when scrolling (1 second to redraw? Great!), but it works perfectly fine in Chrome. Firefox also gets into a state where screen updates in Streeview are laggy after anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days, but I can't figure out a way to predictably reproduce it on demand. Meanwhile, Chrome is snappy all the time. I also…

This is probably much more your bank's fault than it is FF. I think Mozilla has badly neglected FF to the point they probably deserve to die so a new org can take their place, but the blame for that most likely falls at the feet of the bank for not testing on FF.

These websites also keep adding bloat on top of bloat, hell, a goddamn button is 56 layers of nested divs these days instead of just styling the shit out of .

Or they do some batshit insane "polyfill" nonsense that turns the into 56 layers of nested divs behind the hood.

HTML hasn't caught up either, there's no that invokes the native toggle switch that every OS already has, devs are forced to mimic the toggle with 85 layers of nested divs.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#512

Post by isodev »

culi wrote: post #497
isodev wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rendering engine doesn't really matter - nothing is stopping Mozilla from implementing a better browser app than Safari. Safari is _really_ good and a very high bar to catchup to, even if you don't have to implement the rendering engine and Mozilla is not exactly known for their friendly and refined UIs. Vivaldi on iOS is much younger by comparison and looks a lot better than Firefox.

> The rendering engine doesn't really matter I disagree. For the purposes of this conversation, I feel like it's the only thing that matters. The web doesn't benefit at all from a WebKit-based browser by Mozilla capturing some of the iOS marketshare. Websites will still have to cater to WebKit. Not Gecko or something new > Mozilla is not exactly known for their friendly and refined UIs I actually strongly prefer the…

> For the purposes of this conversation, I feel like it's the only thing that matters. The web doesn't benefit at all from a WebKit-based browser by Mozilla capturing some of the iOS marketshare.

I believe it matters because it shows Mozilla's ability to market their product (Firefox). If they continuously fail to capture user base on any platform, then what powers Firefox is of little consequence.

As an experiment, I just installed Firefox on iOS just to see what's up and honestly 4 screens of things to confirm before I even get to the browsing part? As a tech person I understood each of them of course, but no sane person would put 4 screens in a row blocking users from using an app they normally already know how top use. So no, I don't believe Mozilla has the required UI/UX skills.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#513

Post by andrepd »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #485
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Server-side tracking of user agent strings should still be possible.

Except we should be pushing for the elimination of user agent strings, too. They just end up being used as a lazy way for lazy developers to not test for capabilities. The most recent example I've run into is Snapchat's web client: It reject's Firefox purely by user agent string, but then works perfectly in Firefox if you just have your browser lie.

That's the sort of this that should be illegal for anticompetitive reasons.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#514

Post by triceratops »

digging wrote: post #437
jampekka wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? The same thing that is justifying obscene salaries in general. A circle of greed where obscenely paid people decide what obscenely paid people should be paid.

I will say in their defense, they have a legitimate argument. Offering a low-paying CEO role means you'll attract lower quality CEOs. The best CEOs have personal incentive to take the highest paying jobs. This element of competition does exist. However, this ignores a few factors. 1. Mozilla don't seem to have a great CEO despite the pay. 2. Self-interest and CEO skills are not necessarily tightly coupled. They could…

> Offering a low-paying CEO role means you'll attract lower quality CEOs

Maybe in the private sector.

> The best CEOs have personal incentive to take the highest paying jobs

It has to be said again: in the private sector.

Non-profit CEOs shouldn't expect to be compensated as well as their private sector counterparts. The feeling of doing good is part of the reward.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#515

Post by Lamad1234 »

Steltek wrote: post #309
robin_reala wrote: post #28

It’s not on the brink, it’s that Firefox shims GA[1] with Enhanced Tracking Protection, which is on by default.[2] analytics.usa.gov uses GA. So you really can’t rely on usage figures that don’t represent the truth of your situation. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/413b88689f3ca2a30b... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-ava...

What stood out to me was that they didn't break out mobile from PC. The mobile landscape dominates usage these days and extremely few people make an active choice in browser there. The presented stats to me reads more like Android vs iPhone than it does Chrome vs everyone else.

[dead]

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#516

Post by beretguy »

billiam wrote: post #320

The organization that gave the world Rust, Web Assembly, and countless other useful technologies is in a probable death spiral, and most of the blame goes to Mitchell Baker. If Mozilla was not primarily driven by greed and laziness, smart people that still exist in around Firefox would have made the difficult technical decisions needed to continue to ship a useful product that protects user privacy while still being…

Firefox needs new useful features to attract people. Like tab groups, tab position, other useful stuff…

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#517

Post by hughw »

28304283409234 wrote: post #500

Please oh dear god just let me pay for Firefox. This isn’t the nineties. I can and will afford it. I pay for Bitwarden, Fastmail, NordVPN, ElementaryOS. Just give me a paid version, Mozilla.

You can make monthly donations to the Mozilla Foundation.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#518

Post by yonatan8070 »

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…

I daily drive Firefox, it's fast, responsive, and works well for everything I do on the web

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#519

Post by davidelettieri »

whakim wrote: post #475
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…

I always see comments like this on HN, and I struggle to understand why. Firefox is plenty fast. Its interface is extremely similar to most of its competitors. It works well. What special sauce do you expect Mozilla to implement that'll suddenly change their fortunes? It's a browser, after all. And why do you think that such features aren't being implemented due to lack of resources or muddled priorities - surely Moz…

It is quite slow on android IMHO. At least for me, in comparison with Chrome.

I also use ublock origin in android which should make loading page faster I guess but unless the page is absolutely awful, chrome remains faster even with ads on.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#520

Post by crazygringo »

ndriscoll wrote: post #498
crazygringo wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No -- I don't want the US government (or any other) involved in setting web standards. The W3C is not going to be helped by being run by governments instead. No -- I don't want the US government providing a reference implementation of web browsers. No -- I don't want to log into a mainframe computer to fill out my taxes or sign up for Medicaid or a health plan. The government should simply build services that work, i…

Like I said, the US government should just adopt the existing W3C standard. It's crazy to me that 10 years ago people were against the standard for government documents being essentially "whatever Microsoft office does", but in 2023, we've decided it makes sense for the standard for government web sites to be "whatever Chrome and Safari do". And as I've pointed out, for historical reasons, we already have an adequate…

But you're saying that the government should create websites according to those standards, and if it breaks in Chrome or Safari, the government shouldn't test and fix it. Rather, the browsers should fix it.

That's a position I just can't get behind. These are all just tools. The point isn't to follow some ideology, the point is to function.

And no, the government shouldn't formally "adopt" any specific W3C standard either, because standards evolve, and we don't want the government to get stuck in time. It should just write and maintain websites that work.

This isn't complicated. Businesses all seem to manage it just fine. The government doesn't need to do it any differently.

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