71–80 of 274 posts
If FF can manage a good implementation of vertical tabs, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Somewhere in the last two months Firefox Nightly got a massive performance boost on GNU/Linux. Thanks! Nice that vertical tabs are officially coming back, although I've been using them in a DIY manner for years already; sidebar extension with a bit of userChrome.css can do wonders: https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif
What do you mean coming back? I don't recall it ever having vertical tabs. Most people have just used treestyletabs for the past decade or two
Looking at the comments, I'm not surprised about FF's low market share. They chose to target geeks and nerds, and let's face it, we tend to be whiny about almost everything and complain about any new change. Meanwhile, Google Chrome doesn't even need to pretend like they care about privacy, so they automatically target the other "ordinary" people who are not so picky about every new release note. This kinda teaches y…
No, it's worse than that - they chose to target geeks, then decided to throw out the geeks in an attempt to target a more mainstream audience[0] and then failed to actually get the mainstream userbase, leaving them with neither the nerds nor the normies. [0] Firefox has always been at its strongest as a power-user's browser, chock-full of extensions and tweaks. Mozilla met this advantage with... two extinction events…
Unfortunately Mozilla's leadership does not see it that way and have steadily pissed off a huge number of former fans, without making inroads with any other groups.
They are in a tough position regardless, but combining that with terrible product and organization management has gotten them into the state they're in now.
Are you bringing back XUL? No? Then please cease operation.
As a Firefox daily user, this list makes me better understand why Firefox has such a low market share. Reorganizing menus or adding alt text to PDFs won't make any impact on user adoption/churn because users don't care. The alt text specifically sounds like resume engineering for some developers that want "on device generative ai" as a bullet point on this LinkedIn. Bullet points like this wouldn't be a problem if Fi…
Anytime Firefox works on UI stuff, people seem to get really annoyed they aren't working on something else. You mention that "Reorganizing menus or adding alt text to PDFs won't make any impact on user adoption", I think it's the exact opposite. There is no greater thing the average everyday Joe cares more about than the UI, and if they just called it good 10 years ago, the project would be in an even worse state.
> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker Oh no, more of this. What about less used options? How much slower? How much less discoverable? Desktop applications are already for power users almost by definition, let’s not slow them down for the sake of reducing “clutter”. Absolutely annoying trend of the last 15 years or so.
The amount of regressions Mozilla has inflicted on Firefox in recent years blows my mind. One of their few big advantages over Chrome is better user control, but they have been working continuously to destroy that. Getting rid of most extensions and removing about:config are two big wtf decisions. All that does is piss off power users, which are the main advocates for this browser. Plus so many other baffling changes…
As a Firefox daily user, this list makes me better understand why Firefox has such a low market share. Reorganizing menus or adding alt text to PDFs won't make any impact on user adoption/churn because users don't care. The alt text specifically sounds like resume engineering for some developers that want "on device generative ai" as a bullet point on this LinkedIn. Bullet points like this wouldn't be a problem if Fi…
As another Firefox active user, I say this has nothing at all to do with it. I use Firefox because it lets me control what I need to control to be productive, but I recognize this isn't why most people used Firefox at its peak. 99% of the reason Firefox got so big was that IE was so awful. Edge is serviceable, so that takes away the vast majority of Firefox's former user base.
Firefox isn't going to grow as big as it was before Edge came along unless one of the major consumer OS provides a broken default browser on its platform and allows Firefox to run on its platform (iOS fulfills only one of the requirements). It won't grow as big as it was before Chrome came along unless both of the earlier requirements are met and Firefox renders Google sites better than Chrome.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are they stretched for resources? Mozilla's revenue is around a half billion USD per year.
It's important to note here that Mozilla spends the majority of that money on non-Firefox projects (something that has pissed off people who have wanted to donate to Firefox specifically for ages). Firefox itself gets a sliver of that.
You can only donate to MoFo, and indeed it doesn't spend much (if anything) paying Firefox staff. This is because Firefox staff is on the MoCo payroll, which gets its revenue mostly from their search engine deal with Google. MoCo actually pays MoFo to use the trademarks that are owned by MoFo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount of regressions Mozilla has inflicted on Firefox in recent years blows my mind. One of their few big advantages over Chrome is better user control, but they have been working continuously to destroy that. Getting rid of most extensions and removing about:config are two big wtf decisions. All that does is piss off power users, which are the main advocates for this browser. Plus so many other baffling changes…
Yes! FF PMs and designers seem to HATE user customization, add-ons and power user capabilities yet those are the main reasons I came to FF and why I still use it. While FF is still the best browser for me (barely), it's only achieved this by all the alternatives enshittifying and dumb-ifying their browsers even faster than FF. As it is I have to spend significant effort under the hood customizing UserChrome scripts j…