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What We're Working on in Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#91

Post by seba_dos1 »

raffraffraff wrote: post #68
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #13

> We’ve been listening to your feedback, and we’re prioritizing the features you want most. > Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500. > Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible. Wow, that ... actually is what users have been aski…

honestly, container tabs are way more useful to me than profiles every were. I can have 3 different Gmail accounts and a bunch of AWS accounts open in the same browser, with different colours for each so that I can figure out which is which. How about it they continued to iterate on container tabs and make it possible to pattern match urls to containers without a 3rd party addon.

Oh yes, native matching would be faster and remove plenty of glitching opportunities if done right - you can often see the tab being reloaded into a proper container and taking twice as long to load as it should, and sometimes the tab ends up being duplicated. You also lose the tab's history when it switches between containers at the moment.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#92

Post by palata »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #51
Kye wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox certainly didn't help by becoming a bloated mess. Firefox was bad when Chrome came out. All Chrome did was the same thing Firefox did to IE in the same situation: take advantage of complacency. Google's heavy and sometimes ethically questionable promotion of Chrome was an amplifying force, but not sufficient.

Yeah, that was always funny to me too... Google built a browser that was actually faster and more secure, and then decided to be anti-competitive instead of just letting it win. Of course, they didn't actually get destroyed in court for it, so I suppose being evil works in this case.

> and then decided to be anti-competitive instead of just letting it win

Or precisely because it was not enough to have the better product? Don't tell me you believe that the better product usually wins. Marketing wins.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#93

Post by pleb_nz »

thwarted wrote: post #82
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #13

> We’ve been listening to your feedback, and we’re prioritizing the features you want most. > Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500. > Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible. Wow, that ... actually is what users have been aski…

I've been using multiple profiles in Chrome for years for keeping things separate… right up until my company started using Google's centralized browser/device management which infects the entire browser not just the single profile that is tied to my corporate Google account. Specifically, they forced a homepage setting browser-wide that can not be changed on a per-profile basis. So multiple profiles are seemingly dif…

Firefox does have profiles and has had for as long as I’ve needed them. For some reason they’ve always been hidden away and needed different args on start to change the profile being started, or the use of an extension to allow profile switching. I don’t use them anymore but from what I remember they worked well and were very isolated. Hopefully they’re using the current implementation and just making it more user friendly?

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#94

Post by muxator »

Kye wrote: post #43
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't necessarily follow; a person could easily argue that Chrome won because Google abused its search monopoly to push it, then kept winning because of inertia. Unless your friends specifically prefer Chrome because of UX reasons, it could be unrelated.

Firefox certainly didn't help by becoming a bloated mess. Firefox was bad when Chrome came out. All Chrome did was the same thing Firefox did to IE in the same situation: take advantage of complacency. Google's heavy and sometimes ethically questionable promotion of Chrome was an amplifying force, but not sufficient.

> Firefox was bad when Chrome came out

Funny how different people's experiences can be. When Chrome came out in 2008 I remember trying it just for fun (more than once), and it never clicked with me, so I stayed with Firefox.

What was harder for me was keeping with all the unnecessary redesigns, empty eye candy, dumbing down, the Fennec debacle (exensions used to work, then they suddenly stopped for a bunch of years; plus, no keyword search for no reason).

By that time staying away from Google had become a goal in itself, but I understand who migrated to chrome.

Anyway, I am firmly convinced Chrome won because of Google's abuse of its web search monopoly. The innovations that its team introduced were groundbreaking from a technical point of view, but Firefox was a perfectly capable browser.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#95

Post by michael9423 »

The way I see it, there was a time when FF had the chance to not accept the google contracts and go 100% independent with their own search engine or something similar. This would have resulted in FF actually siding with users. It would have resulted in FF radically rejecting ads, and this would have changed the entire web because people would have flocked to Firefox.

But Mozilla leadership did not have an interest in this, in light of endless google money. Google essentially captured Mozilla back in the day.

Now people have got used to ads because they only could chose between browsers that don't protect them.

Brave is trying to correct the mistake of FF and is attracting a small userbase, but not large enough to make a big difference, because the times have changed a lot.

Now with the new management at Mozilla and the dim outlook for the next 5 years, the realization is kicking in that listening to users is actually important. But the elephant in the room is the contracts with large ad-based search engines.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#96

Post by gamepsys »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #77
gamepsys wrote: post #14

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 a Firefox daily user, this list makes me better understand why Firefox has such a low market share 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 t…

I know we aren't going back to peak popularity. The concern is that FF moves to so little marketshare that websites no longer build for compatibility.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#97

Post by jackson1442 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #13

> We’ve been listening to your feedback, and we’re prioritizing the features you want most. > Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500. > Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible. Wow, that ... actually is what users have been aski…

I really hope the profile management system keeps tab containers working the same. It's incredibly useful to have different containers automatically generated for AWS console sessions.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#98

Post by 0x_rs »

aquova wrote: post #66
rurp wrote: post #52

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…

> removing about:config about:config is right where it's always been, unless I've missed something?

They're talking about the mobile application, where only a small subset of extensions was available for a few years. Access to about:config was disabled in official builds (but forks and custom builds such as some on F-Droid still have it).

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/21276

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#99

Post by glenstein »

gamepsys wrote: post #14

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…

I think this perpetuates the fiction of assuming browser share is directly tied to specifics of browser functionality instead of more important macro forces like differences in brand awareness and ability to leverage market sector domination.

There's been a proliferation of conflicting just-so stories purporting to explain the history of Firefox's browser market share, and they seem to relate to idiosyncratic preferences for customization instead of actual market dynamics.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#100

Post by seba_dos1 »

pessimizer wrote: post #84
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #13

> We’ve been listening to your feedback, and we’re prioritizing the features you want most. > Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500. > Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible. Wow, that ... actually is what users have been aski…

If you had 7,500 tabs open, it would take firefox approximately three and a half weeks to start.

I regularly have 10 times as much open in Firefox and it works just fine. Chromium barely works at a fraction of that (or at least used to, haven't felt the need to recheck for a few years now).
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