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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

#101

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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.

Having hit 4-5k tabs in a session, it's really not that bad of a perf hit. It's also an unreasonable thing to ask of the browser, but it holds up well enough.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#102

Post by jimjimjim »

JohnFen wrote: post #15
blizdiddy wrote: post #5

> 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 dumbing down of applications, including FF, is incredibly annoying and off-putting. I get it, though. FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person. I just wish that it (and other applications) would at least have an "expert mode" that isn't aimed just at the casual user.

I would love for applications and even web sites to have an expert mode. Maybe when the UX teams aren't looking devs could add a mode that puts Everything back in the UI.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#103

Post by jasonjayr »

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…

Can you still launch chrome manually with the --user-data-dir=/custom/path option when MDM is enabled?

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#104

Post by palata »

pessimizer wrote: post #81
a0123 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the current design and direction are very clearly not working. You can hardly blame them for trying to emulate what's currently working for everyone else when everything you've tried so far has led to your downfall.

Their downfall came when they changed everything that they were doing, and subsequently nuked every reason why someone would prefer firefox other than that they weren't google. They transformed firefox into wonky chrome, even copying superficial UI stuff. And then got very hostile about any criticism of this project, actively destroying all of the goodwill they built up. That alienation of their stubborn, fanatical b…

Not that I disagree with the alienation of their fanbase. I personally use Firefox mostly because it is not Google, certainly not because it is Mozilla (and to be fair I like the Firefox Containers).

But I am not convinced most people see it like this. Most of the people I know honestly don't make the difference between Firefox and Chrome: they just use what they know. I think Chrome won those people because Google managed to convince them that "Internet == Chrome", not because they consciously chose Chrome as a better alternative.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#105

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

palata wrote: post #92
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firefox was doing fine beating IE on merit once MS was prevented from behaving anti-competitively.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#106

Post by Ciantic »

I switched to Firefox about 3 weeks ago, what is killing me is dragging the tabs. It is so much worse with Firefox. Someone has made a video of this if one can't remember how they differ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRuBDH32hPI

With Chrome I can drag a tab and it moves with me, with Firefox the tab being dragged blocks the view. Also since with Chrome, the tab moves with the mouse I can with one drag move a tab and use Windows' snap-to-edge feature. This is a two-step process with Firefox.

Firefox is an underdog, it should focus on making the UI familiar and fast, but keep customizability. Another thing I noticed is that Firefox doesn't allow to keep unpacked extensions loaded as Chrome does, there is no good reason why not, luckily I fixed that with some userChrome scripts.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#107

Post by chgs »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #100
pessimizer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You have 75,000 tabs open?

I rarely have more than about 300 to be honest, how do you keep track?

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#108

Post by palata »

michael9423 wrote: post #95

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 would have resulted in FF actually siding with users

Sure, but would the users have sided with FF? I'm not convinced. The users use whatever BigTech tells them to use, that's how I see it.

> Brave is trying to correct the mistake of FF

Brave is Chromium. I don't see how this would even begin correcting the mistakes of FF. The one thing FF does right is that it is not Chromium.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#109

Post by squarefoot »

dagurp wrote: post #35
iforgotpassword wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK, they're just following what Chrome has been doing forever now, and it has worked there. I guess that really is what the vast majority of normal people want. And considering how even among my most tech-savy friends and colleagues Chrome appears to be the browser of choice, it seems even these folks don't really care...

Or is it Google deciding for you what you should want?

Before someone flags the above comment as trolling, read on:

"One thing Mozilla does have going for it is a lot of money—more than $1 billion in cash reserves, according to its latest financial statement. The primary source of this capital is Google, which pays Mozilla to be the default search engine on the Firefox home page. Those payments, which started in 2005, have been increasing—up 50% over the past decade, to more than $450 million, even as the total number of Firefox users has plummeted. In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue."

source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...

I read it as: "If Google says jump we jump".

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#110

Post by palata »

amluto wrote: post #62

I have a suggestion for Mozilla: find use cases that benefit your users and are not possible in other browsers . For example: Browsers are terrible at accessing devices on a local network. Make this work well in Firefox, extending protocols as needed. Browsers are terrible at configuring IoT devices. It device makers are terrible at making apps for this purpose that don’t suck. Make Firefox (on desktop and mobile!) b…

Please, no.
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