Is a successful search engine such an easy thing to produce?
> search engine such an easy thing to produce? Yes, I run my own independent search engine[0]. > successful Now that's the challenging part, especially since Mozilla needs to fund browser development. The initial differentiation for a Mozilla search would have been difficult, but at their peak they had 30%+ market share, and if the default search on Firefox was Mozilla Search then they might have been able to make it…
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…
I truly do not understand the complaints about Firefox, the browser (and not Mozilla's questionable stewardship thereof). Every time someone starts talking about their issue, it's either something super niche and inconsequential, or something that doesn't seem to have sufficient evidence to blame on the browser (turns out, crappy web apps will make any browser slow to a crawl). I used Chrome for a few years back in the mid-teens, then switched back to Firefox, and manage to use the Web just fine. It's a browser, it renders web pages. I really don't understand the fuss. Meanwhile, Google (the advertising company) would totally like you to use Google (the browser), for totally innocent reasons.
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…
> Getting rid of most extensions What extensions did they get rid of?
They changed the extension model which broke the extensions using the old model. Many of the developers didn't have the resources to rewrite the extension from scratch, or the new model had restrictions that made what the extension was doing difficult to impossible, so they disappeared.
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.
If you have rule that gmail should open in the red container, then it will always create a new tab if you try to open gmail from a non-container. This the correct behavior. Otherwise, cookies/browser data would have to be invisibly switched as the user goes back and forth in history. Invisible switching is bad design.
As it is right now, if you go to a containerized URL using the adddress bar you may end up losing the tab's history completely when it gets switched between containers, without warning. You can't even get the tab back with Ctrl+Shift+T cause it instantly switches to the new container as well. That's much worse design.
At least that's the behavior you get with Google Container and (Mozilla's own!) Facebook Container extensions. Twitter Container gets it right. Having it centralized could remove plenty of potential failure points.
I just accidentally clicked at a YouTube link from a comment on this very page and couldn't get back!
For me, the big thing Firefox needs is better power management. Mac user here, and streaming video or doing a video call just kills my battery compared to Chrome or Safari. Would love to see more focus on energy consumption optimization.
Could it actually be the hundreds of megabytes of JavaScript each website insists on executing?
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…
None of these things are in scope for a program that is supposed to browse the web (by fetching web pages and rendering them).
> 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…
> 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
Personal profiles on your work computer? That's a no for me. The only account I brought to my work computer was my Github's one. And I'd rather use Incognito Mode or another browser if I want to do something I did not want associated with my google account.
Lack of PWA / installable apps is why I switched back to chrome after trying to daily drive firefox for a while. Really wish they'd reconsider the decision to drop it.
Untested, but I think this Firefox fork added support back: https://floorp.app/en
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…