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Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

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Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#101

Post by duncanawoods »

Well, I love Firefox! It's definitely a better browsing experience for me e.g. most-recently-used alt-tab order, vertical tab extensions, containers and deep configuration with about:config. Stability is great and my only performance problems are on Google sites.

The things I would like:

- default to private mode

- store bookmarks with choice of container - really weakens the feature when I can't e.g. bookmark two different gmail accounts

- built-in vertical tabs - extensions just can't achieve perfect UX e.g. can't tear out tabs to move to different windows, poor use of space due to side-panel header, keyboard shortcuts etc.

- Firefox IOS - lots of rough edges e.g. like always trying to autocomplete my urls to the worst possible sites that I never willingly visit e.g. outbrain, guice, oath etc. and no way to remove them

- better debugger and dev tools - still not a patch on chrome dev tools sadly

- become the better choice for Electron style apps (smaller, faster, easier)

- become the better choice for headless testing

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#102

Post by timwis »

NullInvictus wrote: post #32

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

Interesting. I'm a full time Firefox user as well and honestly can't think of an example where this happened to me. There have been a couple times where I was warned my browser wasn't supported, which is stupid, but it usually works fine anyway.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#103

Post by [deleted] »

klingonopera wrote: post #69
brianpgordon wrote: post #57

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR. It actually reminds…

Those 500 million are easily eclipsed if you compare it to what Google's revenue is... EDIT: It was 136 billion in 2018: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

[deleted]

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#104

Post by heycam »

_gtux wrote: post #89

This could be a little off topic here. I would like to contribute to Firefox but I have no idea where to start with. I dabble with C and x86 assembly. Can anyone suggest where I should get started? I have barely contributed to any open source projects except for a few minor bug fixes.

On https://codetribute.mozilla.org/ you can find mentored Mozilla project bugs to work on (not just Firefox) indexed by language.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#105

Post by feanaro »

NullInvictus wrote: post #32

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest.

Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working.

What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site that I usually avoid.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#106

Post by tragic »

userbinator wrote: post #42
NullInvictus wrote: post #32

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

If developers are genuinely concerned with browser diversity and not handing the Web over to Google and whatever they deem to be the next IE6, it starts with having a test plan for other browsers. I'd say it starts with dialing back the "new feature/change fetish" that a lot of web developers have. Yes, I know some things simply can't be done without a JS webapp, but not all and probably not even a majority, so if HT…

> Yes, I know some things simply can't be done without a JS webapp, but not all and probably not even a majority, so if HTML and CSS will do the job fine, then so be it; and even if it needs to use JS, it likely doesn't need to be latest-browser-only JS either.

Sticking to HTML and CSS won't necessarily get rid of this - new stuff is being added to CSS all the time, in particular. And browser support is just as patchy.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#107

Post by buboard »

brianpgordon wrote: post #57

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR. It actually reminds…

IIRC 90% of that revenue comes from google. It's essentially a grant to stop innovating maybe?

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#108

Post by novaRom »

duncanawoods wrote: post #101

Well, I love Firefox! It's definitely a better browsing experience for me e.g. most-recently-used alt-tab order, vertical tab extensions, containers and deep configuration with about:config. Stability is great and my only performance problems are on Google sites. The things I would like: - default to private mode - store bookmarks with choice of container - really weakens the feature when I can't e.g. bookmark two di…

Yes, default private mode is absolutely necessary! I always open links in 'New private tab', while some of them like comments on HN in normal tabs because I am logged in to HN.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#109

Post by njsubedi »

feanaro wrote: post #105
NullInvictus wrote: post #32

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working. What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site…

For example's sake, try opening payment/billing setting pages of Google products. For example, pay.google.com doesn't load on FF latest on MacOsX latest.
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