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Firefox 90

mozilla.org

191–200 of 351 posts

Re: Firefox 90

#191
post #57

Honestly I'm still not used to the new tab style that was introduced last time. 90 seems fine, but not much to get excited about from the user perspective.

The tab bar is functionally useless if you have > 10 tabs open, so I don't even know why I'd notice. Aesthetically, it's fine for me. Option to hide it completely (replacing with a mobile-style full-screen modal view with properly sized previews and keyboard navigation / fuzzy finding if you allow me to dream) would be nice.

You can use ctrl-tab to switch between tabs and it shows a thumbnail of each page.

Re: Firefox 90

#192

I think Firefox news is what I comment most on here. I don't know why. Well I guess I do. Web browsers, javascript etc is front and center here - which somewhat means the digital world. All my friends use Chrome, and think I'm weird. I think _they_ are. They care about human rights, at least I think they do. But, having Google, an ad company, dictate how our window to the digital world looks like, is now _way worse_…

The time I lost my faith in Firefox was when the CEO of Mozilla got a huge pay increase, whilst firing many technical people at the same time. How can a tech company improve their product without those technical people? Oh, never mention the ever-decreasing number of Firefox users. Weren't the C-level people responsible for that?

Anyway, that was the moment when I realized Mozilla was just another company, not a flagship open source advocator or something. They're not even pretending anymore. Look at the sneaky attempts to integrate ads on Firefox. Look at the user experience being degraded every year. They are not listening to me, so I decided to not listen to them.

Re: Firefox 90

#193

I think Firefox news is what I comment most on here. I don't know why. Well I guess I do. Web browsers, javascript etc is front and center here - which somewhat means the digital world. All my friends use Chrome, and think I'm weird. I think _they_ are. They care about human rights, at least I think they do. But, having Google, an ad company, dictate how our window to the digital world looks like, is now _way worse_…

> If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I really don't see how any other part of our species could. Not sure how that is relevant to Firefox vs Chromium debate. Both Firefox and Chromium are open source.

For a project as massive as a browser, being open source is vastly irrelevant. Only major companies are able to truly maintain a browser these days. You can fork Chrome, sure, but you won't get anywhere with it. Chromium is Google.

Re: Firefox 90

#194

I use and love firefox. I feel sad when I see brave, edge and other new browsers chromium based taking a lead. Firefox by itself is an amazing browser but the company behind it lacks any kind of vision. Brave has its own search, a better startpage, an ad network. From onboarding to incentivising user, they are doing it all very well.

Chromium isn't out of choice it's out of necessity. Unfortunately the newest generation of engineers just see no point in even testing anything but Chrome on a MacBook. This drives me up the wall as someone who's first job required writing CSS that could work in IE6, IE7, Safari, FireFox and Opera and even sometimes IE5.5. To hear devs paid way more than I was back then tell me "can't we just tell them to install Chr…

As someone who has worked in quite a lot of web projects for the last few years I noticed the big difference in requirements.

Back when I started it was all about supporting IE7/IE8+, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari (with an old iPad as a test device). A lot of polyfills were used to ease development and keeping older browsers alive. Testing on IE was quite painful (missing proper devtools, weird "Unknown Error!" alerts, slow scripts crashing the whole browser, browser implementation bugs, headaches with library conflicts, etc). I remember testing against hobby browsers like Pale Moon because things already worked fine.

Nowadays it's just all about testing in Chrome and with less priority, Safari (mostly on iPad, iPhone). The requirement of testing against other browsers were dropped by most of clients. If a project has spare time fixes for those browsers are an extra. Most analytics tools don't even show anything else of Chrome/Chromiums and Safaris (desktop and mobile).

So, even older engineers are slowly moving along with the newest generation and just test on Chrome and sometimes Safari. This days I just use a Chromium derivative, Vivaldi. It does the job and the UI speed has been improving quite a lot (but still lags a bit behind). If the project has some spare time I like to do some cross browser checks (most times, things just work fine). Sometimes I find an engineer using Firefox but most of the time they have a Chrome browser opened to test their work.

Re: Firefox 90

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values It does, but Mozilla is not representative of those values to my opinion. They represent the values on the left of humanism, but are opposed to right values, and therefore it doesn’t embody neutrality or democracy. They go as far as thinking everyone should share their opinion on gay marriage, and a private donation in that…

There's no reason to dig up every opinion on Earth just so you can maintain neutrality between all of them. Brendan Eich is surprisingly un-cancelled for a guy who thinks his employees shouldn't be able to visit their spouses dying in hospitals[1]. He's literally still around. [1] Which happened a lot during the AIDS pandemic and was essentially the purpose of the gay marriage campaign. It was actually relatively cul…

Eich would tell you he supported civil unions.

Re: Firefox 90

#196
post #160

I noticed in the comments below how somebody mentioning Firefox's limited market share was heavily downvoted. I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers whom are trying to make the best of it. That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There is no good in do-good software without reach. Based on statcounter, Firefo…

I wish Firefox had a better mobile experience, which might help entice new users through word of mouth. Their biggest issue (on mobile at least) isn't speed, it's the UX. Obviously, they'll always be gimped on iOS unless something changes there. But the latest Android version still doesn't have feature parity to Firefox 68. And Firefox 68 wasn't perfect either. Some simple UX issues with current versions come to mind…

I'm not sure if you've used FF on mobile recently but the last update was good change to UX. Personally I prefer FF over Chrome on mobile. It's all I use now on mobile and rarely do I notice a difference.

I think FF is relegated in people's minds to being broken on mobile. Which it was a while ago but now it's solid.

Re: Firefox 90

#197
post #160

I noticed in the comments below how somebody mentioning Firefox's limited market share was heavily downvoted. I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers whom are trying to make the best of it. That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There is no good in do-good software without reach. Based on statcounter, Firefo…

FF market share isn't a technical or ideological issue - it's marketing and platform capture. Chrome is the new IE and has the entire Google ecosystem tied in with it to make it a compelling platform. They were also smart to push the Chromebook into schools so a couple of generations of kids grew up with The Web = Google Chrome. Microsoft installs Edge by default on Windows. These two companies alone have hundreds of times the resources of Mozilla. And the resources they do have they apply to things like Mitchell Baker's compensation. Without any effort to gain mindshare, the technical an social merits of Firefox are irrelevant.

This isn't something you can grass-roots with a 3% share, you need influencers to broadcast, and that pretty much means you have to lay out some money. Unless maybe you can get Elon to shill Firefox in a tweet or something...

Re: Firefox 90

#198
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a side note, I don't understand why nobody uses Firefox on Android. It's an excellent browser, has ublock which is fairly rare on mobile. Why not use it?

To add to the comments not mentioned any UX reasons, I wanted to use Firefox on my phone as I do on my desktop and laptop but when using it I disliked the tab organisation compared to Chrome, and that's pretty much all I need the Web browser to be good for on my phone, where I'll often have up to 100 tabs open. Maybe it's changed now but Firefox had an impractical 3D scroll through tabs showing only the top IIRC, whe…

Firefox has never had a 3d tab view on Android. It has had a grid or list view. Pretty sure the same is true on iOS but I don't use it as often as Android.

Re: Firefox 90

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that Mozilla gets over 90% of its revenue from Google.

so what? ofc Google wants FF to be *viable*, but not good.

Probably for legal reasons. Firefox exists so chrome is not a monopoly and stricter government action is not taken.

Google doesn’t give money to control Firefox, they just need it to exist.

Re: Firefox 90

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more mailto: links on the web than ftp: ones, and yet most browsers don't natively do email. Firefox didnt remove the protocol from existence. They just removed a feature nobody uses, which is better handled outside the browser.

I thought mailto links would open in webmail if configured?

You're getting my point. ftp links will open in an ftp client if configured.
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