Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

fadingeek.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 44 posts

Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

#21

Post by politelemon »

NonNefarious wrote: post #15
gardnr wrote: post #12

Pretty extensive but leaves out Phoenix and the meteoric adoption of the lightweight browser and then the co-opting, injection of XUL, and return to bloatware. People left Mozilla products because they didn't have enough RAM to run them. Phoenix was the first time I started looking at Mozilla again.

"Extensive?" This isn't exactly fact-filled: "It all started with an app called Netscape Navigator, developed by a group of people, which was then bought..." This reads like a poorly-researched junior-high report.

Agree to some extent, this feels very sketchily, or maybe hastily, written, with seemingly anecdotal or incorrect historical paragraphs, and just a little supporting data. It's nowhere near the deep dive the opening promises. I'm getting confused.

Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

#22

Post by willnonya »

Like manybi feel the reimaged reality in this article is as flawed as rhe conclusions presented.

The truth is that Firefox and any other browser that can achieve relevance is a critical bulwark against the advancing Google domination of web standards.

Under Googles dominance the web has become a less private and less free version of what we took for granted. People often worry, rightly, about what governments will do while also ignoring the impacts of companies like Google on their lives and liberty.

Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

#23

Post by btmiller »

lemoncookiechip wrote: post #4

These days FF is just as fast and lighter than most Chromium browsers. With a better curated add-on store (my god google store sucks), a clean UI (which they'll hopefully stop messing around with), and more importantly, it just works for day to day use, and is customizable enough for most people's needs. While Mozilla have themselves to blame for a lot of the decline. A big part of it is Google's dominance over the w…

Yes, which is why the EU’s recent legislation is a terrible, terrible thing. The People’s cry for other rendering engines on iOS is a sham (the free market chose iOS among other, more permissive and equally viable platforms). Real people don’t care, and real people won’t notice because they do not care what rendering engine is powering their browser. They only care that websites work and that browsers provide the features they expect. But thanks to the EU, the death of non-Chromium browsers just accelerated to the benefit of no real person. Mozilla will of course continue to make nice browser features, but the day will come when a blog post details their reasons for ditching Gecko. Real people won’t notice and the industry will have further reduced (read: eliminated) engine diversity - the very thing EU was trying to avoid.

Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

#24

Post by codespin »

Around 2007 Google was paying $1 per install/click through to Firefox back when IE was the dominant browser. It seemed like Google threw a ton of money at disrupting the browser market with FF then followed up by launching Chrome.

The article mentions that FF hit %34 in 2010 and acts like that was due to the features, I don't think it was.

For the average browser user we're talking about here talking about bloat and features are irrelevant. FF's market share is just a number bouncing around in the waves between two giant forces, Microsoft which owned the OS for much of this timeline and Google which owns the pages everyone is going to where it is suggesting they install Chrome.

Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

#25

Post by mrandish »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #7
lemoncookiechip wrote: post #4

These days FF is just as fast and lighter than most Chromium browsers. With a better curated add-on store (my god google store sucks), a clean UI (which they'll hopefully stop messing around with), and more importantly, it just works for day to day use, and is customizable enough for most people's needs. While Mozilla have themselves to blame for a lot of the decline. A big part of it is Google's dominance over the w…

Still waiting for the apis to reimplement xul addons, which were promised at least half a decade ago...

To me the best part of Firefox was its unique ability for add-ons to customize the user interface and add significant new functionality. The architectural change in 2017 (version 57) was necessary but the failure to prioritize the re-implementation of the lost API functionality is dooming the browser.

Firefox's incredibly vibrant add-on ecosystem was a huge differentiator and competitive advantage over other browsers. I still use FF as my daily driver but I have to apply UX customization with CSS just to make it livable. Fortunately, there is an active community at www.reddit.com/r/firefoxCSS which eases the burden.

Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

#27

Post by rvieira »

ehsankia wrote: post #17

I can't tell if I'm having a brain fart Sunday morning or this is just generally a very poorly written article. Can someone give a summary? I read half of it and I still don't see a single "point" being made. The closest it got making a point is: > It seemed to be this software that tried to keep up with the pace of Google Chrome more than a software that actually had its own ideas. That sentence answers itself. Obvi…

It is poorly written. Not only it's void of insightful content, it tries to use an informal spoken style but fails to engage, completely. The images add nothing (how many memes on FF logo and Twitter-Giphy-like macros can you fit). Also random stats don't make a point, in itself.

Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

#28

Post by willnonya »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10

At this point it is clear that Mozilla is not really an engineering driven organization. They are mainly a political organization with a browser attached. In addition, as some have mentioned, they really don’t have the resources of the big players (Apple/Google) Given that the web browser is basically ground zero for malware and exploits, I think it is safer to go with the browsers with more resources behind them.

Why is that clear?

Why should we support larger organization that historically use their resources to manipulate web standards in their favor while repeatedly leaving known security issues unpatched in favor of superficial changes?

Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

#29

Post by NonNefarious »

btmiller wrote: post #23
lemoncookiechip wrote: post #4

These days FF is just as fast and lighter than most Chromium browsers. With a better curated add-on store (my god google store sucks), a clean UI (which they'll hopefully stop messing around with), and more importantly, it just works for day to day use, and is customizable enough for most people's needs. While Mozilla have themselves to blame for a lot of the decline. A big part of it is Google's dominance over the w…

Yes, which is why the EU’s recent legislation is a terrible, terrible thing. The People’s cry for other rendering engines on iOS is a sham (the free market chose iOS among other, more permissive and equally viable platforms). Real people don’t care, and real people won’t notice because they do not care what rendering engine is powering their browser. They only care that websites work and that browsers provide the fea…

Amen. I was a complainer about Apple's insistence on WebKit, but when I thought it through I realized that it's the only bulkhead against a total Chrome takeover.

I admire a lot of Europe's consumer protections, but this EU legislation is a huge overreach, written by politicians pandering to hype that they are too ignorant to assess.

Re: Why Firefox Deserves Its Sad Decline

#30

Post by syspec »

ehsankia wrote: post #17

I can't tell if I'm having a brain fart Sunday morning or this is just generally a very poorly written article. Can someone give a summary? I read half of it and I still don't see a single "point" being made. The closest it got making a point is: > It seemed to be this software that tried to keep up with the pace of Google Chrome more than a software that actually had its own ideas. That sentence answers itself. Obvi…

It's written in a quasi stream of consciousness style. I enjoyed it
Post reply on HN