This may be a controversial position but I actually enjoy using Firefox. Vertical tabs, better profile management, etc. have all been welcome things I had in other browsers (cough Arc cough) that have made it bearable enough to use Firefox as my daily driver. They may not be as privacy-focused as some of the other derivatives of Firefox but they’re sure not Chromium.
Say Hi to Kit
41–50 of 66 posts
Re: Say Hi to Kit
#42A rebrand is the most ominous sign of Mozilla’s declining health I could have imagined.
Re: Say Hi to Kit
#43Finally! All these years everyone has been complaining about this or that missing feature or lingering bug in Firefox, or how Mozilla has been hostile to users and pulling stupid stunts which only waste money and alienate even their most passionate fans, but by far the number one grievance everyone had was how Firefox was missing a mascot. At last I can make my mother switch to Firefox. I’m messaging all my friends r…
Indeed if those graphic designers hadn't been wasting time drawing a cute fox they'd have been waist deep in 15 year old code fixing bugs. Orgs can do multiple things at the same time.
Maybe the point is that if they were so useless that they could waste time doing that, we could have fired(/not hired) them and instead hired a developer to improve the product...
And at the same time, the dev already paid by Mozilla that could have been fixing the product, was busy updating the source code to update the mascot...
Re: Say Hi to Kit
#44The criticism of this in the other comments is so strange. If Mozilla can raise some money independently of Google by selling merchandise, all the better! And it's not like software engineers are spending time on this instead of working on Firefox. That's not a real tradeoff. It's an effort that pays for itself and doesn't take away from Firefox development.
> If Mozilla can raise some money independently of Google by selling merchandise, all the better! Agreed, but did they need a new mascot to sell merchandise? It’s not like the old logo wasn’t already cool. > And it's not like software engineers are spending time on this instead of working on Firefox. But Mozilla is still spending money and resources on it. The issue isn’t this rebranding specifically, but that this i…
> Is it? That’s not a given, and we definitely can’t say either way yet. Considering all of Mozilla’s past efforts, pretty much all of which they abandoned, I’d be very wary of calling this one a success so early on.
The economics of selling branded clothing has been very well understood for 50 years. The markup for slapping a logo on a T-shirt is massive. Plus, it's a form of crowdsourced, word-of-chest advertising.
And Mozilla already has designers on staff. It's unlikely they had to do any extra hiring for this.
Re: Say Hi to Kit
#45Yes, that will certainly improve the current 3.7% market share [1]. [1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage#top-browsers...
Let's dispense with this notion that all employees and volunteers at Mozilla must be singularly focused on improving the market share of Firefox at all costs.
Re: Say Hi to Kit
#46This may be a controversial position but I actually enjoy using Firefox. Vertical tabs, better profile management, etc. have all been welcome things I had in other browsers (cough Arc cough) that have made it bearable enough to use Firefox as my daily driver. They may not be as privacy-focused as some of the other derivatives of Firefox but they’re sure not Chromium.
Vertical tabs are still broken. Fullscreen mode (F11) hides all the chrome except for the vertical tabs. Who wants this?
Re: Say Hi to Kit
#47Finally! All these years everyone has been complaining about this or that missing feature or lingering bug in Firefox, or how Mozilla has been hostile to users and pulling stupid stunts which only waste money and alienate even their most passionate fans, but by far the number one grievance everyone had was how Firefox was missing a mascot. At last I can make my mother switch to Firefox. I’m messaging all my friends r…
Indeed if those graphic designers hadn't been wasting time drawing a cute fox they'd have been waist deep in 15 year old code fixing bugs. Orgs can do multiple things at the same time.
> Orgs can do multiple things at the same time.
In principle this is true. In the concrete case of Firefox, they have proven they focus more on side quests than on making a quality browser.
I lost any hope they'll go for technical excellence instead of virtue signaling and branding after the Brendan Eich disaster. They feel now like a Microsoft, Google, Apple, or any other big corp.
I used Firefox since it was called Firebird and finally gave up and switched to another (non big corp) browser and couldn't be happier.
Re: Say Hi to Kit
#48Cure. Ordered a shirt and stickers. Looking forward to being able to rep Firefox!
Re: Say Hi to Kit
#49This may be a controversial position but I actually enjoy using Firefox. Vertical tabs, better profile management, etc. have all been welcome things I had in other browsers (cough Arc cough) that have made it bearable enough to use Firefox as my daily driver. They may not be as privacy-focused as some of the other derivatives of Firefox but they’re sure not Chromium.
They seem to be actively working on vertical tabs for Chromium right now: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/q/message:+vertical...
Re: Say Hi to Kit
#50Finally! All these years everyone has been complaining about this or that missing feature or lingering bug in Firefox, or how Mozilla has been hostile to users and pulling stupid stunts which only waste money and alienate even their most passionate fans, but by far the number one grievance everyone had was how Firefox was missing a mascot. At last I can make my mother switch to Firefox. I’m messaging all my friends r…
Indeed if those graphic designers hadn't been wasting time drawing a cute fox they'd have been waist deep in 15 year old code fixing bugs. Orgs can do multiple things at the same time.
> Indeed if those graphic designers hadn't been wasting time drawing a cute fox they'd have been waste deep in 15 year old code fixing bugs.
That’s not the criticism I’m making.
> Orgs can do multiple things at the same time.
Of course they can. But they should also prioritise—allocating money and resources appropriately—and Mozilla has for far too long not prioritised Firefox itself. That’s the issue. If people felt Mozilla were a good steward of Firefox, they wouldn’t mind most of the tangential stuff they do. The issue is that Mozilla has a history of getting distracted with irrelevant side projects that go nowhere and are summarily abandoned (meaning they were a waste) while Firefox doesn’t get as much attention as it could and should.
One sentiment I often see on HN is “I would like to donate to Firefox but Mozilla only lets you donate to the organisation as a whole, and I don’t like the other things they’re doing”. Unlike every other major browser, Firefox is the main product of its parent company. It should be the best at what it’s for, yet far too often I see people saying they use Firefox not because they prefer it but because it’s not from Microsoft/Google/Apple.